Allyship is a Verb

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This week, Andrew Lear (he/him) discusses what goes into curating gay art history tours and the homophobia he's seen in academia. In this episode, you will learn 1. What intimate and sexual differences he’s seen for teenage boys and men across different cultures 2. How he’s seen gay art evolve over time 3. Which LGBTQ+ historical figures he’d want to have a dinner party with, and why

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Host Charlie Ocean, MSW (they/them), has a background in LGBTQ+ training, community organizing, and technology. Guest episodes feature at least one allyship tip, including tailored questions based on the guests' unique intersecting identities. You can follow Charlie on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Substack.

Creators & Guests

Host
Charlie Ocean, MSW
Pronouns: they/them. Neuroqueer LGBTQ+ speaker, trainer, consultant, podcaster, writer...
Guest
Andrew Lear
There are quite a number of LGBT resistance heroes in Nazi Europe. And it really, it’s just kind of an interesting door to open. You find all these unbelievably courageous people fighting for themselves and others in this terrifying circumstance.

What is Allyship is a Verb?

People want to do better, but they don’t always know how. Allyship is a Verb is a 4x award-nominated (and now award-winning!) podcast featuring conversations with LGBTQ+ community members of various lived experiences and backgrounds who share their stories and an allyship tip. The host is a silly, warm human who offers self-reflection questions and voiceovers to help deepen the learning for listeners. The host is Charlie Ocean, MSW (they/them), who has a background in LGBTQ+ education, community organizing, and social work.

[00:00:00] Charlie Ocean: Well, hello there. I'm Charlie Ocean, and my pronouns are they/them. Welcome to Allyship is a Verb, a podcast for people practicing allyship for the LGBTQ+ community and beyond!

[00:00:26] Andrew Lear: Hi, my name is Andrew Lear. My pronouns are he/him/his.

[00:00:30] Charlie Ocean: Before we dive into the episode, I want to say: Thank you, Craig Martin! (voice echoes) I super appreciate you supporting the Indiegogo campaign.

Happy New Year, folks. I'm back from the December break to finish out the second part of the season, so let's dive in.

Andrew has lived quite a full life, which includes being an author and historian of gender and sexuality. His company, Oscar Wilde Tours, was founded in 2013 and was the first tour company focused on LGBT history. He's won several awards for his tours and academic teaching. I definitely encourage you to check out his offerings for the tours, because he's got some in the United States, as well as some coming up in Greece, Italy, and Germany.

I am truly not doing his background justice, so please also check out his Wikipedia page. For now, I'm going to give you three self-reflection questions to think about during the episode. Make sure you stick around after the conversation for three more to take with you.

1. Have I ever studied the life of a historical figure and later learned that they identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community?

2. Am I familiar with Frank Kameny or Craig Rodwell? Do I know what they are known for?

3. Is there still a need for LGBTQ+ bookstores? Do I know of any?

And now, the conversation.

You are gay and a gay historian. What does that mean to you?

[00:02:15] Andrew Lear: What does it mean? (laughs) That's what I do. I guess I got into this position so indirectly. (laughs) I was a professor of classics, which means - since people don't seem to know what classics means anymore - means Latin and ancient Greek literature, culture, history, philosophy, art, there's - it's really nothing, there's no definition, it's an area study.

And I particularly focused on issues of male-male relations in ancient Greek culture, which are a really important theme in ancient Greek culture. And I guess I got in a lot of career trouble because of that, thus it became a very important part of my identity. (laughs)

[00:02:56] Charlie Ocean: You've managed to, over the years, combine your love of gay art history and travel through your tours that you do, you also have some online. What are some surprising or impactful discoveries you've made about LGBTQ+ history?

[00:03:14] Andrew Lear: Oh gosh, there are just so many. They're forever coming up on something that you think, "Really? Wow!" Just, it goes on and on.

I think, probably, this year I put together a tour in Germany for the first time. An important theme in this tour, or an important figure in this tour, is a person, historical person, about whom I'm also working on a movie - I think it's now a TV series, I used to think it was a movie - who was, in the 1940s, a gay Jewish teenager who ran one of the largest resistance organizations in Nazi Germany, possibly the largest Jewish resistance organization in Nazi Germany.

What I discovered over the year before that was that there are quite a number of LGBT resistance heroes in Nazi Europe and it really, it's just kind of an interesting door to open. You find all these unbelievably courageous people fighting for themselves, and others, in this terrifying circumstance. Some were Jewish, some weren't Jewish.

And among other things, something I just happened upon, is that, so there's really only one well known resistance group in Nazi Germany. It's a group that was called the White Rose. There are three movies about them. So they're, they're quite well known. And what I didn't know was that the founder of that group was also gay. And that his being gay is not just an incidental fact of the story, it's actually how, ultimately, he became a resister because of the way he was treated or his sexuality was treated in Nazi Germany.

So it's really, although obviously not treated as badly as it could have been because he wasn't, you know, in a concentration camp or anything; he was able to form a resistance group at the university in Munich. It just sort of opened this world. It was really, really very interesting and entirely new to me.

[00:05:12] Charlie Ocean: When you're creating these tours, How do you curate that experience? Like do you try to find a balance of some of the moments that are a little bit more crunchy or intense with some of the more joyous parts or what helps to determine the, I guess, tone or vibe of the experience that you're creating for people?

