Hello!

Is it possible that my family, my mother, could ever accept me?

Today we meet Eric Marcus and we’re talking about the book that saved his life: Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson.

Eric Marcus is the author of a dozen books, including two editions of Making Gay History (the original 1992 edition is entitled Making History), Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. Eric is also the co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. He is the founder and chair emeritus of the Stonewall 50 Consortium and is a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.

In Consenting Adult, Tessa Lynn considers herself independent and progressive, a liberated woman of the 1960s. And yet, when she receives a letter from her youngest son, Jeff, informing her that he is gay, Tessa is distraught. At a time when homosexuality is regarded as a mental illness, she struggles with how best to be a parent to a gay son—and how to protect her family from the prejudices of the era. Elegant and subtly drawn, Consenting Adult is a stunning tribute to familial bonds, and a sympathetic portrait of a mother whose best intentions are often clouded by the stereotypes of her time.

Connect with Eric

Making Gay History website: makinggayhistory.org/about
instagram: @makinggayhistorypodcast
facebook: facebook.com/makinggayhistory

Fortunoff Video Archive podcast: fortunoff.library.yale.edu/education/podcasts

Listen to full episode with Damien Martin: makinggayhistory.org/podcast/damien-martin

Our Bookshop

Visit our Bookshop for  new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

Become an Associate Producer!

Become an Associate Producer of our podcast through a $20/month sponsorship on Patreon! A professionally recognized credit, you can gain access to Associate Producer meetings to help guide our podcast into the future! Get started today: patreon.com/thisqueerbook

Credits

Permission to use the theme to Making Gay History provided by Eric Marcus. The theme was composed by Fritz Meyers.

Host/Founder: J.P. Der Boghossian
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kaefer, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, and Sean Smith
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Terry D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson

Quatrefoil Library

Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated by our recording platform Riverside.fm. This transcript may not include episode narration and contains the original interview between J.P. Der Boghossian and today’s guests. Any time-stamps do not correspond to the released audio file and tend not to be fully generated throughout the entire interview. It is approximately 85% accurate and will include spelling and grammatical errors. For any quotation purposes, we strongly recommend referencing the audio.

[theme music]

Hey everyone. It’s always wild to me where our guests end up finding the queer book that saved their life. Never had a conversation – before today – about finding it at the dentist’s office.

Today’s book is about an independent progressive woman of the 1960s whose world is turned upside down when her son sends her a letter telling her he’s gay. What happens next is a struggle between wanting to be a good parent and overcoming her internalized homophobia. And for our guest it provided indelible scenes of queer awakening.

For new listeners, hello. My name is J.P. Der Boghossian. I am your host. And welcome to This Queer Book Saved My Life.

[theme music]

J.P. Der Boghossian (00:07.244)
All right, Eric, would you like to introduce yourself?

Eric Marcus (00:15.405)
I am Eric Marcus. I’m founder and host of the Making Gay History podcast, and I’m delighted to be in conversation with you.

J.P. Der Boghossian (00:23.01)
and you are also an author.

Eric Marcus (00:25.428)
I am a few times over. A dozen books. First book was published in 1988. It was called The Male Couple’s Guide to Living Together.

J.P. Der Boghossian (00:35.896)
What was that about?

Eric Marcus (00:37.552)
It was a book about, it was a guidebook for male couples, everything male couples needed to know about living with each other, or setting up household with each other in a world where everyone said it couldn’t possibly last. So back in those old days, the assumption was that gay men couldn’t possibly have long -term relationships. And I was then in a new relationship three years in.

at dinner with another young couple, also three years in, and we were having a casual conversation about what couples do, who does the dishes, how to get life insurance, because this was of course during the AIDS crisis. And I said off in an offhanded way, gee, I wonder if there’s a book out there on the subject. And very long story short, that was the beginning of my career as a book author, but I only intended to write the one book. From there, I went to work at Good Morning America at ABC.

as a segment producer and then went on to CBS Morning News where I was in 1988 when I got a call from an editor friend at Harper and Row, now Harper Collins, who asked if I would consider writing a proposal for an oral history of what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Movement.

J.P. Der Boghossian (01:49.602)
Wow. Okay, so first of all, so you were part of the morning show Network Wars.

Eric Marcus (01:56.56)
I was, was, right, Good Morning America was very much in a, a, if not war, in competition with the Today Show. And CBS was way behind. I got fired from Good Morning America after a year. What I, the place billed itself as the Good Morning America family, but of course behind the scenes it was more like a, typical family where people stabbed each other in the back.

And I got fired from there, went right to work for, got hired by CBS Morning News, which had just launched a new version of their morning show, which they have done repeatedly through history and stayed there for six months. And then I had a choice between a four -year contract at CBS Morning News or to take a leap of faith and write a proposal for the book that seems to have made my career.

J.P. Der Boghossian (02:52.03)
So is your background in history? Are you a historian?

Eric Marcus (02:54.516)
No, my background, I did my undergraduate degree in urban studies focusing on architecture and urban planning. So how did that happen? Well, after college, I decided to see what it was like to work for an urban planning firm, and I did for a year for Ably Schwartz -Hakel & Silverblatt in New York City.

J.P. Der Boghossian (03:02.648)
So how did that lead to being a segment producer on Good Morning America?

Eric Marcus (03:19.397)
I found it interesting, but not interesting enough to go on to do a master’s in urban planning. Most of my colleagues urged me not to, as they said, it was not a great profession. And then I went on to a job in architecture with Philip Johnson, who is, was a famous architect. And it was a really interesting experience, but I realized that architecture was not for me. And it was around that time that I started writing for a few magazines, freelance, and writing about architecture in

and decided that I would go to journalism school to get my masters rather than architecture or urban planning. So I got my masters in journalism at Columbia University, graduated 40 years ago, exactly 40 years ago, but actually never intended to work as a journalist. I was really interested in electoral politics, but…

I couldn’t possibly run as a gay person, at least not in New York City in those days. So I went to work for a local politician as an assistant press secretary and lasted six weeks. Hated it.

J.P. Der Boghossian (04:30.264)
What was the part that you hated? Or parts?

