Part One: Stonewall: The Criminal Queers Who Birthed a Movement

saying art is weird quote unquote art. Yeah, I just make things. I just made a film like a little culte, like a video essay thing that I think is not too bad, which is a lot because I hate everything I do. But yeah, it's I just make things. I make things cool. I appreciate that today we are running without a producer. Oh yeah means to men, means we can say anything we want. This goes heywire. That's why.

So the way they build the Moltoft cocktail is and then you oh really yeah yeah no, it's it's different than people in my thing And the most important thing is no matter what never ever, Ian as our audio engineer and on woman, wrote or theme music. So Sharine Margaret, did you know that a lot of people are queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, two spirit asexual intersects or otherwise don't line up into the nice heterosexual binary sex system that Western society tries

to fit everyone into. I do know that. I do you know that? Excellent? Well that will make this conversation. Was like, no, what do you mean? Yeah, you're like one man and one woman. Yeah, did you know that some people don't like that? Were like that, like they don't like queer people? Yeah? Yeah, I think they. I mean, I think everyone is on the queer spectrum. Even the people that say they hate they hate it because they are on it. Yeah. I think that's fairly true. Yeah.

I remember the first time of a gay friend of mine sat me down, was like, the reason people say the sexuality is a choice is that for them it's a choice. Who oh my god, well, how I never thought of that. That is very very good point. Yeah, friend, Well, today we're going to talk about some of the queer people who did something about the people who don't like queer people. Hell yeah, it will eventually get to Molltop cocktails. Actually,

although this is our first four partner on the show. Um, it felt timely to talk about this stuff, and I couldn't find a simple way to do it. So it's four parts, so it's going me by the end of So buckle up, strap in, folks. Yeah, today we're going to talk about how in June nineteen sixty nine, in Greenwich Village in New York City, someone bit a cop so hard that the cop had to go to the hospital and the gay Pride movement was born. Wow, wish

that was me. That is amazing. I know, I want to bite a cop so hard that he just like loses an arm. That is amazing, just zombie a cop. Yeah, today we're gonna talk about motherfucking Stonewall. And by today I mean in this four part series that will encompass both this week and next week. You have you heard much about Stonewall? Yeah, I've heard of it. It's a thing that was really important. Yeah, it was. It was

a very important thing. And before we get into it, we're gonna use my favorite thing in the world, context aka backstory, or as I call it when I'm talking about my show, to my friend's side quests. Oh wow, a lot of side quests today, tomorrow, next, Monday and next Wednesday. It's good to understand the main quest. How else are I'm going to understand it? I know exactly that L adds flavor, and I don't know. So there's two things that regular listeners are probably tired of hearing

me say. First, queer people have always been here. Second, the ways in which we define things like same sex attraction and having a gender identity or presentation different from your sex assigned at birth. Those definitions are socially constructed,

and they change over time. The concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality, for example, in the Western context, were invented in the late nineteenth century, and a lot of who we're going to be talking about today would not don't map to today's definitions and labels, or didn't at the time, but are still alive today, or were alive recently and then

like later talked about it. So it's like we're going to talk about like a lot of for example, like drag queens, many of whom would have identified as gay men, many of whom later identified as trans women. We're going to talk about transvestites, which is a word that a lot of people don't use anymore, but a lot of

people used at the time. I used to use for myself actually before I came out as trans, because I consider myself across dresser for a very long time who just happened to have a woman's name and never not wear women's clothes, you know. So things are different and they change. That's my that's my background. In our episode about gay resistance to fascism, that was with you, I think, wasn't it. I think, yeah, we talked about all the yeah they ruled everyone should go back and listen to that.

That was a good one. I love being here for the gay ship, that's share. But yeah. So we talked about some of the earliest homophile organizations as they might have called themselves, and we talked about how they were violently repressed under the Nazis and how they didn't they

also violently unrepressed against the Nazis when they could. We talked about queer people were putting to camps, and about how kind of importantly at the end of the war when the camps were liberated, both the capitalist block and the Soviet Block immediately through the queer prisoners back into prison because being gay was illegal and ikey and whatever that's where we left off. We're going to pick up that thread with the Cold War nineteen forties America just

after World War Two. It's gonna be a situation that is going to be completely unfamiliar to the modern audience. Acceptance of gay gay lifestyles was flourishing in some places, especially Yeah wow, yeah extus to me. Actually, well, that's actually kind of one of the things is that, like we have this way of talking about gayness as if it was like everything was bad and then someone threw a brick at a cop at a place called Stonewall

and everything became good, you know. But so acceptance of gay lifestyles was flourishing in cities, while I'm Arican culture more broadly was moving in a more conservative direction. So everything got set up for conflict. So the cops and all that shit are getting more and more conservative, and

the government's getting more and more conservative. But more and more gay bars are opening, more and more people are finding each other, and more and more people are starting to be like, there's literally nothing wrong with who I am except for the fact that the cops ain't me. I mean that sounds like present day, like it sounds like we're still doing that. So yeah, a number of fucking just one to one comparisons about what's happening right now.

It's people don't change. It feels like history just repeats itself or just like stays the same rather even end and start again. It just like keeps yes sackness, Yeah, totally. Well, you know, a little tiny micro loops. Right, so we'll talk about some of this conflict we've all heard of the Red Scare. Really there were two reds maybe the podcast? Sorry what if I all thought it was a podcast is not an actual thing. I'm I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Wait,

what's the podcast? Uh, I've never listened to it. To be fair, I just I kind of make fun of it a lot. This is part's a podcast with it's not really historical. It's just like a it's just a podcast with two gals. And that's all I'm gonna say about that, because I don't want to get it all right, Yeah, fair enough, Well there's I was going to say there's two and a half Red Scares, but there's actually three and a half because one of them is a podcast.

