This Week in Queer History

Kris with a K

Every week, Kris Fitzgerald digs into the archives of LGBTQ+ history to uncover the moments, people, and movements that shaped queer life and culture. From landmark legal victories to unsung heroes, from underground parties to mass protests - This Week in Queer History celebrates the agency, resilience, and brilliance of queer communities across time. History isn't just what happened. It's who we are.  Watch the video versions on YouTube: youtube.com/@thisweekinqueerhistory  Join our community: thisweekinqueerhistory.circle.so

  1. 18h ago

    Beyond The Parties: How Fire Island Created The Blueprint For Modern Queer Community

    Fire Island. Say those two words and most people picture circuit parties and share houses. But the real story of this thirty-two-mile barrier island is so much bigger than the parties. In this episode, we explore how Cherry Grove became the first openly gay and lesbian community in America in the 1930s, how queer people created democratic self-governance twenty-five years before Stonewall, and how the "house" system of chosen family became a survival mechanism that carried an entire community through the AIDS crisis. From architectural defiance (houses that face each other, not the road) to the legendary Invasion of the Pines, this is the story of how a strip of sand off Long Island became the blueprint for every queer space that came after it. Key topics: Cherry Grove history, Fire Island Pines, Esther Newton's research, Horace Gifford's architecture, the house system as chosen family, AIDS crisis mutual aid, the Invasion of the Pines (1976), queer self-governance. Join the email list for free queer history downloads and early episode access: thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Watch on YouTube: youtube.com/@ThisWeekInQueerHistory Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  2. Aug 4

    He Was Dying of AIDS. He Won the Gold Medal Anyway.

    In 1986, over 3,400 queer athletes marched into Kezar Stadium while the AIDS crisis raged and the government looked away. Tom Waddell — doctor, Olympian, and man already diagnosed with AIDS — threw a javelin and won gold. Forty years later, the Olympics are coming to Los Angeles, and Pride House is landing right in West Hollywood. This is the story of Gay Games II and how a community built their own world when the world wouldn't have them. From Rikki Streicher's vision to Greg Louganis diving while the world watched, these athletes showed up for each other when everything else had abandoned them. The Gay Games drew more athletes than the 1984 Olympics the year before. Nobody noticed. Nobody needed to. They showed up anyway. Now the 2028 Olympics come to Los Angeles, and Pride House is returning to West Hollywood to carry that spirit into a new generation. The institutions that shut them out still exist. So does the community that built something better. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Join our community: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.circle.so Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  3. Jul 28

    The Secret Language That Kept Queer People Alive

    In 1864, a German lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs did something no one had ever done before: he invented a word for himself. Not a diagnosis. Not a slur. A word rooted in ancient philosophy that said this is what I am, and I am not ashamed. That word was Uranian, and it cracked open a door that has never fully closed. This episode traces 160 years of queer linguistic history, from Ulrichs coining his own vocabulary to the underground world of Polari, the secret slang that kept gay men in Britain alive when loving another man was a crime. We explore the coded language of midcentury America, where being a "friend of Dorothy" could mean the difference between connection and isolation. We debunk the persistent myth about the origin of "f****t" and trace how words like "queer" and "dyke" traveled from weapons to badges of honor. The story moves through ACT UP and Queer Nation reclaiming public language during the AIDS crisis, into the ballroom culture that gave the world "slay," "shade," "tea," and "vogue," vocabulary created by Black and Latinx trans and queer people that mainstream culture adopted without credit. And it lands in the modern era, where the internet has accelerated identity language at a pace Ulrichs could never have imagined. Kris shares his own journey with the word "queer," from a time when it felt foreign and wrong to the moment it became a source of strength. He reflects on the power of taking a word that was used as a weapon and making it your own. Because naming yourself, on your own terms, might be the most powerful thing you can do. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  4. Jul 21

    He Was the Best Doctor in the British Empire. They Had No Idea Who He Really Was.

