On October 22, 1999, a scrappy indie film opened on 25 screens and quietly changed queer history forever. Kimberly Peirce spent five years making the world fall in love with Brandon Teena before the violence ever arrived -- and that was the whole strategy. Make the audience grieve the person before they learn the details of the crime.

Boys Don't Cry grossed $11.5 million on a $2 million budget, launched Hilary Swank to an Academy Award, and put Brandon Teena's name in front of millions of people who had never heard it. But its most lasting impact was legal: the film's commercial and cultural success gave advocates the traction to push Nebraska to update its hate crime statutes and helped build the coalition that eventually passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

This is the story of Cultural Production as Resistance: how one filmmaker's obsessive commitment to humanizing Brandon Teena first turned a regional tragedy into a national reckoning.

Learn more at https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

John Duran was there for all of it. He came out in the glitter of the 1970s: a midnight Rocky Horror at the Tiffany Theater, a fake ID at Studio One, and a job at Disneyland where he ended up dating Peter Pan. Then AIDS arrived, and between 1985 and 1995 he lost 104 friends.

In this Rearview Rendezvous conversation, recorded at the rainbow crosswalk at San Vicente and Santa Monica, the civil rights attorney and former West Hollywood mayor tells the whole arc: defending ACT UP protesters straight out of law school, the trial that ended with a judge ruling that every American has the right to call their congressman an idiot, the AB 101 veto march that grew from 35 people to 500 on that exact street, the night Bill Clinton promised a room of angry activists he would sign the bill, and the rainbow flags Duran raised on Santa Monica Boulevard for the people who have not made it to West Hollywood yet.

He also talks about the lesbians who led when gay men were dying, getting sober, finding his voice again in the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles after twenty years of silence, and why his next act is star maker instead of star. Raise a glass to Scott Fleenor at the end. We did.

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/ImYkNgfMZqA
Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

On October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, robbed, and left tied to a fence post in freezing Wyoming temperatures because he was gay. He died six days later.

What followed was eleven years of organized grief, cross-racial coalition building, and a mother from Wyoming who walked into congressional hearings and refused to be dismissed. Judy Shepard helped build one of the most strategically brilliant legislative campaigns in LGBTQ history, linking her son's murder to James Byrd Jr.'s killing to forge a coalition that could not be dismissed as narrow identity politics.

On October 28, 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into federal law. It took eleven years. It took a community that refused to let grief stay quiet.

This is the story of how one murder, in a state with no hate crime protections, became the foundation for federal law, and what it means now that those protections are under political pressure again.

Learn more at https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Graham Chapman came out on live British television in 1972, when it could have ended everything, and then just... kept going. Doctor, drunk turned sober, Python, pioneer, and honestly one of the funniest people to ever exist. This is the story of a man who turned joy into resistance before that was even a phrase.

Chapman was the openly gay member of Monty Python at a time when the law had only just changed, when coming out meant losing your career, when humor was one of the only weapons that didn't get you arrested. He used it anyway. His sobriety story, his activism, his refusal to play it safe, and the way Python's absurdism slipped queer sensibility past every cultural censor: this is what Joy as Resistance looks like in practice.

Thirty-seven years after his death, Chapman's story is still one of the most under-told in queer history. He didn't just survive. He made people laugh while the world burned, and that mattered.

Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe
Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

In 1984, a Filipino housing activist and a lesbian labor organizer threw a block party on six blocks of industrial asphalt in San Francisco and called it "Megahood." They weren't trying to start an institution, they were trying to save one. Forty-two years later, that party draws up to 400,000 people and has donated over seven million dollars to charity.

This is the origin story of Folsom Street Fair: part neighborhood fight, part AIDS-era survival, part queer joy that refused to be gentrified out of existence. Kathleen Connell and Michael Valerio built something that started as a block party to save leather bars from displacement and became one of the largest LGBTQ events on the planet.

The Folsom Street Fair is also one of the most misunderstood stories in queer history. The leather and kink community that built it wasn't just throwing a party. They were practicing Concentric Fidelity: staying true to their core values as the circle expanded, absorbing new communities without losing the thing that made them them.

In the middle of the AIDS crisis. Against gentrification. Without permission.

Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe
Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

On September 21, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act after midnight. No cameras. No ceremony. No press conference. With that signature, the federal government declared that the love of every same-sex couple in America was legally invisible, locking them out of over 1,100 federal rights and protections.

This is the story of how institutional betrayal became the fuel for the longest sustained civil rights campaign in recent American history. From Edie Windsor's $363,053 estate tax bill to Jim Obergefell's name missing from his husband's death certificate, the movement refused invisibility and organized for nineteen years until the Supreme Court delivered marriage equality.

DOMA was designed to be the last word. Instead, it became the beginning of the fight that won everything. The movement converted rage into legal briefs, state campaigns, and coalitions that crossed every difference to build the case that could not be denied.

This is Part 2 of "The Cost of Courage," following Leonard Matlovich's story in Part 1. Together, they trace the arc from one soldier's letter to a movement that changed the law.

Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

In September 1975, a decorated Air Force sergeant with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine. The headline read: "I Am a Homosexual." His name was Leonard Matlovich, and by the time America picked up that magazine, the military was already trying to erase him.

This is the story of how one man used the institution's own paperwork, a strategic partnership with activist Frank Kameny, and a single sentence to change the course of queer history. When his commanding officer asked what his coming-out letter meant, Matlovich answered: "It means Brown versus the Board of Education."

From three tours in Vietnam to the cover of TIME, from a federal court victory to a tombstone at Congressional Cemetery that reads, "They gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one," Matlovich's story is the blueprint for using documentation as a weapon against institutional discrimination.

This is Part 1 of "The Cost of Courage," a two-part series exploring the arc from individual courage to organized collective power. Part 2 picks up in 1996, when the institution struck back with the Defense of Marriage Act.

Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Subscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

I got some things wrong. A few things. Okay, maybe more than a few. Look, I am a queer person with a library card and a lot of feelings, not a PhD, and sometimes that shows.

This is my official corrections video, where I own my mistakes, thank the people who caught them, and remind everyone (including myself) that history is complicated, sources disagree, and I am genuinely out here learning alongside you.

Two years in. Still getting it wrong sometimes. Still showing up anyway.

If you've been here for any of it, thank you for staying. If you're new, welcome to a channel where we care more about getting it right eventually than pretending we got it right the first time.

If this episode resonated, join the email list for free queer history downloads and early word on upcoming episodes: thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe

Watch this episode on YouTube: I Made Big Mistakes (And I'm Owning All of Them)

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show