🎙Interview: Eric Marcus
Meet the host of Making Gay History podcast.
Journalist and author Eric Marcus (he/him) is the founder and host of the award-winning Making Gay History podcast, which mines his decades-old audio archive of rare interviews to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it. Eric is also co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. And he is the author and co-author of a dozen books, including Is It A Choice?, Why Suicide?, and Breaking the Surface, the #1 New York Times bestselling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. Eric is a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum. For more information on Eric and his work on Making Gay History, click here to watch a brief NBC News profile.
Learn more about the Making Gay History podcast by visiting the website. You can also follow the show on Twitter/X, Instagram and LinkedIn.
When did you know that you wanted to document LGBT history? What did you feel was missing from the mainstream conversation?
This work wasn’t my idea! I will take credit for coming up with the idea for my first book, The Male Couple’s Guide to Living Together, which was published in 1988. That book was my excuse to research all the questions I had about how to have a relationship with another man at a time in history when everyone said it couldn’t possibly last. (When I started work on the book I’d been together with my first partner for three years and was pretty clueless. We lasted another six years. My current partner and I just celebrated our 30th anniversary.)
My history book, which was originally published in 1992 under the title Making History, was commissioned by an editor at Harper & Row (now HarperCollins). It was his idea to document the history of our movement in the form of an oral history book patterned after the work of the great oral historian Studs Terkel. I was at a moment in my career as a journalist when it had become clear that I would not get to do what I wanted to do, which was to be an on-air correspondent at CBS News, where I was working on their morning show as a segment producer. I was told point blank that they would never put an openly gay person on camera on national news. It was around the same time that I was offered the opportunity to write Making History. So I made the leap and left CBS to write the book.
It was once I started my research that my passion for our history was kindled. I had no idea that we had such a rich and proud history of activism dating back to the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. And the people I got to meet and interview were extraordinarily interesting and inspiring. Sitting with them and hearing about their lives and adventures was the best kind of time travel.
The Making Gay History podcast came decades later, but because I had recorded my interviews using broadcast quality equipment and had donated my archive to the New York Public Library with an agreement that they digitize my collection, I was well-positioned to mine my own archive for the podcast, which we launched in 2016. I really can’t take credit for the podcast idea, which was our founding producer’s idea—Sara Burningham, who now produces the Amicus podcast for Slate. The impetus for revisiting the archive came after I was fired from my job at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, but that’s a story for another time.
Most of your books were published in the between the late 80s and early 2000s. What was it like during those times, writing about LGBT history?
In the late 1980s when my first book was published, we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis, so there was a lot of misinformation and prejudice regarding LGBTQ people, gay men in particular. There were no out celebrities speaking up for us and no one who was out in mainstream media. When I was interviewed about The Male Couple’s Guide I found that the journalists were much more nervous than I was talking about homosexuality and rarely, if ever, asked anything beyond the most basic questions: When did you know? How did your parents react? Who plays the husband and who plays the wife? I often felt like I was the representative of people from another planet and there was often the assumption that I represented all gay people, which was certainly not the case.
In many ways it was extremely exciting and a privilege to share the truth about our history and my own life. The most fun I had was going up against the right wing nuts, like Bill O’Reilly (on his Fox show) and Paul Cameron from the Family Research Council (on an episode of the “Donahue” show).
Now that you have been podcasting about LGBT history since 2016, have you noticed a shift in interest in this topic from when you were publishing books?
Such a dramatic difference! When the book was first published in 1992, our history wasn’t considered an integral part of the American story. There weren’t out teachers and professors teaching this history. There were very few other books about our history that had been published (two that I recall). And virtually no LGBTQ people (who weren’t called LGBTQ people back then) knew anything about the history of our movement. I was one of those ignorant people—back before I started work on my book—who thought it all started with the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
How has Making Gay History evolved? You’ve done thirteen seasons now, including a half-dozen bonus episodes, which is pretty incredible!
I could never have imagined! The podcast started out as a small education project where we were going to provide short clips from my archive to a new nonprofit organization called History UnErased. They were going to develop lessons and other educational resources about LGBTQ history for K-12 teachers. It was when Sara Burningham started cutting tape for that project that she said, “This sounds like a podcast.”
There were many angels along the way who took us under their wings and helped get the podcast launched, including Jenna Weiss-Berman from Pineapple Street Studios. We had very modest expectations and were told we should be happy if we had 500 downloads per episode. At the end of the first season of ten episodes we’d had 25,000 downloads in 200+ countries and territories around the world, which blew our minds! Since then, we’ve produced 100+ episodes and have had 6 million downloads. Turns out that there’s great hunger for LGBTQ history as told through the voices of the people who lived it. We also have a fully fledged website where we provide full transcripts, extensive episode notes with links to additional resources, and archival photos.
