Michela Griffo was born in 1949 in Rochester, New York, into a large, unruly family of Irish, Germans, Italians—what Michela calls the United Nations of families. Her family drank a lot, and by the time she was 11, Michela was hiding a flask of vodka in her convent school uniform. Michela left home at 16, graduated from the University of Michigan, and earned her master’s degree in photography from the Pratt institute in New York by the time she was 23. In June 1969, her pending marriage to an Orthodox Jewish man was nixed over religious differences. Months later (after a quick detour to Woodstock), Michela fell in love with an Eileen Ford model named Agneta Freiberg. Friends told her that if she pursued this path, her life would be ruined. It made no sense to her—she was the same person she had always been! Spotting an ad in the Village Voice for a group called the Gay Liberation Front, which had sprung up after the Stonewall riots, Michela went down and joined. She loved the group’s focus on social justice and intersectionality. She also participated in the Lavender Menace’s uproarious action to interrupt the NOW national convention. “I was an outlaw then,” Michela says, “and I’m an outlaw now.”

Michela’s first piece of political art was a poster for the first Pride march in June 1970. It read, “I am your worst fear, I am your best fantasy.” It enraged her that the very people who fetishized lesbians were terrified of their actual existence. Michela wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines producing abstract paintings. “I wanted to tell the truth of what I saw in our society.” Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, Michela’s art career flourished, even as she descended into a deep well of alcoholism. Over time, she found her sobriety, earned a master’s degree in social work at New York University, worked for many years in the art department at Colgate Palmolive, and continued to practice her art. She has also been deeply involved with Remote Area Medical, which provides essential medical services to the poorest communities in the U.S.

Michela holds strong opinions, and she is not shy about sharing them. She rejects the word queer. She states that she is not transphobic, but refuses to recognize transgender women as women. Michela’s opinions are controversial and, to some people, offensive. She’s refuses to back down, even when she feels like a stranger to the community she embraced more than 50 years ago.

Recently, a woman asked to photograph Michela for a project she was doing. When Michela agreed, the woman asked where she would you like to be photographed. “In the Museum of Natural History, standing in front of a dinosaur,” Michela replied, “because that’s how I feel.”