54 | Our (Queer) History

Meet the Guest:

Sarah Prager is a speaker, writer, and advocate for queer history education, particularly for youth. She has two books, Queer, There and Everywhere: 23 People who Changed the World and Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ People Who Made History, and her writing on LGBTQ+ issues has also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, NBC News, HuffPost, and many other outlets. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife, two children, and three cats.

Learn more about queer history


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Episode Transcript

Emily McGranachan:
Welcome to Outspoken Voices Podcast from Family Equality. A podcast that is by and for LGBTQ+ families. I’m Emily McGranahan, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations with Family Equality. I’m also the daughter of lesbian moms. And, as of this year, I’m also a parent. I’ve been the host of Outspoken Voices since 2018. We had a little hiatus so far for much of 2020, but we’re back—and there are some very exciting updates to the show! First of which is that I’ve got a co-host! Hey, Dakota!

Dakota Fine:
Hi, Emily! I guess that’s me. I’m Dakota Fine. I am the resident Family Equality Video Producer and Storyteller, and I too have lesbian moms. I too am a parent. I currently have two littles at home. I have a three-year-old and a 10 week old. It’s a lot, but I’m thrilled to be helping out with the Outspoken Voices Podcast.

Emily McGranachan:
Cheers! Confetti! Super excited to have you here and also congrats on being a parent of two with your very, very little one. That is a whole other journey.

Dakota Fine:
It sure is.

Emily McGranachan:
Now that we’re back, we are still—full disclosure—figuring out exactly what our schedule is going to be looking like and when we’ll be releasing new episodes. But listeners, you can expect at least one new episode each month. So we will be making that. And we’re kicking off being back with a celebration of LGBTQ+ history. In this first episode, I had the chance to talk with Sarah Prager, who is a speaker, author, and advocate for queer history. In particular, Sarah really focuses on youth. She actually has two books: Queer, There and Everywhere: 23 people Who Changed the World and Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ people who made history. Her writing on LGBTQ issues can be found in many places around the internet. Sarah’s longer bio will be in the show notes. Like, do you want amazing things? [If so,] Definitely check it out. And I talked with Sarah. I learned a whole lot.

Dakota Fine:
Yeah, for sure. Me too. I just feel like as personally, as a kid who grew up in an LGBTQ family, this was something I thought about a lot as a kid. Just wondering who else was like me, whether there were other notable historical figures, people who had really impacted the world who had come from a family like mine, and guess what? It turns out there are tons of us. Sarah is really an incredible resource and it’s such, it is such a treat to be able to learn from her.

Emily McGranachan:
Sarah and I ended up talking about some folks that I knew and some folks, I didn’t know, but just learned a whole lot about Dell Martin, Audre Lord, Billy Tipton, Bessie Smith.

We talked also about Ma Rainey and then Miss Major Griffin Gracie. And it just was an awesome conversation. So I’m excited to play that now. So folks can join us in this learning and the celebration of LGBTQ+ family history.

Dakota Fine:
Let’s get into it.

Emily McGranachan:
Awesome. And then stick around because, at the end of the conversation, we’re going to have a few, like things that you can discuss around the dinner table, kind of how to keep this really awesome conversation going for all of our families at home.

Emily McGranachan:
So welcome, Sarah! Sarah, some questions that I like to ask at the start of every episode is who is in your family and how was your family formed?

Sarah Prager:
Oh, I love that question. And thanks for having me, Emily. I live with my wife, our two kids, and our three cats. We used a known sperm donor who lives about half an hour from us and is a really special part of our family. He and his wife and their two kids of about the same ages as our two kids—we’re all kind of best friends, and we’re actually in a pod with them for, you know, this weird year. So they’re the only family that we see, and we’re raising our kids as cousins. And we are aunties to their kids and their aunt and uncle to our kids. Although, it is no secret from any of the kids that Uncle Matt is the person who gave sperm to make our two kids. And ours are four and one. There’s are also four and one. And I carried our first and my wife carried our second. Yeah. I love our family and how it worked out better than we could have imagined. We’ve both done the second parent adoption for the kids that the other birthed. Our donor surrendered his parental rights as part of that process. So we’re just so grateful to have them in, in our family and have our kids who are doing great and very funny. And even though they are four and one, they are about the same size and weight because the four-year-old is so little and the one-year-old is so big.

