I was doing a book event a while ago and someone in the audience asked me why I do this every year.

Why I re-release an episode that I originally wrote a few days after the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida on June 12, 2016, where a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 more one night when they were just going out.

Why, I have done it each year for nine years now.

And part of the answer is that I have a deep love and profound respect for places where people

become the people they are, where they find out who they feel most comfortable being,

where they go again and again to be that way.

It could be some art space or all ages matinee hardcore show

or support group or the library or a sci-fi convention

or the dance floor or group therapy or a church basement

or the rec room at a temple or some clearing the woods.

But I love these spaces and intentional communities that people have chosen to

build and maintain as a means to offer, I suppose, different ways to live in this world. And the

Pulse Nightclub, like the White Horse, was one of those. But the rest of the answer is simpler,

because it still feels necessary. People's rights, people's personal safety, people's health, people's health care,

people's identities are under attack in the United States,

and people deserve to be safe. We need these spaces.

This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

The White Horse Inn on Telegraph in Oakland, opened in 1933, where thereabouts. The White Horse Inn on Telegraph in Oakland opened in 1933, or thereabouts.

No one's been able to nail down the date.

Historians have tried, as have some of its various owners, it seems, over the years.

But if you're not an academic, or if you don't have a personal financial stake in solidifying its claim as the oldest gay bar in the United States, to operate continuously in one location, it doesn't really matter when the white horse first opened its doors.

Just that it was soon enough for a man to walk in on just the right night in 1936, or 46, or 54,

...