The first Red Scare was nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty when the US freaked out about the Russian Revolution and they started deporting the anarchists, which is funny because at the same time the Russian Bolsheviks also were freaked out

about the anarchists and we're shooting them. Wow. And so they passed the US past this anti Anarchist Sedition Act of nineteen eighteen, which is part of why I'm very mad that people are calling the January six rioters seditionists because I literally have the word sedition tattooed on my knuckles. Oh my god, you do, Oh my god, she does. I'm looking at her knuckles now in the camera. I did not know you had that tattoo. Yeah, I got

it a while ago. That's hilarious. As so mad when they started calling anyway um sedition being the crime of speaking against the government essentially, which is they called they called January six people that I didn't realize they would call it. That's not that's stupid, I know. I know. Also during this Red Scare, there was the Palmer Raids which made use of UM. Did you know that in the United States it is still illegal to be a foreign born anarchist? What about so you can be a

national National National Yeah, nation board are anarch Yeah. Because of free speech, it's legal to be born in the US and become an anarchist. But um, there's this law, the Immigration Act of nineteen oh three that specifically is like kick out all of the foreign born anarchists. That is so interesting. I did not know that. It's like you can be It's the line they draw as far as where you're born is like anarchy and president that's

what it sounds like. And so it's not enforced anymore, but it'll be interesting because it's still on the books. And so anyway, they raid and deport a bunch of people, and immediately people are like, that's an infringement of free speech. Even at the time people are like, I don't think you're allowed to do that. In the government's like we don't care, you know, and we get it into a bit.

If you want to hear more about this in the birth control episodes we did last year with Katie Stole, then you get the mini Red Scare, the half red Scare, or as I like to call it, or at least I wrote it into the script, the Red Thrill, because the thrill feels like a half scare. Right, Oh yeah it does good. Yeah, good call on that. Thank you, thank you. This one was exclusive to New York City. It took place in nineteen between nineteen forty nineteen forty two.

And it's particularly funny that this happened because overall during these years, there was some other stuff happening in the

world right between. That's why I'm surprised. I mean, I guess like when you you forget that other stuff was happening, though, when you only know that it was like World War two, I forget that there was other stuff happening because it sounds like the whole world was doing this was in World War two, because but um, it's interesting to hear that this was all happening at the same time, I know. And it's particularly interesting because at the time, the USSR

was the United States's ally. Oh my god, and so it was like actually a time when like even the government was like, like, we don't trust communists, but they're not our enemy. The Nazis are. Well what a time unless you're in New York City. It's called the rap Cod Codare Committee. It's a name of two people. Basically, they investigated the public universities to make sure they didn't find any pinko's teaching kids, and refusing to testify before

this committee was grounds for immediate firing. And they got one ex communist to read out fifty four other teachers and whoa, if you're the word pinko much. I really liked this word. No you said it, and I was going to just pretend I what you what you meant, but please explain it, okay. So pinko is this pejorative word for communist, and it's it's an old timey word.

It's our like grandparents pejorative word for communist, and it goes back to nineteen twenty five, I think, um, but it actually being like pink salons was a way to talk shit on communist gathering places even before that. And they used pink because it's for two reasons. One, it's a softer shade of red, and therefore these are like the soft communists, the socialists. And so that we can understand how this ties into why am I talking with the red scares. If we're talking about anti gayshit they

basically we're calling all the socialists gays. They were being like these effeminate men, these like pink men. That's so interesting, and communism is effeminate. Yeah, you know, nothing's effeminate like seizing the means of production, Yeah, exactly, or like millions of you charging German tanks. Yeah, I mean like whatever that is. Gays did that too, but like, yeah, it's interesting. I did not know that. Yeah. No. And it's like one of the politicians who liked using the word pinko

in the twenties, I think he would. Basically he had these quotes about how like these soft handed men they were working, but they didn't use their hands, you know, just funny because guys, we know how to use our hands. And Okay, I know you were thinking, you're thinking, can Margaret tie the UNI bomber into this supisode? I think exactly what I was thinking. Actually the answer is yes, wow, please continue. Yeah, okay, cool. This one I'm gonna be This one is from my memory of being involved in

social movements and not something I can directly source. Ted Kazinski the unibomber, he goes to jail, and for a while a bunch of environmentalists supported him because he was trying to dismantle industrial civilization and all of that stuff. But then he wrote this like public letter complaining about pinko's and one publisher was like, oh, we can't use that. That's an anti gay word, and Uncle Ted was like, what, No,

it's not about gays. It's an anti communist word. I hate the left, and while I'm at it, I hate gay people too, But that's not why I said it. Oh my god, I did not know that even half it. Yeah, it's incredible, that's incredible, and I'm paraphrasing this, so please don't assume me, mister unibomber. That's so funny that like it's like, no, it's not the hates through the you think it is. It's the other hatesler or is the same. I don't know it. Of course I hate that minority,

but that's not what I was saying right now, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, back to the mini red scare. I just wanted to talk about pinkos as a word. We should bring it back. I mean, I maybe other people know about it. I had never really heard it, So you have educated me. I'm sure someone else is like me, being like, oh wow, new word that we can all use. Yep. So it wasn't illegal to be in the Communist Party this time, but the main reason they had this mini red scare.

