This Week in Queer History

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...

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 coun...

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 straigh...

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...

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 desig...

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 episod...

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 p...

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...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 th...

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 f...

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...

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 secre...

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 th...

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...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 room...

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_0EmCZJYQ Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistor...

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 spark...

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/jUrbkjU56kE Sta...

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...