This Week in Queer History

On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization endorsed the ICD-10 and quietly removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was, in the words of the activists who had fought for it, a seismic moment - the day a global institution finally admitted that the science had been on our side all along. In this episode, we explore what that moment meant, what it cost to get there, and why it took 17 years after the American Psychiatric Association made the same call in 1973.This episode goes back to the beginning - to Richard von Krafft-Ebing and the 1886 psychiatric text that framed homosexuality as degeneracy, to the DSM listing it as a sociopathic personality disturbance in 1952, to the aversion therapies and lobotomies and brain surgeries performed on gay people in the name of treatment. And then it tells the story of the people who fought back: psychologist Evelyn Hooker, whose groundbreaking research showed no measurable difference in psychological health between gay and straight men; Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings disrupting the APA's 1970 conference; and Dr. John Fryer testifying before the APA in a mask and voice modulator because he couldn't safely be himself at a psychiatric conference.The 17-year gap between the APA and the WHO isn't a footnote - it's the heart of the story. During that stretch, countries around the world continued to treat queerness as an illness, shaping who got healthcare, who got insurance, who could immigrate, who kept custody of their children. Classification isn't abstract. It's funding. It's policy. It's someone's life.Today that date is marked as IDAHOBIT - the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia - observed in over 130 countries. But the work isn't done. Conversion therapy still exists, still harms people, still costs lives. The same impulse that once classified us as sick shows up today in new language and new legislation. This episode is about the difference between being fixed and being helped - and why that distinction is everything.Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

On May 6, 1933, members of the German Student Union marched to the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin - with a brass band. Like a parade. They stormed the building, seized tens of thousands of volumes, grabbed patient files and address lists full of names and identities - and four days later, burned it all at Opernplatz in front of 40,000 people. In this episode, we tell the full story of what was destroyed that day, and why it matters more right now than it has in decades.The Institute of Sexual Research was extraordinary. Founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, it housed the largest collection on human sexuality in the world. In its first year, staff conducted over 18,000 consultations for 3,500 people - many completely free. Five trans women were employed on staff. Dora Richter became one of the first people in history to receive full gender confirmation surgery there. The institute was pioneering gender-affirming care and hormone therapy decades before the rest of the world caught up. And its motto - through science to justice - wasn't just a slogan. They meant it.But the patient files seized during the raid were later used to round up gay men across Germany. The very institution built to protect queer people became a tool to hunt them. This episode traces how that happened, what was lost forever, and why only 35 items from the original collection of tens of thousands have ever been recovered.And then it connects the dots to right now - because the pattern hasn't changed. Book bans are up 63% in the United States. Kansas is seizing driver's licenses from trans people. The ACLU is tracking nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2026. Where they burn books, in the end they also burn people. Heinrich Heine wrote that 113 years before it happened on the Opernplatz. This episode is about the safe spaces that save lives - and what it means to be the books that survived.Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

On April 30, 1997, Ellen DeGeneres leaned into an airport PA microphone and said three words to 42 million people watching at home. In this episode, we go back to that night - the bomb threats, the pulled advertisers, the watch parties, the tears - and tell the full, honest story of what it cost to kick that door open. Because the story of "The Puppy Episode" is messier and more human than the legend.Ellen didn't become a cultural flashpoint overnight. She climbed through comedy clubs, sold vacuum cleaners, and built an act around finding the hilarious strangeness in everyday life. By 1986, Johnny Carson was inviting her to the couch after her Tonight Show debut - something he almost never did for a first-time performer. By 1994, she had her own sitcom on ABC. And by 1997, she and her writers were sitting across from Disney executives with the most terrifying pitch in network television history.This episode digs into what happened when a gay woman decided her character could simply be gay too - the GLAAD campaign, the celebrity guest stars, the local affiliate in Alabama that refused to air it, and the community watch parties that turned it into a collective coming-out moment for a generation. It also gets honest about what came after: the canceled show, the blacklisting, the years of depression, and a 2024 Netflix special that raised more questions than it answered about what accountability really looks like.And it gets personal. Because for so many of us, that night in 1997 was the first time we saw ourselves reflected back in a way that felt real. Not a punchline. Not a villain. Just a person telling the truth. We can hold gratitude for that moment and hold Ellen to a higher standard at the same time - and this episode explores why that ability to hold both things is actually what real community looks like.Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

