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How to Humanist asks life’s questions big and small with the help of brilliant humans along the way.
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This is Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association. I'm getting married this summer, and we could not be more excited, but weddings can be a lot. On top of dealing with caterers and photographers, it just feels challenging to plan a ceremony that both honors our humanist beliefs and my fiancee's Jewish culture and traditions.
There is no script for something like that. That's why my fiancee and I are getting help from a humanist celebrant, our friend Greg Epstein, who also happened to be the first-ever guest on this podcast. If you're preparing to celebrate your own love story but you're not excited about a traditional religious celebration, you should consider working with a humanist celebrant like Greg.
The Humanist Society can connect you with professional humanist celebrants who are excited to help you and your partner craft a ceremony that reflects your unique story, background, and values. Humanist celebrants are frequently sought out for interfaith, intercultural, and same-sex marriages, but they are available to everyone, and they can legally perform marriages in all 50 states.
If you wanna explore what it means to invite a humanist celebrant into your wedding, visit thehumanistsociety.org. We've got people who can help.
SHAY:
Welcome to How to Humanist. It is Shay Leonia, your host, and I can't believe it. This month is already flying by. Today is week three of our special edition of Pride Month guests who are covering all we need to know about where the queer movement is heading, where it's been.
I've been having some incredible discussions with people that are about to be coming out. No pun intended.
Yesterqueers founder Amanda W. Timson is a public historian, a former television executive, and a Carrie Fisher inspired sass factory who is passionate about celebrating the broad expanse of queer history. As the descendant of a long line of writers and raconteurs, storytelling is part of Amanda's DNA.
She believes that restorative storytelling is our most powerful tool for connection, understanding, and change.
If only you knew how excited I was to book Amanda on this podcast. I have been following her content for so long, and when I tell you the sieve that is my brain that I live with every day, I mean, don't even get me started on walking to the fridge and forgetting what I went into the kitchen for.
I'm talking about there is nothing rattling around in my brain except for '90s song lyrics. So the fact that I'm able to remember the people that Amanda teaches us about, it just goes to show how awesome her content is.
But I was even more fascinated to learn about how she arrived at becoming a historian, because it's not the traditional route that you're gonna think. But anyway, I hope that you love her as much as I do.
Let me know in the comments if there's somebody that she's highlighted already that you particularly enjoyed, or if there's somebody that you want her to cover. Let us know.
SHAY:
That's so funny 'cause you're like the second guest to come on this month that's like, "Cain Culto."
AMANDA:
I know, and what's funny is I am Gen X, so that shouldn't be my milieu, but I love his music so much.
SHAY:
I mean, my sister's Gen X too, and she also is obsessed with Cain Culto, so yeah, you're not alone there.
AMANDA:
I mean, Gen X had some of like... I mean, you have David Bowie, you have Prince, you have Cyndi Lauper. I mean...
SHAY:
Oh, yeah.
AMANDA:
I'm not saying Gen X isn't transgressive, but like usually what happens to people is their music taste gets stuck somewhere and they just never listen to anything new. But that's not me 'cause I just listen to...
SHAY:
I think that sometimes unfortunately that might be me.
AMANDA:
It's most people, honestly. Like your taste sort of gets cemented around like high school or college, and then you just kinda like stay there.
SHAY:
Yeah. I think mine would have stayed around high school if Gwen Stefani wasn't doing all of this awful stuff.
AMANDA:
Oh, God, yeah. Although I was... Because I went to college in Los Angeles, I moved to LA in 1995, and so I was pretty involved in like the Southern California ska scene for a while.
SHAY:
Really?
AMANDA:
So yeah, I always knew that she was not what she purported to be.
SHAY:
Really?
AMANDA:
So that made her fall less...
SHAY:
Share more. Oh my gosh.
AMANDA:
Yeah, I mean, like it's not like it's a big secret. Just people who were in that music scene were pretty clear that she was doing a thing because it was popular at the time, and she did it well. Like No Doubt was a great band, but it's not... I don't think it was a surprise really to anyone who had been there for the early days of No Doubt to watch her sort of take this turn to something else that is now popular.
SHAY:
Oh, that's so interesting.
So where did you move to LA from?
AMANDA:
New Jersey.
SHAY:
Shut up. Where in Jersey? 'Cause I'm from Englewood. I'm from Bergen County.
AMANDA:
I grew up in Essex County. I grew up in Short Hills, which is like 20 miles to the west of Manhattan.
SHAY:
Oh my gosh. I know Short Hills.
AMANDA:
There's a big fancy mall there. Grew up in Short Hills, went to school in Summit, and then fucked off across the country to go to college and never went back.
SHAY:
I love it. I mean, if I had gone to LA, 'cause my family is based in LA, so every now and then I get to go back and visit and see what might have been had my family not moved over this way. But I don't know. There's just some East Coast sensibilities that I truly do appreciate, especially when I go to LA. But then when I go to LA I'm like, "But it's nice here."
AMANDA:
I never thought I would like it here because I have a theater degree. I have a very long and winding history. So I assumed that I would do my four years in college and then go back to New York and work on Broadway for the rest of my life. Like, that's what I thought I was gonna do.
Because I also was just as fat and just as opinionated at 18 as I am now, and I did not think that there was a place for that in LA. But I was wrong. So I, much to my own surprise, really found my people, found my community here and just never left. I've lived here 30-odd years now.
