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Story Telling for Social Change

Grandpa and Grandma Walton Were Gay

The actors who played Grandma and Grandpa on The Waltons TV series (1972-1981) were both actually gay in real life.

Ellen Corby and Will Geer brought veteran acting skills as Grandma and Grandpa Walton. Indeed, The Waltons never even considered recasting the elderly couple when each fell on hard times with their health. They became an inseparable unit on screen. However, in their private lives, each was actually gay and in same-sex relationships.

As a married couple on TV, Grandma and Grandpa Walton represented the base of the Walton family tree, armed with wisdom and traditions. Ellen Corby as herself, however, swore like a sailor. Additionally, the actress behind god-fearing Esther Walton smoked like a chimney, even after Grandma insisted, “If the good Lord had intended us to smoke He would have put a chimney in our heads.” And fell in love with women. Specifically, she became close to Stella Luchetta.

While Grandma Walton’s extramarital relationships slid under the radar as a quiet, well-known secret, Grandpa Walton was keeping no secrets. Geer’s path to notoriety began around 1934 when he met Harry Hay. As lovers, the two inspired and influenced one another into gay rights activism. His fate, to end up on the blacklist, was practically sealed by his additional involvement in union strikes, including the San Francisco General Strike. Today, Harry Hay is celebrated as a sort of founding father in gay rights activism. But Hay himself credits Will Geer for getting him started.

Grandpa and Grandma Walton Actually Gay

Secret Lives of Grandpa and Grandma Walton

The Waltons: Tribute to Ellen Corby and Will Geer

Jennifer Lopez and Emme

Jennifer Lopez and her child Emme Maribel Muñiz, 14, are being praised for a recent duet, but not because of the music.

The pair - who last made headlines for performing together when Lopez co-headlined the Super Bowl LIV Pepsi halftime show in 2020 - took to the stage recently at the LA Dodgers Blue Diamond Gala. Lopez introduced Emme using the gender neutral pronouns they and them.

"The last time we performed together was in a big stadium like this," Lopez said. "And I ask them to sing with me all the time and they won't."

"So this is a very special occasion. They are very, very busy. Booked. And pricey," Lopez went on to say. "They cost me when they come out. But they're worth every single penny because they're my favorite duet partner of all time." Emme then appeared on stage, carrying a rainbow microphone to sing Christina Perri's hit, "A Thousand Years."

Lopez shares Emme and twin brother Max with her ex husband, singer and actor Marc Anthony.

Jennifer Lopez Introduces Her Child Onstage Using They/Them Pronouns
Jennifer Lopez Introduces One of Her Twins with Gender Neutral Pronouns
Jennifer Lopez Introduces Her Child Using Gender-Neutral Pronouns
Jennifer Lopez Introduces Her Child with Neutral Pronouns on Stage For Duet

Camp British Comedian: Larry Grayson

In Britain "Shut That Door" was the catchphrase of the great camp gay comedian Larry Grayson. One of the top line up of stars on the BBC through the 1970s and 1980s. Another of his catchphrases was "What a gay day".

It seems strange that at a time when the country was still very homophobic flamboyant gay entertainers were the top most loved TV and stage stars in Britain. Larry Grayson was one at the very top. His shows on TV drew a regular audience of a massive 18 million viewers.

His early stage acts he did in drag as female character in the first half and in a suit and tie as a male character in the second half both parts were said to be hilarious and drew in massive crowds.

Today we hear about people wanting more gay representation on TV and in film especially in the US. In Britain they never had oppressive homophobic rules like the US Hays Code so they had representation with openly and obvious gay characters and men in drag all the way through from the start of TV and radio and most of them were the most loved British entertainers.

Larry Grayson (1923-1995): Comedian and Entertainer
Larry Grayson Tribute
Biographical Notes: Larry Grayson
Life of Larry Grayson
Larry Grayson: This Is Your Life (1972)

Trans Handy Ma'am

Meet the Trans Handy Ma'am who has amazing videos on social media that show you how to handle handy tasks on your own, with sparkle! Now she's partnering with Lowe's Home Improvement.

Wisconsin resident Mercury Stardust began posting videos on TikTok to promote her weekly burlesque show, but it wasn’t until she began sharing home improvement and maintenance tips that her account really took off. “That took me from like 100 followers to 25,000 followers in less than 24 hours," she said.

Stardust, a transgender woman, has since been dubbed the “Trans Handy Ma’am” and has seen her TikTok account skyrocket to 1.5 million followers.