Eric Marcus (04:32.63)
I went to work for the borough president of Queens, New York. In those days, the borough presidents had a lot of power before the city charter was rewritten. And to take the job, I’m from Queens, New York. To take the job, I had to go back in the closet. There was no way to get hired as an out -k person, and I’d been out since freshman year of college. And I hated being in the closet and discovered that the world of the borough president’s office in Queens, New York in 1984 might as well have been 1954.

it was very much a boys club and I was invited to go out with the guys and there were fag jokes and, there was always a beautiful intern sitting outside the Burr president’s office wearing flimsy clothing and high heels. And I

hated it. it was, I had to use a typewriter. They didn’t have computers, even though that was early days with computers. I had worked in magazine publishing prior to that on computers. And I had a boss who I’d worked for before journalism school. This is way more than you wanted to know. I was working in magazine publishing before I went to journalism school. I worked at Ziff Davis Publishing. I was a managing editor for

for a number of different publications. They were all computer related, which I’m not interested in at all. But when I graduated from journalism school, my boss at Ziff Davis wanted me back. And he called me every week and said, hate the job yet? And then bumped up the base salary by $1 ,000. And after six weeks, we hit $30 ,000 and I really hated my job. And I could be out at Ziff Davis and my boyfriend worked there. So.

J.P. Der Boghossian (06:02.712)
Eric Marcus (06:14.89)
I said goodbye to the bar president’s office and didn’t look back and spent a year at Ziff Davis working on Computer Industry Daily, which was to be the first digital publication for the computer industry before most people had email, before there really, before there was any internet. So we were a little early out of the gate. We were killed the day before we were supposed to launch, got a three month severance package, and that’s when I wrote the proposal for the Male Couples Guide to Living Together.

J.P. Der Boghossian (06:45.323)
Wow.

Eric Marcus (06:46.399)
So when people ask me, I often have young people who say, I really want to do what you do. How did you get there? And I want to draw a map of this really complex and nonlinear journey to where I am today. And that was just the beginning. That was just the beginning. And I left CBS because it was clear that my career wasn’t going to go where I wanted. I had wanted to be an on -camera correspondent.

J.P. Der Boghossian (06:53.87)
Go to urban planning school. Don’t like it.

Eric Marcus (07:15.703)
And I was told, and when I asked, that they would never put an openly gay person on national news as a correspondent. instead of taking a six -year contract, I’m sorry, four -year contract with CBS, I left to write the proposal for the book that is the basis for my podcast and the rest of my career. Yeah. So if not for discrimination, we wouldn’t be talking today because I wouldn’t have done the work that I did because I couldn’t do the work that I thought I wanted to do.

J.P. Der Boghossian (07:45.998)
So unpack that a little bit for me because I think there were a lot of folks who could have made the other decision, which is this is a job that I want to do. I am, you know, I’m going to go in the closet. I’m going to do it. I’m going to play the game because this is where I want to be career wise. Why was that important you to be out and not do

Eric Marcus (08:04.502)
Well, I was already out, so I couldn’t exactly go back. The first, I’ll back up a little bit. I was terrible at being in the closet. I was miserable lying. I’m a bad liar. I have a bad memory. And when you are in the closet, you really have to have a good

for the things that you make up to hide what you’re actually doing. I remember one incident when I was home from college and my sort of girlfriend from high school and one of my really good friends from high school were visiting and my mom was in the living room and I think my mom asked where I had been, what I did on that Friday night or whatever it was. I couldn’t remember what I had told each of the three of them. And I thought I can’t live like that.

So I made an early decision that I wasn’t going to be in the closet. And at CBS, even if I had wanted to be in the closet,

The week I arrived at the job was the week that my first book was published. And my publisher sent a copy of the book, The Male Couple’s Guide, to every single person in the newsroom at CBS Morning News. So I came in one morning, and there was the book everywhere. And one of my colleagues, Amy Rosenblum, who was an incredible producer,

She said, can I ask you a question? I said, sure. She said, who plays the husband, who plays the wife?

Eric Marcus (09:36.44)
To which I said, who in your relationship plays the husband and who plays the wife? Knowing that her husband was an executive at CBS and she had a high level position at CBS Morning News. And she said, well, that’s actually a very good question. And that led to an interesting discussion. So there was no going back. And I couldn’t. I was not somebody who could play that game. And you might ask if I’m envious or jealous of some of the people who did play that game and rose to high ranks within network news and are out now.

came out a few years ago and they have their careers. And I might say that I’m a little envious and jealous, but that’s not the life I chose. And they all paid prices for living a closeted life. I can’t begin to imagine.

J.P. Der Boghossian (10:22.261)
So you publish your first book, what was life then like after that? Because this is still the 90s. So you could count like on two hands the number of queer books that get published in a given year in the 90s. So what was that like for

Eric Marcus (10:35.321)
Well, this was 88. So I got a lot of attention from my yeah, I got a lot of attention from my book. I thought it was a rather innocuous title. But because it was about male couples, it got a lot of attention. did a lot of interviews. And I wasn’t always warmly received by people who were watching. For example, I was on CNN Newsnight Update one night, one or two in the morning. And it was a call in show.

J.P. Der Boghossian (10:37.502)
that’s right.

Eric Marcus (11:01.357)
And one person called in and said, I just want to tell your guest. And I always knew when they said, I want to tell your guest and didn’t address me directly, they’d have something nasty to say. He said, I just want to tell your guest he’s a faggot. to which, I’m live on air, to which I said, you’re smart and laughed and then said, let’s take the next call. And I remember thinking, I’m on television. First of all, this is before the internet. So people couldn’t exactly track me down and.

J.P. Der Boghossian (11:13.08)
Live on

Eric Marcus (11:28.811)
and dox me in the way that people are today, are doxed today. So I remember thinking, you’re at home watching CNN at one or two in the morning, calling a show, a live show to tell a guest that he’s a faggot. And I’m an author who’s publicizing his book, and I am on CNN. So, you

Who’s having a better time? Another caller called in and said that I had my rights. I had the right to be chained to his truck and dragged down the highway. I had the right to serve as a target practice.

J.P. Der Boghossian (12:08.888)
How do you deal with that?

Eric Marcus (12:11.076)
For whatever reason, at the time, I just let it roll off my back. Again, I was in the studio and felt very safe. know? Felt very safe. didn’t, for some reason, I was able to, some might say dissociate. Others might say just, I just let it roll off my back. It wasn’t personal. They didn’t know who I was. It was scary.