[00:05:33] Andrew Lear: Yeah, that's a really good question. And it would particularly come up in terms of the trip in Germany. I think that many of the things I focus on are more cheering than you would imagine. Partly because I tend to be focusing on things for which there is current, visible, evidence. So that we're likely to be talking about Michelangelo more than we are going to be talking about people who were, you know, mistreated in various ways because there isn't visual evidence of their, of their lives.

So that I don't feel like in my tours of Italy or Greece, they're not depressing. But in Germany, of course, you run up against the mass oppression, particularly of gay men, although of LGBT people in general, and of course of many other people in Nazi Germany. And, it did worry me a little bit that the tour would get too depressing (laughs) at various times.

But, yeah, I guess I did perhaps somewhat try to balance that out with Marlene Dietrich and Matt Ludwig and other more amusing stories, because, you know, it would get, it would get too non-vacation like. And I did take the group to Dachau, to the concentration camp in Dachau, where we talked a lot about not only the general situation of mass murder and oppression and so on and so forth, but specifically how it applied to gay men, who were probably the first group systematically arrested, et cetera, et cetera, by the Nazis.

But of course, ultimately not as systematically as Jews.

[00:07:14] Charlie Ocean: Can you share a particularly memorable or moving experience from one of your LGBTQ+ history tours that surprised you?

[00:07:24] Andrew Lear: Well, you know, I think I've recently been talking about this with people. There's a very broad thing that surprises me about the tours, which is why people take them.

So I guess I put them together, originally, just thinking, "Oh gosh, they're, you know - I know this stuff that there's clearly enough a market of people who would be interested in hearing." And and I saw very clearly that there was a contrast between my tours and the tours of the other big LGBT tour companies because the other LGBT tour companies just do tours for LGBT people.

The tour itself is the same as a tour straight people would go on. Maybe there's some slight mention of something else, particularly now because people have started imitating me a little bit. Basically, it's just a regular, what I would call a vanilla tour of wherever they go, and the group is, you know, LGBT. Whereas my tours are about LGBT material.

So they're about art, history, culture in general, created by LGBTQ people or that involved LGBTQ people, whatever. And I actually, in my mind, didn't particularly care whether the people came were queer or not. Now, I assumed they would be, mostly, but they haven't been 100%.

A couple of times I've had straight couples who came on my tours, and they came because they had heard me give a lecture at one of the big museums in the United States, and they liked the lecture, and they thought, "Well, what the hell, we might as well go on one of his tours." And that worked fine. But it's not why most people come on my tours.

And there is this very strong element where people come on my tours because they want to be in a group of other queer people. I may be putting that too strongly. If you think about it, most of the people on group tours, 10 day group tours, are somewhat older; it's the market for that kind of thing.

If you're, say, a gay guy, and you go on a regular tour, you're going to be the only queer person in a tour that's going to consist of either straight couples, or in many cases, a lot of straight women, because of course, among older people, there are more women than men. And it's not that it's horrible. But it is kind of isolating. It's, you know, it's just not as fun or, we can't really let your hair down in a way.

And so they really like being in an LGBTQ group. There's a, you know, there's a feeling that it's a really comfortable environment. I think I do find that rather moving, that they really enjoy being together.

I am myself rather a private person. You know, I organize my tours; I'm with the group perhaps all day long. It's not like a vanilla tour, you know, we have specific things where, interesting things, that we're going to go see morning and afternoon most days. And so we go to them and we tend to have lunch together because that's, you know, why it would be ridiculous to take people to things in the morning and afternoon but leave them free for lunch. Just be a big waste of time.

So I'm with them a lot, but in the evening, I don't necessarily plan on staying with my groups. I tend to have friends in the places we are, but I very often come downstairs and I see my group together, hanging, (laughs) which I really like.

And then one thing is people are always asking single people. My groups are about half couples, half single people, generally. Very often the single people will ask me before the tour, "Do you think, you know, will I be left out by the group?" And instead, I find in those groups, everybody is very conscious about all the different people in the group. And if somebody isn't there, they're asking where he is and why, you know, what's wrong and why he hasn't shown up or something.

So there's a, yeah, there's a very nice group dynamic that establishes itself. It surpasses what I imagined would happen.

[00:11:26] Charlie Ocean: When you had your very first one, how did that go? And how many tours have you done since?

[00:11:34] Andrew Lear: Oh gosh. So, no, I should say, by the way, that I had a very long background in the travel industry before I started doing these tours, because I speak French, German, and Italian all really fluently. And so for the normal travel industry, the non-LGBTQ travel industry, I'm kind of a useful person. And starting when I was 17, I was giving tours to groups in French, German, and Italian.

And I started leading groups on long distance, you know, 10 day, 20 day even, tours, I think in 1983. And, this is just a summer job, but it's a summer job I did every summer for more than 20 years. So I was very aware of many aspects of how to organize a tour and also how to handle a group of people.

So the very first tour was in 2014. I did a press tour. I had planned a tour that would follow Oscar Wilde's life from Ireland to England to France. And the Irish government funded my running a press tour in Ireland, to do just the Irish part of the tour with a lot of people from the gay press. So there were, I can't even remember at this point, because people have moved around a lot, but there were people from Passport and Instinct. Now I don't remember where they were all from; maybe somebody was writing for Queerty. So that, that was the very first tour.

