“I hope that anyone seeking out queer history - whether it's in books, movies, podcasts, whatever - don't just gravitate toward people who look like them,” Camp says.
If one curious queer can create all of this, we really do have a future.Ĭamp has a lot of beautiful stories to share, as well as important insight about how we can find solidarity with one another across liberation movements. Camp is about to release a sort of spin-off “sister series” called “ Give 'Em Hell, Harry! Keeping Harvey Milk’s Dream Alive ” and they’re also directing a documentary about the last active Mattachine activist, Randy Wicker. The show’s resilience, creativity, and popularity through the past few years is a reminder that we can thrive by digging into our roots.
Queer Serial isn’t just handing us hope by telling us about our past, either it’s actively making our future in the process. “It's like a soapy radio show with fabulous drama and shocking cliffhangers, except it's all true queer history,” Camp says. But Camp isn’t just recapping queer history through the podcast they’re also queering history by telling it in all its dramatic - and sometimes NSFW - glory. Queer Serial follows both prominent and lesser known queer liberation activists through the struggle, starting with the early 20th Century.
No matter how dark things get, we're not going anywhere.” Amen. “Even in far darker days for queer folks, like the 1950s, our community couldn't be completely silenced. “There are countless stories - pickets, and riots, and sit-ins, and all kinds of courageous acts - that give me hope about the queer future,” Camp says. It seems that Camp, too, was seeking hope and inspiration. No matter how dark things get, we're not going anywhere.” “It was a pretty cathartic experience making the first three seasons of Queer Serial during the Trump presidency, when it became clear to many of us that our rights could be rolled back pretty quickly,” they say. Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, Camp was researching the Mattachine Society, a gay rights organization founded in secrecy in 1950. In a way, Camp is becoming the queer history teacher I never had, and it turns out they started the podcast for many of the same reasons I looked for it. “We just aren't very aware of that because our history hasn't been taught to us in school.” Yes. “Many people to tend to write off historic nonfiction as a pile of dusty old books, but queer folks in history have some of the juiciest, most fun, and surprising stories to tell,” the 30-year-old writer and podcast producer tells me. But Camp’s titillating style of storytelling hooked me on Queer Serialalmost immediately. Honestly, I find the subject kind of intimidating there’s just so much I don’t know.
Devlyn Camp’s Queer Serial podcast became my primary text, so I talked to Camp about how educating ourselves on the queer liberation movements of the past might inform and inspire our movement toward the future. In my quest to find hope that a queer future is even possible, I decided to delve into our collective history. It feels like the hard won rights earned by queer activists over the course of a century could disappear at any moment. My queer future feels particularly precarious right now.