While Stardust, 34, has more than a decade of experience as a maintenance technician, she never thought those skills would have been what shot her to TikTok stardom. “I’ve performed all around the country. I’ve been to 126 different cities. I’ve performed in 22 different states — and what I’m known for is telling people the difference between what a cup plunger is and what a regular beehive plunger is,” she said.

Stardust’s TikTok account includes hundreds of maintenance and home improvement videos, from how to unclog a drain to how to patch a hole in the wall and how to install a new shower head.

The Ambassador of Cheese and Tease, Mercury is a burlesque performer, emcee, instructor, producer, property manager, and now famous home improvement advisor. "I am thrilled and so overwhelmed that I have now entered a long term contract and partnership with Lowe's Home Improvement. Its been a very long road to get to where I am today but I am finally ready to take my content and career to the next level," she said.

Mercury Stardust Website
Mercury Stardust on Facebook
Mercury Stardust on TikTok
Mercury Stardust on NBC News
Mercury Stardust: How to Check Tire Pressure

Lesbian Farmer Taylor Blake and Emmanuel the Emu

The out and proud lesbian farmer in South Florida started creating content for Knuckle Bump in January 2022, but it wasn’t until Emmanuel took the screen that the TikTok page blew up. Now, Knuckle Bump Farms is seemingly an Emmanuel fan page.

The dynamic duo stars in a variety of videos that show off their best-friend bond. They hold hands, tell each other jokes, and even cuddle in the afternoon sun, making one thing clear: An emu really is a gal’s best friend.

Blake shared her love for the nearly six-foot-tall bird in an Emmanuel appreciation post on Instagram. She wrote: "All I’ve ever wanted was to spread joy like wildfire, I feel like all my dreams are coming true. I can’t wait to tell my future children all about how an emu changed my life.”

Knuckle Bump Farms primarily focuses on miniature cattle. But it also features two obnoxious emus: Emmanuel and Ellen. Don’t get any wild ideas, folks. Blake says that the two are not an item. “Ellen and Emmanuel hate each other,” Blake shared in a TikTok comment section. She also shared the Emmanuel "hasn’t fully come out yet" but she's “pretty sure he’s gay.”

Born in Texas, Blake is 29 years old. She currently lives in South Florida with her girlfriend Kristian Haggerty.

Taylor Blake and Emmanuel the Emu
Internet Fans Have Fallen in Love with Emmanuel the Emu
Taylor and Her Emu Find Fame
Don't Do It Emmanuel
Emmanuel the Emu and Lesbian Farmer Taylor Blake Drop by The Tonight Show

Cleve Jones

This boy.

A few months before this photograph was taken, this boy had planned to take his own life. He, like so many children then and now, saw no hope for a future worth living. He was frightened and lonely and believed he was the only one in the world. He thought his life was a lie and that there was no place for him on this earth. He thought his life was over before it had even begun.

Then this boy read in a magazine about a place called San Francisco and a new movement that shouted through the silence and celebrated his existence and told him and millions more that they were loved and that they belonged, and that the movement they were building was part of a larger, global movement for peace and justice and freedom.

This boy learned that his place was in a long line that stretched back over generations, over centuries, over millennia. He learned that people like him had always existed, in every era, in every culture, in every color of skin, in every human circumstance.

Gradually, this boy even came to believe that he could love and be loved. So he flushed away the pills he had hoarded to end his life, left the desert city where he had lived, and made his way to San Francisco on a foggy afternoon in August.

And then his life began.

That was fifty years ago today. I was 17 years old.

Cleve Jones Website
Cleve Jones and the National AIDS Memorial
Cleve Jones: NPR Interview

Cari & Kim Plus Khaya

Cari Searcy and Kim McKeand legally married in 2008. Cari Searcy's partner, Kim McKeand, had given birth to a baby boy, Khaya Searcy, in December 2005, with the aid of a donor. Searcy then sought to become the adoptive parent of the child, who bears her last name. Adoption would give Searcy rights to make medical decisions for the child as well as securing the sense of family in their home.

In July 2015, Baldwin County (Alabama) Circuit Court Judge James Reid granted the adoption for Cari Searcy in Mobile County Probate Court. His approval of the measure ended a winding and politically fraught legal battle for Searcy and her wife Kim McKeand, Khaya's biological mother.

Their four-year-long quest to adopt the child led to a federal judge overturning the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

"It was such a surreal feeling to hear the judge say that it is in the best interest of this boy to have two legal parents," Searcy said. "For me, that's when I broke down. It's very emotional and a day we've been waiting for a long, long time."