But then the first tour for customers was, I think, a tour in, I'm trying to think if Italy was the very first tour, I think so, yeah, in 2015. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was fine. Maybe a little less smooth than it is now, because we've been doing that same tour for a long time. So both the company who set it up for me, and I, have like filed it down to where it really works incredibly well.

[00:13:40] Charlie Ocean: Do you know how many you've done to date?

[00:13:42] Andrew Lear: I don't really know, but probably about 15, maybe, multi day tours, because - so they started in 2015, now we've been through the tour season of 2023, so that would be nine years, but there were two years in which there were no tours because of COVID.

[00:14:04] Charlie Ocean: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:05] Andrew Lear: So seven years of having tours abroad. And yeah, I think it's about an average of two a year. The first year there was only one, but then some year I think I did three. This coming year, I'm going to do three as well, so.

[00:14:19] Charlie Ocean: In your experience, what are some of the main themes you've seen emerge specific to LGBTQ+ art? Like, have there been any changes or have there been pretty consistent themes throughout history?

[00:14:34] Andrew Lear: Yeah, well, I mean, there's been a big change in recent years because of, you know, starting maybe with Paul Cadmus about a hundred years ago, we have openly LGBTQ artists working on LGBTQ themes in an open way. And so that's, of course, different from what went before.

Before that, the principal LGBTQ theme in art is male nude, right. The sort of object of desire is really, probably, the most I would say it's 90% in the Western tradition, LGBTQ art.

Because there's also art in other cultures, such as in Japan, where the beautiful youth is also a very big theme, but not nude, because Japanese art doesn't really do nudity in that way. But there's also a lot of sex scenes in Japanese art, which are pretty rare in the Western tradition, although there are some, for me, to Greece.

But yeah, I would say that that's really what the vector of anything queer in art through most centuries in the Western tradition is the male nude. Whereas now, you get all kinds of things.

I run a Facebook group called "Gay Art in History" and it's really about the homoerotic tradition in art. So it's sort of the tradition encapsulated by Michelangelo's David. People are always trying to post other things now, in it, and I always sort of say to them, "Look, you know, that's, that's great, but that's not what this group is for. There's the Gay Art Group, so put that over there." but now, for instance, you have a lot of things where you have, like, guys smooching. It's a huge theme in art today, but that really is not seen in the tradition, at all. (laughs)

So, I'll tell you a funny thing that has changed. In the whole homoerotic tradition, because of the influence of ancient Greece, it's a tradition in which male genitalia are kind of small and out of the way, even very small sometimes, smaller than real. Whereas now, there's a very strong tendency in LGBTQ art to exaggerate the size of male genitalia.

I don't know, as a lifelong jock, I've seen an awful lot of naked guys, (both laugh) but the genitalia I see in art these days are larger than the genitalia I've seen in life; quite consistently larger. Maybe that's the influence of porn, of course, because the actors in porn seem to be chosen somewhat for having, oh, larger genitalia.

[00:17:14] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:17:15] Andrew Lear: I'm sorry to talk about this so objectively. (laughs)

[00:17:18] Charlie Ocean: No, this is good.

[00:17:19] Andrew Lear: I don't feel - I don't share the prejudices of my culture at this point. I just, who cares? (laughs)

[00:17:23] Charlie Ocean: Well, in a previous conversation, you had shared with me that there is a human tendency toward repression of sexuality. And, based on what you just shared, I think, like, I see that, and it sounds like, in some ways, maybe folks are just taking up more space, because they don't feel confined by things like religion that have created those kinds of narratives.

But, I don't know, I guess, would you agree with that? I'm just theorizing. You know better than I.

[00:17:51] Andrew Lear: I think there's also a lot of pushback.

[00:17:53] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:17:54] Andrew Lear: So people are pushing back against restrictions. It's not that they don't feel them; they do feel them. But in our society, they're free to protest against them.

[00:18:03] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:18:04] Andrew Lear: And fight against them, which, you know, to some extent, artists in the Renaissance were fighting against them by making somewhat blatantly erotic male nudes. That was already pushing back against the church; but we, we can do so much more openly than they.

[00:18:23] Charlie Ocean: How did you become so passionate about unraveling this aspect of society?

[00:18:29] Andrew Lear: That's a really interesting question; I don't know. I think - and this is very hypothetical - I grew up in Italy, I went to boarding school in England before I moved to - although my family's mostly American, partly anyway - before I moved to America and I think that I lived in several different sexual cultures as a child.

And I became, just as I speak all the languages of the different cultures very well, I also really noticed the differences in the way that sexuality is treated, and particularly because I was a teenage boy, the sexuality of teenage boys. Which is viewed very differently in the three cultures, those three cultures.

[00:19:12] Charlie Ocean: What are those differences for people who are not familiar with them?

[00:19:16] Andrew Lear: Oh yeah, well nobody's familiar with them because nobody talks about it. (both laugh) So, in a large part of Italy, although Italy is in theory a Catholic country, and also in certain ways much more conservative about modern ideas of being gay, but, on the other hand, sexual playing around between boys under the age of maybe twentysomething is regarded as a natural part of life that nobody worries about.

