Flipping Tables

A couple years ago I learned that there is a reason that the 'L' comes first in LGBTQ+ and I want to share that with you.Through much of the 20th century, "gay" served as an umbrella term, and early activist groupings often led with gay men, producing orderings like "GLB." The shift to placing "L" first took hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, and it was a deliberate gesture of respect.
The most cited reason is the AIDS crisis. As the epidemic devastated gay male communities in the 1980s, lesbians showed up in enormous numbers as caregivers, nurses, blood donors, fundraisers, and organizers. Lesbians like those in the Blood Sisters of San Diego organized blood drives when gay and bisexual men were barred from donating. This solidarity reshaped the movement, and foregrounding the "L" became a way of acknowledging that labor and centering women who had frequently been rendered invisible within both gay male spaces and the broader feminist movement.
Lesbians were central to progress long before the acronym existed. The Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the U.S. Figures such as Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon spent decades organizing. Lesbians were present at the 1969 Stonewall uprising and in the Gay Liberation Front that followed. Within 1970s feminism, lesbians pushed a frequently resistant women's movement to take their concerns seriously, even as Betty Friedan infamously dismissed them as the "lavender menace", a slur activists reclaimed in a celebrated protest.
Lesbians also did foundational work that benefited everyone: building community institutions, bookstores, health collectives, and mutual-aid networks; advancing lesbian feminist theory; and fighting for custody rights, anti-discrimination protections, and visibility at a time when being out could cost a woman her job and children.
References
Armstrong, E. A. (2002). Forging gay identities: Organizing sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994. University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, M. (1997). Celebration and suppression: The strategic uses of identity by the lesbian and gay movement. American Journal of Sociology, 103(3), 531–565.
Brier, J. (2009). Infectious ideas: U.S. political responses to the AIDS crisis. University of North Carolina Press.
Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–465.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth century America. Columbia University Press.
Faderman, L. (2015). The gay revolution: The story of the struggle. Simon & Schuster.
Gallo, M. M. (2006). Different daughters: A history of the Daughters of Bilitis. Carroll & Graf.
Gould, D. B. (2002). Life during wartime: Emotions and the development of ACT UP. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 7(2), 177–200.
hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.
Hutchinson, B. (2015). Lesbian blood drives as community building activism in the 1980s. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.959876
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Schulman, S. (2021). Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press.
Vaid, U. (1995). Virtual equality: The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian liberation. Anchor Books.
Zimmerman, B. (1981). What has never been: An overview of lesbian feminist criticism. Feminist Studies, 7(3), 451–475.

In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations.
This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years.
From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover.
We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts.
The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission.
SOURCES
Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE

Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE

Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)

Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)

Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004

Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987

Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)

Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)

Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)

Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988

Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)

Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016

Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568

Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006

Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571

Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992

Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997

Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007

Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997

Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988

Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)

NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023

U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015

Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823

Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2023

My entire life I heard my Dad say "Freedom isn't free" and perhaps the best application of that is the Civil Rights Movement. It's easy from a place of comfort to not fully understand the risk and sacrifice required for... the right to vote. The right as a black person to have equal and fair access to elections, job protection, education. We are in our own Civil Rights moment now and we can learn a lot from what they didv

Sources:
U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)
FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN)
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)
Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files
NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress
Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964
Books — Scholarly and Narrative History:
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.
Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.
Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.
Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.
Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.
Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.
Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.
Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.
McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.
Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.
Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.
Memphis-Specific Sources:
Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.
Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections
Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.
Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland Publishing.
Legal Cases Referenced:
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)
Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)
Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)
United States v. Price et al. (Mississippi Burning prosecutions), 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

Apologies for the lateness of the post, our dashboard encountered a technical difficulty that showed my podcasts didn't exist and had to be fixed before an upload could happen. Thanks for your patience.
After being at Montgomery last weekend I wanted to do a deep dive into what I never learned as a kid. What led to the Civil Rights movement, its danger, its courage. Part one takes us through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and part two takes us beyond.

