Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
Speaker 1: podcast about history and stuff and people and subjective qualities
Speaker 1: like coolness. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. My guest is
Speaker 1: not subjectively cool because she's objectively cool anymore. After an
Speaker 1: introduction like that, anyone who gets introduced is less cool.
Speaker 1: But it's not their fault. It's my fault. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: really set me up for failure that one. This is Sharid.
Speaker 1: I am back. You're welcome. Yay. This week we are
Speaker 1: running Rudderless without our captain slash producer Sophie, which means
Speaker 1: we can finally tell you about the basement full of
Speaker 1: You can't say that on Mike, Margaret, I mean, you
Speaker 1: know who doesn't want you to know about it is.
Speaker 1: But also we can talk about fucking gay rights, not
Speaker 1: because Sophie would let us talk about this. Also, just
Speaker 1: to be clear, I'm not trying to drive so for here.
Speaker 1: This is part two of a four part series, so
Speaker 1: you're gonna be a little bit confused. If you don't
Speaker 1: go back and listen to the part one, you'll have
Speaker 1: missed out on the guy with the leopard who founded
Speaker 1: funded like most of the transhit in US for decades.
Speaker 1: You all got to listen to that. You have to,
Speaker 1: you have to. You'll have to learn about Henry, Henry,
Speaker 1: gay rights, Henry the Leopard right Henry. He also funded
Speaker 1: the Dun Dun Dun, the Daughters of Belitis. And if
Speaker 1: you've been following along and listened and did not google
Speaker 1: anything today, you will learn what that name means. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna learn what that name means because I was a
Speaker 1: good listener and didn't google anything since Monday. Thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to make everyone wait a little bit longer
Speaker 1: as we go on a side quest. A tangent on
Speaker 1: this show that's unheard of, but don't worry. It's about
Speaker 1: a lesbian crime lady, and it's good that's allowed. The
Speaker 1: Daughters of Belitis were a response to lesbian bar culture
Speaker 1: in the Bay. And which is the Bay of California?
Speaker 1: What is the name of bay? San Francisco Bay. I'm
Speaker 1: definitely well traveled. So let's talk about lesbian bars because
Speaker 1: most gay bars at the time were criminal enterprises in
Speaker 1: plenty more ways than one, because it was like illegal
Speaker 1: to be gay but also run by criminals. Tommy Vassou
Speaker 1: like cool criminals are like both, Yeah, and sometimes people
Speaker 1: who are like both at once and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I wish that didn't turn me on. I do not
Speaker 1: feel good about myself, like a big like anti hero
Speaker 1: kind of guy. Yeah, person a lot of anti heroes.
Speaker 1: Gay rights was brought to you by the anti hero. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a couple unabashed good people. But if you're being
Speaker 1: faced with like terrible shit, you know, at least like
Speaker 1: adopt some terrible shit. I don't think gir survive. I
Speaker 1: really think that's like my honest opinion. I think so too.
Speaker 1: Tommy Vassou was a butch lesbian gangster who moved to
Speaker 1: San Francisco in the forties from the Midwest. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: use she pronouns because those are very cool altogether. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she she lived her life as a man, but I
Speaker 1: believe identified with butch culture. Um. She was born in Ohio.
Speaker 1: She lived in Michigan for a while. She moved to
Speaker 1: San Francisco and immediately set about living her best life,
Speaker 1: which means that she had short hair. She wore double
Speaker 1: breasted suits with Fedora's. She drove a fucking Catalac convertible.
Speaker 1: She passed as a man completely. She used the men's restrooms,
Speaker 1: and she was big in the crime scene doing crime stuff.
Speaker 1: Love all that for her. Yeah, she was a pimp.
Speaker 1: She dated sex workers. I don't know one way or
Speaker 1: the other about how she treated them. I know that
Speaker 1: at least some of them she made her business partners
Speaker 1: and such. That's a good sign, I know. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: good as far as pimpsco. Yeah, Like she could have
Speaker 1: been absolutely awful to her other workers. I have no idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know. Later she was a drug dealer, selling emphetamine's,
Speaker 1: weed and heroin. It's implied that that came later, But
Speaker 1: I think people might have been implying that later because
Speaker 1: people don't want any People really want to whitewash gay history,
Speaker 1: even when it comes like why is drugs the line
Speaker 1: that's so interesting to me? You know, there's a couple
Speaker 1: lines they see people like avoid a lot um. The
Speaker 1: people who seem to be written out of these stories
Speaker 1: are the mafia, especially the gay members of the gay
Speaker 1: the gay gangsters. Those are the people I want to
Speaker 1: learn about. Are you kidding? I've got some more in here, good,
Speaker 1: good good. The sex workers, the drug dealers and drug
Speaker 1: users and the prisoners are the people who are all
Speaker 1: left out of this story. They're not good for the
Speaker 1: image what they think anyway. Yeah, and so then they'll
Speaker 1: include people and be like, oh, this person who was
Speaker 1: like a drag queen and be like she was also
Speaker 1: on heroin and selling sex. That doesn't make her less cool,
Speaker 1: It makes her more cool of anything. Yeah, not the
Speaker 1: heroine's cool. Yeah no, yeah, it's it's a I think
Speaker 1: it just like makes someone layered and more were interesting
Speaker 1: to know that, like they weren't this one dimensional activist
Speaker 1: person right totally. It's like when we look back on
Speaker 1: the like fucking um opiate crisis that we're still in,
Speaker 1: you know, people will be like, oh and then these
Speaker 1: people who were harm reduction volunteers for no reason, You're like,
Speaker 1: because they were fucking dealing with it themselves. Not everyone, right,
Speaker 1: but like yeah, yeah, it's like I honestly think some
Speaker 1: of that stuff unfortunately, Like whether it's like addiction or
Speaker 1: even just like recovering from addiction, I think your empathy
Speaker 1: goes like out the wind, like it just goes way up.
Speaker 1: Like I think it just like kind of makes you
Speaker 1: a more sometimes anyway, that's my experience, but it makes
Speaker 1: you more. But if you're someone who's dealing with that.