That certainly was never true in America, right. (both laugh) And of course that was also certainly true in British boarding schools, when I was a kid, and it's still true, I'm told. Although they've been fighting, the boarding schools, have been fighting and fighting and fighting to try to limit it. (laughs) It's a big effort, separate shower stalls, they really, they try and try and try, but - and I always thought maybe they were succeeding, but I was told recently by some younger guys I know (laughs) that they are not successful at all.

[00:20:18] Charlie Ocean: Yeah, they'll find a way; the desire is there.

[00:20:20] Andrew Lear: Yeah.

[00:20:20] Charlie Ocean: They'll figure it out.

[00:20:21] Andrew Lear: Exactly. But, but, but, but, I think American - now this may have changed somewhat too because the generations of kids who are young now are a little, less worried about that kind of thing - but we tend to assume very much more strongly that the rules for adults also apply to adolescents.

And we take seriously the activities of adolescents. Which is to say - it's funny, I catch this all the time: I was just reading some letter to a newspaper recently in which some woman was saying her 13 year old son and his best friend seemed to like sit awfully close together when they were playing video games together and she worried, she said, "Oh my god, I don't want to oppress his sexuality? Is he gay? And, you know, what should I do about it?"

And I'm sorry, but in the culture I grew up in, 13 year old boys were assumed to play around with each other, and nobody thought it had anything to do with whether they were gay or not. And that's, I don't think that's ever been true in America.

[00:21:24] Charlie Ocean: I mean, I think I've only really seen that with girls, like, practicing, and I'm using heavy air quotes there, practicing, you know?

[00:21:34] Andrew Lear: Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:21:36] Charlie Ocean: And so I think that's been kind of normalized, right? Like, I've actually been talking about this with some of my friends, like present day, and a lot of us are Millennials, but -

[00:21:45] Andrew Lear: Exactly.

[00:21:46] Charlie Ocean: Talking about how like we've lost that intimacy over time, because now there's this expectation that you would do that with like your romantic or sexual partners, but not just like any friend. Even if you have that depth and closeness, so maybe previously. And we'll also see this play out in Hollywood, right, where you, there's a certain age at which you don't really see them having like the sleepovers and the cuddling under the blankets, watching movies or whatever.

And that's all it is. It doesn't lead to anything else, but like that closeness and intimacy just sort of trails off over time. I think part of it is because, you know, folks might consider it to be cheating, depending what kind of relationship dynamic you're in, but it's interesting because I found myself missing those moments where we could just be intimate in that way, but it, it doesn't have to mean anything and it doesn't have to lead to anything.

You know, we can just have a sleepover and How nice. I mean, maybe 'cause we're so nostalgic right now, (laughs) for a time that's felt simpler, but, I even - yeah, even myself, I could say that that's something that I've been craving and missing as of late.

[00:22:47] Andrew Lear: Interesting. Yeah, well it certainly, I, I don't think in Italian culture - as it was when I was a kid - grownups continued doing this; not at all. And it's funny, I know this still goes on in Italy, only because I've seen it a little bit, occasionally.

I was sitting in a cafe in Florence not very long ago, and there were two, there was a group of kids, obviously post school, maybe, I don't know, they might have been 17 or something like that. And there was one boy sitting in the middle, and he had his arm around a girl and his arm around his best friend. Or, I'm assuming it's his best friend. And then at a certain point they separated into little, they sex segregated, so the girls were chatting in one corner and the boys lay down and took a nap together, lying on top of each other.

Nobody does that at 27.

[00:23:34] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:23:34] Andrew Lear: That's like, it's kids. And certainly, you don't know "Does that mean they're having some kind of sex?" Maybe yes and maybe no. Because I happened to snap photographs of these kids, (laughs) because I thought, "Oh my god, this is a sociological example of how Italian culture -" American culture is not like this.

And then I showed it to a couple of my Italian friends and asked them what they thought was going on. And they all said, "Oh absolutely, I'm sure they're playing around." (laughs) So, that's not scientific, however. That's just, that's just what they thought. But it was from their own culture.

[00:24:04] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:24:05] Andrew Lear: So it was sort of fun.

But yeah, you don't do that when you're 30.

[00:24:08] Charlie Ocean: I feel like, and I'm saying this based on different forums and things that I've lurked online over the years, I've noticed that there's a lot of threads of - and I don't know if there's a better phrasing for this - but it seems there's a lot of men who are touch starved.

[00:24:25] Andrew Lear: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:26] Charlie Ocean: Because all of a sudden there's just like a sharp drop off.

[00:24:29] Andrew Lear: Yeah.

[00:24:30] Charlie Ocean: I'll see these accounts of how, when all of a sudden, let's say, you know, they're straight and cisgender and they're in a relationship with a woman, that if the woman starts, like, playing with his hair or just, like, gently caresses his back or something, even just, like, gives a compliment that, for a lot of them, it just seems like it goes a long way, because it's just stuff that's I don't know, I guess not considered appropriate anymore.

So like you'll see again in Hollywood or in people raising children today, there's this closeness and the hugging and the cuddles and stuff. Like, I'm thinking about one of my friends that sometimes his young son comes in in the morning to cuddle with him, cause I don't know, maybe he was scared by something or whatever. I'm just like, "That's so sweet."

But it's interesting, yeah. Then there's like a sharp drop off at some point where that's just not okay. And then I think they become, yeah, like touch starved. So -

[00:25:21] Andrew Lear: you know, I think, you know, the version of cisgender, straight, male life that our society has evolved is a sad thing. It's a very deprived life. It's funny because people think of, you know, us living in a patriarchy where cisgender, heterosexual, males dominate everything, but they only dominate everything at the same time as living very sad, starved lives.

