A History of the LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with Eric Marcus, Founder & Host of Making Gay History - The Podcast, which features an oral history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement from both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history.

10/29/19 #2255

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to One on One. I'm Steve Adubato. We're coming to you from the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio in beautiful Brick City, Newark, New Jersey. My pleasure to introduce Eric Marcus, Founder and Host, Making Gay History, the podcast How are you doing? Great. Great to be here. Where does the idea for this come from? Making Gay History, the podcast? The podcast is drawn from an archive that I recorded 30 years ago for an oral history book about the Gay Civil Rights Movement, what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Movement. And I saved all of my tapes. That's 300 hours of interviews. Wow. And donated my collection to the New York Public Library. They digitized the entire collection. And then in 2015, when I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, I checked in to see if they digitized the collection, which they had. And it started out as a small education project. And my producer said, "This sounds like a podcast." And we went from there. We literally launched the podcast in five weeks after being taken under the wing of a company called Pineapple Street Media. They are sort of the hottest podcast production company. And their principal, Jenna Weiss-Berman, loved the audio that she heard. It was her kind of audio. And I thanked my 30 year old self every day that I used broadcast quality equipment 30 years ago, when I did all of those interviews. Really? Yeah. Well I thought these stories would be important. I interviewed people who had been at the very start of the movement, who had been there at the beginning, and they were old. And I also interviewed a lot of people who had AIDS, and I knew they were going to die. So I thought, "Someday, someone's gonna want to use these tapes for something." But I never expected to be the one to mine my own archives. It's so interesting, you're saying this. And I'm gonna come from left field on this. Sure. My wife and I were watching a series called The Deuce. Mm hmm. James Franco. 42nd Street. Yep. Yeah. I know it's not a... it is a fascinating show. Check it out. Every once in a while, we can talk about something not on PBS. But I have to tell you, much of it is not only about the history of pornography, it's about the history of the Gay Rights Movement as well? Sure. And how AIDS, moving into the 1980s? Sure. Am I getting that wrong? No. No, not really. Because some of the key people who were... In New York City at that point? Yeah. Some of the key people featured in my podcast..."