Original audio files and a PDF transcript can be found here on the Supreme Court's website.

"America, Learn Your History" began as a popular Instagram series by composer and professor Bobby Wooten. Join us for our first radio special: Stonewall often gets credit for the beginning of the gay liberation movement. But there was an earlier riot, at Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco, and it was started by a transwoman. Bobby's guests include actor Tituss Burgess and historian Dr. Susan Stryker.

What can the experiences of transgender men who choose to become biological parents tell us about pregnancy and childbirth in our society? Researcher and activist Vann Jones explores that question with interviewer Suki Wessling on The Babblery. In this episode, you'll first hear the background information on how transmasculine people view their gender and their bodies, and what choices they may or may not make regarding medical transition. Then we'll talk about the experiences that the men Vann researched had when they chose to become parents. Finally, we learn how the pregnancy and birth experiences of trans men shine a light on our preconceived notions of what it means to be "mom."

The Stonewall Uprising, fifty years ago, was chapter one in modern LGBTQ history. It was rough and ready in New York.  It was sexy and often celebratory in the San Francisco version. In Boston, true to character, gay struggle was thoughtful, wordy, networked, and momentous (in writing the first gay marriage law in 2004). Everywhere, the LGBTQ cause was older, wider, and deeper than we knew, in working classes and elites. Nineteenth-century Boston, after all, had put a name on the Boston Marriage of single ladies. Cruising culture was stratified—not the same on Boston Common as on the Public Garden, by the swan-boats. Gay or thought-to-be-gay politicians got reelected in Massachusetts, before a word was spoken. On this episode, a fresh look back.

Stonewall, fifty years ago, is a marker in modern memory—more nearly a million markers in conflicting memories. The Rashomon Effect is the rule post-Stonewall: no two eye-witnesses had seen the same event. Did the pitched battle in a mob-run gay bar in Manhattan, between fed-up patrons and city cops, really happen? Were women, black, and Latino militants in the forefront? Have any two people experienced the same Sexual Revolution over the last half-century? And was the effect of it all inclusion: to normalize once-forbidden behavior in gay marriage, for example? Or was the effect disruption and liberation: to radicalize all thinking about sex, gender, and society? The arguments are still alive, and they’re not all in New York. We’re digging up the Stonewall years and beyond in New England for this episode, with people who lived them in range of Boston.
 

As a young girl, future Supreme Court of California Associate Justice Kelli Evans was more excited about the bookmobile coming through her Denver neighborhood than the ice cream truck.

“I was a voracious reader,” the first out lesbian on California’s highest court told Out in the Bay Queer Radio + Podcast. Evans says she read an entire set of encyclopedias from A-Z and again from Z-A bought for her by her grandmother, who “probably paid a usurious amount” for them, along with countless more books while a child.

Sworn in January 2, 2023, Evans joined Associate Justice Martin Jenkins as the second out LGBTQ person on the state’s high court. Jenkins, a gay man who joined the high court in late 2020, spoke with Out in the Bay in 2021. They are both Black.

At her swearing-in ceremony, Governor Gavin Newsom noted that Evans was raised by her grandmother and highlighted that she was raised in public housing.

“I understand what it’s like to live in poverty. I understand what it’s like to be raised by a single parent – by a grandparent. I have a perspective and an experience that not a lot of lawyers have, not a lot of judges have,” Evans told Out in the Bay.

“I think that may have stood out to the governor,” said Evans, as well his recognition “that there are lots of brilliant, extremely hard-working, ingenious poor people.”

Evans said she buried her original U.C. Davis law degree original with her grandmother “because it belonged to her.” Evans said she and her family members are “direct manifestations of her [grandmother’s] deliberate, intentional actions to make sure we had opportunities that she was denied.”

She knew she wanted to be a lawyer from the age of 6 or 7.  “I used to watch ‘Perry Mason’ with my grandmother. I don’t know if that was the spark or not, but in my child mind I thought being a lawyer had something to do with fairness.  And lawyers got to argue! Maybe I was an argumentative child, I don’t know.”

