🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History Archive 2024-2025

2-GAY IN HISTORY — 2024 ARCHIVE

ThirstysRVA | January 2024 – October 7, 2025

81 posts |

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📅 October 07, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

"Conversion therapy" is one of the darkest legacies of the queer experience. Born from pseudo-science and religious zeal, it promised to "cure" LGBTQ+ people through electroshock, institutionalization, prayer regimens, and "reparative counseling." It led to depression, family rejection, and hate. In 1976, three years after the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a disorder, evangelical men claiming to be "Ex-Gay" founded Exodus International. For decades, Exodus was the largest conversion-therapy network in the world—until a decade ago, when it collapsed in scandal, its leaders admitting no one was ever "cured" and acknowledging the harm they caused.

Medical bodies worldwide, from the AMA to the WHO, agreed: conversion therapy is ineffective and permanently harmful, especially to children. Nations and states began passing bans to protect minors. Virginia joined half the states five years ago, restricting licensed professionals from offering it to youth. But last June, a Henrico County judge approved a consent decree in Raymond v. Virginia Dept. of Health. It permanently blocks the state from enforcing its ban against counselors who engage in ex-gay "talk therapy" with minors—reopening the door for queerness to be framed as something to be "fixed" through prayer and shame, despite universal evidence to the contrary. The Republican Attorney General AGREED to the settlement, so no appeal was filed, making the order binding.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to act nationwide. On October 7 it will hear Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to all laws banning conversion therapy for minors. Lower courts have upheld these laws to protect children from proven psychological violence. But if the Court rules otherwise, bans across the country would fall.

For Virginians, the stakes are doubled: even if the Supreme Court upholds protections, the only way to revisit the state's consent decree is at the ballot box—by electing Jay Jones as Attorney General, willing to fight and reinstate Virginia's protections for LGBTQ+ youth.

We are losing our old fights fast, and we have to win both. They are coming for us now. Vote

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📅 September 30, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In Richmond's late-70s nightlife, Cha-Cha's was the stop for drinks and dancing, but it also walked the uneasy line between community joy and the control of the mob. While smaller bars like Casablanca (later Barcode) were able to fly under the radar, the stage was set for a new, loud, and out venue: Scandals.

Scandals opened in 1983 as a massive entertainment complex in Shockoe—a cavernous disco floor that could hold 700+, a long drag runway upstairs, and ambitions to bring national talent to Richmond. For a time, it delivered: acts like Grace Jones, Beverly Carrington (her Miss Richmond dress is pictured), Sylvester, and Melba Moore, and Scandals billed itself as Virginia's premier gay performance space. Its reputation stretched beyond the city, landing Richmond on the queer nightlife map.

But despite owner Steve Edward Proffitt's best attempts, the glamour only hid the problems. There were changing attitudes and more people than ever coming out, but financial problems dogged the club from the start—unpaid performers and contractors, and one partner, a state official, under public investigation. Police pressure was still high as ABC laws still banned gay clubs on paper. Then the rising specter of the AIDS crisis only made things worse. In a last attempt to survive, management tried to rebrand the venue as Rumors, but by the 90s the lights went dark for good.

Scandals' rise and fall symbolized both the new visibility and the fragility of queer nightlife in Richmond. Yet from that collapse came something different: gay-owned, openly queer spaces that no longer relied on shadows, scandals, or mob money. Christopher's joined Babe's in Carytown, proudly billing itself as an LGBT bar in the mid-1980s, followed by others that kept their doors open on their own terms and became community lifelines during the worst health crisis ever to face our community. More next time on that.

The leap from Cha-Cha's to Scandals and then to Christopher's shows how Richmond's LGBTQ community navigated control, excess, and scandal—and eventually began building spaces truly of their own, just when they were needed most.

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📅 September 21, 2025

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Richmond's first official Pride event—the earliest in the South besides Atlanta—took place on June 23rd, 1979 (I edited the original poster with this year's Pride's date), the tenth anniversary of Stonewall. A caravan of decorated cars left Azalea Mall and rolled through the streets to Byrd Park, where banners were raised with the theme "Death of Denial … Birth of Pride." The day featured folk singers, a picnic, and speeches from early leaders like Barbara Weinstock, Beth Marschak, Stephen Lenton, Don Clarke, Bruce Garnett, Bill Harrison, and Rev. Paul Cline, capped off with a dance that night at the Sheraton Motel. For the first time, Pride in Richmond was visible, public, and defiant.

Two years earlier, Richmond's Pride story began not as a parade but as a protest, when nearly 200 brave LGBTQ Richmonders gathered in Monroe Park to stand against Anita Bryant's anti-gay crusade and to demand recognition in their own city, which still criminalized homosexual gatherings. That rally was rooted in years of slow organizing, including the trailblazing Gay Liberation Front at VCU, which gave Richmond its first taste of open queer activism. (They had to take VCU to court to get their group recognized.)

Pride didn't become annual right away; it took a couple of years. By the mid-1980s, however, Pride had become an ever-growing tradition. Each summer, thousands more gathered, carrying forward the spirit of that first small motorcade.

Today, Virginia PrideFest is a major operation, drawing tens of thousands downtown and backed by dozens of nonprofit community groups as well as national and state businesses. What began as a protest and caravan in Byrd Park has evolved into a major festival of visibility, drag, joy, and activism. Now, Richmond's Pride is more necessary than ever: as most corporations and politicians shift their superficial support, we must come together to carry the voices of those who first stood in Monroe Park.

Virginia Pride is this Saturday. We are holding the Pride After Dark Kink Party the Friday before (karaoke is canceled), but it is definitely NOT for everyone.

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📅 September 16, 2025

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In the 70s, much of Richmond's gay nightlife fell under the grip of Leo Koury, a married Catholic softball umpire with mob connections who became known—half in jest, half in fear—as the "Godfather of the Gay Community."

Koury opened gay bars like Eton's Inn on Grace Street—which VCU police harassed until it was shuttered—and used strong-arm methods to control the Dialtone and 409, and made Smitty's, Leo's, and then The Malebox through intimidation and payoffs. Leo controlled all the bars around "The Block," the center of gay life—and unfortunately prostitution. He skimmed profits and convinced police to look the other way, as gay bars were still illegal. Patrons often felt the tension: he himself seemed gregarious and his bars provided some of the only places in the city where queer people could gather openly, but they also operated under a cloud of exploitation, high prices, and control that forced out competition by bribes, threats, or eventually murder.

Despite that, Koury's clubs became central to Richmond's gay culture of the era. On weekends, the dance floors were packed and drag performers lit up the stage. At the same time, everyone knew the environment was precarious—one man's monopoly stood on crime and threats.

That house of cards collapsed in 1977, when a shooting at the Malebox was feared to be a hate crime but was actually due to Koury's attempt to take back control of the bar. Facing numerous charges—including the murder of a bouncer at a rival club—Koury fled, eventually becoming one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives. His disappearance left space for a new generation of gay-owned venues in the years that followed, a topic for next week.

For better and worse, his clubs defined a decade of the city's LGBTQ history.

Koury himself finally died of natural causes nearly two decades later, having lived out the rest of his life in California as a convenience store clerk.

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📅 September 09, 2025

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Richmond's Gay Spaces

Queer life in post-WWII Richmond quietly grew at the margins. It was illegal to serve a homosexual, much less operate a gay bar. Marroni's, Renee's, and Rathskeller's in the Capitol Hotel offered some of the first places to meet, though all were eventually shuttered in succession by ABC crackdowns. Benny's café on Broad Street kept a hidden back room where gay men could socialize in relative safety, while Smitty's on Sheppard Street welcomed lesbians and women's softball teams. These spaces were fragile—laws didn't change until the early '90s—but even under threat, people found ways to build community.

By 1978, the legacy of those early spaces began to emerge more openly under shifting attitudes. The spirit of Smitty's found a new home at Babe's of Carytown. Babe's grew into one of the longest-running lesbian bars in the country, famous for its pool tables, patio, and volleyball court—but even more for the community it fostered across generations. Benny's lineage, meanwhile, lived on in the Broadway Café, where queer Richmonders finally had a public dance floor instead of a hidden jukebox alcove. (We'll do more on the mob-run gay bars of the '70s next.)

Last week, Richmond lost the woman who carried that legacy. Vicky Hester, who owned and guided Babe's for four decades, passed away at 71. Under her leadership, Babe's endured changes in law, culture, and nightlife. At a time when lesbian bars across the U.S. were closing, Babe's kept its doors open—making it the oldest still-operating lesbian bar in the country (though contested, since Seattle's Wildrose opened explicitly as a lesbian bar, while Babe's quickly became one organically years earlier).

Benny's and Smitty's showed that Richmond's LGBTQ people needed community. Broadway Café and Babe's carried that tradition into the open. And thanks to Vicky, Babe's remained a constant: a place of resilience, welcome, and joy to this day.

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📅 September 01, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

On November 20, 1999, in San Francisco, activists gathered for the first Transgender Day of Remembrance, honoring the memory of Rita Hester and others lost to anti-trans violence. What began as a small candlelight vigil is now observed annually around the world, commemorating trans and non-binary people murdered simply for living openly.

Violence is a constant danger for the trans members of our community, and despite misleading claims, they are overwhelmingly the victims of violence. Out of more than five hundred U.S. mass killings (4+ victims as per Gun Violence Archive) over the last 25 years, only a couple of perpetrators have been credibly proven to be trans or non-binary. In contrast, cisgender men account for well over 95% of perpetrators. Around 20% of such incidents have misogynistic motives, and among those designated as domestic terrorism, the vast majority were carried out by right-wing ideologues. The myth of a "trans shooter problem" has zero basis in fact.

What is real, measurable, and heartbreakingly consistent is violence against trans communities. In the last 15 years, at least 400 trans and non-binary people have been murdered in the United States—and the true number is higher, obscured by misgendering and underreporting. The majority were young trans women of color, often killed in acts of homophobia, transmisogyny, or targeted hate. Globally, the Trans Murder Monitoring project recorded 350 victims worldwide in just the past year.

History is clear: trans people are not a danger to society—they are in danger from it, especially in a climate poisoned by right-wing lies.

They are astronomically more likely to be victims than perpetrators.

Real justice requires that we fight not the conjured menace of people living trans lives, but the very real violence that continues to cut them short.

This can't wait until November—correct the record now.

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📅 August 25, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

"I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own." — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde named herself a "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet"—intersectional before it was a term. She took the dignity Baldwin carved out for himself and transformed it into a battle cry—insisting that difference was not a weakness but a weapon, that silence was complicity, and that queer voices carried the power to reshape the world.

Born in Harlem to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde grew out of the soil of the Harlem Renaissance and Baldwin and Rustin's example, but her activism was fiery like no other. She declared anger a resource, eroticism a tool, and poetry a panacea against injustice.

In 1984 she published Sister Outsider, a collection of essays and speeches that became a sacred text for Black, feminist, queer, and liberation struggles everywhere. She fought capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and queerphobia as one multi-headed beast, and reminded us that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Today, her warrior ethos echoes in movements confronting state violence, racism, complacency, and immigrant detention. She proved that art and activism are inseparable—and that queerness in-and-of-itself is a radical stance against fascism.

From Baldwin to Lorde to today's 50501 protesters, our legacy is unbroken. And this Labor Day, if she was still with us, I know where she would be:

shouting at the top of her lungs at the Monroe Park protest at 4:30. "Your silence will not protect you." "Despair is a tool of our enemies."

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📅 August 19, 2025

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"I lay and held him, all night long, his body hard against mine, and I knew that this was all I wanted." — Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin was a brilliant queer Black writer, activist, and public intellectual whose work bridged the artistic legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era. Growing up in Harlem just after the Renaissance's peak, Baldwin absorbed its queer-affirming undercurrent—mentored by painter Beauford Delaney, whose openness about his sexuality and art deeply shaped Baldwin's vision of liberation for both Black and queer people.

