Guest host Denis O’Hare helps us celebrate the landmark event that helped give birth to the modern movement for LGBTQIA+ rights in America. On this special program, we first hear eyewitness accounts of the riots drawn from The Stonewall Reader, published by Penguin Classics and edited by The New York Public Library. Memoirs by Jayne County, Mark Segal, Lucian Truscott IV, and Holly Woodlawn are read by Ivory Aquino, Kate Bornstein, Michael Early, and Beth Malone. Next, we hear about the origins of the Gay Pride March one year after the riots when Ivory Aquino and Kate Bornstein perform Perry Brass’s “We Did It.” And to show how things have changed in 50 years, comments from Tobin Low and Kathy Tu, hosts of the Nancy podcast from WNYC Studios; fierce and touching poems by trans artist Kay Ulanday Barrett, “Right to Release,” and “Song for the Kicked Out,” read by Barrett, and a short story by Gary Eldon Peter in which a gay man at a straight wedding imagines a possible wedding of his own. His “Wedding” is performed by John Benjamin Hickey.
Artists and writers:
Ivory Aquino made her television debut in the ABC miniseries When We Rise, earning her a nomination for Best Actress at the 2017 POZ Awards. She was last seen on HBO's High Maintenance and the feature film The Fever and the Fret, and will next be seen in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us and the revival of Tales of the City, both on Netflix, as well as the upcoming feature film Lingua Franca. At Bryant Park Shakespeare, she has starred in Romeo and Juliet as Juliet, Measure for Measure as Isabella, and Macbeth as Lady Macbeth. As a first-generation immigrant and proud member of the LGBTQ community, Ivory dedicates her work to those who follow their dreams wherever it takes them and "to anyone who feels different and out-of-place, but is truly special and one-of- a-kind."
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, performer, and cultural strategist. In 2018, they were a Lambda Literary Review Writer-in-Residence for Poetry, a guest faculty member at the Poetry Foundation, and were included in the "9 Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Writers You Should Know” in Vogue magazine. Barrett has received fellowships from VONA, Macondo, and The Home School. On stage, they have been featured at Lincoln Center, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Chicago Historical Society, and the Brooklyn Museum. Their work has featured on Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, PBS News Hour Poetry, Asian American Literary Review, NYLON, WBAI Radio, and NPR, among others. Barrett is the author of When the Chant Comes and More Than Organs, which will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in the spring of 2020.
Kate Bornstein is a celebrated performance artist who has toured nationally and internationally for more than thirty years. Most recently, they co-starred in Straight White Men on Broadway, and they performed their solo show, On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, at La Mama. Bornstein is the subject of the documentary film Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger, and appeared with Caitlyn Jenner on E! TV’s I Am Cait. Bornstein has also written six groundbreaking books, including Gender Outlaw and Hello, Cruel World.
Perry Brass is an author and journalist who currently writes for the Huffington Post. He was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, the first radical gay organization founded after the Stonewall Rebellion, co-edited the organization’s newspaper Come Out!, and co-founded the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic, which still exists today as the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center. He has published more than a dozen books, most recently, The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love.
Jane County is a counterculture icon, best known for her work with the punk band Wayne County & the Electric Chairs. She is recognized as rock's first openly transgender singer. County participated in the Stonewall riots, and her memoir, Man Enough to Be a Woman, describes the profound effect the riots had on her life and the central role “street queens” played in the action. County recently debuted Paranoia Paradise, a visual art retrospective comprising five decades of work, and was featured in the docuseries Punk.
Michael Early most recently appeared as the Stage Manager in Our Town at Triad Stage. His television credits include Forever, Royal Pains, Damages, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Early Edition, Another World, All My Children, and One Life to Live. He can be heard on numerous audiobooks and received an Audio Publishers Association Award for Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices by Walter Dean Myers. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Early teaches Acting at Sarah Lawrence College. This summer he will appear in Cymbeline and Much Ado About Nothing at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
John Benjamin Hickey won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance The Normal Heart. He has also appeared on Broadway in Cabaret, The Crucible, Mary Stuart, and Six Degrees of Separation. Most recently, Hickey starred alongside Vanessa Redgrave on the West End in London in The Inheritance, which won the Olivier Award for best play, and is rumored to be coming to Broadway this fall. His screen credits include The Big C, The Good Wife and The Good Fight, Manhattan, Difficult People, Pitch Perfect, Get On Up, Truth, and Mapplethorpe. Hickey will star in the forthcoming film from acclaimed Israeli director Eytan Fox, entitled Sublet.