But Evans did know at that young age that her grandma, other relatives, friends and neighbors were “incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly hard-working, [yet] didn’t have the opportunities or creature comforts that I saw on TV and in movies and that so many other people in society had.” The inequality “didn’t sit right” with her, so she aimed to do something about it.

Find information on the Supreme Court of California and upcoming cases on its website, https://www.courts.ca.gov.

Please help us keep bringing queer air to your ears. Out in the Bay is an independent non-profit production. We receive no funds from podcast platforms nor from radio stations that air Out in the Bay weekly. Your gift will help keep LGBTQ voices and stories coming to you and others who might not be able to give. (Donate tabs on our website will take you to a Media Alliance interface. Media Alliance is our non-proft 501(c)3 fiscal agent. Your gift will be earmarked for Out in the Bay.)

In this episode of Fugitive Waves, The Kitchen Sisters ride the nightshift with The Homobile. Homobiles is a non-commercial, volunteer, 24/7 ride service created by Lynnee Breedlove for the "LGBTQRXT and transgender community and others around San Francisco who feel the need for safe, dependable rides, outside traditional services. "Moes getting hoes where they needs to goes," is their motto. Homobiles is for people who feel at risk because they don't conform to sexual or gender norms and have been targets of rudeness or shame or violence, says Lynne. Homobiles is a network of independent drivers who pilot their own cars, a non-profit organization that caters to this underserved, and sometimes harassed community in the Bay Area. This community car service operates on donations. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Homobiles has been called "Uber for Drag Queens," but with a mission that is social, not financial.

Miles was born in the wrong body.   He was born Megan and after 15 years of serious depression and confusion about his place in the world, at age 28, he decided to do something about it.  He chose the name Miles and began his slow and difficult transition into manhood.  He brought an audio recorder with him.  This is his story.

Featured on Transom.org.  For more information and conversation, visit "Finding Miles" on Transom.org.

Our most recent LIVE LAW 3 event in San Francisco took on the theme of LOVE and the Law, and our first storyteller was Mark Leno, a state Senator in California. Ten years ago, Leno made the decision to fight “a war over a word.”

Jim Brosnahan is a senior trial attorney at Morrison and Forester, and says the law has absolutely nothing and everything to do with falling in love. For Brosnahan, it all began with a dinner more than fifty years ago.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day Provincetown Massachusetts is one of the world's largest and most well known gay vacation meccas.  This small fishing village is festooned with pride flags, drag queens, and gay couples of all ages holding hands and ice cream cones.  But in the late 80's and 90's, while the party continued, 10 percent of Provincetown's year round population was dying of AIDS. And most of the remaining 90 percent were tending to them. This piece is about what it was like to live and die in this small town in the midst of this epidemic and the surreal mix of celebration and devastation.  

RAVE REVIEW: The Guardian calls BON VOYAGE "Vivid and beautifully told ... A tremendous listen: you felt as if you knew both subjects within moments, and got an insight into the hardest moments a relationship will face."

Paul Perkovic and his husband, Eric Trefelner, have lived in style for 36 years. When they find out that Paul has inoperable pancreatic cancer, they decide he should go out in style, too. Eric plans a lavish, quarter million-dollar "Bon Voyage" party at a fine arts museum in San Francisco. Paul and Eric aren't just planning a party; they're trying to choreograph a death. But when relationship breakdowns developm that neither man expects, the couple discovers that death has its own agenda. BON VOYAGE brings the listener along on the intimate, emotional journey of a same-sex couple coping with mortality.

STORY UPDATE : Paul Perkovic died November 26, 2012, in Eric Trefelner's arms at their home in Montara, Calif.

PRODUCER Julia Scott is an award-winning radio producer, journalist and essayist based in San Francisco. She produces documentaries and news features for several nationally syndicated programs. Her previous work is archived at www.juliascott.net .

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Anne Donohue is Associate Professor of Journalism at Boston University. She was the special projects editor at Monitor Radio for five years, and has also been a contributor to NPR, the BBC, WGBH, WBUR and other public radio programs.

BON VOYAGE is part of Real America, a series from the BBC World Service that enlisted four American producers to tell stories found only in America.