In 1956, Baldwin published his second novel, the explicitly queer Giovanni's Room. His first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, had drawn heavily on his abusive upbringing in a Black church. Giovanni's Room was inspired in part by Baldwin's relationship with his Swiss lover Lucien Happersberger, whom he met when he expatriated to Paris in his 20s to escape the insidious racism he feared would harden him. Baldwin subverted early expectations that he would write only "race novels," insisting instead on centering his queer experience by making all the characters white.

Baldwin's life was, in fact, a balancing act between his queerness, his Blackness, and his activism. While he often critiqued the church as destructive to queer people, he often used its rhetoric. He debated Robert F. Kennedy, worked alongside MLK and Malcolm X, and confronted America's failings in interviews and essays like The Fire Next Time. He befriended queer contemporaries Lorraine Hansberry and Bayard Rustin, who—like Baldwin himself—were often sidelined within the Civil Rights movement for challenging its narrow, religiously moral presentation.

Although many of Baldwin's novels explore queer desire—Another Country and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone being standouts—it is in Just Above My Head that Baldwin openly wrestles with the tension between Black queer identity and the church's condemnation.

From Harlem to Paris to Selma, Baldwin's life was a testament to the intersections of identity—and to the revolutionary bravery it takes to stand proud and speak truth in a racist and homophobic world.

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📅 August 11, 2025

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Queer Hands Lifted the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was often fetishized and may have seemed "queer (odd)" to white literary critics—and behind the scenes, they were right.

But some were fans, like gay white critic Carl Van Vechten, who helped nationalize Harlem's brilliance in his problematic but popular 1926 novel about the neighborhood—now infamous for its title and voyeuristic tone. He at least used his privilege to help amplify—but never contain—queer Black voices.

Van Vechten promoted Alain Locke, the closeted philosopher whose anthology The New Negro became the movement's foundation. Locke carefully curated a vision, mentoring queer artists who lived at the intersections of race, gender, and desire, making their work approachable.

Together, they championed Countee Cullen, a poet who laced classical verse with same-sex longing and coded heartbreak. Though briefly married, Cullen gave voice to the emotional interior of Black queer life in a form palatable to elite white audiences—subversively slipping past their defenses.

Where Cullen sparked, Richard Bruce Nugent set the page on fire—literally—in the "vulgar" zine Fire!! There, unlike Locke's collection, Nugent published openly queer stories like Smoke, Lilies and Jade while living boldly in glitter and eyeliner.

Fire!! drew scorn from white readers and Black leaders alike. Claude McKay, author of the homoerotic Home to Harlem, was also sidelined for his queer and socialist themes—while Black culture, especially jazz, was widely appropriated, even as its artists were erased.

But above them all stood Langston Hughes, Harlem's poet laureate. Guarded in life but achingly intimate in verse, he mapped the soul of Black America—and quietly, his own queer desire.

From a private love poem:

"Love me with your whole body, / Not with your mouth only."

And in Young Sailor, one of his most tender:

"He came out of the sea, a boy, / and I saw in his eyes the sun… / The young sailor was the beginning of new days to me."

Beneath the clouds of centuries of pain, there were always rainbows in the Harlem lights—even if many tried to hide them.

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📅 August 05, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

From Black Nite to Berlin: Fighting Back through the Years

On August 5, 1961, a group of sailors stormed into the Black Nite bar in Milwaukee—a beloved queer haven—armed and looking for violence. But the patrons, led by barstool-wielding Black lesbian Josie Carter, fought back. Queer resistance was almost unheard of at the time, eight years before Stonewall.

In the 1970s, as the gay community became more visible in San Francisco, so did violence. Pentecostal Rev. Ray Broshears organized the Lavender Panthers, an armed neighborhood watch to defend queer lives.

By the 1990s, groups like Q-Patrol and the Pink Pistols formed to protect "gayborhoods." Today, Drag Defense teams across the South show up to shield shows and Pride events from hate.

But violence is surging again.

In Berlin, the queer café Das Hoven has endured over 40 attacks in just over a year—most recently last week—all because of its neon sign: "QUEER AND FRIENDS," and the far-right AfD party's hate-filled rhetoric (yes, the one Elon Musk endorsed).

From Pulse to Club Q, and with dozens of Pride events threatened or canceled, LGBTQ+ spaces are under siege. In the U.S.—despite weak reporting and Trump closing the Anti-Hate-Crime Office—anti-LGBTQ violence is at record highs. In the UK, hate crimes rose over 40% in just one year. Extremist groups are being fueled by right-wing rhetoric calling us "groomers"—or worse.

But remember our history. When hatred tries to scare you back into closets, fight back.

As we mark the anniversary of the Black Nite Brawl, we honor every queer space brave enough to exist—and those bold enough to resist.

Pride is still a protest.

Get involved, check the community window at Thirsty's for self-defense and collective action groups here in Richmond.

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📅 July 28, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Alt-right Christian fascists online love the Roman Empire—especially the salute—and often warn that acceptance of LGBTQ+ people led to its decline and fall and will now lead to America's.

That couldn't be more wrong.

In 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius made Orthodox Christianity the state religion of the empire. Influenced by Jewish law, Christian doctrine began to criminalize homosexuality. Don't get me wrong—Rome was the blueprint for toxic masculinity and patriarchy—but for over a thousand years before that, same-sex relationships were tolerated and even celebrated (as long as the citizen or social superior was the top). And no, they didn't "import" homosexuality from Carthage, as the Proud Boys claim—and even if they had, Rome's rise began with that contact.

Rome's height, in fact, coincided with some of its most openly queer leaders: from Tiberius and same-sex-married Nero, to trans-feminine Elagabalus, to possibly even Julius Caesar and Augustus themselves, founders of the Empire. Two of the "Five Good (Best) Emperors" had exclusively male lovers. That phrase—"Five Good Emperors"—was coined by Edward Gibbon, the influential historian who did, in fact, suggest a major contributing cause to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Christianity. (He was doxed hard for it.)

But within a century of mandating Christian morality, the Western Empire fell. A new clergy and monastic class rivaled the size of the army and exempted from service. Church coffers outweighed the imperial treasury. Religious pluralism was outlawed. Pagan libraries, healing temples, and universities were shut down, their knowledge and technological edge lost. Civil wars broke out over obscure points of theology and purity tests. The once-gradual cultural exchange of "Romanization" became convert or die, and citizenship was denied to non-Christians. The army, once diverse and loyal, became underpaid, fractured, and increasingly reliant on mercenaries.

So sorry, Charlie Kirk and fascists everywhere: it wasn't gay rights that brought down Rome—the opposite, in fact. It was the criminalization of queerness and the death of pluralism that weakened the empire from within.

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📅 July 22, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

The new Superman is pretty gay, in fact.

It's comic book summer blockbuster month, and while many fans know that Marvel's Northstar came out way back in 1992, the modern comic landscape is practically a rainbow.

DC made waves when it incorporated the independent and queer superhero team The Authority—led by husbands Apollo and Midnighter (basically gay Superman and Batman). But in just the past few years, Jonathan Kent (the son of Superman and Lois) and Tim Drake's Robin have both come out and entered healthy same-gender relationships—with love and support from their iconic father figures.

That gives us two major queer heroes in the legacy lines of DC's biggest heroes, though not without backlash.

Marvel hasn't been outdone. One of the original X-Men, Iceman, came out in a controversial but powerful storyline: his time-traveling younger self was outed by Jean Grey reading his mind, prompting the older Iceman to unpack years of repression (and yes, there are jokes about how he used to have the "hots" for his roommate Johnny Storm).

But where Marvel really shines is in original queer heroes. Most notably, Young Avengers standouts Hulkling and Wiccan—who is also out in his MCU debut in Agatha—and America Chavez, the lesbian Latina powerhouse who subtly wears a Pride pin in Multiverse of Madness. All of them have played major roles in the comics, and Wiccan is recently married to Hulkling, the King of Space.

And of course, there's Loki, canonically bisexual and genderfluid—which is perfectly mythologically accurate.

You'll find these iconic moments and stories celebrated in our Queer Lending Library here at Thirsty's!

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📅 July 15, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈💅🏾

It's Non-Binary Visibility Day—and while distinct, many non-binary people have found identity, expression, and community within the drag and ballroom scenes.

Long before voguing hit music videos and RuPaul became a household name, Harlem's drag balls were already breaking barriers and creating not just survival spaces, but vibrant centers of culture and resistance.

The first documented drag ball in NYC was held in 1869, but it was during the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and thirties that Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ communities truly carved out space through the ballroom scene. Fraternal groups like the Black Odd Fellows helped sponsor early events at venues such as Hamilton Lodge and the Rockland Palace. Harlem was one of the few places where Black queer folks could gather openly.

Houses like Xtravaganza and LaBeija—founded by Black trans legend Crystal LaBeija—weren't just runway teams; they were supportive chosen families. Without them, there would be no ballroom. No voguing. No "realness." No language of "slay" or "shade"—all of which was beautifully dramatized in the series POSE.

Harlem ballroom culture didn't just shape queer history—it helped shape Harlem itself, influencing fashion, music, language, and community dynamics. Madonna's exposure to the scene came through legendary voguer Willi Ninja. She later hired José Gutiérrez and Luis Camacho, both members of the Latinx House of Xtravaganza, as choreographers—bringing voguing to the global stage, just as drag would follow in the next decade.

To celebrate these legacies and ongoing joy, check out RVA Black Pride and especially the Blacktopia events happening this week—details are on their Facebook and Instagram pages.

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📅 July 07, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Yep, it's Freudian week. Freud wasn't exactly a gay rights hero—his work was steeped in heteronormativity and binary ideas like "penis envy." But his focus on repression and sexual development opened the door for future psychologists and queer theorists.

In his 1905 essay Sexual Aberrations, Freud argued that so-called "perverse" desires are not inherently pathological, and that no one is purely "normal." He suggested everyone starts out a little bisexual, and was the first major figure to use "bisexual" to mean attraction to multiple genders—though he only recognized two.

What does bisexual mean today? That depends on your framework: the community-focused LGBTQIA+ umbrella or the identity-based MOGAI system (Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex). Ever wonder why there are so many Pride flags? MOGAI.

The LGBTQIA+ umbrella groups identities under broader categories (e.g., Pan under Bi, Nonbinary under Trans), while MOGAI encourages specific, evolving identities—dozens, from argosexual to xenoamoric—helping to better understand oneself. Emerging from Tumblr over the past decade, MOGAI is radically inclusive, but unlike LGBTQIA+, it doesn't aim to unite everyone politically.

Some of the final letters in LGBTQIA+ still confound some:

-I: Intersex – people born with sex traits outside typical male/female categories

-A: Asexual, Aromantic, and sometimes Allies

-Q: Questioning or Queer – an umbrella term that can simplify the "alphabet soup"

Others need defining too:

-B: Bisexual – attracted to more than one gender

-T: Trans – a gender identity different from one's assigned sex, including diverse genders

-G & L: Gay and Lesbian – which can include attraction to trans or gender-nonconforming people

Terms differ in MOGAI—check out the Sexuality Wiki on Fandom to learn more.

We always default to LGBTQ in posts, in line with our community focus.

But remember, no matter what your gender or sexual identity, even Freud said: "it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."

Now if I could just stop thinking of Freud every time someone calls me "daddy"…

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📅 July 01, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the first U.S. protest that was a precursor to Pride. Called the Annual Reminder, it was held to "affirm the existence and dignity of gay and lesbian people" and to protest their persecution.

The first Annual Reminder was on July 4th, 1965, organized by activists Craig Rodwell (founder of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in NYC), Frank Kameny, and Barbara Gittings. For four consecutive years, a small group of well-dressed homosexuals peacefully picketed outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia—where the Declaration of Independence was signed—politely demanding equal rights. Participants risked being fired, outed, or arrested simply for being there.

After the Stonewall Riots, the Annual Reminder became Pride, a more defiant yet joyful celebration of queer visibility and liberation.

Now compare that to last week's 30th anniversary of Budapest Pride in Hungary.

