This Week in Queer History

In 1986, over 3,400 queer athletes marched into Kezar Stadium while the AIDS crisis raged and the government looked away. Tom Waddell — doctor, Olympian, and man already diagnosed with AIDS — threw a javelin and won gold. Forty years later, the Olympics are coming to Los Angeles, and Pride House is landing right in West Hollywood.

This is the story of Gay Games II and how a community built their own world when the world ...

In 1864, a German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs did something no one had ever done before: he invented a word for himself. Not a diagnosis. Not a slur. A word rooted in ancient philosophy that said this is what I am, and I am not ashamed. That word was Uranian, and it cracked open a door that has never fully closed.

This episode traces 160 years of queer linguistic history, from Ulrichs coining his own vocabulary to the undergr...

In this episode, we meet Dr. James Miranda Steuart Barry, a brilliant British Army surgeon who rose to the second-highest medical rank in the Empire, performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections where both mother and child survived, and lived as a man for 56 years. Born Margaret Anne Bulkley in Cork, Ireland around 1789, Barry's transformation was made possible by an extraordinary network of allies, including a Venezuel...

Three years before Stonewall, a trans woman in San Francisco's Tenderloin threw a cup of coffee in a police officer's face. That moment ignited the Compton's Cafeteria Uprising, one of the earliest acts of collective queer resistance in American history. In this episode, we explore the story that was almost erased, the community that fought back, and why the language we use matters. We'll talk about the difference between a riot an...

On July 2, 1986, opponents of New Zealand's Homosexual Law Reform Bill moved to kill it entirely. The closure motion failed by one vote - 41 in favor of killing the bill, 42 against. One MP held strong. One week later, on July 9, 1986, Part 1 passed 49 to 44, and gay men in New Zealand were no longer criminals. This episode tells the full story of that nail-biting fight - and why it matters forty years later.

Before British ships ar...

What if America's most patriotic song was a queer love story? On July 4, 1895, Katharine Lee Bates published a poem called "America" in a weekly newspaper. We know it today as "America the Beautiful." And the woman who wrote it was a lesbian who lived for twenty-five years with the love of her life - and whose queerness was systematically erased from popular history for over a century. This Fourth of July episode gives Katharine Le...

On June 25, 1972, a schoolteacher from Queens named Jeanne Manford grabbed a piece of orange posterboard, wrote in marker that parents of gay children should unite in support of their kids, and stepped into the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. She'd never made a protest sign before - you can tell by the lowercase letters in the middle of the message. She'd never crossed the street against the light. And when she walked out ...

At 5:01 PM on June 16, 2008, the doors of San Francisco City Hall swung open and two women walked in. Del Martin was 87 years old. Phyllis Lyon was 84. They had been together for fifty-six years. And they were about to become the first same-sex couple legally married in the state of California. This episode is their story - and it is one of the most important love stories in American history.

But to understand what that 2008 wedding...

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court told sixteen states they couldn't ban love anymore. When Richard and Mildred Loving won their case against Virginia, they didn't just win the right to stay married - they handed us a legal blueprint we'd spend the next half-century turning into our own freedom. This is the story of Loving v. Virginia, and it's the episode for this milestone hundredth episode of This Week in Queer History.

Richard ...

In June 1991, three thousand LGBTQ+ people wore red shirts to Walt Disney World. No sponsors. No corporate blessing. No permission. Just community - coordinated through word of mouth, built on trust, and showing up at the most wholesome space in American family entertainment to say: we are families too. We deserve joy too. We belong here. This episode celebrates the 35th anniversary of the first Gay Days at Disney World and asks a ...

On May 30, 1986, one of America's most influential fashion designers died at forty-six years old. His company said it was encephalitis. The newspapers printed it. And an entire industry exhaled - because nobody had to say the word AIDS. In this episode, we tell the full story of Perry Ellis, his partner Laughlin Barker, and the industry-wide conspiracy of silence that had a body count far beyond two men.

Perry Ellis revolutionized A...

What if a newspaper column could teach America that queer people deserve happy endings? On May 24, 1976, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City arrived in the San Francisco Chronicle - a serialized story about a boarding house full of gay men, lesbians, a trans landlady, and their straight friends, simply living their lives. In this episode, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moment that changed queer storytelling forever.

The m...

On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization endorsed the ICD-10 and quietly removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was, in the words of the activists who had fought for it, a seismic moment - the day a global institution finally admitted that the science had been on our side all along. In this episode, we explore what that moment meant, what it cost to get there, and why it took 17 years after the American P...

On May 6, 1933, members of the German Student Union marched to the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin - with a brass band. Like a parade. They stormed the building, seized tens of thousands of volumes, grabbed patient files and address lists full of names and identities - and four days later, burned it all at Opernplatz in front of 40,000 people. In this episode, we tell the full story of what was destroyed that day, and why it...

On April 30, 1997, Ellen DeGeneres leaned into an airport PA microphone and said three words to 42 million people watching at home. In this episode, we go back to that night - the bomb threats, the pulled advertisers, the watch parties, the tears - and tell the full, honest story of what it cost to kick that door open. Because the story of "The Puppy Episode" is messier and more human than the legend.

Ellen didn't become a cultural ...

What happens when the most famous man in England is told his love is a crime? In 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in a London courtroom and called love between men "beautiful" and "noble," refusing to apologize, recant, or run. This is the trial that sent queer people underground for seventy years, and the defiance that planted a seed we're still growing today.

By early 1895, Wilde was untouchable. Two plays running in the West End, a reputa...

In 1979, a group of queer activists in San Francisco put on nun habits as an Easter joke. Within a few years, they were saving lives.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence started as camp and irreverence, but when the AIDS crisis arrived and official institutions looked the other way, these drag nuns stepped up. They published "Play Fair," one of the very first safer-sex guides in the country, at a time when the government was silent ...

Ryan White never asked to be the face of AIDS in America. He was a teenager from Kokomo, Indiana, who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion used to treat his hemophilia. He was thirteen years old. And when his school tried to bar him from attending class, his family fought back, and in doing so, forced a terrified nation to confront the myths it had built around the epidemic.

Ryan was straight, white, young, and from the heartl...

In 1996, a new class of HIV drugs changed everything. The protease inhibitors, combined with existing antiretroviral treatments, turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition for people who could access them. The dying slowed. Friends who had been given months to live started making plans for years.

This episode is Part 3 of "How Queers Saved Modern Medicine," and it tells the story of how that breakthrough h...