Eric Marcus

For the fag- Hey, stick that in your fucking eye! [gentle music]

I'm Eric Marcus, and this is Making Gay History: The Queens of Welfare Island.

The playwright Travis Lee Russ and I are friends, and when he told me about The Gorgeous Nothings and the Welfare Island fag ward, I was hooked, too.

I couldn't wait to dig into Travis's research and find out more, and I can't wait to share what we found with you.

The Queens of Welfare Island is a production of Making Gay History.

It was made possible with generous support from the Life Jacket Theater Company, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, Ty Ashford and Nicholas Chitkoff, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Christopher Street Financial, the Marcus Family Foundation, Rick Hoffman, Bill Kux, Robert Dodd, Maureen Bennett, Maria Lefkarides, Emily and David Tobin, Richard and Minette Marcus, the Calamus Foundation, and Christine, Bryan, and Alex White, in addition to the many hundreds of other donors who make it possible to bring you this work.

I'm Eric Marcus.

Until next time.

I knew when to take advantage of luck when it, you know, when it crossed my path.

And I did a lot of advocacy in the LGBTQIA plus community beforehand, you know, gay marriage and archiving, working with Eric Marcus and Making Gay History and Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, archiving our history and understanding where we came from.

And I say that because when I got to convention and found out, oh my God, there's a group.

And there's folks that, excuse me, are doing good things together.

[laughs] And they didn't even know what the word gay was.

Yeah, I read a, a phenomenal historical chro- chronicle by Eric Marcus around making gay history, and he re- was remarking, it was a beautiful oral history project, Clarissa, and it is just-

Mm

... astounding.

Jingle, jingle, jingle

I'm Eric Marcus.

This is Making Gay History.

In our newest season, The Queens of Welfare Island, we're inviting you to join us at the Fag Follies.

in part because there is limited documentation of the events that night.

But in a 1987 interview with historian Eric Marcus, Johnson stated that she hadn't arrived that night to Stonewall until the uprising was well underway.

She also said that the police had forced her and others onto the bar's wall to line up and be frisked the night before the rebellion began.

and then the police returned the next day to set Stonewall on fire.