Michael: We think of the fight for gay rights starting with a riot at a bar. But the real revolution might have started with a typewriter, a psychology class, and a handful of carbon paper. The quietest acts were often the loudest. Kevin: Huh. That’s not the story I know. I always picture Stonewall, right? Bricks flying, a big, explosive moment. You’re saying the foundation was laid in near-silence? Michael: In many ways, yes. That's the world we're diving into today with Eric Marcus's incredible oral history, Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights. It’s a book that’s been widely acclaimed for letting the people who made history tell it themselves. Kevin: And what's wild is that Marcus, a journalist himself, started this project in the late 80s, recording these stories on cassette tapes. He basically created an archive of a history that was actively being forgotten or ignored. He stored them for decades before they were digitized. Michael: Exactly. And these weren't just famous leaders. He talked to everyone—teenagers, grandparents, activists, even people who didn't see themselves as activists at all. That's why the book is so powerful. It's history told by the people who lived it, in their own words. So, let’s go back. What was it actually like to be gay in, say, the 1940s? Kevin: I can’t even begin to imagine. I assume it was dangerous, but what did that danger actually look like day-to-day? Michael: It was a world of total invisibility and pathology. Homosexuality was officially classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. It was illegal. You could be arrested, fired, blackmailed, or institutionalized. There was no community, no public voice. You were, by definition, a deviant and a criminal. Kevin: So you’re completely isolated, and the entire system—medical, legal, social—is telling you that you are fundamentally broken. Where does a movement even begin in an environment like that? Michael: It begins with a single person making a quiet, almost unthinkable choice. And that brings us to our first story, which doesn't start with an activist, but with a psychology instructor at UCLA named Dr. Evelyn Hooker.

Kevin: A psychology instructor? How does she fit in? Was she gay? Michael: No, she was straight. In the mid-1940s, she had a brilliant student in her night class named Sam From. Sam was gay, and over time, he and his partner befriended Dr. Hooker and her husband. One day, Sam came to her with a challenge. He said, and I’m paraphrasing from the book, "Evelyn, you and your colleagues only ever study gay men who are in therapy or in prison. You see us as sick because you only study the ones who are already in a state of distress. It's your scientific duty to study people like us—healthy, happy, well-adjusted gay men." Kevin: Hold on. So a single student's challenge basically set the stage to dismantle the medical justification for homophobia? That's insane. Did she do it? Michael: She was hesitant. This was career suicide. Studying "normal" homosexuals was unheard of. But Sam’s plea, and the encouragement of a colleague, convinced her. Starting in 1947, she began to find gay men who weren't patients and a control group of heterosexual men. She put them all through a battery of psychological tests—Rorschach inkblots, thematic tests, the works. Kevin: I’m on the edge of my seat. What did she find? Michael: She took the anonymous test results to a panel of expert judges. She asked them to do two things: first, rate the overall mental health of each man, and second, identify which ones were gay. The results were stunning. The judges couldn't tell the difference. They found no higher rates of neurosis or maladjustment in the gay men. In fact, they often rated the well-adjusted gay men as heterosexual, because their own bias assumed a healthy person must be straight. Kevin: Wow. So she had empirical proof. The entire "sickness" model was built on a lie, or at least on deeply flawed, biased data. Michael: Precisely. Her 1957 paper, "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual," was a bombshell. It was the first piece of scientific evidence that directly contradicted the psychiatric consensus. It took another 16 years, but her work was the scientific cornerstone for the APA finally declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. It all started with one student asking his teacher to just look. Kevin: That is an incredible story of quiet defiance. It wasn't a protest; it was research. But it was just as revolutionary. You mentioned a typewriter, though. What’s that story? Michael: That story is just as remarkable, and in some ways, even riskier. It belongs to a woman known as Lisa Ben, which is an anagram of "lesbian." In 1947, she was a young secretary working at the RKO movie studio in Hollywood. She felt completely alone and wanted to connect with other lesbians. Kevin: So what did she do? There's no internet, no community centers. Michael: She decided if a magazine for lesbians didn't exist, she would create it. At her desk, after hours, she would type up a little newsletter. She called it Vice Versa. And because there were no copy machines, she would type each page with five carbon copies. She’d make a tiny stack of five issues at a time. Kevin: At her work desk? The risk is giving me anxiety just thinking about it. If she was caught, she'd be fired instantly, probably publicly shamed. Michael: Absolutely. She’d hand-deliver them to friends and say, "Please pass this on to another gay gal you trust." It was the first known lesbian publication in the United States. It had book reviews of novels with lesbian themes, poetry, and little essays. One of them, from 1947, had this incredibly hopeful line: "Whether the unsympathetic majority approves or not, it looks as though the third sex is here to stay." Kevin: That's both terrifying and incredibly brave. It's like a form of secret, personal resistance. It wasn't about changing laws; it was about creating a lifeline. Just saying, "You are not alone." Michael: It was a lifeline. She only published nine issues before she had to stop, but for the women who read it, it was everything. It was proof that others like them existed. These two stories—Hooker's research and Ben's magazine—they show the two pillars of the early movement: the fight for legitimacy in the eyes of society, and the fight for connection and self-worth within the community itself. Both were happening in the shadows, at immense personal risk.

