This Week in Queer History

He Wrote America's Most Iconic Music While the Government Tried to Destroy Him

3.4K views · 6d ago · 20:41

A closeted gay Jewish son of immigrants wrote the music that became the unofficial sound of America -- played at inaugurations, Olympics, and school assemblies. The same government using his music to define national identity was building a surveillance file on him. This is Aaron Copland, the invisible architect of American culture, and this is the strategy that made him load-bearing.

The $2M Film That Changed How America Sees Trans Lives Forever

1.7K views · 1w ago · 17:37

On October 22, 1999, a scrappy $2 million indie film opened on 25 screens and quietly changed queer history forever. Kimberly Peirce spent five years making the world fall in love with Brandon Teena before the violence ever arrived -- and that was the whole strategy. Hit play, because this one matters.

Rearview Rendezvous - John Duran on the Decade That Forged Queer LA

329 views · 2w ago · 32:35

Guest: Rearview Rendezvous

(Note this was filmed almost a year ago, just finally had a chance to get it up!) Civil rights attorney and former West Hollywood mayor John Duran takes us to the rainbow crosswalk at San Vicente and Santa Monica and tells the whole story: 104 friends lost between 1985 and 1995, the AB 101 veto march that grew from 35 people to 500 on this exact street, the night Bill Clinton promised a room of angry activists he would sign the bill, and why the rainbow flags he raised on…

He Was Left to Die on a Fence. What Happened Next Changed America.

2.8K views · 3w ago · 16:30

On October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, robbed, and left tied to a fence post in freezing Wyoming temperatures because he was gay. He died six days later. What followed was eleven years of organized grief, cross-racial coalition building, and a mother from Wyoming who walked into congressional hearings and refused to be dismissed — until the day President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law.

He Came Out on Live TV in 1972 and Nobody Stopped Laughing

21K views · 1mo ago · 17:01

Graham Chapman came out on live British television in 1972, when it could have ended everything, and then just... kept going. Doctor, drunk turned sober, Python, pioneer, and honestly one of the funniest people to ever exist. This is the story of a man who turned joy into resistance before that was even a phrase.

The Secret Origin of Folsom Street Fair Nobody Talks About

21K views · 1mo ago · 17:25

In 1984, a Filipino housing activist and a lesbian labor organizer threw a block party on six blocks of industrial asphalt in San Francisco and called it "Megahood." They weren't trying to start an institution, they were trying to save one. Forty-two years later, that party draws up to 400,000 people and has donated over seven million dollars to charity.