So, so I remember one person called up and said, how do you go on television and tell people that you’re gay? And I said, and I’ve watched this tape and I said, I was young, I was 30. I said, well, before I came on today, I took a deep breath. And it was it was scary in that regard that I was just just out publicly in a big way, and just out to my entire family in a big way, including my grandmother, which was a whole other experience.

And she came around, she was incredible and very supportive. But it was scary. And now it’s, you know, all these years later, it’s 36 years later. And, you know, I’ve done a lot of talking about gay stuff, and I’m not scared to go on television. And I came to really enjoy going up against the anti -gay radical right. Whenever I had the opportunity to be on a show, I was glad to be opposite one of those people. So I’m really good at

challenging them. I was on Bill O ‘Reilly’s television show quite a few years ago. And he just, I know his routine, he tries to get his, his guests to get upset. Wasn’t gonna happen. And consequently, he never had me on again. And the really depressing thing is that as soon as the cameras were off, he came across as very intelligent. He wasn’t a jerk. But on camera, he was, he was an idiot. And is.

I mean, it is very calculated in what he did. And so many of these people who pretend to be anti -gay are very calculated, knowing that it’s political weapon to be used for gain, for their gain in whatever game they’re playing.

J.P. Der Boghossian (14:24.174)
That’s what makes me feel it’s more dangerous actually because it’s a choice. It’s a calculated choice that they’re making knowing that, you know, it’s not that they’re steeped in this and they don’t know any better, whatever that means, but the fact that they’re like, no, we know exactly what we’re gonna do. We know exactly how to push the buttons and we’re gonna go for it. And that makes it all the more dangerous.

Eric Marcus (14:45.147)
Yeah, and Everett has been thus. been used for Anita Bryant and her crew with their Save Our Children campaign in 1977. They knew what they were doing. She, I think, actually believed what she was saying, but I think a lot of people around her just used it for their political purposes and used her.

J.P. Der Boghossian (15:08.696)
And then, so making gay history, the like original, I feel like it is the original podcast, a queer podcast, or at least in the early, you know, five or whatever. So how did the podcast come

Eric Marcus (15:12.876)
Yes.

Eric Marcus (15:24.795)
Also a convoluted story. had, I have, of course, of course it’s a convoluted story. I had thought I was done with what I called my gay work in, by 2008, which is when I turned over my entire archive to the New York Public Library with an agreement to digitize my collection so that a scholar someday could access my interviews. I knew they were important interviews. They were rare interviews, some of them one of a kind interviews with people who’d started our movement.

And I took a job with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, where I’d served on the board for four years, to rebuild all of their programs for people who’d lost loved ones to suicide. One of my books is about suicide loss. My father killed himself when I was 12, and it was always an area of interest for me. started work on that book in 1987 when I worked at Good Morning America and started pulling articles from their clip file.

So that was my volunteer work that turned into a job. It was one of those jobs where I was told they want to change and change was not as welcome as I thought and they thought it would be. And I was not a good hire. I’d worked for myself for years. I was not accustomed to working within an organization and understanding the politics. And I wound up being

guilty of insubordination and speaking up and saying no when I shouldn’t have, and got fired. So there I was in 2015, on September 11th, I got fired, and was 56 years old, a journalist, and had nothing that I really wanted to write as far as books, and had to figure out what I was gonna do next.

And I read a wonderful book called Life Reimagined by Barbara Bradley Haggerty, one of my favorite NPR correspondents who’s now left NPR. And it was about how to figure out change in midlife, what to do next. I was a little past midlife, but the book was very appropriate for me. And I also worked with a job coach to figure out what is it that I do.

Eric Marcus (17:42.287)
What we came up with was an incredible job coach. And what she came up with was that I tell stories. And that’s what I’ve done for my entire career. I tell stories in print, on television and ultimately on radio on demand. So I spent nearly a year trying to figure out what to do next. I lots of conversations and. Started with an education project.

I was working with an organization called History Unerased, brand new organization, Deb Fowler, who’s one of my heroes in this space. She’s an educator. And what we were going to do at Making Gay History was, and I was making history at the time, it was just me, I was going to provide Deb with short clips from my archive to anchor history lessons that could then be used by teachers.

And so I asked my neighbor, Sarah Burningham, in New York City, who had worked for the BBC and for NPR Local in Arkansas, if she could cut tape. And Sarah said, sure, I can cut tape, but what have you got? And so I shared with her a couple of things, and she started cutting these interviews, the two of them. And she got down to about 18 minutes, because we’re going to provide six minute pieces. Got down to 18 minutes, and she said, this sounds like a podcast. But.

I don’t know how to make a podcast. And so she said, I’m going to go to podcast school. This was the fall of 2016. This was Labor Day weekend, 2016. And she went to podcast school. And over the course of the weekend, worked on two pieces. And the final day, they had

experts in podcasting come in to work with the students. One of those people was Jenna Weiss -Berman, who had co -founded Pineapple Street Media. I think today it’s called Pineapple Street Studios. And Jenna, who is a lesbian, loved what we were doing, loved the work, I should say, and said to Sara, how can I help? And then very long story short, we launched the Making Gay History podcast five weeks later with a fully fledged website.

J.P. Der Boghossian (19:30.101)
my god.

Eric Marcus (19:48.996)
I wanted to provide full transcript, episode notes, archival photos to go along with the episodes with an expectation that teachers would use this. And for people who are just interested in digging deeper, I do not recommend launching a podcast with a fully -fledged website in two weeks. I’m sorry, in five weeks. But we had a grant, and the requirement of the grant was that I had to have something out during LGBTQ History Month that October.

I produced another podcast for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and we took two years to launch. Yeah, and mind you, we also commissioned original music for the Mammoth and Gay History theme. So it was quick. And then we just, we did 10 pieces, 10 episodes, not knowing where it was gonna go. We were told to expect maybe 500 downloads per episode and we wound up having 25 ,000 episode downloads the first season.

J.P. Der Boghossian (20:42.605)
Wow.

Eric Marcus (20:42.814)
And then since then, we’ve produced 13 seasons, more than 100 episodes. And we’ve had more than 6 million episode downloads in 200 countries and territories around the world. Yeah. And we’ve, in the last year, come back to our original project, which is education. We are working with the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, the largest union in the country. They provided a substantial grant for us.

J.P. Der Boghossian (20:53.026)
Wow.

