Part Two: Ben Egerman and the Gay History of Maryland

0:02 Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that there's bad things happening. I mean, that there are people who try to do things about the bad things, and one of the things that they try to do, the cool people who try to do good things, is that they try to preserve history and let us see ourselves in history again. And also remind us that we actually need to take political power if we want to not all get wiped out. I am your host, Margaret Killjoy. If you didn't listen to part one, none of that will make any sense to you. But you probably listened to part one because what kind of person would you be to listen to only part two of a two-part podcast on the same subject?

0:44 Not very cool.

0:45 No, I know. Exactly. Or your brain just works very differently than me. I can't even watch an episode of DS9 if I haven't seen all the ones that come before it. This drives everyone in my life crazy. But my guest, Ben Agerman. Hi, how are you?

0:59 I'm doing great.

1:02 Ben, you are the author of a book, A Gay Little History of Maryland. And it is a very good book. And I spent all of part one telling everyone why it's a very good book. So go listen to that. Okay, I promised you I was going to be thinking about your presentation about how representation... is useful, but not what protects us. And I was going to be thinking about it a lot. And I think it helps me wrap my head around something that I've been calling the sawtooth of history. Being a trans girl, I know how sound waves work, but I've never been in a noise band.

1:40 And you know what a sawtooth wave is? It's like a wave that goes up at an angle and then collapses completely, right? It's It seems like LGBTQ plus history and rights largely have a saw tooth. Largely building things is slow. Destroying things is fast, which is true for bad stuff too sometimes, right? Bad systems can sometimes be built really slowly and destroyed very quickly. But I keep seeing throughout history, but unfortunately I did most of this before I started tracking where I would learn things about history.

2:23 I remember reading about this island in the Mediterranean, and I don't remember which island it was because this is before I paid attention to stuff, where in the Middle Ages, a lot of queer folks would all go to, right? There's been these places all throughout history. Anytime there's repression, people are like, fuck yeah, I'm going to like the Ottoman Empire was this for a very long time, right?

2:42 Yes.

2:43 You're a European and you want to sleep with other men, you get the fuck over to the Ottoman Empire. Yeah. There was a Mediterranean island that had this kind of reputation and people would move to it. And over the course of generations, it was this like gay haven. And then like in a matter of like a year, they all just kind of got killed or driven out or like it all became illegal again. The sawtooth of history is really fucking rough. And so I like this framework, this framing that you present of that's why we need to pair political power with just like coming out and feeling good.

3:26 Yeah. Well, and also, you know, like community building at a basic level and creating spaces. These are things that, you know, there's a story in here that takes place at sort of the height of repression in the 1950s and 60s. where basically a group of queer people from DC, where there is just a massive amount of repression. It is explicitly focused on finding and firing any queer government employees and people are afraid to go out. And so they wind up basically taking over a tiny sort of down on its luck former resort town about an hour away, where just once a week, it's just sort of the biggest thing is this drag bar that they open up.

4:29 And it becomes this huge sort of scene where, to me, what I like about that story is it shows that there is this aspect of, you know, life finds a way that when there are these situations of extreme repression, people get creative, right?

4:55 Yeah.

4:55 And people actually find ways to support each other and be in community with each other. And I think we see that throughout history. But I think that, especially for modern LGBTQ folks, that's like the model has always been about sort of creating and preserving spaces for community and for mutual aid and for safety. Yeah.

5:23 And it's like one of the things that, you know, I feel like I accidentally presented doom and gloom when I'm like, Oh wait, they tricked us into, we all came out and now they're repressing us or whatever. The thing that I try to remember is that like, even in my own teenage hood, things were dramatically different in the nineties than they are now.

5:43 Right.

5:44 And, All of the rights that we have, we built when we had nothing. We built when they were just kind of killing us. And I don't mean to, we've always had something. We've always had people who care for us. We've always had each other. We've also always had like, you know, our admirers. You tell this story about the trans woman who goes up and down sleeping with soldiers in what I think the Civil War, you know? And you're like, yeah, I mean, the people sleeping with her know what's up, you know? And like, I perfectly find that.

