Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
Speaker 1: podcast that doesn't have a tagline because the title conveys
Speaker 1: the general purpose well enough on its own. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is Shrine Uness who rules. Hi, Shrine, Thanks,
Speaker 1: thanks for thinking I rule. I'm hi, I'm good. Hi.
Speaker 1: Are you all right? Good to know you're hi? Cool? Okay,
Speaker 1: moving up? Sharin? You you make stuff? What kind of
Speaker 1: stuff do you make? I make films. I make even
Speaker 1: saying art is weird quote unquote art. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: make things. I just made a film like a little culte,
Speaker 1: like a video essay thing that I think is not
Speaker 1: too bad, which is a lot because I hate everything
Speaker 1: I do. But yeah, it's I just make things. I
Speaker 1: make things cool. I appreciate that today we are running
Speaker 1: without a producer. Oh yeah means to men, means we
Speaker 1: can say anything we want. This goes heywire. That's why.
Speaker 1: So the way they build the Moltoft cocktail is and
Speaker 1: then you oh really yeah yeah no, it's it's different
Speaker 1: than people in my thing And the most important thing
Speaker 1: is no matter what never ever, Ian as our audio
Speaker 1: engineer and on woman, wrote or theme music. So Sharine Margaret,
Speaker 1: did you know that a lot of people are queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans,
Speaker 1: two spirit asexual intersects or otherwise don't line up into
Speaker 1: the nice heterosexual binary sex system that Western society tries
Speaker 1: to fit everyone into. I do know that. I do
Speaker 1: you know that? Excellent? Well that will make this conversation.
Speaker 1: Was like, no, what do you mean? Yeah, you're like
Speaker 1: one man and one woman. Yeah, did you know that
Speaker 1: some people don't like that? Were like that, like they
Speaker 1: don't like queer people? Yeah? Yeah, I think they. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think everyone is on the queer spectrum. Even the
Speaker 1: people that say they hate they hate it because they
Speaker 1: are on it. Yeah. I think that's fairly true. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember the first time of a gay friend of
Speaker 1: mine sat me down, was like, the reason people say
Speaker 1: the sexuality is a choice is that for them it's
Speaker 1: a choice. Who oh my god, well, how I never
Speaker 1: thought of that. That is very very good point. Yeah, friend, Well,
Speaker 1: today we're going to talk about some of the queer
Speaker 1: people who did something about the people who don't like
Speaker 1: queer people. Hell yeah, it will eventually get to Molltop cocktails. Actually,
Speaker 1: although this is our first four partner on the show. Um,
Speaker 1: it felt timely to talk about this stuff, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't find a simple way to do it. So it's
Speaker 1: four parts, so it's going me by the end of
Speaker 1: So buckle up, strap in, folks. Yeah, today we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about how in June nineteen sixty nine, in
Speaker 1: Greenwich Village in New York City, someone bit a cop
Speaker 1: so hard that the cop had to go to the
Speaker 1: hospital and the gay Pride movement was born. Wow, wish
Speaker 1: that was me. That is amazing. I know, I want
Speaker 1: to bite a cop so hard that he just like
Speaker 1: loses an arm. That is amazing, just zombie a cop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: today we're gonna talk about motherfucking Stonewall. And by today
Speaker 1: I mean in this four part series that will encompass
Speaker 1: both this week and next week. You have you heard
Speaker 1: much about Stonewall? Yeah, I've heard of it. It's a
Speaker 1: thing that was really important. Yeah, it was. It was
Speaker 1: a very important thing. And before we get into it,
Speaker 1: we're gonna use my favorite thing in the world, context
Speaker 1: aka backstory, or as I call it when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about my show, to my friend's side quests. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: a lot of side quests today, tomorrow, next, Monday and
Speaker 1: next Wednesday. It's good to understand the main quest. How
Speaker 1: else are I'm going to understand it? I know exactly
Speaker 1: that L adds flavor, and I don't know. So there's
Speaker 1: two things that regular listeners are probably tired of hearing
Speaker 1: me say. First, queer people have always been here. Second,
Speaker 1: the ways in which we define things like same sex
Speaker 1: attraction and having a gender identity or presentation different from
Speaker 1: your sex assigned at birth. Those definitions are socially constructed,
Speaker 1: and they change over time. The concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality,
Speaker 1: for example, in the Western context, were invented in the
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century, and a lot of who we're going
Speaker 1: to be talking about today would not don't map to
Speaker 1: today's definitions and labels, or didn't at the time, but
Speaker 1: are still alive today, or were alive recently and then
Speaker 1: like later talked about it. So it's like we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about like a lot of for example, like
Speaker 1: drag queens, many of whom would have identified as gay men,
Speaker 1: many of whom later identified as trans women. We're going
Speaker 1: to talk about transvestites, which is a word that a
Speaker 1: lot of people don't use anymore, but a lot of
Speaker 1: people used at the time. I used to use for
Speaker 1: myself actually before I came out as trans, because I
Speaker 1: consider myself across dresser for a very long time who
Speaker 1: just happened to have a woman's name and never not
Speaker 1: wear women's clothes, you know. So things are different and
Speaker 1: they change. That's my that's my background. In our episode
Speaker 1: about gay resistance to fascism, that was with you, I think,
Speaker 1: wasn't it. I think, yeah, we talked about all the
Speaker 1: yeah they ruled everyone should go back and listen to that.
Speaker 1: That was a good one. I love being here for
Speaker 1: the gay ship, that's share. But yeah. So we talked
Speaker 1: about some of the earliest homophile organizations as they might
Speaker 1: have called themselves, and we talked about how they were
Speaker 1: violently repressed under the Nazis and how they didn't they
Speaker 1: also violently unrepressed against the Nazis when they could. We
Speaker 1: talked about queer people were putting to camps, and about
Speaker 1: how kind of importantly at the end of the war
Speaker 1: when the camps were liberated, both the capitalist block and
Speaker 1: the Soviet Block immediately through the queer prisoners back into
Speaker 1: prison because being gay was illegal and ikey and whatever
Speaker 1: that's where we left off. We're going to pick up
Speaker 1: that thread with the Cold War nineteen forties America just
Speaker 1: after World War Two. It's gonna be a situation that
Speaker 1: is going to be completely unfamiliar to the modern audience.
Speaker 1: Acceptance of gay gay lifestyles was flourishing in some places,
Speaker 1: especially Yeah wow, yeah extus to me. Actually, well, that's
Speaker 1: actually kind of one of the things is that, like
Speaker 1: we have this way of talking about gayness as if
Speaker 1: it was like everything was bad and then someone threw
Speaker 1: a brick at a cop at a place called Stonewall
Speaker 1: and everything became good, you know. But so acceptance of
Speaker 1: gay lifestyles was flourishing in cities, while I'm Arican culture
Speaker 1: more broadly was moving in a more conservative direction. So
Speaker 1: everything got set up for conflict. So the cops and
Speaker 1: all that shit are getting more and more conservative, and
Speaker 1: the government's getting more and more conservative. But more and
Speaker 1: more gay bars are opening, more and more people are
Speaker 1: finding each other, and more and more people are starting
Speaker 1: to be like, there's literally nothing wrong with who I
Speaker 1: am except for the fact that the cops ain't me.
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like present day, like it sounds
Speaker 1: like we're still doing that. So yeah, a number of
Speaker 1: fucking just one to one comparisons about what's happening right now.