    In this episode, we meet Dr. James Miranda Steuart Barry, a brilliant British Army surgeon who rose to the second-highest medical rank in the Empire, performed one of the first successful Caesarean sections where both mother and child survived, and lived as a man for 56 years. Born Margaret Anne Bulkley in Cork, Ireland around 1789, Barry's transformation was made possible by an extraordinary network of allies, including a Venezuelan revolutionary, a Scottish earl, and a mother who refused to accept the limits the world placed on her child. Barry's career spanned four continents and four decades of service. In Cape Town, he pushed for clean water, better sanitation, and improved care for enslaved people, prisoners, and the mentally ill. He managed cholera epidemics. He argued with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, two powerful reformers who probably recognized something of themselves in each other. And in a Cape Town home around 1826, he performed a medical miracle that echoed through generations. When Barry died on July 25, 1865, a charwoman discovered the truth about his body. The British Army sealed his records for a hundred years. They couldn't seal the legacy. Today, Barry's story carries urgent resonance as we watch trans people being denied the right to serve in the military and pursue their passions. When we deny people the ability to be themselves, we all lose. This is a story about courage, allyship, and the power of living as yourself. 161 years later, Dr. James Barry's headstone still reads exactly what he chose: Inspector General of Hospitals. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  5. Jul 14

    Compton's Cafeteria Uprising: 60 Years of Fighting Back

    Three years before Stonewall, a trans woman in San Francisco's Tenderloin threw a cup of coffee in a police officer's face. That moment ignited the Compton's Cafeteria Uprising, one of the earliest acts of collective queer resistance in American history. In this episode, we explore the story that was almost erased, the community that fought back, and why the language we use matters. We'll talk about the difference between a riot and an uprising, the Tenderloin neighborhood that became a refuge, and how this moment created lasting institutions like the National Transsexual Counseling Unit. Sixty years later, the fight for trans rights continues, and this history reminds us that resistance has always been part of our story. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  6. Jul 7

    One Vote. That's All That Saved New Zealand's Gay Rights Bill.

    On July 2, 1986, opponents of New Zealand's Homosexual Law Reform Bill moved to kill it entirely. The closure motion failed by one vote - 41 in favor of killing the bill, 42 against. One MP held strong. One week later, on July 9, 1986, Part 1 passed 49 to 44, and gay men in New Zealand were no longer criminals. This episode tells the full story of that nail-biting fight - and why it matters forty years later. Before British ships arrived in New Zealand, the Maori people had a word: takatapui - intimate companion of the same sex. There was no concept of same-sex love as criminal. Then came 1840 and the Treaty of Waitangi, which brought British law with it, including sodomy statutes that originally carried the death penalty. New Zealand didn't invent homophobia. It imported it. And it took 146 years to undo. This episode traces that undoing - from the Dorian Society in 1962, to Ngahuia Te Awekotuku's denied US visa in 1972 that galvanized a movement, to the failed reform bills of 1974 and 1979 where activists refused to accept second-class legislation. Then in 1985, Labour MP Fran Wilde introduced the Homosexual Law Reform Bill and faced sixteen months of debate, death threats, a stalker, a vandalized car, and a fraudulent petition claiming 800,000 signatures - one in four New Zealand adults - that investigators found had pages with multiple signatures in the same handwriting and boxes submitted as full that were nearly empty. The episode also celebrates what came after: the Human Rights Act of 1993, the Civil Union Act of 2004, marriage equality in 2013 - the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to legalize it - and the public gallery breaking into a Maori love song after the vote passed. A colonized people's love song celebrating the end of a colonial law. And it reflects on what it means to be that one vote in your own life - to hold strong to what you believe is right even when the pressure is enormous, because you know what you're actually protecting. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  7. Jun 30