Searcy first filed paperwork in Mobile County Probate Court in 2011 to legally adopt the boy, whom she has raised since birth. After a brief hearing, Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis rejected the petition in April 2012, citing the state's ban on same-sex marriage. The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals later upheld that decision.

In February 2015, a federal judge ruled that Searcy could not be denied her desire to adopt Khaya, clearing the way for same-sex marriage in Alabama.

But hours before the law legalizing same-sex marriage was to begin, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore ordered the state's probate judges to withhold same-sex marriage licenses pending the US Supreme Court decision on the matter.

Searcy filed a second lawsuit after Davis indicated he would not give final approval of the adoption until after US Supreme Court case resolved the same-sex marriage issue. The US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in June 2015, striking down any remaining barriers to Searcy's adoption.

At the courthouse, Khaya, 9, was dressed for the occasion, wearing a gray suitcoat, a blue button up shirt, dress pants, and a plaid clip-on tie. Clutching a brown teddy bear, he said, "It's good that I finally have two legal parents."

Lesbian Couple That Brought Down Alabama’s Gay Marriage Ban Sues State Over Second-Parent Adoption

Here's How Two Women Changed The Lives Of LGBTQ Families In Alabama Forever

Edwardian Lesbian Couple

In 1907 Edwardian Britain, lesbian couple, Lily Elsie and Adrienne Augarde were very famous acting and singing stars of the period.

Lily Elsie was an English actress and singer best known for her starring role in the London premiere of Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow. She became one the most photographed woman of Edwardian times.

Adrienne Augarde was English actress and singer popular for her roles in Edwardian musical comedy. Her career included performances in pantomime, drama, vaudeville, and opera. She gained wide popularity playing leading roles in the popular musicals produced by George Edwardes. She also starred in a number of long-running productions in London and New York from 1903 to 1912.

The two actress appeared together in the play production The New Aladdin. Notable was the fact that Lily dressed in manly attire.

Biographical Notes on Lily Elsie

Biographical Notes on Adrienne Augarde

League of Her Own

Baseball icon and A League of Their Own inspiration Maybelle Blair comes out as gay at the age of 95.

Between 1943 and 1954, baseball fans immersed themselves in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGBL).

Maybelle Blair and other women baseball players in the late 1940s were the model for the central characters in Penny Marshall’s 1992 comedy A League of Their Own. The 95-year-old announced she was gay at the Tribeca Festival premiere of Amazon’s new series based on the film.

Speaking about the new, more inclusive version of the story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, Blair said, “I think it’s a great opportunity for these young girl ball players to come realize that they’re not alone, and you don’t have to hide.”

Blair, who earned the nickname “All the Way Mae” during her time with the Peoria Redwings in the late 1940s, recalled realizing she was attracted to women as a teenager.

Maybelle Blair, Who Helped Inspire 'A League Of Their Own,' Comes Out At 95
Player Who Helped Inspire 'A League of Their Own' Comes Out at Age 95
Biographical Notes on Maybelle Blair
Baseball Player Who Inspired A League of Their Own Comes Out at 95

Cemetary Angel

In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend who had cancer. During one visit, she noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), later known as AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Burks decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told her he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, "Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming”. Burks called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a "sinner" and already dead to her, and that she wouldn't even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room," she recalled, "and when I walked in, he said, Oh, momma. I knew you’d come, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, I’m here, honey, I’m here. She pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand until he died 13 hours later. After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Burks buried his ashes on her family's large plot in Files Cemetery.

After this first encounter, Burks cared for other patients who needed her help. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them. Burks work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars. "They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night", she explained. "And the drag shows were how we raised money, that's how we'd buy medicine, that's how we'd pay rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would have done."

Over the next 30 years (with assistance from her daughter) Burks cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family's plot (most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes). For this, she has been nicknamed the "Cemetery Angel."

“Someday, I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died."

Ruth Coker Burks: Biographical Notes
AIDS Angel: Ruth Coker Burks
Ruth Coker Burks: Home Page
Natl AIDS Memorial: Ruth Coker Burks

Blue Max Motorcycle Club

Fernando, seated , and his husband, both members of Los Angeles’ Blue Max Motorcycle Club, get pulled over as they leave their wedding ceremony, December 1969 . In the mid-twentieth century, the Blue Max Motorcycle Club, along with many other gay motorcycle clubs, provided an alternative to gay bars, which were constantly at risk of police raids and harassment.