SHAY:
That is so awesome. Wow.
AMANDA:
Yeah. I was really lucky.
SHAY:
So you went to school to be a historian, or are you self-trained as a historian? Tell me more about that.
AMANDA:
No, I am an accidental public historian. I did not mean to become a historian. So I worked in theater for many years. I went from theater into television and film. And then I was a television executive until 2022, and had what I thought was my dream job.
And it was my dream job in many ways for a good long while. I got to work on projects I believed in. I got to hire people who were amazing. And then that job fell apart for a variety of reasons.
And so I found myself sort of at loose ends, you know? I had had my dream job in this industry I'd been working in for 20 years. And I knew I needed a new dream, but I didn't know what that was.
And for the first time in my life, I'd been working since I was probably 15, 16 maybe, when I got my first paying job. And so for the first time in my life, I didn't immediately have to go and find another job, and so I had time.
And the first thing I did was sleep for like a month 'cause I realized I was exhausted on like a bone-deep level, because we had just come out of the very worst part of trying to produce television at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, which was... Like, producing television is playing a video game on hard on the best of days, and doing it during the early days of the pandemic was a nightmare mod that none of us were prepared for.
So I was just exhausted in a way that I did not necessarily understand until I could actually stop moving.
So I was at dinner with some friends, and I have always loved queer history. Curiosity is one of my sort of founding principles as a human. I'm curious about everything. And queer history in particular was a huge part of my own process of becoming. I didn't really have like a coming out process so much as I had a decades-long process of becoming. And studying queer history was a really big part of that.
But I am also, as you might imagine, a person who randomly drops fun factoids into dinner conversations 'cause it's just how my brain works. And so I was at dinner with a bunch of friends, and my friend Jess was like, "You should put this on the internet." Which might have been her nice way of saying, "Please stop dominating our dinner conversation with random queer history facts." But I took it. I was like, "Hey, that's a good idea."
I decided I was gonna set up a TikTok account 'cause I needed something that had very low barrier to entry. And my plan originally was I was just gonna do a month of videos for Pride of 2022. And it was really just to get my creative juices flowing so I could get my brain working in a different direction and try and figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
And so I just sat on my porch and I talked about stuff that I thought was interesting in like three-minute videos. And then all these people started showing up, and I was like, "That's weird. All right." And then I got to the end of the month and I put up a video that was like, "All right, guys. This has been fun. It's great. Have fun with the rest of your lives. I'm gonna go figure out what to do with mine."
And I got all of these comments and all of these DMs that were like, "Please don't do that. Please don't go away. Like, we need this." And so then I was like, "Oh, now I don't know what to do."
And then the next thing that happened was I got embraced by this really wonderful group of other public-facing academics, like historians and archeologists and art historians and stuff, who were all also sort of creating content. And I was invited to join a professional group, and they reached out to me, and I was like, "You definitely have the wrong girl. I don't have a PhD. I'm just a person who talks on the internet with citations."
'Cause even then I had a Google Doc of citations 'cause misinformation is one of my triggers. So even then, when I was just sort of doing it casually, I still had a Google Doc of like, "Here's where I got all this information. You can go read it."
SHAY:
Wow.
AMANDA:
They were like, "No, no, no. You are a really competent public historian. You're really good at what you do. And we would like to support you in continuing to do it." So they were sort of the ones who told me that I was a public historian, 'cause that wasn't really a thing I recognized in myself.
And so with the support of all of these people who have now become wonderful peers and friends, and also with enough moxie because I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, I was like, "Sure, let me try this."
So I founded a public history project, built all these social media platforms, joined the National Council for Public History, got Yesterqueers registered with the NCPH, joined the AHA, and now this is what I do full time. I create content online. I do speaking engagements. I'm launching a newsletter later this month.
SHAY:
Wait, and specify because we also go by AHA. You joined which AHA?
AMANDA:
Not yours. The one for the historians.
SHAY:
I was about to be like, "What? We helped?" No.
Oh, that's so cool. Wait, so yeah, I think that one of the things... 'Cause you kept coming across our feed, and one of the things that I've appreciated so much about your content is, as somebody who considers themselves to be an ignoramus on most academic stuff...
AMANDA:
Can I say, I love that you do the little pull-outs in your podcast of like...
SHAY:
Oh my gosh, you're so smart.
AMANDA:
"I actually know what he was talking about here." And so I went and looked it up, and it means... I think that is so clever. Thank you. Because I think so many people do that in conversation. They're like, "Yeah, no, totally, I absolutely understand what you're saying." I do not understand what he's saying at all.
SHAY:
You should see me in meetings with my executive director, Fish. He is so... The jargon that he uses. One time he was writing something that was supposed to be colloquial, and he said obsequious. And we just joke about it all the time now. 'Cause I'm like, "Dude, nobody says that. Like, you need to keep it accessible."
AMANDA:
Not on Threads, they don't, no.
SHAY:
Exactly. We love him. We love him. But sheesh, does he have a vocabulary.
But that's the thing though, is that in humanist culture, I'll say, a lot of the time we run into these pissing contests that are academic versus academic, and it just leaves the rest of us out of the conversation. And so I truly appreciate running across an academic like yourself who makes this stuff accessible. Like, I've been able to have my neuro-spicy brain follow everything that you're saying, and it's so, so helpful. So thank you for that.
