Season 15 — Preview

Clockwise from top left: Christine Jorgensen, 1954, credit: Maurice Seymour/Wikimedia Commons; Mabel Hampton, ca. 1918, credit: courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives; Barney Frank, 2005, credit: United States Congress/Wikimedia Commons; Lou Sullivan, 1987, credit: Mariette Pathy Allen.

Preview Notes

MGH is back for another dive into the archives! Drawing from Eric’s own collection of rare interviews and other repositories of LGBTQ history, we’ll bring you the voices of seven LGBTQ change-makers and allies whose stories will take you from 1920s Harlem to the halls of power in 1980s D.C.

Episode first published June 18, 2026.

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Audio Sources

• Christine Jorgensen Reveals, an LP recording of a 1957 interview between Christine Jorgensen and Nipsey Russell (credited as R. Russell), released in 1958 by J Records, New York, NY.
• Mabel Hampton Oral History Collection, used by permission of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
• Barney Frank excerpt via the Making Gay History archive.
• “Lou Sullivan and Dr. Ira Pauly Interview, Part 1,” January 1988, GLBT Historical Society Film & Video Collection, courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society.

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Preview Transcript

Eric Marcus Narration: I’m Eric Marcus, and we’re back for season 15 of Making Gay History. 

Starting June 18, we’re dipping into the archives—my own Making Gay History archive and a few others—to bring you the voices of seven history-makers—each of them unforgettable and radically courageous in their own way, all of them instrumental in moving the dial toward greater LGBTQ acceptance. 

Their testimonies will take us from the 1920s through the 1980s with stories that shed light on landmark events in gay history, the life of early LGBTQ communities, or their own journeys of self-affirmation.

First up is a 1957 interview with Christine Jorgensen, who became a global media sensation when news broke that she had undergone gender-affirming surgery. She wasn’t the first to do so, but it was through Jorgensen that the existence of transgender people first entered the national conversation. 

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Nipsey Russell: Christine, do you think the time will ever come when people will think of you as Christine Jorgensen, photographer, or Christine Jorgensen, actress, and not as Christine Jorgensen, woman, formerly man?

Christine Jorgensen: No, Mr. Russell, I don’t think the time will ever really come when Christine Jorgensen, formally a man, will ever be forgotten. Should any event come up in my life, such as my marriage or even my death, the newspapers would have a Roman holiday and rehash the whole past. But the strange part of it is, is that the people who know me, know me a very short time, and they forget about the past. 

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EM Narration: You’ll also hear from Mabel Hampton, a performer and domestic worker who lived as an out lesbian in New York City from 1920 until her death in 1989. Her recorded oral histories provide a rare firsthand account of queer life during the Harlem Renaissance—of attending word-of-mouth parties, rubbing shoulders with the era’s most celebrated entertainers, the jargon, and the dress codes.  

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Mabel Hampton: And in those days, people, if you, if they seen you too much with low-heeled shoes on, they’d think you were queer.

Joan Nestle: They were right.

MH: See, and they were right. But that didn’t stop me from wearing them. And I just, uh, because I know, some people would ask me, “You wear low-heeled shoes?” I told ’em, “Yes.” I says, “because my feet’s bad.”

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EM Narration: We’ll also feature my interview with one of my heroes: Congressman Barney Frank, who recently died at the age of 86. Frank was the first member of the U.S. Congress to voluntarily acknowledge he was gay—a watershed moment after years of private agonizing—followed by increasingly hard-to-miss steps out of the closet…  

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Barney Frank: I would not make a public announcement of being gay, but I would do anything else. So I began to tell other members. Uh, I was asked at this meeting at the Kennedy School—I spoke to the first meeting of the gay group, a public meeting—uh, “Congressman, are you aware that many gay people are upset when prominent people who are gay are asked about that and avoid giving a direct answer to the question?” I waited about 30 seconds and I said, “You have to forgive me. I’m trying to think of a way to avoid giving a direct answer to that question.” And that was in the paper. I mean, I don’t know if people knew or didn’t know, or, or, you know… I mean, I, I was introduced at one point as “a good friend of the community” and I said, well, I thought that somewhat understated the connection. I was, well, it was my strategy of sort of leaking myself out. 

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EM Narration: And you’ll hear a 1988 interview with Lou Sullivan, a gay trans man whose sexual orientation challenged the assumption that transgender people transition with the goal of leading straight lives—a misguided assumption that at the time was held even by professionals who specialized in trans issues.

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Lou Sullivan: I came to see you, Dr. Pauly, because, uh, I understood that you are the reigning expert on the female-to-male transsexual. And, uh, I also understood that, that you had not met or, or heard of a female-to-male transsexual who identified as a gay man. And that’s exactly what I am. Um, and I felt that it was important to make this videotape because, uh, I’ve recently been diagnosed with AIDS and don’t expect to be around long, um, and I want my story preserved.

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EM Narration: I look forward to sharing these new episodes with you. If you want to be sure to hear them as soon as we release them, subscribe to Making Gay History wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m Eric Marcus. So long. Until next time.

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