6:17 We've always had our admirers. But like, we have always had each other and we have always built things when we had nothing. But do you want to talk about the lavender scare? I feel like that, you know, the name of the thing you're talking about, because you have this book about Maryland and then people are kind of like, Maryland, isn't that one that doesn't have a shape that makes sense and doesn't have a flag that makes sense? And like, yes, it's a psychedelic state. It's okay. But it's where... A lot of the people who run the country live, and that matters.

6:50 Yes.

6:50 Yeah, you want to talk about the Lavender Scare?

6:52 Yeah, so, I mean, this is something that comes up a lot. You know, I'm doing a history that's focused on, you know, the state that neighbors D.C.

7:04 The only state that neighbors D.C. This is, we don't acknowledge Virginia, yeah.

7:09 Where?

7:09 Southern Maryland, we call it.

7:10 Yeah.

7:12 I'm going to start a fight for no reason. I do not care about this at all.

7:16 Me either. But yeah, because of how close we are to DC, what happens in DC has a huge impact. And effectively, in the post-World War II period, now there is just this massive sort of conservative backlash. And a lot of it is focused around gender. And it's really sort of looking at, there's a pretty open secret that there was just a bunch of gay sex happening in the armed forces.

7:55 The first lady's gay as shit during most of World War II.

7:58 Yeah. And there are these images of butch women working in factories. And this is like really threatening.

8:07 Yeah.

8:08 To a lot of people. And so there's this huge backlash. And it coincides with the second Red Scare, McCarthyism, and it's all the same people. What winds up happening is this cycle where the term is homosexuals and other sex perverts was the category.

8:31 So leather does belong at the street festival is what you're saying. It always has.

8:35 Yeah, exactly.

8:36 Exactly.

8:37 But that we were unqualified for government work because we were security risks. The idea was because being gay is so stigmatized and shameful, it's very easy to blackmail queer people by threatening to out them. And therefore, naturally, the Soviet Union was going to send gay spies to seduce American federal employees and then blackmail them into divulging state secrets. Naturally.

9:13 Is there any evidence of this ever happening? Because it could have happened because of.

9:17 There is no evidence of this ever happening. Zero evidence of this ever happening. There was a whole book investigating this. Never happened. Never happened.

9:27 Because this was a scare that didn't get named until later, right? The book, The Lavender Scare, named The Lavender Scare in what, the 80s, 70s?

9:34 Yes, 90s. And so what winds up happening is as the Red Scare is happening and Joe McCarthy will bring someone in from the State Department and accuse the State Department of harboring communists, they will come back the next month and say, no, we take security very, very seriously, which is why we just fired 101 homosexuals as security risks. Right? Cool.

10:04 And so this was the cycle.

10:06 Yeah.

10:07 Was being accused of being soft on communists and then responding by showing how diligent they are in expelling queer people. And The second Red Scare, there were, I think, between 1,000 and 3,000 people blacklisted. There was about 10,000 to 15,000 federal employees fired for this reason. Wow.

10:31 I didn't know the order of magnitude was so, like, different like that.

10:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, like, much, much higher. And there's, like, trickle-down of, like, states were doing this, and a lot of contractors were doing this. Anyone who needed a security clearance could not get it. All that sort of stuff. And... it's again this period of real sort of backlash and in many ways a lot of fear it's also the period in which modern queer culture sort of develops and there's this huge explosion of sort of people identifying as queer and being willing to sort of live their lives that way yeah.

11:15 With a lot of like a The first wave of it is like mostly assimilationist folks like Mattachine Society and like people who are just like, I want to wear a suit and tie and be a nice normal man.

11:27 Well, their argument was around privacy. They would march with signs that said sexual preference is irrelevant to employment. Right. I mean, first off, the Mattachine Society in D.C. was founded by people who were fired in the lavender scare.

11:44 Oh, I didn't know that.