AMANDA:
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the role of public history, is to bring these conversations quite literally into the public sphere.
And public history is this vast field. It encompasses everything from policy advisors, to people who do what I do, to recreators at places like Colonial Williamsburg. Walking tour guides, all of it. And the entire goal of public history is to connect the very important and nuanced work that academics are doing with the broader public.
Like, we need the academics to be having pissing contests and arguing over the most minute of details. Like, that needs to happen. But there also needs to be people like me, who are then able to synthesize that information and take it out to the general public and say, "This is how this applies to your life. This is how it applies to what's going on in the world right now."
And also, one of the reasons that I list my citations is not just because I think it's really important that the people who are giving information online are giving their sources and their citations. The other reason I do it is because if people are curious, I wanna reward that curiosity. And they can go to a website, and here's like five more things they can read, and here's some other things that are tangentially related that they can read or watch, because I think having ready access to a lot of information on the internet has, in some ways, made people less curious.
They are not as inclined to go searching for information, so I also just wanna reward that curiosity. I want people to ask questions, and I want people to watch one of my videos and go, "What is the rest of that story?" 'Cause there's only so much I can say in five minutes.
SHAY:
Yeah. 'Cause we both grew up with encyclopedias in our homes.
AMANDA:
Yeah, and my curiosity definitely comes from both of my parents. But especially my dad. My dad is a really interesting dude. He was a special operator in the Navy, and then he went and got an MBA, but his undergraduate degree is also in engineering.
And my dad is the one who taught me to do things like wonder why all doorknobs are the height that they are. Like, how did we decide that's the height of a doorknob, you know?
SHAY:
Oh.
AMANDA:
Like, when my dad was in college, what he was studying was, I can't remember what it's called, but like grading and earthworks and soil engineering, soil mechanics, all that kind of stuff. So he would explain to me like why freeways are graded the way they are around a turn, because if it's like four degrees in either direction, then people are either gonna speed or they're gonna crash into each other. So he was definitely the one who conditioned my brain to look at everything and think of a question.
SHAY:
With a sober mind too, because those are the questions typically people ask when they are high as fuck, so.
AMANDA:
100%, yeah. My dad's not even much of a drinker, so yeah. But that's just... I strive every day to look at the world with curiosity and with a desire to understand.
SHAY:
Which is not easy in the current state of the world, but...
AMANDA:
Talk about it, yep. I try.
SHAY:
So in your pursuit of providing credible citations and information, do you run up against a lot of discoveries about, like, colonized history or patriarchal history bias in the stories that you're coming up with?
AMANDA:
Oh, yeah. I mean, my whole gig is what's called restorative history, which is correcting those white supremacist, patriarchal narratives. A lot of queer history is restorative history because of the way in which queer stories get buried in the historical record.
So yeah, it requires a lot of research. Every single video that I do, even if you only see three to seven minutes on screen, takes anywhere from 12 to 60 hours to produce, depending on how much research I have to do. Especially when I'm doing videos about cultures that are not my own or groups that are not my own, because when I do videos like that, I will not do them unless I can find sources from people who are part of that culture.
And if I can't... Like, it took me two years. I wanted to do a video about Kamehameha III from the beginning when I started Yesterqueers, but it took me two years to find enough credible sources from Hawaiian and Polynesian scholars that I felt confident that the story that I was telling was as decolonized as I, a white woman in Los Angeles, could make it, even for a video that short.
SHAY:
Do you gauge a video succeeding the way that you had intended? Is it just bless and release?
AMANDA:
Yeah, it's very bless and release. By now, because I've been doing this for four years, I have a sense of what is more popular. Any video that I do about a musician is gonna be popular. People love to hear about musicians. They love to hear about the inspiration behind music, especially when I cover queer musicians.
Like, I did a video a couple years ago about Labi Siffre, which is still one of my most watched videos. And it's because he wrote the bassline in one of Eminem's most popular songs. And I used that as the hook of the video.
[SHAY interjects: Labi Siffre is such a genius. I am such a huge fan of his, and this song, I Got That, which is the one that Amanda's talking about, is such a bass player's dream. It's ba-ba-doom-bump-bump-bump. But the Eminem part is the ba-bum-brow, ba-dum-bum, ba-dum-bum, ba-dum-bum-bum. There you go.]
AMANDA:
But then I got to tell this amazing story about this polyamorous Black man in the UK and his two adorable husbands and how they lived in like a cottage in Wales.
But I don't... I'd probably have more followers if I thought more about it, but I just sort of think about what's interesting to me, I think about what's relevant to what's going on in the world right now, and that's what I do videos about.
SHAY:
I think one of the more recent ones that I had seen was you profiled, oh, why is his name failing me at the moment, but he was Little Richard's predecessor.
AMANDA:
Escorita.
SHAY:
Yes, and I started listening to his music because of you.
AMANDA:
Yeah, and that's the thing, it's like... I'd probably have a very different platform if I was more interested in consciously trying to boost my metrics, but I'm really driven by the work I do. As with every other thing in my life, as my therapist likes to point out, I have chosen the hardest way possible to do this, but it feels like the right way, so that's the way I'm doing it.
SHAY:
I think that, as somebody who handles social media for a living, I think that's the way to do it because, not to go too far on this tangent, but if you're focusing on what you enjoy, that's what keeps you around longer.