What happens when the most famous man in England is told his love is a crime? In 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in a London courtroom and called love between men "beautiful" and "noble," refusing to apologize, recant, or run. This is the trial that sent queer people underground for seventy years, and the defiance that planted a seed we're still growing today.By early 1895, Wilde was untouchable. Two plays running in the West End, a reputation as the wittiest man alive. But behind the velvet and the wit, he was living a double life with Lord Alfred Douglas, and the walls were closing in. When the Marquess of Queensberry left a card accusing Wilde of "posing" as a sodomite, Wilde sued for libel. The trap closed. Within weeks, Wilde himself was in the dock, charged with gross indecency under the same vaguely worded law that would later destroy Alan Turing.Friends begged him to catch the evening boat to France. He stayed. Because running meant agreeing that love was something to hide. When asked about "the love that dare not speak its name," Wilde delivered one of the bravest speeches ever given in a courtroom. The gallery erupted in applause. The jury did not. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol.This episode explores what silence costs, not just the person being silenced, but everyone around them. Kris shares a deeply personal story about his own family, the grandfather who never knew, and the grandmother who crossed the line at the very end. It is a story about choosing truth over safety, about the people who refuse to hide, and about the seeds they plant for the rest of us.Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1979, a group of queer activists in San Francisco put on nun habits as an Easter joke. Within a few years, they were saving lives.The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence started as camp and irreverence, but when the AIDS crisis arrived and official institutions looked the other way, these drag nuns stepped up. They published "Play Fair," one of the very first safer-sex guides in the country, at a time when the government was silent and the church was hostile. They raised money, cared for the sick, and used humor and visibility to fight back against shame and stigma.This episode tells the story of how joy became a form of resistance, and how a group of people in face paint and habits became genuine lifesavers. Today, more than 600 Sisters operate in chapters around the world, still using camp and community to fight for queer rights.When religion abandoned so many of us, the Sisters created their own. This is the story of drag nuns, sacred rebellion, and love as a radical act.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/qYF0e_TCaSgStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Ryan White never asked to be the face of AIDS in America. He was a teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion used to treat his hemophilia. He was thirteen years old. And when his school tried to bar him from attending class, his family fought back, and in doing so, forced a terrified nation to confront the myths it had built around the epidemic.Ryan was straight, white, young, and from the heartland. For a country that had been telling itself AIDS was something that happened to other kinds of people, he was impossible to dismiss. His story generated empathy that the government and media had withheld from gay men, from Black communities, from IV drug users for years.He died in 1990, at eighteen. Six months later, Congress passed the Ryan White CARE Act, the most significant piece of HIV/AIDS funding legislation in American history. Today, that program primarily serves low-income queer people and communities of color, the very people the country once looked away from.That's not irony. That's a legacy growing beyond the story that created it.Plus: a personal reflection on the fear that shaped an entire generation.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/uKSHN7LPid0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1996, a new class of HIV drugs changed everything. The protease inhibitors, combined with existing antiretroviral treatments, turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition for people who could access them. The dying slowed. Friends who had been given months to live started making plans for years.This episode is Part 3 of "How Queers Saved Modern Medicine," and it tells the story of how that breakthrough happened, and what it cost to get there. It covers the activists and researchers who pushed for faster trials, better data sharing, and international access. It covers the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, where the results were announced and the room erupted. And it looks at where we are now: PrEP, the drug that can prevent HIV transmission almost entirely, is under political threat at the moment this episode was recorded.The activists who fought for protease inhibitors and the Ryan White CARE Act and parallel track trials paid with their grief, their health, and their time. Some paid with their lives. The treatments that exist today are their inheritance to us.What we do with that inheritance is our responsibility.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/_ZhbHARQzDAStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

A playwright. A bond trader. A college dropout. A teenager. These are the people who walked into the FDA in the late 1980s and early 90s and came out having redesigned how drugs get approved in America.This is Part 2 of "How Queers Saved Modern Medicine," and it focuses on the activists who didn't just protest, they taught themselves virology, pharmacology, and clinical trial design in their living rooms. Then they sat down with the scientists, argued with them, and won.Spencer Cox was one of them. He was nineteen years old, had dropped out of school, and was working odd jobs when he joined ACT UP and started reading everything he could find about HIV treatment research. Within a few years he was helping redesign the parallel track system for drug trials, an innovation that allowed people with life-threatening illnesses to access experimental treatments while trials were still ongoing. That system is still in use today. It helped speed the development of cancer drugs and COVID vaccines long after the activists who built it were gone.Mark Harrington. David Barr. People who refused to accept that expertise was something that belonged only to people with the right credentials.This is what radical intelligence looks like in service of survival.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/4_ThEj30aIQStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1987, there was one approved AIDS drug in the United States. It cost $10,000 a year. And the government's message to the people dying while they waited for more options was essentially: be patient.ACT UP was not patient.This is Part 1 of a three-part series on how queer activists didn't just fight the AIDS crisis, they fundamentally changed how medicine works in America. This episode covers the founding of ACT UP in 1987 and its first major action: a demonstration at the FDA that shut down the agency for a day and made national headlines. It covers the organizing genius behind the action, the underground networks importing unapproved drugs from abroad, the Wall Street protests targeting pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome over the price of AZT, and the radical fury that made all of it possible.Larry Kramer. Peter Staley. The Silence=Death project. A movement built by people who were running out of time and decided to use every second of it.This is where modern drug approval reform began. And it began with queer people who refused to die quietly.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/6BsqMos2oxcStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Palm Springs today looks like it was always a gay paradise. Sun-drenched streets, rainbow flags, elected queer mayors, world-famous events. But the real story is grittier, more complicated, and far more interesting than the Instagram version.It starts with closeted Hollywood stars who used the desert town as a weekend escape, just far enough from the studio system's surveillance. Then come police raids that pushed queer nightlife across the city line into Cathedral City, creating a scrappy, defiant community in the shadows. And then AIDS arrives, devastating the community while simultaneously galvanizing it.This episode tells the story of how a deeply conservative desert town transformed into one of America's most iconic queer destinations. Not because of glamour, but because of necessity, community, and the kind of stubborn love that builds something lasting out of almost nothing.You'll hear about the activists who turned grief into refuge, the bar culture that kept the community alive, and the slow political awakening that put queer people in power in a place that once tried to erase them.It's a story about what happens when a community has nowhere else to go, and decides to make that place their own.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/R_SEuYR5u0IStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before the apps, before the bars were safe, before there were queer community centers in most cities, there were gyms. And for generations of LGBTQ people, the gym was not primarily about fitness. It was about finding each other.This episode tells the full, fascinating, and sometimes heartbreaking history of how queer people turned physical spaces - from YMCA locker rooms to Castro clone gyms to the muscle culture of the 1980s - into something much more important: community infrastructure.The story starts earlier than you might expect, with the YMCA's late 19th-century history as a gathering place for men living outside traditional family structures, a history the organization has worked hard to forget. It moves through the coded magazines and the bodybuilding subculture of the mid-20th century, through the political meaning of the Castro's hyper-masculine aesthetic, and into the AIDS crisis, when gay gyms became grief rooms, organizing spaces, bulletin boards for the dying and the living, and sometimes the only place to be reminded that your body was still worth caring for.It's a story about survival, community, and the remarkable human capacity to build belonging in whatever spaces are available.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/2FGsHNR_jxAStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