Speaker 1: You're saying, Yeah, sorry, I was gonna say out the window,
Speaker 1: but I meant like out like up and out the windows,
Speaker 1: the opposite of what I meant. Yeah, But like I think,
Speaker 1: I really think it makes you more empathetic and more
Speaker 1: like emotionally aware and probably like I don't know, not
Speaker 1: that I mean, I don't think anyone should do heroin
Speaker 1: just like to put it out their point play. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I do think that sometimes addiction has like a human,
Speaker 1: like a really human aspect to it that I don't
Speaker 1: think is like talked about enough. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Well. I think that also, like it
Speaker 1: puts you into understanding the needs for need of community,
Speaker 1: you know, they need to like take care of each
Speaker 1: other and like, yeah, the people who reverse the most
Speaker 1: overdoses are our users, you know whom And that gets
Speaker 1: left out of the story. Yeah, go ahead. I think
Speaker 1: it teaches you to depend on people without shame, like
Speaker 1: hopefully you know, and I think that's really hard for people. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So Tommy, Tommy and her girlfriend owned a bar called
Speaker 1: Tommy's Place. They had a different bar before that and
Speaker 1: it moved, but Tommy's Place was next door to and
Speaker 1: basically the same bar as another lesbian bar they also owned,
Speaker 1: called twelve Adler Place. The liquor license was in her
Speaker 1: girlfriend's name, which is how I know that her her
Speaker 1: girlfriend slash client, was a business partner. The local license
Speaker 1: was in her girlfriend's name because Tommy's criminal record meant
Speaker 1: she couldn't get one, and Tommy is the first openly
Speaker 1: lesbian bar owner in the city. San Francisco is the
Speaker 1: place to be gay in the fifties, and there's other
Speaker 1: La Chicago, New York, a bunch of other places, some
Speaker 1: cool shit going on too, but San Francisco had a
Speaker 1: lot going on for it to be gay in the fifties,
Speaker 1: partly because the Beat generation had been pretty openly pro
Speaker 1: gay and or written about how great gay sex is
Speaker 1: all the time. And there are a ton of these
Speaker 1: gay bars. But of course, because it's all these gay bars,
Speaker 1: there's the forces of reaction. The cops and the boring
Speaker 1: people didn't like all these homos moving to town. I
Speaker 1: love that you said cops and boring people. They are
Speaker 1: they're fucking boring. Yeah, And you get this moral panic right,
Speaker 1: because it's like, because straight people aren't boring. Homophobes are boring?
Speaker 1: Yeah kidding? Is they get this moral panic because nothing
Speaker 1: ever changes. Some parents got freaked out that their daughters
Speaker 1: were going to Tommy's place and getting involved in the
Speaker 1: butch and fem culture, and how some of them wore
Speaker 1: mannished clothes and called themselves either butch or fem. This
Speaker 1: is the thing I don't quite have time to go into.
Speaker 1: I would recommend everyone read the book Stone Butch Blues
Speaker 1: by Leslie Feinberg to talk about what it meant to
Speaker 1: be pre Stonewall going to gay bars and like what
Speaker 1: the lesbian culture around butch and fem was basically kind
Speaker 1: of created these two genders where they would date and
Speaker 1: things like that. That's interesting, Okay, very quick, very quick
Speaker 1: side note. There's a book called Hejab Butch Blues, a memoir.
Speaker 1: Ooh and I directed the audio book if y'all want
Speaker 1: to listen. I think it's a really amazing book. It
Speaker 1: was one of those like there's so many things that
Speaker 1: I was just like, wow, this puts into words what
Speaker 1: I felt. But talks about how like like for her
Speaker 1: as a Muslim person, like God was like a non
Speaker 1: binary like entity versus just like a he or a she,
Speaker 1: and the way she describes it as like he's both
Speaker 1: or God is both, the same way she is both.
Speaker 1: I think it's just like there's a really beautiful way
Speaker 1: she says it that I can't articulate, But if you're
Speaker 1: interested in that kind of stuff, I really do recommend it.
Speaker 1: And I directed the audiobook, so that's fun. That fucking rules.
Speaker 1: I'm actually gonna most of the stuff I read that
Speaker 1: as in a history book. I listened to an audiobook,
Speaker 1: so hell yeah, and Stone which blues like shaped so
Speaker 1: much of my like young queer life by coming to
Speaker 1: understand like some stuff. And yeah, I mean if I
Speaker 1: had red cut stuff like that growing up, it would
Speaker 1: have really helped me not feel like a fucking freak,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, I believe it. So you get
Speaker 1: this moral panic nineteen fifty four, the police is like,
Speaker 1: the police chief is like, we gotta stop all these homosexuals.
Speaker 1: So they started arresting people in bars and parks and
Speaker 1: shit like that. On September eighth, nineteen fifty four, the
Speaker 1: SFPD raided Tommy's Place in twelve Adler Place, and the
Speaker 1: charges are around drugs. A heroine kid was found. People
Speaker 1: claim as planted. I literally don't know or care. The
Speaker 1: media refers to the place as a vice academy because
Speaker 1: it's convincing young girls to act manish and do drugs
Speaker 1: and shit. And I know you're thinking, you're like, you know,
Speaker 1: the police are raiding this place. I bet there's some
Speaker 1: way that they can arrest a straight black man and
Speaker 1: pin everything on him. Oh no, uh yeah. The media
Speaker 1: was also like, it's a way to lure young white
Speaker 1: girls into sleeping with black men, to go to this
Speaker 1: wow gay bar. That's one way to really get some
Speaker 1: bigots up in arms. Oh god, huh. And they referred
Speaker 1: to it as white slavery and that's so fun. Sorry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of been repeated in recent times, just the
Speaker 1: idea of white oppression, and it's just laughable every time.
Speaker 1: But I know, I like, there's so many things wrong
Speaker 1: with the words white white slavery. Yeah, because some of
Speaker 1: them include the word for that is slavery. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: it's not worse when it happens to white people. Another
Speaker 1: thing wrong with it is it's often code for we
Speaker 1: hate sex workers. There's anyway, Yeah, yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: that's that's a that's a loaded thing. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: implying that slavery means black enslavement by saying white in
Speaker 1: front of I mean that's already like a yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a can of worms so canceled nineteen fifties media in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Um, but I mean, actually, yeah, fuck them.