Eric Marcus (21:09.727)
to work with 18 of their teachers from across the country to create lessons anchored by making a history podcast episodes. So we’ll begin releasing those this fall. They have three million members and they’ll be pushing these lessons out to their teachers, their middle and high school teachers for history classes, health classes, wherever psychology classes, wherever teachers think that these pieces, I’m sorry, these lessons will fit.

So I now have an education lead, a really terrific educator named Mary Hendra, who created the fellowship program and has worked with the teachers to create these lessons.

J.P. Der Boghossian (21:47.682)
Congratulations. All of this is amazing.

Eric Marcus (21:49.139)
Thanks. So again, is, this is there. If I had to chart this, I would need a very big wall. And so much of it’s serendipitous, a matter of meeting people. If Sarah Burningham hadn’t moved in next door to where I live, if Jenna West Berman hadn’t been at that event, if Kevin Jennings, who provided the first grant, hadn’t founded GLSEN and

been someone I interviewed and then had been working at the Arcus Foundation where he could give a grant, know, lots and lots of, there were so many people who were angels in this process. So that’s how Making Gay History, the podcast, came about. Yeah, so I could say that the Making Gay History, the book, or the original one was called Making History, changed my life. Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (22:26.35)
That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

J.P. Der Boghossian (22:34.284)
I really did. And I do want to get into that. Before we start talking about consenting adult, a lot of these, all of these books provide answers for each of our guests. These books have some type of answers to a question they’re asking. What question was consenting adult giving you answers to? Does that make sense how I worded that?

Eric Marcus (23:02.779)
No, does make sense. It answered the question.

Eric Marcus (23:09.97)
It’s a very good question that you asked because it did answer a question. It answered the question of who am I? Or what am I? Because I found myself in the pages of the book Consenting Adelt by Laura Z. Hobson. The second question I might have had if I had formulated it at that age, and I’m not sure I did or had.

Is it possible that my family, my mother, could ever accept me? And that book answered that question, which was yes, in that particular case with this story. Yes, the mother, who is the main character, ultimately accepted her child. But what stood out for me the first time I read a piece of that book was recognizing myself in

the character she was writing about, her son, who was a high school student, and I was a high school student, who wound up at a diner on his way back to school and was picked up by a guy in a white cable knit sweater, and who offered to drive him back to school, and it was raining,

Eric Marcus (24:29.995)
The guy took him to a quiet location and said, well, indicated with his head to the back of the station wagon that they should go in the back and said something to the effect, you really, you want to, you know you want to. And the chapter, I believe, ends with him, the boy, saying, it’s what I wanted, but I wished I hadn’t wanted

or something to that effect. And I just was so excited reading that passage. And it was just, it was electric. And then I hoped that, I was in my dentist’s office, of course, of all places, Dr. Tidalbaum on Metropolitan Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. And my classmate, Jane Bloom, my neighbor also, Jane Bloom’s mother was the secretary. And I just hoped they wouldn’t call me.

for my latest cavity to be filled because I needed to calm down and my pants were at that point bulging because I was so excited from what I had been reading. It was going to take a little while to calm myself. It was thrilling and terrifying to recognize myself in that way. It was so vivid. It remains vivid to this day. I was probably 14 or 15, probably 15. So that’s, I’m 65.

That’s 50 years ago.

J.P. Der Boghossian (25:56.398)
So let me ask the question officially now. So Eric, what is the queer book that saved your

Eric Marcus (26:04.046)
Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson, who was famous prior to that for writing a book called Gentleman’s Agreement about antisemitism, which was made into a very successful movie with all kinds of stars in it. I recently bought an original copy of that book because it did change my life. And if it didn’t save my life, it

Eric Marcus (26:30.365)
It was certainly of, it helped me understand my life and it was of great comfort. I just watched the movie the other day, starring Marlo Thomas. Marlo Thomas made the film. It is a terrible film made in the mid -1980s. is ter – terrible doesn’t begin to describe it. Did I cry at the end? Yes, of course, but it was terrible.

J.P. Der Boghossian (26:54.734)
Okay, so I watched it last night to prep, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get through the book. So I did watch the movie last night and I don’t know what it says about me. I really liked it. Well, first of all, I hadn’t seen anything, and this is bad of me, guess, maybe as a bad gay, I hadn’t seen Marlo Thomas do anything besides her sitcom, That Girl. So it was really lovely to see

Eric Marcus (26:57.012)
J.P. Der Boghossian (27:20.332)
doing something else. there was just I loved her smile. I found it to be very electric and magnetic in that girl. So whenever it started to like peek out and I was like, she’s going to make it. She’s going to be a good, you know, she’s going to accept him. You could just see that little magical smile coming out. And Martin Sheen. Something I noticed about Martin Sheen, he does this weird thing with his hands and he’s been doing it for decades, apparently, because I saw the same thing. And what was the

Eric Marcus (27:26.932)
Yes.

Eric Marcus (27:45.29)
J.P. Der Boghossian (27:50.13)
show that he did, Grace and Frankie, for Netflix. He does this weird like I’m, I don’t know, I don’t even know how to describe it but it’s, it’s, I really like the movie and how much does the movie align with the novel itself?

Eric Marcus (27:52.514)
huh. Yes.

Eric Marcus (28:03.274)
It aligns somewhat. made him older. They made the boy older. They made more of the relationship between the husband and wife.

J.P. Der Boghossian (28:08.45)
Really?

Eric Marcus (28:14.78)
They have Martin Sheen die and the scene with the doctor, you know, you have high blood pressure, that’s all over the place. This is only going one way. He’d had a stroke. He looked incredibly healthy. It’s like you don’t, but maybe, you know, things were different. It was the mid 80s. But the book is set earlier. The book is set in the 1970s. So the movie takes place a little later. The book isn’t quite so melodramatic. I found the

I found this melodrama to just be a bit much. The books unfold more slowly. There’s more detail. And the scene at the diner in the book, in my memory of it anyway, that it unfolds more slowly and builds. And for a boy like me at age 15 reading that scene for the first time, I’d never read anything like it before.

It was just thrilling. And in the movie, it happens pretty fast. And it fades to black, you know. Yes. Yes. Oh, and it’s very much it was a TV movie of the week. And it was brave of her to do it. This was 1985 when the film was made. So hats off to Marla Thomas for having done it. But yeah, yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (29:16.822)
Right. As they had to do in the TV movies of the 1980s. Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (29:31.422)
And Marty Sheen. So I’m curious, walk me through then being a teenager and reading this for the first time. I that must have been a very heady experience.