AMANDA:
Yeah. It's the only... And this work, and I say this with great gratitude because I love what I do. I really do feel like the universe stood behind me in 2022 and shoved me onto my path. I will do this forever, and I love it, but it is really, really hard work. This is the hardest thing that I have ever done.
And the only way that I can keep doing it is by following my own North Star of what I think is interesting and what I think is relevant. And look, I still have half a million followers across platforms. I still get millions of views a month. Like, I'm doing fine on the getting my message out there.
More than I thought I ever would, honestly. It seems to be working. Following my instinct about what's interesting, what's relevant, what stories need to be in the world right now seems to be working, so I'm just gonna keep doing that.
SHAY:
Do you have any type of religious background that has informed this at all? Because I would say something that really impacts me about the work that you're doing is that in Jewish thought, we believe that every time you say someone's name who's passed on, that you keep them alive. And so that's literally what you're doing, in my mind.
AMANDA:
Yeah, and I've always thought that was a beautiful sentiment.
I was raised Episcopalian, but in the WASPy New Jersey type of Episcopalian where like, we went to weddings and funerals. And because my dad came from a very abusively Catholic household growing up, so my dad is essentially an agnostic. And my mother was a paramedic and spent 25 years of her life facing down life and death every day, so.
SHAY:
You said paramedic, and I thought that was another religion I hadn't heard of.
AMANDA:
No, like paramedic. Like, riding around in the truck, saving people's lives.
SHAY:
I'm with you.
AMANDA:
So she had a very particular understanding of how the world works. So I wasn't really raised with any kind of religious sensibility or framework.
When I got to be about 13, which is I think when you start reading literature in school that has biblical references, and I missed them all 'cause I'd never been to Sunday school or anything, my dad just handed me the Bible and was like, "Start here." And I was like, "Cool." So I read the Bible for the first time when I was 13.
And again, because I'm such a curious person, my immediate thought was like, "That's cool. What does everybody else believe?" Like, what are other texts that I can read? What are other things I can learn about? I'm endlessly fascinated by what people believe about how the world works and how they came to those beliefs, whether they were raised with them or came to them organically.
I would say that I'm not a humanist in the strictest definition of the word, only because I have had some profound experiences that I cannot find another explanation for other than something supernatural.
SHAY:
Yeah.
AMANDA:
But I also very much believe in the ability of humans to lead good and complete and ethical lives without any sort of belief in a deity or the supernatural. I believe in those things, but they're not a requirement for me being a good and curious person in the world.
SHAY:
Oh, that's so cool.
You're the only guest so far that I have asked ahead of time to prepare something for our interview, because I only know of James Baldwin as being a queer humanist in history, and I would love to hear if you've uncovered anyone else.
AMANDA:
Yes, but I sort of brought a different story because I think it's a more interesting story.
SHAY:
Ooh, go for it.
AMANDA:
And the thing that I think is sort of fascinating about this is, I think there's a lot of queer people in history that you could look at them and be like, "Well, yes, obviously a humanist," you know? But there weren't a ton who necessarily identified that way, just because the language is still pretty new, right?
SHAY:
Yeah, for sure.
AMANDA:
It was only, what, 1933 was the signing of the first statement, the manifesto.
SHAY:
Such a historian answer. Sorry. That's so cool that you knew that. Wow.
AMANDA:
But the story that I did uncover that I thought was very fascinating is about the founding of what are now called the LGBT Humanists in the UK. They were, on their founding in 1979, called the Gay Humanist Group. And they were founded in response to... So there was a conservative British activist named Mary Whitehouse who was an evangelical, real piece of work, who spent a lot of time campaigning against pornography and television. Like, she started a whole war with Doctor Who. Like, there was a whole thing.
And the downside of it is, like, if you read her diaries now, she actually kinda had a point about what the ready availability of pornography was gonna do to our children. But it was wrapped in so much hatred and bigotry and homophobia. It was definitely one of those broken clock is right twice a day kind of situations.
But anyway, so in 1976, she brought a blasphemy suit against a publication called Gay News. And this was the UK's last blasphemy suit, the last one that ever went through UK courts. And it was the first one that had been through the courts in like 50 years.
And Gay News published a poem by a poet named James Kirkup called The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name. And even Kirkup, who was an accomplished poet and writer by the time he died, will tell you that this is not a great poem. Like, this is a mediocre poem at best.
But the poem is about the Roman centurion who pulls Christ's body down after he is crucified, fantasizing about making love to him, and also talking about how he knew that Jesus had had other gay relationships, like with Judas, with some of the other apostles.
So Mary Whitehouse filed a blasphemy suit because of this poem. It is still illegal to print this poem in newspapers in the UK, even today, in 2026.
SHAY:
What?
AMANDA:
She ended up winning her suit, but she received enormous amounts of backlash, and went on the offensive saying that the intellectual homosexual humanist lobby was to blame, that humanists were basically ruining morality in the UK, and that it was all this big queer intellectual humanist plot.
And so a guy named George Broadhead founded this humanist group specifically to advocate for LGBTQ+ people.
SHAY:
Really?
AMANDA:
Yep, and they're still around.
SHAY:
That is so fucking cool.
