The New Yorker Radio Hour - From Stonewall to the Present, Fifty Years of L.G.B.T.Q. Rights

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Masha Gessen co-hosts this episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, guiding David Remnick through the fifty years of civil-rights gains for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From drag queens reading to children at the library to a popular gay Presidential candidate, we’ll look at how the movement for L.G.B.T.Q. rights has changed our culture and our laws. The actress and comedian Lea DeLaria takes us through five decades of queer history in five minutes. Gessen talks with a Stonewall historian named Martin Duberman about whether the movement has become too conservative, and, later, she visits with a gay asylum seeker who recently fled Russia’s state security agency. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this program misidentified the location of the 2016 Pulse night-club shooting. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. All righty, so how many of you know what a drag queen is? Oh, good, I see some hands. Any guesses for those of you who don't? What is a drag queen? It's when people dress up. Exactly. What is your name?

Rufus. Rufus. Everybody say, hi, Rufus. Hi, Rufus. So Rufus is exactly right. It's like dress-up. Who likes to play dress-up here? It's lunchtime on a Saturday, and we're at the Brooklyn Public Library.

There's maybe 60 kids here with their parents, and they're here for an event that's called the Drag Queen Story Hour, which is exactly what it sounds like. My name is Chalula Lemon. I'm in New York City, Drag Queen. I'm wearing a blush, rose-colored lace dress with a tie. And I have my signature stacks of Bengh. and my big earrings and my big hair.

So we're going to do one more book. This one's a really good book. It's called It's Okay to Be Different. It's okay to be missing a tooth, right? Or two or three. How many of you are missing teeth? Would you believe that all of these are fake? It's okay to have a different note.

You know, a lot of our naysayers think that we're indoctrinating kids with LGBTQ views, but that's not it at all. We're just celebrating life and celebrating that nowhere does it state that you can't play with all the colors in the crayon box. The mouth on the drag queen goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The mouth on the drag queen goes, blah, blah, blah. What a distance we've come 50 years ago this month, a man was arrested for dressing and drag during a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.

He and some other gay and lesbian customers resisted arrests, which led to a scuffle, which grew into a riot, which led to demonstrations that lasted for days. The event that we now just call Stonewall marked the beginning of the movement for LGBTQ rights. Today on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we're talking about Stonewall and the 50 years since, about the huge advances in rights for LGBTQ people

and also the backlash around the world. But I'm not going to do this on my own, not by any means. The great journalist and activist, Masha Gessen, friend and colleague, is here with me. Masha, how you doing? I do. Now, how are you feeling about this anniversary moment? I don't always love anniversary journalism,

but this 50th anniversary seems particularly meaningful and charged. I have mixed feelings about this anniversary moment. And it's a great celebration. The change that people are celebrating is truly extraordinary. The backlash is also extraordinary. And I probably wouldn't be me if I didn't feel ambivalent. In some way. But, you know, there's been a lot of discussion among LGBT scholars and writers and activists about the direction of the movement,

especially in the last few years sort of as things seem to have come such a long way, but also have gone in a different direction than a lot of people. people expected. So I wanted to talk to my favorite, ambivalent historian of the gay and lesbian movement, Martin Duberman, who is somebody who has been around for all of it. He is in his late 80s now. And Martin, as it turned out during our conversation, used to go to the Stonewall Inn. Because it was the only bar where gay men could dance. If you can believe that, run by the mafia, everyone who was a patron there knew that if the lights went on surrounding the small dance area, you instantly stopped what you were doing. Because the 6th Precinct would come storming through, throwing people against the wall, asking for ID.

There was under law in New York State, I believe, you had to be wearing three pieces of clothing appropriate to your gender. Can you imagine trying to define that today? And all of this is happening in the context of great social foment, right? Oh, absolutely. Black is beautiful. More or less began the across-the-board rebellions that we saw throughout the decade. The feminist movement, Martin Luther King was assassinated. I mean, it was a time of enormous confrontation with authority.

