October is one of my favorite months. It has everything: Halloween, LGBTQ+ History Month (founded by Rodney Wilson in 1993 in St. Louis, Missouri), cute sweaters, light jackets, crisp mornings and warm evenings, apples, apple cider, apple pie, the sweet wet *pop* you get when you throw a slightly soft apple at a tree. What more could you want?

Also: The Brooklyn Borough President named When Brooklyn Was Queer as one of “The 10 Brooklyn Defining Books,” along with classics like A Tree Goes in Brooklyn! So that was a pretty great start to the month.

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Books

I needed some good fiction this month. Work has been crazy (this will be a constant refrain until the day in 2028 when the American LGBTQ+ Museum opens, I’m sure), and I wanted a book that could grab me and transport me instantly, so I picked up De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s The Fervent Whites. De’Shawn is a fantastic writer (and good friend), and The Fervent Whites is a mix of realist 1980s historical fiction about race and family in an upstate New York Town, and a dark thriller full of secrets, kidnapping, and murder. It was the PERFECT book to have when the subway went crazy yesterday and my 45 minute commute took two hours.

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Queer History

Last month, I met a fantastic historian named Hannah Yore, who’s collecting the oral histories of older lesbians from around the globe in a project called In Time. Not only is she preserving essential stories, she’s ensuring that in every country she does an interview, there is at least one archive with a full set of all of the interviews. The project doesn’t launch publicly until next year, but she’s already collected dozens of histories.

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Events

This is a busy month for me!

11/6 - Come down to the NYC Municipal Archives and hear me talk about the Women’s House of Detention: both what the actual prison was (and how it transformed Greenwich Village), and how I used the records at the Municipal Archives to find and tell the story of the women and trans masc folks incarcerated in it.

11/8 - Join me and my friend (and sometime Bennington MFA colleague) Cliff Thompson at the Community Bookstore as we discuss his new novel, Let Us Go Then, You & I. Cliff’s a brilliant essayist and visual artist, and one of the things I loved most about this book is how real it felt- like I was dropping into a completely realized world that extended far beyond the boundaries of what I was reading on the page. I devoured it.

11/9 - Gay American History turns 50 and the American LGBTQ+ Museum is going all out! When I was in college everyone talked about two big queer books: the big blue book (The Routledge Lesbian & Gay Studies Reader) and the big red book (Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History). At a time when there was barely any field of queer history, JNK collected incredible primary source documents about queer lives and identities spanning hundreds of years on this continent. Join us at the New York Historical to celebrate the book’s 50th anniversary.

11/11 - I love The Gilded Age (the show, but also mostly the actual Gilded Age and its batshit maximalism), and on Sunday the 11th, I’ll be joining the incredibly talented Denée Benton (Peggy Scott on the show) and the brilliant Brittany Packnett Cunningham for a discussion of race, class, and queerness in the 19th century, followed by a ball organized by my old friend Luna Ortiz. (Can’t make it but curious? I’ve written about Julien Fellowes’ simultaneous historical acumen and blindness when it comes to queer history before.)

11/16 - For the last few years, I’ve been eagerly listening along as my friend Tim Stewart-Winter researched the hidden history of Walter Jenkins, who was LBJ’s closest advisor right up until Jenkins was arrested for sex in a men’s room. On the 16th, we’ll be in conversation at his book launch for OUTED: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest that Transformed a Presidency at the Bureau of General Services, Queer Division.

11/21 - I’ll be back at the Municipal Archives for a panel discussion with historians Tara Hart and Riah Lee Kinsey to talk about how we can mine public archives for hidden voices!

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That’s all for now

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