Emily McGranachan:
Oh, that’s such a beautiful family. That’s lovely. And that’s great that everyone is able to be together and be like telling your family stories together and creating the history and then understanding of how families work. You have a totally new experience now being quarantining at home with the kiddos and figuring all of that out. But you also have a new book at the same time. Yeah, I would love to know. Could you tell us a little bit about your books and how you came to write about LGBTQ historical figures and contemporary figures?

Sarah Prager:
It’s funny. Our pregnancies timed up with the time I was writing each of my two books and the two processes are not dissimilar. Um, birthing a book is a labor of love and I wrote my first book Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World while I was pregnant with our first. And I wrote my second book, Rainbow Revolutionaries: 50 LGBTQ+ People Who Made History when my wife was pregnant with our second. I came to write about LGBTQ+ history, of course, because as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it’s very personal to me. I came out as lesbian when I was 14, and I started teaching myself about my community’s history in high school. The first book, Queer, There, and Everywhere is a book for teens. It’s the book I wish I had. Uh, it tells the stories of these 23 individuals from the 200s through the 2000s in a kind of teen voice and talks about their crushes and their dating and things that you don’t always hear about historical figures, especially some of the more famous ones in that book like Abraham Lincoln. You know, it barely talks about his presidency.

It’s more about his relationship with Joshua Fry Speed before the White House. These stories, I think they’re so important when I was learning them as a teen. It just, it gave me a sense that I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t the first one to ever feel this way. And that I had this huge extended family of ancestors out there, the role models and knowing that I could achieve incredible things because they achieved incredible things. All of it gave me so much…A sense of community. I’m really excited about the new book that came out this year, Rainbow Revolutionaries, cause it’s for a younger age, about eight to 12, it’s a middle grade book and it’s much more heavily illustrated with beautiful, full page color portraits of each person done by Sarah Papworth and even shorter biographies, just one page long. So that they’re very digestible. You can read like one before bed at night, um, a new person a day. I thought it would be great for youth to be able to go into their adolescence when they’re figuring out their own identities, they wouldn’t need to be unlearning what so many of us unlearn—That everyone in history has been straight and cisgender. They could grow up knowing that already.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah, totally. I remember like being in school and I grew up in Massachusetts, we never talked about anybody being LGBTQ, even people who were for whom it would be extremely relevant to their writing or their presence historically. Anything like that you’d think that like all of a sudden it was like 1969 Stonewall happened. And like suddenly there were gay people and you’re like, wait a minute.

Sarah Prager:
I know, I know. And that’s part of why it’s so important because for both LGBT and non-LGBT youth and adults, to know that this is our identities are not a new fad. No one’s coming out to be trendy. This whole new “pronouns and more than two genders thing” is not some new-fangled gen Z invention. Multiple genders and ways of loving and existing have existed for all of human history. It’s not a kind of argument you can use against equality that it’s just some brand new thing.

Emily McGranachan:
When you were doing your research, what were you finding about LGBTQ families in particular, these, these historical figures that have LGBTQ parents or were themselves LGBTQ plus parents and like caregivers?

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. I’ve come across, uh, many LGBTQ people who were parents, but it certainly wasn’t something that was as possible as it is today. Um, you know, same-sex adoption, sperm donation, those kinds of things have been illegal for most of human history. There, there have been many creative ways for people to make families throughout history. Many of those stories we don’t know about, but I am excited to share the few that we do know about with you.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. So, you know, October is LGBTQ history month is there’s part of the reason we’re so excited to talk with you today. And you know, as I said, I grew up really not knowing of LGB, any other LGBTQ family like mine. Like there was no one in the media historically, we didn’t talk about it. Didn’t learn about it in school. So I would love to get a little history lesson on who are these LGBTQ parents?