Right. That really was a time of social change happening on so many levels. It was. And I think we have to think of the gay and lesbian movement, certainly in that context, which I think is sometimes we forget. And also remember within living memory, within your lifetime and mine, it was basically illegal to be gay. Martin told me about how the police used to entrap gay man on Fire Island, a popular gay holiday spot near here. In the old days when we went out there, and this goes back to the late 50s, early 60s, we used to be very careful because the cruising areas were the boardwalks. And what the police would do across the way in Seville, Long Island, was they would send over the young, hot plain clothesmen. and they would do the approaching on the boardwalk to a gay guy who was out cruising. And given how gorgeous the plane clothesman was, the gay guy would respond.

And the next thing he knew, he'd be handcuffed, and he'd be taken down to the dock. And they would literally handcuff people to the flagpole, go back on the boardwalk, do the same routine five or six more time. go back over to Save Hill and they would have a kangaroo court. Not only were you arrested, but your name was printed in your local newspaper. And very often in those years you lost your apartment almost automatically. You lost your job. The very most basic civil rights were not available. Stonewall was the beginning of what we think of as the Gain-Lisband movement.

Mythologized beginning, obviously not actually an accurate beginning. But that movement is still going on. Some of those rights we still don't have. And what were the initial aims of the movement? Decriminalizing gay sex, stopping the harassment by police, also getting homosexuality off the list of psychiatric disorders, and in discrimination against queer people in housing, employment, etc. Now, broadly speaking, how much of that progress has come from elected officials

finally doing the right thing, and how much of it came through fights in the court? That's a great question. So the marriage fight, which is something that actually began in this millennium, has largely proceeded through the courts. Discrimination protections are mostly legislative. And we've actually made a lot less progress on anti-discrimination protections than on marriage. For example. For example, in half the states in this country, it is still legal to fire somebody for being gay.

It is legal to deny people of public accommodations. So you get cases like the famous Colorado wedding cake case where you can get married in Colorado, but you can also be denied a wedding cake. Now, let's talk about the impact of the AIDS crisis. I remember when ACT UP closed the FDA for a day, demanding earlier access to drugs. How much did the AIDS crisis actually affect the movement?

I would say the AIDS crisis transformed the movement and the community. it's very hard to describe to people who are either not queer or younger than I am what it's like to have lived through a period when everyone I knew died, all the men I knew died. But it also transformed the movement by making LGBT people perversely much more visible. It also brought gay and lesbian movements together. I also think it had a profound impact on the people.

the health care system in this country. I mean, it's a huge social phenomenon, both the AIDS crisis and the AIDS activist movement, that I think we still haven't quite processed. Masha, my sense that while gay marriage, certainly in the queer community, had vast support. It was not a matter of unanimity.

There was some second thoughts, even to the very end, about whether marriage should be, at least as prominent, a goal as it was and is. You know, many of us, joined a sexual liberation movement. We actually envision changing the way that the society thinks about family and kinship and love. The marriage fight is in a way the opposite of that.

It is conservative in some sense. It is deeply conservative in a sense. It is sort of by the entire marriage paradigm and then asking to be included in it. And that's one of the reasons I actually wanted to talk to Martin Duberman because of his book, has the gay movement failed, in which he's pretty critical of what he sees as the movements drift toward the political center. The whole thrust of the gay movement in the last 20 years at least has been not only gay marriage, but allowing gays to serve openly in the military, being allowed to kill and being allowed

to settle down into, you know, a monogamous suburban life, which really doesn't suit. our needs or our values or our heritage. I mean, this is not who we are, or at least who we have been. No, we don't want that. If we're going to form, you know, relationships of long duration, let's tailor them to what we've learned over many years of being outsiders. We've learned a lot about monogamy, gender fluidity. So Martin Doberman wants things to be a lot more radical. What does radical mean in this sense? Radical means, actually,

