Through the 1980s and 90s, Science hosted drag king workshops and formed what is believed to be the first FTM meetup group in New York City, F2M Fraternity.
[2] Science was one of the house bands at the famed punk venue, Max's Kansas City and also regularly played at Women's One World (W.O.W.)
[4][1] In the mid 1980s, Science began engaging in performance art at local sex dungeons like the Belle de Jour and swinger's clubs like Plato's Retreat.
[4] F2M Fraternity had an accompanying limited-run newsletter called "Rites of Passage" and regularly distributed information about medical transition, advertised local drag king events, and hosted video nights highlighting how trans men were being portrayed on television.
[9][10] Science's activism frequently was financially burdensome; in one piece of advertising from September 1990 he wrote, "I have been without a phone for 6 months after running up huge bills, calling T/S's, C/D's, and professionals all over the world!
"[11] Sprinkle met Les Nichols, a trans man on testosterone who had recently had phalloplasty, at one of the F2M Fraternity meetings in 1989 and decided to film a pornographic documentary about a sexual experience between the two of them called "Linda/Les and Annie: the First Female-to-Male Transsexual Love Story.
[2] The film was released in 1990[13] and had a very mixed reaction from some in the transgender community due to some of the outdated language and attitudes Sprinkle displayed regarding Nichols' body and pre-transition life.
[14] They began collaborating on the workshops together, which often included taking their participants out into spaces like parks and strip clubs to see if they "passed" as male to the people around them.
[5] According to Diane Torr, "We were then both determined to get the phrase “drag king” and the concept behind that - the idea of male impersonation by a female - included in common parlance.
[3][18] According to Kit Rachlin in Science's obituary, the show ran until 1998[2] but an article in the New York Times from January 2000 reported that it was still airing on channel 57.
[1] Some time in the late 1990s or early 2000s, Johnny Science chose to go "stealth" - that is, to pull away from FTM activism and blend in with the cisgender gay male community.
[2][4] His friends regularly told him of the goings-on in the trans community, and he expressed sadness over feeling like he could not both participate and be accepted as a man by wider society.
[4] Science preserved hundreds of documents, videos, sound files, and other ephemera pertaining to his and other peoples' LGBT activism in both print and digital form in his home.