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. So I think it would make sense to start with Dell Martin because many people know about Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who were lesbian rights pioneers. They were together for over 50 years. Dell had a daughter from a four-year marriage to a man in the 1940s. After her divorce and becoming partnered with Phyllis, she at first had given up custody of her daughter because of her own internalized homophobia. She thought that it was better for her husband, her ex-husband, to raise their child because he could provide a “traditional family environment”. And she herself at the time in the forties thought that that was better for her child. Over the decades that changed, and her daughter was at the wedding of Del and Phyllis that Gavin Newsom famously performed in San Francisco. Dell and Phyllis were legally married in 2008, two months before Dell passed away.

Sarah Prager:
They’re the co-founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, the first US lesbian organization. They co-created The Ladder in 1956, the first US lesbian publication. And they co-authored Lesbian Women, a groundbreaking lesbian book in 1972. And Dell was also very involved in the rights of lesbian mothers, who, like her situation, had children from previous relationships with men and would have custody taken away because of their sexual orientation. And so she co-founded the Lesbian Mothers Union in 1971 and helped other lesbian mothers to get custody of their children after their identities were used against them.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. And that’s really pretty telling that by the 1970s—so, you know, a number of years after going through her own process that led her to no longer have custody of her daughter—to then be founding an organization that is doing really, you know, thinking about like…clearly things changed, you know, for her internally and socially…

Sarah Prager:
Definitely. Dell helped Phyllis come out herself. So Dell, you know, from the forties to the fifties had a relatively fast transformation from denial of herself—self-hatred even—and then being a lead national activist for lesbian rights by the 1950s. When Del and Phyllis met at a party, Dell said that she was a lesbian, and Phyllis had never heard this word. Dell explained it to her. And the rest is history kind of. When Phyllis first saw Dell at their shared workplace, as journalists, Dell walked in with a briefcase, and Phyllis was just shocked because women did not carry briefcases. She was like, “Who is this?” Um, you know, and then she learned more at that party. And yeah, they lived together in the Castro for over 50 years. They moved in together on Valentine’s Day.

Emily McGranachan:
Stop!

Sarah Prager:
I know. I know. And you know, if anyone, when they reopen (I assume they’re probably closed now for public safety) but the GLBT historical society in San Francisco, they have a museum there. When I visited, they had the part of their collection on display that included the pantsuits that the two women wore for their wedding.

Emily McGranachan:
Oh, I love that. And, I love what feels like so modern and also so timeless of like an over 50-year love story that, you know, that in the life together that they built, you know, that that fashion, that the clothing, is now part of history too. I love that. So who else did, who else have you been learning about now that we’re starting on this like really warm, lovely note to get started? I want to know who’s next.

Sarah Prager:
Another lesbian mother was Audre Lorde, the famous feminist lesbian Black writer, and poet, and scholar. She self describes herself in order as Black lesbian mother warrior poet. Audre married a gay man named Edwin in 1962. And they had two children during that time. And they were married until 1970, and then Audre met her long-time partner Francis in ’72. And Audre’s two children lived with her and Francis on Staten Island. So that’s another lesbian mother from history. And another way that before adoption or anything else, LGBT people were able to have kids. You know, these two people decided that they wanted to become parents and they helped each other to do that. Audre identified as lesbian and Edwin identified as gay during their marriage.

Emily McGranachan:
Oh, that is the beauty of LGBTQ families. You know, you build and find family. And you, you know, determine what’s important to you in finding, uh, you know, partners to, you know, go through that process with you. It is like such a true gift. A true lesson from LGBTQ history.

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. And I think, I mean, gay men have helped lesbian women have children as sperm donors before sperm banks were allowing lesbians to access sperm and stuff like that. So helping each other out as family like that, trusting each other in that way. And lesbians have been surrogates for gay men too. That’s one historical example of the kind of community helping each other out.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s also such a powerful reminder of how things have changed then since the sixties and seventies, you know. Sometimes it feels like, “How much?” And then you’re reminded that, you know, that presumably the expectations, the safety, the acceptance, and the value that a legal marriage put on family formation and the safety protections and the rights then that came from that, like that, that is something that I’m sure plays into many decisions for people to form their families and their partnerships in that legal way as a safety barrier, you know, as a protection too.