SOURCES

U.S. Congressional Records, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866 (Memphis Massacre testimony)

FBI Files on the murders of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the Mississippi Burning case (MIBURN) — available through FOIA requests and the University of Mississippi's Mississippi Digital Library

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records — Mississippi Department of Archives and History (publicly available since 1998)

Department of Justice Civil Rights Division records and case files

NAACP Anti-Lynching Campaign Records — Library of Congress

Congressional Record, Senate filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, March–June 1964

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (2006). Simon & Schuster.

Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Bloomsbury.

Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018). Bloomsbury.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). Harcourt, Brace.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1986). William Morrow.

Hamer, Fannie Lou. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (2011). University Press of Mississippi.

Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998). Simon & Schuster.

Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Knopf.

Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (2007). University Press of Mississippi.

McAdam, Doug. Freedom Summer (1988). Oxford University Press.

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama — The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001). Simon & Schuster.

Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995). University of California Press.

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014). Spiegel & Grau.

Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till (2017). Simon & Schuster.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892). New York Age Print.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1895). Donohue & Henneberry.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). Random House.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Oxford University Press.

Honey, Michael K. Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007). W.W. Norton.

Mlinar, Zeljko, et al. Memphis Sanitation Strike Archives — Memphis Public Library Special Collections

Tucker, David M. Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (1980). University of Tennessee Press.

Wright, Sharon D. Race, Power, and Political Emergence in Memphis (2000). Garland

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960)

Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013)

United States v. Price et al. 383 U.S. 787 (1966)

We met the carefully curated Ronald Reagan in part 1. We saw the Hollywood grin, the borrowed cowboy myth, the astrologer in the basement, the informant and the corporate lackey. In Part 2, we follow the money. The sale of a new economic dream for Americans during a time of desperate stagflation, unemployment and uncertainty. And what it sold has cost this country more than any single presidency in modern American history.
Reaganomics was pitched to Americans as common sense. The government takes too much, thats the problem. Taxes on "job creators" choke the economy, corporations are going to run if you tax them you know. Cut taxes, slash regulation, trust the market — and a tide of prosperity will lift every boat. Cut off the welfare queen and free the small business owner. Trust the rich. Trust the men in suits who already had everything to know what was best for the woman scrubbing the floor at the hospital. He sold it the way only Reagan could, with a tear in his eye, a flag behind him, and a story about a Cadillac driving welfare cheat in Chicago who statistically did not exist.
In this episode, we trace what actually happened next.
The top income tax rate fell from 70 percent to 28 percent. The estate tax was gutted and capital gains were slashed. Corporate rates collapsed. All the ways the wealthiest among us make wealth were unleashed while the rest of us stayed tethered, shouldering more than our share of the burden. Union membership crashed from one in four American workers to roughly one in ten. Wages stopped tracking productivity. The federal minimum wage was frozen in time. Wall Street was deregulated, manufacturing was offshored, and the bottom half of the country watched its share of national wealth fall from 4 percent to barely 2.5, while the top 1 percent's share doubled. All while the national debt tripled. The mental health system was hollowed out, causing homelessness to explode. And every Republican economic platform since has been some version of do that again. Even Democratic leaders have allied themselves with this ideology in some way.
We also dismantle the lie at the heart of it all, that spending on people is waste. Because every credible economist who has actually run the numbers has found the opposite. Every dollar invested in SNAP generates up to $1.80 in economic activity. Every dollar spent on early childhood education returns $7 to $12. Public transit returns roughly $4 to $1. WIC saves $3 in future Medicaid costs for every dollar it spends. Universal preschool, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, infrastructure, these aren't handouts. They are the highest-return investments any government can make. The math has been clear for forty years. We were just told not to look.
Reaganomics were one expensive lie for the American people. In this episode we talk about why we bought it, who profited, who's still paying — and what this country would actually look like if we ran the numbers instead of the mythology.