January 27, 2025 • 15 mins
Making Gay History (MGH) is a nonprofit addressing the absence of substantive, in-depth LGBTQ+-inclusive American history from the public discourse and the classroom. For it’s 14th season, the acclaimed MGH podcast debuts a 12-episode series delving into the often-overlooked experiences of LGBTQ+ people during the rise of the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust, shining a spotlight on a vital but under-discussed chapter of history. Our guest is Eric Marcus, author, founder and host of Making Gay History. For more, visit MakingGayHistory.org
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to get Connected. Thanks for listening. Making Gay History
is a nonprofit addressing the absence of substantive, in depth
LGBTQ plus inclusive American history from the public discourse and
the classroom by sharing the stories of those who helped
a despised minority take its rightful place in society's equal citizens.
Making Gay History aims to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity
(00:35):
within the community, and to provide an entry point for
both allies and the general public to this largely hidden history.
Our guest is Eric Marcus, author, founder and host of
Making Gay History. Thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thanks for having me on the show. I'm delighted.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You can find out more about it at Makinggayhistory dot org. Tomorrow,
January twenty seventh, Making Gay History, the acclaimed podcast debuts
its teenth season, coinciding with International Holocaust Membrance Day. This
unprecedented twelve episode series delves into the often overlooked experiences
of LGBTQ plus people during the rise of the Nazi regime,
(01:13):
World War Two, and the Holocaust, shining a spotlight on
an underdiscussed chapter of history that is fascinating. I want
to go back first to talk a little bit about
the history of the show. It's been in existence for
fourteen seasons now. I just had a chance to listen
to some They're fascinating. What was your original vision for
the podcast?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Wish I could say I had I had the vision.
It wasn't me. It was Sara Burningham, who was our
founding producer and editor. We were working actually on a
small education project with the goal of providing short clips
for my archive of more than one hundred interviews that
I did in the late nineteen eighties for an oral
history book, providing a series of short clips for an
(01:54):
education project. And as Sara began editing these long interviews
which ran two three four hours and she got down
to eighteen minutes, she said, this sounds like a podcast.
And she said, but I don't know how to make
a podcast. I'm going to podcast school. So she went
to podcast school. And she had a lot of experience
as a a radio journalist here in New York and
(02:15):
also for the BBC and also for NPR in Arkansas
and make a very long story. Sure, we had a
lot of angels who helped us. Just five weeks after
Sara attended that crash course of making podcasts, we launched
the Making Gay Story podcast. We had a grant to
do this educational project, which they very kindly let us
use for the podcast. We did ten episodes. We were
(02:38):
told to expect that we maybe would have a few
hundred listeners per episode. By the end of the first
season of ten episodes, we had twenty five thousand downloads,
which we were thrilled about. So now all these years later,
we've had probably going on seven million episode downloads across
thirteen seasons of the podcast and more than one hundred
episode So it wasn't originally a vision. It was a
(02:58):
one off project, but it turns people were really easier
for this history and I turned this into a nonprofit
educational organization and here we are eight years later. It's
absolutely astonishing to me.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
It's fascinating to me, to be honest, I wasn't aware
of the show, so I started listening. The last few days.
I listened to Lorraine Hansbury, Dear Abby Forger, Congressman Robert Bauman,
I just kind of went at random, and that one
was fascinating. It's really American history, which I think is
so valuable.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
It is it is American history. And I'm asked this
when I speak in other countries. Why I focused on
American history as well? You know, this was for one
book thirty five years ago, and there's only so much
I could do. But yeah, it's focused on the US
movement what was then called the game lesbian civil rights
movement in the US. It was a book. It was
a book. It wasn't meant to be audio. I was
(03:50):
commissioned by an editor at Harper and Rowe to write
an oral history book at the case civil rights movement,
and I used broadcast quality equipment to record the interviews.
