Through his popular Making Gay History podcast, journalist and author Eric Marcus is bringing gay history into the classroom. The episodes have attracted over seven million downloads from listeners worldwide since 2016, when Marcus and executive producer Sara Burningham launched the podcast to share his archival interviews with early LGBTQ+ civil rights activists.
As a young gay man, Matt Nadel was discomfited to learn in 2020 that his father, Phil Nadel, had invested in the viatical settlements industry in the early years of the AIDS crisis. “He shared that he’d made a good bit of money off of the life insurance policies of gay men who died of AIDS. That’s what funded my childhood,” Nadel says.
Decades ago, we faced AIDS denialism, a dangerously tragic concept. Denying the reality of the HIV and AIDS epidemic has negatively impacted the lives of thousands of people in the United States and has prevented access to HIV-related medications and care services.
August 11, 1981. That was the day when Dr. Larry Mass and his friend Larry Kramer, the late writer and activist, summoned everyone they knew for an emergency meeting about the mysterious and frightening new diseases killing gay men.