Eric Marcus (29:42.952)
I thought I was the only one in the world. Except for, I remember meeting an acquaintance of my mother’s who lived on the Upper East Side and he was very femme and wore a wig and had a little chihuahua that he always held in his arms and was the sort of stereotype of what we came to think of as the stereotype for gay men.

And I remember thinking that’s when I met him. There was nothing about him that made me think of that I had anything in relation to him except that I did know in some way that I was attracted to men. And I knew that this guy was homosexual, at least as I’d come to understand homosexuals. But I didn’t know that there could be

private school student who was handsome and was a swimmer or whatever he was. I don’t remember if he was a swimmer in the book, it possibly was.

Eric Marcus (30:45.451)
I could relate to the character in her book. That’s, that’s, that was the first time that I saw myself in print. And there’s a line in the movie, it’s also a line from the book, that I came to use, and I’d forgotten that I came to use it, when people would ask me to explain what it was like.

to be a gay teenager as kids are coming of age. I went to summer camp and in summer camp kids went on bunk, the boys went on raids of the girls’ bunks to try to get to first base or second base and that’s not baseball. And I remember thinking, why would anyone want to get up in the middle of the night to try to kiss a girl? I just didn’t, I didn’t understand it. And in Consenting Adult, and in both the book and the movie, he talks about seeing the world through a thick plate glass window that you can see what’s going on but you can’t hear or feel it.

And that’s exactly how I felt. That I just, I couldn’t understand. And I felt so abnormal because I didn’t understand. And did not feel normal until the first time I was fully naked with another young man when I was 17. And for the first time thought, oh, this is what normal feels like. This is, this is, this is normal. This is who I am.

J.P. Der Boghossian (32:07.32)
Were you able to keep a copy in your house? Like did you purchase a copy and had it with

Eric Marcus (32:11.074)
Well, no, no, no. I read an excerpt in a magazine in my dentist’s office and left the magazine there. I don’t remember when I bought and read the full copy of the book. I just can’t recall. It would have been after I left home for college. I didn’t keep anything at home that would have given me away, never.

J.P. Der Boghossian (32:17.325)
Mm -hmm.

Eric Marcus (32:37.482)
I wasn’t one of those kids who hid things under his mattress. I was much more cautious than that.

J.P. Der Boghossian (32:44.12)
What did the title mean to you at that time? Consenting Adult.

Eric Marcus (32:53.058)
If I remember correctly, in the book, the mother character talks about her son and his partner being consenting adults. That their relationship was consensual, that it was something that each of them was comfortable with. I don’t know if I thought about it in any deep terms at the time. But it is a book about consenting adults, both the son and also the mother who

who accepted her son. She was a consenting adult in accepting who he was. Years later, I was in my doctor’s office, and this is only a few years ago, had had an exam and walked out into the waiting room and my doctor followed me. He’s been my doctor forever, Dr. Ronald Grossman, who was one of the first doctors to treat AIDS patients in New York.

And he said, do you recognize the guy sitting in the chair, the chair in the waiting room? I said, no. And he said, that’s Chris Hobson, Laura Z. Hobson’s son. I thought, my god. And he said, do you want an introduction? I said, of course I want an introduction. And I absolutely

Eric Marcus (34:17.747)
Chris wasn’t so happy about being gushed over. And it turns out that the real life story of Laura Z. Hobson and her son is much more interesting than the story in the book. And he didn’t talk to his mother for, I think, two or three years after it was published, because she used the letter he wrote to her in her book where he came out without asking his permission.

And he turned the family, she knew what she was doing. She turned it into a very WASPy family. He was a private school student. In fact, they were Jewish and she was a single mother and her son was actually very involved in the gay rights movement and something of a radical. I interviewed him. We did a Patreon interview with him for making gay history. It was fascinating. Fascinating.

J.P. Der Boghossian (35:06.552)
Talk about consent.

Eric Marcus (35:08.088)
Yes, she didn’t get his consent. She did not get his consent to use the letter.

J.P. Der Boghossian (35:14.072)
So she wrote this entire novel, didn’t tell him the premise, didn’t tell him she was like the entire process of it. Drafts, galleys, publication, like when did he ultimately find out about

Eric Marcus (35:26.928)
It’s possible that he didn’t know until she sent him the book. I don’t remember exactly the interview, but it was not a good situation. Yeah, he was very upset. Sometimes, you know, she was my hero, but then you hear about something like that. But as I explained to Chris when I interviewed him, I didn’t know any of that, and the book had great meaning for me.

it really, I swear I can picture myself to this day sitting in that office and coming across that passage about the guy in the cable knit sweater. And then lucky for me, I had the equivalent of that guy in the cable knit sweater when I was 17.

J.P. Der Boghossian (36:15.598)
Can you share more about that?

Eric Marcus (36:17.543)
Yeah, he was, we did an episode about this in my season on coming of age during the 1970s. Yeah, I was 17, he was 23, he was a college student who lived a couple of houses down from where I lived. And he was the first person I ever said, ever told that I was gay. And he was a kind, lovely, thoughtful person. And he also happened to be very beautiful and…

And I was lucky that he was my first. You know, I know a lot of people who talk about their first experiences not being so good. Mine was memorable in a very good way. And he was a thoughtful person who was terrified of me because I was underage. But was very good in talking with me about what it meant to be gay, what it meant to be a man. One of the books he gave me to read was Men and Masculinity.

J.P. Der Boghossian (36:54.99)
Mm

Eric Marcus (37:17.351)
is a fascinating book about what it means to be a man because I was still a boy. I was just a 17 year old. My father had been dead since I was 12 and I was lucky to have a mentor who was a few years older than I was.

Eric Marcus (37:35.473)
helped me through that phase of life.

J.P. Der Boghossian (37:39.214)
Wow. Well, I don’t know actually in the novel, but in the film, Jeff, our main character, he’s very deliberate about how he chooses to come out, right? It’s first the letter to say, want to have a conversation with you, mom, specifically mom, not dad. And then he calls, I believe, and then he sets up a restaurant, but then he’s like, let’s not go into the restaurant, let’s do a walk first. Okay.

Eric Marcus (37:49.788)
Mm -hmm.

Eric Marcus (37:54.106)
Yes.