Speaker 1: But then okay, you're gonna have some listeners being like
Speaker 1: my ancestors were Irish and they were enslaved, and they
Speaker 1: were white. So there's always that person that's like reminds
Speaker 1: you of the white people that were slaves, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: which does not include the Irish and the United States
Speaker 1: of America as someone of Irish descent, it does include Now,
Speaker 1: if you're saying that because your family is in like
Speaker 1: fourteenth century Iceland, you might be telling the truth. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of Irish slave very, and like some
Speaker 1: port the founding of Iceland was like I think forty
Speaker 1: Irish slaves. Anyway, I mean, I just I have genuinely
Speaker 1: had a person I know that looked like the most
Speaker 1: aryan person I've ever met in my life, with like
Speaker 1: a very like just a bunch of privilege, kind of
Speaker 1: like counteract an argument I made about racism, because he
Speaker 1: was like, my family were slaves, and I'm like, what
Speaker 1: the fuck are you talking about? And that was my
Speaker 1: first experience, like fifteen years ago with the idea that
Speaker 1: people genuinely cling to that as far as like I
Speaker 1: was oppressed too, because people why why people just like
Speaker 1: want to be oppressed so bad they do because whiteness
Speaker 1: is the eradication of culture in exchange for privilege. And
Speaker 1: people on a gut level. Don't get me wrong, these
Speaker 1: people are doing bad when they say shit like this,
Speaker 1: But on a gut level, people are like, I want
Speaker 1: to have a culture instead of this privilege, and so
Speaker 1: like they want to trade it, and it's just like
Speaker 1: we don't get to make that decision, right, but we
Speaker 1: can like whatever. Yeah, as a whole other fucker, I mean,
Speaker 1: I just like what you said. I'm gonna remember that
Speaker 1: whiteness is the eradication of culture because you've put into
Speaker 1: words something that is very true. Maybe it's been said
Speaker 1: before and I just haven't been paying attention, but I
Speaker 1: like that you said it because now I know it. Thanks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's like part of the whole like thing about
Speaker 1: like you know, when we say like get rid of whiteness,
Speaker 1: we don't mean get rid of white people. We mean,
Speaker 1: get rid of whiteness. We get get rid of this
Speaker 1: like weird Devil's bargain where suddenly you don't have an ethnicity,
Speaker 1: you're just privileged, and like get rid of white privilege
Speaker 1: and like I don't know whatever. Um, okay, very quick
Speaker 1: side note. Actually, though, I'm gonna get hate for that everybody. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm already gonna hate for what I yep. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: there's a Vastard's episode that I was on. Was it
Speaker 1: on Bastards? Okay, there's a whole thread on Reddit that
Speaker 1: says that I hate white people, that I'm racist against
Speaker 1: white people, and I want all white people to die
Speaker 1: because I said that white people ruined yoga or like
Speaker 1: something like that, and that just like became a whole
Speaker 1: beast on its own where I don't know how that happened,
Speaker 1: but there's like people are defensive about that stuff. As
Speaker 1: what I'm trying to say, the fact that like you
Speaker 1: can say whiteness and kind of try to equate it
Speaker 1: to like this eradication, and then someone jumps on that
Speaker 1: and like thinks, I want to like genocide white people.
Speaker 1: Just an interesting point in men genocide white people and men.
Speaker 1: That's the that's what the threat is about. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's anyways, that's such a funny, funny, good story that
Speaker 1: I put through. I'm sorry, that's okay, that's funny. Though.
Speaker 1: After this raid, patrons were forced to testify against the
Speaker 1: bar or go to jail themselves. Um. One of the bartenders,
Speaker 1: a white woman, got six months for serving beard of miners,
Speaker 1: a black man who was a regular there. This is
Speaker 1: the this is the person that the whole scare was around.
Speaker 1: He got five years for supplying marijuana to a miner
Speaker 1: um so ten times the sentence and the bar's liquor
Speaker 1: license was revoked and the bar closed. And the whole
Speaker 1: thing was this, like, but young people come here and drink.
Speaker 1: There was this girl who claimed that she'd been drinking
Speaker 1: here since she was thirteen, which is probably true. She
Speaker 1: was drinking at every bar in San Francisco when she
Speaker 1: was thirteen, and she said as much, and they closed
Speaker 1: this one down because it was gay. Wow, Tommy. The
Speaker 1: rest of to fast forward her life, And if you
Speaker 1: fast forward anyone's life, it sounds bad because then you're like,
Speaker 1: and then they'd die, you know, right right, right right, Tommy,
Speaker 1: got arrested nineteen sixty eight, so ten years later for dealing.
Speaker 1: Fourteen years later, got arrested for dealing, spent five years
Speaker 1: in prison, and then was murdered in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: And I could not find out. Someone knows, but I
Speaker 1: did not was. Now they will find out whether it's
Speaker 1: a hate crime thing or a europe A gangster. And
Speaker 1: you do prom for a living and terrible way to
Speaker 1: go either way. Yeah, totally. Her spot wasn't the only
Speaker 1: gay bar in San Francisco, not in the slightest. You
Speaker 1: have a diner called the Paper Doll, which is mostly
Speaker 1: a lesbian spot that was so crowded they cramped strangers
Speaker 1: into the booths with you, which sounds like hell to me,
Speaker 1: but it was a good way for people to meet
Speaker 1: each other. You had Gordon's, a mostly gay male spot
Speaker 1: opened by a guy who had worked for the Paper Doll.
Speaker 1: Because LGBT people, but we belong together. We care for
Speaker 1: each other, you know, we help each other start our
Speaker 1: own things. You had the Beige Room, which was a
Speaker 1: drag theater with trapeez swings hanging from the ceiling, and
Speaker 1: tourist buses stopped at this place, which was actually apparently
Speaker 1: a common source of income for fifties and sixties gay
Speaker 1: bars across the country, as tourists would come and be like,
Speaker 1: hell yeah, drag because drags fucking cool. Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: you had the front, another lesbian owned bar, and the
Speaker 1: front was really interesting. It's kind of the inverse of
Speaker 1: Tommy's Place because Charlotte Coleman she had been in the
Speaker 1: Coastguard and then she was an auditor for the IRS.
Speaker 1: So she's like normy right until the lavender scare got
Speaker 1: her fired from working as an auditor for the IRS.
Speaker 1: That's gonna turn you, that's gonna turn you. In the end,
Speaker 1: she was glad she was fired. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I doubt she was like man, the lavender scare rules,
Speaker 1: but she certainly was happier as a bar owner in
Speaker 1: San Francisco instead of an auditor for the I R. S.
Speaker 1: And when she opened the front, she ran the entire
Speaker 1: thing herself, with no employees noon till close, seven days
Speaker 1: a week. And in order to avoid what Tommy's Placed did,
Speaker 1: I assume Tommy's Places paid off the cops. I couldn't
Speaker 1: promise you that, but what she did in order to
Speaker 1: avoid attention was she opened it in the industrial district,
Speaker 1: like in a warehouse somewhere, and what that meant was
Speaker 1: that working class men would stop by and get a
Speaker 1: drink on their way home from work, and they were
Speaker 1: all buds. This part so heartwarming. The working classmen, they
Speaker 1: never disparagingly, like they weren't harassing them. But they called
Speaker 1: the lesbians the fruit. So the lesbians called them the vegetables.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, and that is the most precious thing
Speaker 1: you've ever said on this rock. And then when ship
Speaker 1: would break, the like worker dudes would just like go
Speaker 1: fix shit for free at their favorite bar, the lesbian
Speaker 1: bar in the warehouse district, and yeah, a vegetable is
Speaker 1: going to help them out. That is so funny. You
Speaker 1: know that one guy walked in there and was like,
Speaker 1: I'm the meat and people are like get out, yeah,
Speaker 1: or one person was like, I'm a tomato and then
Speaker 1: they were like that actually means you're a fruit, and
Speaker 1: just the long pause that they were like, yeah, he
Speaker 1: got wrong. And then she came out as a trans
Speaker 1: exactly so. And one of the front's first events was
Speaker 1: a benefit for the lesbian organization. I've twenty minutes in
Speaker 1: this episode promised, I'm gonna tell you about that's how
Speaker 1: my braid works. It's just like I was on a ride.
