From Stonewall to the Present, Fifty Years of L.G.B.T.Q. Rights

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Masha Gessen co-hosts this episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, guiding David Remnick through the fifty years of civil-rights gains for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From drag queens reading to children at the library to a popular gay Presidential candidate, we’ll look at how the movement for L.G.B.T.Q. rights has changed our culture and our laws. The actress and comedian Lea DeLaria takes us through five decades of queer history in five minutes. Gessen talks with a Stonewall historian named Martin Duberman about whether the movement has become too conservative, and, later, she visits with a gay asylum seeker who recently fled Russia’s state security agency. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this program misidentified the location of the 2016 Pulse night-club shooting.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:09.2	All righty, so how many of you know what a drag queen is?
0:16.6	Oh, good, I see some hands.
0:18.5	Any guesses for those of you who don't?
0:20.3	What is a drag queen?
0:22.2	It's when people dress up. Exactly. What is your name?
0:27.0	Rufus.
0:27.7	Rufus. Everybody say hi, Rufus.
0:29.7	Hi, Rufus. So Rufus is exactly right. It's like dress up. Who likes to play dress up here?
0:36.0	It's lunchtime on a Saturday, and we're at the Brooklyn Public Library.
0:39.8	There's maybe 60 kids here with their parents, and they're here for an event that's called the Drag Queen Story Hour, which is exactly what it sounds like.
0:49.0	My name is Chalula Lemon. I'm in New York City, drag queen.
0:52.1	I'm wearing a blush rose-colored lace dress with a tie.
0:58.0	And I have my signature stacks of bangles and my big earrings and my big hair.
1:04.0	So we're going to do one more book.
1:08.0	This one's a really good book.
1:10.0	It's called It's Okay to Be Different.
1:14.6	It's okay to be missing a tooth, right? Or two or three. How many of you are missing teeth?
1:21.6	I have. I lost two.
1:23.6	Would you believe that all of these are fake?
1:29.7	It's okay to have a different nose.
1:33.6	What do we see?
	...

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