Season 15: Episode 4: Jim Kepner

When Lou Sullivan sought gender-affirming care in the 1970s, he was turned down. The reason? Lou identified as a gay man at a time when all trans people were assumed to be straight—a conflation of gen...

30 Jul 42min

“Are you gay?” a reporter asked U.S. Representative Barney Frank in 1987. “Yes, so what?” With that, Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay. But the casualness of his...

23 Jul 26min

Nancy May’s allyship was as personal as it was political. After all, she was married to a gay man. In 1965, her involvement in San Francisco’s homophile movement placed her at the center of a headline...

16 Jul 29min

Pat Bond joined the Women’s Army Corps in 1945, driven by patriotism and a desire to be among lesbians. The war required bodies, so the U.S. military turned a blind eye to service members’ sexual orie...

2 Jul 26min

Mabel Hampton was a performer and domestic worker who lived as an out lesbian in New York City from 1920 until her death in 1989. Her recorded oral histories offer a rare firsthand account of Black le...

25 Jun 22min

When news broke in 1952 that Christine Jorgensen, an ex-GI from the Bronx, had undergone gender-affirming surgery, she became a global sensation. In this 1957 interview, meet the thoughtful woman behi...

18 Jun 28min

MGH is back for another dive into the archives! Drawing from Eric’s own collection of rare interviews and other repositories of LGBTQ history, we’ll bring you the voices of seven LGBTQ change-makers a...

18 Jun 5min