It was pretty much to destroy the teachers union, and they fired more than four hundred union teachers and blacklisted them because they were teaching things that they didn't want them to teach. Yeah, because they like possibly had any like leftist inclinations at all. And this of course meant firing the first black faculty member ever hired by a New York City public college, whose name was Max Jurgan.

And to tie everything into what's happening now in this case in Florida, he was teaching a class called Negro History and Culture at City College of New York. So you know what we're like, nineteen forty to nineteen forty two, okay, Yeah, so he gets fired basically for teaching black studies. Well,

and also it was also an anti gay panic. The judge said about why it was important to fire teachers who teach that being gay is okay, that the court will quote not tolerate academic freedom being used as a cloak to promote the popularization in the minds of adolescence of acts forbidden by the penal law. Penal law. That was funny. I know what, I know what you need, but it's funny just to hear it in that the end of that sentence. Uh yeah, what I said earlier,

history repeats itself in just different clothing. Yep. What I came up with while writing this was, you know, people say that history doesn't repeat it ryan times, but then I actually think it's more like we just keep going back to the chorus, Yeah, where the verse has changed, and then the chorus of kill all the minorities keeps coming on. I love that That's exactly what it is.

It's also it's maybe it's even just like you mess up and you have to go back to the beginning, and then you keep like messing up different places, so you go back to the beginning. Oh my god, civil rights is groundhog Day. Yeah, exactly. Fuck. The bronx Borough president said, quote, the colleges would either be godly colleges American colleges, or they would be closed. Well, good old America. That was red Scare one point five. Now it's talking

about the big one, Red scare two point zero. Mm. The second red scare is the one that most people know about. If someone says the red scare, they probably mean the second one. This is the one that gets called McCarthyism right nineteen forty seven to nineteen fifty seven. It's target was more communist an anarchist this time, but both red scares went after both. This Red scare, for example, included the anarchist Charlie Chaplin being forced in exile away

from the US. And I really only include this because I like leaving threads to other episodes. So if you want to see the app hear more about that. The episode of Anti Fascism and Film with Caitlin Durante talks about that is marketing genius. Thank you, Thank your job. Yeah, I just get really excited about this, like really intensely dense web of anyway. No, it's a great way to just be like this the same the same way that

you're like, I had no idea this is happening. At the same time, it's good to know that like there's all these threads that just like, oh, this is all intermingled, because that's fucking history. It's not just like I don't know,

totally traded somewhere. And also that our struggles have like always been tied together in all of these ways, right, like the specifically crysto fascist, like you must be a godly college thing, the firing of the gay teachers, the firing of the like the black studies professor, like it's all been tied together forever. Yeah, I think that's why, Like when people are shocked about stuff, sometimes it's a little bit like this has been happening. That's not how

I feel like. It's just like it's not like, how do we get this way? What happened to people? It's like we've always been this way. It's just been like bolstered in certain people because it's been so long. I don't know if that makes sense. I just think it's like, I don't know. Yah. For flavors of the same thing, well, if you want different flavors of the same thing, you should try American capitalism, where you can go to the store and buy a million types of oreos, most of

which a vegan. Yeah they they are. And also you can consume these products and services the support this show. Okay, we are back, and we're talking about this mass hysteria about communists take over the US or whatever the House on American Activities Committee. But and it's famous stuff, and I'm sure we'll talk about it more sometime, or if only there was like a podcast that was like about bad stuff instead. But hmm, get on that. Yeah we should, we should make a proposal for that. Yeah, I heart

would love it. Yeah, I think it would do. Really want nothing like it out there. Yeah, So importantly to our story, the Red Scare has this shadow the Lavender Scare, which targeted gay folks of all stripes, and as far as I can tell, it was just as wide reaching and impactful as the Red Scare in terms of number of people who were like fired and shit as a result. Is that is this something that people know about? Or am I? Am I just a dummy? Like this is

not known about? Okay, because I've never heard that before. It's that's fascinating. Yeah it um, it doesn't get called this or anything at the time. It's just happening. It's just the government fucking up gay people's lives. In two thousand and four, a guy named David K. Johnson wrote a book on the whole thing, called the Lavender Scare, and this kind of cemented the name. Then the name comes from one of the bigots responsible for this repression.

This one happened to be a Republican. I've run across Democrats and Republicans, both being his very bipartisan. This guy's name is Everett Dirkson, and he's famous for being the Republican who help pass the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act, crossing the party lines to devote the Democrats. He hated gay people, and he liked to use a somewhat popular anti gay phrase at the time, and he called gay men lavender lads. That's kind of sick. I don't think

he means it that way. That's kind of sick. Thanks, dude. I know I'm not a gay man, so I can't tell you what slurs to reclaim. But imagine the street gang called the Lavender Lads. You would want to go to their parties. You would not want to fucking cross them, and you wouldn't want to bring your boyfriend because he's going home with a lavender lad instead of that is I mean, you can't. I feel like you can't get mad at that. Like it's all like he chose anything

negative in either of those words. It's all like lavender losers. It's not like lavender anything bad. It's just like lads. Yeah, you know, but despite its sick name, the Lavender scare was a bad thing. Right. Its main task was to root out and fire all the gay folks in the government, in the military. And I don't like the government or

the military, but that's still fucked up. In the first three years of the Scare alone, four hundred and twenty people were fired from government jobs on suspicion of homosexuality. Seventeen hundred others had their applications denied, four thousand, three hundred and eighty people were kicked out of the military.

