He Wore His Medals to Come Out: Leonard Matlovich and the Cover That Changed Everything

On October 22, 1999, a scrappy indie film opened on 25 screens and quietly changed queer history forever. Kimberly Peirce spent five years making the world fall in love with Brandon Teena before the violence ever arrived -- and that was the whole strategy. Make the audience grieve the person before they learn the details of the crime. Boys Don't Cry grossed $11.5 million on a $2 million budget, launched Hilary Swank to an Academy Award, and put Brandon Teena's name in front of millions of peo...

John Duran was there for all of it. He came out in the glitter of the 1970s: a midnight Rocky Horror at the Tiffany Theater, a fake ID at Studio One, and a job at Disneyland where he ended up dating Peter Pan. Then AIDS arrived, and between 1985 and 1995 he lost 104 friends. In this Rearview Rendezvous conversation, recorded at the rainbow crosswalk at San Vicente and Santa Monica, the civil rights attorney and former West Hollywood mayor tells the whole arc: defending ACT UP protesters strai...

On October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was beaten, robbed, and left tied to a fence post in freezing Wyoming temperatures because he was gay. He died six days later. What followed was eleven years of organized grief, cross-racial coalition building, and a mother from Wyoming who walked into congressional hearings and refused to be dismissed. Judy Shepard helped build one of the most strategically brilliant legislative campaigns in LGBTQ history, linking her son's murder to James Byrd...

Graham Chapman came out on live British television in 1972, when it could have ended everything, and then just... kept going. Doctor, drunk turned sober, Python, pioneer, and honestly one of the funniest people to ever exist. This is the story of a man who turned joy into resistance before that was even a phrase. Chapman was the openly gay member of Monty Python at a time when the law had only just changed, when coming out meant losing your career, when humor was one of the only weapons that ...

In 1984, a Filipino housing activist and a lesbian labor organizer threw a block party on six blocks of industrial asphalt in San Francisco and called it "Megahood." They weren't trying to start an institution, they were trying to save one. Forty-two years later, that party draws up to 400,000 people and has donated over seven million dollars to charity. This is the origin story of Folsom Street Fair: part neighborhood fight, part AIDS-era survival, part queer joy that refused to be gentrifie...