January 29, 2025 • 40 mins
Ellen Broidy proposed and helped lead the very first Pride March in 1970 in NYC. She reflects back on what inspired the march, what its original goals were, and whether she believes those goals have been achieved.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, it's Jordan. I wanted to
share some exciting news. We've been nominated for Outstanding Podcast
of the Year at the Glad Awards. This is the
top recognition for queer media in our industry, and I
(00:21):
just wanted to say thank you so much, because we
couldn't have done this without you. Your emails, your messages
to me on Instagram and TikTok. They mean so much
to me and they keep me really encouraged and fired up.
So keep sending them and keep telling me what you
think of the episodes. I love hearing from you. Now
let's get into the show.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The marches now are parades. This was a march. This
was a march. This was a civil rights march. There
were no floats, there were no corporate sponsors. All the
signs were handmade. What seems today like a paltry number
(01:04):
of people, you know, in the thousands, as opposed in
the hundreds of thousands approaching the millions. To me, it
looked like this strong. It was our community doing it
by ourselves and for ourselves. And we immediately started screaming,
you know, join us, Join us.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Ellen Broidy, one of the
(01:51):
organizers of the first ever Pride March, held in New
York in nineteen seventy. We'll learn about the original goals
of that first Pride March, and over half a century later,
whether Ellen thinks we've accomplished them. For my Heart Podcast,
I'm Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved.
(02:34):
I remember my first Pride March. I was fifteen years
old in Houston, Texas, the city that I grew up in,
and I had a really good friend of mine who
was openly gay that I went to high school with,
and she begged me to come to the Pride parade
with her. Most of the people in my life had
already suspected that I was gay, but I was so
(02:54):
deeply ashamed that I didn't want to admit it even
to myself. And I thought, oh my, oh my, God,
if anyone sees me going to the Pride parade, it
will confirm all of these accusations. But I let her
convince me. To be honest, It wasn't this euphoric moment
when I suddenly felt so seen and heard and inspired
(03:16):
to come out. It was in the sweltering heat of
the Texas summer, and I remember feeling so out of place.
I tried to dress in what I thought was my
straightest outfit ever in case anyone saw me, basketball shorts
and a red polo with the collar popped. I can't
(03:36):
even say that this was of the times, because it
honestly would have been tragic in any era. But what
I do remember is a little debate that happened on
the street corner. It was between one of the church hecklers,
who was saying all gay people were going to Hell,
and a gay queen who was probably in college. He
(03:59):
was small, sporting gene schwartz and a tank top that
showed his humble but noticeable build, and was wearing Harry
Potter glasses with rainbow glitter on his face. A femme queen.
I remember the heckler screaming up Bible verse after Bible verse.
But I also remember the queen pulling out his own
Bible verses to defend being gay. He seemed really eloquent
(04:23):
and so calm. This was twenty eleven. I had never
seen anyone so confidently defend being gay. I hadn't seen
that many gay people up until that point. Actually, it
was clear that he came to Pride to have fun
with his friends, but it was also clear that he
was there to take up the space he believed he deserved,
(04:44):
exactly as who he was. My next guest, doctor Ellen Broidy,
probably had that same feeling when she attended her first
Pride March. The first Pride March, ever, she was actually
the person that proposed it, and, along with others, helped
organize it. It took place one year after Stonewall in
(05:06):
nineteen seventy in New York City. At the time, being
queer was considered criminal and a mental illness, but this
was also during a time of great social progress in America.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I grew up in a home with two parents who
were in fact activists. My mother was for many years
the only white employee at the National Urban League. My
father was a white collar worker. They were both quite
aware of the inequalities that exist in our country. And
(05:47):
remember this is back in the forties and fifties. They
would take me to marches and demonstrations. I remember actually
going with my mother to picket a Woolworths in Manhattan.
What was Wolworth's, a wo Worst and Selix was a
large department store chain. They were basically one floor. They
(06:11):
were called five and dimes. There's a place where you
could get inexpensive things. The Woolworths had segregated lunch counters
in the South. Some of the first actions that these
students took in the South were at Woolworth's lunch counters.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And so you and your mom were going to just.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Pick it outside. It was just, you know, a statement
of statement of support.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
When was the first moment that you knew you were gay?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It didn't have to do a sort of my personal
attraction to individuals, more of a personal attraction to a concept.
I went to elementary school in Greenwich Village and I
would see people in the street who, even at a
young age, I could clearly identify as belonging to a
(07:06):
certain community, and it almost like a light went off.
That's my community. That's where it was completely separated out
from attraction, from sexuality, from any kind of physicality. It
was almost this sense of there's a community out there
of people like me. Whatever that might mean to a
(07:31):
twelve year old, but that was my first sort of recognition.
And I also remember like being on the bus going
to school and knowing it's like I had this physical
core in the middle of my being telling me who
I was and leading me. You might say I was
(07:52):
led by my gut, and I guess that's the easiest
way to say it.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
And what was it like being a queer person in
the fifty and sixties in America?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It wasn't so long after the McCarthy era, you know,
inco comedy queer was It was very clear that being
gay in America was being an outlaw. However, I kind
of enjoyed that. I enjoyed the illicitness of it, the
(08:23):
illegality of it. I enjoyed the transgression, even though I
had learned through no particular example, and nobody taught me this,
but I had learned at that point that you'd be quiet,
you'd be careful, you take care because it was dangerous.
(08:45):
I mean, people were being beaten up in the streets.
There were bar rays going on all the time. Even
though I was too young to even frequent any of
those places, I knew enough to know what was going on.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
So Ellen, before you went to NYU, you were at
Boston College, and while you were there you had a
nervous breakdown. And I'm wondering, was that because you were
coming to terms with your sexuality?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Oh, I had a between high school, I went to college,
I went to Boston University. I lasted just under a
quarter before I had a complete and total meltdown, and
I'm not sure why, but I had to leave school.