I worked at CBS at the time the book was commissioned,
and I asked my boss, Jay Cernis, who created morning
edition and weekend edition for NPR, what kind of equipment
do your colleagues use? And I must have thought of
(04:10):
the time that these interviews would have value for somebody
down the line. And then years later I donated my
collection to the New York Public Library with an agreement
that they digitized the collection so that scholars or students
could access the archive and use it, never thinking that
I would be the one to access my own archive
for my own work.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Now you're turning a corner into a different realm. So
this new season again, which debuts tomorrow, focuses on LGBTQ
plus experiences during the Nazi era. Yeah, why is this
so intriguing? It is intriguing.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Well, I was always interested in this subject, although I
have to admit I always said I would never do anything
related to the Holocaust because it's so horrible. I grew
up in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and war refugees
in New York City, a neighborhood called Q Gardens, so
I was familiar with people who had tattoos from being
in the concentration camps. Some of my friends had parents
who were refugees or survivors of the camps. So I
(05:04):
knew about the Holocaust. And five years ago I accepted
a project with the fortune of Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimony to produce a podcast. Co produce a podcast for them,
So I've been immersed in this history. And years ago,
when I did my book, I interviewed the author of
a book about the experiences of gay people during World
(05:24):
War Two, a man named Richard Plant, who wrote the
first American language the first English language book about the
experiences of gay men, in particular during the Nazi era.
So that was outside our of the history I was doing.
I wasn't doing anything about World War Two, but I was.
I must have been curious, and Richard Plant was a
(05:45):
very interesting interview, And all this time I've always thought
I really would like to research this history and know
more about it. I knew, broadly, as many people do,
that homosexuals were among those who were persecuted by the Nazis.
To what extent I didn't know, And of course, the
Holocaust as experienced by Jews, which is also my background,
was a much bigger disaster and killing spree on the
(06:09):
part of the Nazis. So this has always been somewhat
in the background. So I was intrigued, and we decided
once we had enough money and enough time, because I
knew it would take a lot of time to do it,
we decided to take the plunge and do this. I
started actually exploring this three years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Our guest is Eric Marcus. He's the author of a
dozen books, including two editions of Making Gay History, Why
Suicide and Breaking the Surface, the New York Times number
one best selling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Lugainis.
He's also the author, founder, and host of Making Gay History.
You can find out more at Making Gayhistory dot org.
You're listening to get connected on one six point seven
(06:45):
Light FM. I'm mina del Reel. So many challenges to
uncover LGBTQ Holocaust testimonies, people would have been perhaps closeted
with one interviewer and more candid depending on who they
were speaking with. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
That is absolutely fascinating that some of the people we
feature gave more than one interview to different archives, and
in one archive and in one interview they might have
referred to a friend a special friend, but not been
more candid than that, and in another interview spoken specifically
about beloved a partner. If we think about when these
(07:23):
experiences occurred, when we're talking about history from the nineteen
thirties and forties, when gay people were not typically out,
and even when people gave these interviews in the nineteen
seventies and eighties, principally people were shy about talking about
this issue, and even the interviewers might have had trouble.
There were some interviews where I recall hearing the interviewer saying, oh,
(07:44):
we don't need to talk about that, and say, oh no, no, no,
we want you to talk about that please. And also
it involves sex and sexuality, and people are not comfortable
talking about that in general, even today. And there was
so much stigma and shame for the people who experience
being caught up in during the Nazi era who were homosexual,
(08:05):
that they were reluctant to talk about it. They had
hidden it even from their families. Many of them experienced
sexual assault and torture, and it wasn't the kind of
thing that you would necessarily ever talk about again.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Can you share perhaps one or two stories highlighted this
season that you found particularly impactful?
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Oh my goodness, yes, what struck me? Yes? Yes? Two?
One a young man who was sent to a concentration
camp with his boyfriend. They were kids, and I won't
go into detail about what was done to one of them,
but it was the most horrific kind of killing I
have ever read. When I give presentations, I cannot talk
(08:46):
about it without getting choked. Up myself because it's so horrific.
And this is a man who was seventy years old
when he was telling this story. He still has a
candle burning in his kitchen in memory of this boyfriend
who was murdered at the concentration camp they were in together.
And he's French and from the Alsas region of France
(09:08):
which was occupied by the Germans. And it's so hard
to hear. His voice is so heartbreaking and it just
cuts you to the core. And I play the clip
when I do the presentations, and I warned people, this
is really rough stuff. I mean, the Holocaust is rough.