Eric Marcus (38:03.066)
It’s a little different than the book. see, he the book begins with a letter to your mom, dear mom, maybe it was your mom or your mother. I am a homosexual. So in the and so in the book, it’s at beginning, it’s the front of the book. He comes out as a homosexual and asks his mother for help that he wants to see it. He wants me wants help. And so he is sent to a psychiatrist. So the book book movies are always different from books and the movie they build up the coming out.

And they have just the right number of scenes in the movie of young men swimming in competition.

J.P. Der Boghossian (38:43.468)
watching it last night when my partner’s was like, what are you watching right now? He’s I was watching on my phone, which is so Gen Y of me, I guess. And he was like, what are you watching? I was like, it’s a it’s a movie. I’m watching it for tomorrow. It’s my homework. But he was he was he wanted to suddenly watch it with me. But where I was going with that question is, did you find anything about either the original passage you read

J.P. Der Boghossian (39:10.299)
for you and your own coming out process or how you’re approaching

Eric Marcus (39:16.1)
Yes, but I didn’t follow any of it. I was a teenager. What happened was that Anita Bryant launched her anti -gay campaign. I was home for the summer of 1977 and I remember being furious at lunch one day. We had Time Magazine or Newsweek, can’t remember which cover she was on. And I was railing about how outrageous it was. And my mother said, why are you so upset about? And I don’t remember what I said, but I deflected her question.

And that night or soon after, I was going to visit a friend of mine, one of my high school friends. Actually, we’ve been friends since junior high school. And she said, how’s Richard doing? said, well, he’s been kind of depressed. And she said, what’s going on? I said, I think he might be gay. And she said, you say that so casually. And then she paused. And then she got very pale. And she said, maybe that’s because you are, too. And I said,

See you later, Mom. And I left the kitchen, went to the garage, got in the car, drove to my friend Richard’s house. And I said, my God, my God, my mother just asked me if I was gay. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And yeah, I did not follow the dear mom, my mom, route. And so I waited until pretty late, drove home, rolled down the down the driveway with the engine off and lights off.

crawled up the stairs, so the way our house was configured, there were three floors, and I was on the third floor, and to get to the staircase to the third floor, there was a door, and so I crawled up the staircase to the second floor, my mother’s bedroom was right off of the staircase, and opened the door, and it was a slight creak, and my mother said, we need to talk. It was horrible. I was terrified, absolutely terrified.

And so I sat down on her bed, and she’d been waiting up. And I said, and she said, I said, yes, I’m, I’m gay. I don’t remember if she asked me at that point, but I said, yes, I’m, I’m gay. And from what I had read and what I knew was I had investigated P -flag up to that point, which was once known as parents, friends, and families of lesbians and gays. And I had learned that many parents feel guilty. So I said, do you feel guilty? And she said,

Eric Marcus (41:39.326)
to someone who thought of himself as the best little boy in the world who never stayed out late, never drank, never smoked, didn’t do drugs, got high grades. She said, no, I don’t feel guilty. I’m disappointed. And I burst into tears. That was the worst thing she could have said. wish I, don’t, she had said if she was guilty, that would have made sense. But no, she said that she was disappointed. And that was the beginning of a long conversation. We had a

J.P. Der Boghossian (41:58.412)
Mm -hmm.

Eric Marcus (42:08.371)
I think that night she said that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist and I told her I would see a psychiatrist if she went to PFLAG to a meeting. It was many years before she went to PFLAG. We both said no and we’re both rather stubborn. I had thought and didn’t find out until years later that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist not to change because she actually didn’t really understand homosexuality. She wanted me to go to a psychiatrist because she could tell that I was depressed, which I was.

and was afraid that I would kill myself like my father did. So I eventually went to a therapist in my early 20s and just for a year and then went back when I was 32 and stayed for 31 years with my therapist. And my mom joined PFLAG ultimately and became a big activist and was a co -founder of the Queens New York chapter of PFLAG, which she co -founded with among others, Gene Manford, who was the founder, co -founder of PFLAG.

J.P. Der Boghossian (42:39.114)
Mmm.

Eric Marcus (43:04.491)
Period, PFLAG National. So, but I didn’t know my mom, oh she went all in and I didn’t know it. I didn’t know she co -founded PFLAG Queens until 14 years after she was dead.

J.P. Der Boghossian (43:08.664)
So your mom went all in.

J.P. Der Boghossian (43:18.04)
How did you not know?

Eric Marcus (43:19.851)
She didn’t tell me. So I had once given her little lecture about how this was my issue and that she, as it happens with PFLAG parents sometimes, they become the activists and I was a little annoyed. And so she took it to heart and just didn’t tell me.

Eric Marcus (43:37.335)
But one thing I was very, I was of course very proud of what she did now that I know about it, but when she was still alive, and it was in 1980s, maybe it was the early 90s, she had gotten her social work degree, she became a counselor, and she volunteered at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, leading groups for gay men whose partners had died of AIDS. So my mom was great with gay people and really loved, she loved gay people, she was…

She loved in part being a celebrity mom.

J.P. Der Boghossian (44:10.518)
Eric Marcus (44:12.3)
On vacation, she would carry one of my books with her. You know, casually read it at the pool wherever she was. And invariably, invariably, she met gay men wherever she went. Yeah. Yep. And she’s been dead 20 years. She died fairly, fairly

J.P. Der Boghossian (44:15.359)
Ahahaha

J.P. Der Boghossian (44:31.202)
my

Eric Marcus (44:32.332)
Thanks.

J.P. Der Boghossian (44:35.224)
So then I guess my, I guess it’s an obvious question and maybe too simple question, but did you find consenting adults influencing how you were going about writing either your first book or making history?

Eric Marcus (44:39.923)
I love obvious questions.

Eric Marcus (44:53.653)
Making history which became making gay history. No, it did not. But I used techniques that I learned having read that book and other novels when I wrote autobiographies. I wrote Greg Louganis’s autobiography, The Olympic Diving Champion, among others. Writing an autobiography is like a nonfiction.

novel. And you use techniques very similar, similar techniques. And that’s, you have a very strict structure, as you would in a book like Consenting Adult, you want to leave the reader at the end of a chapter wondering what comes next. And that’s how you write an autobiography. Also, you want the reader to keep reading. So I can’t say it directly influenced what I did later. So much of what I did was accidental.