(09:38):
I was hospitalized for quite some time, but then came
out of the hospital and went to NYU. And I
really don't think that my emerging sense of self or
the repressive environment led to whatever was that caused me
(10:01):
to collapse emotionally or mentally. When I was at Boston
University those three plus months, I wouldn't exactly call it
a gay community, but my best friends were two gay
men and a lesbian, so we were clearly out to
(10:23):
each other. In fact, when I said to the psychiatrists
who also was a lesbian who I was assigned to
in the hospital, my problems are because I'm a lesbian's
you know, that's why I'm here, That's why I had
self destructive behavior. Yeah, yah yah. And she looked at
(10:44):
me and she said, you are too messed up to
call yourself something that indicates you know how to love.
That was a pretty positive thing to say to a
messed up eighteen year old. Don't blame it on who
you are, your sexuality. There's a lot of other stuff
(11:07):
going on here, but that core of who you are
is not the problem.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
She was an amazing woman. Her name was doctor Catherine Thales.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Well, fast forwarding a little bit too. When you get
to NYU, you become involved with an organization called the
Student Homophile League League. Yes, tell us what that is
and why you became involved and sort of what it
was like being a part of that group. This was
the sixties.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
This was the sixties. This was nineteen maybe sixty five
or sixty six, sort of around the same time the
Oscar Wild Memorial Bookshop opened. But a man named Stephen Donaldson,
who was a student at Columbia, had started a group,
the first group in the nation forgb We did not
(12:01):
have LGBTQ, we didn't have the whole alphabet. At that
point it was lesbians, gays, and one or two bisexuals.
We didn't trust because we thought they did good. And
three or four of us from NYU met in Stephen's
dorm room one day and asked about the possibility of
(12:23):
starting It wasn't exactly a chapter, but borrowing the name
Student Homophile League and starting our own group at NYU,
and Stephen said fine. We would meet in a room
in the student union, and of course a lot of
(12:44):
the young people were deeply in the closet and we'd
have the door open where the meeting was being held,
and you'd see kids walking back and forth and back
and forth before they decided they could come in. So
it took It took courage. You know, they're looking around,
who's looking at me? Who else is here on the
(13:05):
fourth floor of the student union. But they came in,
they joined, and it became a rather active group.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
What was it like coming out to your family?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
I'd agreed to do a TV show in New York
on the PBS, on the public television station. It was me,
Jack Nichols, elij Clark, and I can't remember who else.
And I knew that my parents watched this show. I
wasn't out to them yet, but I knew they watched
(13:38):
the show. So I decided, brilliant that I probably should
tell my mother. So I called her up and I
invited her out to lunch. We went to lunch right
across from her office building. Every single person in the
(14:00):
agency must have come by the restaurant while we were there.
My mother was so was wound up. She was so tight.
She was sure I was going to say I had cancer,
I'd flunked out of college, some horrific thing. And I
blurted out a crazy conglomeration of lesbian, gay homess. I
(14:24):
didn't even know the word that I used. She leans
back in her chair. All the tension drains from her face.
It was kind of amazing. It was almost like watching
a cartoon. And she says, I've known since you were three.
So I said, why didn't you tell me? She said,
I didn't think it was any of my business. You'd
(14:46):
find out on your own, in your own good time.
But and it was always a butt with my mother.
My mother. Butt was her favorite word. But don't tell
your father. You'd be able to take it. He won't
be able to deal with it. I'm an only child
also won't be able to deal with it. So fine,
(15:06):
I don't tell my father. I do the show. The
next morning, I'm coming home from class. And this was
in the days of no cell phones, of course, just
your regular yellow phone on the wall. We lived in
a fifth floor walk up, and I swear you could
hear the angry phone ringing from the first floor. Yet
(15:31):
on the phone, it's mother. She says, the shit's hit
the fan, and she hangs up. My father had been
at lunch that day after the show, and some a colleague,
a work colleague, not a friend, a work colleague came
by and said, I saw your daughter on TV last night,
(15:53):
and proceeded to out me to my father in the
middle of a business lunch.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
He was furious, having nothing to do with my being
a lesbian and everything to do with the fact that
my mother and I didn't trust him.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
We had that blow up and that was it. Then
it was just his anger at feeling ignored, avoided, eliminated, whatever,
not being trusted.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
In June of nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Riots happened
when a bunch of street queens stood their ground against
the cops and won. Ellen was spending the summer on
Fire Island, but word got to her fast. The riots
brought attention and support to the gay community for the
discrimination they faced, and her activist friends knew how important
(17:03):
this momentum was to capitalize on. One month after Stonewall,
the first radical LGBT activist group was born. It was
called the Gay Liberation Front or GLF for short, and
when Ellen got back from Fire Island, she joined it.
In November of that year, queer activists held a meeting
(17:23):
called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Ellen attended,
and it was there that she proposed the first ever
annual pride demonstration. It was to be called the Christopher
Street Liberation Day March. In nineteen sixty nine, Stonewall happens,
(17:44):
and you present the idea of a march to commemorate
the one year anniversary. Tell us how you came up
with that idea, how you presented it, and what the
goal of the march was.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yes, I was working, in quotes at the Oscar Wild
Memorial Bookshop. The end quotes means I was part of
the unpaid staff, but I was there almost every afternoon
because the original site of the Oscar Wild was in
the middle of the NYU campus. This is before it
(18:20):
moved over to Christopher Street in a much larger space.
So Craig Rodwell and I were actually quite good friends.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And tell us a little bit about what the Oscar
World Bookstore was. Who Craig Rodwell is.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Greig Rodwell was an amazing guy. He regrettably died in
the eighties, I believe of stomach cancer. But Craig came
from the Midwest. He had a rough life, a rough childhood,
a very supportive mother, but he came from a single
parent household. Knew he was gay, also pre natally, but
(18:58):
he always had this dream to open up a bookshop
that would handle gay and lesbian literature, positive stuff, novels, nonfiction.