Speaker 1: I was on a different ride. But yes, I can't wait. Well,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to wait after these ads and we're back.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, there was a Filipino lesbian named
Speaker 1: Rose Bamburger and she decided with her partner that they
Speaker 1: needed a lesbian social club. They were tired of only
Speaker 1: hanging out in bars. I really can't blame them, and
Speaker 1: they got together with three other lesbian couples because lesbians, yeah,
Speaker 1: And on September twenty first, nineteen fifty five, they were like,
Speaker 1: what is the gayest name we could possibly imagine for
Speaker 1: our new social club. I don't know if that's actually
Speaker 1: what they said, but they came up with the gayest name.
Speaker 1: They picked Daughters of Belitis, based on a book called
Speaker 1: the Songs of Belitis, which is a French nineteenth century
Speaker 1: lesbian poetry book written by a guy named Pierre Louis,
Speaker 1: who probably banged Oscar Wilde but was definitely friends with
Speaker 1: Oscar Wilde, yeah probably, and who wrote about pagan sexuality
Speaker 1: aka gay sex all the time. But he also wrote
Speaker 1: this book Songs of Belitis, which he claimed weren't written
Speaker 1: by him, but instead were ancient Greek lesbian poetry that
Speaker 1: would found on the walls and of a tomb in Cyprus,
Speaker 1: written up by a made up ancient Greek lesbian poet
Speaker 1: named Belitis, who was contemporaries with Sappho, the ancient Greek
Speaker 1: Greek penn sexual whose life is the reason we have
Speaker 1: the word safik and lesbians because she lived on the
Speaker 1: island of Lesbos. So the book when it came out,
Speaker 1: Songs of Belitis, it was so successful that people thought
Speaker 1: it was actually an ancient Greek poetry thing for a while.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether eventually it was like surprise, bitch,
Speaker 1: is this to me? Or like, yeah, but I already
Speaker 1: had made it smart at that point. Yeah. And because
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century rules in weird interconnected ways, Claude Debussy,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite composers, wrote a bunch of songs
Speaker 1: from those Songs of Belitis into actual songs, and his
Speaker 1: dad fought in the Paris Commune, which you can listen
Speaker 1: about with my episode with Miriam Roscheck about the Paris
Speaker 1: Everything Connected. I know, Daughters of Belus, Yeah, which just
Speaker 1: sounds like they belong in Vampire the Masquerade, and I'm
Speaker 1: not convinced they aren't vampires. They formed a dads of belitis.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just imagined like a bunch of badass
Speaker 1: like Joan of Arc people, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: That's that's where my head goes. Oh yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: like chainmail and shit. Yeah, just like fucking into it.
Speaker 1: And they about their weird name. Some of the founders said, quote,
Speaker 1: if anyone asked us, we could always say we belong
Speaker 1: to a poetry club. And they had four goals besides socializing.
Speaker 1: One education of the variant, which was their word for
Speaker 1: temperamental love it. Two education of the public. Three participation
Speaker 1: in research projects. They were into the idea that they
Speaker 1: would all go volunteer for these like human sexuality subjects
Speaker 1: and studies in order to prove that they're normal, you know,
Speaker 1: and for investigation of the California penal code. And they
Speaker 1: got support from the Matachine Society and I believe also
Speaker 1: One Incorporated. They shared an office with them on Mission Street.
Speaker 1: Madaschine not one, and they kind of similarly to Madachine,
Speaker 1: took their super cool name and mission and went really
Speaker 1: assimilationist with it, no say so. They encourage people to
Speaker 1: dress and act normal. Several of the founders left when
Speaker 1: they shifted away from their original purpose. But in this case,
Speaker 1: the original purpose was social club and then it became
Speaker 1: more activist. So a lot of the founders left, and
Speaker 1: they they made a magazine called The Ladder starting nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six, using machines mimeograph machine. The Ladder like a
Speaker 1: like a climate of tools. Yeah, yeah, it's not a tool.
Speaker 1: What am I saying? It's just sort of a what
Speaker 1: is it called? What would you what are the massive objects? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I know, it's the Ladder. And they made this magazine
Speaker 1: and like, as far as I could tell, the point
Speaker 1: of making this magazine at first was to convince like
Speaker 1: lonely rural queer ladies to come move to San Francisco
Speaker 1: to expand their dating pool. I mean, I love that.
Speaker 1: Love that's that was thought about, because I'm sure there
Speaker 1: were so many of those people that were just like
Speaker 1: waiting for the correct thing to just like jump on.
Speaker 1: But also fact I respect the effort. I respect the
Speaker 1: effort for sure. Yeah. Here's a quote from their first issue,
Speaker 1: What will be the Lot of the Future Lesbian Fear scorn.
Speaker 1: This need not be if lethargy is supplanted with an
Speaker 1: energized constructive program, if cowardice gives way to the solidarity
Speaker 1: of a cooperative front. Wait, can you repeat that? I
Speaker 1: want to hear that poetry? Yeah, what will be the
Speaker 1: loss of the future lesbian fear scorn? This need not
Speaker 1: be if lethargy is supplanted by an energized constructive program,
Speaker 1: if cowardice gives way to the solidarity of a cooperative front.
Speaker 1: M Basically, it's like, we fucking work together, we can
Speaker 1: fucking do this shit. Yeah, that sounds like it would
Speaker 1: be like from the Daughters of Belitas, just like the
Speaker 1: way it is worded. Yeah, I know, I know. And
Speaker 1: the art on this magazine rules and it's worth looking at.
Speaker 1: It was eventually subtitled a Lesbian Review, the first time
Speaker 1: in a magazine in the US used the word lesbian
Speaker 1: like in its titling, and they ran a mail order
Speaker 1: for her to find lesbian books. They held the first
Speaker 1: lesbian convention in the US, though cops came and made
Speaker 1: sure no one was cross dressing. That's the weirdest whatever,
Speaker 1: fucking cops. Yeah, and they organized lesbians to participate in
Speaker 1: psychological studies, and then in the latter one of the
Speaker 1: things that they did was spread information on how to
Speaker 1: handle arrests. Quote, don't plead guilty, call your attorney, don't
Speaker 1: volunteer information. In fact, don't talk to anyone about anything
Speaker 1: that holds up. That's good advice. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: that's like, that's what we tell people now. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: they had listicles like imagine this on the check outstand,
Speaker 1: thirteen ways a woman can assert her rights in case
Speaker 1: of arrest. Wow, their numbers, but that's just like, that's
Speaker 1: those are the tabloids that I want back, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean? I want those instead of Star. Yeah, like, yeah, anyways,
Speaker 1: I respect them. I respect that well. In episode four,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about a queer organization called Star Don't worry,
Speaker 1: Oh Street Trensvestite Action Revolutionaries. Wow. Oh, it's like a
Speaker 1: good acronym. Yeah, that's fucking sick. Yeah, I love an acronym.