AMANDA:
Yeah, it's really... Let me see if I can find the quote. Oh yeah, so two of the other founders, Barry Duke and Bryan Perry, said that they thought that it was just logical to pair humanist and queer causes, saying, "By fighting ignorance, superstition, dogma, and bigotry, the Gay Humanist Group hoped to encourage more gays and humanists to come out and declare themselves and their convictions with pride."
SHAY:
Ooh.
AMANDA:
Cool, right?
SHAY:
That is so cool. Oh my gosh, Fish is gonna love this 'cause he loves history. This is so cool.
AMANDA:
Literally, like, they're still around. They're still a group. You could absolutely call them and get them on your podcast, I'm sure.
SHAY:
Yeah. I mean, hey, stay tuned everyone. That is so cool.
And I love those intersections of different groups coming together for a common cause. This is a thing I talk about a lot, especially recently, is that, and again, I always wanna preface this by saying I think this is mostly a white American people problem, but we do not understand how to build community or even what community really is. And that you don't have to be friends with all the people in your community, and you don't all have to believe exactly the same thing. You just all have to link arms and walk in the same direction for a while.
So I love stories like this of a bunch of humanists being like, "We seem to have a lot of things in common with what's going on with the persecution of gay people in the UK, so we're gonna link arms and do something about that."
AMANDA:
Yeah, and this was long before the notion of privilege being this mainstream thing for us to be aware of.
SHAY:
Yeah, this was, I think her lawsuit was '76, and the organization was founded in like '78 or '79.
AMANDA:
Incredible.
SHAY:
Wow.
I'm really proud to be a part of this organization because we are constantly working year-round for marginalized groups, but a lot of that work has to do with helping obviously with the LGBTQ community because so many of these laws that are trying to get passed, that we're playing Whac-A-Mole with, would directly impact those communities.
So yeah, I'm really excited about the work that AHA is doing. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but patting ourselves on the back.
AMANDA:
Do it. Pat, who else is patting you on the back? Do it.
SHAY:
But at the same time, I look at me as an individual, and just this past week I went to Stonewall for the very first time.
AMANDA:
Oh, wow.
SHAY:
Because I had walked past it a million and one times, but I had never known what the actual riot history was, and it wasn't until I saw your recent video that I was like, wait, it's up for debate whether or not bricks were even thrown.
AMANDA:
Oh, yeah. And I have to do another video about it because I got a lot of very angry people thinking that I was trying to erase trans women from the history of Stonewall, which is not what I was doing at all, so I do need to do another video about it.
But yeah, I mean, like, think about, you've grown up in and around New York City. How often do you see piles of bricks laying around the streets of New York City?
SHAY:
Yeah.
AMANDA:
So just think about that for a second. On that first night, what they were probably throwing were bottles, shot glasses, change, any sort of small stones that you could find on the street. There was a construction site nearby, so it is probable verging on likely that there were bricks being thrown on the subsequent nights, 'cause Stonewall also wasn't only just one night, it was almost a week.
But on that first night, the thing that sparked all of those subsequent nights was almost certainly not a brick. And Marsha Johnson herself said in multiple interviews, "I wasn't there. I didn't get there till later. I didn't throw a brick." Like, it's a thing that people keep trying to sort of put on her story.
Which by the way, shout out to Tourmaline, who wrote an amazing biography of Marsha P. Johnson, if anyone wants to do a deep dive on her. It just came out this year.
SHAY:
Ooh, I would love to... Oh, yes. Thank you for that. I'll put that information in the show notes for everyone.
AMANDA:
I think it's just called Marsha. It's amazing.
But yeah. So to say that probably nobody threw a brick on that first night of Stonewall, and it almost certainly wasn't the inciting incident, does not take away from the crucial role that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Miss Major and other trans and gender non-conforming people played, both in the lead-up to Stonewall and in the years after Stonewall.
SHAY:
As a historian, can you set the record straight for why a seemingly minuscule detail like that would affect our telling of the history? Like, why is it important to get that right?
AMANDA:
I mean, it's a great myth, right? And if you think about the way that Americans in particular tell our history, most of the most common stories that we understand about American history are myth. The Boston Tea Party was not a bunch of disgruntled people angry about the price of tea. Like, that's not what the Boston Tea Party was, but it was still an inciting incident.
So sometimes myth plays a very crucial role in dragging the rest of the story out with it. The myth of the first brick at Stonewall did a lot of heavy lifting to pull the rest of the story of Stonewall out of the shadows. It did a lot of heavy lifting to pull the name of Marsha P. Johnson out of the shadows and put her front and center in all of this activism work.
So sometimes those myths can be useful because they are stories that people respond to. They have an emotional resonance. But at some point, once you have dragged the history out, then you need to be able to look at it and say, "Okay, this is probably not quite what happened." But that doesn't make what happened any less impactful, any less serious, and it doesn't diminish the contributions of all the people we're talking about. Their contributions were just beyond this one moment.
SHAY:
So if a movie were to be made, let's say, about the Stonewall riots, and they depicted Marsha P. Johnson up front throwing a brick, would that be harmful in the sense of sharing the story?
AMANDA:
I mean, I think the Stonewall movie they already made, putting a white cis man front and center of that story, is way more harmful than having a depiction of Marsha P. Johnson throwing a brick.
SHAY:
Yeah.