Viktor Orbán has been Hungary's authoritarian Prime Minister for decades; his model is frequently referenced in Project 2025. Under his rule, Hungary has banned legal gender recognition for trans people, outlawed so-called "LGBTQ propaganda," and brought most of the country's media under state or loyalist control.

This year, Orbán's government went even further, passing a constitutional amendment banning Pride marches and threatening €500 fines for attendees. Yet in this "illiberal democracy," nearly 200,000 people defiantly took to the streets—six times more than ever for a Hungarian Pride.

See the trucks in the photo as the crowd crosses the Danube from Buda to Pest?

Pride is resistance, because freedom isn't free.

Happy Annual Reminder and Happy Independence Day.

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📅 June 23, 2025

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In June 1998, a short film called TREVOR, which had won the Academy Award for short films, was making its debut on HBO. The film was about a gay kid and his somewhat comedic attempts to fit in and his eventual unsuccessful attempt at self-destruction. When the filmmakers, especially Peggy Rajski, created the film, they wanted to include a helpline in the credits, but found that there wasn't a national service that catered to LGBTQ youth—so they made one and premiered it along with their movie on HBO.

THE TREVOR PROJECT was born, initially just an always-available helpline serving youth until age twenty-five. They slowly added online chats, safe social media spaces, and a text line. Now it helps half a million youth a year, has over two hundred full-time counselors, and has trained fifteen hundred more.

The Trevor Project has been one of the least controversial advocacy organizations as well, with everyone from Elton John to Ellen, Dua Lipa, the new Mr. Fantastic, and the Harry Potter golden trio doing PSAs and fundraising for them. They have created training for schools, drawn attention to issues, and lobbied Congress on our behalf.

Just a few years ago, when the government was launching the 988 service from the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, they asked the Trevor Project for help and ended up creating a "press 3" or "text Pride" option for LGBTQ youth to be connected directly to Trevor Project-trained staff.

At the beginning of Trump's term he forced them to "drop the T" from the 988 service, serving only the LGB population, and last week the mask fell off as he ended federal support for the LGBTQ youth line at 988 and the Trevor Project completely. (Just in case anyone thought they wouldn't come for the rest of the alphabet rainbow after they're done oppressing the T.)

For those that need it, The Trevor Project is still here. The founder, Peggy Rajski, has retaken leadership, and their text line at 678-678 is alive and well, as is their helpline 1-866-488-7386 and website. Already they have seen a 200% increase in youth reaching out since the election last year. They need your help, and we need theirs.

Side by Side, a Richmond-area youth support services organization, also offers a helpline: 804-644-4800.

Our Canadian friends have also opened an all-ages U.S. helpline.

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📅 June 17, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1977, a former teacher, naval officer, Wall Street banker, occasional actor, and out gay camera shop owner won election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The local Democratic Party had refused to endorse him, as his politics were a mix of socialist, libertarian, hippie, and unionist, AND they wanted someone who would "put up the chairs."

Milk had been rudderless as he drifted through life and love since his early years on Long Island; he was twice arrested at gay cruise spots, but managed to flourish in the navy after his father pressured him into enlisting. He kept drifting from city to job with a string of boyfriends. Eventually he found himself in San Francisco permanently.

Only a year later he started running for office and organizing grassroots intersectional community groups. He was repeatedly defeated as a radical out gay activist, while encouraging "pink dollars" to gay businesses. Yet he built his alliance with unions on the encouragement that "we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets."

After a redistricting and three attempts, Harvey finally won a seat alongside liberal Mayor Moscone. That same year, Anita Bryant championed California ballot initiative Prop 6, which would ban gay and supportive teachers from public school jobs. Milk spearheaded the against campaign, saying "My name is Harvey Milk and I'm here to recruit you" and, in a fiercely heterosexual world, "Why am I a homosexual, if I'm affected by role models?"

In three months he swung the polls and defeated the initiative. Harvey started talking about running for mayor next, but only three weeks later a former cop and rival city supervisor murdered Milk and the mayor. The pathetic sentence for the killer and his "Twinkie Defense" (junk food proved his diminished capacity) sparked the White Night Riots, followed by a brutal homophobic police crackdown, but also a legacy of queer activism and proof that it can work.

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📅 June 10, 2025

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🏳️‍⚧️🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍⚧️

Evidence for trans people is thousands of years old. The Corded Ware Culture, often called the "first Europeans," has a burial from 2900 BCE where a male-bodied individual was buried like a woman (oriented to the east) with associated religious goods showing her as some sort of priest.

Only a couple hundred years later we have actual written evidence in Sumerian from Gilgamesh's Uruk. The Gilgamesh story was told a couple weeks ago. Ishtar, the goddess of Love (sexuality) from that story, had a revered and protected class of priests called Gala. They were born male but presented, dressed, and were addressed as women; however, they would seemingly partner with men or women as they chose, showing that their gender was separate from their sexuality.

Over a thousand years later, the influence of these two cultures would combine with a third in modern Turkey (Türkiye) with Cybele, who takes aspects of the leopard-loving Throned Great Mother from Çatalhöyük and Ishtar. She has priests called Galli, who were either trans or non-binary, many of whom even castrated themselves in an early form of transition. The Greeks syncretized her with Rhea, and she features in many trans myths including the gender-fluid Dionysus, Hermaphroditus, and Iphis.

Iphis was raised as a boy by her mother on ancient Crete. When she fell in love with a woman she wanted to marry, she feared coming out to her and being unable to satisfy her husbandly duties. The night before the wedding she told her, and they prayed to the Goddess together, who transitioned her. The Roman poet Ovid told the story in his popular Metamorphoses, which is full of trans myths.

Cybele was worshiped in Rome as the goddess of gender non-conformity. More on Roman trans history soon.

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📅 June 02, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1991, the Oscars made history by nominating their first animated film for Best Picture, Beauty and the Beast, and although it only ended up winning two awards for its music, the man who accepted was the long-time partner of the composer, who had just died from AIDS.

We want to recognize Howard Ashman and Dean DeBlois, two gay men who saved Disney and inspired many of us to be ourselves.

Howard Ashman moved to New York in the seventies to write and compose for Broadway, but his style of intimate stories with character-driven songs took a while to catch on. He eventually found success with Little Shop of Horrors, but he also felt pressured to sand off his characters—then he got an offer to work at struggling Disney Animation. He began working on The Little Mermaid, rewriting much of the story and teaching them how to make animation more like musical theater. Ursula was inspired by the Baltimore drag diva Divine; the story became about not fitting in with your family, and them eventually accepting their unconventional love. Its smash success kicked off the Disney Renaissance.

Howard's next project, Beauty and the Beast, came on the heels of his HIV diagnosis and took themes of feeling like a monster, social rejection, a curse, a ticking clock, and love for the unlovable. He feared his illness would get him fired by the children's movie company, but instead they asked how they could help. As his health declined he wanted to work frantically, even writing a good deal of Aladdin. Howard passed just before the release, but the crew and Disney ensured Howard's partner Bill accepted the Oscar.

Dean DeBlois was inspired by Howard's work and moved to Disney as a storyboard artist, but he kept rewriting his assigned storyboards, adding queer themes. Instead of firing him, the director, Chris Sanders, promoted Dean to co-writer to work with him directly on Mulan, where he brought more identity themes to the story. After its success as one of the last movies of the Disney Renaissance, Chris and Dean were given free rein to make anything. So together they created the amazing weirdness of LILO AND STITCH.

Dean went on to make How to Train Your Dragon.

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📅 May 27, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

If you've been to a Pride event in the last twenty years, you've probably seen a float, or a tent, or even a go-go dancer with the rainbow logo of your favorite brand, or bank, or airline plastered all over.

This wasn't always the case: it wasn't until 1994 that IKEA shocked everyone with its public support of Pride and the first same-sex couple in a national television commercial. It was soon followed by Levi's Jeans, American Airlines, Absolut, Apple, IBM, and Ben & Jerry's, all of whom also matched their public support of Pride with expanded employee protections and benefits (Levi's being the first ever to offer same-sex partner benefits two years earlier).

These early adopters did a brave thing against harsh conservative backlash, and they paired their promotions with protections. "Pink dollars" flocked to them, ending up making their moral stance profitable.

This started a flood of RAINBOW CAPITALISM in the late 2000s, where corporate brands slapped rainbows on, consumed every tent and float at Pride with branding, and turned what was once a protest into a family-friendly, high-cost, brand marketing event.

While these companies would have a rainbow flag up in June, they'd limit partner benefits in July, deny gender-affirming surgery in September, and give piles of money to anti-gay tax-cutting Republicans in November.**

Many local Pride committees turned around and used this fair-weather corporate money to fund community centers, support groups, and scholarships. Even though "go woke, go broke" was obviously wrong, the changing political climate means we need those big-money friends more than ever, but most of those companies are now pulling out of Pride as fast as their lawyers can break contracts.

While many brands have taken the Amazon/Target/Bank route of actively unfriending the gays, major giants like Google, PayPal, Disney, and Edward Jones have actively upped their support, and all of those OG '90s brands above are still standing strong. But Pride needs your support too. Give what you can to local Pride events…

PRIDE IS A PROTEST, let's take it back!

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📅 May 20, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

"You were the axe at my side, the dagger in my belt, the shield that defended me, my joyous armor. You were my glory."

— Epic of Gilgamesh

4,200 years ago, the very first piece of literature was written in ancient Sumerian, and it was a gay epic about loss, love, and mortality.

The first city in the world was Uruk, dedicated to the goddess of love Ishtar, and ruled by the demigod king Gilgamesh. But he was a selfish, uncaring king; he would force the men into wrestling contests that he'd always win, make the populace build Uruk's massive walls, and instituted prima nocta for all the young women. The people cried out to the gods, who created a man out of clay to be Gilgamesh's equal. The wild man Enkidu came into being in the wilderness, and knowing little else, befriended the beasts. Ishtar sent a priestess to seduce and civilize Enkidu, and once they'd mated the beasts abandoned him. The priestess told Enkidu of the "evil" king, and Enkidu went to Uruk to challenge him—and Gilgamesh never refused a challenge.

The battle lasted all day, for they were evenly matched, but as night fell their strength was spent; they held each other, sweaty and exhausted, and instead of enemies, they became lovers.

Gilgamesh proclaimed: "I loved him as a woman, and he was dear to me, as a wife to her husband."

Together they had many adventures, including slaying a massive giant, the protector of the cedars of Lebanon. Ishtar became enamored of the now kinder and more just Gilgamesh, but he rejected the goddess of love, for his heart belonged to Enkidu. Yet Ishtar was a jealous god and sent the all-powerful Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh. The Bull rampaged through Uruk, and despite its overwhelming power, the couple faced it in combat. At a crucial point the Bull rushed Gilgamesh, sure to kill him, when Enkidu caught it by the tail, saving his love. It wheeled and gored Enkidu. Amazingly they managed to defeat it, but Enkidu was injured and dying. Gilgamesh tried everything to heal him to no avail.

"I touched his heart but it did not beat. I mourned him seven days and nights; I would not leave."

Ending below in the comments (spoilers)

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📅 May 13, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

By 1978, Gilbert Baker had been living in San Francisco for half a decade; he had first been stationed there while in the army after leaving his small-town Kansas home, where his mom owned a dressmaking store. He fit right in with the San Francisco scene, campaigning for marijuana legalization, becoming a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, and befriending Harvey Milk. As Pride was approaching, Gilbert was asked to work with a committee coming up with decorations and branding for the event. It was there that the rainbow flag was born. Originally having eight colors representing the sources of strength of the gay community when we come together—diverse but united—(pink representing sexuality and turquoise representing art were eventually dropped as the colors were hard to find as the flag entered mass production).

The flag debuted at the 1978 San Francisco Pride (Freedom Day). Gilbert refused a trademark, making it the ubiquitous symbol it is today.

