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- [00:01]
Monte Mater
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability various 18 plus.
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Narrator
Your call has been forwarded to voicemail.
- [00:30]
Zoe Deutch and Nick Robinson
Hi, this is Zoe Deutch and Nick Robinson.
- [00:32]
Voiceover Actor
Our brand new movie Voicemails for Isabel is all about those little moments that feel like the universe is looking out, feeling homesick. Then your sister calls, hearing that perfect song exactly when you need it.
- [00:44]
Narrator
Please stay.
- [00:47]
Voiceover Actor
Sometimes life rigs things in our favor, like learning about your new favorite rom com. Voicemails for Isabel Only on Netflix June 19th.
- [00:57]
Zoe Deutch and Nick Robinson
This episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away? Sam, you Came Home Based on the best selling novel from Carly Fortune. Every Year after follows childhood friends Sam and Percy as they reunite in the dreamy, nostalgic lakeside town of Barry's Bay. Love can be hard to find, so
- [01:17]
Narrator
if you're lucky enough to find that
- [01:19]
Zoe Deutch and Nick Robinson
person, never let go. A second chance at first love. Every Year after now streaming only on Prime.
- [01:26]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:57]
Narrator
2600 years ago, Long before protest signs, before marches, before a rainbow flag, a woman stood on a rocky island in the Aegean Sea and wrote poems about loving other women. Her name was Sappho. The island was Lesbus. The century was seventh, before the Common Era, and the words she put down were so raw, so unguarded in their longing, that the philosopher Plato would later call her the 10th museum. And almost none of it survived. Fire took some of it. War took more. What remained got caught in the machinery of a world that decided women's desire was a problem to be managed rather than a truth to be honored. What we have today are fragments, partial lines, half sentences, and a lot of silence. And those fragments were powerful enough to give a name to an entire identity. The Word lesbian comes from Lesbos, and it is the oldest name identity in the modern LGBTQ acronym. And its roots reach further into human history than any flag, any organization, or any piece of legend legislation ever written. Before there were letters in an acronym, before there were coalitions and courtroom battles, There was a poet on a Mediterranean island writing about the way a woman's voice made her heart stutter in her chest. The identity was not invented by a committee. This is not some. Some new thing that has arrived in humanity. It is very old because members of the queer community have always been there. It was not coined by a scholar. It was lived into existence thousands of years ago by women whose names the world tried very hard to erase. The this is a story about that erasure, the women who refused it, not once in a single era, but over and over and over, across centuries and continents, in living rooms and hospital wards, on the floor of the United States Congress, in the waiting room of a blood bank in San Diego, California. Today, we're going to talk about why the letter L is in the front of the LGBTQ+ acronym. That placement, of course, not alphabetical, but it's also not random. It was earned through decades of labor sacrifice, particular kind of bravery that made the newspapers and almost never made the history books. The pattern you're about to see will become and feel familiar. Women. Organized women showed up. Women did the hardest, most intimate, least glamorous work a crisis demanded, and then credits went somewhere else. The story of why the L Comes first is really the story of what happens when a community of women refused the arrangement, refused to sit back and be silent, refused to deny help or deny truth. When they say plainly and without apology, we were here. We bled for this, put our name at the front. To understand how they got there, we have to go back the way we do on a lot of these episodes, not to the 1980s, because we will be spending a lot of time in how lesbian women were the ones who stood up to help those suffering from AIDS during the AIDS crisis in a government that would not even acknowledge the crisis. We're going to go back to the 50s, back to a time when gathering in a room of other lesbians was a criminal act. Back to San Francisco apartment where eight women, most of them terrified of being discovered, decided to build something that had never existed before in the United. Today, on a Pride Month celebration episode, we're going to talk about why the L comes first on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome, or welcome back to Flipping Tables. I'm your host, Monte Mater. You've probably discovered me on your phone. That's where I live these days. And I just wanted to welcome you here. Flipping tables is all about history. It's about challenging long held beliefs. It's about learning new things, about making sure we don't whitewash specifically American history. We talk a lot about scripture and deconstruction and theology as well. Try to mix it up because I know everybody likes a little bit different things. Some people really love the biblical deep dives, which we're going to do some of those and some people really love the history. So we're going to do a little mix. This topic I was really excited to write about because this was something I actually learned in the last two years. I didn't know about, especially how women responded to the AIDS crisis and how lesbian women specifically came and, and stood to care for of victims suffering from aids. And I also didn't, I actually didn't know the history of Lesbos, the island. I didn't know about the poems in the Aegean Sea. And I thought that was so beautiful and such a testament to always been here, always been here. Not new, not a new invention, just, you know, in those ancient times they grew up in a, in a world where women weren't people, there was no autonomy and many of them were killed for being who they were. But it's always existed, always, always. And so today we're going to dive in. I hope you find this as interesting as I did. I don't have any announcements for today. Oh, I do have one starting next week after this episode, Patreon folks, you're also going to get little behind the scenes clips of the podcast. We're going to do a little 10 to 15 minute outtake. Either talking about the topic or you'll just hear from me. You'll get those bonuses just as another little added perk to your Patreon page. And we've been having the Bible study, how we got the Bible. That's been happening in a series. It's probably going to be a six part series because of how long it's taking me to thoroughly cover each book. But if you want to see those replays, those are on Patreon as well. I was kind of surprised because this series is so scholarly and it's very intense and it's a lot of history. And I was kind of worried. I was like, oh, I don't know if people are going to really like this. People have not only showed up, but they have locked in. It's probably the most focused classes I'VE been teaching. So if you want to see those as well, those are also over on patreon@patreon.com montemater and thank you to everyone who supports me there. It makes it possible. It makes it so that I can do all of this stuff full time. And if you are on the upper tiers of Patreon, your gift boxes are being packed right now as of June 11, so they will be being sent in the next couple of weeks. We had a little shipping delay, but you will get those at the end of the month anyways. Let's go to Act 1. The 1950s looked like calmness on the surface. America was prosperous and above all, orderly. Deeply invested in the performance of normalcy, which is truly so boring. Underneath, the government was conducting a purge. We've talked about him before. Senator Joseph McCarthy had ended his campaign against suspected communists. But the machinery he built didn't stop there. It's still happening now. It expanded, as a matter of fact. In 1950, the United States State Department