AMANDA:
And also, the thing about movies is, like, are you making a movie or are you making a documentary? Because if you put that in a documentary, then yeah, that's a problem. But if you put that in what is essentially historical fiction, like, all right, that serves the story. It's certainly in the flavor of what was happening at the time. It's not entirely out of left field.
Like, as a historian would I roll my eyes about it? Yeah, probably, because there are other more interesting stories that are more true that you could put there. Whether or not you believe that Stormé DeLarverie is the lesbian who first punched a cop, it was definitely a lesbian who first punched a cop, and like, we could highlight that.
SHAY:
Such a fair point because, not to go again too far on a tangent, but I think about the retelling of these stories that, you know, for me the one that I see people get wrong all the time, it's not even queer history, but it's the legend that has become Robin Williams committing suicide because of depression.
AMANDA:
Oh, yeah.
SHAY:
And I'm like, he had Lewy body dementia. We need to recognize that because it's so important, and it's such a missed opportunity to spread awareness about what that disease is.
So I just find myself getting very up in arms about learning an accurate detail and then continuing to see the myth roll on. And I'm so fascinated to hear you say that it has a purpose in the marketing of it almost.
AMANDA:
Yeah. And I sort of wanna be careful about that. Like, I'm not advocating for telling all of our history in myth first and then trying to correct it. It's more of a like, you can look back and say, "Okay, that myth served a purpose."
And we also see that a lot of times in how queer history was reported in the moment. You know, like the headlines in newspapers were purposefully inflammatory and inaccurate a lot of times. But it was at least drawing eyeballs to what was happening.
Certainly, I personally think history is interesting enough we don't need to mythologize it. Like, we could just say what happened, and that was interesting enough to get people invested. But you can sometimes look back and say, "Okay, I understand why it was useful. The fact that that story proliferated that way shouldn't happen, but it did, and it was useful."
SHAY:
I'm curious if you can fill in any of the gaps. I had questions while I was on my tour, the Pride Tours NYC. Our tour guide was explaining to us about the cops that were constantly throwing the people into line-ups at Stonewall, collecting IDs and whatnot, but he didn't get a chance to really go into any detail about there being any type of overlap or, like, closeted policemen back then.
Oh, and then also what I'm calling George Michaeling them. He didn't go into any detail about that. But I feel like there had to be some closeted ones.
AMANDA:
Yeah. I mean, and certainly we have a lot of evidence of that, right? Especially in New York City, going all the way back to the bathhouse raids at the end of the 1800s, beginning of the 1900s.
What you're calling George Michaeling is a method called pretty police, of finding... It's sort of like 21 Jump Street, but for entrapping gay people. It's finding the youngest and the hottest and sending them undercover to entrap, usually gay men, in public cruising spots.
So yeah. I mean, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that some of the police officers who were regularly undercover at Stonewall were secretly really enjoying that assignment. But also, those people were traitors to their community, so probably don't need to spend too much time thinking about them.
But the thing that's interesting about Stonewall is that, first of all, as anyone who has older family members who tell the same story over and over in slightly different incarnations every time can tell you, the way major events are remembered changes. And then when you take a major event that is also incredibly traumatic, both on a personal level and on a community level, and then that event also becomes an enormously influential point in history, suddenly you have a whole lot of people whose recollections of what happened that night and who was there and how it all went down are very different.
That's just sort of how human memory works, and that's part of the reason that the world needs historians, right? Like, you need people to interpret the stories that are being told, the records that have been left, because you cannot necessarily just... If we relied on everyone's first-person accounting as being 100% true, we would have no idea what happened, 'cause they're all very different.
And that's part of the problem with memory in general, not just around Stonewall, but about any of these really big, really influential, really traumatic events. Like, I'm sure this is also true of people who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge the first time, right? Like, that's not my particular area of history, so I can't tell you for sure. But I would be pretty certain that if you talk to historians who are really deeply into those records, they would have a similar selection of stories that all kind of hang together but also are all very different.
And it's the beauty and the frustration of history. So something like Stonewall, like, we're never gonna have a 100% accurate, clear narrative about what happened that night.
But what's very interesting about Stonewall is that it certainly was one of the bars that was regularly raided by the police, but those raids, they usually knew they were coming because they were sort of scheduled between the dirty cops and the mafia who ran the bar.
There is a whole other piece of Stonewall history that we really don't talk about a lot, and it hasn't, as far as I know, been too deeply investigated. But the door manager at Stonewall, whose name I am blanking on right now, was very, very involved in a blackmail and a sex trafficking ring in New York. And one of the things that this ring did was blackmail Wall Street professionals with information that this door manager had learned about them at Stonewall.
So there is a theory, and I wanna be clear that this is just a theory, but it is the story of the officer who instigated the raid that night, for why they raided Stonewall that night. It was not necessarily about the people, like the client base at Stonewall, but wanting to get that bar closed down to stop the flow of blackmail information that was screwing up Wall Street.
SHAY:
Whoa.
AMANDA:
Yeah.
SHAY:
As somebody who literally just learned about Stonewall's significance, that just knocked me down. Wow.
AMANDA:
Yeah. I'm gonna do a video about it at the end of the month because the NYPD officer who led that raid, that is his explanation for what that raid was about, at least in part.
SHAY:
Really? Our tour guide had shared that the fights broke out after one of the trans women had said, "My cuffs are on too tight," and then the officer just beat her upside the head. Is that part accurate as far as you know?