11:45 OK. Yeah, it was founded by Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols. And Frank Kameny had been fired. He was trying to work for NASA, but was not allowed to and suggested that he needed to retire. He said he did not realize that he lacked the moral standing to work under Wernher von Braun.

12:04 He was an Operation Paperclip guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:10 There might have.

12:11 Been assimilations, but they were not above saying some catty shit that ruled. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

12:16 But so their whole thing was about privacy, whereas the post-Stonewall generation was about being public and saying, no, we shouldn't have to be private about this at all.

12:28 Yeah, it's like, well, we'll fuck in the streets. Fuck you.

12:30 Yeah, exactly. But you see, again, throughout this period of, The Lavender Scare, you see just a ton of work going into creating, finding and creating spaces that can be sort of relatively safe. And one of the best, again, I get into this, the chapter of this book is on a place called the Gold Key Club. That is a drag bar in rural Southern Maryland. It's one of the most conservative parts of the state. And for the whole of the 60s, it was the only place In the area where you could legally see a drag show.

13:11 Because they called it theater, right? Like, how did they make it legal?

13:15 No, it wasn't anything like that. Oh, okay. The deal was, was this was a town that had previously been a resort town. Most everything had shut down. The only business left was a biker bar, which was the clubhouse of an outlaw biker club that frequently had like gang fights in the middle of town. And so when a bunch of queer people started showing up and spending money there, the chief of police basically said, I have too many bigger problems to deal with. And it was sort of a space where people knew like, well, if you want this town to survive, you just sort of have to, you know, hold your nose and put up with the fact that there's going to be a bunch of gay people like overwhelming the town every weekend. Yeah.

14:10 We talk about how in history, we mostly see the criminal queers. If we go back prior to oral history, prior to people being out and writing their own stories, we're mostly seeing when we get dragged in front of the courts. And so you can even kind of see that with the difference between Mattachine society and the gay liberation front, right? Like, like, the Mattachine society wanted to just be fucking quiet. They were like, if you just let us keep working for the government, we'll put you on the moon, you know? Like, and it's just so interesting.

14:44 Cause like, I think way too much in story, but it's like, it's such good fodder where you now have like people who are forced into being criminalized, who are therefore going to go like, you know, I'm sure that there's like crazy loud, drag queens who are doing all kinds of fabulous, wonderful shit. And I'm sure there's also just like suits from DC who are like, this suit is my fucking gender. You know, like maybe when they get wild, they throw their tie over their shoulder, you know?

15:17 And like, I kind of love that for us. I kind of love that. Like, I don't know what the situation in this town was in terms of like the biker, uh, Were the outlaw bikers, were they in tension with the queers or were they like supportive or were they just like completely separate?

15:33 It's pretty separate. It's unclear. There's definitely, we do know that there were some like biker lesbians who like hung out in both places.

15:43 Yeah.

15:45 Cool. Like in both bars.

15:46 And I think about how like, like Stonewall was a mafia bar and the first lesbian bar in San Francisco was a woman who getting arrested for actually unethical crime and then like eventually killed, you know, in a crime related shooting or whatever. And it's interesting because like there's this version of the story when we talk about how queers were mobbed up in the like mid 20th century because our lifestyle was criminal. So we're going to go to the people who know how to organize being criminal in order to stay safe. But what it doesn't quite, It presents more separation between these two things than I think is real. Like, I think that there is queer elements within, like, it's been a while since I did

16:36 the Stonewall episodes that I did. But it's like some of their connections in the mob that own Stonewall. And I'm not trying to talk up the mob. I am not a big fan of that version of organized crime. Crime should not be organized for profit. It should be organized for liberation.

16:51 Yes. And fun. Yeah. Yeah.

16:54 But it's like, there's gay gangsters who are doing this shit, you know? And like, I just think it's interesting. It's like, by being criminalized, we end up in this like interesting melting pot. And like, I think about just like how, I don't know. I was sleeping outside as a traveling punk kid where I would like sleep in Tompkins Square Park during the day and then walk around New York and go to parties at night because I didn't have a place to sleep, right? And like, I'm not as hard luck as that makes me sound. I was more of an adventurer. I'm not trying to take any stolen valor here. But it was a rough period of my life.