I would say, more intersectional, more concerned with other questions of equality. So economic justice, racism, ableism, sexism. Is it succeeding? Or is that kind of, or is he a fringe voice in the overall community? He's not a fringe voice, but there is a kind of vice situation

and this has been the case throughout the gay and lesbian movement, which is that the left has not particularly welcomed the queers. How does that show itself? Because in Black Lives Matter, you did see a lot of intersectional rhetoric, at least, from the leadership of Black Lives Matter. Absolutely. But that's a fairly recent development, and it has a lot to do with the Black Lives Matter movement

being founded basically by a bunch of queer people, queer people of color. that's the sort of thing that Doberman is talking about and I think dreams of. So we're also at a time where we're seeing a mounting legal challenge to some of the movement's gains. There's a case before the Supreme Court where the court will decide if laws against gender discrimination include or not sexual orientation or gender identity. Well, we've seen a lot, actually. We've seen the Trump administration lift most of the protections that could be lifted by executive. action. And this has especially affected transgender people.

In the military, for example. The transgender ban in the military affects the greatest number of people. The military is the largest employer of transgender people in this country. The case that is in the Supreme Court now, a lot of LGBT lawyers are sort of waiting with dread to see what happens because there's very little reason to think it could work out well. There are several employment discrimination cases that are sewn up together in this one case that's coming before the court. The well-founded fear is that it will essentially legalize or sanctify anti-gay discrimination for the foreseeable future. Right now you have Pete Buttigieg running for the presidency and certainly makes no secret of his personal life, his sexual life.

Does that have any effect on anything? There was a great article now I'm trying to remember where about Pete Buttigieg being the heterosexual candidate without the wife. I mean, there's a kind of perfect American narrative. You know, the veteran, the happily married, the religious. For queers like me, it's a little cringe-worthy. I think that for a lot of people it's deeply meaningful, and I don't want to discount it. I think for a lot of young people in this country to see somebody like Buttigieg, unapologetic, articulate, beautiful, with his wonderful husband being taken seriously, being so visible, it has to be hugely meaningful for a lot of people.

I'm here with staff writer Masha Gessen and I'm David Remnick. We're talking about 50 years of gay rights since the Stonewall uprising, right up to the present. Now, that's a lot of history. So here's what we could call the Cliff Notes version, 50 years and five minutes from actor and comedian Leah Dillaria. Why, yes, it's me, Leah Dillaria. Cue the disco music. Not because disco music is gay music,

but because it's awesome. And it's a little gay. 1970. The first gay pride parade is held in New York and the first gay rights march is held in the UK. Did you know? Being a lesbian in the UK was never illegal. That is because Queen Victoria very famously said,

There are no lesbians in the UK. Right. Me fix thou doth protest too much, Your Highness. 1971, homosexuality is decriminalized in Austria, Costa Rica, and Finland. 1972, decriminalization in Norway and decriminalization in Hawaii. Look, I can't keep saying decriminalization. So every time a bell rings, a bunch of people get more rights. Let's try it out.

Malta! It works! 1974, Angela Morley becomes the first trans person nominated for an Academy Award. Also, Robert Grant founds American Christian cause to oppose the gay agenda. Did we ever get around to voting on the gay agenda, kids? We're going to have one bad hair day off a year and a 12-minute dance version of the Star-Spangled Banner. Nd-D-D-D-D. 1977, more dings, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro.

I'm so glad I know how to pronounce Montenegro. I didn't see it coming. Harvey Milk is elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. In Sweden, where homosexuality is classified as a disease, a whole bunch of people calling gay to work. Again? What? Oh, yeah.

Somewhere. In here is the founding of the moral majority. And that means we don't have to promote homosexuality as an acceptable alternate lifestyle. It is not that. It's moral perversion. All right. Bring the music back. 1981, the European Court of Human Rights tells Northern Ireland to decriminalize. And Columbia. And oh, man, cut the music.

On June 5th, doctors record the first documented cases of HIV AIDS. In the U.S., 234 people die from AIDS-related illnesses in 1981. Globally, HIV-AIDS has killed 35 million people. All right, let's bring the music back. All right. Now I get it. That's a big one. Okay.