Speaker 1: Their numbers never get really high. The daughter's politism. A
Speaker 1: bunch of different explanations are offered not by them, but
Speaker 1: by like future historians or whatever. It was mostly for
Speaker 1: middle class folks, predominantly white, but not overwhelmingly, so there's
Speaker 1: very explicit racial inclusion. Many of its founders were Filipino,
Speaker 1: or at least one of the founders of Filippine. I've
Speaker 1: heard that two of them were. It's some of its
Speaker 1: leaders were people of color. They had a black president
Speaker 1: for a while. They were trying yeah, most Yeah, and
Speaker 1: frankly ahead of the curve for fifties and sixties for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have to remind myself that that's that's the decade
Speaker 1: it was in, because in my head it was like,
Speaker 1: without realizing it, I'm like, oh, seventies or like eighties
Speaker 1: or whatever. But the fact that it was so long
Speaker 1: ago is even more impressive. Yeah, but the assimilationist model
Speaker 1: of it just didn't really light a spark in people.
Speaker 1: And they talk a bunch of shit on butches and
Speaker 1: gay bars, which is like where more of the lesbian
Speaker 1: cultures is happening. By the mid sixties, both the Daughters
Speaker 1: of Bilitis and Matachine are both getting a little bit
Speaker 1: more Actually society needs serious changing, and so they do
Speaker 1: start getting a little bit more radical in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: or they get more political. I guess it's a better
Speaker 1: way to say it. In nineteen sixty four, the daughters
Speaker 1: picketed a cathedral because a church guy inside had yelled
Speaker 1: at another church guy for supporting queers, because actually religion
Speaker 1: has never been united on the issues of gay people
Speaker 1: in one direction or the other. And these groups all
Speaker 1: together they get called the homophile movement movement. They used
Speaker 1: the word homophile to emphasize that it was about love,
Speaker 1: which is sweet, But could you imagine the fucking discourse,
Speaker 1: like if this was on Twitter? Like right, so you've
Speaker 1: got another one of these groups around at this time.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's more, but this one also had a
Speaker 1: really metal name, the Janis Society JA and U Jis.
Speaker 1: Could you imagine showing up at the like the big group,
Speaker 1: the big thing that collected all the homophile groups is
Speaker 1: called Echo. I think the East Coast homophile organizations are
Speaker 1: least the eascast ones were. But could you imagine showing
Speaker 1: up as like the Delaware Association of Guys who like
Speaker 1: fucking other guys and everyone else is like Obliviator, the
Speaker 1: Society of Destroyers. First of their name, you're Janis. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Janis Society was a Philly area group that
Speaker 1: had both men and women and They got their name
Speaker 1: from the Roman god Janis, who had two faces, and
Speaker 1: as the god of dualities and beginnings and endings and
Speaker 1: just all kinds of metal shit. In nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: Janus societal with a you yeah, Janis like ja and
Speaker 1: you ask like the fucking movie logo. Okay, finally I
Speaker 1: put together saying with that reference, I'm an idiot. I
Speaker 1: was thinking of the white woman's name Janis this whole time.
Speaker 1: But Janis is a really cool god. Yeah you say that,
Speaker 1: and it's the fucking logo from that really cool company.
Speaker 1: So anyway, but yeah, I don't know a company. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a like a restoring or like film company
Speaker 1: that like just do some really cool shit and like
Speaker 1: helps restore old films. But logo itself is like a
Speaker 1: two headed like a coin that has like two heads
Speaker 1: on it. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Cool. In nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: they held us sit in just like straight up at
Speaker 1: a lunch counter in Philly. We're queer people and cross dressers.
Speaker 1: We were being refused service. After about one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty queer people had been denied service at this lunch counter.
Speaker 1: Three teenagers, two boys, and one girl. Just sat the
Speaker 1: fuck down and refused to leave, and they were arrested.
Speaker 1: So then the president of the Janis Society, Clark Pollack,
Speaker 1: he's a gay Jewish man and we're talking more about
Speaker 1: him in a second. He got arrested next. During this
Speaker 1: he just went and was like, all right, you're gonna
Speaker 1: arrest these kids, You're gonna arrest me. So then three
Speaker 1: more people come in and sit down, and this time
Speaker 1: the cops refused to arrest them, and eventually the place
Speaker 1: had to start serving queers, I think. But if nothing else,
Speaker 1: they stopped arresting them, stopped kicking them out right. Janis Society,
Speaker 1: in particular, that guy, Clark Pollak. They published a magazine
Speaker 1: called Drum, which was a gay magazine that got its
Speaker 1: name just like the sources of all their names. No, fascinating, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to know. It got its name from that
Speaker 1: book Walden by Throw, and it includes this quote in
Speaker 1: every issue from that book. If a man does not
Speaker 1: keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he
Speaker 1: hears the beat of a different drummer. And in this case,
Speaker 1: the beat that this magazine heard was hot naked guys.
Speaker 1: I love that these names have these like very deep
Speaker 1: meanings that like you only know if you were in
Speaker 1: on it. Yeah, I love that, And I don't know
Speaker 1: the latter's meaning. I looked a little bit, but I
Speaker 1: couldn't find it. I'm sure if I read an entire
Speaker 1: book about the Daughters Blow to Right, I would know.
Speaker 1: So this becomes the most popular game magazine in the
Speaker 1: country because has hot naked guys in it. It also
Speaker 1: gets in a lot of trouble. Its other motto was
Speaker 1: less poetic and just as cool, put the sex back
Speaker 1: into homosexuality. So you know where they would have been
Speaker 1: in the Twitter discourse. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: This scot Clark pullack A rested and sent to prison,
Speaker 1: as did him running a peep show, and the magazine
Speaker 1: disbanded because once again, sex work and gay stuff do.
Speaker 1: It's not the same history, but it's a fucking huge
Speaker 1: ven diagram. Yeah, and not everything that happened during this
Speaker 1: era happened in the name of various organizations, in particular
Speaker 1: what was called transvestites at the time. They're left out
Speaker 1: a lot of the assimilations rhetoric because we're harder to
Speaker 1: grapple with and explain something that's happening now. But while
Speaker 1: organizations were more like trying to be respectable, the street
Speaker 1: queers and LGBT across the spectrum, we're just fucking willing
Speaker 1: to get rowdy. So now we get to talk about
Speaker 1: some of the riots. Hell yeah, Los Angeles nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: there was a thriving queer community and scene, and the
Speaker 1: cops kept fucking with it. They would arrest people and
Speaker 1: they would print their names in the paper as queers
Speaker 1: as a big scare tactic. It's like doxing back then. Yeah, basically,
Speaker 1: that's so stupid. Yeah. In May nineteen fifty nine, some
Speaker 1: queer folks were hanging out at a twenty four hour
Speaker 1: donuts shop called Cooper Donuts on skid Row. And this
Speaker 1: place was right between two different gay bars and was
Speaker 1: totally fine with this clientele. It was a twenty four
Speaker 1: hour donut shop between two gay bars. That's who you know.