Speaker 1: It's people don't change. It feels like history just repeats
Speaker 1: itself or just like stays the same rather even end
Speaker 1: and start again. It just like keeps yes sackness, Yeah, totally. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, a little tiny micro loops. Right, so we'll
Speaker 1: talk about some of this conflict we've all heard of
Speaker 1: the Red Scare. Really there were two reds maybe the podcast?
Speaker 1: Sorry what if I all thought it was a podcast
Speaker 1: is not an actual thing. I'm I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Wait,
Speaker 1: what's the podcast? Uh, I've never listened to it. To
Speaker 1: be fair, I just I kind of make fun of
Speaker 1: it a lot. This is part's a podcast with it's
Speaker 1: not really historical. It's just like a it's just a
Speaker 1: podcast with two gals. And that's all I'm gonna say
Speaker 1: about that, because I don't want to get it all right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough, Well there's I was going to say there's
Speaker 1: two and a half Red Scares, but there's actually three
Speaker 1: and a half because one of them is a podcast.
Speaker 1: The first Red Scare was nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: when the US freaked out about the Russian Revolution and
Speaker 1: they started deporting the anarchists, which is funny because at
Speaker 1: the same time the Russian Bolsheviks also were freaked out
Speaker 1: about the anarchists and we're shooting them. Wow. And so
Speaker 1: they passed the US past this anti Anarchist Sedition Act
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighteen, which is part of why I'm very
Speaker 1: mad that people are calling the January six rioters seditionists
Speaker 1: because I literally have the word sedition tattooed on my knuckles.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you do, Oh my god, she does.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at her knuckles now in the camera. I
Speaker 1: did not know you had that tattoo. Yeah, I got
Speaker 1: it a while ago. That's hilarious. As so mad when
Speaker 1: they started calling anyway um sedition being the crime of
Speaker 1: speaking against the government essentially, which is they called they
Speaker 1: called January six people that I didn't realize they would
Speaker 1: call it. That's not that's stupid, I know. I know.
Speaker 1: Also during this Red Scare, there was the Palmer Raids
Speaker 1: which made use of UM. Did you know that in
Speaker 1: the United States it is still illegal to be a
Speaker 1: foreign born anarchist? What about so you can be a
Speaker 1: national National National Yeah, nation board are anarch Yeah. Because
Speaker 1: of free speech, it's legal to be born in the
Speaker 1: US and become an anarchist. But um, there's this law,
Speaker 1: the Immigration Act of nineteen oh three that specifically is
Speaker 1: like kick out all of the foreign born anarchists. That
Speaker 1: is so interesting. I did not know that. It's like
Speaker 1: you can be It's the line they draw as far
Speaker 1: as where you're born is like anarchy and president that's
Speaker 1: what it sounds like. And so it's not enforced anymore,
Speaker 1: but it'll be interesting because it's still on the books.
Speaker 1: And so anyway, they raid and deport a bunch of people,
Speaker 1: and immediately people are like, that's an infringement of free speech.
Speaker 1: Even at the time people are like, I don't think
Speaker 1: you're allowed to do that. In the government's like we
Speaker 1: don't care, you know, and we get it into a bit.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more about this in the
Speaker 1: birth control episodes we did last year with Katie Stole,
Speaker 1: then you get the mini Red Scare, the half red Scare,
Speaker 1: or as I like to call it, or at least
Speaker 1: I wrote it into the script, the Red Thrill, because
Speaker 1: the thrill feels like a half scare. Right, Oh yeah
Speaker 1: it does good. Yeah, good call on that. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you. This one was exclusive to New York City.
Speaker 1: It took place in nineteen between nineteen forty nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: And it's particularly funny that this happened because overall during
Speaker 1: these years, there was some other stuff happening in the
Speaker 1: world right between. That's why I'm surprised. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess like when you you forget that other stuff was happening, though,
Speaker 1: when you only know that it was like World War two,
Speaker 1: I forget that there was other stuff happening because it
Speaker 1: sounds like the whole world was doing this was in
Speaker 1: World War two, because but um, it's interesting to hear
Speaker 1: that this was all happening at the same time, I know.
Speaker 1: And it's particularly interesting because at the time, the USSR
Speaker 1: was the United States's ally. Oh my god, and so
Speaker 1: it was like actually a time when like even the
Speaker 1: government was like, like, we don't trust communists, but they're
Speaker 1: not our enemy. The Nazis are. Well what a time
Speaker 1: unless you're in New York City. It's called the rap
Speaker 1: Cod Codare Committee. It's a name of two people. Basically,
Speaker 1: they investigated the public universities to make sure they didn't
Speaker 1: find any pinko's teaching kids, and refusing to testify before
Speaker 1: this committee was grounds for immediate firing. And they got
Speaker 1: one ex communist to read out fifty four other teachers
Speaker 1: and whoa, if you're the word pinko much. I really
Speaker 1: liked this word. No you said it, and I was
Speaker 1: going to just pretend I what you what you meant,
Speaker 1: but please explain it, okay. So pinko is this pejorative
Speaker 1: word for communist, and it's it's an old timey word.
Speaker 1: It's our like grandparents pejorative word for communist, and it
Speaker 1: goes back to nineteen twenty five, I think, um, but
Speaker 1: it actually being like pink salons was a way to
Speaker 1: talk shit on communist gathering places even before that. And
Speaker 1: they used pink because it's for two reasons. One, it's
Speaker 1: a softer shade of red, and therefore these are like
Speaker 1: the soft communists, the socialists. And so that we can
Speaker 1: understand how this ties into why am I talking with
Speaker 1: the red scares. If we're talking about anti gayshit they
Speaker 1: basically we're calling all the socialists gays. They were being
Speaker 1: like these effeminate men, these like pink men. That's so interesting,
Speaker 1: and communism is effeminate. Yeah, you know, nothing's effeminate like
Speaker 1: seizing the means of production, Yeah, exactly, or like millions
Speaker 1: of you charging German tanks. Yeah, I mean like whatever
Speaker 1: that is. Gays did that too, but like, yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I did not know that. Yeah. No. And it's like
Speaker 1: one of the politicians who liked using the word pinko
Speaker 1: in the twenties, I think he would. Basically he had
Speaker 1: these quotes about how like these soft handed men they
Speaker 1: were working, but they didn't use their hands, you know,
Speaker 1: just funny because guys, we know how to use our hands.
Speaker 1: And Okay, I know you were thinking, you're thinking, can
Speaker 1: Margaret tie the UNI bomber into this supisode? I think
Speaker 1: exactly what I was thinking. Actually the answer is yes, wow,
Speaker 1: please continue. Yeah, okay, cool. This one I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: This one is from my memory of being involved in
Speaker 1: social movements and not something I can directly source. Ted
Speaker 1: Kazinski the unibomber, he goes to jail, and for a
Speaker 1: while a bunch of environmentalists supported him because he was
Speaker 1: trying to dismantle industrial civilization and all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: But then he wrote this like public letter complaining about
Speaker 1: pinko's and one publisher was like, oh, we can't use that.
Speaker 1: That's an anti gay word, and Uncle Ted was like, what, No,
Speaker 1: it's not about gays. It's an anti communist word. I
Speaker 1: hate the left, and while I'm at it, I hate
Speaker 1: gay people too, But that's not why I said it.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I did not know that even half it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's incredible, that's incredible, and I'm paraphrasing this, so please
Speaker 1: don't assume me, mister unibomber. That's so funny that like
Speaker 1: it's like, no, it's not the hates through the you
Speaker 1: think it is. It's the other hatesler or is the same.
Speaker 1: I don't know it. Of course I hate that minority,
Speaker 1: but that's not what I was saying right now, Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: back to the mini red scare. I just wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about pinkos as a word. We should bring it back.
