Secret gay backstory of the way we were
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David Bohnett was born 13 years before the Stonewall Revolution, which kicked off the modern time gay civil rights movement in 1969 – and his early life tragically mirrored the strife. His first significant other took his possess life because he couldn’t reconcile his religion and his sexuality; he was in the closet with his family until 1983; his life partner died of AIDs in 1993; and he had to stay another 22 years before same-sex marriage was legalized across the United States.
But while that would be enough trauma to stop most people in their tracks, Bohnett took those experiences and created an entire world where people could not only connect over similar interests, but also live as the people they truly were.
Bohnett’s life companion — Rand Schrader, who was the first openly queer staffer in the Los Angeles Town Attorney’s Office and, later, one of the few openly gay judges in the entire society — left him a sizable amount of money in his life insurance policy after he died from complications due to AIDs. Bohnett took that money and co-founded an internet service provider (ISP) he named Beverly Hills Internet in 1994.
As a marketing gimmick, he and his
No Way! They Were Gay? Copy
Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi had a soulmate and it wasn’t his wife Casaba? It was the male Architect Hermann Kellanbach. Or that a gender-fluid Pharaoh governed Egypt for 22 years over 2000 years ago?
In this week’s episode of “The Be Ruthless Show” I spoke with Lgbtq+ activist and author Lee Wind about the crucial LGBTQ+ topics he is passionate about, and his amazing book “No Way, They Were Gay? Concealed Lives and Secret Loves”.
Growing up being taught a straight-washed false facade of history contributed to Lee feeling isolated and alone as a Queer kid. In his latest novel Lee shares the empowering Queerstories from history he wishes he was taught in school, in hopes that Queer kids don’t wait until their 20s to come out as he did.
Introducing our unreal guest: LEE WIND
Lee Wind’s superpower is stories – true and fictional – that center marginalized kids and teens and rejoice their power to modify the world. Closeted until his 20s, Lee writes the books that would have changed his animation as a young same-sex attracted kid. His Master’s Degree from Harvard didn’t comprise blueprints for a occasion machine to go help and tell th
Season 4 — Introduction
Photo Information
Clockwise from upper left: Martha Shelley at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, 1969. Credit: Photo by Diana Davies, courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library.
Bayard Rustin at a news briefing on the Civil Rights Rally on Washington in the Statler Hotel, August 27, 1963. Credit: Photo by Warren K. Leffler, courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-01272.
Ernestine Eckstein on the cover of The Ladder in June 1966. Credit: Photo by Kay Tobin Lahusen, courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives Division, The Recent York Public Library.
Harry Hay press let go still for Clifford Odets’s Til the Day I Die, May 1935. Credit: ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
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Episode Notes
Our fourth season is about beginnings. 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. 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.
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Episode Transcript
Eric Ma The Way We Were, which punch movie screens 50 years ago, is a production about remembering and forgetting. The Way We Were premiered in 1973, the year of a national “nervous breakdown”—the Watergate hearings, defeat in Vietnam, Roe v. Wade, and an oil crisis. The film harkens help to earlier decades and to what feminist chief Vivian Gornick calls the “romance of American communism,” as well as the blacklist that romance produced. Today, audiences are still drawn to the film’s unlikely romance between the unkempt, loudmouthed, Jewish revolutionary, Katie Morosky (played by Barbra Streisand) and the gorgeous, athletic and waspy Hubbell Gardner (Robert Redford), with whom Katie falls in love, despite herself. Beyond Streisand’s magic as an actor, Katie is imprinted as a character. That’s because screenwriter Arthur Laurents—“a self-hating gay Jewish man” who changed his identify from Levine and fell in love with a man who looked a lot like Robert Redford—put so much of himself into her, according to two new books on the film. But these books don’t tell the whole story. Laurents also drew on memories of classmate Eva Moskovitz, who became the successful TriPod: Novel Orleans at 300 returns with a look at the once secret history of Gay Carnival Krewes. Note: this episode contains a racially insensitive word that may offend some listeners. We have included it for context. Barrett Delong Church is showing me a giant flamingo Mardi Gras float that his husband will be riding on in the Krewe of Armenius den. Armenius is an all male, gay krewe, and it celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. I met Barrett, this year’s krewe captain, at their den the day before their big ball. This year’s theme? 300 years of fabulous. Obviously what I should have called TriPod. “Oh tomorrow is going to be incredible”, Church said. Credit Laine Kaplan-Levenson / WWNO / WWNO And it was. I was there. The ball was held at Mardi Gras World. Hundreds of people showed up, many in black tie, to see these flamboyant costumes in action. People sat in tuxes and gowns at tables, picking at cheese plates and pounding drinks, as krewe members pranced around the vacuum, one by one, blowing kisses to the cheering crowds from inside th
The Lost History Of Gay Carnival