Rita Mae Brown (right) seated next to unidentified woman before the Lavender Menace Action, New York Public Library Digital Collections
June was Pride Month!
This edition of From the Archives to the Air begins with voices from the Denver 2011 Queer Youth Summit, four years prior to the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision. The case guarantees same-sex couples in all 50 states the right to marry.
Queer Youth Summits bring together educators, students, and parents who want to learn more about LGBTQ+ advocacy. One Colorado is finalizing details for the 2024 Summit.
After that, we hear a segment called “Transgender Childhood,” in which Trans youth share stories of difficult adolescence.
Finally, in 1997 KGNU’s Willow Pierson interviewed author and gay-rights leader Rita Mae Brown. Rita Mae Brown is perhaps best known for Rubyfruit Jungle, first published in 1973. “This novel is pegged as a lesbian novel, therefore classified in the ghettos of literature,” Brown wrote in 2015, in an Introduction to a new edition of the book. “There are no lower orders. There are no lesbians or transgender people or fill in the blank. There are only people, a wild mix of energy, different abilities, colors ranging from ebony to bleached white. We’re everything and everybody … the most revolutionary thing you can do is be yourself.”
Listen:
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Pride Month: Be Yourself! A look back to archival interviews recorded before Marriage Equality passed in US John Kelin
CREDITS
Circus by Portron Portron Lopez is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Daytime Delights by Amil Byleckie is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Pride flag: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0), Creative Commons
Rita Mae Brown: Rita Mae Brown (right) seated next to unidentified woman before the Lavender Menace Action, New York Public Library Digital Collections
From The Archive to the Air is produced by John Kelin and Alexis Kenyon from KGNU Archival Audio, and co-hosted by Benita Lee.