Speaker 1: I mean, I maybe other people know about it. I
Speaker 1: had never really heard it, So you have educated me.
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone else is like me, being like, oh wow,
Speaker 1: new word that we can all use. Yep. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't illegal to be in the Communist Party this time,
Speaker 1: but the main reason they had this mini red scare.
Speaker 1: It was pretty much to destroy the teachers union, and
Speaker 1: they fired more than four hundred union teachers and blacklisted
Speaker 1: them because they were teaching things that they didn't want
Speaker 1: them to teach. Yeah, because they like possibly had any
Speaker 1: like leftist inclinations at all. And this of course meant
Speaker 1: firing the first black faculty member ever hired by a
Speaker 1: New York City public college, whose name was Max Jurgan.
Speaker 1: And to tie everything into what's happening now in this
Speaker 1: case in Florida, he was teaching a class called Negro
Speaker 1: History and Culture at City College of New York. So
Speaker 1: you know what we're like, nineteen forty to nineteen forty two, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he gets fired basically for teaching black studies. Well,
Speaker 1: and also it was also an anti gay panic. The
Speaker 1: judge said about why it was important to fire teachers
Speaker 1: who teach that being gay is okay, that the court
Speaker 1: will quote not tolerate academic freedom being used as a
Speaker 1: cloak to promote the popularization in the minds of adolescence
Speaker 1: of acts forbidden by the penal law. Penal law. That
Speaker 1: was funny. I know what, I know what you need,
Speaker 1: but it's funny just to hear it in that the
Speaker 1: end of that sentence. Uh yeah, what I said earlier,
Speaker 1: history repeats itself in just different clothing. Yep. What I
Speaker 1: came up with while writing this was, you know, people
Speaker 1: say that history doesn't repeat it ryan times, but then
Speaker 1: I actually think it's more like we just keep going
Speaker 1: back to the chorus, Yeah, where the verse has changed,
Speaker 1: and then the chorus of kill all the minorities keeps
Speaker 1: coming on. I love that That's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: It's also it's maybe it's even just like you mess
Speaker 1: up and you have to go back to the beginning,
Speaker 1: and then you keep like messing up different places, so
Speaker 1: you go back to the beginning. Oh my god, civil
Speaker 1: rights is groundhog Day. Yeah, exactly. Fuck. The bronx Borough
Speaker 1: president said, quote, the colleges would either be godly colleges
Speaker 1: American colleges, or they would be closed. Well, good old America.
Speaker 1: That was red Scare one point five. Now it's talking
Speaker 1: about the big one, Red scare two point zero. Mm.
Speaker 1: The second red scare is the one that most people
Speaker 1: know about. If someone says the red scare, they probably
Speaker 1: mean the second one. This is the one that gets
Speaker 1: called McCarthyism right nineteen forty seven to nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1: It's target was more communist an anarchist this time, but
Speaker 1: both red scares went after both. This Red scare, for example,
Speaker 1: included the anarchist Charlie Chaplin being forced in exile away
Speaker 1: from the US. And I really only include this because
Speaker 1: I like leaving threads to other episodes. So if you
Speaker 1: want to see the app hear more about that. The
Speaker 1: episode of Anti Fascism and Film with Caitlin Durante talks
Speaker 1: about that is marketing genius. Thank you, Thank your job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just get really excited about this, like really intensely
Speaker 1: dense web of anyway. No, it's a great way to
Speaker 1: just be like this the same the same way that
Speaker 1: you're like, I had no idea this is happening. At
Speaker 1: the same time, it's good to know that like there's
Speaker 1: all these threads that just like, oh, this is all intermingled,
Speaker 1: because that's fucking history. It's not just like I don't know,
Speaker 1: totally traded somewhere. And also that our struggles have like
Speaker 1: always been tied together in all of these ways, right,
Speaker 1: like the specifically crysto fascist, like you must be a
Speaker 1: godly college thing, the firing of the gay teachers, the
Speaker 1: firing of the like the black studies professor, like it's
Speaker 1: all been tied together forever. Yeah, I think that's why,
Speaker 1: Like when people are shocked about stuff, sometimes it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like this has been happening. That's not how
Speaker 1: I feel like. It's just like it's not like, how
Speaker 1: do we get this way? What happened to people? It's
Speaker 1: like we've always been this way. It's just been like
Speaker 1: bolstered in certain people because it's been so long. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that makes sense. I just think it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yah. For flavors of the same thing, well,
Speaker 1: if you want different flavors of the same thing, you
Speaker 1: should try American capitalism, where you can go to the
Speaker 1: store and buy a million types of oreos, most of
Speaker 1: which a vegan. Yeah they they are. And also you
Speaker 1: can consume these products and services the support this show. Okay,
Speaker 1: we are back, and we're talking about this mass hysteria
Speaker 1: about communists take over the US or whatever the House
Speaker 1: on American Activities Committee. But and it's famous stuff, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll talk about it more sometime, or if
Speaker 1: only there was like a podcast that was like about
Speaker 1: bad stuff instead. But hmm, get on that. Yeah we should,
Speaker 1: we should make a proposal for that. Yeah, I heart
Speaker 1: would love it. Yeah, I think it would do. Really
Speaker 1: want nothing like it out there. Yeah, So importantly to
Speaker 1: our story, the Red Scare has this shadow the Lavender Scare,
Speaker 1: which targeted gay folks of all stripes, and as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, it was just as wide reaching
Speaker 1: and impactful as the Red Scare in terms of number
Speaker 1: of people who were like fired and shit as a result.
Speaker 1: Is that is this something that people know about? Or
Speaker 1: am I? Am I just a dummy? Like this is
Speaker 1: not known about? Okay, because I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1: It's that's fascinating. Yeah it um, it doesn't get called
Speaker 1: this or anything at the time. It's just happening. It's
Speaker 1: just the government fucking up gay people's lives. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and four, a guy named David K. Johnson wrote
Speaker 1: a book on the whole thing, called the Lavender Scare,
Speaker 1: and this kind of cemented the name. Then the name
Speaker 1: comes from one of the bigots responsible for this repression.
Speaker 1: This one happened to be a Republican. I've run across
Speaker 1: Democrats and Republicans, both being his very bipartisan. This guy's
Speaker 1: name is Everett Dirkson, and he's famous for being the
Speaker 1: Republican who help pass the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act,
Speaker 1: crossing the party lines to devote the Democrats. He hated
Speaker 1: gay people, and he liked to use a somewhat popular
Speaker 1: anti gay phrase at the time, and he called gay
Speaker 1: men lavender lads. That's kind of sick. I don't think
Speaker 1: he means it that way. That's kind of sick. Thanks, dude.
Speaker 1: I know I'm not a gay man, so I can't
Speaker 1: tell you what slurs to reclaim. But imagine the street
Speaker 1: gang called the Lavender Lads. You would want to go
Speaker 1: to their parties. You would not want to fucking cross them,
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't want to bring your boyfriend because he's
Speaker 1: going home with a lavender lad instead of that is
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't. I feel like you can't get
Speaker 1: mad at that. Like it's all like he chose anything
Speaker 1: negative in either of those words. It's all like lavender losers.
Speaker 1: It's not like lavender anything bad. It's just like lads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, but despite its sick name, the Lavender scare
Speaker 1: was a bad thing. Right. Its main task was to
Speaker 1: root out and fire all the gay folks in the government,
Speaker 1: in the military. And I don't like the government or
Speaker 1: the military, but that's still fucked up. In the first
Speaker 1: three years of the Scare alone, four hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: people were fired from government jobs on suspicion of homosexuality.