This is just beyond belief that anybody would do this
to another human being. The other story that I always
(09:32):
stays with me was a story of a woman who
was a resistance fighter, who was a cellist in the Netherlands,
who with a group of people, led an effort. What
she did was she doctored documents to protect Dutch Jews
whose documents noted that they were Jewish. She found a
way to change the documents in a way that didn't
(09:54):
break the seal on their ID cards. Long story short,
they led an effort to blow up the register in
Amsterdam to protect people from being identified because there were
duplicates of these ideas, and it was led by an
effeminate gay man who was out to prove that gay
men were courageous, and when he was they actually executed
(10:17):
this plan to blow up the registry. They were betrayed.
And so this is a lesbian who's telling the story.
She wasn't allowed to participate in the natural action because
the women weren't allowed to do that, but she said
this gay man who was then arrested along with set
with with a dozen other people or eleven other people.
He told his lawyer to tell the world that gay
men were not cowards, and that this show that gay
(10:40):
men were not cowards. And one of the other men
insisted on being shot when he was wearing a pink shirt.
There's such powerfully moving stories, and what struck me about
what he said is so relevant today that gay men
are still often considered or looked down upon as being
(11:01):
stronger courageous, less so now than when I was a
young person. And here it was in the nineteen forties
where this is a guy saying, show the world, tell
them we're not cowards.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
It's fascinating to think about You know, I'm a kid
of the seventies, you know, and it's hard to, i
think for younger people sometimes to see the evolution of
this conversation from you talk about the nineteen thirties and forties,
the seventies, eighties, we had a certain idea or no
idea at all, and now the volume is very high
in different ways. Right, it's vitriolic and it's pride, it's
(11:34):
all these things together. Can you talk a little bit
more about sort of marrying these stories and bringing them
to light again.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yeah, So many of the themes are familiar, especially as
the as we see the rise of the Nazi regime,
the kinds of screws that were turned to crush gay people,
closing down gate bars, changing laws, passing laws. A paragraph
on seventy five was a law that existed before or
before the Nazi took power, that criminalized homosexuality, and the
(12:02):
Nazis strengthened that law and found ways to more ways
to arrest gay men. They will also went after lesbians
and other and gender non conforming people. But it's so familiar.
There are echoes that are really uncomfortable in terms of
what's going on today in the way in which this
incoming administration and the Republican Party have demonized trans people.
(12:25):
It's very familiar. So anyone listening to our upcoming season
will find echoes that are disturbing. And it's important to
pay attention to what's happening now because in nineteen thirty three,
they could see what was happening, but they didn't know
what was coming. So we can see what's happening now,
and it's so important to stand up and fight back
(12:46):
now as opposed to sitting by quietly and waiting for
things to get worse.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I hate to distract from what you're debuting tomorrow, but
looking forward, what else do you want to explore as
far as upcoming seasons? You've explored so much the last
thirteen Yeah, no, it's oh.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
My goodn't have something about what's next after this, but
I do. There are archives across the US oral history archives.
I just recently learned about this extraordinary archive of hundreds
of interviews with lesbians over the age of seventy that
was created by one woman who launched this project to
interview older lesbians across the country. We've partnered in the
(13:24):
past once with another archive, the Studs Turkle Radio Archive,
which is where the Lorraine Hansbury interview comes from, as
well as several others. And while I like doing my
own interviews and I think I'm a better interview than
many of the people who sorry, Stud's Turkle one of
my heroes, but there were many times listening to his interviews,
even with Lorraene Hansbury, you want to say, Studs, shut up,
(13:46):
let the person talk. This is not your mean, it
is his show, but we really want to hear from
that person. So that is a limitation of using other resources.
But there are so many stories to be told. I
only interviewed one hundred people, but there are thousands of interviews,
and as long as there are a good enough quality
to use for a podcast, I love exploring other archives.
(14:06):
So that's what's coming. So probably up next is a
season of making gay history interviews. We have still more
in my archive, so possibly six more, and then a
partnership with one of the other archives to bring out
stories that I wasn't able to record.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
On a side note, I love a podcast that is
generally under about twenty minutes, so you can kind of
get a little bite size of it, and you know,
you can get more in in the time you have.
Eric Marcus is author, founder, and host of Making Gay History.
