Restful Rainbow

A red wool poncho. A single guitar. A blue house. A mountain that answers back.

Tonight we travel to Mexico to meet Chavela Vargas: born in the coffee hills of Costa Rica in 1919, a street singer in Mexico City, a guest in Frida Kahlo's blue house, and the woman who took ranchera away from the trumpets and sang it low and slow, in trousers, to women, without changing a word.

Along the way: coffee flowers on a green hillside, sawdust and lamplight at the Tenampa, torchlit divers at Acapulco, fifteen years of silence, a small cabaret in Coyoacán where she came back from the dead, Almodóvar kissing the stage in Paris, Carnegie Hall at eighty-four, and the year she finally said the word "lesbian" out loud. She was eighty-one.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

A lamp in a dark doorway. Four thousand years of color. Two men, nose to nose.

Tonight we travel to Saqqara, around 2400 BCE, to meet Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep: royal manicurists to King Niuserre, royal confidants, and the two men who built one tomb together and had their names carved as one above its door. Inside, they walk hand in hand, feast beside harpists and dancers, and embrace in the innermost chamber in the pose Egyptian art uses for a kiss. Khnumhotep stands where a wife would stand. A wife was erased from the banquet wall. In 1964, Egyptologist Ahmed Moussa lifted a lamp and saw it all for the first time in forty-four centuries. Brothers, twins, or a couple? The men are silent. The embrace is not.

The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to ease you into sleep. Along the way you'll see the Nile spreading brown over black fields, alabaster jars and scented oil in a palace at Memphis, painters mixing copper blue by lamplight, and a door sealed with care and opened with wonder.

Perfect for falling asleep, ancient Egypt, LGBTQ+ history before the words existed, archaeology lovers, and anyone who needs a calmer story tonight.

Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Related episodes: Hatshepsut · Hadrian & Antinous · Sappho · Sacred Band of Thebes · The Cut Sleeve

Lamplight on wet cobblestones. A cheetah on a diamond collar. A cup of coffee that changed a speech.

Tonight we travel to Paris in 1925 to meet Josephine Baker: born poor in St. Louis in 1906, famous overnight at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at nineteen, a spy for French intelligence who hid secrets in her sheet music, the mother of twelve adopted children at her château in the Dordogne, the only woman to give a speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and the first Black woman inducted into the Panthéon in 2021. She sang that she had two loves, her country and Paris. Her son and biographer named six women she loved as well.

The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to ease you into sleep. Along the way you'll see velvet seats on the Avenue Montaigne, red lamps in Montmartre, small shoes on a château staircase, a hot August afternoon on the National Mall, and a coffin of soil from four homes carried up stone steps.

Perfect for falling asleep, bisexual and Black queer history, Jazz Age Paris, women of the Resistance, and anyone who needs a calmer story tonight.

Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Related episodes: Gladys Bentley · Ma Rainey · Bessie Smith · Colette and Missy · Marlene Dietrich

Paper bags in the rain. A wardrobe door. Two parts of one person, refusing to be divided.

Tonight: Simon Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who led Africa's first Pride march. Born in Soweto in 1957, he hid his parents from the police as a boy, came out at eighteen, and founded the first group for Black gay men in South Africa. Tried for treason alongside the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, he came out to his comrades in prison and in court, and changed their minds. On October 13, 1990, he marched through Johannesburg in the first Pride on the continent and told the crowd he could not separate being Black from being gay. Six years later, South Africa became the first country to protect sexual orientation in its constitution.

Along the way: jacarandas on wet pavement, maize fields under highveld storms, a stack of prison letters, a rainbow flag over a coffin, and two men exchanging rings in a small office eight years later, to the day.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Rainbow umbrellas in the rain. Sixty-six votes. A question 33 years old, finally answered.

Tonight: how Taiwan became the first place in Asia where same-sex couples could marry. It begins in 1986, when Chi Chia-wei came out on national television, asked a court to notarize his marriage, and was detained for it under martial law. It ends on May 24, 2019, in a registration office beneath Taipei 101, with rainbow-colored forms on the counter and more than five hundred couples signing their names across the island.

Along the way: the soft roar of Taipei scooters, night-market steam and temple incense, the first Pride march with its masked faces, a stamped page in a city register, the 2017 court ruling that started a two-year clock, a hard referendum night, and forty thousand people waiting in the rain on May 17 until the president could write two words: love won.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Forty-two million people. Two words. One microphone she didn't mean to lean on.

Tonight: The Puppy Episode. The night in April 1997 when Ellen DeGeneres and her sitcom character came out together on ABC, and a country gathered in living rooms and bars and one rented theater in Alabama to hear it.