Speaker 1: Seventeen hundred others had their applications denied, four thousand, three
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty people were kicked out of the military.
Speaker 1: That's so, how does who's deciding who's gay and who's not. Well,
Speaker 1: this is that's part of the thing about anti gay repression,
Speaker 1: and we see this also with what the Nazis did,
Speaker 1: is that when you decide to go against gay people,
Speaker 1: you can call anyone gay. It's really hard to prove that,
Speaker 1: Like you don't like scissorin, you know, like it's just
Speaker 1: like your word against theirs. And if the person that
Speaker 1: is calling you gay has more power than than you're
Speaker 1: fucked even if you are or are not gay. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so many people's so I mean, obviously it's a
Speaker 1: lot of people, but like it's just crazy that there's
Speaker 1: always someone deciding something for everyone else. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. It's just like we there are
Speaker 1: so many huge decisions and all throughout history that is
Speaker 1: like one or two people, just like some dude deciding
Speaker 1: on something. I always think about that when it comes
Speaker 1: to like fucking like taxes or something. Yeah, someone someone
Speaker 1: chose this, you know what I mean, Like someone shows
Speaker 1: this and now we're suffering because of it. But anyway, no, no,
Speaker 1: I like some of the markers that they used to
Speaker 1: determine if someone was gay and should therefore be fired
Speaker 1: was being unmarried and talking gay. Rude. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: kind of I relate, but rude, I know, I know. Also,
Speaker 1: around this time, I think it was the late forties.
Speaker 1: This didn't end up in the script. It almost didn't.
Speaker 1: I So now I'm my memory might be faulty. But
Speaker 1: around this time, the first Kinsey report comes out, and
Speaker 1: these are these studies about the percentage of In this case,
Speaker 1: it was a study of like several thousand men, and
Speaker 1: it was like representative of the US population, which is
Speaker 1: obviously not true. But of these several thousand men in
Speaker 1: the late forties, only fifty percent were I had only
Speaker 1: had heterosexual sexual experiences, only fifty percent. Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, there were medical studies saying that half
Speaker 1: of the US population is somewhere on the gay spectrum.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. Yeah, And I think about this a lot
Speaker 1: because I'm down with the way that we currently have
Speaker 1: like gender as an identity and stuff like that. I'm
Speaker 1: fine with being a trans woman whatever, you know. But
Speaker 1: when you didn't have these identities, people probably were like
Speaker 1: maybe doing more fucking of because there's like less like
Speaker 1: because now if you are a man, you're gay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but before you probably weren't gay unless you were mostly
Speaker 1: having sex with men, or you were a bottom or
Speaker 1: all kinds of other shit, you know, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: like all throughout history, you see, at least, like I
Speaker 1: always paid attention to the close relationships that men had
Speaker 1: with each other. Like even like my father his like
Speaker 1: pictures from like his college days, Like men like loved
Speaker 1: each other like it just like a different more like touchy,
Speaker 1: Like they never would think like no homo kind of way.
Speaker 1: They just like that's just how they operated until probably
Speaker 1: it was labeled as something that made them feel shame. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: And it's such a fucking shame because there's this like
Speaker 1: massive problem in the US at least of like um
Speaker 1: loneliness among males, and like, yeah, I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: of it is that you're not allowed to open up
Speaker 1: about your emotions to anyone except the one woman you're
Speaker 1: dating or whatever, which it puts in sorry if that
Speaker 1: I know. And then even so I feel bad for
Speaker 1: the one woman you're dating who suddenly you're a fucking
Speaker 1: free therapist and the only person you talked to anyway,
Speaker 1: the lavenger. It's hard. Sorry, no, I mean it's funny
Speaker 1: because it's like but I'm kidding, and you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Yeah, yeah, And the and the reason it's
Speaker 1: hard is patriarchy and homophobia. You know, like we we
Speaker 1: all have the same oppressor. It's patriarchy, you know, a phobia.
Speaker 1: And like so the government had an excuse about why
Speaker 1: I was going after gays. It was really that they
Speaker 1: just like didn't like gays. But it was the idea
Speaker 1: that closeted homosexuals since they were hiding a shameful secret,
Speaker 1: were vulnerable to blackmail and might like give information about
Speaker 1: government ship to the the russ skis interesting. Okay, that's
Speaker 1: a loophole I ever heard one? Okay, yeah, yeah, one
Speaker 1: Democratic politician put it this way, it is generally believed
Speaker 1: that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack
Speaker 1: the emotional stability of normal persons. Or McCarthy himself, who
Speaker 1: basically was like, communism and homosexuality are both men. I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 1: Communism and homosexuality are both mental and balances and are
Speaker 1: kind of the same thing. It was McCarthy's take on it,
Speaker 1: which is funny because I was thinking this through. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's a real problem if people are have to hide
Speaker 1: the fact that they're gay or be shamed by their society,
Speaker 1: and therefore they're vulnerable to blackmail. What if instead of
Speaker 1: firing them all, you create a society where people aren't
Speaker 1: afraid to be outed because no one cares. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just I can't. I'm still kind of like processing
Speaker 1: everything that you said about I don't know. I was
Speaker 1: stuck on the fact that like people were gay and
Speaker 1: then they were like in their heads, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, Like the clips. But the FBI and cops
Speaker 1: kept list of suspect homosexuals and their hangouts. The United
Speaker 1: States Postal Service tracked where gay mail got sent and
Speaker 1: passed that information along to the government, and even though
Speaker 1: the whole like main thing was to fire people who
Speaker 1: worked for the government, this led to this massive anti
Speaker 1: gay backlash. Cities banned cross dressing time as a flat circle,
Speaker 1: bars were rated and shut down. Professors lost their jobs.
Speaker 1: All this shit happened by nineteen fifty three, President Eisenhower
Speaker 1: signed Executive Order ten zero whatever one zero four five zero,
Speaker 1: which included quote sexual perversion on a list of bad
Speaker 1: qualities that were bad for government employees. Wow, and more
Speaker 1: gay folks were fired from their jobs and some killed themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's tragic. One fired employee his name was Frank Kameni
Speaker 1: and he's today's first protagonist. Hell yeah, okay, Frank, let's go. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was born a Jewish parents in New York in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five, which a lot of people who end
Speaker 1: up as protagonists on this show are Jewish New Yorkers
Speaker 1: from this era. Hell I love that. Yeah, love that.
Speaker 1: By seventeen, he's like mom, Dad, I'm an atheist. In
Speaker 1: nineteen forty one, he ships off and is part of
Speaker 1: one of the best things humans have ever done, kill
Speaker 1: the shit out of the Nazis. He comes home, he
Speaker 1: finishes undergrad he gets his doctorate in astronomy. Then in
Speaker 1: the fifties, I think nineteen fifty six, he gets arrested
Speaker 1: for homosexual behavior. And this is part of AM I
Speaker 1: think this happens in LA. There is this thing that
Speaker 1: the cops would do where basically anyone who's suspected to
Speaker 1: being gay, they would like and trap them, like since
Speaker 1: I'm going to be like, yeah, what's up? You want
Speaker 1: fuck in person? Be like oh yeah, yeah maybe, and
Speaker 1: they'd be like maybe it's enough. You're going down, motherfucker,
Speaker 1: you know right. I think in this case, literally someone
Speaker 1: came up at a fucking bus stop and grabbed his
Speaker 1: dick like groped him, and then the cops arrested him
Speaker 1: for having his dick groped. Huh that's curious. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like not my favorite thing that's ever happened. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty seven, he's hired for the Army map service.