Gilbert went on to be a successful vexillographer (flag designer), but now 47 years later, after having been flown over world capitals and thousands of Pride marches, three U.S. states have banned the Pride Flag from flying on public property, following the federal ban executive order this year. In the last few weeks Alabama, Utah, and Idaho have banned the Flag from being flown on public property (you can still carry it), while Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and even Gilbert's home state of Kansas have similar less restrictive bans related to public buildings. A dozen other states have bills proposing even more extreme bans, including from public marches and protests.

It is more important than ever, as we now fly the Progress Rainbow Pride Flag, that we remember the original message of us coming together to fight for our rights, united in our diversity.

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📅 May 06, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1997, Patria Jiménez made history when she became the first openly lesbian member of the Mexican Congress, and the first in all of Latin America. Prior to her election, Jiménez co-founded El Clóset de Sor Juana a few years earlier, an organization that became one of Mexico's leading voices for lesbian rights, feminist issues, and the broader LGBTQ+ movement. In Congress, she advocated for anti-discrimination policies, same-sex unions, and legal protections. She served in the senate for over a decade before serving on the UN Human Rights Council. Mexico has a federal system, but has roughly followed just behind the arc of rights granted by the United States.

One of the most liberal areas is Mexico City, where Temístocles Villanueva, from the liberal MORENA Party (same as new President Claudia Sheinbaum), emerged as the leading queer legislator. For the last decade, Temístocles championed a wave of progressive changes, including banning conversion therapy, guaranteeing easy legal gender marker changes, and anti-discrimination laws in healthcare, employment, and schools. His efforts have made Mexico City a haven for LGBTQ+ policy, dragging more conservative areas (slowly) toward inclusion.

But Mexico City does have a fairly permissive temporary residency program for up to four years.

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📅 April 27, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

"It is a tragedy of our age that love and affection between people of the same sex is treated as a crime." — Emma Goldman

In 1886, Albert and Lucy Parsons were leading a Haymarket strike advocating for an 8-hour workday when the situation turned explosively violent and Chicago police opened fire on the protesters. Afterward, Illinois executed Confederate veteran turned peaceful socialist Albert, leaving his Black and Latin widow Lucy (born enslaved in Virginia) to continue the cause, becoming a major figure in the workers' rights movement that commemorated the Haymarket Affair on May 1st as International Workers' Rights Day. Although she lived sixty more years, she never had another relationship with a man, but may have had several with women. Unfortunately, Chicago police burned all her personal documents after her death, so we'll never know for certain.

Her contemporary, anarcho-socialist Emma Goldman, accused Lucy of hypocrisy. Emma—only seventeen at the time of the Haymarket Affair—was the first major gay rights activist in United States history. As a mixed-race woman, Lucy preached a more focused and acceptable socialism, while she saw Jewish Emma as "prat(ing) about free love and sex, while the masses starve as wage-slaves." Emma thought that there could be no real liberation as long as patriarchal ideas of marriage and morality kept people in self-imposed chains.

They avoided each other at the numerous rallies, protests, and organizing events they both led as they achieved much in shorter work days, better safety standards, healthcare access, and free speech, while Emma also gave voice to women's and LGBTQ struggles.

This is a tale of two women who changed their world and expanded workers' and human rights—one who may have been closeted, the other who was one of the first to try and tear the doors off the closets. Both deserve remembrance on this May Day; now get out there and continue their work.

🏳️‍🌈🚹Resistance🚹🏳️‍🌈 every Sunday and protests this Thursday May 1st.

"People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take." — Emma Goldman

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📅 April 22, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1971, Sister Jeannine Gramick was just a math teacher and a nun at Notre Dame, when she was invited to an apartment Eucharist with wounded gay Catholics that transformed her. She joined Dignity, an LGBTQ Catholic support group, and asked to make the queer community her full-time ministry with support from her order of nuns and the help of Father Robert Nugent. But the leader of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly called the Inquisition—Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) called homosexuality an "intrinsic moral evil" and banned "gender ideology," eventually launching an investigation of Sister Gramick.

She was barred from ministry, but she refused to be silent. She had to leave her order but joined the Sisters of Loretto and continued her work. Then, thirty-five years later, in 2021, a new pope had been named—one who said "Who am I to judge?" and that "God does not disown any of his children." He thanked Sister Gramick for her fifty years of ministry, inviting her and fifty LGBTQ Catholics to an audience to hear him say, "Homosexual people have the right to family; they are children of God," supporting civil unions and civic marriages. Then two years later, by Fiducia Supplicans, he authorized blessing same-sex couples. Although Pope Francis expressed some transphobia, and gay Catholics still cannot be equally married in the Catholic faith, as long as saints like Sister Gramick keep evangelizing to sympathetic ears like Pope Francis had, there will be a better, more compassionate Church on earth for the 1.5 billion Catholics in it.

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📅 April 15, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Isaac Newton is probably one of the best-known names in science, and in his own time he was famous and powerful as the head of the Royal Society (of Science), but he was cold and never had a single romantic relationship. However, in 1693, as the only man he ever said he loved, Nicholas Fatio de Duillier, was set to join a monastic community—seemingly because of his own internalized homophobia—Newton, at his most distraught, wrote: "I love you more than anyone else… I could withdraw from all business and live a private life with you."

Newton never self-identified as asexual or homoromantic, as the terms were unknown at the time. Most well known for his theory of gravity, laws of motion, and invention of calculus, he also studied light (inventing a reflecting telescope) and was made Master of the Mint for his anti-counterfeiting techniques. Fatio was a Swiss-born mathematician first involved in geodesy (measuring the earth), who became an admirer of Newton, moving to London and even translating and editing Principia Mathematica, Newton's masterwork. Fatio was also deeply religious and oscillated between periods of scientific and theological fervor, ultimately leaving Newton and science altogether for a religious life.

Newton's only other notable connection was his bitter rivalry with German polymath Gottfried Leibniz, who published independently a system of calculus before Newton. And although both men seem to have been ACE (asexual), Leibniz—although also aromantic—was gregarious, collaborative, and cosmopolitan, while Newton was secretive, ambitious, and solitary. They spilled a great deal of ink disagreeing with each other; Newton, possibly influenced by Fatio, argued for an interventionist God, while Leibniz thought we lived in "the best of all possible worlds," a relational universe only started by a distant "clockmaker god."

Newton was buried as a state hero in Westminster Abbey; Fatio continued as a Camisard monastic, largely forgotten by the scientific world; and Leibniz's funeral was attended only by his secretary, after Newton destroyed his reputation.

The image is a modern reinterpretation of Fatio and Newton.

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📅 April 08, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1908 London, a new member was introduced to a private club called the Bloomsbury Group: painter Duncan Grant met economist John Maynard Keynes. It was to be "the supreme male love of Keynes' life."

The Bloomsbury Group was a social and artists' club filled mainly with graduates from Cambridge University. Members included E.M. Forster, the famous gay author of Howards End (an influence for Downton Abbey); Virginia Woolf, lesbian (bi?) groundbreaking novelist; Arthur Hobhouse, who founded the national parks of Britain; Dilly Knox, famous codebreaker who helped get the U.S. into WW1; and Lytton Strachey, biographer focused on psychology who brought his boyfriend Duncan Grant into the group. More than half the members were queer and fairly open, but none are more important than Keynes.

John Maynard Keynes was an economist who didn't believe in laissez-faire capitalism or trickle-down economics, unlike Adam Smith or the much later Milton Friedman respectively. There is no zero-sum economy; instead there is a multiplier as paychecks are spent and government invests in communities, which leads to more spending—and taxes should be high on the richest to help the government invest more. TRUE. His ideas were key to FDR's New Deal and the economic boom after WW2, until Reagan pushed the trickle-down theory—that the rich should be richer and the poor will get more crumbs the richer the 1% get—obviously FALSE.

Although Keynes would marry late in life, Grant would be his best man, and their love lasted their lifetime. Duncan Grant was one of the only members of the Bloomsbury Group not educated at Cambridge, and helped Keynes understand the working class better. Grant did the portrait of Keynes pictured and had a successful career in art.

Keynes is the inspiration for the Rules-Based Order, where nations would invest in developing economies, globally share markets, lend money freely, and trade openly. That order came crashing down last week under the tariffs and "zero-sum," "small-pie economics" of Trump that Keynes would have hated—and which is also FALSE.

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📅 March 31, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1981, Absolut Vodka became the first major alcohol brand to start advertising in LGBTQ+ magazines and venues and even sponsoring Pride events worldwide. This was in stark contrast to companies like Coors, who during the seventies and eighties actually gave their employees polygraph tests to see if they were gay.

Coors went on to be a major donor to the Heritage Foundation, the people currently fighting against gay marriage and trans rights. In response, gay and lesbian bars across the country stopped serving Coors, and during Anita Bryant's campaign against gay rights in the seventies, even stopped serving orange juice, since she had been the spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice.

Following in that great tradition, as companies like Bacardi, Grey Goose, and Kraken supported Trump and thus his attack on trans and gay rights, we will be boycotting their products. We will sell through our current stock at a markup and not be buying any more.

Might we recommend Absolut, Smirnoff, and Captain Morgan, all of whom fiercely support our community. We will also be pushing more local companies like Belle Isle Moonshine (our new rail) and Cirrus Vodka (potato-based).

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📅 March 25, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1979, on Easter weekend in the Castro District of San Francisco, three drag-nuns started protesting the sexual shame perpetrated by conservative, anti-gay religious teachings. They would come to be known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The group quickly grew in numbers and colorful presentation and reached its zenith in creative sister names. As the AIDS crisis began, the sisterhood was on the forefront of preaching safer sex, caring for AIDS patients, and activism for treatments and funding.

By taking the style, humor, and irreverence of the drag community and combining it with the rule, charity, and sisterhood of the Catholic monastic tradition, the Sisters spread to over eighty houses in a dozen countries, and their membership represents all genders and sexual orientations. While their work drew allegations of anti-Catholic bias, they served a community of the marginalized and have become far less controversial. They still are active, and now it seems like their irreverent activism is needed again.

This Sunday's 🏳️‍🌈🚹Resistance🚹🏳️‍🌈 meeting will focus on the lessons of their joyful and irreverent protest and community care.

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📅 March 18, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In August of 1966, police were called to an all-night diner on Taylor Street in the Tenderloin red-light district of San Francisco. The Gene Compton's Cafeteria was just around the corner from the city's gay bathhouse and beauty salon frequented by trans women. The diner was not welcoming, charging a surcharge for "cross-dressing" and often calling the police to arrest the gay and trans customers. When the police tried to arrest a "drag queen" for "female impersonation," she threw her coffee in his face and sparked a riot.

There were no newspaper reports, and police cracked down hard on the protesters, so it never gained the traction that Stonewall would a few years later.

In 2022, California had submitted the Compton's Riot site to the National Historic Landmarks Registry, but it was not accepted as they wanted more details on the significance of the largely forgotten riot. Last month, quietly without any announcement or fanfare, Park Ranger Sherry Frear, the deputy in charge of the registry, quietly added the Compton's site to the registry—just under the radar of the administration.

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📅 March 11, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-gay in history🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1973, thanks to the quiet, relentless work of psychiatrist Evelyn Hooker and the bravery of hundreds of gay men willing to speak up, homosexuality was no longer considered a disease.

From all the way back to Sigmund Freud, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder, a form of arrested development—perhaps an overbearing mother? For nearly a century, gay men were placed in asylums, arrested, or would secretly choose therapy only to be told they were diseased, deformed, traumatized, or deficient.

They were deviants and monsters, so they agreed to—or were more often forced into—the most horrific and unregulated practices: hypnosis; beatings; "reparative prostitutes"; electro-aversion therapy on the genitalia while watching gay porn; nauseating chemicals; castration; hormones or testicular transplants; and electro and surgical lobotomies. There were NO long-term successes at orientation change, but plenty of lifelong damage that often led to patients taking their own lives.

In 1944, Evelyn Hooker was teaching at UCLA when her best student, Sam From, told her he was gay. Hooker knew that homosexuality was considered a disorder, but when Sam asked her to meet his friends she realized that something was wrong with her profession's prognosis. These weren't miserable, diseased patients but people, living and loving as best they could. She asked Sam if she could interview some of his friends and publish a study. He replied, "I can get you a hundred gay guys."