Along the way: an oyster counter in New Orleans, a phone call to God, Johnny Carson waving her to the couch, a network that wanted her to get a puppy instead, Oprah and Laura Dern saying yes, a Time cover that said it in three words, the sponsors who left and the ones who stayed, a Birmingham station that went dark and five thousand people who watched anyway. Then the Emmy, the parental advisory, the quiet years, and the long way back: a blue fish, a talk show, a wedding, a medal.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Related episodes: The Unfolding Story of Elliot Page · Tom Daley's Olympic Gold · George Michael · Marlene Dietrich

A town told for five hundred years to have two kinds of people, and it simply declined.

Tonight: the muxes (MOO-sheh) of Juchitán de Zaragoza, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. A Zapotec identity for people called boys at birth who grow up into something the town has always had a name for, and a place at the table.

Along the way: the market the women open before sunrise, wind off the lagoons, the legend of San Vicente Ferrer and the three bags of seeds, a mother teaching her child to embroider flowers, the Authentic Intrepid Seekers of Danger and the vela they've held every November since the 1970s, the 2017 earthquake and the rebuilding, the first muxe on the cover of Vogue, and a single red stitch at the end of the day.

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

Related episodes: We'wha of Zuni · Kapaemāhū: The Healer Stones of Waikīkī · The Voices We Carry · The Colonel Who Rode with Zapata: Amelio Robles

He saved a mother and child on a kitchen table by candlelight. He fought cholera with clean water and open windows. And he kept one secret for fifty years.

Tonight, drift off to the story of Dr. James Barry, born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Cork around 1789, who sailed to Edinburgh in 1809 under a new name, qualified as a doctor in 1812, and joined the British Army in 1813. In Cape Town he reformed the prison, the asylum, and the leper settlement, and in 1826 performed the first caesarean in the British Empire where both mother and baby lived. He served in Mauritius, Jamaica, St Helena, Malta, Corfu, and Canada, rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, and scolded Florence Nightingale for standing in the sun without a hat. When he died in 1865, his wish not to be examined was ignored, and the whole empire learned what he had never told anyone. The army sealed his records for a century. His headstone says what he wanted it to say.

You'll walk the tidal quays of Cork, sit in a chalk-and-lamp-oil lecture hall, watch cloud pour over Table Mountain, stand beside a candlelit kitchen table, ride a sleigh over the frozen St. Lawrence, and rest at a quiet stone in long grass.

Told twice: once at a natural pace, then slowly, with long pauses, to guide you into sleep.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

London bet a fortune on whether the Chevalier d'Éon was a man or a woman. She never answered. She just got dressed.

Tonight, drift off to the story of Charles-Geneviève d'Éon de Beaumont, born in Tonnerre, Burgundy, in 1728: a spy in Louis XV's secret network, a wounded captain of dragoons, a diplomat who helped end the Seven Years' War and then refused to go home, holding the king's own invasion plans as insurance. When a new king sent the playwright Beaumarchais to get them back, the price of the deal was strange: d'Éon would be recognized as a woman and must live as one for the rest of her life. Dressed by Marie Antoinette's own dressmaker, presented at Versailles in 1777, mocked, impoverished by the Revolution, she returned to London and earned her living fencing in a black silk gown, beating men half her age before the Prince of Wales, with the Cross of Saint Louis pinned over her heart. She died in a small room in Holborn in 1810, nursed by a widow named Mrs. Cole, and rests under the plane trees at St Pancras Old Church.

You'll walk through a blue-green spring rising from limestone, candlelight on Russian snow, coffee-house London loud with wagers, a dressmaker's rooms full of silk and pins, the ring of steel in a fencing hall, and a warm bed near a window at the end.

The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with long pauses, to carry you into sleep.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

A Two-Spirit Zuni weaver charmed 1886 Washington, met the President, and walked forty miles home.

She was six feet tall, wove blankets on the lawn of the Smithsonian, and shook the President's hand. Washington never knew she was lhamana.

Tonight's story is We'wha of Zuni (c. 1849 to 1896), a master potter and weaver, a ceremonial dancer, and the most famous lhamana, a Zuni Two-Spirit gender role, on record. Orphaned by smallpox, raised at the heart of her village, We'wha built a bridge to the outside world one silver dollar and one woven blanket at a time. In 1885 she rode the train to Washington with anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson and spent six months as the toast of the capital, then called on President Grover Cleveland on June 23, 1886 with a wedding gift made by her own hands. Seven years later she was jailed by soldiers for defending her home, and walked forty miles home through the winter desert. She died during the Sha'lako ceremony of 1896, mourned by her whole village.

You'll drift off to juniper smoke at dusk, corn ground on a stone, red clay under strong hands, a shuttle passing through a loom, and the red face of Corn Mountain at evening. The story is told once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses for sleep.

Support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.