Speaker 1: Probably who fucking worked there, I don't know. So the
Speaker 1: cops came in, which were fucking with people one night,
Speaker 1: and one night they came in, they were fucking with
Speaker 1: two drag queens, two male sex workers, and a guy
Speaker 1: who was just outlook to get laid and So the
Speaker 1: cops arrest a bunch of people, including this Mexican American
Speaker 1: author John Retchie, and people watching this are like, no, no,
Speaker 1: you're just you're just not actually gonna do that. So
Speaker 1: they start throwing coffee and donuts and trash at the cops.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, that is incredible. That's the right that
Speaker 1: I want to enjoy. That's great. That's so good. Coffee
Speaker 1: and donuts particularly at cops, which is like they have
Speaker 1: that whole fucking stereotype because and then it works. They
Speaker 1: drive the cops off with no one getting arrested. And
Speaker 1: it's usually presented as the first gay riot, And U asked,
Speaker 1: I don't have any counter argument, and I yeah, I
Speaker 1: love that it's throwing down. It's a cops are trying
Speaker 1: to arrest a Mexican man and some cross dressers and
Speaker 1: sex workers, and they fucking what and they fucking won.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I'm so glad you told me about that.
Speaker 1: The visuals in my brain are so beautiful. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: this next one's real good too. Hell yeah, Okay. August fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one in Milwaukee, which I misspelled in my script,
Speaker 1: nied you know who cares? Yeah, no One. Four Navy assholes.
Speaker 1: They show up at a dare at an illegal gay
Speaker 1: bar called Black Night. It was illegal asn't it didn't
Speaker 1: bother having a liquor license. The four Navy guys they
Speaker 1: refused to show idea to the bouncer, so the bouncer
Speaker 1: was like, sorry, buds, you're leaving. You might enough hraise
Speaker 1: it that politely. I don't know, so all four of
Speaker 1: them jumped the bouncer. What they didn't take into account
Speaker 1: was that the bouncer happened to be married to Josie
Speaker 1: fucking Carter, a black drag queen who was ex Navy herself,
Speaker 1: who was there to perform. She actually lived full time
Speaker 1: as a woman, but it didn't identify as trends. She
Speaker 1: had a parrot with her, just to set the scene.
Speaker 1: Know that she always went to the bar with her parrot.
Speaker 1: This is incredible. Josie fucking Carter, I'm adding that middle name,
Speaker 1: walks out of a walks out with a beer bottle
Speaker 1: on each hand, and just fucks up the Navy guys.
Speaker 1: To quote her, this man turned on me. I thought,
Speaker 1: I can't let him put his hands on me. He
Speaker 1: was big and he kept coming at me. I thought
Speaker 1: he would kill me in that moment, I could fight
Speaker 1: off an army in a bathrobe. I let him have
Speaker 1: everything that was in that bottle. He went down. That's amazing.
Speaker 1: So the Navy guys fuck off and take the bottled
Speaker 1: guy to the hospital. So a dozen more navy fucks
Speaker 1: show up. They like, go and get their friends. They're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go up these quarters. Yeah. In the bar,
Speaker 1: everyone's like, oh shit, what do we do? Do we run?
Speaker 1: Josie says about it later a quote, But we did
Speaker 1: not run from a fight. We did not run from nothing.
Speaker 1: What a badess. Huh beer bottle? Yeah, it's probably at
Speaker 1: the bar, but you know, yeah yeah, I mean yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So twelve Navy guys show up and they just start
Speaker 1: literally tearing the bar apart, like I think it's like
Speaker 1: a makeshift bar or something, and seventy five gay patrons
Speaker 1: just fuck them up. Um, a bunch of people on
Speaker 1: both sides get hospitalized. The cops kind of miraculously they
Speaker 1: arrest the Navy guys and not the bar patrons. Wow,
Speaker 1: but the charges are dropped the time I know, I know,
Speaker 1: but the charges are dropped immediately. Say yeah, um, but
Speaker 1: at least the gay folks defending themselves don't go to jail. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, another riot San Francisco. Now are all amazing.
Speaker 1: I think there's always something that makes it like crazy,
Speaker 1: and I know that the parrot, the donuts, yeah, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Just the fact that she was like a Navy X person,
Speaker 1: just like yeah, totally next ride on the list, San Francisco,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six. It's in the Tenderloin district, which apparently
Speaker 1: gets his name from basically being the district where cops
Speaker 1: can get bought off through like old timey slang. I've
Speaker 1: always wondered that that's what it's from. It's from a
Speaker 1: New York thing, um, tender Loin. I've always wondered the
Speaker 1: origin of that, that's you know, And now I'm like,
Speaker 1: I can't. I like looked up the exact origin and
Speaker 1: then like summarized it that way, and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't Oh well, whatever, my bad memory. Whatever,
Speaker 1: let's go with it. Yeah. Tenderloin In in San Francisco
Speaker 1: the center of LGBT community in San Francisco at the time.
Speaker 1: It was also home to a large number of trans
Speaker 1: women doing sex work there. Weren't a lot of jobs
Speaker 1: available to non passing trans women then, unlike now. It
Speaker 1: is better now, but it's not fucking easy as a
Speaker 1: slightly yeah, like you know, it's like it's still a
Speaker 1: point of contention unfortunately. Yeah, totally. Um. And also trans
Speaker 1: women and cross dusters often weren't welcome at gay bars,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk more about that later when we
Speaker 1: talk about Stonewall. But like basically a lot of bars
Speaker 1: were like no, this is for you know, there is
Speaker 1: also like a discrimination with the same community that's sucks.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to tell how much is like a no,
Speaker 1: we're respectable, and how much is a know, what you're
Speaker 1: doing illegal and we don't want the heat. So it's
Speaker 1: hard to know whether it was like bigotry or cowardice
Speaker 1: or some combination of the two. You know, it's either way. Yeah, stupid.
Speaker 1: Neither are words that I like ascribed to me, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, just you're ostracizing and like, yeah, singling
Speaker 1: out a group it's already so in need of defense
Speaker 1: or like I don't know whatever totally, and if you're
Speaker 1: in need of defense is one of our ads Sometimes
Speaker 1: simply safe. I'm just I'm trying to make it. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe let's ads are a thing that support
Speaker 1: this podcast. Um, you don't have to listen to them.
Speaker 1: I don't care. There's a forward button on your thing
Speaker 1: that's a secret. Oh right, No, I mean you must listen.
Speaker 1: Keep wondering if I remember, gonna get in trouble. So
Speaker 1: he's not a sop. He's never stopped me either. And
Speaker 1: we're back from those ads that we all care deeply about,
Speaker 1: and you listen to the whole way through. That's right.
Speaker 1: So no one cared about the street workers in the Tenderloin,
Speaker 1: at least no one at an institutional level. They were
Speaker 1: a combination of everything cops don't care about. They were
Speaker 1: poor people, people of color, trans people, gay people, sex workers,
Speaker 1: homeless people. They any one of these things is enough
Speaker 1: to get you treated like shit, and a lot of
Speaker 1: them were all of these things. So there's this chain
Speaker 1: store cafe called Compton's Cafeteria, and it had a location
Speaker 1: in the Tenderloin. It's twenty four hours. It becomes a
Speaker 1: social hangout for trans workers, for trans sex workers in particular,
Speaker 1: and the owners suck and they keep calling the cops
Speaker 1: on them and getting them arrested for female impersonating the law.
