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. Hey, I'm Lee.

And I'm Gretchen. And in this episode, we are going to be talking about what this podcast is and why you should listen to us.

I mean, other than the fact that we're super cool big gay nerds and who wouldn't want to

listen to us?

I mean, there's that.

But like, also, we have really cool shit to say.

Specifically, we like to think of this podcast as queering history.

So what is queering history?

Well, for us, it's a recognition that persons who existed outside of straight sexuality and the gender binary have always existed,

but that history or, you know, the people who write and tell history may or may not always have

acknowledged that we exist. We're going to introduce you to some people from history who aren't as straight as people might think.

We'll also cover cultures who may have been more affirming or at least understood differently of what we now consider LGBT identity.

But it's not just about sexual orientation. We're also going to be diving into gender representation beyond the binary

that we've been taught in Western American culture. Whether it be same gender attraction,

trans experience, or gender expression outside of the modern Western binary, we're going to look

at it all, or at least as much as we can get our hands on. Basically, if it's not heteronormative

or ciscentric, you can bet it's something we want to talk about. Like... And Bonnie and Mary Reid, who totally boned on the open seas. The original emo, lesbian, Sappho. Gay Egyptians, who are married for all eternity. Speaking of Egyptians, do you know they had three genders? That's so cool. We're also going to talk about people like Claude Cahoon, the genderqueer

Nazi fighter. And more. I guess you'll just have to listen to see. Yes. Well, before we move on,

we want to address our choice of language. The podcast is called History is Gay, but you've also

heard us use the term queer. For us, gay is, it's a good umbrella term, but we may also use queer as an umbrella term as well.

We understand that not everyone is comfortable with either or both of these terms.

We, however, find them useful.

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