Speaker 1: But then they're like, because he's an astronomer and he
Speaker 1: makes maps, I guess he's related somehow. I'm not smart
Speaker 1: enough to totally get it. And they're like, oh, you
Speaker 1: got arrested for doing a gay thing. Never mind, fuck off,
Speaker 1: and they fire him, and they blacklist him from all
Speaker 1: employment in the federal government. This fucking war hero doctor
Speaker 1: at astronomer who wants to work in the public sector
Speaker 1: because this is part of it. Like my grandfather worked
Speaker 1: in the public sector. He was you know, worked for
Speaker 1: the Navy and shit, and is not how to get rich.
Speaker 1: It just isn't like the people who do public like
Speaker 1: public servant work a fucking doing it because they care
Speaker 1: about it. And I guess he really cared about the stars.
Speaker 1: Oh until this point, our guy Frank, he's like this
Speaker 1: upstanding citizen, right, But they kick him out, so he sues.
Speaker 1: So we lost, so we took it to a higher court.
Speaker 1: He tried to take it the Supreme Court and they
Speaker 1: were like, now we're good. We don't give a shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So he becomes a gay rights radical and he coined
Speaker 1: the phrase gay is good, which was controversial among gay
Speaker 1: rights activists at the time. Oh why what Yeah, because
Speaker 1: this is like one of the kind of complicated things
Speaker 1: we'll touch on a little bit. But I is basically
Speaker 1: a lot of the gay rights movement before the forties
Speaker 1: and fifties, and even during the fifties and early sixties,
Speaker 1: it was very assimilationist, and it was and some of
Speaker 1: it was even like we are a bit ashamed that
Speaker 1: this is the way we are, and we would like
Speaker 1: to be better, and you know kind of like we
Speaker 1: would like to be straight or if not, we would
Speaker 1: like version therapy kind of, yeah, or at least like
Speaker 1: except that we're deviance and be ashamed and stuff. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he was one of the first like really prominent
Speaker 1: people being like, no, there's literally nothing wrong with the
Speaker 1: way I am. And he was fairly assimilationist and stuff,
Speaker 1: but he fucking did a lot of really important good work.
Speaker 1: And there's kind of these like way of looking back
Speaker 1: at this history and I'm I will do this a
Speaker 1: little bit by accident throughout here, where I think that
Speaker 1: the direct action stuff was a lot more effective. And
Speaker 1: so this assimilation is stuff where they just want to
Speaker 1: be part of mainstream society I'm like less interested in.
Speaker 1: But it's really worth understanding that they did a fuck
Speaker 1: ton of work. And so his name won't come up
Speaker 1: a ton of the rest throughout the episode, but basically
Speaker 1: everything that isn't a riot, Frank is there and helping
Speaker 1: make it happen. I love you, Frank. Yeah, Frank is
Speaker 1: a good dude. Yeah, he just wants to talk about
Speaker 1: stars and learn about stars, and they didn't let him
Speaker 1: do that. You know. Yeah, that's a like sorry, you
Speaker 1: like dick too much to study the stars. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: off air. It's just like it's also just like such
Speaker 1: a very specific expertise, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 1: did they really have a big line of people that
Speaker 1: wanted to do that, Like, yeah, go work for the
Speaker 1: map service. Yeah. The lavender scarce slowed down in the sixties,
Speaker 1: but the damage was done. In the nineteen seventies, gay
Speaker 1: people were allowed to become spies for the Imperial nightmare
Speaker 1: called US government again and in nineties. I love that
Speaker 1: they're allowed to do stuff that's like bad purely, I
Speaker 1: like purely would benefit them and like put the gay
Speaker 1: people at risk of like danger, like totally. It's like
Speaker 1: like no gays in the middle, like like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: care about whether you're cannon fodder likes anyway. In nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety five, Clinton signed an executive order saying that gay
Speaker 1: should be allowed at the highest level of security clearance,
Speaker 1: and then John Kerry, when he was Secretary of the State,
Speaker 1: put a public apology on the State Department website about
Speaker 1: the Lavender Scare. Basically within days of Trump's inauguration, the
Speaker 1: apology came down. Oh my god, it was like on
Speaker 1: January twenty third, people noticed that it was just suddenly
Speaker 1: missing from the website. That's crazy. I know, someone is
Speaker 1: like tracking that over the century, just being like up down, yeah,
Speaker 1: edited down, that's crazy. Yeah, the Lavender Scare isn't often forgotten.
Speaker 1: Peace of the context for gay rights in the US,
Speaker 1: there's this attitude that's like, yeah, as we talked about
Speaker 1: this attitude when it was the Dark Ages, when everyone's homophobic,
Speaker 1: and then the gay rights changed all of that. But
Speaker 1: even though it wasn't good for queer folks before the
Speaker 1: Lavender Scare, it was a specific and intentional destruction of
Speaker 1: the power of homosexual people done by the federal government
Speaker 1: and local governments, as well as the usual random bigots.
Speaker 1: And I think we need to understand it from that
Speaker 1: point of view. So let's talk about some early gay
Speaker 1: rights organizations. Hell yeah, who all had sick fucking names.
Speaker 1: I can't fucking quit. I mean, lavender lads, it's already great,
Speaker 1: and that wasn't even their choice, I know, I know, Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: for the most part. The idea that all gays are
Speaker 1: communists or whatever is bullshit. Gays or people, people have
Speaker 1: all kinds of political leanings. Um, you know, in our
Speaker 1: Nazi Gays Versus Nazis episode we talked about his name
Speaker 1: is rom Right, the gay Nazi who got murdered and
Speaker 1: all that shit. But one of the first groups, maybe
Speaker 1: like the first it's kind of called the first group
Speaker 1: for gay rights in the US, but whatever, Yeah, who
Speaker 1: knows what the first yeah? Yeah, it was formed by
Speaker 1: a gay communist hell yeah. And the first gay magazine
Speaker 1: was in Germany. We talked about this before. It was
Speaker 1: made by an anarchist because political organizers know how to
Speaker 1: get shit started. And so this guy, his name is
Speaker 1: Harry Hey, and he was a Mary Hey. I know, great, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a Marxist labor organizer and he's the He
Speaker 1: was in the Communist Party and he worked hard in
Speaker 1: fights against anti Semitism and anti Jim Crow, which is
Speaker 1: credit where it to do what the Communist Party was
Speaker 1: up to during the Red Scare. That's probably part of
Speaker 1: why there was a Red Scare. Is the fucking Communist Party. Again,
Speaker 1: I'm not the biggest fan. They were fighting hard against
Speaker 1: racism as one of the only organized groups of people doing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Harry knew he was gay from a young age. He
Speaker 1: tried being straight for a while. He went to the
Speaker 1: doctor and the doctor was like, you know, I've helped
Speaker 1: a lot of you people. Get over it. People, you
Speaker 1: just need to marry a lady and buy Year five.
Speaker 1: You're just gonna fucking love it. So he married this
Speaker 1: communist lady and it didn't work out. Eventually they get separated.
Speaker 1: I don't think on bad terms. He starts a gay
Speaker 1: right gay rights group and it's called Mattachine and it
Speaker 1: could not have a gayer origin for its name. I
Speaker 1: love I can't wait to know what that means. Harry
Speaker 1: Hay was into workers education, which is basically popular education.