17:33 And I also was named Margaret, had a beard, and wore dresses.

17:39 Right.

17:40 And like the people like rowdy, fucked up old like folks who live outside New York didn't have a fucking problem with me. You know, like it's like you can kind of be weird in crime land. In a way that you can't in normal society. And I'm not saying everyone should go join crime land, but there's like like I remember at one point I was like I would I would wear my my skirt. rolled up and tucked into the pocket of my pants if I needed to suddenly be a boy, right? And then I would take it down when I actually felt safer. And at one point I like get up and I run off kind of groggy and it falls down and this like kind of rough train riding guy that I was hanging out near was like, is that a skirt? I'm like, yeah.

18:32 And he's like, all right. Yeah. end of the fucking conversation you know like I don't know this is what I like about that story about what was it North Beach Maryland that you're talking about yeah North Beach Maryland that like it's just interesting to me to imagine the guy who's hiding at work or has just been fired at work who's now like I guess I hang out with lesbian bikers at the beach you know like Just because I wanted to meet a man to fall in love with one day. Yeah. And I'm not trying to paint this clean cut versus rowdy dichotomy or something. I'm actually trying to break that down. Anyway, the stories you tell, there's a romance to them that I get lost in.

19:27 Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I mean, this is, again, I think I said this in part one, it's really a natural thing for queer people and trans people for whom we've been told we do not exist in history to sort of immediately sort of jump to try and, you know, place yourself. What would it be like? Right.

19:48 And to some extent, I just want people to do that, to sort of get lost in that a little bit and start asking those questions of how would I have responded? What would it have been like for me?

20:04 Yeah.

20:05 And I think that... we should, we should see ourselves in history and see ourselves as not just objects in history, but as actors in history. And I think that like being able to sort of reflect back on that, that's a big part of it.

20:20 Yeah. Well, you know what I see myself in? I see myself in all of these products and services that define my identity. And we're back.

20:36 Okay.

20:36 And so like, I don't want to paint a like dichotomy between history, good cultural representation, not as important because I don't think I believe that. But if what you were talking about the end of last episode was about how cultural representation isn't enough and that we need to like have the capacity to change systems and, or be well ready to defend ourselves on like a, community level and defend these gains that we've made. How do you think your work as a historian does and doesn't tie into that part of it? Is this also just sort of cultural work and obviously has its own value? How do you think about this stuff?

21:23 Well, no. I mean, so this book is a collection of the first six zines that I have written and released. And the way that I do this is by taking this research that I did as a part of my master's program, right? And this was like eight or nine years ago and presenting it in a fun way in a community space. So I do this by having these like release parties where I basically just sort of give a little PowerPoint presentation of what's in the zine at a gay bar in town. here in Baltimore and sell it usually as a benefit for either an activist group or, you know, people doing good work in the community. And usually try to partner with one or more sort of artists who I also think are cool and try and make it into an event. Right. Because I think that

22:25 like having this history, sharing this history, learning this history shouldn't, be a relationship between you and a book or really you and me. It is a tool to help us understand our community and to build that community. At least that's how I try to approach it.

22:49 No, that makes sense to me. One of the sort of metaphor that I use a lot about why I think history genuinely matters in the current present moment is that if you And I use a baseball metaphor because I'm a big sports girl. That part's not true. If you want to know where a ball is going so that you can hit it, you don't just need where the ball is currently. You need where it came from and how fast it went and the trajectory it took to get there. Like you need more than one point of reference to understand motion. And so if all we have is the present moment and we only know our present and we don't know our past, we have no reasonable means by which to conjecture where we're going. And I think that, you know, it's not just that we

23:32 can avoid all of the problems of the past by studying the past, although I think that there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from the past, including ways that we can be like critical of how we've behaved in the past, right? To avoid doing those same things again. You know, you mentioned in this book a gay bar that was raided in the 50s in Baltimore that was a segregated whites-only bar and how that kind of like colors... what's like otherwise a cool story about the cops come and raid this place. And then they like do it so badly. It's so embarrassing that even the, like, it's like too homophobic for the homophobic judges who are like, yeah, you should just arrest them one by one. What are

24:14 you doing? You know?

