Out in the Bay

This third week of LGBTQ History Month, Out in the Bay explores the life and accomplishments of a Black, queer civil rights pioneer left out of history books: Pauli Murray.

It's LGBTQ History Month. In 1996, as AIDS ravaged San Francisco’s gay community, Metropolitan Community Church pastor Jim Mitulski risked imprisonment, dispensing marijuana to alleviate his sick congregants’ pain before it was legal. He did this in church, right after services.

"Gender is queer for everyone,” says scholar and author Kathryn Bond Stockton. She doesn’t mean “queer” only in the LGBTQIA+ sense, she means the dictionary definition: strange. “Gender is strange even when it’s played straight.”

Big Freedia is famous for her "bounce" music and twerking; her life story and anti-gun activism are less well known. She's on tour this month promoting her new EP, BDE — Big Diva Energy — and raising funds for Hurricane Ida relief.

Out in the Bay proudly features a new queer podcast this week: Stereotypes – Straight Talk From Queer Voices. On the pilot episode, “Still Coming Out,” producer and host Christopher Beale brings us two beautifully told coming out stories.

Ten years after Don't Ask Don't Tell's repeal, we hear from writer Lauren Hough, who grew up in the infamous Christian free-love and -sex cult The Family, formerly The Children of God. At 18, she joined the US Air Force, where she got death threats and her car was set ablaze because she’s lesbian.

The first openly LGBTQ California Supreme Court justice is also only the third Black man ever to serve on the state's highest court. He says his struggles helped him achieve success.

On this week's Out in the Bay we bring you the story -- in his own words and voice -- of the late LGBTQ philanthropist, civil rights activist and ambassador James C. Hormel. He died in August after a full and fascinating life.

Pamela Sneed’s prose and poetry can reach out and grab you. She reads four selections from her memoir, Funeral Diva, on this week’s Out in the Bay and shares some of her life story.

In his debut novel, Robert Jones, Jr. describes the romantic and tragic relationship between two enslaved young men on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the early 1800s. The Prophets explores gender and sexuality, race, power, and toxic masculinity and religion.