[00:25:44] Charlie Ocean: Yeah. And I think that's why we see high rates of suicide and things like that, especially older in life and once maybe they've retired.

[00:25:52] Andrew Lear: Yes.

[00:25:52] Charlie Ocean: If anyone can even afford to do that anymore, but -

[00:25:54] Andrew Lear: Yeah, I don't know. I'm from a generation where a few people still retire, not very many, but a few people do. But I know that that's just not going to be a function anymore. But yeah, definitely, because then, you know, you've been living this deprived, erotically - but erotically is maybe too strong a word - affectively deprived life for a really long time.

For a lot of them, the only people from whom they're, you know, allowed to derive any kind of affective pleasure is like their wife and their children. And what happens when your wife dies.

[00:26:28] Charlie Ocean: Right.

[00:26:29] Andrew Lear: It's not a good thing.

[00:26:30] Charlie Ocean: And it's not for everyone too because not everyone's intimate in those ways, but -

[00:26:34] Andrew Lear: No, of course.

[00:26:35] Charlie Ocean: Lots of rabbit holes to go down.

[00:26:37] Andrew Lear: Yeah.

[00:26:37] Charlie Ocean: Reflecting on your experiences working in both the travel industry and academia, I imagine given how long you've worked in those careers you've likely experienced homophobia or prejudices.

[00:26:50] Andrew Lear: Yes. (laughs)

[00:26:50] Charlie Ocean: So I guess I'm curious, like, yeah, what has that been like for you and what kinds of obstacles or challenges have there been along the way?

[00:27:00] Andrew Lear: Right. So I have to say in the travel industry, I have not experienced any homophobia, but I, you know, I work in the LGBTQ travel industry, right. (laughs)

[00:27:10] Charlie Ocean: That definitely helps.

[00:27:12] Andrew Lear: Yeah, my company is clearly in that area and my customers are in that area. And I, you know, my other connections in the industry are with people I meet through the, I don't know if you've ever heard of the IGLTA, which is the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association, and it's - which is a charming organization, I got the only fun convention in the world; delightful group.

But, certainly in, in academia, I ran into a lot of it. Not, I have to say, I did not, as far as I know, run into very much homophobia in a direct personal level. That is to say, I don't believe anyone ever objected to my being in something because I was a gay man. I don't think I ran into that. I mean, sometimes you wouldn't know, but I don't think so.

But, I did run into a lot, an almost universal ban in my field on work on gay issues. It is often, a number of people have said that given my level as a scholar, my fame as a scholar - I really am a fairly famous scholar - it's astonishing that I'm not like, you know, a top level professor in a major school.

But I have to say, I knew a bunch of scholars who work on male-male issues in the ancient world, and not a single one of them has a good job. I mean, I do know some older senior scholars who did other things first - got jobs and then did something on - those guys have jobs.

But in my generation, my generation academically, people who finished PhDs and things at the same time as me, there were quite a number of really bright people in the field and they were all eliminated, in one way or another. I'm the most cheerful (laughs) because I, you know, I found something else that was fun to do. But others are a great deal bitterer about it.

And I was actually somewhat surprised because there was a young female grad student, she has a husband and a child, who worked on male-male issues in ancient Greek culture. I kind of thought, "Oh," - and she was from one of the absolute top classics departments, which are like Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, those are like the three big, and Berkeley, those would be the four big ones. She was one of them.

And I thought, "Okay, so maybe she will get through this barrier." But no, no, she didn't, despite her manifestly excellent dissertation and everything else that she had, she was literally tossed out of the field.

[00:29:47] Charlie Ocean: What are some common misconceptions people have, and what's a crucial aspect of that historical event that often goes unnoticed? (awkwardly asking what misconceptions people have about LGBTQ+ history and for a specific event, what’s something that goes unnoticed that may be crucial and good for folks to know moving forward)

[00:29:58] Andrew Lear: The thing that interests me about the Stonewall Uprising, as I think we should probably call it, is the mythification of it.

It was a very big event, judged objectively, it was the largest protest by LGBTQ people against their oppression. There were a few before that, which people spend a lot of time talking about right now, but they were all much smaller.

So it was very large, but what was really remarkable about it was how much attention it got. Often you hear that the press didn't pay it any attention - that's not true. The press did report on those events. They did not report on it in a complementary way. Even the Village Voice, which was, you know, the lefty rag of the time, used the phrase, and I put this in quotes, "the forces of faggotry." (laughs)

[00:30:49] Charlie Ocean: Wow.

[00:30:51] Andrew Lear: Yeah, wow. (laughs) The journalist who wrote that, still alive, much regrets the phrase, of course, at this point.

It was reported on, and it was reported on partly because some people decided to make it well-known. And that was in particular, he really is the hero of - one of the he- oh god, you know, there is a book about Frank Kameny now.

[00:31:13] Charlie Ocean: In 2009, I went to an LGBTQ+ leadership camp, Camp Pride. Some of you know that if you've been listening for a while. We stayed primarily in Maryland that year, though we did hop to DC for a day in order to meet Frank, among other wonderful experiences. I got to take a photo with him when we were in an Italian restaurant for one of our meals. I'll be including the photo on the episode page.