issued a formal declaration. Homosexual Americans constituted security risks. The logic was circular and doesn't make any sense. Because homosexuality was illegal, gay people could be blackmailed. And because they could be blackmailed, they were dangerous and a threat to national security, which is wild. The solution wasn't to change the law that doesn't make sense and discriminates against people. The solution was to destroy them. The consequences were immediate. Federal employees were fired on suspicion of being gay. State and local governments followed. Police departments conducted and coordinated raids on bars known to serve gay and lesbian customers. In San Francisco, on September 8th of 1954, officers stormed into Tommy's Place on Broadway, a bar where lesbians gathered and arrested women for the crime of being in the same room together. They weren't even doing anything. The bars were the only places lesbians could find each other. And the bars weren't safe. There was no organization, no hotline. Obviously, there's not dating apps. There's no legal defense fund that served lesbian women anywhere in the United States. When there is nothing, the act of building something becomes the revolution itself. And on September 21, 1955, a Filipino woman named Rose Bamberger hosted a gathering at her home in San Francisco. She invited three other couples. The idea was modest. Form a secret social club where lesbians could dance, share a drink and talk without looking over their shoulders. And eight women attended. Among them were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, a couple since 1953 who had complained to friends that they didn't know any other lesbians. That complaint, spoken In a kitchen would change the course of American civil rights history. I want to say again, lesbians, gay people, queer people, asexual people have always existed. Always. This is. This is not new. Our. Our ability to articulate it is new. And hopefully there will come a time when humanity can grow up and let people love who they want to love when they're not hurting anybody and stop demonizing them and pay attention to your own business. The group needed a name, and one that would mean nothing to an outsider. They chose the Daughters of Billetus, named for the fictional character in the 1894 collection of French poetry imagined as a contemporary of Sappho on the island of Lesbus. To a stranger, it sounded like any other woman's civic club, no different from the Daughters of the American Revolution. To someone on the inside, it was a signal. And I. I don't remember. I keep saying Lesbus because that's how my brain wants to. It might be Lesbos as well, but I think it's Lesbos. The Daughters abilities became the first lesbian rights organization in the history of the United States. From the very first meeting, they understood a truth that would define lesbian activism for the next 70 years. Visibility was survival. And visibility was also the most dangerous thing in the world. The FBI sent agents to DOB meetings and filed reports on proceedings. The CIA monitored the organization because apparently they had nothing else to do. Local police searched their offices. Members kept only 2 cop of their mailing list, moved from hiding place to hiding place. Everyone who walked through that door was risking her job, her housing, her family, and her freedom. Like, that's another thing is. Is this. Especially this Christian nationalist rhetoric of homosexuality or queerness is some like, oh, you're just giving into sin, and you're just doing this because you want to be, you know, whatever. And I'm like, people are not. People are not going to risk their entire life for fun. Like, no one's gonna do that. No kid in school knowing that they could be thrown out of the house by their parents, knowing they could be beaten by bullies, knowing they could be ostracized, knowing they could lose everything is going to come out as trans. Unless it's true. Unless that is absolutely who they are and they're being braver than a lot of us could ever be, and telling the truth, they're not going to do that. It's the same, especially in this era, with queer people. They're not going to come out just because, oh, just because I want to get laid, because I want to be kinky. No one's doing that. No one's going to join an organization and fight for their life knowing they could end their life if they get caught. It doesn't make any sense. You know, when I was growing up and I was taught Christian apologetics, one of the talking points we were given was, well, you know, that Christianity was real and Christ was really a savior because people were willing to die for it. That was told to me a lot, right? Like. Like Jesus's disciples. And these apostles wouldn't have died for it if they didn't believe it was true. I will present that argument directly back to you and say people would not die for their identity and for who they want to love unless it was the truth and unless it was who God made them, quite frankly. And the other part of that is that all this conversation around, oh, media is like. Because media actually shows that gay people are real, you know, oh, it's gonna, you know, influence the kids, turn the kids gay. There is no amount of, you know, a movie acknowledging gay people are real you could show to a straight kid or, like, and it would change them. That doesn't work. Because if it did work, all of the heterosexual only media we have had up to this point would have converted all the gay kids. But weird. Not how that works. Anyways, in 1956, the DOB began publishing a monthly magazine called the Latter, the first nationally distributed lesbian periodical in the United States. The editorial staff wrote under pen names. The mailing envelopes were plain. Every issue carried the same promise, printed in bold. Your name is safe. The Latter wasn't just a magazine. This was a lifeline threaded through mailboxes of small towns across America, connecting women who had never met another lesbian in their life to a community they didn't know existed. A young playwright named Lorraine Hansberry, who would soon write A Raisin in the sun, which is an incredible play, submitted long, searching letters under her initials, lhn. Researchers challenged the psychiatric establishment's classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder. Activists debated strategy and legal theory. And thousands of ordinary women across the country that treated their existence as a crime, across a country that treated their existence like a crime, discovered for the first time that they weren't alone. The latter, published for 16 years, in an era before the Internet, before social media, before there was any mechanism for these isolated people to find each other. A small magazine with a deliberately bland cover was the only proof many lesbians had that their community was real and they weren't by themselves. The Daughters of Billetus didn't operate in isolation. Since 1950, the Mattachine Society had served as the primary advocacy organization for gay men. The DOB shared office space with them in San Francisco. Francisco participated in joint events. The relationship were colleagues on the surface and deeply unequal underneath. DOB members routinely reported being treated as auxiliary, as though lesbian concerns were a footnote to the real work of homosexual liberation. The women organized. The women showed up. The men set the agenda so hard. Hard to unpack all that misogyny when it's programmed into you from birth. By 1960, the DOB had chapters in LA, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago. Ernestine Eckstein. Eckstein. Excuse me. A black woman who became vice president of the New York chapter traveled to Philadelphia and Washington in 1965 to participate in some of the earliest public protests for gay rights in the country. She picketed. She let her face appear on the COVID of the latter. In 1966, at a time when public identification as a lesbian could cost you again your job, your housing, your children. You could get arrested. Stepping in front of a camera wasn't just symbolic. This was actual bravery. Actual I'm putting