Kevin: Okay, so you have these incredibly brave but isolated acts. A secret study, a hidden magazine. How do you get from that to a full-blown rights movement? It feels like a massive leap. Michael: It is a massive leap, and it required a fundamental shift in strategy and attitude. The early "homophile" organizations, like the Mattachine Society, which started in the 50s, were very much in the spirit of Dr. Hooker. Their goal was assimilation. They argued, "We are just like you, we are respectable, we are not sick, please accept us." They wore suits and ties to their protests to look as non-threatening as possible. Kevin: They were trying to prove their worthiness to the mainstream. Michael: Exactly. But by the late 1960s, influenced by the Black civil rights movement and the anti-war protests, a new generation was tired of asking politely. The mood shifted from "Please accept us" to "We demand our rights." And that's the explosion we know as Stonewall in 1969. After that, you get groups like the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF. Their slogan wasn't "We're respectable." It was "Gay Power!" Kevin: So it’s a move from defense to offense. From assimilation to liberation. Give me a story that embodies that shift. Who represents that change from quiet fear to loud, unapologetic pride? Michael: For me, one of the most powerful stories in the entire book is that of Jeanne Manford. She wasn't a radical student or a seasoned activist. She was an elementary school teacher from Queens, a mother. In the early 70s, her son, Morty, was a gay activist. During one protest, he was beaten by police while handing out flyers. Kevin: Oh man. As a parent, that must be your worst nightmare. Michael: It lit a fire in her. She wrote a furious letter to the New York Post, declaring, "I have a homosexual son and I love him." This was unheard of. But she didn't stop there. In 1972, she decided to march with Morty in New York's Christopher Street Liberation Day March, what we now call the Pride Parade. Kevin: A mother marching in a gay pride parade in 1972? What was that like? Michael: It was electric. She carried this simple, hand-lettered sign that read, "Parents of Gays: Unite in Support for Our Children." The book describes how the crowd reacted. People were stunned. Then they started cheering. Young men and women ran out from the sidelines, weeping, hugging her, kissing her on the cheek, begging her, "Will you talk to my mother? Will you talk to my father?" Kevin: Wow. That gives me chills. It wasn't a politician or a radical. It was a mom. That feels like a different kind of power. It’s not a demand for rights; it’s a declaration of love, which in that context, is the most radical statement of all. Michael: It was a revolutionary act of love. And it had a concrete outcome. So many people approached her that day that she and Morty decided to start a support group. They held the first meeting in a church basement a few months later. About 20 people showed up. That meeting was the beginning of PFLAG—Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Kevin: PFLAG came from that one sign? From one mother's decision to show up for her son? Michael: It did. It completely changed the landscape. It showed that this wasn't just a fight for gay people; it was a fight for families, for love, for basic human dignity. Jeanne Manford’s story perfectly illustrates that shift from the quiet, internal struggle to a loud, public, and community-based movement. She took the love that was supposed to be private and shameful and made it a public, political force.

Kevin: It’s incredible when you lay it out like that. The history isn't just one big event like Stonewall. It's a chain reaction—a secret magazine inspires someone, a scientific study gives people the language of legitimacy, and a mother's love ignites a new kind of public fight. Michael: Exactly. Eric Marcus's book is so brilliant because it avoids a simple, top-down narrative. He was inspired by the biographer Lytton Strachey, who wrote about exploring the past by lowering a "little bucket" into the "great ocean of material" to bring up characteristic specimens. That's what these stories are. They're specimens of courage. Kevin: I like that. A bucket of courage. Michael: And what they show is that history isn't just made by a few famous figures on a stage. It's made by countless individuals making brave choices in their own lives, in their own contexts. A psychologist in her lab, a secretary at her typewriter, a teacher on a parade route. The fight for rights isn't a single battle; it's a relay race of courage, passed from one person to the next, often in the dark. Kevin: It makes you wonder, what are the quiet, brave acts happening today that will be seen as revolutionary 50 years from now? What are the things we're overlooking? Michael: That's a powerful question. And it’s a question that applies to any movement for justice. It’s about recognizing the power in small, seemingly insignificant acts of defiance and love. Kevin: It really is. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What parts of this history resonate with you? Find us on our socials and share your perspective. It’s a history that belongs to everyone. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.