They Showed Up in Red Shirts - No Permission Required

They Showed Up in Red Shirts - No Permission Required

In June 1991, three thousand LGBTQ+ people wore red shirts to Walt Disney World. No sponsors. No corporate blessing. No permission. Just community - coordinated through word of mouth, built on trust, and showing up at the most wholesome space in American family entertainment to say: we are families too. We deserve joy too. We belong here. This episode celebrates the 35th anniversary of the first Gay Days at Disney World and asks a question that hits harder in 2026 than it ever has before: who actually owns our visibility? This episode sets the scene: the AIDS crisis devastating the community, same-sex relationships with zero legal recognition, sodomy laws still on the books in most states. Into that reality walked three thousand queer people who picked a date, picked a color, and showed up. Nobody asked Disney's permission. The company stayed carefully neutral - and in 1991, not being kicked out felt like victory. By 1995 attendance had tripled. By 2010, Gay Days had become a six-day celebration drawing 150,000 people. What started as a whisper grew into one of the largest LGBTQ+ celebrations on earth. But then came 2026, and organizers announced the event would be "paused" - citing lost sponsorships, changed hotel agreements, and broader challenges impacting LGBTQ+ events nationwide. They weren't wrong about those challenges. Corporate sponsors who proudly flew rainbow flags in the 2010s have been retreating. Bud Light. Target. Company after company discovering that rainbow capitalism only works until it isn't. Tampa Pride - paused. Arlington Pride - paused. Tucson Pride - paused. This episode gets honest about what corporate allyship actually is - and isn't. And then it gets personal. Because walking through those gates for the first time in a red shirt - seeing red shirts everywhere, at the Matterhorn and Space Mountain and in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle - felt like breathing for the first time. Like something tight in the chest finally let go. That feeling belongs to us. Not to any sponsor, not to any corporation. The sponsors can leave. The hotel terms can change. But the people? We're still here. We never left. Wear red. Show up. Be seen. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe] Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/support]

The Fashion Industry Lied About How Perry Ellis Died - Here's Why

On May 30, 1986, one of America's most influential fashion designers died at forty-six years old. His company said it was encephalitis. The newspapers printed it. And an entire industry exhaled - because nobody had to say the word AIDS. In this episode, we tell the full story of Perry Ellis, his partner Laughlin Barker, and the industry-wide conspiracy of silence that had a body count far beyond two men. Perry Ellis revolutionized American fashion by understanding something most designers didn't - that women wanted clothes that felt like them. Oversized sweaters, earth tones, natural fibers, the famous slouch look. He won eight Coty Awards between 1979 and 1984. His wholesale revenues climbed to $260 million by 1986. He was as big as Calvin Klein, as big as Ralph Lauren. And he was doing it all alongside the love of his life, Laughlin Barker - romantic, domestic, professional partners in every sense, their relationship an open secret in an industry that knew and said nothing publicly. This episode traces the devastation that followed when AIDS arrived. Laughlin died on January 2, 1986. His New York Times obituary said lung cancer - not Kaposi's sarcoma, not AIDS. Lung cancer, at thirty-seven. Five months later, Perry died too. His spokesperson refused to say the word AIDS. It took until 1993 - seven years - for the Associated Press to explicitly list Perry Ellis among AIDS victims. Seven years to print what everyone already knew. But this isn't just a story about two men. The fashion industry of the 1980s was built by queer people - its entire creative engine. And when AIDS started killing that engine, the industry turned its back because acknowledging AIDS meant acknowledging queerness, and acknowledging queerness threatened the brands selling aspirational fantasy to Middle America. The closet wasn't just personal. It was a business model. This episode asks what we've actually learned since then - and what it would look like to truly honor Perry Ellis's legacy. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe] Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/support]

From Nixon's White House to Pride Parade: The Wild Story Behind Tales of the City