That's so, how does who's deciding who's gay and who's not. Well, this is that's part of the thing about anti gay repression, and we see this also with what the Nazis did, is that when you decide to go against gay people, you can call anyone gay. It's really hard to prove that, Like you don't like scissorin, you know, like it's just like your word against theirs. And if the person that is calling you gay has more power than than you're

fucked even if you are or are not gay. Yeah, yeah, and so many people's so I mean, obviously it's a lot of people, but like it's just crazy that there's always someone deciding something for everyone else. I don't know if that makes sense. It's just like we there are so many huge decisions and all throughout history that is like one or two people, just like some dude deciding on something. I always think about that when it comes

to like fucking like taxes or something. Yeah, someone someone chose this, you know what I mean, Like someone shows this and now we're suffering because of it. But anyway, no, no, I like some of the markers that they used to determine if someone was gay and should therefore be fired was being unmarried and talking gay. Rude. Yeah, I mean kind of I relate, but rude, I know, I know. Also, around this time, I think it was the late forties. This didn't end up in the script. It almost didn't.

I So now I'm my memory might be faulty. But around this time, the first Kinsey report comes out, and these are these studies about the percentage of In this case, it was a study of like several thousand men, and it was like representative of the US population, which is obviously not true. But of these several thousand men in the late forties, only fifty percent were I had only

had heterosexual sexual experiences, only fifty percent. Yeah, So in the nineteen forties, there were medical studies saying that half of the US population is somewhere on the gay spectrum. That's incredible. Yeah, And I think about this a lot because I'm down with the way that we currently have like gender as an identity and stuff like that. I'm

fine with being a trans woman whatever, you know. But when you didn't have these identities, people probably were like maybe doing more fucking of because there's like less like because now if you are a man, you're gay. Yeah, but before you probably weren't gay unless you were mostly having sex with men, or you were a bottom or all kinds of other shit, you know, right, I mean, like all throughout history, you see, at least, like I always paid attention to the close relationships that men had

with each other. Like even like my father his like pictures from like his college days, Like men like loved each other like it just like a different more like touchy, Like they never would think like no homo kind of way. They just like that's just how they operated until probably it was labeled as something that made them feel shame. Yeah, totally.

And it's such a fucking shame because there's this like massive problem in the US at least of like um loneliness among males, and like, yeah, I'm sure a lot of it is that you're not allowed to open up about your emotions to anyone except the one woman you're dating or whatever, which it puts in sorry if that I know. And then even so I feel bad for the one woman you're dating who suddenly you're a fucking free therapist and the only person you talked to anyway,

the lavenger. It's hard. Sorry, no, I mean it's funny because it's like but I'm kidding, and you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, And the and the reason it's hard is patriarchy and homophobia. You know, like we we all have the same oppressor. It's patriarchy, you know, a phobia. And like so the government had an excuse about why I was going after gays. It was really that they

just like didn't like gays. But it was the idea that closeted homosexuals since they were hiding a shameful secret, were vulnerable to blackmail and might like give information about government ship to the the russ skis interesting. Okay, that's a loophole I ever heard one? Okay, yeah, yeah, one Democratic politician put it this way, it is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons. Or McCarthy himself, who

basically was like, communism and homosexuality are both men. I'm paraphrasing. Communism and homosexuality are both mental and balances and are kind of the same thing. It was McCarthy's take on it, which is funny because I was thinking this through. Okay, it's a real problem if people are have to hide the fact that they're gay or be shamed by their society, and therefore they're vulnerable to blackmail. What if instead of firing them all, you create a society where people aren't

afraid to be outed because no one cares. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just I can't. I'm still kind of like processing everything that you said about I don't know. I was stuck on the fact that like people were gay and then they were like in their heads, you know what I mean, Like the clips. But the FBI and cops

kept list of suspect homosexuals and their hangouts. The United States Postal Service tracked where gay mail got sent and passed that information along to the government, and even though the whole like main thing was to fire people who worked for the government, this led to this massive anti gay backlash. Cities banned cross dressing time as a flat circle, bars were rated and shut down. Professors lost their jobs.

All this shit happened by nineteen fifty three, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order ten zero whatever one zero four five zero, which included quote sexual perversion on a list of bad qualities that were bad for government employees. Wow, and more gay folks were fired from their jobs and some killed themselves. Yeah, that's tragic. One fired employee his name was Frank Kameni and he's today's first protagonist. Hell yeah, okay, Frank, let's go. Yeah.

He was born a Jewish parents in New York in nineteen twenty five, which a lot of people who end up as protagonists on this show are Jewish New Yorkers from this era. Hell I love that. Yeah, love that. By seventeen, he's like mom, Dad, I'm an atheist. In nineteen forty one, he ships off and is part of one of the best things humans have ever done, kill the shit out of the Nazis. He comes home, he

finishes undergrad he gets his doctorate in astronomy. Then in the fifties, I think nineteen fifty six, he gets arrested for homosexual behavior. And this is part of AM I think this happens in LA. There is this thing that the cops would do where basically anyone who's suspected to being gay, they would like and trap them, like since I'm going to be like, yeah, what's up? You want fuck in person? Be like oh yeah, yeah maybe, and they'd be like maybe it's enough. You're going down, motherfucker,

