Thursday Night Live (TNL) was a gay organization for white collar workers that turned into an AIDS activist group focused on education and providing support for those with AIDS.

You can learn more at the Heinz History Center's Detre Library where TNL's archives reside.

Listen to Butch Izaj talk about Pittsburgh's Gay Bars and the anual Memorial and Labor Day picnics.

Pittsburgh was one piece of a larger national study that led to great advancements in AIDS research. Listen to how it came to be!

Welcome to season 2! This season is all about Pittsburgh's queer history. Tune in for some exciting stories!

This episode explores gender as a creation of society. This is a very theory heavy episode that may be hard to digest for some. Below are the more specific sources that I utilized throughout this episode.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender

“Womanish Men and Manlike Women: The Native American Two-spirit as Warrior.” In Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850, by Roger M. Carpenter on pages 146-164.

“The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History.” from Gender & History by Toby Ditz, on pages 1-35.

Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India by Serena Nanda

Gender Without Identity by Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini

Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600-1870 by Nichols, David Andrew

Learn about one of the first successful gay organizations in the nation, the Mattachine!

Sources

Gay American History by Crowell Publication

https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/before-stonewall/one

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/blogs/its-zap#:~:text=First%20used%20by%20gay%20and,to%20think%20about%20an%20issue.

Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America

This episode is about the Hijra of India and the differing gender norms of India versus Western Europe.

Also, special guest, my cat Bella

Bibliography

Arondekar, Anjali. For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2009.

Cohen, Lawrence. “The Pleasures of Castration: The Postoperative Status of Hijras, Jankhas, and Academics.” Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society (1995): 276-305.

Dutta, Aniruddha. “An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis) Continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India.” In Gender History Across Epistemologies, edited by Donna R. Gabaccia and Mary Jo Maynes, 305-329. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013.

Hinchy, Jessica. Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra 1850-1900. Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Hinchy, Jessica. “Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India.” Asian Studies Review 38 (2014): 274-294.

Hinchy, Jessica. “The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Colonial Rule in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North India.” In Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges edited by Stephan Miescher, Michele Mitchell, and Naoko Shibusawa, 23-48. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2015.

Nanda, Serena. “Life on the Margins: A Hijra’s Story.” In Everyday Life in South Asia edited by Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, 124-131. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Nanda, Serena. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1990.

Preston, Laurence W. “A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in Nineteenth-Century India.” Modern Asian Studies vol. 21 no. 2 (1987): 371-387.

Pushyamitra, M. “Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and Fundamental Rights: A Study.” International Journal of Law Management & Humanities 5 (2022): 1708-1716.

Sweet, Michael J. and Leonard Zwilling. “The First Medicalization: The Taxonomy and Etiology of Queerness in Classical Indian Medicine.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 4 (1993): 590-607.

The stories of saints in this episode are from research I did a few years ago. I'm super excited to share them! I read the translations of the medieval text, the Aelfric Lives of Saints.

Bibliography

Aelfric. Aelfric’s Lives of Saints: Being A Set of Sermons on Saints’ Days Formerly Observed by the English Church. 2 vols. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. London, England: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Anson, John. “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif.” In Viator, 5 (1974): 1-32.

Aspegren, Kerstin. The Male Woman: A Feminine Ideal in the Early Church. Edited by Rene Kieffer. Stockholm. Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell International,1990.

Bennett Judith M., Ruth Mazo Karras, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Burrus, Virginia. The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Coon, Lynda L. Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Davis, Stephen J. “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertexuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-36.

Kitchen, John. Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. New York, New York. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Lees, Clare A., ed. The Cambridge History of: Early Medieval English Literature. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

McNamara, JoAnn, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, ed. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, England: Duke University Press, 1992.

Noble, Thomas F. X. and Thomas Head. Ed. Soldiers of Christ: Satins and Saints’ Lives from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Sound Bite: https://pixabay.com/users/freesound_community-46691455/

This is a recording of the talk Al Preston gave at the DC History Center.

If you want to see the presentation that goes with this talk, check out our youtube page here.

Listen in to my conversation with Thomas Rainbolt, Chatham University Alumnus. This episode is a little more conversational than the other oral histories we have presented thus far.

You can also check out Thomas's thesis on the Resource Page of the Holiday Pride.