And I took as my guiding principle some words from Lytton Strachey. Together their individual stories would give people at least a sense of how that hidden history unfolded over the decades. I’d have to use bits and pieces of our history, told by the people I interviewed.
What saved me in the end was accepting that there was no way I could tell the whole story. How could I even begin to tell all these stories? How could I weave together the history of a movement that had for so long gone undocumented? A history that wasn’t considered a legitimate part of the American story… in the mid-20th century… threads that stretched across the Atlantic to Germany back as far as the 19th century.īy this point in the project I was so overwhelmed by what I was finding that I thought I’d made a terrible mistake in taking it on. Or so I thought, before I began my research-before I pored over books, public records, old magazines, and telephone directories to find the early troublemakers who started the movement… Before I crisscrossed the country to interview people who had gotten together in secret in tiny groups as far back as the 1950s… Before I heard first-hand from people who dared to dream about a fairer tomorrow in the 1940s…Īnd as I followed those threads stretching back through history, I learned that there were some threads that stretched back much farther than the U.S. Everyone knew the movement began there on a hot summer night when the New York City police raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village and queer people fought back. I was very fresh because I knew almost nothing.Īt least I knew where to start. Why me, I asked? The editor said he liked how I handled dialogue and he wanted someone fresh to the subject. I was a journalist with one book under my belt about same-sex couple relationships. It started with a phone call from an editor at Harper & Row, now HarperCollins, who commissioned me to write an oral history book about what was then called the gay and lesbian civil rights movement.
Because my journey of discovery is something like the journey we’ll be taking together over the next 10 episodes or so… But in the spirit of beginnings, first I’d like to tell you how the Making Gay History project got its start in 1988. This season is about beginnings-about how the LGBTQ movement began and unfolded in the years before the Stonewall uprising and how the people who got involved in the movement pre-Stonewall got their start. In this episode, meet some of the trailblazers who will guide us from 1897 in Germany to the eve of the Stonewall uprising, including Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Hay, Ernestine Eckstein, Bayard Rustin, and Martha Shelley.Įric Marcus Narration: I’m Eric Marcus and welcome to season four of Making Gay History. So we’re going to start at the beginning and hear from the activists and visionaries who got the ball rolling for LGBTQ civil rights. Credit: ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Harry Hay press release still for Clifford Odets’ “Til the Day I Die,” May 1935. Credit: Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Leffler courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-01272.Įrnestine Eckstein on the cover of The Ladder in June 1966.
Credit: Photo by Diana Davies courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.īayard Rustin at a news briefing on the Civil Rights March on Washington in the Statler Hotel, August 27, 1963. Clockwise from upper left: Martha Shelley at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, 1969.