We need some wins here. Let's see. Okay, look, the 80s weren't great, but there were wins, people, in Israel. Lichtenstein. Denmark starts legally recognizing. gay relationships on our way to gay marriage. Okay, here we go. Bring it back.

Bring it back. Bill Clinton gets elected president. Remember, Democratic president, Bill Clinton? The one who signed Don't Ask, Don't Tell into law. The one who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? No, we're not cutting the music from Bill Clinton. We're celebrating Romania instead. And the arrival of anti-retroviral drugs.

And Melissa Ether's coming out and Ellen coming out. Oh, also a few years earlier, Leah Delaria became the first openly gay comic to perform on American television. And it's great to be here because it's the 1990s and it's hip to be queer and I'm a big dyke. Yes, you could see queer people on magazines and on TV. Mostly white, cisgendered middle class queer people, but still. In 2000, the Netherlands straight up legalizes same-sex marriage. Over the next 10 years, gay marriage becomes legal in Belgium. Spain, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, and finally.

This morning, the Supreme Court recognized that the Constitution guarantees marriage equality. In 2016, Obama establishes the Stonewall National Monument, America's first official LGBTQ historic site. And a few months later, 49 people are killed in a gay club. We stand with the people of Orlando who have endured a terrible attack on their city. And then we had a presidential election. But the transgender, the military is working on it now. They're doing the work.

It's been a very difficult situation. And here we are, 2019, 50 years after Stonewall. We've come a long way, my guess. And I have to ask, what are y'all doing for pride this year? comedian, singer, and actress, Leah Dillaria, of Orange is the New Black and many other shows. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, back in a minute. I'm going to be dancing topless on the Stonewall Pride Float,

drinking a whole lot of beer. I am what I am. I am my own special creches somewhere. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, here with Masha Gessen. We're talking about the Stonewall Uprising 50 years ago and the sweeping changes in how LGBTQ people live around the world. Take Ireland, for example, once a very conservative place.

Ireland now has a gay prime minister. Irish voters recently approved gay marriage in a referendum, the first country to do so. Masha, you've reported on these issues, and you were in Ireland recently. I was. But not to meet with Irish people. I went to talk to a refugee from a country that is not so hospitable to LGBT people. His name is Yevgeny Storn.

Gray and windy and rainy sometimes. I was walking with Yevgeny Storn in Galway, which is a coastal city in Ireland. This is early May. And I had first heard of Yevgeny a couple years ago when some friends let me know that he was, looking for help trying to get out of Russia. Something horrible was happening to him. I got some more details later. Jeanne, can you start by talking about how you ended up in Ireland? I think the

story starts in St. Petersburg. No, the story starts in the Soviet Union in 1983 when I was born in Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic. Yevgeny was born in Kazakhstan when it was still part of the Soviet Union. When he was a teenager, there was a recruiting push for young Russian speakers from Kazakhstan to go study in Russia. And he did. And that's also when he came out. I was practicing Sam-Sex in school with boys. But I wasn't gay men at that moment. So it just when I moved to St. Petersburg, when I first went to 69 nightclub, and another one which I liked more was Grishniki,

sinners. So yeah, that was a very moment when I just realized that this is my culture, this is my music, this is my style, this is where I feel comfortable, and I really feel part of it. How old were you? 17, 18. Oh, so right as soon as you got to St. Petersburg? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It wasn't yet an identity, let's say. This is something that I didn't have in Kazakhstan, obviously. I was thinking I'm the only one there. Well, except for the other boys. I think they also were thinking they're the only one. Yeah, it was interesting. In St. Petersburg, Yvgen, you met Alexander, who became his partner. He's a very bright person, I would say, you know, stands out and you easily identify

as a person with whom you want to be closed. So I stayed overnight at this place at a certain point and never apart since then. Alexander wasn't in Ireland when I was there. We talked to him over Skype. Yevgeny and Alexander had a room in a communal apartment in St. Petersburg. They also had a cat named Musa. She's like Garfield. She has a lot.

