Making Gay History | LGBTQ Oral Histories from the Archive

A century ago, at a notorious men’s penitentiary in New York City, gay inmates managed to find joy and community through their annual Christmas show, the “Fag Follies.” This season, join Eric Marcus as he delves into their lives and explores their world within and outside the prison walls.

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When Lou Sullivan sought gender-affirming care in the 1970s, he was turned down. The reason? Lou identified as a gay man at a time when all trans people were assumed to be straight—a conflation of gender identity and sexual orientation that Lou made it his mission to dismantle.

Visit our ⁠episode webpage⁠ for background information, archival photos, and other resources, as well as a transcript of the episode.

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Audio source: Louis Sullivan interviews #1, #2, and #4, GLBT Historical Society Film & Video Collection (GLBT-VIDEO), courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

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“Are you gay?” a reporter asked U.S. Representative Barney Frank in 1987. “Yes, so what?” With that, Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay. But the casualness of his reply hid decades of agonizing and a very real fear of torpedoing his political career.

Visit our ⁠episode webpage⁠ for background information, archival photos, and other resources, as well as a transcript of the episode.

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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 placed her at the center of a headline-making face-off between the police and the city’s LGBTQ community.

Visit our ⁠episode webpage⁠ for background information, archival photos, and other resources, as well as a transcript of the episode.

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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. His collection of gay-themed materials grew into the largest LGBTQ archive in the world.

Visit our ⁠episode webpage⁠ for background information, archival photos, and other resources, as well as a transcript of the episode.

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