    America the Beautiful Was Written by a Lesbian - And They Erased Her

    What if America's most patriotic song was a queer love story? On July 4, 1895, Katharine Lee Bates published a poem called "America" in a weekly newspaper. We know it today as "America the Beautiful." And the woman who wrote it was a lesbian who lived for twenty-five years with the love of her life - and whose queerness was systematically erased from popular history for over a century. This Fourth of July episode gives Katharine Lee Bates her full story back. Katharine was an English professor at Wellesley College who essentially created the first American literature course in the country and wrote the first textbook on the subject. In the summer of 1893, she traveled west with her partner Katharine Coman - the first American woman to teach statistics, co-founder of the American Economics Association, founder of Wellesley's entire Department of Economics. They visited the Chicago World's Fair, that gleaming "alabaster city," and then continued to Colorado Springs, where Katharine climbed Pikes Peak by prairie wagon and mule and came back to her hotel room to write the poem. The "alabaster cities" she described were the ones she and Katharine Coman had just seen together. The two Katharines lived together for twenty-five years in a home they called The Scarab. They were known around campus as The Two Katharines. Bates wrote to Coman: "You are always in my heart and in my longings." They described themselves as one soul together. When Coman died of breast cancer in 1915, Bates published an entire volume of love and grief poetry dedicated to her. And then, like so many queer people throughout history, she destroyed most of their correspondence - a common act of self-protection, burning the evidence, erasing the trail to protect the person she loved most. This episode sits with the meaning of all of that - the longing in those lyrics, what it means to love a country that doesn't fully love you back, and the choice to stay and keep singing anyway. When queer Americans are being told they don't belong, this episode is a reminder: the woman who wrote the song that defines what America aspires to be was one of us. She loved deeply. She saw beauty everywhere she looked. If that isn't American, nothing is. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

  8. Jun 23

    The Mom Who Marched for Her Gay Son - and Changed Everything

    On June 25, 1972, a schoolteacher from Queens named Jeanne Manford grabbed a piece of orange posterboard, wrote in marker that parents of gay children should unite in support of their kids, and stepped into the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. She'd never made a protest sign before - you can tell by the lowercase letters in the middle of the message. She'd never crossed the street against the light. And when she walked out into that crowd, strangers ran into the street weeping, begging her to talk to their parents. This episode is a celebration of that day and the movement it became. To understand why that handmade sign broke everyone open, you have to understand the world it appeared in. Gay People at Columbia University. The Gay Activists Alliance. The New York Hilton Inner Circle dinner, where Morty Manford was brutally beaten by a firefighter while police stood and watched. Jeanne's response was to write a letter to the New York Post: I have a homosexual son and I love him. Published April 29, 1972. A public school teacher in Queens, putting her name and career on the line in 1972. And then marching. On March 11, 1973, Jeanne held the first PFLAG meeting at Metropolitan-Duane United Methodist Church in Greenwich Village. About twenty people showed up. Those early meetings were described as frank and raw and therapeutic - parents struggling with the gap between who they thought their child was and who their child actually is. From those twenty people grew an organization with over 360 chapters and more than 550,000 members and supporters today. Research from the Family Acceptance Project shows that LGBTQ+ youth with accepting families are eight times less likely to attempt suicide. That is what Jeanne Manford built. This episode also gets deeply personal - about what it means to come out to parents who love you, about how a parent's greatest growth is learning to let their child be who they already are, and about the grandmothers who love you completely even when they have to spell out every syllable of the word. In 2026, PFLAG faces its most organized opposition since the mid-1990s. But the lesson of Jeanne Manford is simple and undefeatable: you step off the curb, you hold your sign, and you march for the ones you love. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com Send us Fan Mail Support the show

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About

Every week, Kris Fitzgerald digs into the archives of LGBTQ+ history to uncover the moments, people, and movements that shaped queer life and culture. From landmark legal victories to unsung heroes, from underground parties to mass protests - This Week in Queer History celebrates the agency, resilience, and brilliance of queer communities across time. History isn't just what happened. It's who we are.  Watch the video versions on YouTube: youtube.com/@thisweekinqueerhistory  Join our community: thisweekinqueerhistory.circle.so

Information

  • Creator
    Kris with a K
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    108
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 This Week in Queer History
  • Show Website
    This Week in Queer History

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