Speaker 1: He was like, I'm gonna go teach the fucking working
Speaker 1: class stuff. But instead of being like, here's like how
Speaker 1: to balance your checkbook, he's like, let's teach you about
Speaker 1: medieval French costume in theater. And there was Oh that
Speaker 1: is so gay, I know, sokay, I love it. There
Speaker 1: was a sixteenth and seventeenth century thing. Um, it's more
Speaker 1: early Renaissance as much as is late Medieval, but I
Speaker 1: hate typing the word renaissance, so because I can't spell it,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna. And it's called mask the style of
Speaker 1: dancing with a que, not a k. And these are
Speaker 1: elaborate pageants with singing and dancing and costumes and shit,
Speaker 1: and they end up courtly like for rich people. But
Speaker 1: the rich people are incapable of inventing their own entertainment,
Speaker 1: so they steal ours. So there was this mask group
Speaker 1: called I can't pronounce French, so siete Madachine, who gets
Speaker 1: its name from an from an Arabic word madachine. It
Speaker 1: comes from an Arab Arabic word that means mask wears,
Speaker 1: which was a more a Moorish costumed and masked sword dancing.
Speaker 1: It's not the word, isn't madaschine. I should have written
Speaker 1: down the Arabic word. Um, It's okay. I can imagine
Speaker 1: the origins of it, just based on like the sill,
Speaker 1: like the sounds in it. Okay, manash, I don't know
Speaker 1: what I'll think of it, okay. And so that because
Speaker 1: there's this Moorish costumed and masked sword dancing called Madishine
Speaker 1: or called something like Madishine, to quote Jonathan Katz from
Speaker 1: gay American history. These societies lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried
Speaker 1: townsmen who never performed in public, unmasked aka probably gay man.
Speaker 1: We're dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting
Speaker 1: dances and rituals during the feast of fools at the
Speaker 1: vernal equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals or masks were peasant
Speaker 1: protests against depression, with the maskers and the people's name
Speaker 1: receiving the brunt of a given lord's vicious retaliation. So
Speaker 1: we took the name Madachine because we felt that we
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty gays were also a masked people unknown and
Speaker 1: anonymous who might become engaged in morale building and helping
Speaker 1: others and ourselves through struggle to move towards total redress
Speaker 1: and change. So they found seventeenth and sixteenth century gay
Speaker 1: French social revolutionaries who are into singing and dance, and
Speaker 1: that's amazing. Yeah. I think like it's one of those
Speaker 1: words that like, if you know what it means, you're
Speaker 1: like wow, yes, Yeah. If you don't, you're just like wow,
Speaker 1: that's intense sounding, I know, because it was like a
Speaker 1: machine gun or something, you know, it sounds like machine
Speaker 1: gun if it have machine gun was sounding like a
Speaker 1: machine gun like you Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's that was
Speaker 1: again high. But so they start the Matachine Society first
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, and according to Harry Hey, they didn't
Speaker 1: call themselves gay or homosexual. They called themselves temperamental. All.
Speaker 1: He has a quote, all us temperamental guys, we should
Speaker 1: organize I mean big safe. I mean I love that.
Speaker 1: I know. There's this quote from Harry about why he
Speaker 1: did it, why he started this group that I like.
Speaker 1: I was an older brother, so I had to do
Speaker 1: a lot of things. First. My father was a self
Speaker 1: made man and he would beat me senseless. But he
Speaker 1: was a Scotsman and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm
Speaker 1: stubborn too. I go on being stubborn. If you, one
Speaker 1: of the fellow temperamental guys, if you have to wait
Speaker 1: until I can make it safe, okay, I'll make it safe.
Speaker 1: And if I have to use myself as a battering ram,
Speaker 1: I'll do that too the best I can. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you a deep, dark secret underneath that facade. I'm a
Speaker 1: terrified little sissy, just like everyone else. But I never
Speaker 1: let it show. Well, I fucking like that's like, that's
Speaker 1: like poetry. Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful, and that's what we need.
Speaker 1: We need this bravery and we owe it what we
Speaker 1: have to the fucking human battering rams that came before us. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: his partner who helped him start it romantically and in
Speaker 1: starting this was a fashion designer named Rudy Gernreich who
Speaker 1: was an Austrian Jewish refugee from the Nazis who later
Speaker 1: went on to invent the thong bathing suit, the first
Speaker 1: woman's swimsuit without a built in braw. So anytime you're
Speaker 1: swimming in a swimsuit without a built in bra, you
Speaker 1: can thank a gay Jewish probably communist, or at least
Speaker 1: dating a Communist refugee from the Nazis who started the
Speaker 1: first gay rights organization in the United States. Talk about
Speaker 1: a power couple. That is so sick, big shit. I
Speaker 1: love that. And they only dated for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: but he kept funding it for a time. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And his whole thing as a fashion designer was to
Speaker 1: get rid of the idea that nudity was shameful and
Speaker 1: even inherently sexual, and he designed a lot of unisex
Speaker 1: clothing later in life, he got really into making soup
Speaker 1: he likes, stopped being a fashion designer and just like
Speaker 1: made soup recipes. What an endearing man. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And Rudy helped start Madachine Society with his boyfriend. Gays
Speaker 1: are the best, really. Yeah. For the first few years
Speaker 1: Madachine Society was really fucking neat. In La gay men
Speaker 1: were getting routinely entrapped out went out cruising, this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff we were talking about, you know, cops would
Speaker 1: solicit them for sex and then arrest them for lude behavior.
Speaker 1: Madachine fought one of these cases, I think the first
Speaker 1: time anyone fought one of these, but I'm not one
Speaker 1: hundred percent on that, and they won. They deadlocked the
Speaker 1: jury despite the defendant admitting his homosexuality. That's an improvement
Speaker 1: or like a progress if you want to call it that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Madachine Society here and then in New York did a
Speaker 1: lot of work to specifically stop the entrapment of gay
Speaker 1: men by cops. Most of its founders were Communists anyway,
Speaker 1: so they started in a similar way to the Illegal
Speaker 1: Communist Party. They had like cells, oaths of secrecy, multi
Speaker 1: tiered membership like all that, like revolutionary organization you hear
Speaker 1: about in like twentieth century shit. But there's a problem
Speaker 1: with that style of organization. They were infiltrated, like right
Speaker 1: the fuck away. Within six months, every chapter ended up infiltrated,
Speaker 1: and they never figured out who any of the infiltrators were. Wow,
Speaker 1: So I will say that the twentieth century cell structure
Speaker 1: of resistance is outdated for a reason. Wait, so infiltrated
Speaker 1: by like, yeah, maybe local cops as well. I actually
Speaker 1: I'm not actually certain whether there's local cops or FEDS.
Speaker 1: So they're infiltrating to like dismantle and like at least
Speaker 1: provide information on it. Well, but then the Madachian society,
Speaker 1: Actually I wonder if these are related. They probably aren't.
Speaker 1: What you just said about the infiltration pretty quickly got
Speaker 1: really normy and middle class and assimilationist. Early Madaschian goals
Speaker 1: were to basically unify homosexuality and see society dramatically transformed
Speaker 1: as a result. Soon enough people were like, actually, I
Speaker 1: just wanted to be legal to get my dick wet,
Speaker 1: which is I'm sure how they phrased it. And so
Speaker 1: they kicked out the founders, including Harry Harry it might
Speaker 1: be that driven out is more accurate. I've read a
Speaker 1: couple the ways of relating it. It seems like maybe
Speaker 1: they all resigned after basically they were told like, get
Speaker 1: the fuck out of here, and so they went a similationist.