you know right. I think in this case, literally someone came up at a fucking bus stop and grabbed his dick like groped him, and then the cops arrested him for having his dick groped. Huh that's curious. Yeah, it's like not my favorite thing that's ever happened. Um. Yeah. In nineteen fifty seven, he's hired for the Army map service. But then they're like, because he's an astronomer and he makes maps, I guess he's related somehow. I'm not smart enough to totally get it. And they're like, oh, you

got arrested for doing a gay thing. Never mind, fuck off, and they fire him, and they blacklist him from all employment in the federal government. This fucking war hero doctor at astronomer who wants to work in the public sector because this is part of it. Like my grandfather worked in the public sector. He was you know, worked for the Navy and shit, and is not how to get rich. It just isn't like the people who do public like public servant work a fucking doing it because they care

about it. And I guess he really cared about the stars. Oh until this point, our guy Frank, he's like this upstanding citizen, right, But they kick him out, so he sues. So we lost, so we took it to a higher court. He tried to take it the Supreme Court and they were like, now we're good. We don't give a shit. Yeah, So he becomes a gay rights radical and he coined the phrase gay is good, which was controversial among gay

rights activists at the time. Oh why what Yeah, because this is like one of the kind of complicated things

we'll touch on a little bit. But I is basically a lot of the gay rights movement before the forties and fifties, and even during the fifties and early sixties, it was very assimilationist, and it was and some of it was even like we are a bit ashamed that this is the way we are, and we would like to be better, and you know kind of like we would like to be straight or if not, we would like version therapy kind of, yeah, or at least like

except that we're deviance and be ashamed and stuff. You know. Yeah, And he was one of the first like really prominent people being like, no, there's literally nothing wrong with the way I am. And he was fairly assimilationist and stuff, but he fucking did a lot of really important good work. And there's kind of these like way of looking back at this history and I'm I will do this a little bit by accident throughout here, where I think that

the direct action stuff was a lot more effective. And so this assimilation is stuff where they just want to be part of mainstream society I'm like less interested in. But it's really worth understanding that they did a fuck ton of work. And so his name won't come up a ton of the rest throughout the episode, but basically everything that isn't a riot, Frank is there and helping make it happen. I love you, Frank. Yeah, Frank is

a good dude. Yeah, he just wants to talk about stars and learn about stars, and they didn't let him do that. You know. Yeah, that's a like sorry, you like dick too much to study the stars. Yeah, that's off air. It's just like it's also just like such a very specific expertise, you know what I mean, Like did they really have a big line of people that wanted to do that, Like, yeah, go work for the map service. Yeah. The lavender scarce slowed down in the sixties,

but the damage was done. In the nineteen seventies, gay people were allowed to become spies for the Imperial nightmare called US government again and in nineties. I love that they're allowed to do stuff that's like bad purely, I like purely would benefit them and like put the gay people at risk of like danger, like totally. It's like like no gays in the middle, like like, yeah, you

care about whether you're cannon fodder likes anyway. In nineteen ninety five, Clinton signed an executive order saying that gay should be allowed at the highest level of security clearance, and then John Kerry, when he was Secretary of the State, put a public apology on the State Department website about the Lavender Scare. Basically within days of Trump's inauguration, the apology came down. Oh my god, it was like on January twenty third, people noticed that it was just suddenly

missing from the website. That's crazy. I know, someone is like tracking that over the century, just being like up down, yeah, edited down, that's crazy. Yeah, the Lavender Scare isn't often forgotten. Peace of the context for gay rights in the US, there's this attitude that's like, yeah, as we talked about this attitude when it was the Dark Ages, when everyone's homophobic,

and then the gay rights changed all of that. But even though it wasn't good for queer folks before the Lavender Scare, it was a specific and intentional destruction of the power of homosexual people done by the federal government and local governments, as well as the usual random bigots. And I think we need to understand it from that point of view. So let's talk about some early gay rights organizations. Hell yeah, who all had sick fucking names.

I can't fucking quit. I mean, lavender lads, it's already great, and that wasn't even their choice, I know, I know, Yeah, Okay, for the most part. The idea that all gays are communists or whatever is bullshit. Gays or people, people have all kinds of political leanings. Um, you know, in our Nazi Gays Versus Nazis episode we talked about his name is rom Right, the gay Nazi who got murdered and

all that shit. But one of the first groups, maybe like the first it's kind of called the first group for gay rights in the US, but whatever, Yeah, who knows what the first yeah? Yeah, it was formed by a gay communist hell yeah. And the first gay magazine was in Germany. We talked about this before. It was made by an anarchist because political organizers know how to get shit started. And so this guy, his name is

Harry Hey, and he was a Mary Hey. I know, great, Yeah, he was a Marxist labor organizer and he's the He was in the Communist Party and he worked hard in fights against anti Semitism and anti Jim Crow, which is credit where it to do what the Communist Party was up to during the Red Scare. That's probably part of why there was a Red Scare. Is the fucking Communist Party. Again, I'm not the biggest fan. They were fighting hard against

racism as one of the only organized groups of people doing. Yeah. Harry knew he was gay from a young age. He tried being straight for a while. He went to the doctor and the doctor was like, you know, I've helped a lot of you people. Get over it. People, you just need to marry a lady and buy Year five. You're just gonna fucking love it. So he married this communist lady and it didn't work out. Eventually they get separated.