everything on the line. To live in truth and to live honestly and to fight for people. The tension between coalition and identity followed lesbian activists into every movement they joined for the next three decades. In the late 1960s, the Women's Liberation movement was gaining strength. The lesbians were at the center of it, organizing marches, staffing phone banks, writing position papers, building on logistical infrastructure that held feminist organizations together. While the famous faces were the ones giving the speeches. If, like for women, a lot of our progress that happened in the 60s and 70s, the helm and the machine behind that were two groups of people, black women and lesbians. The reward for that labor arrived in 1969, when Betty Frieden, president of the National Organization for Women, publicly called lesbians in the feminist movement a lavender menace. She argued their visibility would discredit feminism and push to remove open lesbians from leadership positions within now. The message was blunt. Do the work. Don't expect the credit. Your identity is an embarrassment. Keep it hidden. And here's the thing, like a lot of. Because the. The NOW organization has done a lot of great work and it a very powerful organization for women's rights. But they themselves in the beginning, demonize lesbians. Said, hey, you can do the work, but don't expect the credit. We don't want you to be the face of this because we're going to anger people. It is the exact same thing that white suffragists suffragists in the late nineteen teens and the early nineteen twenties demonized black women. They would allow black women to do the work, but they wouldn't allow them to be the face. They wanted to segregate the marches. So, like, we have to also be honest about these movements have made great progress. These organizations did great things, but also a lot of them, especially early on, also demonize black women, also demonize lesbians. But the response was equally blunt and kind of hysterical. At the second Congress to Unite Women in New York City in 1970, a group of women wearing hand dyed purple shirts reading Lavender Menace took over the stage and refused to leave until the women's movement addressed lesbian rights. Good for them. That is the correct response. Among them was writer Rita Mae Brown, who had been expelled from NOW's New York chapter for being too openly gay. The Lavender Menace action didn't resolve the conflict, it expose it. Lesbians did the work. They were told to be invisible while doing it in the same society that was telling them that their identity as a whole should be invisible and that they should just play along, you know, pretend to be hetero, you know, do what you're supposed to do, pretend that's not real. And they refused invisibility. And when they refused invisibility, they were pushed out. The same dynamic played out in the gay rights movement, where organizations led by Men Retreat routinely treated women's concerns as secondary. Lesbians existed at what a legal scholar would later describe with precision, saying the intersection of two systems of oppression, and neither movement that claimed them was willing to see them as whole. The feminist movement addressed sexism, but flinched at homophobia. The gay rights movement addressed homophobia but ignored sexism. Lesbians fell through the crack between the two. Audre Lorde captured the weight of this double erasure in her 1984 collection, Sister Outsider. She wrote about the demand that she choose between her identities present only in parts of herself a given present only the parts of herself a given movement found acceptable, as though being a human being could be disassembled and reassembled to suit someone else's comfort. She refused. And that refusal became the intellectual foundation for the next generation of activists who would insist on being whole without apology and without negotiation. So feminism wanted them to show up just as women, but don't be gay. And the gay movement said, well, yeah, you're gay, we'll fight for your rights, but also you're women. We're not going to deal with the sexism. And again, we have to acknowledge good movements did where they fell short because then we get to ask the question, okay, how do we do better moving forward? And a lot of these movements and organizations have addressed these, which is great. That's progress, that's growth. The mid-1970s, the Daughters of Bilitas had dissolved as a national organization torn apart by debates over which movement to align with the women who had passed through its doors didn't disappear, but they became lawyers and doctors and social workers and journalists and community organizers. They carried the skills they'd built into new organizations, new coalitions and new battles. And they didn't know it yet, but they were going to need those skills because the worst Crisis in American LGBTQ community was less than a decade away. And before we get to that crisis, I'm going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you would like these episodes ad free early merch now the little behind the scenes clips we're going to be doing for you and you just or you just want to support my work, enable me to do this full time. You can sign up@patreon.com montemater
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Voiceover Actor
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Narrator
On June 5th of 1981, the center for Disease Control and Prevention published a brief item in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. It described five men in Los Angeles who had developed a rare form of pneumonia called pneumocytis carini. All five were gay. Two were already dead. The report was roughly 600 words long. It appeared on page two. Almost nobody noticed. But within 12 months, the illness had a name. Acquired Immune deficiency syndrome. Within 24 months, it had killed over a thousand Americans. Within 60 months, the death toll exceeded 12, 12,000. And during every single one of those 60 months, the president of the United States refused to say the word AIDS in public. Ronald McDonald Reagan. Not once. Not in a press conference, a speech, a written statement. The word did not exist in the vocabulary of the Reagan White House. Ronald Reagan had taken office in January of 1981, five months before that first CDC report. His political coalition was built on white evangelical Christians. Obviously, we've covered him. Corporate deregulators and Cold War defense hawks and Pretty much the formula for every single Republican president since Nixon. The communities being devastated by this emerging epidemic, gay men in particular, intravenous drug users, Haitian immigrants, hemophiliacs were not part of that coalition. They held no leverage. They commanded no fundraising apparatus. So the administration didn't care. They were expendable. The administration's early posture wasn't silence. It was actually mockery. In October of 1982, a reporter named Lester Kinsolving asked White House deputy press secretary Larry speaks about the growing AIDS death toll. The press room erupted in laughter. Speaks. Asked whether Kinsolving was personally affected, the room laughed again. At that point, more than 600Americans had already died. The transcript of that briefing survives. The laughter is noted. They were like, haha, it's funny. Well, you're not gay, are you? Is is the vibe of that. Reagan didn't say the word AIDS publicly until September of 1985, and only then in response to a direct question from a reporter. He didn't deliver address an address on the epidemic until May 31st of 1987 at a fundraising dinner for the American foundation for AIDS Research. Yeah, years. He just let it happen for years. His longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor, who chaired the foundation, had personally persuaded him to attend. So it took a celebrity friend to be like, hey buddy, you want to come help us out here while people are dying. Nancy Reagan had seconded the request. On that night, the president of the United States finally spoke the word AIDS before a national audience. 