Of the few writers who were not saying we were
either morally diseased or physically diseased or mentally diseased at
(19:22):
any rate. He scraped together the money and he opened
up this bookshop on Mercer Street, and I would hang
out there. My partner Linda would come after work. Everybody
would be there. It became sort of like a small
community center. Stonewall happens in June of sixty nine. In
(19:45):
November of sixty nine, there was a meeting in Philadelphia
of something called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations
or ERCO, which drew groups most we from New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, but some groups for Fatherfield GLF
(20:07):
had started by this point, so they were an organization
that could have quote unquote delegates to this meeting, and
I was going both as a member of GLF and
as the president of the Gay Students Liberation at NYU.
The night before we were going to go to Philadelphia,
(20:32):
Craig and his then partner Fred Sargent, and myself and
my partner Linda had dinner at Craig's apartment, and we
started talking about what we thought was going to happen
at this meeting, you know, what was going to be
on the agenda, what was important, what was critical. And
the more we talked, the more it became a parent
(20:55):
that Stonewall and what happened at Stonewall really needed to
feature large in whatever was going to be going on.
We were talking, suddenly Craig disappears. He comes back. He
has a pad and a pen. He says let's write
(21:19):
a statement. Let's talk about what we can do to
make Stonewall stay alive. I have to step back here
because there's a lot of history that predates this, because
we came up with a proposal based on a reaction
(21:41):
to another demonstration supporting the rights of lesbians and gay
men to be employed by the federal government because Frank
Hammony had been fired for being gay from his position
as a federal employee. So every year, for several years,
(22:07):
this demonstration would go on. The men were required to
wear jackets and ties, the women dresses or skirts. It
was extraordinarily orderly. There was minimum age I think you
had to be twenty one or older. And part of
our proposal was to turn this annual event, this very
(22:33):
regimented dress code, age delimited event into a major statement
for game and lesbian liberation and gay lesbian pride. So
that's what we were working with. And actually we talk
about this in the proposal, but we mentioned that, and
we mentioned no dress codes, no age limits.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Stonewall marked a huge shift in gay American activism. Before Stonewall,
the scene was dominated by two groups, the Mattachine Society
for Gay Men and the daughters of Balitis for lesbians.
Their goals were to work within the system to seek
change through legal action and peaceful protest. They wanted to
conform and assimilate into American society. But Ellen was part
(23:25):
of Gay Liberation Front or GLF, a new generation of
activists that didn't feel that way anymore. They didn't like
society the way it was. They wanted radical change, an
end to capitalism, an end to the nuclear family, and
an end to the military. This created tension at the
conference because both the radicals and the conformists were present.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
How I ended up making the proposal is that Craig
was very much a lightning rod, controversial well controversial mostly
He had butted heads with Matachine for years. He and
Dick Leitch, who was the president of Matachine, were sort
(24:11):
of on and off frenemies. It was always hard to
figure out what their relationship was. But the concern was
that if Craig made the proposal, the people in the
room would look at the speaker, not the speech. It
was decided that since I was credentialed at this meeting
(24:34):
because of the NYU group, that there would be less pushback.
So we wrote it collectively Craig knew better than to
say that he should present it, and it fell to
me to present it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
How did it go?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
It passed with only one abstention, which was New York.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
They abstained and briefly kind of tell me what were
the goals of this march?
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Visibility? I think that was that was probably the major goal.
Visibility memorializing what happened at Stonewall, fighting back, the power
to be in the streets as who you are, and
(25:33):
the fact that it was open to everybody that you
didn't you didn't have to conform to a certain idea
of what a gay man or a lesbian was. We
weren't asking anybody's permission to be who we were.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
And a couple of days before the march, leading up
to the march, were you nervous at all about anything?
Speaker 2 (25:58):
I was terrified. We had no idea whether the people
who were going to be lining the streets, on the
fire escapes, looking at the windows were there to support
us or to do us harm. It was a complete unknown,
and that saur buying was also a complete unknown. What
(26:21):
the behavior of the police would be. They were not
given what happened to Stonewall. They were not exactly our friends.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
In other words, you were nervous about violence.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, I was not nervous about being seen and being
in the street and making that kind of statement. I
was nervous about something preventing us from making the statement
that we needed to make. But I will say that
(26:55):
the minute we stepped into the street and started marching
up from the village to Central Park, all that fear dissipated.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
At this point, you're kind of on I guess, rocky
terms with your dad and mom. After sort of coming up.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
The morning of the march, my father called me. He said,
I know this is happening today. It was widely advertised
in the city. I know this is happening today. You
write down on the palm of your hand our lawyer's
number if there's any trouble, if you get into trouble,
(27:36):
if you're arrested, if you're harassed, if any authority gets
in your face, that's your first phone call. Wow, he
wrote me a poem. I can't even remember why he
did it, what caused him to do it, But he
wrote a poem. But the tone of it was, and
(28:00):
the winds, the waves, nothing can wash away the love
of a father for his child, I count myself extraordinarily blessed.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So going back to the march, describe what that day
was like. So you start the day off being kind
of scared and nervous, understandably so, and walk me through
kind of what you see, what you smell, what you hear.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Getting to Christopher Street. We lived in the East Village,
So going all the way across town to Christopher Street,
what seems today like a paltry number of people, you know,
in the thousands, as opposed in the hundreds of thousands
approaching the millions. To me, it looked like this throng
(28:54):
and that created a sense of safety because there is
I mean, let's face it, there's there's in numbers. The
marches now are parades. This was a march. This was
a march. This was a civil rights march. There were
no floats, there were no corporate sponsors, there were no
(29:15):
police walking behind us like this was some sort of
perverse Macy's Day parade. It was just people taking to
the streets, owning the streets. All the signs were handmade.