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to entirely shit on them or anything,
Speaker 1: but like from and apparently, one thing I heard was
Speaker 1: that they would like invite psychologists to come to meetings
Speaker 1: to talk to everyone about how they were like sick
Speaker 1: and how therapy could help. And it was like and
Speaker 1: they wanted to, you know, they wanted to change the
Speaker 1: laws to make it more okay, but they also like
Speaker 1: were like whatever, I mean, that definitely sounds like an
Speaker 1: infiltrator tactic in my opinion, right, I don't know, it's possible,
Speaker 1: I don't ye. Or it's just like it was so
Speaker 1: hard to keep up being radical that like they had
Speaker 1: to water it down to the most simple thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of those to me, or like, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of things get started by political radicals.
Speaker 1: Both cultural things and political things get started by political
Speaker 1: radicals and then become popular and then as people join it,
Speaker 1: they're there for the like esthetics or they're there for
Speaker 1: in this case, the like society of men, and they're
Speaker 1: not interested in the thing that started at the seed.
Speaker 1: So the machine society adopted non confrontation as a strategy,
Speaker 1: and as far as I'm concerned, non confrontation as a
Speaker 1: non strategy, because strategy is how you do confrontation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: never works. Also, yeah, fucking Quaker ship does not fucking work. No, no.
Speaker 1: And when the Quakers did do good shit, it was
Speaker 1: when they would like smuggle slaves to freedom. Not yeah
Speaker 1: they did stuff, yeah, yeah, exactly, confrontational shit that got
Speaker 1: them killed. Yeah, they were just like pacifists forever they
Speaker 1: had to actually do something. Yeah, I don't know. But
Speaker 1: and what's interesting is when it got more assimilationist, the
Speaker 1: membership actually dropped. People were like, just not as interested,
Speaker 1: I guess. And I think this happens a lot. You know,
Speaker 1: people who are like, oh, we'll reach more people by
Speaker 1: being watered down, and people are like, no, the spiciness
Speaker 1: is what fucking drew us here, right, It's not cool
Speaker 1: to be in that group anymore. It's like NORMI yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Harry Hay He gave an interview in nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: with the progressive that I learned a lot from. If
Speaker 1: you're feeling like reading some fucking wise words, I think
Speaker 1: this is where the battering ram quote comes from too.
Speaker 1: Just look up Harry Hay the Progressive. So what he
Speaker 1: said about all of this assimilation of stuff quote assimilation
Speaker 1: is the way you excuse yourself. It absolutely never worked
Speaker 1: at all. You may not think you are noticeable, but
Speaker 1: they know who you are. They know you're a degenerate,
Speaker 1: and they've never forgotten that. You won't find out until
Speaker 1: the push comes to shove, and then you'll find out
Speaker 1: fast because they're respectable in the eyes of God and
Speaker 1: you aren't. And so the journalist in response, I love
Speaker 1: the way this guy talks. I mean, Harry is a
Speaker 1: fucking poet. Yeah, that's his words are like they make
Speaker 1: me feel things, yeah, and I don't feel anything. So
Speaker 1: and so the journalist is like, no, no, no, like, look,
Speaker 1: we've we've made it. You know, which is funny is
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight we don't have a gay marriage yet, right,
Speaker 1: And he's like, no, we've assimilated whatever they am not
Speaker 1: quoting in paraphrasing. No, we've assimilated. Whenever they want, they
Speaker 1: can rewrite the laws and fuck us up, or to
Speaker 1: quote him, if people become frightened, if something all of
Speaker 1: a sudden goes wrong in our economy, and it can,
Speaker 1: and the preachers start blaming the sin around them on you,
Speaker 1: saying that God's judgment is on you. Little by little,
Speaker 1: they haven't anything to hang on to except that, and
Speaker 1: they'll listen, just as they did in Germany. It may
Speaker 1: take four or five years, but it'll work well. Which
Speaker 1: is that's haunting to hear spelled out that way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's what's happen. Yeah, I mean, it's like fucking
Speaker 1: predicting the future. Yeah. It's also just so silly that
Speaker 1: the people, like the journalist in nineteen ninety eight was like,
Speaker 1: we did it because I'm pretty sure, like note president
Speaker 1: even said the word gay or homosexual until like Obama
Speaker 1: or something. Right, it was just like I have to
Speaker 1: look that up. I'm pretty positive. It was like in
Speaker 1: recent times like the hold on, well, while we're looking
Speaker 1: up the truth, you can learn the truth from these products,
Speaker 1: say services, and we're back. Yes I was correct. President
Speaker 1: Obama was the first president to use the word gay
Speaker 1: in in inaugural address to reference sexual orientation, So fuck yeah,
Speaker 1: that was like ten years after that interview ish, probably
Speaker 1: more because he was probably president for a minute, but
Speaker 1: was an inauguration would have been two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: so yeah, oh yeah, okay, yeah, unless he did any
Speaker 1: second inauguration. But no, I think Harry Hayes's words going
Speaker 1: back to like the actual crux of that stuff before
Speaker 1: the break, it's I don't know, it's it's really it's
Speaker 1: really frightening to see it all spelled out so correctly
Speaker 1: and so scary. It's it's scary to just to read
Speaker 1: and hear and then it's happening. Yeah, it's just like
Speaker 1: I don't know, it drives me insane. No, no, and
Speaker 1: that you know. But it's like, okay, so the lavender
Speaker 1: scare sucked, right, but it wasn't Nazi death camps, and
Speaker 1: so I think that we need to look at the
Speaker 1: bad that's coming. Couldn't be somewhere on a spectrum. Part
Speaker 1: of where we end up on that spectrum is like
Speaker 1: how much we all get together and fight, you know,
Speaker 1: like all of us, like who are marginalized or people
Speaker 1: who care about people are marginalized, how much we work
Speaker 1: together to stop it. I think we can. We can
Speaker 1: have some control. I don't know. I mean, we only try.
Speaker 1: I think. What really scares me is that the technology
Speaker 1: is just like at an astronomical place that it wasn't
Speaker 1: at before. Like people are doing deep fakes of drag
Speaker 1: shows where drag queens are like like I don't know,
Speaker 1: doing like doing things in front of children that they
Speaker 1: weren't doing, and like, I don't know, there's there's all
Speaker 1: these deep fakes that I'm saying there aren't actually true.
Speaker 1: One in particular was like this, all these parents and
Speaker 1: their children are sitting on the floor and it was
Speaker 1: apparently an event with a drag queen reading a story,
Speaker 1: but instead they've made a deep fake with them like
Speaker 1: dancing kind of like risque and all that stuff, and
Speaker 1: it looks real. Yeah, And that's what's scary to me.
Speaker 1: It's like, unless you were told, like pay more attention
Speaker 1: to this, this isn't actually happening. People are gonna like
Speaker 1: see that and like run with it. And that's what's
Speaker 1: scary to me. It's like the control we have is
Speaker 1: so fickle. That's that's I don't know. No, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I sorry, that was just it's gonna be messy. And
Speaker 1: the other future is gonna be fucking complicated. That's what
Speaker 1: that just means. How that's just like emphasizes how important
Speaker 1: it is to actually like fight the good fight and
Speaker 1: like not give it up because then the fucking weirdos
Speaker 1: are gonna win. Yeah, hateful of meanis hateful Meanis I
Speaker 1: really like that? Um? Because I don't want to. I
Speaker 1: don't want to call them weirdos. I think weirds are great.
