This Week in Queer History

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...

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...

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 ri...

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 aft...

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 s...

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 c...

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 Hous...

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...

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 follo...

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 P...

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, pub...

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...

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...

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...

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 pass...