What if a newspaper column could teach America that queer people deserve happy endings? On May 24, 1976, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City arrived in the San Francisco Chronicle - a serialized story about a boarding house full of gay men, lesbians, a trans landlady, and their straight friends, simply living their lives. In this episode, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moment that changed queer storytelling forever. The man who wrote it might be the last person you'd expect. Armistead Maupin grew up a self-described uptight, archconservative racist brat in Raleigh, North Carolina. He worked at a TV station managed by Jesse Helms. Richard Nixon invited him to the White House as a model young Republican. Then he moved to San Francisco in 1971, found a society where tolerance was valued above everything, came out publicly in 1974 - and started writing Tales. By 1988, he was standing on the steps of the North Carolina State Capitol denouncing Jesse Helms by name. That is a transformation story for the ages. This episode explores why Tales was so revolutionary: Anna Madrigal, one of the most significant transgender characters in American fiction, introduced decades before mainstream conversations about trans identity even existed - not tragic, not a spectacle, but the moral center of the entire story. Chosen family as a radical act. The serial format that had readers calling the Chronicle office demanding to know what happened next. And the long fight to bring it to television - HBO acquiring the rights in 1982 and then burying them, the 1993 PBS miniseries that became the highest-rated dramatic series in a decade, and the conservative groups that threatened to pull federal funding rather than let queer people simply live on screen. And it gets personal - because Tales is ultimately about what happens when you let yourself be changed by the people you meet, the places you live, the world you open yourself up to. Chosen family isn't just a theme. It's a survival strategy. And fifty years after a newspaper column dared to show queer people simply living, we're still finding our way to 28 Barbary Lane. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe] Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/support]

When the WHO Finally Admitted Being Gay Isn't a Mental Illness (1990)

On May 17, 1990, the World Health Organization endorsed the ICD-10 and quietly removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. It was, in the words of the activists who had fought for it, a seismic moment - the day a global institution finally admitted that the science had been on our side all along. In this episode, we explore what that moment meant, what it cost to get there, and why it took 17 years after the American Psychiatric Association made the same call in 1973. This episode goes back to the beginning - to Richard von Krafft-Ebing and the 1886 psychiatric text that framed homosexuality as degeneracy, to the DSM listing it as a sociopathic personality disturbance in 1952, to the aversion therapies and lobotomies and brain surgeries performed on gay people in the name of treatment. And then it tells the story of the people who fought back: psychologist Evelyn Hooker, whose groundbreaking research showed no measurable difference in psychological health between gay and straight men; Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings disrupting the APA's 1970 conference; and Dr. John Fryer testifying before the APA in a mask and voice modulator because he couldn't safely be himself at a psychiatric conference. The 17-year gap between the APA and the WHO isn't a footnote - it's the heart of the story. During that stretch, countries around the world continued to treat queerness as an illness, shaping who got healthcare, who got insurance, who could immigrate, who kept custody of their children. Classification isn't abstract. It's funding. It's policy. It's someone's life. Today that date is marked as IDAHOBIT - the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia - observed in over 130 countries. But the work isn't done. Conversion therapy still exists, still harms people, still costs lives. The same impulse that once classified us as sick shows up today in new language and new legislation. This episode is about the difference between being fixed and being helped - and why that distinction is everything. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe] Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/support]

They Burned the World's First Trans Clinic - And They're Doing It Again

On May 6, 1933, members of the German Student Union marched to the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin - with a brass band. Like a parade. They stormed the building, seized tens of thousands of volumes, grabbed patient files and address lists full of names and identities - and four days later, burned it all at Opernplatz in front of 40,000 people. In this episode, we tell the full story of what was destroyed that day, and why it matters more right now than it has in decades. The Institute of Sexual Research was extraordinary. Founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, it housed the largest collection on human sexuality in the world. In its first year, staff conducted over 18,000 consultations for 3,500 people - many completely free. Five trans women were employed on staff. Dora Richter became one of the first people in history to receive full gender confirmation surgery there. The institute was pioneering gender-affirming care and hormone therapy decades before the rest of the world caught up. And its motto - through science to justice - wasn't just a slogan. They meant it. But the patient files seized during the raid were later used to round up gay men across Germany. The very institution built to protect queer people became a tool to hunt them. This episode traces how that happened, what was lost forever, and why only 35 items from the original collection of tens of thousands have ever been recovered. And then it connects the dots to right now - because the pattern hasn't changed. Book bans are up 63% in the United States. Kansas is seizing driver's licenses from trans people. The ACLU is tracking nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ bills in 2026. Where they burn books, in the end they also burn people. Heinrich Heine wrote that 113 years before it happened on the Opernplatz. This episode is about the safe spaces that save lives - and what it means to be the books that survived. Listen to more episodes: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Stay in touch: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribe] Website: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com [https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com] Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2609297/support]