You probably know "The Little Mermaid" as a fairy tale about a girl who wants to live on land. But look at who wrote it, and the story takes on a whole new meaning.Hans Christian Andersen wrote some of the most beloved fairy tales in history. He also spent his life deeply in love with people who could never love him back the same way: a married man named Edvard Collin, and a celebrated singer named Jenny Lind. His letters to Edvard are among the most heartbreaking declarations of unrequited love in literary history.When you read "The Little Mermaid" through that lens, as a story about longing to belong, about loving someone who doesn't see you the same way, about sacrificing everything to be accepted in a world that wasn't made for you, it reads unmistakably as a queer allegory. Andersen may not have had our vocabulary, but he had our experience.This episode explores Andersen's hidden queer life and what it reveals about the stories he told. The fairy tales we grew up with have always carried more than we realized.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/fhequCTzeMsStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before there were gay bars in every city, before there was queer television or LGBTQ+ social media communities, there were show tunes. And for generations of gay people who grew up isolated, confused, or afraid, those songs were a lifeline.This episode traces the long, intimate relationship between Broadway and the LGBTQ community - not just as a story of queer people who worked in theater, but as a story of what the music did for the people who needed it. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" as a promise that somewhere, things were different. "I Am What I Am" from La Cage aux Folles as a declaration of survival. The entire score of Rent as a document of the AIDS crisis, written from inside it.Show tunes became a secret language. Gay men of a certain generation knew who else was "in the family" partly by what records they owned and which lyrics they could sing by heart. The music of Broadway was coded queer in ways that kept its listeners company during years when being openly queer was dangerous.This episode honors that history with warmth, some favorite songs, and a clear-eyed look at why musical theater and the LGBTQ community have been so deeply intertwined for so long.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/udR5mYUTKVYStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

What happens when the people most aggressively persecuting LGBTQ lives are secretly LGBTQ themselves? It is one of the most painful patterns in queer history, and this episode examines it honestly, with care, and without cheap irony.From J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI's systematic persecution of gay federal employees while living a closeted life with his companion Clyde Tolson, to Roy Cohn prosecuting and ruining gay men during the Lavender Scare while pursuing men himself, to the long list of anti-gay politicians who were later outed - the history of closeted leaders weaponizing their own self-hatred is both heartbreaking and clarifying.This is not about mockery. The closet causes genuine psychological damage, and the people caught in it were often victims of the same forces they perpetuated. But understanding this pattern matters because it reveals how systemic oppression works: it recruits the oppressed into their own oppression.This episode covers the Lavender Scare of the 1950s, when thousands of gay federal workers were fired, the political machinery that drove those purges, and the complex psychology of internalized homophobia. It is heavy history - and it is told with the compassion and clarity that queer people deserve.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/6P0CCzZX71IStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Queer history is full of people who were told their protests were too loud, too disruptive, too theatrical, too radical. This episode is a love letter to all of them.We go through ten of the most effective, innovative, and honestly sometimes hilarious protest tactics that LGBTQ+ activists used over the decades to fight back against a system designed to ignore them. From the Stonewall riots and the street brawls that launched a movement, to ACT UP's die-ins that forced the federal government to confront the AIDS crisis, to the Lesbian Avengers who fire-ate their way into public consciousness, to the classic political kiss-in that still makes people uncomfortable in exactly the right way.Each tactic tells a story about what queer communities had, what they lacked, and what they improvised. Most of these activists had no money, no media access, no political allies. What they had was creativity, anger, each other, and a genuine willingness to make people uncomfortable.The episode also asks: which of these tactics are still relevant? In a moment when queer rights are under sustained attack, this history isn't just inspiring. It's instructional.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/EaLdWjrQmd4Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1996, a scrappy rock musical about artists and activists living with AIDS in New York's East Village opened on Broadway. Critics were skeptical. The subject matter was raw, the staging was bare, and the composer, Jonathan Larson, had died the night before the first preview performance.Rent ran for twelve years. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. And for a generation of queer people, it was the first time they had heard themselves in a mainstream story.This episode explores Rent's radical queerness: the trans woman of color Angel, whose love story with Collins is treated with more tenderness and dignity than most mainstream productions gave queer characters at the time; the lesbian couple Maureen and Joanne, whose relationship is funny and real and central to the story; the frank portrayal of HIV-positive characters living fully, not just dying symbolically.We also look at Jonathan Larson's history with the project, the Puccini inspiration behind "La Boheme," and the ways Rent's legacy has aged: what it got right, what it couldn't fully see, and why it still matters.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/OuuLLLWyB8kStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Dollywood sits in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, deep in the Bible Belt, surrounded by the kind of conservative Christianity that has historically made queer life in the American South brutal. And yet, for decades, it has been one of the most beloved destinations for LGBTQ+ visitors and employees in the region.How does that happen? This episode goes looking for the answer.Part of it is Dolly Parton herself: a straight ally whose unconditional warmth toward her LGBTQ+ fans has been consistent across fifty years of fame. She hired queer performers before it was safe. She refused to condemn the community when pressure mounted. She built something that felt, to queer employees and visitors alike, like a place where you could breathe.But the story is also about the workers, the performers, the queer families who found each other in the park's employee culture, the local LGBTQ+ communities who used Dollywood as a rare gathering place in a region with few options.It's a story about how joy is political, about how Southern queer resilience finds the most unexpected refuges, and about what it means to build a little bit of safety in a place that wasn't designed to provide it.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/UtipDWgfgakStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before there were out-and-proud LGBTQ characters on daytime television, queer viewers were doing something remarkable: reading between the lines. Soap operas were full of "best friends" who lingered a little too long, "roommates" who never seemed to need separate beds, and emotional bonds that made the on-screen romances look pale by comparison.This episode is about that secret fluency. The way LGBTQ audiences learned to find themselves in stories that officially denied their existence. We dig into the classic American soap opera era and decode the hidden language that queer viewers used to survive on daytime TV.You'll hear about specific moments from shows like Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and All My Children, where the subtext was doing heavy lifting. About the writers and actors who knew exactly what they were putting on screen. About the slow, uneven, hard-won progress toward actual representation.And about what it means to be a community that gets so good at reading between the lines that you start to wonder what would have happened if the lines had just been honest from the start.It's part media history, part queer love letter to everyone who sat in front of their TV set and knew, even if no one else was saying it.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/0zjf7EfC4UQStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Long before Ellen came out on network television, long before Hannah Gadsby's Nanette reframed what comedy could do, queer people were using humor to survive, connect, and quietly dismantle a world that wasn't built for them.This episode tells the untold history of queer comedy, starting well before Stonewall and tracing the comedians who used the stage, the nightclub, and eventually the television set as tools of cultural resistance.You'll hear about Jean Malin, a flamboyant gay performer in the 1920s and 30s who packed nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles with his sharp wit and unapologetic persona. About Jose Sarria, the drag queen who performed elaborate satirical operas at San Francisco's Black Cat Bar in the 1950s and 60s and became the first openly gay person to run for political office in the United States. And about the tradition they represent: comedy as a survival skill, as a form of community-building, as a way of saying something true in a room that isn't ready to hear it seriously.Queer comedy didn't just make people laugh. It made them feel less alone. It made them visible to each other. And sometimes, when it was working at its best, it made the people who wanted to erase them feel just a little bit foolish.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/G4wKu93ys7AStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