She started a thirty-year journey of collecting, publishing, and even advocating for the stories of gay men. Finally, after many loud protests and quiet conversations, the American Psychological Association, under Dr. Alfred Freedman, removed homosexuality as a disorder, banned conversion therapy, and eventually said the only disorder was homophobia.

Conversion therapy is now illegal in twenty-three states, and only unlicensed religious counselors practice it in the others.

But yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to overturn Evelyn's work and allow conversion therapy again.

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📅 March 04, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Vikings

In 988, the powerful trade city of the Varangian Vikings on the banks of the Dnieper River north of the Black Sea converted to Orthodox Christianity, after rejecting Islam and Catholicism for their views on drinking and boring architecture respectively. This choice started a massive change in the southern Viking peoples' views of gender. The capital city of Kiev had been founded by a woman and her three brothers. The first baptized monarch was Olga, a queen who invited her husband's killer to marry her but killed him and his whole tribe in a ruse, where she reportedly said "The Rus already have a King," referring to herself. She never remarried, ruled as a man, and led her country for a decade before giving the throne to her son and being canonized as a saint after death.

The pre-Christian Norse view of gender fluidity is perfectly captured in their trickster god Loki, who transformed into a mare to mate with a stallion, even giving birth to Odin's horse. Most famously, when he lost Thor's hammer, he had Thor dress up as his own sister Freyja to marry the frost giant who had Mjolnir, while Loki became a woman to pose as Thor's bridesmaid. They got the hammer on the wedding night and few giants survived. Loki is even said to have just lived as a human woman for long periods, and even Odin took on more feminine aspects (magic) at least once.

The Kievan Rus would go on to be the cultural foundation of the Ukrainian people, a lifeline for Constantinople, and a huge influence on the entire Slavic world.

At least in surviving records—most written after conversion—receptive male partners were called Ergi and looked down upon socially or even exiled, but sources are scant. It reflects a culture that had both strict gender norms and a reverence for those who subvert them.

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📅 February 24, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 2022, Viktor Pylypenko, a gay soldier who came out four years earlier, succeeded in getting the unicorn battalion patch made officially available to LGBTQ+ soldiers defending Ukraine.

The Russian aggression has been a major driving factor for LGBTQ+ rights in Ukraine. Ukraine decriminalized homosexual acts in the early nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then expanded employment protections after the illegal annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. A year after the start of the war, a civil unions bill made its way through the Parliament in Kyiv, but a small faction of religious conservatives stalled the bill's progress.

Putin has used the queer community in Russia as a scapegoat, "undermining traditional Russian values with decadent western ways." But after the botched invasion of Ukraine, Putin took the partial media ban on positive depictions of queer people to a complete shutdown, where even wearing rainbow kitten earrings will result in imprisonment in a gulag. Almost all gay activists have been imprisoned or silenced.

Putin's Russia is an evil totalitarian state attempting a violent occupation of Ukraine, but it also represents a battle for gay lives. Russians have been propagandized into virulent homophobia, and to in any way support or apologize for Putin is to condone his oppression of LGBT people and free expression.

When in 2022 the tanks started rolling toward Kyiv, everyday citizens posted signs of support on the local gay bars, promising to stand with their gay neighbors. With the unicorn patch, gay Ukrainians show where they stand as well. Although it is still a journey to full acceptance in Ukraine, it is obvious whose side we all should be on.

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📅 February 17, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Tennessee Williams, considered by many to be America's greatest playwright, battled with addiction and depression for most of his life, but his happiest and most productive period started in 1948 when he met struggling Sicilian actor and naval veteran Frank Merlo. They bought a house together in Key West, splitting their time with New York while Merlo kept the author organized and stable.

Williams' plays were often adapted into movies, with much of the homosexuality scrubbed out, and gay icon Elizabeth Taylor often starring. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams' favorite play, featured a bisexual love triangle, though the director and the Hays Code forced Williams to revise the ending, giving the main character "some sort of moral awakening."

Similarly, the film adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer was allowed to feature a gay character since he was violently murdered, thus providing a "moral" about "the horrors of such a lifestyle." In that play, as in his most famous work, A Streetcar Named Desire, the main character slips into insanity—as Williams' sister did.

Merlo and Williams had a happy life that slowly broke apart after fourteen years because of increased drug use, but shortly after their breakup Merlo was diagnosed with lung cancer and Tennessee rushed back to his side and cared for him until his death. Although Williams lived another twenty years battling depression and drug addiction, he said he was never truly happy again after the loss of Merlo.

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📅 February 12, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Continuing our famous gay lovers series:

When Roman Emperor Hadrian's young lover Antinous died in 130 CE, over two thousand statues of him were made. The wise and beautiful young man from the Black Sea region of modern Turkey first met the Emperor while he was visiting the outlying regions of the empire—which he did more than any other ruler, building walls in Scotland and rebuilding Athens and the like.

Right after they met, Hadrian invited the intelligent youth to accompany him on what was to be a five-year tour of the Mediterranean world. They enjoyed hunting and reading together, and when Hadrian became deathly ill, Antinous stayed by his side.

Afterward, they went to visit northern Africa, and while on the Nile, Antinous mysteriously fell overboard and drowned. Egyptian priests quickly consoled the heartbroken Emperor by claiming Osiris had taken him as a demigod, thanking him for ending a drought.

Hadrian commissioned games and shrines to his dead lover across the empire and even named a star after him. He decorated his still-intact tomb and villa with statues of Antinous in the form of every Greek god. In fact, more statues survive of Antinous than of any other historical Roman figure—the greatest love of Rome's greatest emperor.

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📅 February 04, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Since it's been in the news, let's talk about Marianne Budde; she made headlines for begging mercy for LGBTQ people and immigrants from the new/old President last week at the National Cathedral's post-inauguration prayer service. But in 2018 she solemnly walked in front of the first gay bishop of any major Christian denomination, Gene Robinson, in a momentous service for the LGBTQ community.

Gene Robinson had been elected as bishop fifteen years earlier and it resulted in a schism in the Episcopal Church. Gene had to wear a bulletproof vest to his consecration, where three bishops and EMTs were standing by to consecrate him in the ambulance in case he was hurt before the service could finish.

In 2018, Marianne Budde invited the parents of Matthew Shepard to bring him to rest at her Cathedral in DC. University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, then twenty-one, had been murdered twenty years earlier in a heinous hate crime that shocked the nation. There had been so much right-wing backlash at Matthew's original funeral that the family chose to keep his ashes at home.

Marianne, Gene, and Matthew's parents, pictured above, finally put Matthew to rest in the cathedral that has seen the funerals of six presidents and Helen Keller.

In the wake of tech moguls, news corporations, and foreign leaders groveling to Trump's ego, it took one meek-looking bishop to again stand between hate mongers and the vulnerable.

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📅 January 20, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1895, celebrity playwright Oscar Wilde went from media darling on the cover of Vanity Fair to a degenerate despised by the public. Despite his first case for sodomy ending with a hung jury, public pressure forced a retrial that found him guilty and sentenced him to two years of hard labor. The cause of his downfall? The demon twink, Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he called Bosie.

Bosie was the young, rich, spoiled, and beautiful son of the Marquis of Queensbury. Bosie's elder brother had had an alleged affair with the then-Prime Minister, that ended with his possible self-destruction.

Wilde's plays, like The Importance of Being Earnest, were satirical, witty comedies—cuttingly indicting of upper-class society, yet critical and commercial successes.

Bosie encouraged Wilde to live a lavish lifestyle of restaurants, private clubs, and fancy hotels along with a constant parade of young "rent boys" (lower-class men who turn to prostitution on the side).

Bosie antagonized his father as he and Wilde lived openly together, and Bosie rashly pushed Wilde to sue for libel when his father called Wilde a "Somdomite" (misspelled). The lawsuit was quickly lost as the Marquis brought the prostitutes Wilde had hired into court, and the publicity forced the prosecutor to bring a charge against Wilde for gross indecency.

Although Wilde stayed in love with Bosie all through his imprisonment, even writing a long letter to him called De Profundis, Bosie had fled to France. After prison, Wilde tried to reconcile with his long-suffering wife, only to have Bosie swoop back in—and quickly back out—after they ran up a huge debt living in exile in France. Wilde died in Paris, penniless and friendless, save for Robert Ross, who would forty years later be buried with Wilde after he spent his lifetime rehabilitating Wilde's literary image and caring for Wilde's two children.

Bosie would become Catholic, conservative, and antisemitic in later life, and eventually regretful of how he treated Wilde—but only after being imprisoned for slander against Winston Churchill.

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📅 January 14, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1886, Oscar Wilde finally met an out gay person… only a year before, Wilde had married a rich young woman, and British "Gross Indecency" laws were expanded to cover sodomy.

Oscar Wilde was probably one of the last to realize he was gay. His Irish poet mother put him in dresses and taught him to always be unapologetically flamboyant; in school he decorated his room in lilies and blue china and excelled in ancient Greek; then as he started his writing career he said "he'd be famous, or if not famous, notorious," often walking down the street in bright dandy clothes and flowers—but it wasn't until he met the "unrestrained homosexual" 17-year-old Robert Ross, who could tell by Wilde's poetry which way he leaned, that he was ushered into the budding gay scene of Victorian London.

Wilde was part of the Aesthetic Movement, a philosophy that celebrated beauty and art for art's sake, saying "all of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." His wit and early poetry got him invited to all the parties and a year-long lecture tour of the United States, declaring at customs he had "nothing to declare except his genius." The Prince of Wales even said "I do not know Mr. Wilde… which is not to be known."

After meeting Ross he shortly started working on his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, predicting the backlash to the homoerotic tale: "there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; (they) are well written or badly written, that is all."

Ross was in love with Wilde and was a lifelong friend, but lost him when Wilde met Bosie, the irreverent, beautiful son of the Marquis of Queensbury, and the toxic love of Wilde's life.

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📅 January 06, 2025

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Queer… in 1894, the Marquess of Queensberry—of the famous boxing rules—used that word to describe Oscar Wilde, who was in a relationship with the Marquess' son.

Queer was a common form of self-identification in the community, at first for effeminate partners as opposed to the clinical term at the time, "invert," and the assimilationist term "homophile," especially in the UK. The old saying "there's nowt so Queer as Folk" being an idea that LGBT people resonated with (so much it became a TV show title in the late 90s).

Queer, gay, fairy, invert, and the "F word" were all used against us as pejoratives.

Later, in the early ballroom scene in the middle of the last century, queer was used for masculine-presenting guys who were gay, as opposed to "trade," referring to closeted or straight-identifying guys.

As the decades passed, gay—meaning happy—became a more positive umbrella term for all LGBT people, but after Stonewall and the rise of the assimilationist idea of a sexuality binary (gay or straight), those left out of this simple dichotomy—gender-nonconformists, bisexuals, people in non-traditional relationships, POC, and radical socialists, sometimes called liberationists—felt excluded from the gay label.

As the AIDS crisis began, a group of activists spun off of ACT UP calling themselves "Queer Nation."

They said in "Queers Read This":

"Ah, do we really have to use that word? It's trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. And for others 'queer' conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering. Well, yes, 'gay' is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay (happy). So we've chosen to call ourselves queer."

From this counter-culture usage, it became an academic term, with many universities and disciplines using "queer studies," and is now a more inclusive, reclaimed umbrella term that still has a tinge of civil disobedience.

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📅 December 30, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

On the seventeenth of November, 1901, police illegally raided a home in Mexico City and arrested 41 people, less than half of whom were in drag. Because of the drag, it was immediately (and correctly) assumed to be a queer dance party. Rumors even swirled that the son-in-law of President Díaz, the thirty-year dictator of the country, was also in attendance and allowed to escape charges. While homosexuality was not expressly illegal at the time, those in drag were charged with indecency and sent to the Yucatán to fight in the Mayan revolt (The Caste War); seven of them bought their way out, leaving only twelve sent to the front. The resulting political scandal of Mexican elites engaged in homosexuality caused the number 41 to become taboo—much as 13 is here today—with hotels often not having a room 41 and the military still not having a 41st battalion.