Tobin Low is the co-host and co-managing editor of Nancy, an acclaimed WNYC podcast about the queer experience. He previously served as a producer on the podcast More Perfect. His work has been featured on Marketplace, Studio 360, and the Codebreaker podcast. Low is a graduate of the Transom Story Workshop and was selected as a 2014 New Voices Scholar by the Association of Independents in Radio.
Beth Malone was nominated for a 2015 Tony Award and Grammy for her game-changing role of “Alison” in Fun Home on Broadway. Additional stage credits include Ring of Fire and Angels in America on Broadway, and Bingo, The Marvelous Wonderettes. She has played the title role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, which is coming to New York with The Transport Theater, and most recently, Nassim off-Broadway. In television, she’s been featured in Hick, The Good Wife, BrainDead, and Bull. Malone will appear in the forthcoming feature film Brittany Runs a Marathon and The Comedian, opposite Robert Deniro. She is the author and star of the critically acclaimed one-woman show Beth Malone: So Far.
Denis O'Hare’s film credits include Garden State, 21 Grams, A Mighty Heart, Michael Clayton, Milk, Duplicity, HBO’s The Normal Heart, Dallas Buyers Club, Lizzie, Danger One, Butterfly in the Typewriter, and Late Night. He won a Tony Award for his performance in Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out and a Drama Desk Award for his role in Sweet Charity. He is the co-writer, with Lisa Peterson, and star of An Iliad, which was performed at the New York Theatre Workshop and The Broad Stage in Santa Monica; he and Peterson also co-authored a play about the bible, The Good Book, which premiered at the Court Theatre in Chicago. His television credits include American Horror Story, True Blood, The Good Wife, The Comedians, and This Is Us. O’Hare’s upcoming projects include The Goldfinch.
Gary Eldon Peter’s short stories have appeared in Water-Stone Review and Great River Review, among other publications. His work has been honored with the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award in Creative Prose as well as two Minnesota State Arts Board grants. His debut short story collection, Oranges, won the 2016 New Rivers Press Many Voices Project competition in Prose, the Midwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He currently teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Mark Segal is a gay activist and journalist, known for founding the activist group Gay Youth in 1969 and the newspaper Philadelphia Gay News in 1976. In his memoir, And Then I Danced: Traveling the Road to LGBT Equality, he describes the Stonewall uprising and the activism that arose in the wake of the riots, and provides the greater context of the LGBTQ riots that took place in the 1960s before Stonewall. Segal is the president of the National Gay Newspaper Guild.
Lucian Truscott IV is a novelist and journalist. He was on the streets outside the Stonewall during the initial raid, and followed the protests and resistance for the rest of the weekend. His account was published as “View from Outside” in the July 3, 1969, issue of The Village Voice, which covered the uprising. Truscott currently serves as a columnist for Salon.
Kathy Tu is the co-host and co-managing editor of Nancy, an acclaimed WNYC podcast about the queer experience. Prior to Nancy, she worked on Radiolab, The Memory Palace, The Mortified Podcast, Masterpiece Studio, and other podcasts. Tu is a graduate of the Transom Story Workshop.
Puerto Rican transgender actress and singer Holly Woodlawn (1946 - 2015) may be best remembered for starring in the Warhol films Trash and Women in Revolt, among numerous additional screen credits, including Alibi, The Lie, East of the Tar Pits, and Transparent. In her autobiography, Low Life in High Heels, Woodlawn describes her experiences at the Stonewall as well as in the transgender Latinx community living in the Village at the time.