The new season debuts tomorrow. You can find out more
at Making Gayhistory dot org. Eric Marcus, thank you for
(14:41):
being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to talk
about this work.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
onloads and podcasts at one o six seven light fm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome to get Connected. Thanks for listening. Making Gay History
is a nonprofit addressing the absence of substantive, in depth
LGBTQ plus inclusive American history from the public discourse and
the classroom by sharing the stories of those who helped
a despised minority take its rightful place in society's equal citizens.
Making Gay History aims to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity
(00:35):
within the community, and to provide an entry point for
both allies and the general public to this largely hidden history.
Our guest is Eric Marcus, author, founder and host of
Making Gay History. Thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thanks for having me on the show. I'm delighted.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You can find out more about it at Makinggayhistory dot org. Tomorrow,
January twenty seventh, Making Gay History, the acclaimed podcast debuts
its teenth season, coinciding with International Holocaust Membrance Day. This
unprecedented twelve episode series delves into the often overlooked experiences
of LGBTQ plus people during the rise of the Nazi regime,
(01:13):
World War Two, and the Holocaust, shining a spotlight on
an underdiscussed chapter of history that is fascinating. I want
to go back first to talk a little bit about
the history of the show. It's been in existence for
fourteen seasons now. I just had a chance to listen
to some They're fascinating. What was your original vision for
the podcast?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Wish I could say I had I had the vision.
It wasn't me. It was Sara Burningham, who was our
founding producer and editor. We were working actually on a
small education project with the goal of providing short clips
for my archive of more than one hundred interviews that
I did in the late nineteen eighties for an oral
history book, providing a series of short clips for an
(01:54):
education project. And as Sara began editing these long interviews
which ran two three four hours and she got down
to eighteen minutes, she said, this sounds like a podcast.
And she said, but I don't know how to make
a podcast. I'm going to podcast school. So she went
to podcast school. And she had a lot of experience
as a a radio journalist here in New York and
(02:15):
also for the BBC and also for NPR in Arkansas
and make a very long story. Sure, we had a
lot of angels who helped us. Just five weeks after
Sara attended that crash course of making podcasts, we launched
the Making Gay Story podcast. We had a grant to
do this educational project, which they very kindly let us
use for the podcast. We did ten episodes. We were
(02:38):
told to expect that we maybe would have a few
hundred listeners per episode. By the end of the first
season of ten episodes, we had twenty five thousand downloads,
which we were thrilled about. So now all these years later,
we've had probably going on seven million episode downloads across
thirteen seasons of the podcast and more than one hundred
episode So it wasn't originally a vision. It was a
(02:58):
one off project, but it turns people were really easier
for this history and I turned this into a nonprofit
educational organization and here we are eight years later. It's
absolutely astonishing to me.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
It's fascinating to me, to be honest, I wasn't aware
of the show, so I started listening. The last few days.
I listened to Lorraine Hansbury, Dear Abby Forger, Congressman Robert Bauman,
I just kind of went at random, and that one
was fascinating. It's really American history, which I think is
so valuable.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
It is it is American history. And I'm asked this
when I speak in other countries. Why I focused on
American history as well? You know, this was for one
book thirty five years ago, and there's only so much
I could do. But yeah, it's focused on the US
movement what was then called the game lesbian civil rights
movement in the US. It was a book. It was
a book. It wasn't meant to be audio. I was
(03:50):
commissioned by an editor at Harper and Rowe to write
an oral history book at the case civil rights movement,
and I used broadcast quality equipment to record the interviews.
