Margaret Katherine Flowing Johnson
November 14, 1940 – January 20, 2026
On her birth certificate, she was Margaret Katherine. To her origin family, she was Midge. To her partner Marcia’s family, she was Margaret. For a brief moment, she was almost Honey. To most who knew her in the St. Louis region for the last nearly five decades, she was Flowing – Flowing Johnson, a kick-ass activist. Among the many conversations at yesterday’s Celebration of Life was a question: When and why did she take Flowing as her chosen name?
Becoming Flowing
After fifteen years of teaching math at St. Louis Community College, in 1979 then-Margaret (to her St. Louis friends) took a one-year unpaid sabbatical, bought a van she painted purple (in part to hide the rust), christened it with the name Vanessa, had a bed and bookcase installed, and spent the next twelve months traveling the country with her then-girlfriend Judy, a cook at the Central West End’s Sunshine Inn.
The trip included a stop at the fourth-annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival that August, an annual event that became one of Flowing’s must-attends for the next four decades. Three months later, during the season of Flowing’s 39th birthday, she and Judy were in Wolf Creek, Oregon, staying in a little cabin. It was there, in that cabin, that she chose her new name: Flowing.
She described the pivotal event in an unpublished memoir, sent to the writer of this piece in late 2020:
I’d decided to take a chosen name. This custom was prevalent in the lesbian community during these times. Partly a resistance to the patriarchal practice of naming children after their father, partly a resistance to religious requirements for naming, but mostly with a sense of play and the idea that choosing a new name sets a boundary between our past and our future. I knew lesbians who’d named themselves Dolphin, Pyramid, Oak and Sage. The most common names were animals and plants…. Selecting a new name would be a clear boundary between the person I was and who I was becoming… This fine morning, the cabin, warmed by the wood stove, still sat in the shade of the ridge while the sky above lightened from the rising but still unseen sun. I sat at a small, wooden table as my tea completed steeping and the sun rose over the ridge and bathed the cabin in sunlight. It streamed through a window and the oak table glowed. I pulled a spoonful of honey out of a jar with a spoon and let the thick, golden sweetness slowly unravel into my cup and thought, I’ll call myself honey. I immediately broke into laughter. As I sat sipping my tea and watching the sunrise I realized that what I liked about the honey’s motion from spoon to cup was the way it flowed. So, I considered the name Flowing. Flowing named how I currently lived. I flowed with the currents of the day. I consciously paid attention to signs and adjusted my plans accordingly. I did a tarot reading and it indicated adventure, love, and community. OK, then, I thought. Flowing it is. When people called me by my new name it would remind me of my current mission: letting go of preconceived notions and of control. I would flow through life from now on. When I declared my new name to Judy she said, “You’re the only person I know who would take a verb for a name.” That comment surprised me. I hadn’t considered the place the word held in the English language. I’d just seen the honey flowing off the spoon and liked how it went from one place and state to another with no resistance. I became Flowing.
Flowing: A Celebration of Life
On Saturday afternoon, May 9, about 150 of Flowing’s friends, family, and colleagues gathered in the beautiful auditorium at the St. Louis Ethical Society in Clayton to remember her life.
Dayna Deck and Sue Levin begin the Celebration of Life at the St. Louis Ethical Society.
The celebration was led by Flowing’s dear friend of many decades, Dayna Deck, and by Flowing’s sister-in-law, Sue Levin.
Attendees heard and laughed with Dayna’s and Sue’s stories of adventures with Flowing and her and Marcia’s forty years of love and life. There were half a dozen additional remembrances and tributes — from a niece who learned from Flowing to be a feminist; a nephew who was grateful in knowing that his aunt had lived a rich and fulfilling life; and from friends and activists who had worked with and known Flowing over the decades in St. Louis.
There was laughter, tears, Flowing’s poetry, congregational singing — Holly Near’s Singing for Our Lives — and a reading of an excerpt from a recent Jeannette Batz Cooperman essay, “What Do We Owe Our Dead?“:
Those loved and lost live between worlds, kept alive because we remember them, resurrected every time we let them influence us again. “The dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them,” wrote George Eliot. We owe them this place in our psyche, this lingering in the world. When my best friend asked what she could do after my mom died, I blurted, “Talk about her with me.” I did not want to let the ghostly vapors dissolve, vanishing in the mist like Hamlet’s father. And I knew that every year, there would be fewer people alive who had known her, and my own memories would grow thinner, fainter, uncertain.
Professionally streamed, the video of Flowing Johnson’s Celebration of Life is available by clicking on the image below:
Flowing’s official obituary is here.
Rodney Wilson is the founder of LGBTQ+ History Month.