Speaker 1: That would have sounded old timey if we'd written this
Speaker 1: only a year ago, but is now back on the books.
Speaker 1: And I think I could get arrested for going to
Speaker 1: the grocery store in Tennessee right now. That is so scary, genuinely, yeah,
Speaker 1: do we ever? Humans don't change, society never changes. It's
Speaker 1: genuinely the same. It's like groundhog Day, it really is.
Speaker 1: I think we've had moments, long moments of good and
Speaker 1: there's so many societies that aren't poisoned by Western stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, it's good to remember that our world
Speaker 1: is not the world. I guess that's a good point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I no, I do agree that there has been
Speaker 1: stretches of goodness. I just when when you're reminded of
Speaker 1: like the badness that's still there, it's just fucking upsetting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course it is. I don't know. Yeah. In August
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, the queens are hanging out doing their
Speaker 1: thing at Compton's when the cops show up and try
Speaker 1: and arrest this lady. So she throws a cup of
Speaker 1: coffee in the CoP's face. People just kind of fucking
Speaker 1: blew up all their pent up rage. Tables are flying everywhere,
Speaker 1: cops are getting pummeled with high heels and purses, the
Speaker 1: windows are broken out, the fight moves into the street,
Speaker 1: a cop car gets smashed up, and at the end
Speaker 1: of it, Compton's go on, I'm just like smiling board. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's great, it's great, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, I can imagine you've just been putting
Speaker 1: up with a ship for so long. You know, there's
Speaker 1: like purses at high heels and like, yeah, starting it
Speaker 1: off with a cup of coffee. I'm the next Ryan
Speaker 1: I go to. I will bring a company up a
Speaker 1: coffee because I think that's the most amazing thing. A donut.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, fuck you, Oh my god. I think it
Speaker 1: was during the altar globalization stuff. There's these pictures of
Speaker 1: I think it's in Canada, anarchists in black block with
Speaker 1: them donuts on fishing polesh tangling them in front of
Speaker 1: the cop That is so funny. It was so funny.
Speaker 1: So Compton's bans the trans community for good after this,
Speaker 1: and so no one went there anymore and it went
Speaker 1: out of business. Hell m, that's what you fucking get
Speaker 1: you assholes. Wait, so I interrupted you. Unfortunately I do
Speaker 1: that sometimes I pologize. But you were talking about the
Speaker 1: car getting smash. Is that like what happened after that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they kind of like the I don't have the like
Speaker 1: specifics about how the riot, but were they like a
Speaker 1: like I don't know, I don't know. Um, I I
Speaker 1: found a bunch of I don't know because I have
Speaker 1: a bad memory and I didn't put it in the script.
Speaker 1: That is the ends. Well, I'm going to believe that
Speaker 1: they drove the cops away, so that yeah, that's my take. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I know that there was like, um, there's this
Speaker 1: whole other part of this where this uh radical queer
Speaker 1: group was also like picketing and stuff at the place.
Speaker 1: I just it ended up being like a level of
Speaker 1: complexity more than I was going to include in the script.
Speaker 1: But and all of this and the riot also it's
Speaker 1: spark change. It's kind of like a it's funny, as
Speaker 1: I would say, mini Stonewall, the riot was about the
Speaker 1: same size as stone Wall, as I think maybe maybe
Speaker 1: it was smaller, but like it had this like fairly
Speaker 1: major local impact in that people knew that the queer
Speaker 1: people fought back. Yeah, and also more services and stuff
Speaker 1: started appearing and being built and like not being destroyed
Speaker 1: as part of trying to make things better. Then one more.
Speaker 1: This one's unfortunately a one sided police riot. LA. The
Speaker 1: next year, nineteen sixty seven, the Black Cat Tavern, And
Speaker 1: there's this new gay bar. It's doing this thing. It's
Speaker 1: New Year's. As the year changes, some gay people kissed
Speaker 1: each other. Just terrible thing, be awful gay kissing. Just
Speaker 1: don't just don't think about that right now and smile.
Speaker 1: That would be a terrible thing. Some gay people kissed
Speaker 1: on fucking New Years. So undercover cops in the crowd
Speaker 1: just started beating the shit out of everyone, beat people unconscious,
Speaker 1: arrested people. Customers fled to a nearby gay bar, where
Speaker 1: cops found them and arrested them, being like, no, I
Speaker 1: saw you two kiss I'm going to personally track you
Speaker 1: through the streets. They have nothing better to do than
Speaker 1: to go undercover at a fucking New Year's party at
Speaker 1: a bar. Yeah, Like, are you shitting me? Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: all fucking clown I know. I don't want to insult clowns. No, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And two of the men who kissed on New year's
Speaker 1: became registered sex offenders, and the Supreme Court refused to
Speaker 1: hear their case. They argued that they had the right
Speaker 1: to equal protection under the law. The law did not
Speaker 1: agree with them. In response, this is the first group
Speaker 1: I found called Pride, A group called Pride Personal Rights
Speaker 1: in Defense and Education, which is the most bullshit accurate
Speaker 1: the Personal Rights and Defense or whatever. It's Pride. A
Speaker 1: group called Pride. They threw a protest and about two
Speaker 1: hundred people showed up, and it was orderly because there
Speaker 1: was it was way the fun contained by a very
Speaker 1: militant lipd that Basically they're like, oh my god, the
Speaker 1: homos are organizing and like, and this is seen as
Speaker 1: one of the first protests for gay rights. I mean
Speaker 1: there's other like small pickets and stuff like that, you know,
Speaker 1: but this is um yeah, and organizational gay rights activists
Speaker 1: also did a lot of stuff during this time. It
Speaker 1: goes a little bit uncredited because it wasn't riots or
Speaker 1: guess sort of dismissed as less radical because it was
Speaker 1: less radical frankly, and I'm less interested in it, but
Speaker 1: it's important. The Madachine Society, for example, got the Mayor
Speaker 1: of New York to stop the policy ofven trapping gay
Speaker 1: men for solicitation, and that fucking matters, you know, it
Speaker 1: really does. In April nineteen sixty five, some folks from
Speaker 1: the Mach Society led the first gay rights protest of
Speaker 1: the White House. And I think this includes that guy
Speaker 1: Frank we were talking about way at the beginning. Now
Speaker 1: I said, just like woven into everything that isn't a riot.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty seven, a man named Jack Nichols was
Speaker 1: one of the first Americans to get on TV and
Speaker 1: to be basically like, yeah, I'm gay, what do you want?