AMANDA:
Uh, yeah, probably.
SHAY:
Okay.
AMANDA:
Yes. There are a bunch of different stories about what started where. It seems that the first sort of scuffles were inside the club, because this is when they had officers pulling people into bathrooms to check their genitals essentially, to make sure that their genitals matched the clothing that they were wearing.
SHAY:
Unbelievable.
AMANDA:
Yeah. And so there are a couple of different stories about what started it outside. Was it that woman being arrested saying the cuffs were too tight? Yeah, possibly. Was it this lesbian who may or may not have been Stormé DeLarverie who hauled off and punched a cop? Probably.
The other part of that story is that Stormé, or that lesbian, turned to the crowd and yelled, "Why don't you do something?" And that was the moment that sort of made everyone go, "Oh, right, we could all be participating in this."
So yes, that is as true as anything else is true about what the inciting incident was, insofar as there was one. I don't know if you've ever been in a crowd of people who are really worked up about something, but there is very rarely just one inciting incident.
SHAY:
True. Yeah, yeah, very true.
He also said that Stormé ended up working as a bouncer for what became Henrietta's for years.
AMANDA:
She worked as a bouncer at Henrietta Hudson, at the Cubbyhole. But really what Stormé was was sort of the guardian angel of Chelsea and the West Village, because Stormé had a permit to carry a handgun, to open carry a handgun when that was still a thing that you could do in New York City.
You cannot do that in Manhattan anymore. But she had a permit to carry a handgun, and she patrolled the streets protecting mostly lesbians but, you know, all queer people broadly, from what she called ugliness, which was any kind of hateful words or threats or whatever. And she did that for 30 years. She was in her 80s when she stopped doing that.
She was tall, and she was butch, and she had a gun. Not only did she work as a bouncer at the clubs, but she also was essentially a superhero. She was a lesbian superhero protecting the innocent queers from ugliness.
SHAY:
What a badass.
AMANDA:
Yeah. Yeah.
SHAY:
I mean, I know that term gets thrown around so much, but what a fucking badass.
AMANDA:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Stormé was amazing. Wow. I want someone, someone who is not me, to do a really, really deep dive biography on her.
SHAY:
For people who are listening to us and want to look more into not just Stonewall, but history in general, what tips do you have for them in this age of misinformation that would help them in their research journey?
AMANDA:
If you really wanna research something and you have no idea where to start, call your local library. Librarians are geniuses, and they will point you in the right direction. You can also probably email them if you're a person who doesn't like talking on the phone. They usually have an email inbox too.
And I know that seems weird when there's so much information available in the world, but call a librarian and they will point you in the right direction.
Barring that, I always want people to find trusted sources of information, by which I mean, if you are following educators and creators, make sure they are listing sources somewhere, that they have a website like I do, that they are putting them on screen, that they are putting them in the description of the video, that they are listing their own qualifications somewhere.
The latest sort of scourge in online history education is all of these AI videos taking AI people back into the past, and they are horrific for so many reasons. A, because generative AI is a scourge, but also the history is so wrong and so terrible. You know, but it looks slick 'cause it looks like a crappy movie.
So finding trusted sources. And also, once you have a library card, you have access to a whole lot of things, including ProQuest, where you can access academic articles and dissertations and papers and all kinds of stuff that are quite often behind a paywall if you're not connected to an institution.
But if you are a student somewhere, use that institutional access. Read all the things you can read. But yeah, in general, start at a library. Get a library card, which will give you access to books. And you can get library cards like Pokemon. You can get library cards from everywhere.
Yeah, there's a biblical scholar and a creator named Dan McClellan, and his...
SHAY:
Oh, love Dan.
AMANDA:
Yeah, and I love his tagline, which is, "Google competently." But in order to do that, you have to know what you're looking for. So that's where a librarian can help you if you have never been taught how to evaluate a source.
SHAY:
Now, on the flip side, if you happen to have a loved one that has some history to be able to contribute to this research, what do you recommend they do to get the stories down in an integral way?
AMANDA:
Interview them. Everyone's got a camera in their pocket. Interview them. You know, even if it's only an audio interview, set your phone on the table between you and just ask questions.
SHAY:
And then post it online somewhere, or...
AMANDA:
Or if you want to, or not, or hang onto it, or send it to a local historical society or an archive.
Oh. I'm doing a lot of work with the Mazer Lesbian Archives right now, which are here in Los Angeles, and I think a lot of people don't know that you don't have to be dead to send something to an archive. Like, if you went to a bunch of protests during the George Floyd era, and you still have all that ephemera from the protests, send it to an archive. You don't have to keep it in a box until you're dead. You can just send it now.
SHAY:
Oh, interesting.
AMANDA:
How do you even find out what they're looking for?
SHAY:
I guess you just contact them.
AMANDA:
Yeah. Usually you have to call or send an email. You can almost always send an email.
SHAY:
And all these introverts listening are like, "Gah."
AMANDA:
I know. But also you have to remember that most people who work in archives and historical societies are also introverts who prefer books and paper to people. So you all just gotta introvert together. There you go.
But almost every town has some sort of historical society. There are a ton of really cool queer-specific archives like the Mazer, like the ONE Archives at USC. There are some that are sort of geographically specific that are archiving materials from like southern queer people. And that is where Google can be helpful.