What would Marsha P. Johnson resolve to do in 2026? What about Harvey Milk, Christine Jorgensen, Bayard Rustin, or Audre Lorde?This special year-end episode takes a different kind of trip through queer history. Rather than just looking back, it imagines forward, asking what the dreams and demands of our most iconic trailblazers might sound like if they were setting intentions for this moment. The result is something that's equal parts history lesson, love letter, and call to action.The episode weaves real biographical detail with imaginative "what ifs," grounding each resolution in the actual values, words, and life's work of the person it honors. Marsha's would be joyful and uncompromising. Harvey's would be practical and hopeful. Audre's would be a dare.The point isn't that these people would say exactly this. The point is that their lives show us what it looks like to turn a dream into action, sometimes at enormous personal cost, and often in the face of people who said it couldn't be done.What's your resolution? This episode might give you some ideas.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/eCF6x5w2v3sStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

History doesn't live only in courtrooms and protest marches. Sometimes it lives in a flag, a song, a piece of jewelry, a letter hidden in a desk drawer, a painting that hung in the wrong living room for the right reasons.This episode is about the objects, artifacts, and cultural gifts that carried the LGBTQ+ community through centuries of suppression and into the light. We trace a surprising set of items, from ancient tomb offerings to Gilbert Baker's first rainbow flag, from disco anthems to coded artworks, that became beacons of identity and survival when almost everything else was forbidden.Some of these gifts were made deliberately: the rainbow flag was designed as an act of political defiance and communal joy. Others accumulated meaning over time, adopted by queer communities who recognized something in them that the original creators may not have fully intended.Together, they form a kind of unofficial museum of queer survival. Not the formal kind with plaques and velvet ropes. The kind that gets passed from hand to hand in the dark, that gets played at maximum volume in tiny apartments, that gets tattooed onto skin as a reminder that you are not alone and you never were.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/uS9wEuOOGN0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

The holidays have always been a little gay. This episode is about how much gayer they are than most people realize.Long before queer people had legal protections or visible community, they developed a remarkable set of codes, symbols, and traditions - ways of finding each other and celebrating themselves while hiding in plain sight. Christmas and the broader winter holiday season turns out to be full of them.We trace this from ancient winter festivals where normal social rules were suspended, through the Victorian era where Oscar Wilde's green carnation became a recognizable signal among gay men in London, to the 20th century tradition of Christmas Eve bar nights - the one night a year when chosen family gathered, when the bar was the warmest place in town, when being gay felt briefly, beautifully ordinary.We also look at the ways queer people have always found the holidays complicated. Chosen family versus family of origin. The tension between the world as it is and the world the holidays pretend exists. The specific grief that comes with empty chairs.The holidays belong to everyone who shows up for them. This is the part of that history that doesn't always make it onto the greeting cards.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/NdidySoJ0b0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In the years after Stonewall, queer people were building something. Not just rights, not just visibility, but community. And one of the most powerful expressions of that community came in the form of voices raised together.This episode tells the story of LGBTQ+ choral music, from the founding of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus in 1978, days after the assassination of Harvey Milk, to the spread of choruses across the country and around the world. These weren't just performing arts organizations. They were spaces of belonging for people who had been told their voices didn't belong anywhere.The choruses sang at funerals during the AIDS crisis when other institutions turned away. They performed on stages that had never heard queer music. They brought together people across generations, backgrounds, and experiences and gave them something to do with their grief, their joy, and their defiance.The history of LGBTQ+ choruses is also the history of queer community building. It's a story about what people create when they refuse to be silent, and what those creations mean to everyone who comes after.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/ogZamRSPqlIStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