Speaker 1: And he did this like he was a bit of
Speaker 1: a like there's some contentious stuff about him that I
Speaker 1: don't remember well enough to go into, but he did
Speaker 1: this even though his dad was a fucking FBI agent
Speaker 1: who said he would kill his own son if the
Speaker 1: government ever found out that he was gay, Like if
Speaker 1: the son was gay, he was like, I will fucking
Speaker 1: murder you if you come out, and that Jack the son,
Speaker 1: he did it anyway, and he got fired from the
Speaker 1: hotel he worked out the next day. So people are
Speaker 1: like they'll talk about they'll be like, oh, the first
Speaker 1: game in on TV, the big Landmark or whatever, not.
Speaker 1: This man could have been murdered by his father and
Speaker 1: was fired from his job. So Jack goes on to
Speaker 1: found Gay Magazine in nineteen sixty nine, the first weekly
Speaker 1: gay newspaper in the US, and as protests in the
Speaker 1: US in general are starting to heat up, especially around
Speaker 1: civil rights in the Vietnam War. Basically like, you start
Speaker 1: seeing shit change about what people think is how people
Speaker 1: should protest in things, and you start getting the first
Speaker 1: regular recurring marches, the kind of thing that later becomes
Speaker 1: the Pride marches. In a way, people like to argue
Speaker 1: about the exact lineage because everyone wants to fucking own pride.
Speaker 1: Everyone wants to be like, no, it was us, No,
Speaker 1: it was them, No, it was fucking all of us.
Speaker 1: What do you fucking want? I'm like, can't we all
Speaker 1: be happy that we're gay and alive and be proud
Speaker 1: of all the gay dead people who came before us
Speaker 1: as fucking literal battering rams. Yeah, I mean, in fighting
Speaker 1: is always just what the bad guys always want. You're
Speaker 1: doing the work for them basically over yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: the hateful meetings wat, you're doing their work for them. Yep.
Speaker 1: So there's criminal gays and respectable gays and gay people
Speaker 1: of every gender and every type involved in all this
Speaker 1: shit and these early gay marches, and they're called Annual Reminders,
Speaker 1: which is kind of morbid and beautiful. They were held
Speaker 1: every July fourth from nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine in Philiate Independence Hall, which is the building that
Speaker 1: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution came from. And
Speaker 1: they were organized by the Matachean Society, the Daughters of Bolitis,
Speaker 1: and the Janis Society, coming together as echo the East
Speaker 1: Coast homophile organizations. The only modern group I can think
Speaker 1: of with as good of a naming convention is the
Speaker 1: Journal Baden, which is named after the medieval English sort
Speaker 1: of third sex transwomen or gay men anyway. Interesting these
Speaker 1: Annual Reminders, they're very serious affairs. A dress code was enforced,
Speaker 1: jackets and ties for the boys, dresses for the women.
Speaker 1: Gays were supposed to be presentable and employable. They didn't
Speaker 1: have huge churnouts because they're boring. Forty people or so
Speaker 1: came the last one, July fourth, nineteen sixty nine. Two
Speaker 1: women broke ranks from it and held hands and one
Speaker 1: of the organizers was like, no, you can't do that
Speaker 1: and tried to like separate the women holding hands. That
Speaker 1: this is why I talked shit assimilation of stuff. It's silly. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's stupid. It's like you're really doing the work of
Speaker 1: your oppressors. That's through all it is. It's really backwards
Speaker 1: that you lose the plot. That's what happens. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: totally And by nineteen sixty nine, this time for solemn
Speaker 1: annual reminders was over. The time for gay liberation had
Speaker 1: begun because of something that had happened one week earlier,
Speaker 1: from July fourth, nineteen sixty nine, a thing that people
Speaker 1: remember more than solemn picketing. People remember when people threw
Speaker 1: fucking molotovs at cops who tried to arrest them for
Speaker 1: cross dressing and kissing other boys or ever. People remember
Speaker 1: the stonewall fucking riots, which we will talk about next week.
Speaker 1: Who don't google anything, Yeah, or talk to any other person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no spoilers. Yeah, but that was good. I always learned
Speaker 1: so much, like not to not to show on any
Speaker 1: other podcasts. But I I'm always so engaged when you're
Speaker 1: explaining stuff because I don't know, you just do it. Well.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's because it's a good stuff too. Maybe I
Speaker 1: just don't want to remember the bad stuff, so I'm
Speaker 1: like to get out. But but I really think I
Speaker 1: don't know. I it's funny to be recorded as I
Speaker 1: learned stuff. But I'm glad. I again, I'm representing the
Speaker 1: dummies out there. I'm you and you're me, and it's okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's okay. And I was a dummy about all of
Speaker 1: this last week. You know. That makes me feel like
Speaker 1: a less dummy. Yeah. Yeah. People are like, wow, how
Speaker 1: do you know everything? I'm like this every week I
Speaker 1: read like two rats and like a ton of articles.
Speaker 1: I am excited to learn how we upgraded from coffee
Speaker 1: to Molotov cocktails because that's pretty oh yeah, pretty nice.
Speaker 1: That is That is an escalation, I do confess, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is why if you ever need to now, we
Speaker 1: already did that joke about making molotovs h But if
Speaker 1: people want to make connection with your work, that was
Speaker 1: that was you stumbled. But I will accept this. I
Speaker 1: will I will pick you back up. Thank you. Um
Speaker 1: uh yeah. You can follow me on the internet. My
Speaker 1: Twitter is Shiro hero six six six because fill in
Speaker 1: the blank, and then my Instagram is just Shiro Hero
Speaker 1: And yeah, I made like a video essay recently that
Speaker 1: if you want to watch it. That's what my brain
Speaker 1: is on. It's called how can I be present when
Speaker 1: photographs exist? And that's what I've been struggling with for
Speaker 1: the last several months. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, it's also present.
Speaker 1: It's especially important because Shiro Hero. The six to sixty
Speaker 1: six comes from Shiro's birth year six six six, because
Speaker 1: Shiro here is actually one of the original daughters of
Speaker 1: Politis the Vampire. I was supposed to be revealed in
Speaker 1: the last episode. But thank you for I mean, it's okay,
Speaker 1: it's okay. It's good that they know, you know, it's
Speaker 1: good that they know. Um. But yes, that is correct, Margaret,
Speaker 1: thank you. Yeah. And if you want to follow me
Speaker 1: on the internet, you can do so at Magpie Killjoy
Speaker 1: on Twitter, or you can follow me on Instagram, where
Speaker 1: I talk less about history and politics and more about
Speaker 1: why I like my dog at Margaret Killjoy. And I
Speaker 1: have a book out called Escape from Insul Island, and
Speaker 1: I have a bunch of bands. One of them is
Speaker 1: called Feminis School Band Camp, Feminist black Metal. And we
Speaker 1: will see you all next week when we when you
Speaker 1: all listen to our first or partner, or you already
Speaker 1: listened half of it, see y'all soon. Yeahys, aren't sick
Speaker 1: of me yet, just wait. Cool People Who Did Cool
Speaker 1: Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website coool Zonemedia
Speaker 1: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.