21,000Americans were already dead. Among them was actor Rock Hudson, one of Reagan's closest personal friends who had died from AIDS 19 months earlier. The scale of the federal failure isn't just moral, it's measurable. In San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein city aids budget exceeded the entire federal aids budget under Reagan, just for that city. When Congress finally doubled the national research allocation in 1987, pushed it to 416 million, the increase came despite the White House, not because of it. Surgeon general c ever c Everett Koop released a comprehensive report in 1986 calling for condom distribution and honest public education about transmission. People can't prevent the spread if they don't know how it spreads. The same way you can't prevent a pregnancy if you don't have sex education and you don't understand how it works. The same way you can't be responsible if you don't have education so important. It's so important people are going to have sex. They have been having sex since the dawn of time. Education is what keeps people safe. It's what gives people an opportunity to plan for their families and do all of that. It's not something to be demonized or removed. In February of 1987, the President publicly contradiction contradicted his own surgeon general by endorsing the position of domestic policy advisor advisor Gary Bauer, who insisted all federally funded AIDS materials promote abstinence and marriage rather than safe sex practices. And we. We h. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And they know it doesn't work. That advice doesn't work. It doesn't prevent pregnancies, and it doesn't prevent the spread of disease in any group, by the way. The result was a vacuum, a literal vacuum of care and resources and institutional will. Hospitals were turning patients away. Families disowned their dying sons. Funeral homes refused to accept the bodies. Ambulance workers refused to touch the sick. Nurses refused to enter hospital landlord evicted tenants. Employers fired workers. And in city after city again, across the richest nation on earth, people with aids were left to die alone in apartments that no one would visit or hospital beds where no one would sit next to them. And in that vacuum walked the people with the least institutional power and the most reason to keep their asses at home. Into that vacuum walked lesbians. Lesbians showed up. In 1983, federal health authorities imposed a ban on blood donations from men who had sex with men. The policy was intended to protect the national blood supply from HIV contamination, but again, they're not researching it. Straight couples can get and pass aids, but people don't. People didn't know because there wasn't any research being put into it. There wasn't any education being put out. The education was, don't have sex, get married. As if that always. It doesn't. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. Okay. Been really wound up these days. The policy was intended, again to protect the national blood supply. In practice, what it did was it created an immediate secondary crisis. AIDS patients suffered from severe anemia caused by the virus, and many required regular TR transfusions to survive. The ban removed the population most connected to the AIDS patients from the pool of available donors. Blood banks ran short. Hospitals couldn't keep up. In San Diego, the women's caucus of San Diego democratic club had watched the epidemic destroy their community from the inside. Within two years of the first diagnosis, more than half of the caucus's male leadership was dead. I'll say that again. Within two years of the first diagnosis, more than half of the caucus's male leadership were dead.
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Monte Mater
Blood.
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Narrator
Gloria Johnson, the first social worker assigned to aids Cases in San Diego would later recall losing two or three men every week. There was nothing the medical system could offer in 1983 except palliative care, comfort and blood. The women looked at the crisis, looked at the ban, and identified one thing they could do that no one else was doing. Lesbians weren't banned from donating blood, so they were under no restriction. On July 16, 1983, three women, Wendy Sue Big Gleason, Nicolette Ibarra and Barbara Vick, held the first Blood Sisters blood drive at the San Diego blood bank at in the Hillcrest neighborhood. They had printed flyers. Some had riffed on Rosie the Riveter images. Others borrowed the visual language from the Superman logo. They expected 30 donors. Close to 200 showed up. Women packed the waiting room, sitting on armchairs, cross legged on the floor, talking and laughing and waiting for their turn. I will say that again, 200 lesbians showed up to help gay men. And again, lesbians being disenfranchised from a lot of the gay rights movement as well as from a lot of the feminist movement because there were things about them both movements didn't like, showed up en masse to donate 130 units of blood. And every unit was tagged and directed specifically for AIDS patients. Barbara Vick later described the emotional calculus behind the drives. Women in the lesbian community appeared immune to the disease. That immunity carried weight again, they don't really know how it's passed yet. There's not research hasn't been put into it yet. So the men in the community, their community, were dying. And even though so often those men didn't look out for them the way they should have, many of them did. But many of the organizations didn't. The women were ready to help them. The women are. The women looked at those men and said, those men are part of my community. I'm going to help. The women had less money to give than most, but the blood was basic. The blood was something every, everyone had and it was something everyone could give. The drives continued for nearly a decade. Between 1983 and 1992, the Blood Sisters organized 12 drives in San Diego. Their model was replicated in cities across the country. In the spring of 1984, the National Gay Task Force gave them a formal award for their contribution. The recognition triggered immediate backlash, backlash. Conservative groups demanded that Edward Brandt, the Assistant Secretary of Health, be terminated if he attended that ceremony in December of 1980. So pro life. So pro life. You literally have these women organizing to save people's lives and get awarded for it. And you're mad. Sit down, be quiet. In December 1984, the American Red Cross canceled a Blood Sisters drive scheduled in Los Angeles after learning it was to be held at a gay community center, stating that holding a blood drive at a gay venue would create the public impression that donations were being accepted from gay men. Two previous drives in LA already had been denied blood mobiles for the same reason. The obviously, the institutional message is pretty clear. Even the act of saving l lives could be punished if the wrong women were the ones doing the saving. So preposterous. So preposterous. And especially for conservatives who will scream pro life to the heavens, Please just start caring about the people that are actually already here. Just care about the people that are here. Could we start there? If you started there, I'd be much more inclined to believe that you were being serious when you said that. The blood drives were visible, they were organized, they left a paper trail. But they were only the surface of a vast, largely undocumented architecture of care that lesbians constructed during the AIDS crisis. Beneath the drives and the protests and the organizations, there was a quieter, more intimate kind of labor. It didn't make the newspapers, they didn't get any awards. It was the thing that kept the community from collapsing entirely. And this, when I learned about this, and I'm getting emotional thinking about it, like, so powerful to me, such a testament to what it means to love people. I think all the time of the passage from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, you will know a tree by its fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit. And a man, I'm telling you, this