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. Another—you know, these are all 20th century stories—so Billy Tipton (1914 to 1989) is not as familiar of a name as this first two, too many folks.

Emily McGranachan:
Me included, so I’m excited.

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. He was a jazz musician. That’s kind of why he’s remembered. And he was never legally married, but he was trans—assigned female at birth—and had several long-term female partners over the time of his life. And with one of them, a 20 year partner, was Kitty Kelly. And the two of them adopted three children together. Now, according to Kitty and Billy and Kitty’s sons, Billy lived as stealth even to his own family. And the sons did not know that their dad was trans until after his death.

Emily McGranachan:
Wow.

Sarah Prager:
The sons remember him as a loving father who took them camping and to the movies. While Billy Tipton’s jazz career was more modest, he made more headlines posthumously after the surprise over his sex assigned at birth made headlines kind of sensationalist. But that was a family who, because of being able to pass as a heterosexual couple was legally able to adopt. If Billy’s identity had been known, that probably would have been a reason for any adoption agency to deny the couple. They were partnered from 1961 to 1981. The children were adopted during that time.

Emily McGranachan:
Wow. Yeah. Another powerful reminder of why the rights of LGBTQ people to foster and adopt and care for, you know, and, parent is so important because somebody who was, you know, by his, as you mentioned, according to their children, a loving parent, you know, for that person to have to hide their identity so that they could become a, you know, a parent…

Sarah Prager:
Right. However, it is very encouraging, no matter where you’re looking in the world, if you compare where we are now to a hundred years ago, it’s invariably improved. While there’s always a long way to go, you do get to at least see the trend, even when they’re steps forward and then steps backwards. We’ve been moving in the right direction for years, regardless of setbacks. I’m, I’m hopeful that like the global trend will continue.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s gotta be wild to like, read about someone from the 200s and be like, wow, this feels so relevant today.

Sarah Prager:
Yes. Yeah.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. So who’s next?

Sarah Prager:
Another parent from history is, oh, Bessie Smith! So Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey are both kind of remembered as the heroes of the blues. Ma Rainey was Mother of the Blues and Bessie Smith was the Empress of the Blues. And these were both—.

Emily McGranachan:
Great titles!

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. I know they were both Black women who revolutionized the music industry and Bessie was a parent and she was one of the highest-paid Black performers in the US. She and Ma were friends at the least. She was married to a man – Bessie was – and they adopted a six-year-old boy while they were married. They separated after six years of marriage. This story is sadder. There were a lot of custody fights over this adopted boy. Bessie had adopted him from the niece of one of her chorus girls from her show.

Sarah Prager:
Bessie had always doted on this boy as a baby and known him forever and told his birth mother that if she ever couldn’t care for him, that she’d adopt him. And the birth mother eventually took Bessie up on this, but the adoption was never made legal. And so Bessie’s sister ended up doing most of the childcare while Bessie was on the road—just as much as before she became a parent. In the end, the boy was kind of bounced from home to home: his biological father’s, biological mother’s, both of his separated adoptive parents’ home, his adopted aunt’s home. And Bessie and her ex-husband would even kidnap him to kind of take him back. And the legalities around these custody agreements, adoptions, didn’t protect any one person. And in the end, the child is who suffered for that. So while, you know, we were talking about the importance of like the access to legal adoptions and things like that. And even though this person did have access to a different-sex marriage, the consequences of not having a legal adoption ended up playing out in this sadder story.

Emily McGranachan:
What do we know then about, about Bessie’s bisexuality? Was that something that was known at the time during her life, or kind of came out later? Like how was that—in her parenting or in her fame or—.

Sarah Prager:
Bessie was relatively, totally open about her sexuality. It’s something that her husband knew about. They were not polyamorous. They both cheated on each other. He was on the road so much. And so she had relationships with people of different genders before, during, and after her marriage. And those were not necessarily secret relationships. She was not forced into a closet by her fame. In contrast, she really could kind of do whatever she wanted because of her wealth and fame.

