Making Gay History | LGBTQ Oral Histories from the Archive

When did you make gay history? Join host Eric Marcus, pioneering photojournalist Kay Lahusen, and a group of LGBTQ history-making elders for their monthly retirement community dinner. Happy memories f...

25 Apr 202017min

Vito Russo’s legacy—as a film historian, activist, and cofounder of GLAAD and ACT UP—is hard to overstate. In this 1988 interview, legacy was also very much on Vito’s mind: It was the height of the AI...

18 Apr 202022min

“I’ve spent a large percent of my life being angry.” That was Shirley Willer, reflecting on the death of a close friend and fellow nurse who in 1947 received fatally inadequate hospital care because h...

11 Apr 202021min

Wendell Sayers understood isolation. Born in western Kansas in 1904, Wendell was the first Black lawyer to work for Colorado’s attorney general; living openly as a gay man wasn’t an option. When he at...

4 Apr 202020min

Musical uplift for anxious times. When Eric Marcus interviewed lesbian publishing pioneer Edythe Eyde in 1989, she treated him to a concert for one on her front porch singing her gay songs from the '5...

28 Mars 202017min

In 1957, Frank Kameny was fired from his job at the U.S. Army Map Service for being gay. He went on to fight the federal government for 14 years and never lost his resolve. And he won! Inspiration for...

21 Mars 202017min

In 1970, a young radio reporter recorded an interview with Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and other members of the newly formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—STAR. Nearly 50 years late...

27 Dec 201922min

Damien Martin grew up in foster care and on the streets of Philadelphia, so he knew all too well about the needs of vulnerable youth. In 1979, when he and his partner, Dr. Emery Hetrick, heard about a...

19 Dec 201932min