So you and Alexander and Musa are living in St. Petersburg? Yeah, we were living on Vasiliwskine. island in a huge communalca. Yeah, super terrible. It was actually, that was part of why Musa became part of our life, because when we got that room, the money was so small that we couldn't really find anything better. But we also said that, well, we have mice, which basically means that there is no rats. So that was a selling point that we have mice.

Yes. Yeah, if we have mice, we don't have rats. And we said, well, we will have a cat. And it was a funny story. You know, they have a good life in St. Petersburg. Alexandra got a PhD in sociology and started working at a nonprofit, doing research on LGBT issues. This is in the mid-2000s.

When the gay movement in Russia is developing, it's not like Western Europe, but things are moving in the right direction. People are becoming more open, and there are more spaces appearing. They're not just like community spaces and bars, but there's research, there are discussion groups, there are film festivals.

Things are moving along. Well, we were living in a real bubble. Like, you know, the NGO world, no one judge you for being a semi-sex couple. But there's some trouble with the gay newspapers. Back when he became a student, And he applied for his Russian passport and got it easily. Ten years later, he suddenly told that there was a problem.

So Yivgen, you went back to the embassy of Kazakhstan, and they rescinded his citizenship as well. And suddenly he finds himself stateless. He doesn't have a passport, and he doesn't have the ability to travel. It's just a kind of disabling status. On an everyday level, like every policeman who stops you. and looks at your papers, knows that something is wrong with you. If you want to check in in a hotel, huge issue every time, they look at the papers of a stateless person

and they don't understand what the status is, but they definitely know that it's officially bad. But Russia tells him he actually has a path to citizenship. He can stay in the country on a residency permit and apply for a passport in five years. He can't break any laws, and he's got to work. He gets a job at the same NGO as Alexander, the Center for Independent Social Research. Meanwhile, Russian politics is changing in a big way.

In 2012, Vladimir Putin returns to the presidency after months of mass demonstrations. And Putin is immediately looking for a way to discredit the demonstrators. And LGBT people make the perfect scapegoat because we stand in for, everything. We stand in for the West, we stand in for all the things that have changed in the last quarter century that make you uncomfortable. We also stand in for the promise of going back to an imaginary past without gay people. And of course, no Russian things that they've actually ever met a gay person in person, so that makes it really easy to create this image of the villainous queer people. First, St. Petersburg, and then the Federal Parliament, pass a

ban on what they call propaganda of homosexuality or propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations. You can't have any positive or neutral coverage of LGBT issues in any kind of media. You can't have public demonstrations. But the biggest purpose of this law is to signal that there are second-class citizens in Russia outside the protection of the law. That means that hate crimes skyrocket. And Yivgeny actually decided to go back to school, and his subject of study is hate crimes against LGBT people. I was analyzing the court decisions on the murders of gay men, how people were killed in Russian.

And usually, like, it's normal situation where two people are drinking, and then one of them is declaring or proposing. There's drinking, it seems like there's going to be sex, and instead there's a murder. Basically, the homophobia is in a very private spaces, and this was my main finding. Yvgenius' finding was in direct contradiction to the state's message, which was essentially, you can do whatever you want in the privacy of your own homes, we just don't want you corrupting our children. In fact, violence was coming to people's homes. So while Putin is cracking down on LGBT people, the other attack is on NGOs. The foreign agents law requires NGOs that get foreign funding to submit to special reporting requirements.

The whole thing is designed to paralyze their work and also to designate them as pariahs. In the center where Alexandria and Yivgenia work ends up on the list. So here's Yvgeny, a stateless person. working for a foreign agent NGO and setting LGBT issues. And he goes and applies for his Russian passport. I got a phone call. Yevgeny Mikhailz. Hello.