People were dressed in everything from the most flamboyant drag
(29:35):
you can imagine too, you know, the separatest lesbians in
their flannel shirts and workboots. It was our community doing
it by ourselves and for ourselves. There were people lining
the sidewalks, there were people on the on the fire escapes,
(29:57):
there were people on the roofs. And we immediately started screaming,
you know, join us, join us, out of the closets,
into the streets, off of the sidewalks, into the streets.
And unlike the New York Parade now barricades on both
sides of the street, if you're not sort of officially
in the parade, you're not in the parade. With this one,
(30:17):
people were streaming off the sidewalk and walking with us.
So that was that was That was like a stunning moment.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Before recently retiring, Ellen was a librarian and a professor
at UCLA in their Women's Studies department. But much before
that she had proposed and helped organize the first ever
annual Pride march. She remembers that day vividly. After marching
through half of Manhattan, Ellen and the other protesters made
(30:57):
it to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. Oftentimes, queer people
didn't gather in broad daylight together at that time in
fear of violence or harassment. So this was a site
many marchers had never seen before. The park filled with
gay people, As queer historian Lilian Vaderman said, never in
(31:19):
history had so many gay and lesbian people come together
in one place for a common endeavor. It was a
triumph for the community and for Ellen. I wonder if
you have a favorite memory of that day or story.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Mostly some of the internal change that I went through,
from the fear of being in that situation to absolutely understanding, feeling, respecting,
the joy of it. And by the time we got
(31:56):
to the park two Sheet Meadow, it was a real party.
The march itself was the political statement. Getting to the
park and being in the park with all of these
people was the celebratory statement. Not only had we made
it sixty some blocks alive and in one piece, but
(32:21):
we made it as a community.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
When you went home that day after the march, how
did you feel about the future of the movement.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I really thought we were on the cusp of a revolution.
I thought that we had now, we had become the
lavender stripe in the rainbow, and that there would be
a people's revolution and things would change so markedly for
all marginalized communities. And that's how I felt. For some time, we,
(32:57):
honest to God, thought that we were now out part
of a revolutionary movement that was going to change change
this country in profound, profound ways. Us, the Black Panthers,
the Young Lords, which was the Puerto Rican group, the
women's movement, that we were going to make such profound
(33:20):
changes that the country would never turn back to the
class based, race based, gender based nation that we had
come out of in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
The Pride March is pretty different these days. You think
then what you described as the first March, and I
wonder what about it feels different for you?
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The Gay Liberation Front, those of us who have survived
were grand marshals in twenty nineteen at the fiftieth anniversary
of Stonewall. And I had been to marches off and
on Los Angeles, San Francisco, the funny little thing we
have in Santa Barbara, sometimes in New York. But it
(34:14):
just struck me, you know, what am I doing leading
a march with AT and T and Bank of America
and the NYPD. You know, it's wonderful that they that
we created. And I'll say this, this is ego maniacal,
but that we created the space for those huge corporations,
(34:37):
those huge entities to have lesbian and gay and buy
and trans groups. So that made me feel good. It
didn't make me feel good that one day a year
they were patting themselves on the back to do this.
I don't like the floats. I don't like the fact
(34:58):
that there are barricades between the marchers and the folks
watching the march. That doesn't feel like building community to me.
On the other hand, when we went by, and because
both my partner and I have some mobility issues, we
(35:20):
were riding in a flatbed truck, and the love from
the people behind the barricades on the other side of
the barricades was just amazing, just amazing, and in some
ways made me reflect back on how it felt at
(35:41):
that first march.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Do you think your goals were accomplished with that very
first Pride March in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
That is a complicated question, in part because I would
be hard pressed to identify anybody at that first march
who thought serving in the military or getting married was
a goal. The goal really was liberation, revolution, other things,
(36:16):
military service, marriage, those are important, and I think that
those evolved out of what we started. The reformist parts
of sort of a broader LGBTQ agenda were achieved, the
(36:37):
revolutionary parts were not. So I think I mean clearly
we started something and that something is still going on.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Ellen, you've been an educator for a long time and
you have worked with a lot of young people that
engage in the queer history that you lived, and I
wonder what about that gives you hope.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I was in women's studies, and I was a librarian
both at University of California, Irvine and at UCLA and
then at UC Santa Barbara. I was a writing specialist
or a minority scholars program. Those students, all of whom
were either students of color or first generation in college,
(37:27):
whether they were LGBTQ or straight, they all had the
same fire in their gut that I remember having at
nineteen and twenty and twenty one as an undergraduate. So
they gave me great hope. I do get a sense
(37:50):
that there are groups of young people who are not
going to back down, who understand that we didn't accomp
what we set out to accomplish, but we set a
framework and we have to keep moving forward.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
This show is about history, but it's really about passing
things down from one queer generation to the next. Stories, love, wisdom,
what have you. What's one piece of wisdom that you
want to give to young people, the next generation of
(38:30):
young folks.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
We've been here throughout history, we will continue to be here,
and you cannot wipe us off the face of the
earth by saying that book can't be in the library,
that class can't be taught, that word can't be spoken.
We're not going away. You have a history. You can
learn both from our victories and our failures, which we
(38:57):
had many. But you can't be an activist. You can't
be a political person if you're not a lifelong learner.
If you're stuck in some idea, some concept, some immovable ideology,
you're not going to go any place, which does not
(39:18):
mean that you step back from what you truly believe.
But you interrogate, You investigate, You ask questions. You look
to others who may have answers. Some you'll agree with,
some you won't. The younger generation is moving forward, is
(39:38):
moving way beyond me, that's for sure. If they would
occasionally turn around, smile and wave, we know you're there.
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
What we Loved is hosted by me Jordan can solve this.
New episodes drop every Wednesday. We want to write in
to tell your story. Email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore gooin solve this. We
are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts.