I don't think on bad terms. He starts a gay right gay rights group and it's called Mattachine and it could not have a gayer origin for its name. I love I can't wait to know what that means. Harry Hay was into workers education, which is basically popular education. He was like, I'm gonna go teach the fucking working class stuff. But instead of being like, here's like how to balance your checkbook, he's like, let's teach you about medieval French costume in theater. And there was Oh that

is so gay, I know, sokay, I love it. There was a sixteenth and seventeenth century thing. Um, it's more early Renaissance as much as is late Medieval, but I hate typing the word renaissance, so because I can't spell it, so I'm gonna. And it's called mask the style of dancing with a que, not a k. And these are elaborate pageants with singing and dancing and costumes and shit, and they end up courtly like for rich people. But the rich people are incapable of inventing their own entertainment,

so they steal ours. So there was this mask group called I can't pronounce French, so siete Madachine, who gets its name from an from an Arabic word madachine. It comes from an Arab Arabic word that means mask wears, which was a more a Moorish costumed and masked sword dancing. It's not the word, isn't madaschine. I should have written down the Arabic word. Um, It's okay. I can imagine the origins of it, just based on like the sill, like the sounds in it. Okay, manash, I don't know

what I'll think of it, okay. And so that because there's this Moorish costumed and masked sword dancing called Madishine or called something like Madishine, to quote Jonathan Katz from gay American history. These societies lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public, unmasked aka probably gay man. We're dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the feast of fools at the

vernal equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals or masks were peasant protests against depression, with the maskers and the people's name receiving the brunt of a given lord's vicious retaliation. So we took the name Madachine because we felt that we nineteen fifty gays were also a masked people unknown and anonymous who might become engaged in morale building and helping others and ourselves through struggle to move towards total redress

and change. So they found seventeenth and sixteenth century gay French social revolutionaries who are into singing and dance, and that's amazing. Yeah. I think like it's one of those words that like, if you know what it means, you're

like wow, yes, Yeah. If you don't, you're just like wow, that's intense sounding, I know, because it was like a machine gun or something, you know, it sounds like machine gun if it have machine gun was sounding like a machine gun like you Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's that was again high. But so they start the Matachine Society first in Los Angeles, and according to Harry Hey, they didn't call themselves gay or homosexual. They called themselves temperamental. All.

He has a quote, all us temperamental guys, we should organize I mean big safe. I mean I love that. I know. There's this quote from Harry about why he did it, why he started this group that I like. I was an older brother, so I had to do a lot of things. First. My father was a self made man and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm

stubborn too. I go on being stubborn. If you, one of the fellow temperamental guys, if you have to wait until I can make it safe, okay, I'll make it safe. And if I have to use myself as a battering ram, I'll do that too the best I can. I'll tell you a deep, dark secret underneath that facade. I'm a terrified little sissy, just like everyone else. But I never let it show. Well, I fucking like that's like, that's like poetry. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful, and that's what we need.

We need this bravery and we owe it what we have to the fucking human battering rams that came before us. Yeah. Well, his partner who helped him start it romantically and in starting this was a fashion designer named Rudy Gernreich who was an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazis who later went on to invent the thong bathing suit, the first

woman's swimsuit without a built in braw. So anytime you're swimming in a swimsuit without a built in bra, you can thank a gay Jewish probably communist, or at least dating a Communist refugee from the Nazis who started the first gay rights organization in the United States. Talk about a power couple. That is so sick, big shit. I love that. And they only dated for a couple of years,

but he kept funding it for a time. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, And his whole thing as a fashion designer was to get rid of the idea that nudity was shameful and even inherently sexual, and he designed a lot of unisex clothing later in life, he got really into making soup he likes, stopped being a fashion designer and just like made soup recipes. What an endearing man. Oh my gosh. And Rudy helped start Madachine Society with his boyfriend. Gays are the best, really. Yeah. For the first few years

Madachine Society was really fucking neat. In La gay men were getting routinely entrapped out went out cruising, this kind of stuff we were talking about, you know, cops would solicit them for sex and then arrest them for lude behavior. Madachine fought one of these cases, I think the first time anyone fought one of these, but I'm not one hundred percent on that, and they won. They deadlocked the jury despite the defendant admitting his homosexuality. That's an improvement

or like a progress if you want to call it that. Yeah. Madachine Society here and then in New York did a lot of work to specifically stop the entrapment of gay men by cops. Most of its founders were Communists anyway, so they started in a similar way to the Illegal Communist Party. They had like cells, oaths of secrecy, multi tiered membership like all that, like revolutionary organization you hear about in like twentieth century shit. But there's a problem

with that style of organization. They were infiltrated, like right the fuck away. Within six months, every chapter ended up infiltrated, and they never figured out who any of the infiltrators were. Wow, So I will say that the twentieth century cell structure of resistance is outdated for a reason. Wait, so infiltrated by like, yeah, maybe local cops as well. I actually I'm not actually certain whether there's local cops or FEDS. So they're infiltrating to like dismantle and like at least

provide information on it. Well, but then the Madachian society, Actually I wonder if these are related. They probably aren't. What you just said about the infiltration pretty quickly got really normy and middle class and assimilationist. Early Madaschian goals were to basically unify homosexuality and see society dramatically transformed as a result. Soon enough people were like, actually, I just wanted to be legal to get my dick wet,

which is I'm sure how they phrased it. And so they kicked out the founders, including Harry Harry it might be that driven out is more accurate. I've read a couple the ways of relating it. It seems like maybe they all resigned after basically they were told like, get the fuck out of here, and so they went a similationist.