24:16 Yeah, no, it's like, these people should be committed to an asylum, not, not rounded up and sent to jail.

24:23 Right. And it's like, This is such an important, interesting piece of history, but we can also look back and be like, oh, wow, Baltimore is a weird city to be fucking segregated in. I mean, it is a somewhat segregated city as American cities tend to be, but it is a majority black city. So it's not an uncritical look at history. We actually have to look honestly at history to the best that we can, but also just to see how fucking interesting and brave we are so that we can remind ourselves that like, Bad shit is coming and is here. And we can be interesting and brave.

25:01 Yeah, absolutely. And I also, again, I hate neat, tidy, uplifting stories. Which, perhaps this is the wrong podcast for me. Oh, no, no.

25:11 See, that's the weird, dark secret of cool people who did cool stuff. It's actually deeply flawed people who did interesting things is actually what this show is.

25:19 Yeah. And so... Baltimore and Maryland. And Maryland, historically, is either the southern border of the north or the northern border of the south.

25:34 Oh yeah, we just can't win. No one wants us.

25:36 Yeah, and that does not make for a lot of very clean stories. Right? There's no way around dealing with issues of race and racism. There's just a ton of really sort of messed up stuff or stuff that we would look at and be like really angry at. But also like, this is perhaps us look needing to sort of adjust our expectations of history and recognize that like, Oh, there aren't good stories like this. Like Stonewall was a mobbed up bar. You know, there's a ton of stuff that a lot of people that we, we would idolize, uh, would say that we're just, oh, like, you know, that this idea of history is either uplifting or it isn't is very difficult, right? Yeah. Because, yeah, I tell this story of the Pepper Hill Club, and this is another...

26:38 Lavender Scare one, where it's this period of extreme repression and the cops raid the biggest gay bar in Baltimore and it blows up in their faces. And there's like all of this resistance in the courthouse and people are mocking the cops.

26:54 And, you.

26:56 Know, like this at the same time, this is Baltimore in the 50s. Yeah, it was a segregated bar. And like, Whereas in the fifties, that was sort of the norm. This is a bar that States segregated well into the sixties and had to be actually like, like there's, there's a lot of ugliness. Yeah. And fundamentally, I think we also have to accept that people who run bars are generally not the best of people or like the most virtuous of people we'll go with that bars tend not to be the most virtuous of spaces because And yet, they are massively important. And, you know, they shape communities.

27:44 And I think that, like, we just have to sort of sit with that. This is part of what interests me so much about this research and what I've tried to do with this book is the story of the Pepper Hill Club. So that happens in 1955. If you actually look at, there's a Wikipedia page of pre-Stonewall people sort of gay resistance to police. And it's listed as the first. I don't know if that's really true. It's very early.

28:14 Yeah, it beats the, like, donut shop in San Diego or whatever.

28:17 Yeah, it's years earlier than all of that.

28:20 I like the one where they beat up all the Marines in, I think, Milwaukee or something like that.

28:24 Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. But this is what that story looks like, you know, 14 years earlier in what's considered a southern city. that's sort of more buttoned up. And you can sort of see the ways in which it's different. And similarly, the last chapter of this book is about, is the sort of modern one, is about the growth of all of the big queer activist groups in Baltimore in the 70s.

28:54 And it looks really different than what you expect because Baltimore is. A working class city, a majority Black city. It is a port town. It is sort of scuzzy in a lot of ways. And that actually shapes the story of what these groups look like, right? They are at a time when, you know, the Gay Activists Alliance is being like routinely criticized and rightfully for being pretty much all white.