(40:16):
But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our
producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our
executive producers are Me, Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original
music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and
Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a
(40:37):
rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and
thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, it's Jordan. I wanted to
share some exciting news. We've been nominated for Outstanding Podcast
of the Year at the Glad Awards. This is the
top recognition for queer media in our industry, and I
(00:21):
just wanted to say thank you so much, because we
couldn't have done this without you. Your emails, your messages
to me on Instagram and TikTok. They mean so much
to me and they keep me really encouraged and fired up.
So keep sending them and keep telling me what you
think of the episodes. I love hearing from you. Now
let's get into the show.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
The marches now are parades. This was a march. This
was a march. This was a civil rights march. There
were no floats, there were no corporate sponsors. All the
signs were handmade. What seems today like a paltry number
(01:04):
of people, you know, in the thousands, as opposed in
the hundreds of thousands approaching the millions. To me, it
looked like this strong. It was our community doing it
by ourselves and for ourselves. And we immediately started screaming,
you know, join us, Join us.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I've found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Ellen Broidy, one of the
(01:51):
organizers of the first ever Pride March, held in New
York in nineteen seventy. We'll learn about the original goals
of that first Pride March, and over half a century later,
whether Ellen thinks we've accomplished them. For my Heart Podcast,
I'm Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved.
(02:34):
I remember my first Pride March. I was fifteen years
old in Houston, Texas, the city that I grew up in,
and I had a really good friend of mine who
was openly gay that I went to high school with,
and she begged me to come to the Pride parade
with her. Most of the people in my life had
already suspected that I was gay, but I was so
(02:54):
deeply ashamed that I didn't want to admit it even
to myself. And I thought, oh my, oh my, God,
if anyone sees me going to the Pride parade, it
will confirm all of these accusations. But I let her
convince me. To be honest, It wasn't this euphoric moment
when I suddenly felt so seen and heard and inspired
(03:16):
to come out. It was in the sweltering heat of
the Texas summer, and I remember feeling so out of place.
I tried to dress in what I thought was my
straightest outfit ever in case anyone saw me, basketball shorts
and a red polo with the collar popped. I can't
(03:36):
even say that this was of the times, because it
honestly would have been tragic in any era. But what
I do remember is a little debate that happened on
the street corner. It was between one of the church hecklers,
who was saying all gay people were going to Hell,
and a gay queen who was probably in college. He
(03:59):
was small, sporting gene schwartz and a tank top that
showed his humble but noticeable build, and was wearing Harry
Potter glasses with rainbow glitter on his face. A femme queen.
I remember the heckler screaming up Bible verse after Bible verse.
But I also remember the queen pulling out his own
Bible verses to defend being gay. He seemed really eloquent
(04:23):
and so calm. This was twenty eleven. I had never
seen anyone so confidently defend being gay. I hadn't seen
that many gay people up until that point. Actually, it
was clear that he came to Pride to have fun
with his friends, but it was also clear that he
was there to take up the space he believed he deserved,
(04:44):
exactly as who he was. My next guest, doctor Ellen Broidy,
probably had that same feeling when she attended her first
Pride March. The first Pride March, ever, she was actually
the person that proposed it, and, along with others, helped
organize it. It took place one year after Stonewall in
(05:06):
nineteen seventy in New York City. At the time, being
queer was considered criminal and a mental illness, but this
was also during a time of great social progress in America.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I grew up in a home with two parents who
were in fact activists. My mother was for many years
the only white employee at the National Urban League. My
father was a white collar worker. They were both quite
aware of the inequalities that exist in our country. And
(05:47):
remember this is back in the forties and fifties. They
would take me to marches and demonstrations. I remember actually
going with my mother to picket a Woolworths in Manhattan.
What was Wolworth's, a wo Worst and Selix was a
large department store chain. They were basically one floor. They
(06:11):
were called five and dimes. There's a place where you
could get inexpensive things. The Woolworths had segregated lunch counters
in the South. Some of the first actions that these
students took in the South were at Woolworth's lunch counters.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And so you and your mom were going to just.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Pick it outside. It was just, you know, a statement
of statement of support.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
When was the first moment that you knew you were gay?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
It didn't have to do a sort of my personal
attraction to individuals, more of a personal attraction to a concept.
I went to elementary school in Greenwich Village and I
would see people in the street who, even at a
young age, I could clearly identify as belonging to a
(07:06):
certain community, and it almost like a light went off.
That's my community. That's where it was completely separated out
from attraction, from sexuality, from any kind of physicality. It
was almost this sense of there's a community out there
of people like me. Whatever that might mean to a
(07:31):
twelve year old, but that was my first sort of recognition.
And I also remember like being on the bus going
to school and knowing it's like I had this physical
core in the middle of my being telling me who
I was and leading me. You might say I was
(07:52):
led by my gut, and I guess that's the easiest
way to say it.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
And what was it like being a queer person in
the fifty and sixties in America?
Speaker 2 (08:03):
It wasn't so long after the McCarthy era, you know,
inco comedy queer was It was very clear that being
gay in America was being an outlaw. However, I kind
of enjoyed that. I enjoyed the illicitness of it, the
(08:23):
illegality of it. I enjoyed the transgression, even though I
had learned through no particular example, and nobody taught me this,
but I had learned at that point that you'd be quiet,
you'd be careful, you take care because it was dangerous.
(08:45):
I mean, people were being beaten up in the streets.
There were bar rays going on all the time. Even
though I was too young to even frequent any of
those places, I knew enough to know what was going on.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
So Ellen, before you went to NYU, you were at
Boston College, and while you were there you had a
nervous breakdown. And I'm wondering, was that because you were
coming to terms with your sexuality?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
Oh, I had a between high school, I went to college,
I went to Boston University. I lasted just under a
quarter before I had a complete and total meltdown, and
I'm not sure why, but I had to leave school.