right here is some good fruit. Because remember, gay men, AIDS patients are getting kicked out of apartments. They're losing their jobs, Hospitals won't take them, people won't visit. They're dying alone in apartments. They're dying alone in a hospital bed because no one will sit with them because people are afraid of the disease. They don't understand how it's transmitted. Lesbians became hospice workers, patient advocates, grief counselors and surrogate daughters and sisters to men whose biological families wouldn't talk to them as they died. They cooked meals for people who could no longer stand at a stove. They cleaned apartments that hadn't been cleaned in weeks. They organized systems to care for the pets of people who had died because a dying man's last worry was often what would happen to his dog. They planned funerals that no church would host, and they would even wash the bodies of the dead when the funeral workers wouldn't touch them. That is so beautifully physical and intimate in ways most people didn't want to think about. It meant sitting beside a man whose body was covered in the purple lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, holding his hand while he dictated a message to his mother, who hadn't spoken to him in years. It meant calling that mother the next day and hearing her say she didn't have a son. It meant attending a memorial service on a Saturday, then another one Saturday, then another one Saturday until the count of the funerals blurred into a single unbroken season of grief. And then going back to work on Monday and doing it again. In New York City, lesbians were driving force inside ACT up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which formed in March of 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services center at West 13th street in Greenwich Village. ACT UP became the most effective direct action organization of the AIDS era, staging demonstrations that forced pharmaceutical company pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices, compelled the federal government to accelerate clinical trials and change the way the FDA approved new medications. The Act Up Oral History Report, which collected 188 recorded interviews with participants, documented the central indispensable role that women played at every level of the organization. They designed the campaigns, they wrote the policy documents, they organized logistics of civil disobedience. They confronted corporate executive to their faces. Ann Northrup, a former CBS News producer who became one of ACT up's most prominent spokespeople, described the bond that formed between lesbians and gay men during the crisis. What a healing moment for the community in that regard. For many, it was the first time the two communities had really truly worked together and sustained intimate proximity. The epidemic dissolved barriers that had separated them for decades. Gay men who had previously treated women's issues as peripheral began attending rallies for reproductive rights. Lesbians who had focused on feminist causes found themselves spending entire weekends at memorial services and hospital bedsides. The crisis didn't erase the differences between the two of them, and it made the differences irrelevant in the face of dying. And it made people care for someone as a human being rather than as a gay man or as a woman or as a lesbian. Sarah Schulman, the history historian, novelist and ACT UP member, documented a fact that women themselves understood at the time. The favor was unlikely to be returned. Breast cancer research was underfunded. Reproductive health access was shrinking. Workplace discrimination against women remained pervasive. The women who gave their blood staff the crisis hotlines, planned the funerals, cleaned the apartments, and held the hands of the dying men. Did it all know that when their turn came, that level of solidarity was not guaranteed to them, and they did it anyway. They did it because they cared, because they loved their community, because people were dying alone, and because they understood something institutions don't seem to is that solidarity is not a transaction. It's not a loan to be repaid. It's a decision about the kind of person you're going to be when the world is falling apart and the kind of story that you want to be able to tell at the end of your life. We make make either hell on earth or we make heaven on earth with our decisions. For most of the 70s and early 80s, the standard terminology for the community placed gay first. Organizations use GLB or glbt. Publications defaulted to gay and lesbian. The National National Gay Task force, founded in 1973 as the first national advocacy organization for homosexual civil rights in the U. S Carried that ordering in its name. From the beginning, women within the organization fought for equal representation. The board was stricter with gender parity. In 1975, the task force hired Gene O' Leary to serve as co executive director alongside Bruce Voller. The internal structure reflected a commitment to equality, but the external name did not. The name would change. In 1985, under sustained pressure from the lesbian members and allies, the organization became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The word lesbian was added not as a courtesy, but kind of as a corrective. It was a public acknowledgment that the organization served a constituency whose specific concerns, including workplace discrimination, domestic violence, child custody battles and healthcare access, had been subordinated too long to an agenda that defaulted to the priorities of men. And with this reference to domestic violence, I want to. You've probably seen it all over social media. There's this thing of like, well, the study showed that domestic violence between lesbians is higher than any other group. It's not. That's a misreading of the study by someone who doesn't know how to. To read research and wanted to have a talking point. What that study did was it talked to women and it women of all different backgrounds, but many of them are currently in lesbian relationships. And what the survey asked them was if they had ever experienced domestic violence in their life. Most of those women had previously been in relationships with men. Most of the domestic violence was in those relationships with men. But the. The survey didn't ask them if they experienced domestic violence in their current relationship or how they currently identify, but ever in their life. And that's an important correction. The renaming wasn't an isolated event and it was a visible expression of a shift in the movement. By the late 80s, one organization after another began reversing the orders of the letters, moving the L ahead of the G. The reason wasn't complicated. Lesbians were the one who had organized the drives. They had staffed the AIDS wards, lesbians had written the policy briefs, they'd coordinated the demonstrations, built the coalition, clean the apartments. And the language of the movement itself, the. The language that's supposed to represent. They were still listed. Second, placing the L before the G was a correction of the factual record. And it was. It was a gradual shift across dozens of organizations between the late 80s and the mid-1990s. In 1989, an organization in Scotland founded under the name LGBT Youth Scotland, with the L already at the front, American organizations followed. By the end of the 90s, LGBT had replaced GLBT as the dominant form in official communications and public discourse. And this wasn't like a. Something that people voted on to produce the change. It just emerged from the accumulating weight of decades of evidence of, of how lesbians were showing up for the movement. Both feminism and the queer rights movement would not be where they are today if lesbians hadn't shown up and done the work. And again, and also specifically black lesbians. Because you want to talk about someone who falls through the cracks every time. So you have lesbians not wanting, like, the feminist movement doesn't want to include lesbians because, oh, we don't want to deal with homophobia, we don't want to address that.