I'm not trying to entirely shit on them or anything, but like from and apparently, one thing I heard was that they would like invite psychologists to come to meetings to talk to everyone about how they were like sick and how therapy could help. And it was like and they wanted to, you know, they wanted to change the laws to make it more okay, but they also like were like whatever, I mean, that definitely sounds like an infiltrator tactic in my opinion, right, I don't know, it's possible,

I don't ye. Or it's just like it was so hard to keep up being radical that like they had to water it down to the most simple thing. Yeah, it's it's one of those to me, or like, I think a lot of things get started by political radicals.

Both cultural things and political things get started by political radicals and then become popular and then as people join it, they're there for the like esthetics or they're there for in this case, the like society of men, and they're not interested in the thing that started at the seed. So the machine society adopted non confrontation as a strategy, and as far as I'm concerned, non confrontation as a non strategy, because strategy is how you do confrontation. Yeah,

never works. Also, yeah, fucking Quaker ship does not fucking work. No, no. And when the Quakers did do good shit, it was when they would like smuggle slaves to freedom. Not yeah they did stuff, yeah, yeah, exactly, confrontational shit that got them killed. Yeah, they were just like pacifists forever they had to actually do something. Yeah, I don't know. But and what's interesting is when it got more assimilationist, the membership actually dropped. People were like, just not as interested,

I guess. And I think this happens a lot. You know, people who are like, oh, we'll reach more people by being watered down, and people are like, no, the spiciness is what fucking drew us here, right, It's not cool to be in that group anymore. It's like NORMI yeah, yeah, Harry Hay He gave an interview in nineteen ninety eight with the progressive that I learned a lot from. If you're feeling like reading some fucking wise words, I think this is where the battering ram quote comes from too.

Just look up Harry Hay the Progressive. So what he said about all of this assimilation of stuff quote assimilation is the way you excuse yourself. It absolutely never worked at all. You may not think you are noticeable, but they know who you are. They know you're a degenerate, and they've never forgotten that. You won't find out until the push comes to shove, and then you'll find out fast because they're respectable in the eyes of God and you aren't. And so the journalist in response, I love

the way this guy talks. I mean, Harry is a fucking poet. Yeah, that's his words are like they make me feel things, yeah, and I don't feel anything. So and so the journalist is like, no, no, no, like, look, we've we've made it. You know, which is funny is nineteen ninety eight we don't have a gay marriage yet, right, And he's like, no, we've assimilated whatever they am not

quoting in paraphrasing. No, we've assimilated. Whenever they want, they can rewrite the laws and fuck us up, or to quote him, if people become frightened, if something all of a sudden goes wrong in our economy, and it can, and the preachers start blaming the sin around them on you, saying that God's judgment is on you. Little by little, they haven't anything to hang on to except that, and they'll listen, just as they did in Germany. It may take four or five years, but it'll work well. Which

is that's haunting to hear spelled out that way? Yeah, because that's what's happen. Yeah, I mean, it's like fucking predicting the future. Yeah. It's also just so silly that the people, like the journalist in nineteen ninety eight was like, we did it because I'm pretty sure, like note president even said the word gay or homosexual until like Obama or something. Right, it was just like I have to

look that up. I'm pretty positive. It was like in recent times like the hold on, well, while we're looking up the truth, you can learn the truth from these products,

say services, and we're back. Yes I was correct. President Obama was the first president to use the word gay in in inaugural address to reference sexual orientation, So fuck yeah, that was like ten years after that interview ish, probably more because he was probably president for a minute, but was an inauguration would have been two thousand and nine, so yeah, oh yeah, okay, yeah, unless he did any

second inauguration. But no, I think Harry Hayes's words going back to like the actual crux of that stuff before the break, it's I don't know, it's it's really it's really frightening to see it all spelled out so correctly and so scary. It's it's scary to just to read and hear and then it's happening. Yeah, it's just like I don't know, it drives me insane. No, no, and

that you know. But it's like, okay, so the lavender scare sucked, right, but it wasn't Nazi death camps, and so I think that we need to look at the bad that's coming. Couldn't be somewhere on a spectrum. Part of where we end up on that spectrum is like how much we all get together and fight, you know, like all of us, like who are marginalized or people who care about people are marginalized, how much we work together to stop it. I think we can. We can

have some control. I don't know. I mean, we only try. I think. What really scares me is that the technology is just like at an astronomical place that it wasn't at before. Like people are doing deep fakes of drag shows where drag queens are like like I don't know, doing like doing things in front of children that they weren't doing, and like, I don't know, there's there's all these deep fakes that I'm saying there aren't actually true.

One in particular was like this, all these parents and their children are sitting on the floor and it was apparently an event with a drag queen reading a story, but instead they've made a deep fake with them like dancing kind of like risque and all that stuff, and it looks real. Yeah, And that's what's scary to me. It's like, unless you were told, like pay more attention to this, this isn't actually happening. People are gonna like see that and like run with it. And that's what's

scary to me. It's like the control we have is so fickle. That's that's I don't know. No, I mean, yeah, I sorry, that was just it's gonna be messy. And the other future is gonna be fucking complicated. That's what that just means. How that's just like emphasizes how important it is to actually like fight the good fight and like not give it up because then the fucking weirdos are gonna win. Yeah, hateful of meanis hateful Meanis I really like that? Um? Because I don't want to. I

don't want to call them weirdos. I think weirds are great. And I said hateful so well. The temperamental folks of the Matachine Society, Yeah, they keep going and they do a lot of work, building connections with other groups. Frank Kameny, the guy, the astronomer guy, he gets involved actually before the split, UM, and he starts the DC chapter and he starts pushing to get DC sodomy laws changed in