(09:38):
I was hospitalized for quite some time, but then came
out of the hospital and went to NYU. And I
really don't think that my emerging sense of self or
the repressive environment led to whatever was that caused me
(10:01):
to collapse emotionally or mentally. When I was at Boston
University those three plus months, I wouldn't exactly call it
a gay community, but my best friends were two gay
men and a lesbian, so we were clearly out to
(10:23):
each other. In fact, when I said to the psychiatrists
who also was a lesbian who I was assigned to
in the hospital, my problems are because I'm a lesbian's
you know, that's why I'm here, That's why I had
self destructive behavior. Yeah, yah yah. And she looked at
(10:44):
me and she said, you are too messed up to
call yourself something that indicates you know how to love.
That was a pretty positive thing to say to a
messed up eighteen year old. Don't blame it on who
you are, your sexuality. There's a lot of other stuff
(11:07):
going on here, but that core of who you are
is not the problem.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Hmm.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
She was an amazing woman. Her name was doctor Catherine Thales.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Well, fast forwarding a little bit too. When you get
to NYU, you become involved with an organization called the
Student Homophile League League. Yes, tell us what that is
and why you became involved and sort of what it
was like being a part of that group. This was
the sixties.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
This was the sixties. This was nineteen maybe sixty five
or sixty six, sort of around the same time the
Oscar Wild Memorial Bookshop opened. But a man named Stephen Donaldson,
who was a student at Columbia, had started a group,
the first group in the nation forgb We did not
(12:01):
have LGBTQ, we didn't have the whole alphabet. At that
point it was lesbians, gays, and one or two bisexuals.
We didn't trust because we thought they did good. And
three or four of us from NYU met in Stephen's
dorm room one day and asked about the possibility of
(12:23):
starting It wasn't exactly a chapter, but borrowing the name
Student Homophile League and starting our own group at NYU,
and Stephen said fine. We would meet in a room
in the student union, and of course a lot of
(12:44):
the young people were deeply in the closet and we'd
have the door open where the meeting was being held,
and you'd see kids walking back and forth and back
and forth before they decided they could come in. So
it took It took courage. You know, they're looking around,
who's looking at me? Who else is here on the
(13:05):
fourth floor of the student union. But they came in,
they joined, and it became a rather active group.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
What was it like coming out to your family?
Speaker 2 (13:16):
I'd agreed to do a TV show in New York
on the PBS, on the public television station. It was me,
Jack Nichols, elij Clark, and I can't remember who else.
And I knew that my parents watched this show. I
wasn't out to them yet, but I knew they watched
(13:38):
the show. So I decided, brilliant that I probably should
tell my mother. So I called her up and I
invited her out to lunch. We went to lunch right
across from her office building. Every single person in the
(14:00):
agency must have come by the restaurant while we were there.
My mother was so was wound up. She was so tight.
She was sure I was going to say I had cancer,
I'd flunked out of college, some horrific thing. And I
blurted out a crazy conglomeration of lesbian, gay homess. I
(14:24):
didn't even know the word that I used. She leans
back in her chair. All the tension drains from her face.
It was kind of amazing. It was almost like watching
a cartoon. And she says, I've known since you were three.
So I said, why didn't you tell me? She said,
I didn't think it was any of my business. You'd
(14:46):
find out on your own, in your own good time.
But and it was always a butt with my mother.
My mother. Butt was her favorite word. But don't tell
your father. You'd be able to take it. He won't
be able to deal with it. I'm an only child
also won't be able to deal with it. So fine,
(15:06):
I don't tell my father. I do the show. The
next morning, I'm coming home from class. And this was
in the days of no cell phones, of course, just
your regular yellow phone on the wall. We lived in
a fifth floor walk up, and I swear you could
hear the angry phone ringing from the first floor. Yet
(15:31):
on the phone, it's mother. She says, the shit's hit
the fan, and she hangs up. My father had been
at lunch that day after the show, and some a colleague,
a work colleague, not a friend, a work colleague came
by and said, I saw your daughter on TV last night,
(15:53):
and proceeded to out me to my father in the
middle of a business lunch.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
He was furious, having nothing to do with my being
a lesbian and everything to do with the fact that
my mother and I didn't trust him.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
We had that blow up and that was it. Then
it was just his anger at feeling ignored, avoided, eliminated, whatever,
not being trusted.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
In June of nineteen sixty nine, the Stonewall Riots happened
when a bunch of street queens stood their ground against
the cops and won. Ellen was spending the summer on
Fire Island, but word got to her fast. The riots
brought attention and support to the gay community for the
discrimination they faced, and her activist friends knew how important
(17:03):
this momentum was to capitalize on. One month after Stonewall,
the first radical LGBT activist group was born. It was
called the Gay Liberation Front or GLF for short, and
when Ellen got back from Fire Island, she joined it.
In November of that year, queer activists held a meeting
(17:23):
called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Ellen attended,
and it was there that she proposed the first ever
annual pride demonstration. It was to be called the Christopher
Street Liberation Day March. In nineteen sixty nine, Stonewall happens,
(17:44):
and you present the idea of a march to commemorate
the one year anniversary. Tell us how you came up
with that idea, how you presented it, and what the
goal of the march was.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yes, I was working, in quotes at the Oscar Wild
Memorial Bookshop. The end quotes means I was part of
the unpaid staff, but I was there almost every afternoon
because the original site of the Oscar Wild was in
the middle of the NYU campus. This is before it
(18:20):
moved over to Christopher Street in a much larger space.
So Craig Rodwell and I were actually quite good friends.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And tell us a little bit about what the Oscar
World Bookstore was. Who Craig Rodwell is.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Greig Rodwell was an amazing guy. He regrettably died in
the eighties, I believe of stomach cancer. But Craig came
from the Midwest. He had a rough life, a rough childhood,
a very supportive mother, but he came from a single
parent household. Knew he was gay, also pre natally, but
(18:58):
he always had this dream to open up a bookshop
that would handle gay and lesbian literature, positive stuff, novels, nonfiction.