I'm calling from the Migrationary Service. Calling from the Migration Service. We are working with your application on citizenship. I said, what is wrong with it? No, no, no, everything is okay. We just would have to discuss. with you personally, could you please come tomorrow at 10 a.m.? The man on the phone gave him an address, his name, and a phone number.

But when he arrived the next day, that migration office was closed. Yivgeny called the number and the man came down to meet him. Young, my age, more or less. Somehow good-looking even. Well-dressed, polite. Went with him to the first floor and it was. was nothing just a camera and an ordinary door. We entered. The thing that I saw and that really impacted me was this huge portrait of Andropov. Andropov. Andropov.

Andropov was the head of the KGB and a hero of Putin's and a former head of the Soviet Union. Yeah. And then he shows his knoissechka. His ID. His ID, his FSB ID. The FSB is the Federal Security Agency, the successor agency to the KGB. As soon as Yvgeny saw the FSB ID, he knew he wasn't there to talk about a passport. The conversation with the agent lasted two hours. They talked about his master's thesis and about the murders of gay men and the work of the center. What was terrifying is mostly he was naming some people that I won't name here.

He was particularly interested in certain individuals, foreigners. He wanted you to talk about them. Yeah. The man wanted the Eugenie to agree to be an informant. Basically, his main attitude was very polite, but in a very subtle, very tender way he was. mentioned the law on espionage and the law of the traitor of motherland. The prison sentences are essentially life in prison.

Yeah, basically, my main goal was to at least get out of there, but also not to damage other people. At the end of the interview, the FSB agent asked if they could talk again. Yvgenia said, sure, basically anything to get out of there. He gets out of there, called Alexander, said everything is okay. And as soon as they got home, Yivgeny wrote on a piece of paper, F.S.B. Well, we're in the center of Galway, which is terribly touristy, terribly shopping-y. It's one of those places that don't feel like a place to live.

It's a town where people are coming to relax. Spending their weekends and holidays. Yevgeny managed to get himself on a plane to Ireland. Ireland is not a bad place to land. It's generally very friendly to persecuted people, especially in some ways to LGBT people. The Prime Minister is gay. The country held the first successful referendum on same-sex marriage.

And there are definitely worse places to apply for asylum than Ireland. For example, in the United States, you might end up in detention. and you don't qualify for any public assistance. But Ireland has one of the slowest asylum processes in the world. To somebody who is stuck in the process, it can feel just interminable. Yvgeny is living in what's called Direct Provision, which is this network of hotels and hostels and former convents, which are run by private companies, but funded by the state.

he has a small room with a single bed he gets three meals a day he can't cook he cannot have overnight guests which means that Alexander can't come and spend the night with him Alexander is not in Ireland with Yvgeny I would go wherever he is right

but I'm just a citizen of Russia I have to get a visa to any country I want to go. The thing is, if they were a straight couple who had been together for 15 years, they would probably be married, and there probably wouldn't be a question of whether they're seeking asylum together. As it is, they had to consider whether Alexander had a case for asylum,

and they also had to consider what it would mean for neither of them to work. Right now, Alexander has a temporary teaching position at the university in Helsinki. Every time he visits Yevgeny in Ireland, he has to get an Irish visa, which is a fairly arduous process. And both men say that it's not clear when or how they'll be reunited. It's been more than a year. And so we both are waiting and waiting and waiting. And you want someone who's been with you 15 years right beside you,

and you cannot have it. And we don't know what future is bringing us. I just can't visualize the future. I can't see it. What do you think is preventing you from imagining the future? Tiedness. I'm very tired. Do you know this feeling?

To wake up tired. After sleeping 10 hours, you wake up and you are tired. This is the type of tiredness I have. Yvgenia is taking a course at the university in Galway because he felt a depression coming on. He spends every day in the library. He leaves the hostel in the morning. he reads and he writes until the library closes at 10 o'clock at night.

