"Are you gay?" a reporter asked U.S. Rep Barney Frank in 1987. He replied: "Yes, so what?" W/ that, Frank became the first Congress member to voluntarily come out as gay. The casualness of his reply hid a very real fear of torpedoing his political career. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-frank

So there they are, a trio out on the water in a little Sunfish sailboat: Eric; Libby, Eric’s friend with a family summer house on Long Island’s North Shore; and Barry, Eric’s “California country bumpkin” coworker at Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-not-alone

Nancy May’s allyship was as personal as it was political — after all, she was married to a gay man. In 1965, her involvement in San Francisco’s homophile movement put her at the center of a headline-making face-off between the police and SF's LGBTQ community. 🔊 makinggayhistory.org/podcast/nanc...

Activist and scholar Barbara Smith has been amplifying the voices of Black women for half a century. Before co-founding, with Audre Lorde, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, Smith co-founded the Combahee River Collective. 📸 Courtesy of Margo Okazawa-Rey 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-barbara-...

🏮NEW EPISODE🏮 Raised in a religious home in 1920s and ’30s Texas, Jim Kepner pieced together a sense of his identity where he could—a homoerotic suggestion read between the lines here, a secretly acquired booklet there. #MakingGayHistory 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-kepner

🏮NEW EPISODE🏮 Pat Bond joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1945 for patriotism and a desire to be among lesbians. The military turned a blind eye to sexual orientation because the war needed bodies. But as Pat witnessed firsthand, once WWII was won, the anti-gay witch hunts began. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-bond

🏮NEW EPISODE!🏮 Mabel Hampton was a performer and domestic worker who lived as an out lesbian in New York City from 1920 until her death in 1989. Her recorded oral histories offer a rare firsthand account of Black lesbian life during the Harlem Renaissance. #MakingGayHistory 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-hampton

Season 15, episode 1 is now LIVE! When news broke in 1952 that Christine Jorgensen, an ex-GI from the Bronx, had undergone gender-affirming surgery, she became a global sensation. In this 1957 interview, meet the thoughtful woman behind the frenzied headlines. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-jorgensen

Today, @savingplaces.bsky.social placed the Stonewall National Monument on its list of America’s "11 Most Endangered Historic Places."

Indian-born activist and lawyer Urvashi Vaid was attuned to injustice early on. Adamant that the fight for LGBTQ equality can't be separated from other struggles, she became one of the most influential and inspiring movement leaders in recent history. She died #OnThisDay 2022. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-vaid

Subversive. Sinful. Sick. Negative opinions about gay people were ubiquitous in the 1970s. “There was no pro-gay propaganda. The support wasn’t out there,” remembered activist and @pflag.org co-founder Morty Manford (died #OnThisDate 1992) during his 1989 interview with Eric. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-manford

Join Eric THIS THURSDAY at Musée Judéo-Alsacien in Bouxwiller, France for VOICE FROM THE SHADOWS: LGBTQ+ Experiences During the Nazi Era. Drawing on "The Nazi Era," Eric will share excerpts from archival interviews that bring this painful—and often overlooked—history to life.

Was there even a moment of hesitation in Jeanne Manford’s mind as she wrote her now-famous letter to the NY Post? “No, I didn’t even think about it.” Why? “I was furious.” #MakingGayHistory 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-manford

#OnThisDate 1965, the first gay rights picket at the White House took place. It was organized by members of the Mattachine Society of Washington to protest the unjust treatment of homosexuals by the federal government. #MakingGayHistory #activism 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-kameny

Join Eric at University College London 5/5 for "Voices from the Shadows: LGBTQ Experiences During the Nazi Era.” Get an intro to our latest season, the first-ever audio documentary series dedicated to sharing the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals under the Nazi regime. Learn more: bit.ly/4cOABVy

Reed Erickson was a trans man with a big checkbook and a pet leopard named Henry. Starting in the '60s, he was the money behind the organization that published ONE magazine: ONE, Inc. #TransgenderDayofVisibility #TDOV 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-erickson

“At Vassar also I got really involved in the women’s movement ... It changed my life, it did.” — Urvashi Vaid Eric’s earliest memory of Urvashi Vaid dates to 1976 when Vassar students demonstrated to protest promo material developed to attract men. #WomensHistoryMonth 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-vaid

On a drizzly March day in 1970, Morris Kight took the lead spot at a Gay Liberation Front protest over securing permits for L.A.’s first Gay Pride March. Unlike most of his fellow activists, he was not young: he was already a veteran of multiple political and social movements. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-kight

"By the time I came out to my mom in 1977, I knew about @pflag.org..when my mom told me that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist I told her I’d go if she went to a PFLAG meeting. She said no. I said no. Big mistake." —Eric #WomensHistoryMonth ⁠⁠ 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-manford

Perry Watkins checked the “homosexual box”—literally. As the Vietnam War entered its 13th year, in 1968, Perry was drafted into the U.S. Army despite having responded "yes" in response to the question on the intake form, "Are you a homosexual?" #BlackHistoryMonth 🔉 bit.ly/mgh-watkins

Openly gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin traced his commitment to speaking against injustice to an experience on a bus as he spoke to @washblade.bsky.social's Peg Byron in 1986. #BlackHistoryMonth 1/4 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-rustin

Civil disobedience is nothing new to the Black and LGBTQ communities. As Ernestine Eckstein reflected in 1965 in conversation with Kay Lahusen and Barbara Gittings, it is fundamental to educating those around us about injustice. 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-eckstein

“I used to tell my mother, ‘I’m gonna marry a girl when I grow up.’” It was in Houston, Texas, that Rev. Carolyn Mobley-Bowie met her life partner, Rev. Adrain Bowie. #BlackHistoryMonth 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-mobley

"None of us is free and none of us can practice democracy fully so long as any other segment of the community or any country is not democratic." —Bayard Rustin #MakingGayHistory⁠ #BlackHistoryMonth 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-rustin

The admin banned the trans-inclusive rainbow flag from Stonewall National Monument, and now Gilbert Baker's standard rainbow flag. The Nazis also came for homosexuals, as documented in “The Nazi Era." If history doesn't repeat itself, it's echoing loudly. makinggayhistory.org/season-fourt...

“It was February of 1987 ... Three months before Emery died, I was diagnosed with AIDS. And, poor baby, I remember he was upset on a number of levels. But the major one was, ‘Who’s gonna take care of you, you know, like you’ve taken care of me?’" —Damien Martin (died #OTD 1987) 🔊 bit.ly/mgh-martin

We're proud and humbled to share that "The Nazi Era," our season featuring the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals during the Holocaust, has been nominated for Best History Podcast by The Ambies. bit.ly/4apriJB Thank you to all who have encouraged their networks to listen, reflect, and learn.

“If the plague of homosexuality goes unchecked, it will spell the end of Germany.” That was the message Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler delivered to an audience of SS officers four years after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. #HolocaustRemembranceDay 🔊 linktr.ee/makinggayhis...

With a score inspired by the Great American Songbook, this nontraditional musical creatively weaves six inmates’ stories into high-camp numbers from The Fag Follies — the prison’s annual Christmas pageant — to expose a secret, fabulous, underground world that was never supposed to have existed. 5/6

Inspired by true events, this new investigative theatrical work uncovers the long-buried story of the “Fag Ward” — a hidden wing of the Men’s Penitentiary on NYC’s Welfare Island, where inmates were imprisoned in the 1930s for homosexuality. ⁠4/6