Of the few writers who were not saying we were
either morally diseased or physically diseased or mentally diseased at
(19:22):
any rate. He scraped together the money and he opened
up this bookshop on Mercer Street, and I would hang
out there. My partner Linda would come after work. Everybody
would be there. It became sort of like a small
community center. Stonewall happens in June of sixty nine. In
(19:45):
November of sixty nine, there was a meeting in Philadelphia
of something called the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations
or ERCO, which drew groups most we from New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, but some groups for Fatherfield GLF
(20:07):
had started by this point, so they were an organization
that could have quote unquote delegates to this meeting, and
I was going both as a member of GLF and
as the president of the Gay Students Liberation at NYU.
The night before we were going to go to Philadelphia,
(20:32):
Craig and his then partner Fred Sargent, and myself and
my partner Linda had dinner at Craig's apartment, and we
started talking about what we thought was going to happen
at this meeting, you know, what was going to be
on the agenda, what was important, what was critical. And
the more we talked, the more it became a parent
(20:55):
that Stonewall and what happened at Stonewall really needed to
feature large in whatever was going to be going on.
We were talking, suddenly Craig disappears. He comes back. He
has a pad and a pen. He says let's write
(21:19):
a statement. Let's talk about what we can do to
make Stonewall stay alive. I have to step back here
because there's a lot of history that predates this, because
we came up with a proposal based on a reaction
(21:41):
to another demonstration supporting the rights of lesbians and gay
men to be employed by the federal government because Frank
Hammony had been fired for being gay from his position
as a federal employee. So every year, for several years,
(22:07):
this demonstration would go on. The men were required to
wear jackets and ties, the women dresses or skirts. It
was extraordinarily orderly. There was minimum age I think you
had to be twenty one or older. And part of
our proposal was to turn this annual event, this very
(22:33):
regimented dress code, age delimited event into a major statement
for game and lesbian liberation and gay lesbian pride. So
that's what we were working with. And actually we talk
about this in the proposal, but we mentioned that, and
we mentioned no dress codes, no age limits.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Stonewall marked a huge shift in gay American activism. Before Stonewall,
the scene was dominated by two groups, the Mattachine Society
for Gay Men and the daughters of Balitis for lesbians.
Their goals were to work within the system to seek
change through legal action and peaceful protest. They wanted to
conform and assimilate into American society. But Ellen was part
(23:25):
of Gay Liberation Front or GLF, a new generation of
activists that didn't feel that way anymore. They didn't like
society the way it was. They wanted radical change, an
end to capitalism, an end to the nuclear family, and
an end to the military. This created tension at the
conference because both the radicals and the conformists were present.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
How I ended up making the proposal is that Craig
was very much a lightning rod, controversial well controversial mostly
He had butted heads with Matachine for years. He and
Dick Leitch, who was the president of Matachine, were sort
(24:11):
of on and off frenemies. It was always hard to
figure out what their relationship was. But the concern was
that if Craig made the proposal, the people in the
room would look at the speaker, not the speech. It
was decided that since I was credentialed at this meeting
(24:34):
because of the NYU group, that there would be less pushback.
So we wrote it collectively Craig knew better than to
say that he should present it, and it fell to
me to present it.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
How did it go?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
It passed with only one abstention, which was New York.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
They abstained and briefly kind of tell me what were
the goals of this march?
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Visibility? I think that was that was probably the major goal.
Visibility memorializing what happened at Stonewall, fighting back, the power
to be in the streets as who you are, and
(25:33):
the fact that it was open to everybody that you
didn't you didn't have to conform to a certain idea
of what a gay man or a lesbian was. We
weren't asking anybody's permission to be who we were.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
And a couple of days before the march, leading up
to the march, were you nervous at all about anything?
Speaker 2 (25:58):
I was terrified. We had no idea whether the people
who were going to be lining the streets, on the
fire escapes, looking at the windows were there to support
us or to do us harm. It was a complete unknown,
and that saur buying was also a complete unknown. What
(26:21):
the behavior of the police would be. They were not
given what happened to Stonewall. They were not exactly our friends.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
In other words, you were nervous about violence.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, I was not nervous about being seen and being
in the street and making that kind of statement. I
was nervous about something preventing us from making the statement
that we needed to make. But I will say that
(26:55):
the minute we stepped into the street and started marching
up from the village to Central Park, all that fear dissipated.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
At this point, you're kind of on I guess, rocky
terms with your dad and mom. After sort of coming up.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
The morning of the march, my father called me. He said,
I know this is happening today. It was widely advertised
in the city. I know this is happening today. You
write down on the palm of your hand our lawyer's
number if there's any trouble, if you get into trouble,
(27:36):
if you're arrested, if you're harassed, if any authority gets
in your face, that's your first phone call. Wow, he
wrote me a poem. I can't even remember why he
did it, what caused him to do it, But he
wrote a poem. But the tone of it was, and
(28:00):
the winds, the waves, nothing can wash away the love
of a father for his child, I count myself extraordinarily blessed.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
So going back to the march, describe what that day
was like. So you start the day off being kind
of scared and nervous, understandably so, and walk me through
kind of what you see, what you smell, what you hear.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Getting to Christopher Street. We lived in the East Village,
So going all the way across town to Christopher Street,
what seems today like a paltry number of people, you know,
in the thousands, as opposed in the hundreds of thousands
approaching the millions. To me, it looked like this throng
(28:54):
and that created a sense of safety because there is
I mean, let's face it, there's there's in numbers. The
marches now are parades. This was a march. This was
a march. This was a civil rights march. There were
no floats, there were no corporate sponsors, there were no
(29:15):
police walking behind us like this was some sort of
perverse Macy's Day parade. It was just people taking to
the streets, owning the streets. All the signs were handmade.
People were dressed in everything from the most flamboyant drag
(29:35):
you can imagine too, you know, the separatest lesbians in
their flannel shirts and workboots. It was our community doing
it by ourselves and for ourselves. There were people lining
the sidewalks, there were people on the on the fire escapes,
(29:57):
there were people on the roofs. And we immediately started screaming,
you know, join us, join us, out of the closets,
into the streets, off of the sidewalks, into the streets.
