NEW YORK, NY — Thursday, June 24, 2021 — The award-winning Making Gay History podcast will debut its ninth season, "Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis," on July 1, 2021. After eight seasons of episodes drawn primarily from decades-old interviews with LGBTQ trailblazers and allies that were conducted by the podcast's founder and host Eric Marcus, this new season marks a first: Eric steps into the spotlight and shares part of his own story.
In Season 9, Making Gay History presents a six-chapter audio memoir of Eric's coming of age—and coming out—during the early years of the AIDS crisis. "This isn't a story about heroics and sacrifice on my part … that wasn't my experience," says Eric. "But I realized, after decades of mining other people's oral histories, that my own story is part of our shared LGBTQ history, too. And ultimately, it's the story of how Making Gay History—first my book and then the podcast—came to be."
Listen to Making Gay History's Season 9 Preview: https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/season-9-preview/
It was exactly 40 years ago this month when news first broke into the mainstream of a deadly new disease that disproportionately affected gay men. First came a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on June 5, 1981, covered that same day by the Los Angeles Times, and on July 3, the New York Times ran its buried but now infamous headline, "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," on page 20 of the newspaper. Currently, more than 36.7 million people worldwide are living with HIV, and 35 million have died since 1981—100,000 have died in New York City alone. Eric witnessed that devastation up close as AIDS cut a wide swath through the city's gay male community, before effective treatments arrived in the mid-1990s.
Although the audio memoir format of "Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis" is a departure for Making Gay History, the podcast's reliance on intimate conversation will remain, both in Eric's own newly recorded oral history of the years from 1981 to 1988, and in taped interviews in which Eric reconnects with key people whose paths he crossed during that time:
Doug Aucoin, Eric's Vassar classmate and post-college roommate: "In retrospect, I'd always admired the fact that you were so out and gay and you took a lot of crap for it."
Hal Moskowitz, a volunteer with the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC): "I have never been that frightened in my life … They would wake up on a Monday with symptoms that felt like a cold was coming on. By Monday night, they had a fever. By Tuesday morning, they couldn't breathe. By Wednesday, they were dead. It was that quick."
Sandi Feinblum, who managed the GMHC program Eric volunteered for: "You would get calls day and night that were referred from all over and often they were [calling] about funeral homes. People who had lost a child or a lover or a sibling, and they couldn't find a funeral home to take them."
The season will also include remembrances of friends who didn't live to tell their stories, and people like Jimmy, the straight, twice-divorced father and drug addict dying of AIDS whom Eric met as a GMHC volunteer (and at whose funeral he delivered a eulogy).
The audio memoir is punctuated by Eric's own oral history, conducted by Shane O'Neill, friend and New York Times video journalist. In response to Shane's question as to why he decided in this new podcast season to "turn the tables" and step into the role of subject rather than interviewer, Eric says: "I was 30 when I started work on the Making Gay History book. I'm now 62, and some of the people I interviewed who I thought of as 'old' were younger than I am now. I find more and more that young people ask me questions about what it was like to live through the AIDS crisis. And I find myself in the role of an elder sharing stories about what it was like."
In addition to capturing Eric's experience of living through the early years of the AIDS epidemic, "Coming of Age During the AIDS Crisis" will also present the origin story of Eric's landmark book Making Gay History and how the AIDS epidemic lent great urgency to that project. Eric had seen how fast AIDS could cut down a life, and he knew he had to work quickly to record the key stories of people who didn't have long to live.
The Making Gay History podcast's Season 9 trailer is now streaming on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, GooglePlay, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts—and at makinggayhistory.com, where archival photos and episode notes can be found.
About Making Gay History
The Making Gay History podcast features decades-old rare interviews drawn from Eric Marcus's own archive of more than 100 interviews originally conducted for his award-winning oral history book of the LGBTQ civil rights movement as well as other archival sources. Using these recordings, he creates intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history. To learn more about Eric Marcus and Making Gay History, watch this NBC News video profile.