nineteen sixty three, starts pushing. It takes thirty years. The laws against sodomy in the District of Columbia weren't taken off the books until nineteen ninety three. But he worked at it the whole time, right, because I don't want to be like earlier. I was like, Oh, they just want to get their dicks wet, Like people should be allowed to get their dicks with that is like one of the base human desires that approximately fifty percent of

the population has. And like anyway, so the founders who left, including Harry, they go on to start another group called One Incorporated, which is less metal of a name but is fucking weird. One Incorporated, Like, Okay, it's kind of vanilla. One Comma Incorporated, I know, but it's vanilla, but it's like almost like creepy. The number one spelled out or the number one spelled out, yeah spelled out Okay, and One Incorporated let women in actually Mattershian Society was letting

women in by this point too, I think. And One Incorporated they found the first LGBT center in the US basically, which is their office. It's very similar to what later became LGBT social Centers essentially. And in nineteen fifty three they published the first pro gay US magazine. It was called One, which is a fucking culty name, no shade, but that is fucking culty. They got the name from the fact that gays referred to each other as one

of us, huh and interesting. Their magazine got banned from being mailed in nineteen fifty three, same year that it made because it was obscene and it had an article about gay men and straight marriages and that was what was obscene, apparently, And they sued and five years later they won the right to mail their magazine. So the entire fucking fifties, but the place that One incorporated got its money. This is one of my favorite stories of all of this. I'd never heard of this guy. There's

this transman philanthropist. His name is read Ericson. Read Ericson. He you know, he inherited his dad's company and he invested in real estate and a success successful business man, and he you know, made a bunch of money. He gave a bunch of money away his legal transition. Uh you know, he's a trans transmasculin person. Helps set precedent in Louisiana in the fifties about how to get your ID change all that shit. But he also used the fact that he was rich to be weird, which is

objectively what you should do when you are rich. The only thing you should do when you have money is to do that, yeah, be fucking weird, yeah, and help people. But you know, yeah, yeah, well he did both. And that's what's so cool about him. Like yeah. I mean, like, I'm sure his businesses did bad things, but but he was really good to his pet leopard named Henry. Repeat, what were time? His pet leopard named Henry Henry? Yeah? Oh my god, Yes, I mean I heard you that

time for a real but I needed to hear it back. Yeah, we're time. Yeah, Okay, that's that's a rich ass think if I've ever heard of. That's just that's something you would only do with an obscene amount of money. Yeah, it's got a fucking pet leopard named Henry. Yeah, who came with him everywhere, including on airplanes. No, I assume they were a private jet. I assume it was a private jet. That's a well trained leopard. I mean, in my head, like the leopard fights back eventually and like

eats him by. This is just like the kind of animal revenge story that probably never happened. Friends for life. What it feels really good? Yeah? No, maybe it's like Calvin and Hobbs, they were like close. Oh um, I don't know, I don't really treated is he a leopard? Now he's a tiger? On? Oh he's a tiger okay, sorry, you know my mind for a second. Um, oh my god, yeah. No. Um. The other thing he did was financed a ton of LGPT stuff, including one incorporated and various gender identity clinics

throughout the country. I think more or less, if you were a trans person in the nineteen fifties and sixties, it was read Ericson who was paying the people who were helping take care of you. That's pretty cool. They published, He financed a ton of information and counseling resources for trans people. They published pamphlets about how to access resources,

all that shit. And then he died. How every in nineteen ninety two, he was in his seventies and he was a fugitive from justice from the US for drug charges because he used drugs recreationally, and so he was hiding out in Mexico and that's where he died. That's just the fact that he used drugs recreationally and that was what made him go into hiding is one depressing, Yeah, but two, I mean, seventiesel, it's a long life. It's longer than most. So now he did great, he did.

He did a lot. He did a lot. If you're going to be a capitalist, be read Ericson, yes. And if you're going to get a leopard and help people. Yeah, that's all you can do. Yeah. And also I would argue, I think if you're a rich guy with a pet leopard, your us of dying in Mexico as a fugitive go up to eighty. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's so. Uh. I don't know. I want to happen to that leopard. I wonder what the leopard's name was. I'm getting off a tangent just because I'm imagining this man like with a

leopard next to him. Wait, the leopard's name was Henry. Oh you did tell me? God damn, my brain is really on display in this episode, and I want everyone to take pity on me. I know someone else is out there that is as dumb as I am. So I'm representing that one person. Both Mashing and One Incorporated provided material support for another group, the first lesbian political organization in the US, which had another sick fucking name, The Daughters of belitis Um sometimes the Daughter of Bliss.

It's sometimes called d OB or the Daughters. And I'll tell you what the name comes from. On Wednesday. Oh what a Cliffhanker. That was great. Thanks, they have to come back. I know you're gonna need to know where the daughter can't google? Thank God forbid. Don't google until Wednesday, yeah or at all. Yeah, but what people should google is sharene UNEs. No, No, you shouldn't. Don't do that. But you can follow me on the internet if you want to. My Twitter is shiro Hero six six six

and my Instagram is just shiro Hero. I'm around sometimes. That's that's about it. Have you ever googled your name plus controversy? No, but now I will. I haven't either. All right, well, ye see you all. Oms As to plug things, I have another podcast. It's called live like Doorld's Dyne. If you think things are bad, I do too. I have a podcast about how to get prepared and get together with your friends. Don't live like Doorld's Dyne. We'll see you on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool

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