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Monte Mater
That.
- [36:28]
Narrator
And then the gay rights movement in many ways was catered to men. And like, oh, you're a woman, so your issues are secondary. And then you put race in there. Unbelievable. But queer women of color showed up, took the reins, as they always do, and led these movements. And I want to, I want to just make a special acknowledgment of them. The debate over ordering of those letters was never a debate about the letters itself. It was about power, invisibility, and whose labor is considered important. Throughout the 1990s, scholars and activists engaged in sustained, sometimes bitter arguments about identity politics within social movements. We still do that. Joshua Gamson, writing in the journal social problems in 1995, identified a fundamental tension at the heart of identity based movements. And it is the need for stable, recognizable, collective identity exists in permanent conflict with the reality that identities are fluid, contested and overlapping. The acronym was one of the sites where that tension plays out. And, and what that really means in, like, common language is that, that, you know, members of the queer community are also members of the feminist community, and they're also members over here. And that these identities are, are fluid in the sense of, like, I can show up to something, you know, I can show up to women's rights, because that's part of who I am. But I'm also this over here. For lesbians, of course, this is a acute conflict within the broader LGBTQ+ movement. Lesbian identity had been repeatedly subsumed under the umbrella term gay in the mainstream American culture. The word was casually used to describe all homosexual people. Erasing this distinct history, distinct culture that we, that we opened this episode with. Like, this goes all the way back to a poet thousands of years ago. There, there is a distinct group here that was, that was kind of being erased and just glossed over. Placing the l first was a refusal of that erasure. The declaration that lesbian identity was not a subset of gay identity. It wasn't a junior partner. It was its own word. And again, so many centuries of history, reaching back to Sappho and the island of Lesbos, Bonnie Zimmerman, in the landmark 1981 essay in Feminist Studies, mapped the systematic exclusion of lesbian perspectives from literary criticism and the broader cultural record. The pattern she identified in academia mirrored exactly what was happening in the activist world. When the history of gay rights movement was written. The contributions of lesbians were often footnotes. When they were the driving force, when organizations were named, gay came first. When credit was distributed, it went to men. So while the changing of these letters might not seem significant, it truly, truly is, and it was truly an acknowledgment and a correction of a group that had been marginalized and overlooked even within their own movement. Kathy Cohen, writing in GLQ in 1997, extended this analysis further, arguing that the mainstream gay and lesbian movement had constructed its own internal hierarchies. We about talked, take these systems with us. If we don't unpack them privileges the concerns of white, middle class, gender conforming members while marginalizing queer people of color, poor queer people, and those whose identities didn't fit neatly into one category. Moving the letter to the front, of course, doesn't resolve that. Black lesbians, indigenous lesbians, disabled lesbians, working class lesbians, and immigrant lesbians all faced additional layers of erasure. That rearranging the acronym isn't going to fix. But it's a step to try to overcome some of those issues. Because again, if we all grow up, especially if you are a white person who grew up in evangelicalism in any way, we grow up with this. This Racism kind of built into our worldviews. We grow up taught to care about the needs of middle class and up white men, right? Corporations. We're taught to you got to look a certain way, you got to talk a certain way, you got to make enough money. And unless we, we take all that down and we evaluate it, we will continue to do that. Not because we're evil and not because we're trying to not care about people, but because we have been programmed to think and prioritize a certain way. And in order to change those priorities, you really have to break those patterns down. By the early 2000s, when LGBT had become the standard abbreviation in the American public life, the change had come to represent something larger than the four rearranged world. It was an acknowledgment that the women who organized those blood drives, who did all that work, who sat with the dying, had earned the right to be named first. It's really powerful, not because their suffering was greater than anyone else's, but because their labor had been erased for so long. And I think that that is a beautiful acknowledgment of what they did. And the work never stopped. They never stopped showing up. And before we get to the continuation of all the things they did, we're gonna take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks.
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- [42:55]
Narrator
from the mid-1990s and see how things continued. The introduction of effective antiretroviral therapy in the mid-1990s marked the end of the most acute phase of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. People who had been given months to live suddenly had years. The death rate had climbed relentlessly for a decade and a half began to fall. The crisis isn't over. It still isn't. But the worst of the dying slowed. Lesbians who had built the caregiving infrastructure of the crisis era, didn't retire. They moved on to the next fight. And the next fight, and the fight after that in the battle for marriage equality, which consumed the political energy of the LGBTQ+ movement. From the early 2000s through the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs Hodges, lesbians were once again the operational center. The plaintiff in one of the earliest and most important marriage equality lawsuits, Bear vs. Lewin in Hawaii in 1993, was a lesbian couple couple. The attorneys who argued many of the critical appellate cases were women. The organizations that raised the money, coordinated the legal strategy, trained the grassroots. Volunteers relied heavily on lesbian donors, lesbian organizers, and lesbian attorneys. When the victory was won, when the cameras pointed to the courthouse step and the newspapers, the faces prominently featured in the national narrative of marriage equality belong to gay men. The pattern was old enough, of course, to be predictable. Women did the structural work. Men received the structural credit It. This is. Again, this is not unique to the LGBTQ+ movement. And I'm not trying to pick on or be critical. It's. It's kind of the entire history of, like, the American social change. Women have been the backbone of the abolitionist movement. They organized the labor strikes in the early 20th century, which are the reason that you have a opportunity for overtime, why you're protected at the office, why you have workers comp. All organized by women. Women, registered voters. During the civil rights movement, women built the environmental justice movement from the ground up. And in each case, they did all the unglamorous work, the scheduling, the fundraising, the door knocking, the envelope stuffing. And in each case, we know, we. We often credit all of these movements, all of that progress to men. So, again, not unique to the queer community, but it's. It's still at that structure, that hierarchy is still there. For les. For lesbians, the erasure is doubled, though in many straight spaces, obviously, they're marginalized because they're gay. In gay spaces, they're marginalized for being women. In feminist spaces. They were told at various points across