What was it like to spend a season sharing your personal history and reflecting on the historical events you experienced?
We’ve produced two seasons where we decided to use my own personal history as the backdrop for audio documentaries about a particular era. The first one, Season 9, was “Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis,” which was very emotionally challenging given how painful that period of history was for me when I was quite young. It was Sara Burningham’s idea to make my personal history the thread and backdrop for that series. It was also Sara’s idea to use my own coming of age story to explore the 1970s, which was the explosive and very dynamic period of our movement that followed the Stonewall uprising.
I’m much more comfortable being in the position of asking the questions, rather than being the interviewee. But I was very lucky that one of my friends and colleagues, Shane O’Neill, who writes the “Style” newsletter for the Washington Post, agreed to be my inquisitor. I felt very comfortable in Shane’s hands as he took me through my own history. And as reluctant as I had been to share my own history, I had to remind myself that this is what I’d asked of all the people I’d interviewed for the original Making Gay History book. But it was a bit strange to realize that I’d lived enough life to be someone who had a relevant history of his own to share.
What is next for Making Gay History? What are histories that you have not covered yet that you would like to?
Two things. First, right now we’re deep into production on a 10-part series (Season 14) that explores the experiences of LGBTQ people during the Nazi regime and through the Holocaust. It’s been a very time consuming and expensive project because of the extensive research that was necessary in order to uncover and gather enough material to produce an entire series. The middle eight episodes feature individual stories that were recorded in other languages, so we’re having to work with actors to record English translations of the archival testimony.
We recently recorded voice over with Bianca Leigh, one of the stars of the Broadway hit “Oh, Mary!” Bianca voiced testimony from Luci Salani, an Italian trans woman who had an extraordinary story of survival to tell. We’ll begin releasing that series in late January to coincide with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Second, we’re working in partnership with the National Education Association (NEA) to create lessons for middle and high school teachers anchored by Making Gay History podcast episodes. The lessons have been created by a dozen teachers from across the country and we anticipate releasing the lessons later this year or early next. The lessons and accompanying materials will be made available on Making Gay History’s website and through the NEA to educators everywhere for free.
I want to note that Making Gay History is also registered as a nonprofit. Which came first, nonprofit status or the show? And if the show came first, what was the rationale behind turning this audio venture into a nonprofit? How does nonprofit status help further the mission of your show?
We were a nonprofit from the very beginning. We never had any expectations that a podcast with a relatively small audience would have enough commercial support to make it viable. And to accept the initial grant that got us off the ground (from the Arcus Foundation through its then executive director Kevin Jennings, who is now the chair of our board), we had to be a nonprofit organization. Our nonprofit status allows us to raise funds through foundation grants and individual tax deductible donations.
We now consider ourselves an educational nonprofit whose mission is to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices who lived it—through the podcast, presentations, and our soon-to-be available educational materials.
Speaking of nonprofits, you served on the board for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). We know that LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times likely to attempt suicide than their peers (Trevor Project). I don’t want to assume that a figure such as this is the reason you got involved with the AFSP, but can you speak to how we can better support LGBTQ+ people, and perhaps how visibility through storytelling is part of building that support?
My initial interest in suicide loss had nothing to do with the horrific reality of high suicide rates and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ youth. I was twelve years old when my father killed himself, which blew up my family and changed the trajectory of my life. I spent years (decades, actually) coming to terms with what my father did and its impact on my family and it remains a painful part of my personal history.
My father’s suicide inspired me to write a book about suicide called Why Suicide? It’s a question and answer book patterned after my gay book, Is It A Choice? It’s principally for people who have lived through the suicide of a loved one. Why Suicide? is the book that I wish had been on the shelves when I was a child so the adults in my life would have known how to help me. Suicide was, and remains, an even more taboo subject than homosexuality, although things have changed in recent years with younger generations who are more comfortable speaking out about mental health and the subject of suicide.
When it comes to LGBTQ youth and helping LGBTQ young people feel less alone and hopeless (both are big contributors to suicidal ideation and suicide attempts), hearing the stories of our ancestors in their own voices and learning about our proud history has the potential to make a difference. At least that’s what we’ve heard back from many of our young listeners, who have written to say that after listening to the podcast they feel like they have grandparents, that they never knew that they had a proud history, that they feel inspired by their ancestors to be themselves and to make a difference. We hadn’t set out to launch the Making Gay History podcast with that specific goal in mind, but it’s very heartening to know that these stories that I recorded so long ago have the potential to make a powerfully positive difference in the lives of young LGBTQ people today and for generations to come.
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