If you burn the records, you erase the people. That was the logic behind the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1933, when Nazi students set fire to one of the world's most important archives of LGBTQ research and history. It was one of the first great book burnings of the Third Reich.But queer people refused to let the record disappear. In living rooms, storefronts, and back offices, they started rebuilding. Jim Kepner collected LGBTQ materials for decades in his Los Angeles apartment. ONE Magazine fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to mail information about homosexuality. The Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York became one of the most important preservation efforts in queer history, built entirely by community members.This episode traces the courageous network of queer librarians, archivists, and collectors who preserved our history when no one else would, and why today's book ban movement makes this fight urgently relevant again.Our stories survived because someone decided they were worth saving.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/PFTCfkBNwPgStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

From whispered custody fights to Supreme Court victories, queer families rewrote what “parent” means. In this episode, I share the real history behind those wins — and how a steady stepdad taught me that family is the practice of showing up. Hit play for law, love, and some kitchen-table courage.Listen to the video version: https://youtu.be/SB_0EmCZJYQStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Queer outrage once crashed through newsroom doors, shut down city streets, and eventually rewrote the future of television — and this episode tells the wild, uplifting story of how ACT UP and GLAAD made it happen.Dive in as we revisit the battles, the brilliance, and the sheer queer audacity that brought our stories onto primetime screens. It’s not just history — it’s ourstory, and it still sparks today.Listen to the video version: https://youtu.be/WnJ1e3pp0WAStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before there were apps, there was The Damron Guide — a secret travel book that helped queer people find safety, joy, and each other in a hostile world. In this episode, I uncover the bold story of Bob Damron, the gay bar owner who risked everything to map hidden queer havens across America. It’s part history, part heart — and all pride.Listen to the video version: https://youtu.be/jUrbkjU56kEStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Harvey Milk was not the first LGBTQ person to run for public office. But when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, something changed. He lit a torch. And generations of queer people have been running with it ever since.This episode traces the arc from Harvey Milk's election and assassination to the remarkable expansion of LGBTQ political representation across the United States. By the 2020s, more than 1,300 openly LGBTQ elected officials were serving at every level of government - city councils, state legislatures, governors' offices, and Congress. That number was unimaginable when Milk first ran.We talk about the "lavender ceiling," the unspoken assumption that being openly LGBTQ would end a political career, and how candidate after candidate proved it wrong. We talk about the first transgender state legislators, the first openly gay senator, the first LGBTQ Cabinet members. We talk about the communities and campaigns that made those firsts possible.This is a story about hope that was earned the hard way. About people who ran not despite the danger but because of it. About what it means to represent a community that has always deserved a seat at the table and spent decades fighting to take it.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/Kwz3d7k5nusStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Queer sobriety did not just happen. We built it.In the early decades of Alcoholics Anonymous, LGBTQ people were frequently told they did not belong - that their "lifestyle" was incompatible with recovery, or that they needed to fix their sexuality before they could fix their drinking. Some were told the two problems were connected. Many simply left, or never came in the first place.So queer people did what queer people have always done: they made their own space.This episode traces how LGBTQ recovery communities emerged across the United States, from the first explicitly gay AA meetings in cities like New York and San Francisco, to the creation of Alcoholics Together and other queer-specific sobriety groups, to the way AIDS reshaped the landscape of queer addiction and healing in the 1980s and 90s.What emerged from that history is a tradition of recovery that is warmer, more politically aware, and more attentive to how shame and stigma fuel addiction than the mainstream recovery world often is. Queer sobriety spaces became places where you did not have to choose between your identity and your healing.This is a warm, reflective, occasionally funny episode about the people who turned "you don't belong here" into a sanctuary. Pour something non-alcoholic and settle in.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/gbsuK4D5zNIStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before queer TikToks and rainbow emojis, there were typewriters. And the brave people who used them to build something.Long before LGBTQ+ media was a market category, it was a survival strategy. The editors, writers, and publishers who created queer magazines and newspapers in the 20th century weren't chasing clicks or ad revenue. They were filling a void so vast and so damaging that they risked their livelihoods, their safety, and sometimes their freedom to do it.This episode tells the sweeping, emotional story of LGBTQ+ journalism from its earliest underground newsletters to the radical press of the 1970s. We trace how these publications built queer identity and community in an era of criminalization and erasure, and why the history of queer media is also the history of queer survival.From secret mimeographed newsletters to nationally distributed magazines, queer voices have always found a way to be heard. This is the story of how that happened, and what it cost.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/yLzhVeKXaI0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In October 1979, more than 100,000 queer people and their allies gathered in Washington, D.C. for the first National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights. It was the largest gathering of LGBTQ+ people the country had ever seen.The march came two years after Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign had repealed gay rights ordinances across the country, and two years after the assassination of Harvey Milk. The community was grieving and furious and ready to make itself impossible to ignore at a national scale.This episode tells the full story of that march: the organizing, the speeches, the coalition-building that brought together groups who didn't always agree. You'll hear about Audre Lorde, who stood on that stage and connected queer liberation to feminist liberation and anti-racist struggle in ways that remain essential today. About the Salsa Soul Sisters, one of the first organizations for queer women of color in the country. About the demands the marchers brought to the steps of government and how many remain unmet.The march didn't produce immediate legislative victories. But it created a national queer consciousness and a template for political organizing that would shape everything that came after. This is where a movement became a movement.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/rmHXrJE2Mq4Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