I would never have taken, well, the first book, The Male Couple’s Guide, wasn’t so accidental because I pursued it. Making history, which became making gay history, was not my idea. I never would have taken on a project that was so ambitious and well beyond what I thought I was capable of doing. As, as,

As I noted when we first started talking, I was an urban history major with a focus on architecture and urban planning. I didn’t know about LGBTQ history. And in fact, I said to the editor, why me? I’m not an academic. I don’t know this history. And he said, I want a book that people can read. And I want someone who’s fresh to the subject. And I was so fresh to the subject that I thought that the gay rights movement began at Stonewall. But in rereading Laura Hobson’s book, Consenting Adult last year, I think I reread it.

She talks about the Manishing Society, which was founded in 1950 and was pre -Stonewall. So I must have known that there was a movement pre -Stonewall. So that was my first taste of our history, which, you and then once I was in it, so one of the reasons I didn’t want to write the book was that I found history really boring, everything that I’d learned in school. I remember in junior high school, I had Mr. Fetterbush for American history.

Eric Marcus (47:05.402)
Anyway, it was world history. And he read from the textbook and expected us to take notes. The only, yeah, eww. The only interesting thing I remember from that class is when he, as an aside, mentioned he was in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. But then he wouldn’t answer any questions about it. So I said to my editor when I agreed to do this project, said, I don’t want to write a boring history book.

J.P. Der Boghossian (47:11.767)
Ew.

Eric Marcus (47:30.354)
and then discovered through oral history how interesting history is when you go to the primary source and talk to people who live that history. So I had the opportunity to do that in print with the books and with the podcast. The joy of that is sharing these stories and the voices of the people I interviewed. And it’s so multi -dimensional in comparison to reading words on the page.

J.P. Der Boghossian (47:47.704)
Mm -hmm.

J.P. Der Boghossian (47:58.794)
In a previous episode, we got to chat with Greg Louganis. He was a featured author and he was telling us about writing, Breaking the Surface, and having you there with him. And he was all very, very lovely, but he said it was a very emotional process, particularly, and I did not realize this and maybe I should have intuited it, but he was like, they were trying, the publisher was trying to get that

completed because they didn’t know if he was going to be alive very much longer. I mean, that must have been such an intense book to co -author.

Eric Marcus (48:37.712)
It was very intense. And we were keen on getting this book done and published before he died. This was before the cocktail. And he had, I think, 200 T cells at the time. I knew, and he knew, that people with his profile could get sick and die very quickly. And I was determined to get it done fast so that he would see that people still loved him, even though he was gay, and even though he had AIDS.

that he had earned that. But he just assumed that people wouldn’t. And oh my god, the outpouring after the book was published. The first book signing was in Fort Lauderdale at the Olympic Diving Center. And head of the Olympic Diving Center would not come to the event because Greg was gay and had AIDS. But there were 1 ,000 people in line. 1 ,000 people.

to come for a book signing. And it wasn’t just gay people. It was gay people. was everyone you can imagine. There were a couple of nuns in line. And at the very end of the line was a little boy and his father. And I said to the father, what, what, you know, and I watched as this little boy went up to the desk and hugged Greg. He couldn’t have been more than eight or 10 years old. And I said, why?

Are you here? And he said, my little boy saw Greg on television and said, Daddy, I just want to go and tell him I hope he feels better.

Greg had the capacity for whatever reason to convey to people his vulnerability. And people responded. I was with him for the first week of the book tour. And everywhere we went, there was a outpouring. Huge outpouring. It was a number one New York Times bestseller for five weeks, nine weeks on the bestseller list, not that I’m counting.

Eric Marcus (50:37.877)
And I knew at the time that this was a singular experience, that this doesn’t happen very often. We went to the White House. Bill Clinton invited Greg to the White House. I went along too and called my partner Barney in New York and I said, get on a train. We’re going to the White House. And it was thrilling. But his life was very, he had a very challenging life. And that was tough. He got very depressed during the.

I lived at his house for weeks at a time and I knew he had a history of suicide attempts and I was very worried and I insisted at one point, I said we are, he didn’t talk to me for two days and I said we are going to see a therapist because you cannot do this work without being in the hands of a professional. I’m not, I was just the co -author.

And so I found a therapist, a friend of mine who was a child psychologist, well suited for Greg given his trauma, the various traumas he’d lived through, drove him to the appointment and sat outside in the car when he went to his first appointment.

J.P. Der Boghossian (51:45.63)
Eric, wow.

Eric Marcus (51:47.354)
Yeah, that was an intense. There were lot of tears with that one. That was very intense. There was one one one more story. We were in Miami Beach at forgetting the name of the bookstore. So wonderful bookstore. No longer there. Books and Books, I think, was the name of it. And we left the store. It’s a pedestrian mall on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. We were chased down Lincoln Road and I was leading the way back to the car.

And I realized at some point that it was a crowd. didn’t, they were, don’t think they were necessarily hostile. They were just people who wanted a piece of Greg. And I, and I called the publisher and I said, I am the coauthor. I am not his bodyguard and you have to get security at every place we go. I was, I was all that was standing between Greg and the crowd. and I’m, I’m a fast runner and Greg was pretty fast too, but, and after that they hired, local security.

J.P. Der Boghossian (52:37.793)
Ugh.

Eric Marcus (52:45.746)
There was a, the next stop was Atlanta and one of the people who was assigned to us was an off -duty Atlanta police officer. She was probably six foot one, 200 pounds. And she gave each of us a bullet and she said, I would take a bullet for you. Lesbian. It was amazing. I still have the bullet.

I tried giving it to my local police precinct, they wouldn’t take the bullet.

J.P. Der Boghossian (53:11.374)
That’s intense.

J.P. Der Boghossian (53:17.738)
He told a very endearing anecdote. He said that you had to explain to him what being on the New York Times best -selling list and how important that was. was like, Eric had to tell me that meant five gold medals. And I went,

Eric Marcus (53:29.489)
Like a lot of elite athletes, Greg led a very sheltered life. And I’ve worked with other elite athletes and it’s astonishing how naive they often are and how unworldly because they have led a very focused life. And there were things that I mentioned to Greg that were just part of the ether, you who was vice president during such and such administration or he just, he didn’t know, he didn’t have an education.