I met other queer migrants in Ireland. I met people from South Africa, from Zimbabwe. The thing is, in some ways, it's becoming harder for LGBT asylum seekers to find a place in the world. Many countries don't grant asylum on the basis of persecution because of sexual orientation or identity. The United States is one of those countries, but it's getting harder and harder to get into this country

to seek asylum. And that possibility of getting refuge is actually narrowing just as the world is becoming more polarized in the treatment of LGBT people. So in some parts of the world, we're seeing incredible advances on LGBT rights, including really striking ones like India, in other countries, we're seeing a horrifying backlash. Kenya's highest court recently upheld a ban on gay sex. and new law in Brunei has made gay sex punishable by death by stoning. So even as global culture is pulling more people out of the closet, when the culture becomes more repressive, there's no closet to go back into.

So people end up really exposed. I found myself in a sense of newlyified belonging. I don't belong to any country, I don't belong to any ethnic group, any anything. Actually, my only diaspora is a queer LGBT diaspora. That's where I feel that a part of this queer nation. This is my diaspora. That's Masha Gessen in Galway, Ireland with Yvgeny Stern.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Today on the program, we've been talking about the Stonewall Uprising and the state of gay rights around the world. I'm David Remnick, and this is critical. Kristen. Who's a lesbian from the 80s or 90s?

Let me Google this. 90s lesbian. 90s lesbian. Melissa Eartheridge releases lesbian anthem, come to my window. What is this? Oh, this song. Okay, yeah, no, I totally know this. Vaguely.

It's not like a bop for. me per se, but like, yeah, this hits. Kristen Tomlinson is a radio rookie, and that's a program at WNYC that trains people to make documentaries about their own lives. Kristen has come of age with a conception of gender identity that for some who are older is a little difficult to understand. Mostly like, you know, I can be anything. I can be a boy or a girl or things that are in between, or, you know, vastly out of the realm of the binary. Kristen describes herself as gender fluid, and she's found a lot of her role-mind. online. The internet is where you can craft a version of yourself and you figure out who you

want to become. For me, I was born and looked like a black girl. I'm five foot seven. Most days I wear black lipstick and Doc Martins and never smile. Some days, I want to look cute, showy, and sweet. And other days I'll feel comfortable. Like, I just want to wear dark clothes and sweatpants. And on another day, a button-down shirt. It's never tied to a binary feeling. There's definitely a kind of generation gap here between a young gender-fluid person like Kristen who resists the binaries and an older generation of gay and lesbian people

who came of age in a very different, much more rigid climate. Kristen set out to explore that generation gap. Could I ask like your sexuality? A lesbian. Okay. See, this is the first time I've ever talked to, like, an older black lesbian before. Like, I've always been around straight adults,

my whole life, so I don't know. This is like really giddy for me. I met Paulette when I went to Sage, a place in Harlem for older LGBTQ people to meet and mingle. She's the epitome of all struggle stories that you read about in your life. You know, you have to be in the closet. You have to pretend to be straight. I mean, Paulette told me she got pregnant at 17, and later she got married in her 20s. It was hard beyond belief.

I had to bury who I was. On her wedding day, she felt horribly sick. To live that life, to live a straight life, without understanding that you don't have to. It's a feeling like this, something's not right. It's no balance. I'm out of source. To describe it, this is how I described my life.

I was in, you know, a manhole going into the ground. I was in that ground with the heaviest and the darkest manhole cover covering my head, and I couldn't breathe. It was horrible. It was horrible. It hurts my soul that I did that. I came to understand it was a trade-off. Would I do it again? Never. Never. Paulette eventually came out, and she's proud to identify as lesbian. But the terms that Kristen uses to describe herself in the language are still new to Paulette. So we've had to educate ourselves.

We've got all these colors and banners and... All the pride flags. Oh, Lord. Yeah, I just know the rainbow colors. Yeah. So for transgender, pink is for the female part. Blue is for the male part. And then white actually symbolizes non-binary, which follows under me.