For centuries, religion was used as a weapon against queer people. But queer people were also inside the churches, reshaping them, founding new ones, and creating spaces of radical welcome long before most denominations were willing to have that conversation.This episode uncovers the hidden history of LGBTQ faith communities: the secret sanctuaries where queer people gathered to worship without shame, the trailblazing congregations that opened their doors when others slammed theirs shut, and the activists who fought to transform religious institutions from within.We trace the founding of affirming churches, the spiritual lives of queer people across different faith traditions, and what it meant to hold both queerness and faith in a world that insisted you had to choose. It's a history full of courage, contradiction, and genuine grace.Queer people didn't just survive religion. Many of them reimagined it entirely, building communities of belonging that still exist today. This is the story of sacred rebellion and the spiritual resilience of the LGBTQ community.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/mIiWQ5jABKgStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Naming yourself has always been an act of freedom. For LGBTQ+ people across centuries, it was also an act of survival.This episode is about pseudonyms: the fake names, pen names, aliases, and alternate identities that queer people used to love, create, correspond, and simply exist in a world that criminalized who they were. From an 18th-century drag performer known as Princess Seraphina, to the coded personal ads of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, to the early online handles that let queer teenagers find each other before it was safe, the false name has been one of queer culture's most powerful tools.We trace specific stories: the remarkable love letters between Countee Cullen and a partner who wrote under an assumed name. The correspondence of Rose Cleveland, sister of President Grover Cleveland, and her partner Evangeline Whipple, who found ways to say what they needed to say without saying it directly. The 19th-century writer Xavier Mayne, whose novel "Imre" was one of the first sympathetic portrayals of gay love in the English language, published under a name that protected him.This is a long one, over twenty minutes, because the history is deep and the stories deserve their full space. Pour something warm and settle in.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/ROmMpoqd8g0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

When Prohibition shut down legal drinking in 1920, it didn't shut down queer joy. It drove it underground, and what emerged was extraordinary.Step inside the hidden world of 1920s speakeasies, where queer people carved out space to dance, dress freely, and love openly. From drag balls at Rockland Palace drawing thousands of spectators to Gladys Bentley performing in a tuxedo at the Clam House, Harlem became the unlikely capital of queer nightlife in America.This episode explores how the Harlem Renaissance gave birth to a thriving, defiant queer culture. We hear about Ma Rainey singing openly about same-sex love in her blues, the legendary Hamilton Lodge Balls where gender-bending was the whole point, and how these spaces became community, family, and survival for people who had nowhere else to go.Prohibition tried to control pleasure. Queer people responded by building something more joyful, more vibrant, and more resilient than anyone expected. This is the story of how our community has always found a way to gather, even in the shadows.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/gcbSCzL0xD4Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before queer bookstores, before pride sections at Barnes & Noble, before the internet, there were paperbacks. Cheap, pulpy, often sold alongside detective novels and westerns at drugstore spinner racks. And for countless queer people in the 1950s and 60s, those books were a lifeline.This episode celebrates lesbian pulp fiction and the bold writers who made it. Tereska Torrès wrote "Women's Barracks" almost by accident, drawing on her wartime experience in the Free French Forces. Marijane Meaker wrote "Spring Fire" under a pen name at her editor's insistence, with a tragic ending she resented. Ann Bannon created the beloved Beebo Brinker series and gave readers a whole world of queer women living, loving, and surviving in Greenwich Village.These weren't just guilty pleasures. For readers who had never seen themselves in print, who had been told they didn't exist, finding one of these paperbacks under a mattress or passed hand-to-hand was an act of recognition. You are real. You are not alone. Someone else felt this too.The books were called trashy. They were anything but. They were survival documents dressed up in sensational covers, and they changed lives.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/AEa0BStnWRwStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