Speaker 1: And I said hateful so well. The temperamental folks of
Speaker 1: the Matachine Society, Yeah, they keep going and they do
Speaker 1: a lot of work, building connections with other groups. Frank Kameny,
Speaker 1: the guy, the astronomer guy, he gets involved actually before
Speaker 1: the split, UM, and he starts the DC chapter and
Speaker 1: he starts pushing to get DC sodomy laws changed in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, starts pushing. It takes thirty years. The
Speaker 1: laws against sodomy in the District of Columbia weren't taken
Speaker 1: off the books until nineteen ninety three. But he worked
Speaker 1: at it the whole time, right, because I don't want
Speaker 1: to be like earlier. I was like, Oh, they just
Speaker 1: want to get their dicks wet, Like people should be
Speaker 1: allowed to get their dicks with that is like one
Speaker 1: of the base human desires that approximately fifty percent of
Speaker 1: the population has. And like anyway, so the founders who left,
Speaker 1: including Harry, they go on to start another group called
Speaker 1: One Incorporated, which is less metal of a name but
Speaker 1: is fucking weird. One Incorporated, Like, Okay, it's kind of vanilla.
Speaker 1: One Comma Incorporated, I know, but it's vanilla, but it's
Speaker 1: like almost like creepy. The number one spelled out or
Speaker 1: the number one spelled out, yeah spelled out Okay, and
Speaker 1: One Incorporated let women in actually Mattershian Society was letting
Speaker 1: women in by this point too, I think. And One
Speaker 1: Incorporated they found the first LGBT center in the US basically,
Speaker 1: which is their office. It's very similar to what later
Speaker 1: became LGBT social Centers essentially. And in nineteen fifty three
Speaker 1: they published the first pro gay US magazine. It was
Speaker 1: called One, which is a fucking culty name, no shade,
Speaker 1: but that is fucking culty. They got the name from
Speaker 1: the fact that gays referred to each other as one
Speaker 1: of us, huh and interesting. Their magazine got banned from
Speaker 1: being mailed in nineteen fifty three, same year that it
Speaker 1: made because it was obscene and it had an article
Speaker 1: about gay men and straight marriages and that was what
Speaker 1: was obscene, apparently, And they sued and five years later
Speaker 1: they won the right to mail their magazine. So the
Speaker 1: entire fucking fifties, but the place that One incorporated got
Speaker 1: its money. This is one of my favorite stories of
Speaker 1: all of this. I'd never heard of this guy. There's
Speaker 1: this transman philanthropist. His name is read Ericson. Read Ericson.
Speaker 1: He you know, he inherited his dad's company and he
Speaker 1: invested in real estate and a success successful business man,
Speaker 1: and he you know, made a bunch of money. He
Speaker 1: gave a bunch of money away his legal transition. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, he's a trans transmasculin person. Helps set precedent
Speaker 1: in Louisiana in the fifties about how to get your
Speaker 1: ID change all that shit. But he also used the
Speaker 1: fact that he was rich to be weird, which is
Speaker 1: objectively what you should do when you are rich. The
Speaker 1: only thing you should do when you have money is
Speaker 1: to do that, yeah, be fucking weird, yeah, and help people.
Speaker 1: But you know, yeah, yeah, well he did both. And
Speaker 1: that's what's so cool about him. Like yeah. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: I'm sure his businesses did bad things, but but he
Speaker 1: was really good to his pet leopard named Henry. Repeat,
Speaker 1: what were time? His pet leopard named Henry Henry? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Yes, I mean I heard you that
Speaker 1: time for a real but I needed to hear it back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're time. Yeah, Okay, that's that's a rich ass think
Speaker 1: if I've ever heard of. That's just that's something you
Speaker 1: would only do with an obscene amount of money. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's got a fucking pet leopard named Henry. Yeah, who
Speaker 1: came with him everywhere, including on airplanes. No, I assume
Speaker 1: they were a private jet. I assume it was a
Speaker 1: private jet. That's a well trained leopard. I mean, in
Speaker 1: my head, like the leopard fights back eventually and like
Speaker 1: eats him by. This is just like the kind of
Speaker 1: animal revenge story that probably never happened. Friends for life.
Speaker 1: What it feels really good? Yeah? No, maybe it's like
Speaker 1: Calvin and Hobbs, they were like close. Oh um, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't really treated is he a leopard?
Speaker 1: Now he's a tiger? On? Oh he's a tiger okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: you know my mind for a second. Um, oh my god, yeah. No. Um.
Speaker 1: The other thing he did was financed a ton of
Speaker 1: LGPT stuff, including one incorporated and various gender identity clinics
Speaker 1: throughout the country. I think more or less, if you
Speaker 1: were a trans person in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
Speaker 1: it was read Ericson who was paying the people who
Speaker 1: were helping take care of you. That's pretty cool. They published,
Speaker 1: He financed a ton of information and counseling resources for
Speaker 1: trans people. They published pamphlets about how to access resources,
Speaker 1: all that shit. And then he died. How every in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two, he was in his seventies and he
Speaker 1: was a fugitive from justice from the US for drug
Speaker 1: charges because he used drugs recreationally, and so he was
Speaker 1: hiding out in Mexico and that's where he died. That's
Speaker 1: just the fact that he used drugs recreationally and that
Speaker 1: was what made him go into hiding is one depressing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but two, I mean, seventiesel, it's a long life. It's
Speaker 1: longer than most. So now he did great, he did.
Speaker 1: He did a lot. He did a lot. If you're
Speaker 1: going to be a capitalist, be read Ericson, yes. And
Speaker 1: if you're going to get a leopard and help people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all you can do. Yeah. And also I would argue,
Speaker 1: I think if you're a rich guy with a pet leopard,
Speaker 1: your us of dying in Mexico as a fugitive go
Speaker 1: up to eighty. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's so. Uh. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I want to happen to that leopard. I
Speaker 1: wonder what the leopard's name was. I'm getting off a
Speaker 1: tangent just because I'm imagining this man like with a
Speaker 1: leopard next to him. Wait, the leopard's name was Henry.
Speaker 1: Oh you did tell me? God damn, my brain is
Speaker 1: really on display in this episode, and I want everyone
Speaker 1: to take pity on me. I know someone else is
Speaker 1: out there that is as dumb as I am. So
Speaker 1: I'm representing that one person. Both Mashing and One Incorporated
Speaker 1: provided material support for another group, the first lesbian political
Speaker 1: organization in the US, which had another sick fucking name,
Speaker 1: The Daughters of belitis Um sometimes the Daughter of Bliss.
Speaker 1: It's sometimes called d OB or the Daughters. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell you what the name comes from. On Wednesday. Oh
Speaker 1: what a Cliffhanker. That was great. Thanks, they have to
Speaker 1: come back. I know you're gonna need to know where
Speaker 1: the daughter can't google? Thank God forbid. Don't google until Wednesday,
Speaker 1: yeah or at all. Yeah, but what people should google
Speaker 1: is sharene UNEs. No, No, you shouldn't. Don't do that.
Speaker 1: But you can follow me on the internet if you
Speaker 1: want to. My Twitter is shiro Hero six six six
Speaker 1: and my Instagram is just shiro Hero. I'm around sometimes.
Speaker 1: That's that's about it. Have you ever googled your name
Speaker 1: plus controversy? No, but now I will. I haven't either.
Speaker 1: All right, well, ye see you all. Oms As to
Speaker 1: plug things, I have another podcast. It's called live like
Speaker 1: Doorld's Dyne. If you think things are bad, I do too.
Speaker 1: I have a podcast about how to get prepared and
Speaker 1: get together with your friends. Don't live like Doorld's Dyne.
Speaker 1: We'll see you on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 1: Stop is a production of cool Zone Media. Or more
Speaker 1: podcast on Coolzone Media. Visit our website coool Zonemedia dot com,
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