So because I identify as non-binary or gender fluid. So what's the point of so much different terminologies and verse? to say basically the same thing. I think it's just preference at the end of the day. Honestly, I don't know. I used to identify as bisexual, but when I heard pansexual, it just felt better to me because

bi uses like buy, it's two. But like... Panic means many. Because see, in my mind, this is a very good topic for intergenerational conversations. It's important that each generation has a language they can adapt. identify with. Back in my day was Butch femme. Bisexual was just nasty. Sorry, but that's how it was.

Like promiscuous? Yeah, it was just nasty. And you're straight. That was it. You need to have your language to identify with your needs. And what they did 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, doesn't. So to have a conversation with someone of your age opens our eyes and our eyes. And our ears to understanding that, yeah, it doesn't make sense, but it's not our world to make sense. I like that way of looking at things because it's like, I might not understand you, but I still respect that what you're going through is valid. As we're talking, I'm understanding a lot more myself about the pan, what do you call pansexual? Pansexual. I think that's the difference with our age is.

Like, for me, I like cutting dry. Okay. Maybe I don't have cut and dry answers, but queerness is just an essential part of my identity as a black, gay, 21-year-old. And maybe I won't always be pansexual and gender fluid. I'm still figuring out dating and all of that. There are days when I wish my gender was like Mr. Potato Head. Like, I wish my chest was just an accessory, I could velcro off, and by doing so, I wouldn't get rid of my femininity either. Being gender fluid is the perfect way for those two binaries to meet and form something new.

Kristen Tomlinson is in WNYC's radio rookies program and you can hear her story in its entirety on the podcast called The Stakes. I'm here with Masha Gessonet and we've been talking about the gains and the changes in LGBTQ rights over the 50 years since Stonewall. Masha, trans issues and gender fluidity, these weren't things that people were talking about in any mass way years ago. How has the movement responded to that? The movement has had some growing pains, both in including transgender people, but also in sort of embracing some of the conversation around gender. Certainly when I was coming out, the right thing to do was to embrace your womanhood. No, no, no, no, no, you don't want to be a man. You just want to be a woman who loves women. And it was lovely some 30 years later to be given permission to play with gender

more actively. But I think some people are concerned, rightly so, that there is a conservative sort of undercurrent. That's a kind of essential view of gender that doesn't actually change how we treat gender. You can just have the freedom of switching from one to the other. The best example I can give you a few years ago, there was a viral story in one of the glossy magazines about this wonderful family that once their five-year-old came out as transgender, repainted their room, which had been blue, and they painted it pink, because this child wanted to be a girl. That's an example of what I'm talking about. It's a kind of essential view of gender that doesn't actually change how we treat gender.

You can just have the freedom of switching from one to the other. Whereas within the LGBT community, it's a much different conversation and much more interesting one that problematizes gender as such. Do you think we're headed for a point where we might not identify? identify people by gender in an official way, that that might be a subject of real political and social debate? That's a really hard question to answer, because it actually depends on the strength of the backlash that we're facing. The backlash is new, right? It basically began with the Trump administration. At this point, the movement, I think, hasn't quite figured out whether we're entirely on the defensive or where there's actually a positive agenda. So in a way, Stonewall, the new Stonewall for this has not yet happened. Well, Stonewall was started, as we used to say when I was younger, by drag queens,

and now we say by transgender women of color. Stonewall was very much a battle about gender. We heard Martin Doberman say earlier that one of the pretexts used for raiding Stonewall was that people weren't wearing gender-appropriate clothing. For many years, the gender aspect was sort of on the back burner, but it's very much a part of Stonewall. Which means that Stonewall will reverberate with meaning for years to come and with many more political battles to come, I would think. I think that's right. Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of The Future is History and other books.

I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour this week. Next week, I'll talk with a writer who can rightfully be called a real national treasure. Robert Kara. Please join us for that. Until then, have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced with help from Michelle Moses, Kari Pitkin, and Johna McCone. Special thanks to Alexis Quadrado for music he composed for this episode.

Radio Rookies is supported in part by the Margaret Newart Foundation and the Pinkerton Foundation. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part, by the Turina Endowment Fund.