And that’s really, I think, one of the tragedies of elite athletes. They often become things, things to be trained and don’t become fully rounded human beings. I haven’t been able to watch the Olympics since doing Greg’s book. I have not been able to watch the Olympics since I worked with Greg on his book. I just can’t. Because I know what these athletes have gone through and all the cheering and all the rest and then.

the what after, what happens after, so what if they win or what if they don’t win? And it just seems so exploitive that I find it awful.

J.P. Der Boghossian (54:41.774)
I don’t know how to respond to that.

J.P. Der Boghossian (54:47.15)
because we’re recording this before the Olympics are coming up here

Eric Marcus (54:47.474)
I know it goes beyond, you know, the Summer Olympics. It’s like, I know it goes on beyond the scenes. And it’s hard to get excited about these athletes and what they do and then what they do after. And so many of them have lives that are, lost after they are finished because they don’t have, they’re not educated. They don’t have money.

They don’t have careers. They haven’t thought past age 20, whatever. I remember working when I was working with Greg. He retired at 28. I was just at the beginning of my career when I worked with him. He didn’t know what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He also thought he was going to die. And I had my whole life ahead of me. Now, mind you, I didn’t know Greg had AIDS when I first started working with him.

Yep. Yep. He didn’t tell me that until we sat down to do the first interview for the proposal for the book. And I clipped my microphone that I used for making gay history to his collar. And he just looked in my office. It was my I lived in a studio apartment. It my office and home on 69th Street in Broadway, Manhattan. And mind you, I was just I couldn’t believe I was I was meeting Greg Luganis.

And he looked so uncomfortable. said, is there something you’d like to talk about before we get started? He said, yes. He said, you remember I told you about Jim? I can’t remember now if his name was really Jim or it was something else. My boyfriend, he said, Jim, my boyfriend and my manager. said, yeah, I remember you talked about him. He said, he died. He had AIDS. I have AIDS too.

I had already formulated in my mind what this book was going to be, what the story was going to be. was going to be a happily ever after. Greg Luganus comes out and he’s got a great life. And it suddenly changed to, my god, Greg is going to die. Mind you, we got an extra bump up in the advance from the publisher once we shared that with them. there’s a, yeah, yeah, there was a premium for having AIDS.

J.P. Der Boghossian (56:53.88)
I hope

Eric Marcus (56:59.573)
And that’s when it became a race to get the book done. That’s another project that changed my life. Another book, I should say, that changed my life. In no small part because through Greg, I met my partner who I’ve been with for 30 years. Yeah.

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:14.53)
Really? Wow.

Eric Marcus (57:18.674)
So it didn’t save my life, but it changed my life. I’m sitting in the house now that we built, moved into a year ago.

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:28.238)
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Well, talk to me more

J.P. Der Boghossian (57:38.378)
making history and the, because you said earlier about how it was life -changing for you and even life -saving. So unpack that a little bit more for me about how that process saved

Eric Marcus (57:51.006)
Well, I didn’t know that I had gay ancestors before I started that work. And I had the opportunity to interview people who were there at the very beginning, whether it was Chuck Rowland or Dick Lichoy, didn’t like so much. All kinds of people, Barbara Gettings and Kayla Housen, Frank Kameny, all these people who were inspirational, Morty Manford, who co -founded P -Flag with his mom, so that in life, I was able to call on in my head

all of these voices that I now share with people through the podcast so that they can call on these people. So when I was afraid or, for example, Morty Manford, age 21, in a very public setting challenged the mayor of the city of New York. Age 21, when he was president of the Gay Activist Alliance. I was in any number of situations where I was afraid and thinking, look, if Morty could do that, I can do this. I also acquired mentors along the way, Kayla Housen.

who was Barbara Giddings’ I became good friends with, especially in her later years. And we would talk every other week. And if my spirit was flagging, particularly around making a history or about, I was on the board of the American LGBTQ Plus Museum, which we were in the process of founding, and she said, you can’t give up. You have to keep going. And she was in her late 80s, early 90s. She’d had two strokes.

But she was fierce. So when I’d call her, she’d call me and she’d say, what do you got? And she was a journalist, a photojournalist, and she always wanted to know and was very encouraging. I had an early mentor early on when I was working on the book, Randy Schiltz, who I got to meet, who wrote And the Band Played On, probably one of the best journalists covering the AIDS crisis. And he said, call me anytime you feel

you’ve hit a wall, I’m here. So I acquired a whole pantheon of people, both living now mostly dead, whose voices I hear and voices that keep me going at times.

[music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
I want to thank Eric for being on the show today.

Making Gay History is about to release 10-part series on the experiences of LGBTQ people in the Nazi regime. There will be a number of different voices in other languages and they will be using actors to provide voice over. And there will also be testimonies as well. It will come out later this year or early 2025.

Eric also served as host and script doctor on an upcoming podcast about an American Gay General. Stay tuned for more details. It also comes out later this year.

He’s also pitched a new podcast, but he wouldn’t tell me about it because he can’t. Boo.

Finally, as if all of that wasn’t enough, he produces a podcast called Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust. They are at work on the fourth season. Season three was titled “Remembering Vilna: The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In 10 episodes it brought to life the Lithuanian city Vilna and it’s Jewish community through recorded testimonies from Holocaust survivors. Work that has taken on an urgent significance for Eric as he recently learned about members of his own family were killed in the Holocaust.

For all the release dates and how to find these projects you have visit making gay history dot org. As well as the Fortunoff Archive at Yale’s website. They are also on social media and we’ve included all the links in the show notes and on our website.

[theme music]

J.P. Der Boghossian
Well, thanks for listening today.

Our podcasts are executive produced by Jim Pounds. Accounting and creative support for our podcasts is provided by Gordy Erickson. Our associate producers are Archie Arnold, K. Jason Bryan, and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kaefer, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shea, and Sean Smith.

Our Patreon subscribers are Steven D, Terry D., Steven Flam, Ida Goteberg, Thomas Mckna, and Gary Nygaard. Our soundtrack and sound effects were provided through royalty free licenses.
Our website is this queer book dot com. And if you want to be on the show, fill out the form on the home page.

Permission to use the theme to Making Gay History provided by Eric Marcus. The theme was composed by Fritz Meyers.

We are on social media. We’re @thisqueerbook and at @jpderboghossian on Instagram. We also have a Facebook page.

And until our next episode, see you queers and allies at the bookstores!