Also, a lot of these archives are starting to build their social media presences so that people are more aware of them. If you have a family member die, and you come upon a dozen photo albums and you don't know what to do with them, call your local historical society. And if that family member was like a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution or the Kiwanis Club or something, call them and say, "Do you want these things?"
Please just don't throw them in dumpsters until you've checked with someone.
SHAY:
Ugh.
AMANDA:
And sometimes people say, "That's not valuable to us," and then you can just toss it if it doesn't have sentimental value. But please check. Because one of the problems with the rise of the digital age is we are losing paper records.
So one thing I also always advise people to do is keep a journal. Even if you think you don't have anything to say, keep a journal. At the end of the day, spend 20 minutes writing down what you did that day, what's going on in the world. A, because I think as you get older, when you have them to look back on, you're gonna be glad you did it.
But also those things are invaluable to historians, because even if you think you don't have anything to say, so much information exists in the just sort of day-to-day minutiae. Like, I have a friend whose entire dissertation was done about women entrepreneurs in the 18th century, and most of that research was in diary entries and receipts.
SHAY:
Wow.
AMANDA:
So.
SHAY:
Oh, all right. Well, that's my fifth reminder this year to get back to journaling. Ai-yai-yai.
AMANDA:
Yeah, and you don't have to do anything with it. Like, you can just throw it in a box. That you can leave until you die, and then someone can give it to a historian. But it is so useful, especially because of the way memory works, it is so useful to document how you're feeling, what you're doing in the moment, because your mind will change that almost immediately.
SHAY:
Yes, so true. Yeah. I heard Jenifer Lewis talking about how she started her journal as a kid, and she's been keeping them straight for decades. And I was like, "That's why she has a book." It's 'cause she was...
AMANDA:
I wish I had done that, now, especially now that I'm a historian. Like, I wish I had decades of journals to look back on, but I didn't start journaling till I was probably in my 20s.
SHAY:
Yeah. All right. Well, still...
AMANDA:
Which is still a couple of decades now, but not as many decades as it could be.
SHAY:
So okay, I know we have a few minutes left, but I wanted to make sure that I ask you about the chapter of the '80s with the AIDS crisis. And my first question about that is how do you go about sharing the history of someone who is part of this massive tapestry of our history without erasing who they were, and kind of just letting it fall into the pot of this tragic part of our history?
AMANDA:
That's a good question. Sometimes it depends on the person. I don't know if you're familiar with Hannah Gadsby, but...
SHAY:
Oh, yeah.
AMANDA:
So in her special Nanette, she talks about freezing her story at the point of trauma, and how she thought she was gonna have to be done with comedy because of how she was telling her own story.
And I think that we freeze a lot of queer stories at the point of trauma. And so then it makes those stories about that trauma as opposed to the trauma just being part of a person's story. So I always try very hard to tell stories through the point of trauma whenever I can. And if I'm talking about someone who died during the AIDS crisis, that is usually just sort of like a colophon at the end of the video.
[SHAY interjects: I need to stop so that we can understand what colophon means because Amanda's vocabulary is fascinating me. A colophon is a statement or emblem in a book providing details about its production or publisher. Historically, it was a note at the end of a book detailing the printer, date, and place of publication. Modern colophons typically list the typography, paper, and design credits, or serve as the publisher's logo. Now we can continue.]
AMANDA:
Like, the entire video is not about how they got sick and died. The entire video is about what they were doing up until that point.
SHAY:
Oh, gosh, there was this really awesome, I wanna say he was Japanese, man that you highlighted. He ended up...
AMANDA:
Oh, Kiyoshi Kuromiya.
SHAY:
Yes. Yes. His story fascinated the fuck out of me.
AMANDA:
Yeah. I mean, he is... I wish he had lived longer. The ways in which he could have changed the world, but he did already change the world in the not enough years that he had.
SHAY:
I know. I just, when I was learning about him, I was just like, "How did he do all of this?"
[SHAY interjects: Okay, just so you can get a brief sense of what this man was about. He was born May 9th, 1943. He was a Japanese American author and civil rights, anti-war, gay liberation, and HIV/AIDS activist. He was born in Wyoming at the World War II era Japanese American internment camp known as Heart Mountain. He became an aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War during the 1960s. One of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front in Philadelphia. He also founded the Critical Path Project and its newsletter. He was also the editor of ACT UP's Standard of Care, the first medical treatment and cultural competency guidelines produced for people living with HIV by people living with HIV and AIDS.]
AMANDA:
And I think the part that I got so excited about too was that he was based in Philly.
SHAY:
Which is where I am.
AMANDA:
Philly has an enormous amount of queer history. Like, it is just dripping from the walls there.
SHAY:
Ugh. I just can't...
Amanda, I can't thank you enough for continuing on with this channel, because I, as somebody who is just mortified by my memory retention when I'm watching videos or learning about anything in life, just the fact that I am able to just be gripped by whatever and whomever you're sharing about is just a testament to how powerful it is what you're doing. So thank you, seriously.
AMANDA:
Thank you. That's very kind. I mean, I'm really very lucky. I love what I do, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done, as I said. But I wouldn't do anything else.
SHAY:
Yeah. Ugh. All right. Well, anything that you wanna share with our audience before we head out?
AMANDA:
You can find me everywhere as Yesterqueers and at yesterqueers.com.
SHAY:
Awesome. Thank you again so much.