29:30 The leadership of all the activist groups in Baltimore are Black. or at least there's a really significant part of the leadership that is. And when I've, talked to people about this, the people involved, to them, this was just the normal way that this should have happened. Because whereas in New York, it would be very, very easy to find a large group of white gay men to run your organization, If you're in Baltimore in the 70s and you're trying to do that, you're not going to be very successful. And pretty much everyone is going to look at you and be like, this doesn't look like the city. Right. And so what I love about this type of history and this book is this is the same story that you can,

30:22 you know, you can very easily read about how it happened in New York. how it happened in San Francisco and in LA, but it looks so fundamentally different, right? And it tells you about sort of the ways in which that didn't affect sort of these groups' activism. And so to me, that's sort of, that's my pitch for this book for people who weren't from Maryland, is that This is going to tell you a lot of stories that sound like things you might have heard about, but they look just different because they're sort of done through this lens of just, you know, a sort of very different place than what is usually written about when you're reading queer history.

31:14 Yeah.

31:15 Right. Maryland looks like a lot of places, but New York City is not one of them.

31:22 Yeah, no one's confusing Baltimore for New York. Philly sometimes gets confused for New York, although sometimes gets confused for Baltimore. Philly is just literally a half.

31:29 Yeah, it's like Philly and Baltimore.

31:32 Philly is just like half of each.

31:34 But yes, you see these possibilities that open up because of these things happening in a different place. And I think that this is true probably of everywhere.

31:45 Yeah, totally.

31:46 And what I have tried to do is focus on the things that make Baltimore and make Maryland sort of unique or that sort of color our history. And that is, that's, you know, the sort of longstanding tradition of Black activism and culture. Baltimore being this sort of almost Rust Belt type city that's, you know, historically been a port town, been a very working class town. And also, yeah, Baltimore having a thorough reputation for being sort of seedy and trashy.

32:24 A little murdery.

32:26 A little murdery sometimes. Yeah.

32:28 Although not so much the past couple of years. Turned it around.

32:31 Yes, it's true.

32:34 Well, do you know what else is different depending on where you are?

32:37 The ads.

32:38 They're actually algorithmically determined based on the location of where your phone thinks you are. Yeah, that's the future we live in. No getting away from anything unless you use the forward 30 seconds. And we're back. Yeah, I think that this like the why Maryland question is such an interesting one, right? And like, you know, to me, it's very logical. Obviously, it's the best state. I actually don't live there anymore, but I'm from there. I think I've admitted that on the show before. And Maryland is kind of, you know, Ohio is the state that everyone makes fun of when they're looking for a state to make fun of.

33:14 Yes.

33:15 Maryland is the state that Ohio makes fun of.

33:21 Okay.

33:22 I learned that recently. Or at least I know someone in Ohio who thinks this. I can't speak to all Ohioans. I have not done a thorough survey of this. But I think exactly, like, it's not a coincidence that Stone Butch Blues, one of the most important pieces of queer history, even though it's a fiction book, you know, Is about what? Buffalo, New York? It's been a minute since I read it.

33:47 Yeah.

33:48 It's about Buffalo, New York. It is not about New York, New York. Now, that's not even to be like, oh, New York is all like highfalutin people, right? Like New York has plenty of seeds and seediness available to anybody. But like just this like corner of the country, working class place is where we set that story And that is a better way to understand what is probably a more realistic understanding of what it was like to be queer.

34:20 So we have this narrative that in order to be queer, you leave where you're from and you go to the big city. And that is true for a lot of people. And big cities matter for that reason. I'm a rural person at heart, but I respect cities for a lot of reasons. One, it's actually better for the earth if we all live in higher population density. I'm just very selfish and want to be around birds instead of people.

34:41 But I mean, I wasn't going to say anything, but I've been thinking it.

34:45 Yeah, yeah. Cities are better. I acknowledge this. But we end up with this one version of gay history in America, which is leave where you're from and go to the big city. And that's just not what everyone did. But that's where the people who then wrote more of the stories that we hear came from. And so that's like something that I like about a gay history of Maryland.

