7. F is For Friend Who Did Not Have Gender

History is Gay

Leigh Pfeffer

History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 536 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2018

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

R is for Revolutionary War, which is where hosts Leigh & Gretchen are headed in this, the very first episode dedicated to a single person from history: the Publick Universal Friend. The Friend presented as something entirely new: a genderless spirit from God who eschewed gendered pronouns and dressed and spoke in ways that purposefully blurred the lines between male and female in early American society. So come join us as we talk about this most special of Friends; to make things even more interesting, turns out one of our hosts is related to the Friend!

Outline

0:00 – Introduction

2:30 – Corrections Corner: On Egyptian Lettuce

5:22 – Main Topic: Jemima Wilkinson, The Publick Universal Friend

7:54 – Socio-Historical and Religious Context

27:48 – Who were they? Bio Time.

48:42 – Why do we think they're gay?

1:05:08 – Analysis from Queer Historians

1:17:15 – Fun Fact: One of our Hosts is Related!

1:20:40 – How Gay were They?

1:27:10 – Closing and Where to Find us Online

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. I'm Gretchen.
0:32.0	And I'm Lee.
0:32.9	And in this episode, we're talking about Jemima Wilkinson,
0:37.0	a.k.k., aka the public universal friend.
0:40.1	They were a post-revolution early American religious leader who founded their own Christian sect after being reborn as a genderless spirit inhabiting the body of the former Quaker, quote-unquote, woman.
0:51.6	We had to give that description because, as we've discovered and we discovered ourselves, not a lot of people know about this person. This was a delight for us to figure out. Oh my gosh. It was great. And like the funny thing is, is we, this is our first episode that we're doing on a single person. And it was someone that we initially couldn't find a lot of information about. And so we both had this moment where we were like, Are you going to have enough to say? I don't know.
1:14.6	I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we're going to have enough. No, we have what? How long is our outline? I don't know. Like something like 15 pages. Like it always is. Like normal. Like our outlines are really are. Yeah. God, we're just a couple of Ravenclaws who like enjoy writing
1:30.0	basically term papers every other week.
1:33.0	For no credit.
1:34.5	Yeah, I was talking to a, uh, my friend Shelby is always like, how do you meet such new queer friends on the train all the time?
1:42.3	And I'm like, I don't fucking know.
1:44.1	But, um, I guess I just attract I'm like, I don't fucking know. But I guess I just
1:45.7	attract them. God, I wish. All the queerest come to me. But no, I was talking to this person
1:51.1	on the train who, like, is in grad school. And then they saw the giant, like, stack of papers
1:56.8	that I pulled out of my backpack to start reading. And they were like, so you're basically
2:00.7	in grad school? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, except nobody gives me grades. And there's no scary pressure. I just do this shit for fun. Right. And we can, you know, there's no obligation to like get it. I mean, we set our own deadlines and we try and stick to them, but it's not the same.
2:19.1	Plus, it's like we get to make our own courses. And we don't have to pay thousands of dollars.
2:24.2	Yes. Yay. Even better. That's always nice. So, but yeah. To start this episode, we have our first ever
2:32.8	corrections corner. Yeah. We have to make a correction have our first ever corrections corner. Yeah.
2:34.6	We have to make a correction to our last episode on Egyptians.
2:37.6	Apparently lettuce does reproduce sexually.
2:41.1	Yeah.
	...

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