What does it mean to risk your life for a country that legally considers your existence a crime?During World War II, hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ+ people served in the United States military. They fought in Europe and the Pacific. They broke codes, treated the wounded, led units, and died for a nation that would have discharged them dishonorably if it had known who they were.This episode follows a handful of those people. Chuck Rowland, who would go on to co-found the Mattachine Society. Frank Kameny, whose military discharge became the fuel for a lifetime of activism. Christine Jorgensen, who served before becoming one of the most famous trans women in American history. Allen Irvin Bernstein, whose story is only now getting the attention it deserves. And Alan Turing, the British codebreaker whose war service saved millions of lives before his country destroyed him.Their stories share a painful thread: service, sacrifice, and betrayal. Many received "blue discharges," a policy specifically designed to remove gay and lesbian service members without the legal protections of an honorable discharge.But their stories also share something else: resistance, resilience, and the refusal to disappear.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/HAZdYg9V8FEStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before Instagram, before streaming, before any of it, queer people had magazines. And not the glossy, advertiser-friendly kind. These were radical, often illegal, stapled-together lifelines that helped a generation of LGBTQ+ people understand they were not alone.This episode dives into the remarkable history of 1970s gay publications: The Advocate, Come Out!, The Lesbian Tide, Fag Rag, The Body Politic, and others. These weren't just periodicals. They were the infrastructure of a movement, carrying news, politics, erotica, theory, and community in a single package that you couldn't find anywhere else.We explore how these magazines were created, what they published, and what they risked. Police raids, postal bans, obscenity charges, community debates about what queer media should look like and who it should serve. Through it all, the editors and readers built something that mattered enormously: a queer public sphere.One stapled page at a time. This is how queer identity got built.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/1hbVFQv7KFYStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In August 1867, a German lawyer stood before the Congress of German Jurists in Munich and did something no one had ever done publicly before: he argued, in his own name, that same-sex love was natural, not criminal, and that the laws persecuting it should be repealed.The audience was not moved. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was booed off the stage.He kept going anyway.Ulrichs spent decades writing, publishing under his own name, and building the intellectual and legal framework that would eventually become the foundation of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. He coined terms for same-sex attraction at a time when no language existed. He wrote letters to German lawmakers. He appealed to authorities who ignored him. He lost every battle.And yet: Magnus Hirschfeld credited Ulrichs as his forerunner. The movement Ulrichs started, the argument that queer people deserved legal protection and human dignity, is the same argument that every LGBTQ+ rights victory since has rested on.This episode is about what it means to be first. To fight for something you'll never live to see. To lose every battle and still be the reason the war eventually turns.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/JVxc5gIKKZsStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Would you believe Hollywood once had a rule that explicitly prohibited gay characters on screen? Or that the post office refused to mail magazines that mentioned homosexuality? Or that today, algorithms quietly bury queer content on social media platforms in ways that are hard to prove and harder to fight?Censorship has followed LGBTQ+ people across every era of American media, changing its form but not its function. This episode traces three pivotal moments when queer creativity collided with institutional power: the Hollywood Hays Code and its decades-long erasure of gay and lesbian characters, the legal battles over queer print media in the mid-20th century, and the contemporary fight against shadow banning and algorithmic suppression on platforms like TikTok.Each era tried something different to silence queer voices. Each era failed, because queer people are extraordinarily good at finding ways through walls. Subtext, code, community, and sheer creative brilliance have always been our tools.This is not just a history of censorship. It's a history of survival, subversion, and queer brilliance that refuses to disappear.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/rMoo-go99v0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Willem Arondeus was a Dutch artist, an openly gay man, and one of the most daring resisters of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. In 1943, he and a small group of collaborators broke into the Amsterdam Civil Registry and destroyed records that the Nazis were using to identify Jewish citizens for deportation. It is estimated their action saved tens of thousands of lives.He was caught. He was executed. Before he died, he sent a message through his lawyer: "Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards."This episode traces Arondeus's life - his early career as a painter and writer, his coming out in a more open pre-war Amsterdam, and the radicalization that turned an artist into a resistance fighter. We look at the specific courage it took to resist as a gay man in occupied Europe, doubly targeted, doubly at risk.Arondeus was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1984. He deserves to be remembered as something more specific: a queer man who chose other people's survival over his own safety, and who wanted the record to be clear about who he was when he did it.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/9Age9UmNXHkStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1904, before there was a word for it in common usage, before any legal protections existed anywhere in the world, before even the most optimistic activist could have imagined Pride parades or marriage equality - a woman stood on a stage in Berlin and declared herself a homosexual.Her name was Anna Rüling, and she was the world's first known out lesbian activist.Rüling gave her speech to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering organization, arguing that the women's rights movement and the homosexual rights movement needed each other. She made a political argument, a personal declaration, and a historical statement all at once - and then largely disappeared from the record, her contribution buried for most of a century.This episode recovers her story. We talk about the world Anna Rüling lived in: Wilhelmine Germany, Paragraph 175, the early gay rights movement, and the context that made her declaration both extraordinary and, in some ways, possible. We talk about why she was forgotten, and why recovering the stories of early queer activists matters so much for understanding how long this fight has been going on.She was out before your great-grandparents were born. That deserves to be known.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/rexTNpI21m0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. He sculpted David. He shaped the entire trajectory of Western art. He was also, undeniably, queer, and the evidence is hiding in plain sight.His poetry, letters, and friendships tell a story that art historians argued over for centuries and that some deliberately obscured. The man who gave us one of history's greatest artistic legacies also wrote passionate love sonnets to men, formed intense relationships that shaped his creative life, and lived in a world that demanded secrecy around same-sex love.This episode explores the queerness woven through Michelangelo's life and art. We look at his relationships, the sonnets that were altered after his death to change male pronouns to female ones, and what his work might tell us about desire, beauty, and the human body when we read it through a queer lens.Michelangelo was a queer icon four centuries before the term existed. His legacy belongs to us too.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/G76WZWx45yUStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1933, Nazi students marched to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin and threw its contents into a bonfire. They were burning the life's work of Magnus Hirschfeld - a gay, Jewish doctor who had spent forty years building the world's first queer rights organization, the first clinic to provide gender-affirming care, and one of the most comprehensive archives of human sexuality ever assembled.They tried to erase him. We are here to make sure they failed.Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897, making it the oldest known LGBTQ rights organization in history. He coined the word "transvestite," helped develop early frameworks for understanding what we now call transgender identity, campaigned against Paragraph 175 (Germany's anti-sodomy law), and treated thousands of patients with compassion when the rest of medicine treated them with contempt.He survived multiple assassination attempts. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and died in exile in 1935. But the ideas he planted - that sexuality is natural, that trans people deserve care, that science should protect rather than persecute - those ideas survived everything the Nazis threw at them.This is the story of the man who started it all, and why his legacy belongs at the very heart of queer history.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/cMmqehb7VLkStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Before the floats and the corporate banners, before the rainbow merchandise, there has always been the roar of motorcycles. And at the front of Pride parades across the country, there have always been the Dykes on Bikes.This episode tells the story of how this group of lesbian motorcyclists became one of the most iconic and enduring presences in Pride history. Meet Soni Wolf, a key figure in the San Francisco chapter whose advocacy and persistence helped shape the organization into what it is today. And hear the story of the legal battle over their name, a fight that ended with a federal trademark victory that recognized "Dykes on Bikes" as a term of pride, not offense.What makes the Dykes on Bikes story so compelling isn't just the leather and the engines. It's what they represented: unapologetic visibility at a time when visibility was dangerous. Leading the parade wasn't just a tradition. It was a statement. We are here. We are not asking for your permission. We are going first.That spirit is still roaring.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/Ovcd0z1Lh0YStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Three hundred years before dating apps, queer men in London found each other in Molly Houses - secret gathering places where they could drink, dance, find community, and be themselves in a world that wanted them dead.This episode tells the story of one of the most extraordinary figures in early queer history: Margaret "Mother" Clap, who ran the most famous Molly House in London from her home in Holborn. At a time when sodomy was a capital offense, Mother Clap provided a space for somewhere between 40 and 50 men at a time to gather on any given night. She knew the risk. She took it anyway.We trace the 1726 raid that brought down Mother Clap's establishment, the trials that followed, and the men who were executed as a result. We also sit with what it meant to build community under those conditions - the care, the courage, and the specific kind of chosen family that emerges when survival requires solidarity.Queer people have always found each other. This is one of the earlier documented stories of how.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/osSs84B9Is8Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore didn't have weapons. They had scissors, a printing press, and an absolute refusal to be afraid.During the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey in World War II, these two queer surrealist artists waged a remarkably creative resistance campaign. They made anonymous leaflets designed to demoralize German soldiers, forged signatures, cut and pasted subversive messages, and slipped them into cigarette packets and coat pockets around town. They were eventually caught, sentenced to death, and somehow survived.But before all of that, they had already spent decades building one of the most radical artistic practices of the 20th century. Cahun's self-portrait photography challenged gender norms in ways that feel startlingly contemporary, decades before the language existed to describe it.This episode tells the story of two queer rebels who turned creativity into defiance, humor into resistance, and art into survival. Their story is a reminder that queer people have always found ways to fight back, even in the darkest circumstances.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/zh92Cpqi2xkStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