The classic “metal look” that Heavy Metal Rock came to be associated with (leather, studs, tight fitting clothes) was introduced by Rob Halford of Judas Priest, an openly gay man who says he was simply wearing the look from the gay leather subculture on stage, and people started imitating him.

So the two “iconically hetero” fixtures of masculinity - biker gangs and heavy metal music - are both actually just gay culture that heteros unknowingly adopted.

Stories From LA’s Pioneering Gay Motorcycle Clubs
Archive: Blue Max Motorcycle Club Notes and Records
USC Archive Sheds Light On LA's Gay Motorcycle Clubs

Courageous Trans Kid Testifies

10 year old Kai Shappley didn’t feel scared when she sat before the Texas Senate committee in April 2021. Wearing a flowing yellow blouse, floral skirt and cowboy boots, the then-4th grader calmly introduced herself. “I love ballet, math, science and geology. I spend my free time with my cats, chickens, FaceTiming my friends and dreaming of when I finally get to meet Dolly Parton,” she testified. “I do not like spending my free time asking adults to make good choices.”

Shappley urged lawmakers to vote against Senate bills 1311 and 1646, which banned doctors from providing gender-affirming treatment to transgender kids like herself. One of the bills even went as far as to define the treatment as “child abuse.” (Both bills ultimately failed.)

“It makes me sad that some politicians use trans kids like me to get votes from people who hate me just because I exist,” she continued. “God made me. God loves me for who I am. And God does not make mistakes.”

Video of Shappley’s testimony quickly went viral. It wasn’t the first time she’s garnered attention. The now-5th grader has been publicly telling her story and calling for trans equality for years. She’s traveled the country with her mother, speaking at rallies for LGBTQ rights. She’s worked with the ACLU on pro-trans projects. She’s met with national lawmakers to urge them to pass the Equality Act, which would outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. But April was the first time she’d ever testified on her own. Her reasoning was simple. “I wanted to show them that all these lies people have been spreading about trans kids are not true,” she says.

Shappley is a force of nature. At only 11 years old, the trans rights activist has built a following online; children and adults have written to her saying she’s inspired them to come out. “It makes me want to keep on going, knowing that there are so many people who rely on me,” Shappley says. And amid an unprecedented rise of bills in US state legislatures targeting trans kids—including over 130 anti-trans bills in 2021 alone, per the advocacy group Human Rights Campaign—she has no plans on stopping. “Activism matters to me because it is a way to show that we belong,” Shappley says. “It’s a way to show that we will fight for what is right. We won’t sit silent."

Kai Shappley Takes on Lawmakers in Her Fight for Trans Rights
Trans Kid Kai Shappley Testifies
10-Year-Old Activist Kai Shappley on Fighting for Trans Kids in the Texas

Trans Hairdresser in Birmingham

Meet Jody Suzanne Ford, an out transgender woman and business owner in Alabama. She owned Ms. Sid's Coiffures in Birmingham's Five Points South Neighborhood in 1975.

Born Sidney Ford III, she was a college basketball star (6'4") at David Lipscomb College and a semi-professional football player in Miami before she moved to Birmingham, transitioned, and opened her beauty shop. She earned a good reputation and became very well-known for her skill as a hairstylist.

In 1977, when she was 41, she was killed by a short-range shotgun blast to the chest by the 26-year old owner of a Travelodge Motel. He argued he was acting in self-defense and was acquitted.

Jody Suzanne Ford: Trans Birmingham Hairdresser Shot to Death in 1977
Trans Lives Matter: Jody Suzanne Ford

Flight Attendant Loves His Job

My flight was being served by an obviously gay flight attendant, who seemed to put everyone in a good mood as he served us food and drinks.

As the plane prepared to descend, he came swishing down the aisle and told us that "Captain Marvey has asked me to announce that he'll be landing the big scary plane shortly, so lovely people, if you could just put your trays up, that would be super."

On his trip back up the aisle, he noticed this well-dressed Arabic-looking woman hadn't moved a muscle. "Perhaps you didn't hear me over those big brute engines but I asked you to raise your trazy-poo so the main man can pitty-pat us on the ground."

She calmly turned her head and said, "In my country, I am called a Princess and I take orders from no one."

To which (I swear) the flight attendant replied, without missing a beat, "Well, sweet-cheeks, in my country I'm called a Queen, so I outrank you. Tray-up, Bitch."

[Source: Hank Rouse]

Flight Attendant Comedy Routine
Flight Attendant Performs Funniest Safety Routine
Funny Flight Attendant

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QUEER CAFE │ LGBTQ Information Network │ Established 2017