the decade that their sexuality was a distract and an embarrassment to the feminist movement. Yikes. Because, again, just because you're a feminist doesn't mean you're a good person. The result was community that contributed foundational labor to nearly every progressive movement of the last century, nearly remaining invisible in popular understanding. And again, the black feminist tradition offered the sharpest articulation of this dynamic. Andre Lord, the Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, and scholars like Crenshaw all insisted that the invisibility of lesbian labor was not a side effect of movement politics. It was a structural feature built into the way movements distribute recognition, the way media covers activism, and the way that history is written. Lorde again, in that sister outsider, described the demand that she fragment herself, presenting her blackness in one room, her lesbianism in the other room, and her womanhood in a third, as a form of violence. Right. It's a segmenting of yourself. She refused, and her refusal opened a space that would eventually make room for a more honest accounting of who had done the work and who had received the credit. It. So let's briefly talk about what the record shows. The former record of lesbian participation in the AIDS era. Activism is enormous. Women Constitution constituted a substantial portion of ACT up's membership and occupied leadership roles at every level. Lesbians held executive positions in virtually every major LGBTQ plus nonprofit. The Blood Sisters model was adopted across the country when the movement pivoted from caregiving to political confrontation, targeting pharmaceutical companies, insurance corporations, and federal bureaucracy. The strategic and organization infrastructure was case after case, designed and managed by, you guessed it, women. Deborah Gould, in her historical analysis of emotion and political mobilization during the AIDS era, argued that the solidarity between. Solidarity between lesbians and gay men during the crisis transformed the political culture of the movement permanently. Before the epidemic, the two communities had operated largely in separate spheres, different priorities, different organizational models. The crisis forced them together. That merger brought decades of experience in feminist organizing, coalition building, direct action strategy and community care to, to the gay rights movement. They'd been developed in the feminist movement, the anti war movement, the labor movement. These skills were honed through decades of practice. And when the worst crisis in the history of the community arrived, those skills were the difference between collapse and survival. Yvashi Vade, who served as the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian task Force from 1989 to 1992, offered a more cautious assessment in her book Virtual Equality. Organizations were more inclusive than they'd been a decade earlier. She acknowledged. Women held prominent positions now. Lesbian concerns appeared on institutional agendas more often. But the underlying architecture of power hadn't been changed all that much. Fundraising still tilted towards issues that primarily affected men. Media coverage still privileged male voices. The ill had moved to the first of the acronym. But whether that rearrangement actually changed the structure in the institutions was left to be seen. And let's talk about kind of where we are now and what's still happening. So obviously, as you've noticed in the last few year, the acronym keeps expanding. What began as a community defined under the single word gay grew to be gay and lesbian, then lgb, then lgbt. And now the most inclusive form is LGBTQIA plus and beyond. Each letter represents a history. And I think that's one thing I would like to challenge us with, Especially if you're someone who's, you're straight and you're white and this, these issues don't affect you, especially if you're a man. And that's not to pick on you. I don't want people to suffer.
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Sponsor Voice
Right?
- [48:43]
Narrator
I don't, I don't want people to have a hard life. I don't want people to suffer. But there are certain things that, especially if you're a straight white man, but, but even a straight white woman you've never had to deal with, we've never had to face, We've never had to sit and think about, you know, and, and I've talked about on my page and in my stories and Instagram, I Came out as bi in my 30s. Cause I didn't have the vocabulary for it until then. I didn't realize that straight women don't think that way about other women. I was like, oh, that makes sense. And thankfully, at that time, I had deconstructed enough that I was like, oh, interesting. And I just moved on with it. I was like, okay, that's good to know. But I also recognize that for my entire life and still, even now, I present as straight. I present, obviously, I'm a white woman. So so many of these things I have never had to face. And I want to acknowledge that in myself. And that acknowledgment doesn't take away anything from the hard things I have suffered. It doesn't mean that there weren't hard things in my life. So when I say that when I talk about privilege or I talk about issues, it's not to say that your life has not been hard, that you haven't suffered, that things haven't happened to you. It's specifically meaning, hey, you haven't had to suffer for this reason. You've never been demonized for your sexuality, or you've never been demonized for your race. Those are important because that allows us to give empathy to our neighbors. Because we all have a lot more in common than we have indifference. And it's taking the time to acknowledge those things. It doesn't mean that you haven't suffered. It just means you haven't suffered for this reason. So even as this acronym has grown, the L has stayed at the front. It hasn't been displaced. It sits in a place that was earned, really, in the 80s and 90s, a permanent marker of the women who earned that position by the work itself. And truly, the picture that comes into my mind when I tell this story is about. About, like, you know, you have this woman sitting next to the bed of a man who would have died alone if she wasn't brave enough to be in there. And. And at the time, they didn't know how this was passed. They weren't sure. We didn't have the research. We didn't have the education. And these women did it anyway. That's so incredibly brave, Especially because of how quickly AIDS kills people when it's untreated. The story of lesbian activism during the AIDS crisis is better known today, obviously, that it was a decade ago. Sarah Sarah Schulman's like the Record show, published in 2021, brought scholarly and public attention to the full scope of lesbian participation in the Act UP movement. Lillian Federman's histories remain essential reading. The Act Up Oral History Project's 188 interviews are publicly available and widely cited. Documentary filmmakers, podcasters. Hello. And journalists have begun to recover and amplify these stories that were invisible for so long. But I think this recovery is still incomplete, complete. The popular culture, the AIDS crisis is still overwhelmingly narrated through the experiences of gay men. And again, I don't. I don't want to negate their suffering or their creativity, their resilience, the loss. You know, one of my favorite, favorite quotes. I believe it's Dan Savage who said, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night because it was the dance that we were fighting for. That is one of the most. What's one of my. My favorite quotes. But it's specifically regarding the AIDS crisis when, when men were dropping like flies and people were going to multiple funerals a week or a funeral a week, I do not want to negate that at all. I also don't want stories to be lost. I don't want to lose the account of the women who stood beside the