Most people know Stonewall as the beginning of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. But nearly two decades before those riots, a small group of queer people in Los Angeles gathered in secret and decided it was time to organize.In 1950, Harry Hay and a handful of others formed the Mattachine Society, one of the first sustained LGBTQ political organizations in American history. They met in living rooms. They used pseudonyms. They took enormous personal risks at a time when being gay could cost you your job, your family, or your freedom.This episode traces the founding of the Mattachine Society, the activism it inspired, and the brave, ordinary people who built the framework for everything that came after. We look at Dale Jennings's landmark legal case, the Sip-In protest at Julius' Bar in New York, and how pre-Stonewall organizing laid the groundwork for the movement we know today.Queer rights didn't begin with a riot. They began with a meeting. And this is that story.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/PEOgURL810QStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

She was loud, fierce, and absolutely refused to back down. Sylvia Rivera wasn't just present at Stonewall in 1969 - she was a lifelong fighter for the trans community when most of the world, including parts of the LGBTQ movement, turned its back on her.Born in 1951 in New York City, Sylvia Rivera survived homelessness, rejection, and erasure to become one of the most consequential activists in queer history. She co-founded STAR - Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries - with her best friend Marsha P. Johnson, creating one of the first trans-led organizations in the United States. She showed up to marches, rallied communities, and never let anyone forget that trans people were at the center of liberation work from the very beginning.What makes Sylvia's story so powerful is not just her bravery but her persistence. She was pushed out of spaces she helped create. She was erased from histories she helped make. And she kept fighting anyway. Right up until her death in 2002, she was demanding that trans women of color be seen, included, and protected.This episode is a celebration of her revolutionary legacy - and a reminder that the freedoms so many of us enjoy today were built on her sacrifice.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/IChMN7dBsDoStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

In 1948, a mild-mannered Indiana biologist who had spent years studying gall wasps published a book about human sexual behavior that caused a national crisis.Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" wasn't just controversial. It was a detonation. Kinsey and his team had conducted thousands of in-depth interviews about the sexual lives of American men, and what they found shredded the assumption that most people were straightforwardly heterosexual. Same-sex behavior was far more common than anyone publicly admitted. Sexuality existed on a spectrum, not in fixed categories. The Kinsey Scale, running from zero to six, gave people a framework for understanding something they'd often felt but had no language for.This episode tells Kinsey's story: his own complex sexuality, the extraordinary research methodology he and his team developed, the ferocious backlash from politicians and religious leaders, and the lasting impact of his work on how we understand sexual identity.The Kinsey Scale has been refined and criticized in the decades since. But the core insight, that human sexuality is more varied and fluid than official culture wants to admit, changed everything.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/SVelmTrcnG0Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show

The King James Bible is the most printed book in human history. Hundreds of millions of copies. It has been used to condemn queer people for centuries. And it was commissioned by a king who, by all historical accounts, was very much into men.King James I of England is one of history's great contradictions. He wielded enormous political power, united the Scottish and English crowns, and authorized the translation that would reshape Protestant Christianity. He also had a well-documented series of male favorites - young men he showered with titles, land, and what contemporaries described as conspicuous affection.This episode examines the historical record honestly. We look at the men James loved: Esme Stuart, Robert Carr, George Villiers. We look at what his contemporaries said about those relationships. We look at why this history gets buried, and what it means to reclaim it.This isn't about taking revenge on a text. It's about telling the full story of a man who was far more complicated than the monument he left behind. History has room for contradictions. So does queer history.Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/UOcGy94YrtUStay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeWebsite: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSend us Fan MailSupport the show