Unfortunately, we lost him in 2011. He was an American gay rights activist. I feel very fortunate that in all of the years I've done LGBTQ+ community organizing, I've gotten to meet some fantastic people that I look up to. There have been some folks like Leslie Feinberg that I'll never get the chance to meet. However, I'm so grateful for everyone that I do get to meet and learn from.

So, this is your sign. If you have someone in mind that you've been wanting to meet, go for it. Reach out to them. See them at one of their stops on a tour, if they have one. Send an email. When we take the time to reach out to someone and let them know what they mean to us, or what they have meant to us, I think it's a really beautiful opportunity for both people.

[00:32:35] Andrew Lear: There ought to be a book about Craig Rodwell. I didn't very much like Craig Rodwell, but (laughs) he's a very important person. Craig Rodwell was the founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, which was, among other things, the first gay bookstore. It's hard to point out to people, now, how important that was, or how remarkable that was at its time.

But nobody, before Craig Rodwell, had ever taken Plato's "Symposium," Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," and the poems of Sappho, and put them all in one place, and said, "You know, these things are part of a thing." So it was a really seminal thing, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop.

And nowadays, we don't need gay bookstores anymore, because you can just, you know, do a web search on Amazon and say, "I want a novel about trans 13 year olds, " and - pop - (laughs) you know, your results will come up and you can just buy them from Amazon. But that was of course not true 50 years ago. So Craig was remarkable for that.

[00:33:44] Charlie Ocean: Andrew's right. It is a lot easier to find curated lists online and quickly order from Amazon.

To me, LGBTQ+ owned or specific bookshops are still relevant and important today. When I think of the "don't say gay" laws and library book bans, it becomes more critical. They're more likely to carry lesser known voices and create safer spaces for people to be. Plus, folks like Mercury Stardust, the trans handyman, just did a book tour, only stopping at independent bookstores. They also carry historical significance.

Even to this day, they're a beam of hope and resources in their local communities. I'm including a link to a very powerful story about what happened when a person was in crisis and called an LGBTQ+ bookstore. I hope you'll read it.

I'll also be including some ways that you can find an LGBTQ+ or independent bookstore or bookshop near you.

[00:34:46] Andrew Lear: But he also had a remarkable role in the Stonewall uprising because the Oscar Award Memorial Bookshop was on Christopher street - just about what you might call two blocks from the Stonewall - amusingly, at the corner of Christopher and Gay. (both laugh) Which is a great corner to have a gay bookstore at, right? Although, obviously, Gay Street was not named for anything to do with homosexuality. It's just a, you know, the name - an 18th century name of a street.

But anyway, at the corner of Christopher and Gay, there was this bookshop and Craig called the press, through the Stonewall Uprising, updating people on what was going on. So he had a really important role in getting it to be well known. And he also had an important role in its being turned into a symbol, because he very consciously wanted to do that.

And if you look at, you know, right after the Stonewall Uprising, there were, several gay organizations were founded; there was the GAA, the GLF. These organizations which no longer exist.

[00:35:48] Charlie Ocean: The GAA, Gay Activists Alliance, was founded in New York City on December 21st, 1969, almost six months after the Stonewall Uprising.

[00:35:59] Andrew Lear: The GLF was the Gay Liberation Front. It was meant to be the gay version of the Black Panthers. If you look at the GLF flyers for 1969 and 1970, you see little, like, personal ads from Craig Rodwell, saying "If you can think of a way to commemorate the Stonewall riots, call Craig Rodwell at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop."

And he, among other people, but very largely he, came up with the idea of a march, (laughs) which of course we now know as the Pride March, although at the time it was called the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March.

That really was the event that broke through the sound barrier. That march on the anniversary of the Stonewall, first Stonewall riot in 1970, when, estimates vary, but about 2, 000 people ended up joining the march up 6th Avenue, really, you know, caught the public's attention.

And also, yeah, I mean, it wasn't the beginning of a movement. There already were various different LGBT rights organizations, but it was the moment when that movement caught fire. So it was very important.

But a further aspect of this mythification, this is kind of like, it's an event about which people know very little. There is very little information. It was reported on in the press, but not in great detail. There is only one photograph.

[00:37:33] Charlie Ocean: Some rare stonewall uprising photos on the second day of protests surfaced in 2019. The photos were displayed in an exhibit in New York. I'll be linking to more information so you can check them out.

[00:37:47] Andrew Lear: Of the riots taking place. It's a very vaguely recorded event, which is the foundational stone of a movement. And it's, not only can its meaning change, but people's memories of what happened can change.

[00:38:04] Charlie Ocean: To add to the myth's rabbit hole, of the Stonewall Uprising, some people were, have said to have been there, who weren't. There are different recollections of who threw the first brick, punch, some object. I actually remember when the Stonewall film came out in 2015, lots of folks, myself included, cried out that it whitewashed history and we were discouraging folks from watching it because it erased people like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

Of course. It was another film centering a white, cisgender, gay man, so it was disappointing, if even for that. Though it wasn't meant to be historically accurate as a film, some folks may take it as truth.

Back to Marsha. Marsha didn't arrive at the Stonewall Inn until about 2am, after the uprising already started, which comes from Marsha directly. There's also much debate about which pronouns Marsha used, and if Marsha would have aligned with the term "transgender," as it wasn't a well known term at the time.