35:07 And I think that, you know, if you look at a... I think visually, which doesn't help the fact that I'm a podcaster. If you want a picture to show up and you only have two dots, that's not enough to see a picture and you need to start filling in more dots and let Maryland be one of those dots because letting someone pick a place and study it as a location. And actually, okay, this gets to, sorry, I'm kind of rambling. This gets to one of the things that you talk about is how all of this started.

35:41 I wrote down in my notes somewhere, but I don't know where, so I'm just going to say it and you can correct me. You were asked by a historical society of some kind to find like 40 or 30 locations in Maryland of like historical importance. Yeah, yeah.

35:59 It's a historic preservation group, but yeah.

36:01 Yeah, okay. You could tell the story better than my disappearing notes.

36:05 Yeah, so I... have a master's of library science. I'm a librarian in my day job. And while I was doing that, I wound up having an internship with this historic preservation group that was doing the first ever sort of statewide survey of places that could be relevant to LGBTQ history. And they needed someone to do the research.

36:31 And they asked me to have like, I think like 30 to 40 different sites that I told them when I got that, like when I applied for that internship, you are setting your goal way too low. Yeah. I wound up basically being like rehired twice. And the report, which is available online has, I believe the final number was 388 places associated with it that I was able to find. And now a lot of those are, I mean, the most common among them is this is a park or a rest stop where there was an arrest, right?

37:12 Usually a cruising arrest. But there's all sorts of different stories there that, you know, range from those that are sort of very micro scale to ones that are very important. From, again, these places where there was an arrest 30, 40 years ago to like, I don't know, like Divine's birthplace. Yeah. which is a significant thing for queer culture, certainly here in Maryland, but really everywhere.

37:42 Yeah. I've probably brought this up before on the show. I think maybe even recently, I'm not sure. I grew up in Maryland in the 90s, 80s and 90s, and started the Gay Straight Alliance at my high school. All of us were quote unquote straight. All of us are gay now, but like, That's true. One solid actual ally.

38:07 One of the main organizers, one of the most militant. And I believe has remained heterosexual to this day. But there weren't really out gay people in the 90s and where I grew up, you know, as teenagers. There were adults, right? And it's just so interesting because then like within a couple years, people started sort of making fun of the Gay Straight Alliance for having straight in the name. And I'm like, first of all, a lot of people just needed the cover. But then it was like the next high school over from where I lived, my thought was if I were going to put something on Maryland's historic site registry, it would be the next high school over, the out gay kid who started the Gay-Straight Alliance was

38:46 hospitalized by other students with like beaten with a lock. And like, there was like stakes that people didn't think about and I think don't get acknowledged. And I'm, you know, there's plenty of, I don't want to only specifically focus on like stories of violence that happened to us, but like, I don't know. Sorry. I just got emotional thinking about that.

39:10 That comes up like reasonably often in the back of my mind is that like the person who I would go to the like regional organizing meetings with was, was hospitalized for doing that work. And it's just so interesting because it was like cute high school activist stuff, but it's like, that's about the same stakes as I faced as an anarchist revolutionary organizing large militants street protests every now and then someone gets hospitalized or killed you know yep that's the same shit like that was happening to fucking high school kids yeah anyway for sure Okay. Do you have any final thoughts about any of this topic?

39:52 You want to talk about any of your other work? I want to talk to you about John Waters, but I don't want to do it today. I want to talk you into coming back sometime to talk about John Waters.

40:03 Sure.

40:04 Hell yeah.

40:05 Sure. I mean, like volume two is going to open with my zine about John Waters.

40:08 I read your zine about John Waters on your website earlier today and was thinking a lot about it.

40:13 Ah, yes.

40:14 And that actually one of the people was named Waters earlier in this book. There's probably not a relation.

40:20 There is probably not.

40:22 But I've decided there is.

