I'm Eric Marcus out of the closet and into your podcast feeds.

I'm once again speaking to you for my guest room closet

revisiting the Making Gay History Archive as a coping mechanism in the COVID crisis. I hope these trips to the

archive help you a little. They help me a lot. Here on West 20th Street in New York

City things have been slowly opening up, the

gelato place on the corner, the French pastry shop across the street, and soon

our favorite restaurant down the block. But normal, not even close.

Noisy traffic and streams of chattering tourists on their way to the Highline Park

have been replaced by chattering birds looking for mates or just hanging out. The city that never sleeps is a

surprisingly sleepy place to live, at least in my neighborhood where many people have

fled to second homes or other parts of the country.

So this is the 10th week that my partner Barney and I have been sheltering in place.

Here in the US, at least 90,000 are dead, more than a million and a half infected.

Along with the cold statistics, there's been much discussion about how this pandemic is the great equalizer,

that no matter who you are or the size of your bank account

you're not protected from this virus. It's true that viruses don't discriminate

but our society does and this virus has cast in stark terms how systemic inequality determines

how likely you are to get sick, and if you get sick, how likely you are to die.

And that brings me to Perry Watkins, another of the many people I interviewed who was just

trying to live his life when fate and in Perry's case racism cast him in a very different role,

one that could easily have landed him six feet under. Perry Watkins was a 19 yearold American college student living in Germany and studying

dance when his draft number was called. It was 1968. The war in Vietnam was at its peak. But Perry figured that after a quick trip to the Army's

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