Still, Marsha and Sylvia did an incredible amount of activism and organizing, though we can't specifically credit them to the Stonewall Uprising.

So, we know, by other means, Especially when people are like filling out reports and stuff like that. People can remember things differently.

[00:39:32] Andrew Lear: Mmm, of course.

[00:39:33] Charlie Ocean: Like people's memories - we can't always trust them. Sometimes it's all we have to go off of, so -

[00:39:38] Andrew Lear: Yes.

[00:39:38] Charlie Ocean: You know, in this kind of work, how do you vouch for resources or rather, how do you in this work vouch for sources? Like, I mean, I know sometimes I've seen that there's - I don't want to say wishy washy answers - but like they kind of protect their asses, let's say, because they'll say, "Well, we think this based on this information or something."

But like, yeah, what are, like - yeah, how do you even begin to, yeah, validate and vouch for those kinds of sources?

[00:40:11] Andrew Lear: Yeah, very hard. This is so funny because this is what the introduction to "Thucydides" is about. So it's the very first attempt at writing an objective history. He says, you know, "People remember things differently, even people who were there, you know, have different memories."

There was a very interesting article I read once, I wish I could locate it, about, so you remember the incident in which Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table at the UN. There was an article where somebody interviewed people who had been present, and their memories were just all over the place, including many people who did not remember that he banged his shoe on the table.

[00:40:50] Charlie Ocean: Right.

[00:40:51] Andrew Lear: I mean, things vary a lot. And I did not know Marsha P. Johnson particularly well, a friend of a friend. In that case, I would think that somebody who knew Marsha well would be the best person to talk to. And we're not, you know, we're still only 70 years after this event -

[00:41:06] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:41:06] Andrew Lear: 60 years after it. So there are still some people alive who were there, not very many people who were there, but there are a few.

[00:41:13] Charlie Ocean: Right.

[00:41:14] Andrew Lear: Of course, there again, you're dealing with, you know, were they actually there? Certainly a lot of people have claimed to have been there. But there we run into a little bit of the same phenomenon you run into with the French Resistance. Which is that an awful lot of people claim to have been in the French Resistance after the war. But how many of them really were in the French Resistance?

So you have that same problem, I think, with Stonewall. But there are some people who were certainly there, and certainly some people who knew Marsha. I guess they would be the people to ask.

But I don't recall from the 1970s anyone caring a whole lot about what pronouns they used. You know, it wasn't a big issue at that time, and it would seem to me that when people used she/her pronouns, they did so in a campy way.

[00:42:00] Charlie Ocean: Yeah, well, and I think this is where you started to see some of the community fracture, right. Because there's even footage of Sylvia that you can watch today highlighting the fact that especially, like, gay men were not really wanting people like Marsha and Sylvia to be part of the movement for, I think, a bunch of different reasons, but I think that's, like, why in that video, Sylvia was, like, crying out for it, and a lot of people were booing her, if I remember that correctly.

[00:42:32] Andrew Lear: Oh, I've not seen that footage, but that doesn't surprise me at all. Just as people in the feminist movement didn't want lesbians involved.

[00:42:39] Charlie Ocean: Right.

[00:42:40] Andrew Lear: Not because they hated lesbians, but because they thought of them as a burden.

[00:42:45] Charlie Ocean: Yeah. Or, or sometimes it's, "Well, we'll come back for you." And we - (laughs)

[00:42:50] Andrew Lear: Oh yeah.

[00:42:50] Charlie Ocean: I think we've learned a few times now that doesn't work. (laughs)

[00:42:53] Andrew Lear: That doesn't work.

[00:42:54] Charlie Ocean: Doesn't work that way.

[00:42:55] Andrew Lear: But they didn't want to be, you know, they didn't want to be accused of being lesbians themselves. They didn't want people dismissing them as lesbians.

[00:43:02] Charlie Ocean: Right.

[00:43:02] Andrew Lear: And that's what Carla Jay, you know, really fought back against very successfully in the feminist case. But yeah, it's quite recent that - it does seem to me that now, there's a pretty comfortable sense that many different sides of the LGBTQ movement, let's call it that, have at least a political movement in common.

[00:43:22] Charlie Ocean: Mm-hmm.

[00:43:23] Andrew Lear: But I think that's a pretty recent consciousness. You know, people did try to think that way. But I mean, the histories of some of these groups are quite different, among other things. Some of what they have in common is politics, you know, they may not be parts of the same social circles.

And certainly bars in the 1960s and 1970s were pretty divided. Particularly on a gay bars, lesbian bars line.

[00:43:49] Charlie Ocean: We still see a lot of that today.

[00:43:50] Andrew Lear: Of course. Of course you do.

[00:43:52] Charlie Ocean: I do think there's enough in common for all of us that it also just makes sense for us to band together.

[00:43:57] Andrew Lear: Sure.

[00:43:57] Charlie Ocean: But I understand that it's just history repeating itself and people saying like, "Your struggle isn't my struggle," or, "I want to worry about my rights first," or whatever.

It's definitely something I felt, especially being in California during the whole "No on Prop 8" situation.

If you could have a dinner party with a few historical LGBTQ+ figures, (Andrew laughs) who would they be, and what would you discuss?

[00:44:24] Andrew Lear: (laughs) So that's, that's such a big question.