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📅 December 24, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

The 1873 Comstock Act forbade the postal service from transporting obscene materials, especially across state lines. In the early fifties, ONE, Inc. magazine, the oldest still-operating gay magazine, was denied deliveries by the postmaster (Olesen) citing the Comstock law. The case was decided along the "Roth test of Prurient Interest" but with social value, and allowed to be posted.

Only a few years later, a gay photo magazine called Physique—of Tom of Finland fame—was brought to court in the Manual Enterprises case. Here the court decided that "a nude male cannot be regarded as more objectionable than the nude female, that society tolerates," opening the porn floodgates.

Now that same 1873 law is coming up again, as birth control and contraceptives—listed in the original law as obscene—could be banned by the next administration via an executive order to the postmaster general, making them much harder to obtain and possibly making medication abortions impossible to ship.

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📅 December 17, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (Colorado Civil Rights Division) was a case decided last year by the Supreme Court, following the more famous Masterpiece Cakeshop case a few years before. After the first case—where a baker refused to make cakes for a gay wedding—was narrowly decided, the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom group brought the 303 Creative case. Both dealt with a public business refusing to make custom creations for a gay couple's wedding; this time, a wedding announcement website.

The justices decided 6-3 again that a sign could be posted refusing custom or "expressive" services to specific groups because of a deeply held "value" or "belief," because it would be compelled speech at odds with the First Amendment—despite deciding otherwise in numerous other discrimination cases historically.

So yes, businesses can now refuse service to gay people as long as it is somehow expressive. In light of that, we at Thirsty's are considering banning straight people from ordering any custom drinks more complicated than a vodka soda.

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📅 December 10, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Last week, ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio made history as the first openly trans person to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Skrmetti v. US won't be decided until June 2025, but it deals with Tennessee's (and by extension twenty-four other states') law banning any trans healthcare for minors, and whether the law violates the "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which bans discrimination based on "sex."

Although allowing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and puberty blockers for cisgender kids while banning them for trans and nonbinary folks is obviously a difference based on sex, the three centrist conservative justices seem poised to allow the laws on a state-by-state basis. The votes of the three more liberal and three ultra-conservative activist justices are a foregone conclusion, of course.

Nonetheless, while we hope against hope these unequivocally unconstitutional laws are struck down, we will celebrate Chase Strangio's historic attempt to defend his community and protect trans kids.

Of course, the six conservative justices seemed more concerned about surgical reassignment for trans youth, which is rarely electively practiced anywhere—but is a lie repeated by right-wing media.

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📅 December 03, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

It's been just over twenty years since most of the country had laws that made gay sex in private a crime. In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that there was a fundamental right to privacy that protected consenting adults from legal prosecution for sexual acts taken in private. The decision overturned the seventeen-year-old Bowers v. Hardwick from Georgia, in which the court made a Judeo-Christian argument—uniquely citing homosexuality as unnatural—to uphold "sodomy" laws. Many states still have so-called "sodomy" laws to use as add-on charges for sexual assault cases; however, should Lawrence v. Texas be overturned—as it uses the same inferred privacy right that Roe v. Wade did—homosexual acts could become illegal again overnight in about a third of the country. Virginia has codified consensual exceptions legislatively, thankfully.

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📅 November 26, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges opened marriage to our community—but it was a long legal road…

In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court kicked off the firestorm when it suggested that denying couples the right to marry under the law because of their gender may be unconstitutional. Three years later the government passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), under some protest from half of Democrats, which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages on a federal level.

Eight years later, the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized the first marriages for LGBTQ people in the nation. Meanwhile, President Bush proposed a Federal Marriage Amendment blocking state and federal courts from extending marriage rights (though not necessarily civil unions). It helped him get reelected but never passed.

Two years after that failed amendment, with more states now allowing gay marriage through the courts, the Mormon Church funded a movement in California that took away the marriages of people in the nation's largest state: Proposition 8.

Maine, Maryland, and the Washingtons all opened marriage through the legislature four years later. Challenges to California's "Prop 8" made their way through the courts, which ruled against removing rights from a minority. Simultaneously, U.S. v. Windsor overturned the federal DOMA, because a lesbian widow was taxed on her spouse's joint property.

Finally, in 2015, the Obergefell v. Hodges case from Ohio legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

It was also the year Cameron and Keyan, owners of Thirsty's, got married at last.

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📅 November 19, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

You can't fire someone just for being gay in this country…

thanks to the 2020 Supreme Court decision Bostock v. Clayton County.

When Gerald Bostock invited work colleagues to his gay softball team's game, he was quickly fired from his Georgia county job. The case contributed to a circuit split, where different federal courts come to different conclusions.

You may remember Frank Kameny, who lost his case against wrongful termination from the military over fifty years earlier. Bill Clinton was the first president to protect sexual orientation in federal security clearances. We can say "Thanks, Obama" for making an executive order to protect LGBT employees at any federal contractor—all while employment non-discrimination legislation, The Equality Act, stalled in Congress to shrinking Republican support.

Trump refused to continue the executive order.

The liberal justices were joined by Justices Roberts and Gorsuch in finding that President JFK's Civil Rights Act's Title VII protects against employment discrimination based on sex, since the sex of one's partner is the reason for the discrimination.

This will be a three-part series about the cases that protected LGBT rights.

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📅 November 12, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1798, as John Adams became the second U.S. President amidst tensions with newly revolutionary France and old adversary England, Congress passed the Alien Enemies Act, which allowed even legal immigrants to be arrested or deported when at war.

The Sedition Act simultaneously silenced any dissent against the government. Then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson* made an impassioned plea for rights and freedoms to the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures, leading to them nullifying the acts.

Serendipitously, this push for free speech and privacy also helped Jefferson get Virginia and Kentucky to lower the sentence for homosexual acts from mutilation and death to a prison sentence of only a few years or less in both states that same year.

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions did lead to further justifications for the Civil War; and now Trump wants to use part of the Alien Enemies Act to allow him to deport or arrest even legal immigrants, despite the fact that the old act does specify in times of war.

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📅 November 05, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

Polls are open for voting 6am-7pm today, Tuesday 11/5. If you're in line, stay in line even after close.

The Heritage Foundation has fought gay marriage, women's autonomy, climate protection, and privacy rights for fifty years, and all the judges Trump appointed were members. Their Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership relies on what's called the Unitary Executive Theory, which would give Trump unchecked power—and his Supreme Court appointments say the President cannot be prosecuted for crimes.

Project 2025 was written by current Trump aides and would—

Ban all pornography, but really target any books with LGBT characters or issues and keep them out of schools and public life.

Ban trans people from the military, again.

Erase any reference to LGBT people in any legislation, including marriage protections.

Force the government to only support and promote straight marriage, including limiting social services and food assistance to married hetero couples.

Make it illegal for teachers to use preferred pronouns, and make "don't say gay" national.

Make birth control and medication abortions illegal across state lines (effectively nationally).

AND set up CAMPS to deport immigrants… because that never ended badly.

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📅 October 29, 2024

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🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

This Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, we can make history. It will either be the day we defeated fascism in this country again and chose (admittedly slow) progress and inclusion—

OR we descend into a generation of hate and dictatorship.

Vote, early if you can (open daily until Saturday). You can same-day register with your state ID.

We will be open late on Election Day.

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📅 October 01, 2024

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"Tell the people that homosexuals aren't cowards."

In 1943, among the millions of people who died as a result of World War II were two heroic gay men, Willem Arondeus and Ian Gleed. Willem was a poet and artist living in Amsterdam when the Nazis took over. He started publishing a resistance magazine and soon was taught to use his artistic skills to make forged documents for Jews attempting escape. Unfortunately, many of the forgeries were caught by comparing them to the public records. On the night of March 27th, along with lesbian Fredrika Bellinfante and at least two other gay men, they broke in and burned down the Civic Registry Office in Amsterdam, allowing Jews to hide from the Reich. Someone implicated Willem; he was caught, took full responsibility, and was executed, asking his lawyer to "Tell the people that homosexuals aren't cowards."

Royal Air Force pilot Ian Gleed was always a confirmed bachelor, and his short stature got him the call sign "Widge" for the Wizard Midget. He quickly distinguished himself as the war broke out, fighting in France and defending Bristol during the Blitz. He rose to wing commander and his memoir Arise to Conquer made him a national hero. Even though his publisher slipped in a fake fiancée, Ian was fairly openly gay on base. He was shot down while aiding the Americans in North Africa. His final kill count was over twenty-five.

Both Willem and Ian were awarded their country's highest military honors posthumously after the war.

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📅 September 24, 2024

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Out gay German businessman Friedrich Radzuweit, who founded the gay rights group The Society for Human Rights, died of a heart attack, but had legally adopted his boyfriend, who used his inheritance to fund Jewish and gay people escaping the country. His last act was to destroy the membership records of the Society as the Nazis came to impound them in 1934.

Members of the Nazi SA youth had stormed Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research and burned his research, while beginning inhumane surgical experiments on imprisoned gay men to "cure" homosexuality.

Many gay men had been involved in the Nazi party and especially the SA—the paramilitary Nazi "storm-troopers"—led by the outed "same-sex-oriented" Ernst Röhm. But that same year was the Night of the Long Knives, where Hitler killed any prominent member of the party who was gay.

The next year, the Nazi SS, under Heinrich Himmler, created the Office to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion—because to them homosexuality was a communicable disease that would weaken the Aryan race and leave them open to foreign immigrants, mainly Jews, corrupting traditional German values.

They converted gay clubs, and the office accepted anonymous denouncements and would torture men for confessions of even homosexual thoughts. Fifty-three thousand men were arrested under the Third Reich; more than ten thousand died in concentration camps, along with two million Poles, half a million Romani, a quarter million disabled people, and six million people of Jewish descent.

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📅 September 17, 2024

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In 1919, in the ashes of The Great War (WW1), the German Weimar Republic was born. It would be a cultural moment centered on Berlin. Although there were still laws against homosexuality and transgender people, the Republic had "Transexual Certificates" allowing people to be officially recognized on all government documents.

In that same year, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science. Meanwhile, homosexual men founded the German Friendship Society with over forty-eight thousand members, which later became more inclusive and political as The League for Human Rights, financed by out gay millionaire Friedrich Radzuweit.

Almost a hundred gay establishments were known to be in Germany, including the world-famous Eldorado, which was even frequented by international tourists, notably Christopher Isherwood, who wrote Cabaret.

The League for Human Rights was selling gay magazines on newsstands, winning court cases, getting laws changed, and even speaking to parliament, which was considering a bill to allow a form of domestic partnerships.

It wasn't all rainbows—there was also a more toxic, more trans-exclusionary gay group, The Society of Unique Ones, which at first embraced the idea of the Übermensch. And in the background there was an alt-right fascist politician promising to make Germany great again.

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📅 September 02, 2024

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This is the first Homosexual.

In 1869, a letter arrived at the German law office of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from his friend, Hungarian author Karl Kertbeny. In it, Kertbeny first used the term "Homo-sexual" (Greek for "same," not Latin for "man").

Ulrichs was the first person to come out publicly a few years before, writing in pamphlets that he had a "female psyche in a male body." He called himself a "Uranian" (German: Urning), referencing the Symposium and the heavenly form of Love (Aphrodite). He campaigned against Paragraph 175, the Prussian (soon German) law that banned same-sex relations; spoke and was banned from numerous universities and conferences; and was often arrested and had his books and pamphlets confiscated.

He adopted the term homosexual but was forced to leave Germany, publishing his collected pamphlets under the title "The Riddle of Man-Manly Love." In it he cites all the famous historical figures who were homosexual, from Socrates to Prussian King Frederick the Great.

But his public bravery would start a movement as Germany became an empire and then a republic—more on that next week.

