5 Questions About Making Gay History

We ask authors of projects reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore their projects. In our latest installment of the series, Eric Marcus discusses the Making Gay History Podcast.

Read Kae Bara Kratcha’s review discussing the recent season of Making Gay History Podcast drawing on the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The Making Gay History (MGH) podcast brings LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it, drawing principally on the oral history archive Eric Marcus recorded for the two editions of his oral history book, which was first published in 1992 under the title Making History (the 2002 edition was titled Making Gay History). MGH’s episodes create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to an aspect of American history that’s too often been relegated to the shadows.

The MGH podcast provides a window into that history through the stories of the people who helped a despised minority take its rightful place in society as full and equal citizens. Our goal is to encourage connection, pride, and solidarity within the LGBTQ community and to provide an entry point for both allies and the general public to its largely hidden history.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

We use recorded oral history in a podcast format, which is still somewhat unique. But I don’t think we make novel use of media in our podcast. What we do is use novel media. And it’s only novel because so few oral histories were recorded with the kinds of people and stories we’ve featured in Making Gay History over the past five years. Aside from the recordings in my archive, we partnered with the Studs Terkel Radio Archive to feature some of their recordings. And MGH has also uncovered and shared never-before-heard archival interviews with iconic figures in LGBTQ history including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Bayard Rustin.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology? 

I’ve always loved hearing people’s stories. This was long before I even knew what oral history was. And then I was commissioned to write an oral history book and fell in love with learning about history through individual stories. It brought history to life in a way that dry history books never could. And now I’ve gotten to share these oral histories in an audio format that lets the people I interviewed tell their stories in their own voices, which adds multiple dimensions to what would otherwise be two-dimensional transcript.

I want people to remember the stories of the people we feature—their heartbreaks, their triumphs, their struggles, and ultimately their humanity.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your project? 

From a purely academic perspective, the Making Gay History podcast provides an example of how recorded oral histories can be used to share stories in a format that’s highly accessible and powerfully affecting. And I’m not speaking of simply taking recorded oral histories, cutting out a 20-minute chunk, for example, and slapping on an introduction and conclusion. These are highly produced episodes that are edited for clarity and brevity with the goal of never changing what the interviewee intended to convey. We have the added benefit of the fact that I recorded the interviews and I’m here to provide descriptive and historical context. Even so, I’ve had to rely on contemporaneous notes that I took at the time of the interviews to set the scene for each of the episodes. In our special season on “Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis,” I think oral historians will be interested in listening to what happens when the oral historian becomes the subject. In this case we used my own recorded oral history as a framework for the storytelling.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

I want people to remember the stories of the people we feature—their heartbreaks, their triumphs, their struggles, and ultimately their humanity.

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Eric Marcus is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews — conducted for his oral history book of the same name about the LGBTQ civil rights movement — to create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history. His many other books include Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis.

Eric is also co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He is the founder and chair of the Stonewall 50 Consortium, an organization that brings together 240 nonprofit institutions and organizations committed to producing programming, exhibitions, and educational materials related to LGBTQ history and culture. He is a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.