Cindy is a 26-year-old Palestinian who lives in Israel. She and a dozen other Moslem women have set up a lesbian group, called Aswat or Voices. Its goal is to provide support to Palestinian and Arab-Israeli lesbians and to try to overcome some of the taboos regarding homosexuality. For more information, contact joan@schardtmedia.org

Host Intro: A short passage in the Koran, along with a handful of quotes attributed to the prophet Muhammed, condemn homosexuality as a crime in the eyes of many Islamic scholars. Punishments range from whippings, prison time or even death by stoning. A new documentary called "A Jihad for Love" tells the stories of more than a dozen gay and lesbian Muslims from around the world...all of whom stay devoted to a faith that doesn't seem to want them. Laura Kwerel explains. Outro: "A Jihad For Love" is playing in select theaters now through September.

In 1995, Douglas A. Nadeau of Marblehead, Massachusetts underwent a pallidotomy at Mass. General Hospital, an operation designed to eradicate neurons in his brain that no longer responded to dopamine, the naturally-created chemical that facilitates movement. Nine years earlier, while on a business trip, Doug had been bitten by an insect and developed strange Parkinsonian symptoms, such as the inability to keep his eyes open while talking. These caused numerous problems for Doug, a high-powered corporate lawyer in Boston. Over time, the symptoms worsened until Doug lost his mobility at night and was reduced to a hospital bed. Following the procedure, in which Doug practically walked off the operating table, he found he was unable to inhibit certain antisocial tendencies that, prior to the surgery, he'd kept repressed. To make matters worse, his surgery turned out to be a failure, and his symptoms returned one by one. The next nine years tested the boundaries and limits of love, marriage, and tolerance, both within the family and in the Nadeaus' wide circle of friends and acquaintances.

Moab, Utah, a little town in the southeast corner of the state, isn't the likeliest of places for a burgeoning LGBTQ pride movement. But the Moab Pride Festival, established in 2011, calls itself "...the nation's second largest small town Pride Festival." In these places, where everyone knows everyone, it can be hard to stand up for something you believe in -- something that makes you different -- but maybe it's exactly these hometowns that have the best shot at pioneering a community-driven atmosphere of tolerance and understanding.

Producer Jen Telischak has the story of a critical moment in the life of "Kyle," a FTM transgender 14-year-old who desperately wants to tell his classmates and peers that he was born a girl.  His mom, Susan, doesn't think this is a good idea and wants Kyle to wait until he's older.  A snapshot that encompasses a moment of change.

Local artist Skylar Fein is fascinated by New Orlean's gay cultural history. For the art biennial Prospect One which closed this past month, Skylar paid homage to the memory of a gay bar in the French Quarter.

One evening in the summer of 1973, an arsonist set the Upstairs Lounge on fire. Most of the bar's regulars, including many friends and lovers, died that night. In an installation, Skylar recreated the inside of The Upstairs Lounge.

The piece brings attention to a forgotten tragedy, an act of courage that helped to galvanize the gay community, and the work of an emerging artist dedicated to reinterpreting and retelling New Orleans gay history.

A hero's journey of self-discovery (sifting through Riot Grrrl records in his mom's attic). Features killer tracks from Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and compelling interviews with original Riot Grrrls.

Beta is intersex. Which means she doesn't fit squarely into either gender, in a biological sense. Most intersex babies are assigned a gender at birth and undergo surgery. She didn't find out until her 20s, which caused great confusion for her growing up. Cary's story is almost exactly the same---born intersex, assigned a gender that didn't really fit, found out much later in life. Cary and Beta were living 1000 miles apart when they met on Second Life. After a life time of being a very different type of different, they each found someone with whom they could truly relate.

While Audio Smut's "Tender Moments" are in full compliance with FCC regulations, they do openly engage with the topic of sexuality and gender.

When seniors at a small public high school in the Bronx cast their votes for "Best Couple" they chose a pair they admire but who definitely defy the stereotype of best couple.

Poet AJ Tran, 18, is a senior at Northside College Prep. This is the second year she has represented her school at Louder Than a Bomb, which advanced to the Final round of competition in the 2012 Festival. Dear First Grade Teacher is AJ's poetic commentary on gender, how our society teaches young children what 'girls' can do and what 'boys' can do, without leaving enough room for those who may think otherwise.