Decided to reshuffle the posts a bit, and we will do the presidents closer to the election.

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📅 August 27, 2024

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In 416 BC, the tragic poet Agathon held a party to celebrate his win at the Athenian drama festival. He challenged his guests to speak in praise of love. Agathon, who often wore a dress, spoke near the end. He emphasized that Eros is the youngest of gods and seeks out youth and beauty, and is fleeting, looking for its next "bud to bloom." Ironically, Agathon—renowned for his own beauty—had a some twenty-five-year lifelong relationship with his boyfriend, Pausanias.

Socrates, as was his custom, spoke last. Never one to give definitive answers, he related something told to him by a wise old woman, who said: Love is not a god—it is propagation and desire for wisdom and beauty. The greatest aim is the intellectual reproduction of the knowledge of beauty. (An idea very much in accord with the author Plato's own theory of the World of Forms, put into Socrates' mouth.)

Just as Socrates is about to give his own opinion, Alcibiades—the most beautiful and desired man in Athens—stumbles in late and drunk and gives a lisping speech in praise of Socrates, whom he loves, but complains won't physically love him enough.

Alcibiades is often shown trying to get Socrates into bed, while the elder is trying to get Alcibiades to stop hooking up with everyone long enough to learn some philosophy. They were just as frequently depicted as very close and affectionate with each other as well. When Alcibiades was overly zealous in his very first battle and was wounded, Socrates calmly walked into the fray and rescued him, after which they often spent the night together.

The story ends with Alcibiades getting jealous as Agathon flirts with an oblivious Socrates, before passing out along with most of the other guests. Socrates puts his cloak over Alcibiades before wandering to the agora for breakfast and to find more people to debate.

We will return to the misadventures of Alcibiades—the most interesting man who ever lived—and the death of Socrates, in the near future.

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📅 August 20, 2024

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According to Plato, 7 people attended a special dinner and drinking party, called a Symposium, in classical Athens to celebrate a victory in the annual drama and poetry competition called the Dionysia (for the god of wine and theater). The host challenges everyone to speak in praise of the god of love.

The first speaker, a young man, praises ancient love for driving men to great feats, like Achilles for Patroclus.

The second speaker, a lawyer, makes a distinction between vulgar heterosexual love—that is lust and biological—and heavenly homosexual love that seeks to improve oneself and the beloved, while mocking nations that do not allow homosexuality.

The third to speak is a doctor, who between suggesting various hiccup cures to another guest, says that love is the ultimate power in the body and when in balance leads to good health.

Next is Aristophanes, a famous comic playwright, who was battling hiccups. He claims that we all were once made of two people: four arms, two heads, one heart. Some were all male, others all female, but most were "hermaphrodites" with both organs. Zeus feared the all-male especially, and split them in two with a lightning bolt. We now search for our other half—some for men, others for women—according to what we should be, to complete our heart.

We'll discuss the final three out of the seven speakers—including Socrates and the young man who was in love with him—next week.

That young man is also the most interesting and chaotic person in history, Alcibiades.

The relief depicted is from the Istanbul Museum and is a Hellenistic Era interpretation of Aristophanes's combined "Male."

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📅 August 13, 2024

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In 8 CE, the Roman poet Ovid published his masterpiece, The Metamorphoses. In it he talks about various myths dealing with change, including the story of Hermaphroditus. A child of Hermes and Aphrodite—Herma-Aphrodite-us—was a beautiful youth who, after being raised on Mount Ida, started exploring what is now Turkey. They came to a pool and decided to go for a swim, but the Nymph Salmacis saw them bathing and leaped upon them, wishing to forever be a part of them. Hermaphroditus continued to serve their mother Aphrodite as an Eros, a spirit of love, and a deity of gender nonconformity—perhaps being worshiped along with a bearded Aphrodite on Cyprus and having festivals that involved cross-dressing. Eventually they may have also had a part in Dionysus' entourage, as keepers of mysterious cult magic.

Although ancient discrimination existed, gender-nonbinary and nonconforming people were present openly in many Greek city-states and even had a temple on Mount Ida that only allowed non-binary clergy, which existed until around the first century BC.

Plato also discussed Hermaphrodites in his Symposium, which we will discuss next week. The image is from Roman Herculaneum, and was hidden away in the Secret Cabinet of the Naples Museum (where they hid all the naughty art in the Victorian Era).

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📅 July 29, 2024

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Some 4,500 years ago, during the 5th dynasty of Egypt (endonym Kemet), two people were buried together. Their names were Ni-Ank-Khnum ("my life belongs to Khnum") and Khnum-Hotep ("Khnum is satisfied"); they were the manicurists and hairdressers (wigs, probably) of the Pharaoh—an important, trusted position, being allowed to touch the holy body of the living Horus (God-King of Egypt), especially with sharp things. Despite what the current Egyptian government wrote on the outside of their tomb, they are in fact the oldest definitively gay couple in history.

Buried together in the shadow of the very first pyramid (the Step Pyramid of Djoser; there are over 100 pyramids in Egypt), Khnum-Hotep is depicted holding the blue lotus, putting his arm on Ni-Ank-Khnum's shoulder while he puts his around the other's waist as they stare into each other's eyes—the most intimate pose allowed in formal Old Kingdom art. What's more, their wives are erased in their shared eternal banquet scene. In that same scene they request the song about the "Two Contenders," a reference to a gay myth we will retell next week.

So what does the modern Egyptian government call this obviously gay duo? Two brothers—as you do. The lintel above the tomb they share, in a bit of Egyptian wordplay:

"My life belongs to Khnum-Hotep"—an eternal and still visible declaration of their love, 4,500 years later.

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📅 July 15, 2024

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Everyone knows the Rosetta Stone, but this Obelisk—brought to Dorset, England in 1835—has a secret gay history. Gay adventurer William Bankes was a member of Parliament from a young age. After being a classmate of Lord Byron, Bankes went on the "Grand Tour" of the Mediterranean, where he detoured to Egypt. He used his family wealth to excavate numerous ancient sites, where he copied the still-unintelligible hieroglyphs. He became famous as an adventurer with disguises, kidnappings, gunfights, and forgotten temples that would make Lara Croft jealous. Bankes even saved the life of the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon. Bankes found this ancient obelisk, which had the Greek names of several Ptolemaic rulers in hieroglyphs. Realizing the significance, he sent his notes to Thomas Young, who had been trying to translate the Rosetta Stone for twenty years. It proved the key to unlocking the Stone. It was a few years later that he finally got the obelisk transported to his English estate—but that same year, 1835, was the last English execution for "buggery."

Bankes was fairly openly homosexual, and despite his fame and money and even Wellington's intervention, his second offense had him sentenced to death. Bankes lied and tricked his way out of prison, signed his estate over to his brother, and went back to the Mediterranean, where he spent the rest of his life doing archaeology and homosexuality. But he'd occasionally visit his English estate—allegedly in drag. It was his continued fame and political connections that led to the abolition of the death penalty under the three-hundred-year-old Buggery Act six years after his death.

Obelisks are sometimes symbols of the rays of the sun fertilizing the earth; other times, as the phallus of earth god Geb, forever yearning for the sky goddess Nut—so yes, it's phallic.

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📅 July 09, 2024

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On June 23rd, 2016, Christopher Park, part of Christopher Street, and of course the Stonewall Inn where it all started, were designated by then-President Obama as a National Monument—the first (and so far only) dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. It was just a year after the Obergefell decision where the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, and only two weeks after the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, highlighting the continued struggle for equality, recognition, and safety.

The park contains photos and statues commemorating the riots and the first parades, and just two weeks ago a visitor's center and museum opened next door to the current Stonewall Inn, still operating as a gay bar—but now gay-owned.

We hope you enjoyed our Pride series, but even now several of the conservative justices, appointed by the previous president, do not believe that the gay marriage question was rightly decided, or Lawrence v. Texas for that matter. Recognition isn't victory; there is still a lot of work to do. You can start by voting in November for the candidate who will appoint justices that support our rights…

It's a binary choice, unfortunately, but it's ours.

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📅 July 01, 2024

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Stonewall was not the start of collective action for LGBTQ+ rights. The Mattachine Society in 1965 started the Annual Reminder, with fewer than 50 well-dressed picketers at Independence Hall in Philadelphia every year on July 4th, after a successful demonstration at the White House that April (organized by a regional offshoot group, the East Coast Homophile Organization).

On the west coast that same year, the Society held a fundraiser with the lesbian group the Daughters of Bilitis and others. The police had agreed to let the group meet but surrounded the event anyway with spotlights on the windows. When two gay lawyers confronted the police, they were arrested. Twenty-five prominent straight lawyers joined their defense team, and the judge scolded the police and prosecutors before telling the jury to find them not guilty—significantly changing how police in San Francisco treated gay people going forward.

And just a year later, group members—including Craig Rodwell—walked into Julius' Bar in Manhattan, ordered a drink, and then mentioned they were homosexual. Since it was illegal to serve gay people, the bartender tried to remove them, but they made a press event out of it and started a court case that at least allowed "orderly" "known homosexuals" to drink in a bar. (Whatever that means.)

The last Annual Reminder was only days after Stonewall, where many protesters held hands, against Frank Kameny's wishes. Afterward, the group decided to focus on the Christopher Street Liberation Day—better known as the first Pride.

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📅 June 24, 2024

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A riot became a protest for liberation in 1970.

By November 2nd after the Stonewall Riots, members of the new Gay Liberation Front along with a dozen other organizations heard a proposal by Craig Rodwell and Ellen Broidy…

"We propose that a demonstration be held annually on the last Saturday in June in New York City to commemorate the 1969 spontaneous demonstrations on Christopher Street and this demonstration be called CHRISTOPHER STREET LIBERATION DAY. No dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration."

The day was moved to Sunday, June 28th, 1970.

Marches happened the same weekend in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where the police tried to charge them $1.5 million (1970s dollars) for a permit, but with legal help from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) the California Supreme Court affirmed the right of gay Americans to assemble and protest.

Across the country, the demonstrations rejected the fear and shame so long associated with homosexuality and embraced self-worth and the pride in oneself embodied by Stonewall.

The following years, it spread to more cities: Atlanta, London, Minnesota, and Berlin, and many more.

Bi activist Danny the Punk (Stephen Donaldson) and friends suggested the name change to Pride by the third anniversary.

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📅 June 18, 2024

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"Do you think the Homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are!"

The day after the 1969 raid and riot, crowds came to stare at the blackened and burnt Stonewall Inn. It seems the police had smashed everything inside; someone had spray-painted "Legalize Gay Bars Now" on the covered windows, and the more conservative Mattachine Society had urged peace and non-violence.

By nightfall a new piece of graffiti was on the window: "We Are Open."

Poet Allen Ginsberg had never been to the nearby Stonewall Inn before, but when he got close, the overflow crowd from the bar spilled into the streets—thousands were there, dancing and kissing IN PUBLIC. He said to a Village Voice reporter, "You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they've lost that wounded look that fags all had."

Police came and the violence continued sporadically for five days. Marsha P. Johnson even climbed a light post to throw her handbag through a police windshield. The Stonewall Inn closed, partly because of a call for gay (instead of Mafia) owned businesses by Craig Rodwell, a local gay bookshop owner.

A month after the riots, many gay and trans people who had had enough filed into a meeting hall on 14th Street, holding a flyer that said, "Do you think the Homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are!" In attendance were gay activists like Martha Shelley, Marty Robinson, Ellen Broidy, and Craig Rodwell, and trans activists like Marsha and Sylvia Rivera. The group decided to reject the old goals of "homophile" assimilation and quiet tolerance and declared themselves The Gay Liberation Front…

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📅 June 11, 2024

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On June 28, 1969, a brick was thrown and a riot began in Christopher Park outside the Stonewall Inn. Who threw the first brick?