Sarah Prager:
Ma Rainey was…she has nothing to do with this story, but they were important parts of each other’s lives and so similar. Because Ma also was open about her bisexuality before, during, and after her marriage to a man. Bessie once bailed her out of jail for an arrest for being at an all-female party where everyone was naked. When the police showed up, they couldn’t prove that anything illegal, like same-sex sex, had happened. So Ma was released, but she released a song after Bessie had bailed her out. The Prove It On Me Blues, taunting the legal system that, you know, no one could prove anything. So she’s going to keep talking to girls and the lyrics are just like really clear about, you know, she says, “Going to talk to the girls like any man. I’m going to wear a suit and tie.” And the cover art for the single is Ma in a, in a suit with two flapper women chatting her up. Ma was a mentor to Bessie in the industry. I feel like I can’t bring up Bessie without talking about Ma.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. Well, now I know what I want to be listening to after I finished the episode.

Sarah Prager:
Yeah! You can listen to Ma Rainey’s songs, including The Prove It on Me Blues. You know, they were singing about domestic violence and discrimination and racial inequities and sexuality as women, especially as Black people and as Black women. So they really broke a lot of barriers through getting record deals and signing with major labels and things like that. They changed the face of music.

Emily McGranachan:
Yeah. Well, I really am glad that a little bit about the Bessie Smith story was also included in here because it’s the truth about LGBTQ people. You know, we talk about the joy and the celebration and the love—all of which is still in Bessie’s story. And it’s complicated, you know, and families are complicated and parenting is complicated and you know, there’s no one ideal perfect way to be a family. You know, our families also include traumas and difficulties and sadness too.

Sarah Prager:
Not every family story is simple.

Emily McGranachan:
Yep. Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. Um, so who is the last person we’re going to be talking about?

Sarah Prager:
So Miss Major who is alive today. Miss Major Griffin Gracie. She is best known for having been at Stonewall and a trans rights activist through today. She’s been working for trans rights since the sixties, and she became a parent in ’78 for the first time when her first child was born to her girlfriend. At the time Miss Major retained custody after that breakup. Then she became a parent three more times over adopting three sons that were runaways that she met at a park. She invited them over. She wanted to give them meals, and she eventually just took them in. And officially they became part of the family. She has been a mother figure to dozens of youth over the decades. Yeah. Even adopted three additional sons after her biological son and now is about to be a parent for the fifth time. And she and Beck Witt announced their pregnancy last month.

And, and, you know, I mentioned like being a mother figure for other people, we can’t talk about LGBT families without talking about chosen family. We have parental figures who are not our families of origin. We have sibling equivalents who are not from our family of origin, and we’ve always made our own families and continue to do that. Whether it’s the nuclear family sense that I have with my wife and kids or the extended family with, or without biological connection, you know, both with our donor family, but the siblinghood that we have with so many other LGBT people.

Emily McGranachan:
I like wrapping up here because that’s a particularly happy note to kind of hear about these historical figures and contemporary really—I mean, really pretty contemporary figures—but then someone who is, you know, still today being an LGBTQ parent is still very much in Miss Major’s story. And so, that’s so exciting. And I know there’s some great documentaries and books and resources, and we’ll link a lot of information about these various figures, including Miss Major in particular, you know, whose work is still in leadership and advocacy that is still ongoing today. Um, you know, one thing as you were doing all this research and compiling all this information about 23 and then 50 people, was there really somebody or someones that you feel particularly connected to or inspired by?

Sarah Prager:
I mean, out of the 60-ish people, cause there’s some overlap between the two books, those 60-ish were chosen out of a couple hundred. And if they made it into the book, they are my favorite. I connected with them and felt inspired by them and felt that they could inspire others. It’s really hard to narrow it down. I did definitely feel a connection with Eleanor Roosevelt who’s in Queer, There, and Everywhere, but not Rainbow Revolutionaries. Researching, I think part of what helped me feel inspired by her was that we have many of the letters between her and Lorena Hickok and being able to read those letters, the reprinting of them, you just felt transported in time to really get to know both of these women and their relationship. And clarity. Some people talk about, you know, “maybe they were just friends” or “we don’t really know”. That kind of thing. And, you know, reading the letters, it was so undeniable.