I worked at CBS at the time the book was commissioned,
and I asked my boss, Jay Cernis, who created morning
edition and weekend edition for NPR, what kind of equipment
do your colleagues use? And I must have thought of
(04:10):
the time that these interviews would have value for somebody
down the line. And then years later I donated my
collection to the New York Public Library with an agreement
that they digitized the collection so that scholars or students
could access the archive and use it, never thinking that
I would be the one to access my own archive
for my own work.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Now you're turning a corner into a different realm. So
this new season again, which debuts tomorrow, focuses on LGBTQ
plus experiences during the Nazi era. Yeah, why is this
so intriguing? It is intriguing.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Well, I was always interested in this subject, although I
have to admit I always said I would never do anything
related to the Holocaust because it's so horrible. I grew
up in a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and war refugees
in New York City, a neighborhood called Q Gardens, so
I was familiar with people who had tattoos from being
in the concentration camps. Some of my friends had parents
who were refugees or survivors of the camps. So I
(05:04):
knew about the Holocaust. And five years ago I accepted
a project with the fortune of Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimony to produce a podcast. Co produce a podcast for them,
So I've been immersed in this history. And years ago,
when I did my book, I interviewed the author of
a book about the experiences of gay people during World
(05:24):
War Two, a man named Richard Plant, who wrote the
first American language the first English language book about the
experiences of gay men, in particular during the Nazi era.
So that was outside our of the history I was doing.
I wasn't doing anything about World War Two, but I was.
I must have been curious, and Richard Plant was a
(05:45):
very interesting interview, And all this time I've always thought
I really would like to research this history and know
more about it. I knew, broadly, as many people do,
that homosexuals were among those who were persecuted by the Nazis.
To what extent I didn't know, And of course, the
Holocaust as experienced by Jews, which is also my background,
was a much bigger disaster and killing spree on the
(06:09):
part of the Nazis. So this has always been somewhat
in the background. So I was intrigued, and we decided
once we had enough money and enough time, because I
knew it would take a lot of time to do it,
we decided to take the plunge and do this. I
started actually exploring this three years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Our guest is Eric Marcus. He's the author of a
dozen books, including two editions of Making Gay History, Why
Suicide and Breaking the Surface, the New York Times number
one best selling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Lugainis.
He's also the author, founder, and host of Making Gay History.
You can find out more at Making Gayhistory dot org.
You're listening to get connected on one six point seven
(06:45):
Light FM. I'm mina del Reel. So many challenges to
uncover LGBTQ Holocaust testimonies, people would have been perhaps closeted
with one interviewer and more candid depending on who they
were speaking with. Can you talk about that?
Speaker 3 (07:00):
That is absolutely fascinating that some of the people we
feature gave more than one interview to different archives, and
in one archive and in one interview they might have
referred to a friend a special friend, but not been
more candid than that, and in another interview spoken specifically
about beloved a partner. If we think about when these
(07:23):
experiences occurred, when we're talking about history from the nineteen
thirties and forties, when gay people were not typically out,
and even when people gave these interviews in the nineteen
seventies and eighties, principally people were shy about talking about
this issue, and even the interviewers might have had trouble.
There were some interviews where I recall hearing the interviewer saying, oh,
(07:44):
we don't need to talk about that, and say, oh no, no, no,
we want you to talk about that please. And also
it involves sex and sexuality, and people are not comfortable
talking about that in general, even today. And there was
so much stigma and shame for the people who experience
being caught up in during the Nazi era who were homosexual,
(08:05):
that they were reluctant to talk about it. They had
hidden it even from their families. Many of them experienced
sexual assault and torture, and it wasn't the kind of
thing that you would necessarily ever talk about again.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Can you share perhaps one or two stories highlighted this
season that you found particularly impactful?
Speaker 3 (08:23):
Oh my goodness, yes, what struck me? Yes? Yes? Two?
One a young man who was sent to a concentration
camp with his boyfriend. They were kids, and I won't
go into detail about what was done to one of them,
but it was the most horrific kind of killing I
have ever read. When I give presentations, I cannot talk
(08:46):
about it without getting choked. Up myself because it's so horrific.
And this is a man who was seventy years old
when he was telling this story. He still has a
candle burning in his kitchen in memory of this boyfriend
who was murdered at the concentration camp they were in together.
And he's French and from the Alsas region of France
(09:08):
which was occupied by the Germans. And it's so hard
to hear. His voice is so heartbreaking and it just
cuts you to the core. And I play the clip
when I do the presentations, and I warned people, this
is really rough stuff. I mean, the Holocaust is rough.