And unlike the New York Parade now barricades on both
sides of the street, if you're not sort of officially
in the parade, you're not in the parade. With this one,
(30:17):
people were streaming off the sidewalk and walking with us.
So that was that was That was like a stunning moment.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Before recently retiring, Ellen was a librarian and a professor
at UCLA in their Women's Studies department. But much before
that she had proposed and helped organize the first ever
annual Pride march. She remembers that day vividly. After marching
through half of Manhattan, Ellen and the other protesters made
(30:57):
it to Sheep's Meadow in Central Park. Oftentimes, queer people
didn't gather in broad daylight together at that time in
fear of violence or harassment. So this was a site
many marchers had never seen before. The park filled with
gay people, As queer historian Lilian Vaderman said, never in
(31:19):
history had so many gay and lesbian people come together
in one place for a common endeavor. It was a
triumph for the community and for Ellen. I wonder if
you have a favorite memory of that day or story.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Mostly some of the internal change that I went through,
from the fear of being in that situation to absolutely understanding, feeling, respecting,
the joy of it. And by the time we got
(31:56):
to the park two Sheet Meadow, it was a real party.
The march itself was the political statement. Getting to the
park and being in the park with all of these
people was the celebratory statement. Not only had we made
it sixty some blocks alive and in one piece, but
(32:21):
we made it as a community.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
When you went home that day after the march, how
did you feel about the future of the movement.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I really thought we were on the cusp of a revolution.
I thought that we had now, we had become the
lavender stripe in the rainbow, and that there would be
a people's revolution and things would change so markedly for
all marginalized communities. And that's how I felt. For some time, we,
(32:57):
honest to God, thought that we were now out part
of a revolutionary movement that was going to change change
this country in profound, profound ways. Us, the Black Panthers,
the Young Lords, which was the Puerto Rican group, the
women's movement, that we were going to make such profound
(33:20):
changes that the country would never turn back to the
class based, race based, gender based nation that we had
come out of in the fifties.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
The Pride March is pretty different these days. You think
then what you described as the first March, and I
wonder what about it feels different for you?
Speaker 2 (33:48):
The Gay Liberation Front, those of us who have survived
were grand marshals in twenty nineteen at the fiftieth anniversary
of Stonewall. And I had been to marches off and
on Los Angeles, San Francisco, the funny little thing we
have in Santa Barbara, sometimes in New York. But it
(34:14):
just struck me, you know, what am I doing leading
a march with AT and T and Bank of America
and the NYPD. You know, it's wonderful that they that
we created. And I'll say this, this is ego maniacal,
but that we created the space for those huge corporations,
(34:37):
those huge entities to have lesbian and gay and buy
and trans groups. So that made me feel good. It
didn't make me feel good that one day a year
they were patting themselves on the back to do this.
I don't like the floats. I don't like the fact
(34:58):
that there are barricades between the marchers and the folks
watching the march. That doesn't feel like building community to me.
On the other hand, when we went by, and because
both my partner and I have some mobility issues, we
(35:20):
were riding in a flatbed truck, and the love from
the people behind the barricades on the other side of
the barricades was just amazing, just amazing, and in some
ways made me reflect back on how it felt at
(35:41):
that first march.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Do you think your goals were accomplished with that very
first Pride March in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
That is a complicated question, in part because I would
be hard pressed to identify anybody at that first march
who thought serving in the military or getting married was
a goal. The goal really was liberation, revolution, other things,
(36:16):
military service, marriage, those are important, and I think that
those evolved out of what we started. The reformist parts
of sort of a broader LGBTQ agenda were achieved, the
(36:37):
revolutionary parts were not. So I think I mean clearly
we started something and that something is still going on.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Ellen, you've been an educator for a long time and
you have worked with a lot of young people that
engage in the queer history that you lived, and I
wonder what about that gives you hope.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I was in women's studies, and I was a librarian
both at University of California, Irvine and at UCLA and
then at UC Santa Barbara. I was a writing specialist
or a minority scholars program. Those students, all of whom
were either students of color or first generation in college,
(37:27):
whether they were LGBTQ or straight, they all had the
same fire in their gut that I remember having at
nineteen and twenty and twenty one as an undergraduate. So
they gave me great hope. I do get a sense
(37:50):
that there are groups of young people who are not
going to back down, who understand that we didn't accomp
what we set out to accomplish, but we set a
framework and we have to keep moving forward.
Speaker 1 (38:08):
This show is about history, but it's really about passing
things down from one queer generation to the next. Stories, love, wisdom,
what have you. What's one piece of wisdom that you
want to give to young people, the next generation of
(38:30):
young folks.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
We've been here throughout history, we will continue to be here,
and you cannot wipe us off the face of the
earth by saying that book can't be in the library,
that class can't be taught, that word can't be spoken.
We're not going away. You have a history. You can
learn both from our victories and our failures, which we
(38:57):
had many. But you can't be an activist. You can't
be a political person if you're not a lifelong learner.
If you're stuck in some idea, some concept, some immovable ideology,
you're not going to go any place, which does not
(39:18):
mean that you step back from what you truly believe.
But you interrogate, You investigate, You ask questions. You look
to others who may have answers. Some you'll agree with,
some you won't. The younger generation is moving forward, is
(39:38):
moving way beyond me, that's for sure. If they would
occasionally turn around, smile and wave, we know you're there.
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
What we Loved is hosted by me Jordan can solve this.
New episodes drop every Wednesday. We want to write in
to tell your story. Email us at Buttweloved at gmail
dot com, or you can send me a message on
Instagram or TikTok at your underscore gooin solve this. We
are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts.
(40:16):
But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our
producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our
executive producers are Me, Maya Howard and Katrina Norville. Original
music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and
Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a
(40:37):
rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and
thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com