[00:44:27] Charlie Ocean: I knew better than to ask him for one person because of course his answer was going to be Oscar Wilde.

[00:44:35] Andrew Lear: Yeah, yeah, well the party, let me think, who else would I want to have dinner with?

You know, for instance, I would be really interested in meeting Plato or Socrates. (laughs) It would be really interesting to talk to Socrates and figure out how close what he said was to what Plato tells us.

[00:44:53] Charlie Ocean: Hmm.

[00:44:54] Andrew Lear: For instance. It would take a while, but it would be really interesting. There are a lot of people in the ancient world that I would be interested in meeting as well, of course, fairly obvious for me.

It would be kind of fun to have Nero at dinner (laughs) and see whether he was a monster or not. (Charlie laughs)

[00:45:13] Charlie Ocean: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different angles you could take. I mean, especially if you want to instigate something, I'm sure you could, bring in some people that may not share the same values and see what happens there.

[00:45:26] Andrew Lear: Yeah, they're just all within - now, of course, I have a very simple regret, which is that my little Jewish, gay, hero in Nazi Berlin only died in 2010.

[00:45:39] Charlie Ocean: Oh, wow.

[00:45:40] Andrew Lear: Yeah, and so if I could only have heard of him a little earlier. I mean, I was telling an elderly friend in New York about him at one point, and he said, "Oh yeah, I met him."

But unfortunately, none of the gay historians in New York, you know, relatively eminent ones, none of them met him when he was in New York, because none of them had ever heard of him.

[00:46:02] Charlie Ocean: So, for some of the folks that you were first mentioning, that would be at this dinner party, what do you think you'd want them to know about life present day?

[00:46:14] Andrew Lear: Oh, wow. Well, for Godbeck, I mean, he died in 2010, so he would know most of what we need.

I mean, I think that someone like Oscar Wilde would be fascinated by the very different universe of sexual freedom, sexuality freedom, that we live in today. Obviously not perfect, by any means, but nonetheless you don't get sent to two years of hard labor in prison for being gay, so I think he would be really astonished by the world around us.

For the ancient figures, there would be so many things that would astonish them. (laughs) It's probably too much to imagine. But, well you know Wilde was a very open minded and curious character, so I think he would be really fascinated.

[00:47:02] Charlie Ocean: What is a recent moment in time that you think will become a future tour, like the tours that you give?

[00:47:13] Andrew Lear: Oh, wow. I can think of, for instance, places like where the first gay marriage took place that will probably be seen as historic landmarks. That where today, I don't have a feeling that people are all, you know - it's still an ongoing issue, but wasn't it in the Netherlands that gay marriage became legal first?

[00:47:36] Charlie Ocean: No April Fools here, but it has been legal since April 1st of 2001.

When you were mentioning it earlier about like hearing about more places, I know it's just been really interesting for me. I feel like every couple of months I hear about another place that's just legalized it, and I'm just like, "Well, this is amazing." Let's keep this up.

[00:47:55] Andrew Lear: And like Nepal or Uruguay or something, you think, "What? (laughs) They have gay marriage?"

[00:48:00] Charlie Ocean: Yeah.

[00:48:01] Andrew Lear: Pretty amazing. No, I totally agree. I think the first gay marriage in America took place at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts.

[00:48:10] Charlie Ocean: That is correct. Marsha, (not same Marsha as above) who was 56, and Tanya, who was 52 at the time, got married on May 17th, 2004.

[00:48:19] Andrew Lear: Because I think I was there; I think we went over to watch. I think the first, legal, modern marriage took place in the Netherlands. So I think that that will become probably a kind of a place of pilgrimage in a way, rather like the Stonewall over time.

[00:48:34] Charlie Ocean: Good stuff.

[00:48:35] Andrew Lear: Yeah.

[00:48:36] Charlie Ocean: What's one allyship tip you'd like everyone listening to consider?

[00:48:40] Andrew Lear: This is both for people in the LGBTQ community and for the cis, straight, people. You have to remember that everyone you meet has their own story, which you don't know. And that they got to where they are through a complex process, starting in places that you might not be able easily to imagine. And that in order to reach them, you have to respect their whole story.

And that's, I think, very hard for people to do.

Obviously, we think of it more as, like, straight people looking at LGBTQ people, but it's somewhat true also for LGBTQ people. You have to, looking at people on the outside, imagine that they had a whole different life that may be hard for you to put together to get where they are in order to converse with them, in any way.

[00:49:35] Charlie Ocean: Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me and record this episode. I know that I've taken a lot away from this conversation and have no doubt listeners will too. Maybe one day I'll catch you on one of your tours.

If you are one of the kind souls who has left a review of the podcast, thank you so much. Whether you rated it or left a review, I just want to thank you so much for doing that. And if you haven't done it already but you've been meaning to, here's your reminder.

But for now, it is time for the final three self-reflection questions.

4. Do I think it makes sense for LGBTQ+ communities to organize together? Why or why not?

5. What do I think about men in certain cultures being touch starved? Does that seem to hold true?

6. Is there someone I want to meet in my lifetime who is still alive today? Is there a way I could connect with or see them?

Visit AllyshipIsAVerb.com for any resources and a full transcript of the episode.

And remember, sometimes allyship means knowing that everyone you meet has a story which you don't know.