Making Gay History | LGBTQ Oral Histories from the Archive

Everybody loves Ellen. But that wasn’t always so. When she came out on screen and in real life the backlash was fierce a... Read more

There’s a war on out there. That was Ruth Simpson’s Stonewall takeaway—and she was ready to fight. But when Ruth pushed ... Read more

Like so many other acts of queer resistance, the 1969 Stonewall riots could have become a footnote in history. But the p... Read more

In 1976 Nancy Walker joined the Gay Community News, an influential Boston-based weekly paper. She was in her 40s, an out... Read more

Damien Martin grew up in foster care and on the streets of Philadelphia, so he knew all too well about the needs of vuln... Read more

What made Stonewall different? How can we carry the lessons of the uprising with us today? Eric is joined by one archivi... Read more

In 1981 Larry Kramer sounded an alarm almost no one wanted to hear. Gay men were dying from a mysterious disease and the... Read more

Bayard Rustin was a champion of the black civil rights movement—mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., organizer of the 1... Read more

In 1975, long before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Navy asked, and Officer Copy Berg told: “Yes, I am gay.” When Copy cho... Read more

For nearly half a century, Barbara Smith has been speaking truth to power—as a woman against misogyny, as an African Ame... Read more

Meet Marsha P. Johnson and Randy Wicker—two very different heroes of the early LGBT civil rights movement. Marsha was a ... Read more

A generation ago, tens of millions of people turned to "Dear Abby” in her daily newspaper column for advice. Long before... Read more

CNN business anchor Tom Cassidy kept his “private life” strictly separate from his public life. Three decades ago he had... Read more

Vito Russo loved movies, but he looked behind the silver screen and saw how Hollywood was sending a message that LGBTQ p... Read more

Brooklyn-born Martha Shelley was a rebel. She didn’t like being told what to do, wear, or say. She hated the lesbian bar... Read more

When the Stonewall uprising upended the 1960s homophile movement, Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen refused to be put out... Read more

The right to love and be loved for who we are has always been a driving force in the fight for LGBT civil rights. Eric s... Read more

Morty Manford was one of thousands of young people who joined the fight for gay liberation in the early 1970s. As a memb... Read more

“I’m a bisexual ki-ki s.o.b butch-femme.” Stella Rush railed against rules and binaries: butch/femme, gay/straight. Figh... Read more

ONE, the first national gay magazine, attracted the attention of the FBI and was at the heart of a landmark U.S. Supreme... Read more