I love that Lorena—she went by Hick—Lorena Hickok, nicknamed Hick, you know, Hick gave Eleanor—who, you know, Eleanor is another LGBT parent who had children with FDR. Those children actually gave us some background information as adults about Eleanor’s relationship with Hick and helped to preserve those letters. But Hick had these great suggestions and nudges for Eleanor, just kind of the woman behind the woman. She encouraged Eleanor to hold her own press conferences where only female journalists were allowed because only male journalists were allowed at official White House briefings and just kind of great feminist ideas that Eleanor happily carried out in her work on human rights. It’s a decades-long love story between Eleanor and Hick. It just, it touched me. And we mentioned I was pregnant while writing Queer, There, and Everywhere. And we ended up naming our first daughter, Eleanor.

Emily McGranachan:
Aw, that’s beautiful. Well, thank you. This is like…I feel like I’ve learned a lot. There’s so much now that I can’t wait to like research and use it to listen. To listen to Bessie Smith and Billy Tipton and I’m really like…I am so ready. Um, so how can people find your books and how can they find you online?

Sarah Prager:
Both books—Queer, There and Everywhere and Rainbow Revolutionaries—are sold online. Pretty much anywhere books are sold. Of course, I prefer if you order through your independent local bookstore, you can either order directly through a specific indie bookstore or just generally support indie bookstores by going to bookshop.org. The books are also sold through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc. I am also at sarahprager.com. You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and you’ll see the little icons for those on sarahprager.com. If you follow me there, you’ll be able to see that, you know, outside of my books, I also write a lot of articles on different stories from LGBT history, the importance of LGBT history, for places like JStore Daily and Extra and Them. And other writings on kind of culture and news. I also may or may not have a new book coming out in 2022. That is not yet officially announced. So…

Emily McGranachan:
That’s exciting! Is this going to be a separate conversation with your wife of whether or not that then means also another baby?

Sarah Prager:
Well, it’s already written, so. Um, our chance to get pregnant again has passed. It has to be, there will have to be a fourth book if we’re going to have a third, but no, we’re…it’s now a one-to-one. We have our hands full with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, and I—we’re—we’re good.

Emily McGranachan:
So thank you so much.

Sarah Prager:
Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for everything that Family Equality does for all of our families.

Emily McGranachan:
I’m so grateful to Sarah for that awesome conversation. I was truly like Googling and listening to Ma Rainey songs afterwards and learning more about Billy Tipton. It was just great. So I know I’m probably not the only one who wants to keep learning and keep talking about this. Here are just like two things that folks can be doing at home to talk with their family or with friends.

Two of the things were: Who are some other LGBTQ+ heroes and historical figures that we can name. I know I’m challenging myself and I would love for others to join me to make a plan, to learn more about someone or something in particular, and to do that together. So as a family or with your friends, pick a documentary to watch, find a book to read or visit a museum virtually. There’s a lot of resources out there and a lot of information and let’s keep learning together.

So thanks everyone for listening. Connect with Family Equality at www.familyequality.org, and find us on social media:@FamilyEquality on Facebook and Instagram and @family_equality on Twitter. Special thanks to California Cryobank, a generate life sciences company, for supporting Family Equality and this episode. For over 40 years, California Cryobank sperm donors have helped clients realize their dreams of becoming parents. A sperm donor helped my mom have me. So it’s no exaggeration to say that affirming and welcoming assisted reproductive technology providers like California Cryobank just really warm my heart. Check them out and learn more at cryobank.com. And don’t forget every California Cryobank client gets free newborn STEM cell preservation from their sister company, CBR! Preserving your baby’s newborn STEM cells offers a genetically unique resource for your family. For more information on this and all of the ways that choosing California Cryobank benefits the growth and health of your family visit cryobank.com today.

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A special thanks to our sponsor, California Cryobank by Generate Life Sciences for supporting Family Equality and this episode. For more than 40 years, California Cryobank sperm donors have helped clients realize their dreams of becoming parents. Learn more by clicking here.