This is just beyond belief that anybody would do this
to another human being. The other story that I always
(09:32):
stays with me was a story of a woman who
was a resistance fighter, who was a cellist in the Netherlands,
who with a group of people, led an effort. What
she did was she doctored documents to protect Dutch Jews
whose documents noted that they were Jewish. She found a
way to change the documents in a way that didn't
(09:54):
break the seal on their ID cards. Long story short,
they led an effort to blow up the register in
Amsterdam to protect people from being identified because there were
duplicates of these ideas, and it was led by an
effeminate gay man who was out to prove that gay
men were courageous, and when he was they actually executed
(10:17):
this plan to blow up the registry. They were betrayed.
And so this is a lesbian who's telling the story.
She wasn't allowed to participate in the natural action because
the women weren't allowed to do that, but she said
this gay man who was then arrested along with set
with with a dozen other people or eleven other people.
He told his lawyer to tell the world that gay
men were not cowards, and that this show that gay
(10:40):
men were not cowards. And one of the other men
insisted on being shot when he was wearing a pink shirt.
There's such powerfully moving stories, and what struck me about
what he said is so relevant today that gay men
are still often considered or looked down upon as being
(11:01):
stronger courageous, less so now than when I was a
young person. And here it was in the nineteen forties
where this is a guy saying, show the world, tell
them we're not cowards.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
It's fascinating to think about You know, I'm a kid
of the seventies, you know, and it's hard to, i
think for younger people sometimes to see the evolution of
this conversation from you talk about the nineteen thirties and forties,
the seventies, eighties, we had a certain idea or no
idea at all, and now the volume is very high
in different ways. Right, it's vitriolic and it's pride, it's
(11:34):
all these things together. Can you talk a little bit
more about sort of marrying these stories and bringing them
to light again.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yeah, So many of the themes are familiar, especially as
the as we see the rise of the Nazi regime,
the kinds of screws that were turned to crush gay people,
closing down gate bars, changing laws, passing laws. A paragraph
on seventy five was a law that existed before or
before the Nazi took power, that criminalized homosexuality, and the
(12:02):
Nazis strengthened that law and found ways to more ways
to arrest gay men. They will also went after lesbians
and other and gender non conforming people. But it's so familiar.
There are echoes that are really uncomfortable in terms of
what's going on today in the way in which this
incoming administration and the Republican Party have demonized trans people.
(12:25):
It's very familiar. So anyone listening to our upcoming season
will find echoes that are disturbing. And it's important to
pay attention to what's happening now because in nineteen thirty three,
they could see what was happening, but they didn't know
what was coming. So we can see what's happening now,
and it's so important to stand up and fight back
(12:46):
now as opposed to sitting by quietly and waiting for
things to get worse.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I hate to distract from what you're debuting tomorrow, but
looking forward, what else do you want to explore as
far as upcoming seasons? You've explored so much the last
thirteen Yeah, no, it's oh.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
My goodn't have something about what's next after this, but
I do. There are archives across the US oral history archives.
I just recently learned about this extraordinary archive of hundreds
of interviews with lesbians over the age of seventy that
was created by one woman who launched this project to
interview older lesbians across the country. We've partnered in the
(13:24):
past once with another archive, the Studs Turkle Radio Archive,
which is where the Lorraine Hansbury interview comes from, as
well as several others. And while I like doing my
own interviews and I think I'm a better interview than
many of the people who sorry, Stud's Turkle one of
my heroes, but there were many times listening to his interviews,
even with Lorraene Hansbury, you want to say, Studs, shut up,
(13:46):
let the person talk. This is not your mean, it
is his show, but we really want to hear from
that person. So that is a limitation of using other resources.
But there are so many stories to be told. I
only interviewed one hundred people, but there are thousands of interviews,
and as long as there are a good enough quality
to use for a podcast, I love exploring other archives.
(14:06):
So that's what's coming. So probably up next is a
season of making gay history interviews. We have still more
in my archive, so possibly six more, and then a
partnership with one of the other archives to bring out
stories that I wasn't able to record.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
On a side note, I love a podcast that is
generally under about twenty minutes, so you can kind of
get a little bite size of it, and you know,
you can get more in in the time you have.
Eric Marcus is author, founder, and host of Making Gay History.
The new season debuts tomorrow. You can find out more
at Making Gayhistory dot org. Eric Marcus, thank you for
(14:41):
being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to talk
about this work.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
onloads and podcasts at one o six seven light fm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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