At around 1:20am, police announced another raid of the Mafia-owned gay bar. Serving known homosexuals, dancing with the same gender, and cross-dressing were the usual charges as they began to line up the patrons. The bar paid bribes to the police since they couldn't have a liquor license; raids were common. This night was different, however—people began resisting, and not running home after the police recorded their IDs. Writer Edmund White, later author of The Joy of Gay Sex, said when he saw the crowd outside, "No one has a slogan, no one even has an attitude, but something is brewing."

A delay in police wagons arriving meant the crowd had time to grow. When the "cross-dressers" were finally being loaded onto the wagon, a lesbian—perhaps Stormé DeLarverie—resisted and was beaten. She cried, "Why don't you guys do something?"

It was at this moment the crowd surged forward and a riot began. As many of the young gay homeless "street kids" threw coins to "pay off the cops" and police barricaded themselves inside the bar, someone found a pile of bricks from a construction site across the park.

Although some claim she threw the first brick, activist Marsha P. Johnson said she didn't arrive back until 2am, after the riot had already started. It could have been a misidentification of Zazu Nova, a trans sex worker who would be seen fighting alongside Marsha the next night; or Jackie Hormona, a fem-presenting gay man who is seen in the only picture published from that night. By all accounts, it was undoubtedly a "queen," though.

More about the aftermath next week.

So who threw the first brick? We will probably never know for sure, but it doesn't really matter either, as long as someone throws the next one.

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📅 June 03, 2024

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Best known for the homoerotic Leaves of Grass and "O Captain, My Captain"—about the 1865 assassination of Lincoln—American poet Walt Whitman was rumored to be gay during his life, with Oscar Wilde even saying after a trip to the States: "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips."

The love of Whitman's life, besides poetry, appears to be Richmond resident Peter Doyle, who defected from the Confederate army, escaping to DC where he met Whitman while working as a trolley operator. Doyle wrote of their first meeting: "We were familiar at once—I put my hand on his knee—we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip—in fact went all the way back with me."

Doyle was in the audience at Ford's Theater the night in 1865 that Lincoln was assassinated, and it was from his moving witness account that Whitman wrote the stirring elegy "O Captain, My Captain."

Doyle and Whitman lived together for over a decade, and Doyle helped with Whitman's care after the stroke that eventually took his life.

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📅 May 27, 2024

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Happy Birthday to the "Grandfather of Pride," Frank Kameny, who was born this week, but whose life really changed in 1957 when he was fired from the U.S. Army Observatory.

He was fired for being gay during the Lavender Scare of Senator McCarthy, but instead of hiding in shame he took the Army to court and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused the case.

He went on to co-found the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights groups, and is probably most famous for the phrase "Gay is Good"—which was inspired by other civil rights struggles, and in turn inspired the Stonewall rioters the very next year, who chanted "Gay is Good!" in the streets of New York.

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📅 May 21, 2024

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Hyvää syntymäpäivää—Happy Birthday—to Touko Laaksonen, who was born this week in 1920.

Much better known under his pseudonym Tom of Finland, which was coined by the editor of his first publisher, the 1950s magazine Physique Pictorial—an unintentional outlet for gay men before pornography. His work is a conscious and titillating rejection of the "sissy" stereotype that was prevalent in the 20th century.

After serving in WW2, he became enamored with the Hugo Boss-designed German uniforms—despite the fact that Tom hated what the Third Reich stood for—but "They had the sexiest uniforms."

His other inspirations include the lumberjacks of his native Finland and the freedom and conscious societal rejection of the Biker Culture that developed after the war. By the 70s, his work influenced gay liberation, identity, expression, attraction, and of course the leather culture.

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📅 May 14, 2024

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Happy birthday, Magnus Hirschfeld, who is most known for founding the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 in Weimar Berlin. Less known is that he also formed what is considered the first gay rights organization, The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which in that same year made the first gay film—pictured here—where Hirschfeld plays himself counseling the main character who is being blackmailed, eventually comes out, loses everything, and is driven to suicide. The movie, "Different from the Others," ends with Hirschfeld saying: "The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecution of witches and heretics is inscribed."

Despite many practices considered barbaric by modern standards, the Institute did the first studies of homosexual and transgender people—American newspapers calling him the "Einstein of Sex." He was forced to flee to France, and his Institute and its research was one of the first targets of book burnings by the Third Reich.

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📅 May 06, 2024

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Happy Birthday to all of our friends, and especially Keith Haring, born on May 4th. Now an iconic Pop Art pioneer and hipster counter-culture favorite, his work started as illegal graffiti-style street art while he worked as a busboy at nightclubs. He broke out when, in 1982, his work appeared on the first electronic billboard in Times Square—reportedly after a hookup brought his art to the attention of the Public Art Fund, who paid for the display. He opened the POP Shop and openly sold art featuring gay sexual and tolerance themes. In later life he used his art to help spread the word on safer sex and AIDS, which eventually claimed his life at only 31.

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📅 April 22, 2024

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In 1120, the Crusader King Baldwin II of Jerusalem held the Council of Nablus, which outlawed homosexual acts and started the sequence of European laws banning the practice. The council actually referenced the Code of Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who had outlawed homosexuality after blaming gay people for an earthquake in the sixth century. Humorously, it was that same emperor who was supposedly saved from a treason trial by Bacchus and Serge—the gay saints from last week—and built their church, the Little Hagia Sophia, that still stands in Istanbul.

To compound the irony, it was Baldwin who oversaw the founding of the Knights Templar and granted them the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. More about that next week.

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📅 April 09, 2024

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Up until 1051 CE, homosexual acts were quietly engaged in and tolerated in Europe, with only acts of penitence and prayer as punishment for clergy and monks caught engaging in them in the west.

Benedictine Monk Peter Damian published The Book of Gomorrah, which lashed out at clergy having female concubines, secret children who were given church lands as inheritance, and bribes for religious offices.

He also called out in the book rampant masturbation and homosexuality among clergy and monks. This sparked the Gregorian Reform of the church—many reforms long needed—but also the church began officially recognizing marriages of common people, demanding celibacy for priests, and imposing harsh punishments for homosexuality, eventually death.

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📅 April 01, 2024

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This week: Harry Hay. His life ran the gamut of the gay rights movement, for good and ill. In 1950, after divorcing his wife, Harry co-founded the Mattachine Society, the first open U.S. gay rights group, which was at first very associated with the Communist Party of the USA. Once the Lavender and Red Scares progressed, however, Hay was ousted from the more moderate organization whose goals became increasingly assimilationist. He then went on to work with the more liberal Gay Liberation Front and founded a secular queer consciousness and spirituality group called the Radical Faeries; both groups rejected heteronormative conformity. Finally, he was unfortunately a vocal supporter of NAMBLA. 😑 So not great.

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📅 March 25, 2024

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From almost its founding, the Colony of Virginia officially adopted the English Sodomy laws making homosexuality punishable by death. Governor Thomas Jefferson* lowered the penalty to castration in 1777. Ninety-nine years later, in Doe v. Commonwealth Attorney of Richmond, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to uphold the felony status of anti-gay laws, which held a penalty of not less than one year. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force hoped that Loving v. Virginia, along with Roe v. Wade, would provide precedent for equal protection under the law and the right to privacy. Unfortunately, sodomy laws' "historical and foundational connection to this country's inception" meant that the laws remained in effect another 27 years until Lawrence v. Texas.

Current conservative Supreme Court Justices, appointed by Trump, think Lawrence v. Texas was wrong…

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📅 March 19, 2024

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In March of 1987, a new political activist group was founded. With their slogan "Silence = Death," the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—better known as ACT UP—took their protests out of the streets and into boardrooms, cathedrals, and government buildings. At the time the AIDS epidemic was raging with little support from the government and judgment from other quarters of polite society. Through radical action, ACT UP was able to increase experimental drug availability, condom access, funding, and public awareness (if not public comfort).

Although sometimes maligned for their methods, they undoubtedly saved countless lives and helped slow the spread of HIV.

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📅 March 12, 2024

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Speaking of The Great War (WW1), this week is Wilfred Owen's birthday. He was born in 1893 and died only 25 years later, less than a week before the war would end. He had a famous friendship with gay poet Siegfried Sassoon, saying "you (Siegfried) have fixed my life—however short." But it is Wilfred who is remembered as the greatest poet of the war, having captured the tragedy and yearning of the lost generation.

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📅 March 06, 2024

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In March of 1922, T.E. Lawrence finally finished his biography of his time in Arabia during WW1, but his manuscript was edited to remove several references to homosexuality. What did survive the editors was the poem dedication he probably wrote to his lover, who was trapped behind enemy lines for most of the war and died only days before Lawrence took Damascus with his Arab allies. It starts…

I loved you, so I drew these tides of

Men into my hands

And wrote my will across the

Sky in stars

To earn you freedom, the seven-

Pillared worthy house,

That your eyes might be

Shining for me

When I came

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📅 February 26, 2024

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This week we congratulate—a little late—the first openly gay man to serve as Prime Minister of 🇫🇷 France: Gabriel Attal, at only 34. Attal took office on 1/9/24 as Marine Le Pen's right-wing, formerly fascist, National Rally (Front) Party is on the rise in French politics and polling ahead of the more left-wing party of French President Emmanuel Macron.

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📅 February 11, 2024

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In honor of Valentine's Day, meet Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Tyrannicides. In 514 BC, the Athenian king's brother tried to rape Harmodius; afterward, the king disgraced Harmodius's family rather than apologize. Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton joined a plot to assassinate the king and his brother. They succeeded in the former but both died in the attempt. The public outcry led to the first Democracy, and Harmodius and Aristogeiton being celebrated as faithful lovers and heroes. The moment is referenced in the flag of Virginia, where Athena is shown over the dead king.

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📅 February 05, 2024

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Just a reminder: not all gays are good. Un-Happy Birthday, Roy Cohn—chief counsel to the McCarthy Hearings in 1954—who as part of the Lavender Scare attempted to out homosexuals in government and military positions as potential security leaks and/or communists, all the while being gay… or rather, having sex with men himself (see his depiction in the amazing Angels in America). In later life he mentored a young Donald Trump… he died in '86, but of, uh, cancer… yeah, cancer…

There is an HBO and Netflix documentary about him, and he features in the excellent Showtime show Fellow Travelers.

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📅 January 29, 2024

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This week we look at Prussian King Frederick the Great, who laid the groundwork for a united Germany. When at 17 it seemed he was destined for an arranged marriage, he tried to escape with his gay lover; he was betrayed, and his militaristic father executed his lover in front of him. Frederick, however, would prove himself an amazing warrior and patron of the arts and the Enlightenment. His small kingdom around Berlin fought Austria, Russia, and France—as the only ally of Great Britain during the Seven Years' War—and by 1763, Prussia was the new leader of emerging Germany.

Frederick's beautiful palace was a women-free zone; he wrote notes to friends about gay sex, and the homophobic Voltaire called him "Luc" because backwards it was "Cul," a French slur for gay people… but others would just call him The Great.

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📅 January 22, 2024

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Lord George Gordon Byron, who died in 1824, was an early Romantic poet and the first modern-style scandalous celebrity—"mad, bad, and dangerous to know." His childhood should have been miserable, with an overbearing single mother who was in constant debt and a disability that made it difficult for him to walk, until he suddenly inherited the title of Lord at 10. At school he was already "conscious() of sexual differences…that make England untenable." As soon as he was able he left for the Grand Tour of Europe, which he wrote up as the fictionalized "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," which introduced the world to the moody, broody, but deeply sensitive Byronic Hero. He awoke to find himself instantly famous. His numerous sex scandals—for he was very much a "Don Juan" with men and women, and a bi icon—led to him leaving for Italy, where his close friendship with the Shelleys led to one of the first vampire novels and Frankenstein. But his love for Ancient Greece spurred him into volunteering for the fight for Greek independence from Ottoman Turkey, where he died in 1824.

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📅 January 15, 2024

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This week's queer spotlight is:

Bayard Rustin, who was a major civil rights leader and worked with MLK to organize the 1963 March on Washington where MLK gave the "I Have a Dream" speech, pictured here with his life partner. He was openly gay in the 60s and pushed for intersectionality in the civil rights movement.

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