Making Gay History<\/span><\/i> wasn\u2019t meant to be a podcast.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1988, Eric Marcus left his job at CBS\u00a0Morning\u00a0News soon\u00a0after he\u00a0was commissioned to write an oral history book about what was then\u00a0typically referred to as the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. He gathered over 100 interviews that featured the perspectives of gamechangers like Abigail Van Buren (AKA Dear Abby) and Ellen DeGeneres. Even then, it seems he had some inkling that the information he\u2019d collected would be treasured by the LGBTQ community decades later.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was hyper aware that some of the people I was interviewing were very old. They were involved at the very start of the movement and might not be around much longer,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus recalled. <\/span>\u201cA number of the men had AIDS, and I knew they didn\u2019t have much time. I must’ve realized to some degree that one day, these interviews would have value for someone.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The first edition of Eric\u2019s book was published in 1992 and the second in 2002. That\u2019s when he donated six-feet worth of cassette tape trays to the New York Public Library. It wasn\u2019t until 2015 when he was taking stock of his assets that he decided the stories he had collected are the kind that can be shared through any creative medium. <\/span>\u201cI figured I might as well showcase them using broadcast-quality equipment,\u201d <\/span><\/i>he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the <\/span>Making Gay History<\/span><\/i> podcast was born.\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u201cThe people I interviewed who started the movement, they faced such a hostile world\u2014one in which you could lose your job if you were found out,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus said. <\/span>\u201cWhat impressed me most were the people who had this conviction in the 1950s and 60s, or even the 1940s, that they were right, and the world was wrong. There was nothing wrong with them, and they were going to change the world. It\u2019s mind-blowing and so inspiring that they imagined a world that could be different.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

One of the most poignant stories Marcus encountered was from Morty Manford, who was present at the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and helped found and became president of the Gay Activist Alliance the same year. At that time, he had just helped found one of the nation\u2019s first gay campus groups while attending Columbia University. Manford made countless contributions to the movement, and Marcus interviewed him in 1989 for the first edition of his book.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Manford\u2019s story is told in two parts on the podcast:\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u201cNot long before he died of complications from AIDS, [Manford\u2019s] mother told me that he\u2019s afraid no one\u2019s going to remember his contributions to the movement,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus said. <\/span>\u201cI sent her Morty\u2019s chapter of the book, so she could read it to him. I felt so happy that I was able to capture Morty\u2019s story and find a way to get it out into the public realm. So many more thousands of people have since been inspired by what he did.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The podcast was adapted into a theatre production called <\/span>\u201cMaking Gay History: Before Stonewall\u201d<\/span><\/i> through <\/span>NYU Steinhardt\u2019s\u00a0Educational Theatre\u00a0program.<\/span> The live performance featured 20 characters from the podcast, and the company completed 10 performances before COVID-19 closed everything down. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s interesting to me is that young people today are very interested in the history whether they\u2019re gay or not,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus said<\/span>. \u201cFor many of them, the LGBTQ civil rights movements was the civil rights movement of their time. We had a couple performances of the play held for middle and high school students, and I was moved watching their discussion. We had a Q&A after the show between the students and the director, and they had really good questions. They wrote to tell me how they now felt they had family, they had community, and they had ancestors.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

One of the stories in the play revolved around Bayard Rustin, who was one of Martin Luther King Jr\u2019s mentors. He organized the 1963 March on Washington Movement with A. Philip Randolph.<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u201cI asked the students for a show of hands if they\u2019d studied the black civil rights movement,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus said. <\/span>\u201cThey all raised their hands. And then I asked, \u2018How many of you had ever heard of Bayard Rustin before today?\u2019 Not a single hand. The reason he isn’t taught is that he was kept very much in the background of the black civil rights movement because he was gay. Yet he was a principle architect of the movement.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Marcus said that although there are many hidden histories of America, he\u2019s hoping to recover and un-erase some of it for a new generation of students.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know I had a history until I started working on my book in 1988, and I felt I was robbed of it,\u201d<\/span><\/i> Marcus said. <\/span>\u201cI imagined what it would have been like for me to be a middle school student sitting in that audience, watching that show unfold, and hearing those stories\u2026 what it might have been like had I known I had ancestors. I shared that with the students. I said, \u2018I can’t imagine how different my life would have been if I were sitting where you’re sitting now in 1973 when I was a middle school student\u2026 how transformative that would have been.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Marcus believes it\u2019s his responsibility to share the stories he\u2019s gathered over the years, and remarkably, he gets to do that in a way that allows people in over 200 countries to listen. The stories provide context for those who feel that we haven\u2019t gotten far enough in the movement, and to see how far the movement has actually come and what people sacrificed to get to where we are today.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

June 2020 Issue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making Gay History wasn\u2019t meant to be a podcast.\u00a0 In 1988, Eric Marcus left his job at CBS\u00a0Morning\u00a0News soon\u00a0after he\u00a0was commissioned to write an oral history book about what was then\u00a0typically referred to as the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. He gathered over 100 interviews that featured the perspectives of gamechangers like Abigail Van Buren (AKA Dear Abby) and Ellen DeGeneres. Even then, it seems he had some inkling that the information he\u2019d collected would be treasured by the LGBTQ community decades later. \u201cI was hyper aware that some of the people I was interviewing were very old. They<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":10996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[1619,1621,1617,434,1618,1616,1620],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n