dying when no one else was brave enough to do that and hospitals wouldn't treat people. You know, I do not want to lose the account of the blood drives, the hospice shifts, the funerals, the cleaning of the apartments of someone who's dying. Sure that a man who's worried about what's going to happen to his dog knows that someone's going to take care of his puppy. That those are powerful and it. And gives unity to the community. And it also helps us. No matter where you are, if you're part of the rainbow community or not, this idea of how do we show up and we love our neighbors, what can that look like? What can that look like? What are the practical applications of getting my hands in the dirt? Hope is where you put your hands. Hope is built. I want to acknowledge the suffering of the gay men, especially who died during the tragedy. But I also want to acknowledge and account for the women who showed up in rooms where no one else would sit. A community decimated by the plague. The infrastructure of survival was built predominantly by people who were not at risk. That though things turned out the way they did, the advocacy turned out the way it did because the lesbians who historically had. Had been disenfranchised even by some of the gay rights community showed up and said, this doesn't affect me. We seem to be immune and I'm going to help you anyway. The story of the AIDS crisis Without lesbians is a story with a hole in the middle of it. You can't tell the story and leave them out. The Blood Sisters of San Diego disbanded in 1993. Barbara Vick, one of three founders, still lives in San Diego. She sings in a gay feminist chorus, which I love. She speaks publicly about the Blood Sisters legacy, about the broader culture of care that lesbians constructed during the epidemic. The drives were more than this medical intervention. They were proof that the community could protect its own and would protect its own. They were proof that the men who were dying were loved by people who had nothing to gain and everything to give. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who co founded the Dollars Daughters of Billetus in San Francisco in 1955, became the first same sex couple married in the city during the brief window opened by Mayor Gavin Gavin Newsom in February of 2004. The marriage, of course, was later voided by the courts, but it was an important moment. They married again in June 16th of 2008, after the California Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage in the state. Del Martin died two months later at the age of 87. But they got to be legally married, which is someone's cutting ends in here. Phyllis Lyon died on April 2020 at the age of 95. Between them, they had spent 65 years fighting for the right of women who loved women, women to live openly and without fear. And their names are on the record. Spent 65 years loving each other. That is a beautiful, successful relationship by any standard. The word lesbian is 2600 years old. It was born on an island in the agency, the poetry of a woman whose work was so threatening to the established order that it was systematically destroyed across the centuries. They tried to erase Sappho and her love for women. They tried to pretend that homosexual people, queer people, have not existed forever. They have. The placement of the L at the front of the modern LGBTQ acronym is, by comparison, a recent development, a product of late 20th century response to a specific historical crisis. But it carries the weight of these centuries, the weight of this erasure. It says, we're here. We've always been here. We did the work. We specifically did the work to keep this community alive, life. And the record shows it. Not because the institutions were generous, generous with their acknowledgments, not because the history books got it right the first time. The record shows it because women insisted it show it, because they organized and documented and testified and refused to let a story be told without them. Because Sappho wrote the poems, because Del Martin published The magazine Because Wendy Sue Big Gleason and Nicolette Ibarra and Barbara Vick set up the chairs and rolled up their sleeves and gave their blood. Because Sarah Schulman sat down with 188 activists, recorded their voices before their memories could fade. And I want to read to you some of the poetry written 2600 years ago by Sappho on the island of Lesbos. Immortal Aphrodite, on your intricately brocaded throne, child of Zeus, weaver of wiles. This I pray, dear lady, don't crush my heart with pains and sorrows, but come here. If ever before when you heard my far off cry, you listened and you came. Leaving your father's house, yoking your chariot of gold, your beautiful swift sparrows led you over the black earth from the sky, through the middle air, whirling their wings into a blur, rapidly they came. And you, O blessed goddess, a smile on your immortal face asked what had happened this time? Why did I call again? And what did I especially desire for myself and my frenzied heart? Who this time am I to persuade for your love? Sappho, who is doing you wrong? For even if she flees, soon she shall pursue, and if she refuses gifts, soon she shall give them. If she doesn't love you, you soon she shall love, even if she's unwilling. Come to me now once again and release me from my grueling anxiety, all that my heart longs for, Fulfill and be yourself, my ally in love's battle. Some say an army of horsemen, some say foot soldiers, some of ships is the fairest thing on the black earth, But I say it is what one loves. It is very easy to make this clear to everyone. For Helen, by far surpassing mortals in beauty, left the best of all husbands and sailed to Troy, mindful ne of neither her child nor of her grandparents. But with one glimpse she was seduced by Aphrodite. For easily, bent and nimbly has reminded me now of Anactoria, who is not here. I would much prefer to see the lovely way she walks and the radiant glance of her face than the war chariots of the Lydians or their foot soldiers. In arms, that man seems to me equal to the gods, the man who sits opposite you and close by listens to your sweet voice and your enticing laughter, for indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast. For whenever I look at you, even briefly, I can no longer say a single thing, but my tongue is frozen in silence. Instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin and my eyes see nothing My ears make a whirring noise. A cold sweat covers me, trembling seizes my body, and I am greener than grass, lacking but little of death do I seem. 2600 years ago, this woman writing to a woman who's with a man saying, I love you. You make me feel this way. So I hope that inspired you a little bit, such beautiful work from thousands of years ago. And acknowledge that queer people have always existed, always been here and fought for freedom and life in societies that told them they were sinful or heretical or they were broken or they were ill. They're not. Beautifully made. Beautifully and wonderfully made. I hope that you learned something today. I hope it excites you. I would challenge you to learn a little bit more, especially if you're a straight person. Learn a little bit more about the community. Learn a little bit more about the history. You know, I believe that we are on the brink of great change in this country, and that gives me hope. And that great change can make us a lot more loving and a lot more caring to everyone, no matter who they are. Because loving your neighbor didn't come with a qualifying. And I will see you next week on flipping tables. Take care of yourself. Love passionately, love deeply, and make sure that you're always looking out for your community, however that shows up, because those stories matter and that's the reason that we survive and it's the reason that we have hope. Hope is built and it exists where we put our hands. And I will see you next week.