This Week in Queer History

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 The march came two years after Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" campaign had repealed gay rights ordinances across the country, and two years aft...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...

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...

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...

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...

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 mes...

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 room...

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 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...

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 autho...

Ancient Greece had a complicated relationship with what we'd now call queer identity, but it also produced some of history's most celebrated same-sex relationships, recorded without shame and often with genuine admiration. This episode profiles seven figures from the ancient Greek world whose stories complicate any claim that queer love is new, unnatural, or culturally aberrant. We cover...

Forget what you learned in English class. Emily Dickinson was not a lonely, reclusive spinster. She was a bold, brilliant poet whose passionate love letters, especially to Susan Gilbert, reveal a deeply queer legacy that her editors spent over a century trying to hide. The relationship between Emily and Susan was one of the great love stories of 19th-century American literature. Susan lived next d...