40:23 But yeah, no, I mean, I think that this is not to, you know, put down anywhere else. I always say if you like reading queer history books, you know, you've probably read a pretty good book about New York recently.

40:38 Which also matters. None of us here are arguing otherwise, dear New York listeners.

40:43 It matters. New York has been, you know, one of the centers of queer culture for, you know, ages. But it's also where almost like 90% of publishing about queer history takes place in either New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or L.A., And those are all really fascinating and amazing places. But a lot of the country doesn't look like that.

41:11 And a lot of the country is weird and unique. And the stories that take place there are strange and like fun in a way because they don't sound a lot like what you're expecting. And so, you know, I think just like you were saying about Stone Butch Blues is this look at Buffalo, New York. And there are a few actually books about Buffalo, New York that teach you quite a lot about queer and sort of, I guess, sapphic or lesbian history because it looks so different than what you sort of hear out of bigger cities. And so my pitch is, that I think what you'll find in this book is a series of stories that sort of give a much fuller understanding of queer and trans life as it was lived in a part of the

42:17 country that, yes, is unique, but also that I think has a lot of similarities to a lot of places. Yeah.

42:28 All right. Well, If people want to read your book, they can do it by going to redemmas.org. Or is it distributed? Like it has an ISBN on it. Is it like available through distributors? Is it pretty much online and then like local bookstores?

42:45 Online and local bookstores.

42:47 Okay. Fortunately, online is a big place. And I believe that you, dear listener, have access to online. And you can go to redemmas.org and you can buy whatever printing it's on now. They are putting up new listings every single time that it's a new printing because I think there's like slightly different cover stock. I spent a while trying to track down more about editions of it earlier today.

43:09 And it's a fantastic book. It is printed by Black Classic Press, which is a publishing and printing company founded by a member of the Black Panther Party. It is published by Red Emmas, which is a worker-owned, majority POC-owned bookstore and cafe that is a specifically a radical bookstore named after an anarchist rather than specifically an anarchist bookstore. Yeah.

43:33 But read Emma herself, Emma Goldman. I know that her boy, her like longtime boyfriend, Alexander Berkman was gay as shit, buy a shit, wrote a whole book about dating other men in prison.

43:45 Yep.

43:45 And tried to stab a guy and shoot a guy actually did stab and shoot a guy. But then unfortunately the man didn't die.

43:50 He didn't really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't very good at it.

43:54 Oh, fucking A for effort, though. You know, Alexander Bookman both stabbed and shot that man.

43:59 A for effort.

44:00 Yes. And it backfired and set back the labor movement dramatically. But that is always a crapshoot because sometimes that shit works. It makes everyone happy. Sometimes it makes everyone alienated. That's unrelated. So it all ties together. There's a little gay history in everything, including a gay little history of Maryland. And your website is mdhistory.gay?

44:27 Yes, it is.

44:29 You're on social media? You talk about this stuff on social media?

44:32 Yeah, I do. I'm mostly on Instagram, but you can find me on Instagram or Facebook or presumably anywhere. It's the same. It's mdhistory.gay. Cool.

44:43 And you can also pre-order my newest zine, which is called Folk Tales of Lola and Sakan. It is $ 5. folk tales set in the same world as my Transwitch YA book, The Sapling Cage, but you don't have to have read that book in order to enjoy these folk tales because they are set hundreds of years in the past.

45:03 I just obsessively like filling out the history of fantasy worlds when I'm not busy. That's my break from my day job to fill it out, the history of the real world in my own mind and then try and explain it to you all. You can get that at tangledwilderness.org. And that one also is not going to be available for wide distribution. You're going to have to get it online or a few specific places in person because it too is sort of small press printed. And you can get it. And in the meantime, I don't know, take care of each other. Fuck ICE, free Palestine. And remember that everything we have, we built up out of nothing.

45:43 So we're actually in a stronger place than... the people who built all of the things that we stand on today. Bye everyone. Cool people who did cool stuff is a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts and cool zone media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

46:11 You get your podcasts.