Did any number cause as much trouble as zero? It stranded ships; it scrambles the brains of mathematicians, calendar users and computers; it even got itself banned in Florence. Math(s) communicator and drag queen Kyne explains the Terminator of numbers.
Read moreAllusionist 56+12. Joins & Pride
To celebrate Pride Month, I’m playing two of the Allusionist episodes that have stuck with me the most during the show’s existence.
The first is Joins. You listeners talk about your particular experiences in your trans bodies, dealing with the available vocabulary for sex and the associated body parts.
Second is Pride: the story of how that word was chosen in 1970 for LGBTQ Pride events.
Read moreAllusionist 100. The Hundredth
To mark the 100th episode of the Allusionist, here’s a celebratory parade of language-related facts.
Read moreAllusionist 12: Pride
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"The poison is shame. The antidote is pride."
It’s June; the President of the USA has officially designated it LGBT Pride Month, and there’ll be Pride events around the world.
Activist and the publisher of Homosexuals Intransigent Craig Schoonmaker recounts how the word ‘pride’ was chosen, which eventually came to be the banner word for demonstrations and celebrations of LGBT rights and culture.
ADDITIONAL READING:
In the episode I contemplate the history of the word 'lesbian', and if you're also interested to know how 'gay' evolved from 'colourful' or 'cheerful' to its present meaning, read about it here and here.
For background on the Stonewall riots whence arose the Pride movement, listen to this short oral history on Witness by the BBC World Service. I haven't seen the Stonewall Uprising documentary, but the transcript is interesting.
Craig Schoonmaker mentions the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organisations in the USA. Here's a short history; this was its mission statement (from probably the mid-1960s), and here's what the FBI thought of it.
Fred Sergeant remembers the first Pride march.
Barack Obama officially proclaims June 2015 to be Pride Month.
There is a movement called Gay Shame, founded in 1998 as a protest against/alternative to what they saw as the overcommercialisation and conservatism of Gay Pride. Read about them here.
There is a transcript of this episode here.
CREDITS:
L. Craig Schoonmaker has several websites, including Mr Gay Pride, featuring articles and materials going all the way back to 1969; the Mr Gay Pride blog is also very interesting. He also runs a photo journal about Newark, NJ, as well as a version making the case for phonetic (fonetik?) spelling of English.
This episode was produced by me and Eleanor McDowall of Falling Tree, with help from Peregrine Andrews.
All the music in this episode is by Martin Austwick. Hear and/or download more at thesoundoftheladies.bandcamp.com.
Find me at facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/allusionistshow and twitter.com/helenzaltzman.
