This Week in Queer History

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...

In 1919, a German film dared to do something that Hollywood wouldn't attempt for decades: tell a gay love story with honesty, sympathy, and a direct argument for LGBTQ rights. Then the Nazis burned almost every copy. This is the story of that film, and how one reel survived. "Anders als die Andern" - Different from the Others - was written by activist Magnus Hirschfeld and director...

Most people know the story of Stonewall. Fewer know what happened three years earlier, in 1966, when a caravan of cars drove through Philadelphia carrying the first public gay pride demonstration in American history. The NACHO Armed Forces Day Motorcade was organized by the National Association for Homophile Organizations at a time when public queer activism was genuinely dangerous. There were no...

Florence Nightingale is one of the most famous women in history. She is also one of the most sanitized - reduced to a lamp, a saintly bedside manner, and a founding myth of modern nursing. The full story is far more interesting. Nightingale was a statistical pioneer who used data visualization to reform hospital mortality rates. She was a fierce critic of the medical establishment. She defied her...

Most people know Stonewall. Fewer know about the night in 1959 when queer people in Los Angeles fought back against a police raid with coffee cups and donuts, and sparked one of the earliest known acts of LGBTQ+ resistance in American history. Cooper's Do-nuts was a 24-hour donut shop on Main Street in Los Angeles, a gathering spot for gay men, transgender women, drag queens, and sex workers...

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have been making music together since high school in Georgia. They signed their first record deal in 1987. They won a Grammy in 1990. And for decades, they have been two of the most consistently outspoken, politically engaged, and artistically uncompromising queer musicians in American history. The Indigo Girls weren't just a folk duo. They were a lifeline for queer...

If you sat through high school English without anyone mentioning that Shakespeare's most famous sonnets are addressed to a young man, you were not alone - and you were definitely being shortchanged. This episode digs into the evidence hiding in plain sight across Shakespeare's works: the 126 sonnets addressed to a mysterious "Fair Youth," the erotic tension in plays like Twelft...

Most people assume marriage equality is a modern achievement. This episode is here to complicate that assumption. In 1061, in a small church in northwestern Spain, two men named Pedro Díaz and Muño Vandilaz stood before a priest and made their vows to each other. The document recording their union has survived nearly a thousand years. It is not a metaphor. It is not a misinterpretation. It is a sa...

What would it have meant to you, at sixteen, to go to a school where you didn't have to hide? Harvey Milk High School in New York City has been answering that question since 1985. It started as a small alternative program through the Hetrick-Martin Institute, designed to serve LGBTQ+ youth who faced harassment, violence, or homelessness because of their identity. For many of its students, it...

Lady Gaga is more than a pop icon. She's a fearless advocate who transformed LGBTQ+ visibility around the world, and her influence goes far deeper than any single album or award show moment. From the release of "Born This Way" to her outspoken advocacy for transgender rights and her testimony before Congress, Gaga has consistently put her platform to work for the queer community. Sh...

In June 1961, at the Le Bourget airport in Paris, a 23-year-old Soviet ballet dancer sprinted toward a group of French police officers and asked for asylum. Rudolf Nureyev had just made one of the most dramatic defections of the Cold War, and he did it partly because he wanted to dance, and partly because the Soviet government had discovered he was gay. What followed was a career that transformed...

For over sixty years, Doctor Who has been doing something quietly radical: putting queer characters, queer love stories, and queer themes at the center of one of the most beloved science fiction franchises in the world. This episode traces the show's LGBTQ legacy from the early 2000s revival forward. Captain Jack Harkness arrived in 2005 as an openly omnisexual character who flirted with ever...

On February 24, 1995, Greg Louganis sat across from Barbara Walters and told the world he was HIV-positive. He had won four Olympic gold medals. He had been the greatest diver in the world for a decade. And he had carried a secret that, at the time, many people believed would end not just his career but his life. It did not end either. This episode centers on Greg Louganis as the anchor of a large...

What happens when some of history's greatest musical minds have to hide who they are in order to survive? In this episode, we pull back the curtain on fifteen LGBTQ+ composers whose brilliance shaped Western classical music, even as the world tried to erase the fullness of their lives. You'll hear about George Frideric Handel, whose passionate relationships with men were an open secret i...

Cabaret is one of the most beloved musicals in Broadway history. It's also one of the most politically urgent pieces of LGBTQ+ art ever created. Set in Weimar-era Berlin as the Nazi Party rises to power, Cabaret uses queer characters, a decadent nightclub, and an emcee who seems to know everything, to build a chilling portrait of how fascism creeps in while people are distracted by spectacle....

Nathan Lane spent years as one of Hollywood's and Broadway's worst-kept open secrets - beloved by audiences, treasured by collaborators, and quietly, powerfully out to everyone in the industry long before he said the words in public. When he finally came out in an interview in 1999, the sky did not fall. His career, already extraordinary, continued. And in doing so, he became part of a g...