The Queens of Welfare Island: Episode 2: Let’s All Be Fairies

The arrest of Gene Mosley

0:00Hi, Eric Marcus here. In honor of Making Gay History's 10th anniversary, an anonymous donor, who also happens to be one of my oldest friends dating back to junior high school, has offered us a very generous challenge grant. Between now and the end of November, he'll match any donation we receive, dollar for dollar, up to $20,000. If our work this past decade has been meaningful to you, I hope you'll join my friend in supporting Making Gay History's ongoing efforts to bring LGBTQ history to life through the voices of the people who lived it.

0:31To make a tax-deductible contribution, please go to makinggayhistory.org slash donate. That's makinggayhistory.org slash donate. Thanks so much. The next line should be, and he looked fabulous. Oh, yeah, it should be. It should absolutely be, and he looked fabulous. Fabulous. Yeah. The actor, Alan K. Washington, and I are sitting across from each other, and he's reading aloud an article published in the New York Herald on December 4th, 1925. The headline reads,

1:03Chorus Man's Red Frock Wins 30-Day Engagement. It's about an arrest in Midtown Manhattan. Gene Mosley, a Negro, appeared in West Side Court yesterday in a maroon evening frock, black velvet cape, silk stockings, pumps, and a black wig. Patrolman Myers had arrested him for disorderly conduct at 44th Street and 8th Avenue. My gosh, that's right here. Coincidentally, we're in a recording studio just a few steps away from Times Square, the exact same block where Gene Mosley was arrested more than a hundred years ago.

1:41Mosley was on his way to a masquerade, he said, and the costume was quite proper for the occasion. What do you do for a living? Magistrate Levin asked him. I'm a chorus man, was the reply. I understand, Magistrate Levin said, that the inmates of Welfare Island want a little talent for their Christmas show. Now I'm a kind man, and sometimes given to philanthropy. I think you ought to go big there. Thirty days. What?

2:13Oh my goodness. So the magistrate is sort of the casting director for the Fag Follies. Wow. The Fag Follies was the yearly Christmas pageant staged inside the men's penitentiary on Welfare Island in the 1920s and 30s. In drag. They're like, oh yeah, you look like a performer. You look fabulous. They need some folks for their holiday concert at the prison. I'm going to send you over there for 30 days.

2:43That's wild.

The Gorgeous Nothings musical

2:56I'm Eric Marcus, and this is Making Gay History, the Queens of Welfare Island. That drag Christmas show, The Fag Follies, is being recreated on stage in New York City in the form of a new musical, The Gorgeous Nothings. And Ellen K. Washington plays the character of Gene. Gorgeous Nothings Gene is based in part on the Gene we're reading about in this old copy of The New York Herald, Gene Mosley. Of all the real stories that inspired The Gorgeous Nothings, Gene's is the one drawn from the fewest scraps.

3:32Gene Mosley didn't leave us much of a paper trail. We don't even know if that was his real name or just a pseudonym he gave the police. But those scraps aren't the end of Gene's story, because we can look back in time to the world in which he lived and how he fit into it. In this episode, we're going to follow the breadcrumbs left in the press clippings through the woods to fairyland. We'll go to The Follies, both Fag and Ziegfeld, and rediscover an early 20th century queer identity, nearly forgotten, which was both celebrated and criminalized, sometimes all at once.

4:09This is Episode 2. Let's All Be Fairies.

4:25We only know Gene Mosley through a few short newspaper clippings, yet Gene leaps off the page as vivid as any New York City character. I just love the description. It's just, whoa. Yeah. Yeah, that took time to get that fabulous.

4:58It took a lot of time. The pumps, the stockings, the cape. Yeah. Yeah, and a black wig. And arrested for that? And arrested for that. Why was she dressed up in her bright flaming red? Unless she expected to knock someone dead. Why would she ramble down? Just the image of, like, being in a cape, in this velvet cape. I mean, I get stuck on the cape because Gene talks about wearing a flaming red evening cape in the show.

5:30This morning, we catch one of the homosexuals. Wearing one flaming red evening cape. That's Alan, reading from the Gorgeous Nothings script. He's been living with his gene since joining the production in 2022. The inmate immediately confessed. Of course I stole them dirty rags. But baby, it was a drag emergency. The playwright behind the Gorgeous Nothings, Travis Lee Russ, conjured this gene from scraps in the archive, while Alan K. Washington brought his own life experience and flair to breathe life into this sketch of Gene.

6:09Page 71. Yes. I think we could leave it there. Alan's gene is not a historically factual Gene Mosley, but a version of Gene, who reaches back through time as a bridge between the 1920s and today. The inmate has been cross-dressing since age 15, baby. The day my daddy kicks me out the house and baby, this fine black ass hopped a greyhound from Baltimore and I ain't never looked back. Gene is a firecracker.

6:39Gene is a black, queer person. I think in modern language, Gene would be a non-binary, gender non-conforming person, if not a trans person, who really is unapologetically themself. While Alan refers to the fictional character in the Gorgeous Nothings with they-them pronouns, the historical record of the real Gene uses masculine pronouns.

7:10And without Gene Mosley's word on the matter, that's what we're using. What do you want, kid? I'm working here. Sorry to bother you, ma'am. I'm just looking for a job. In the Gorgeous Nothings, fictional Gene is incarcerated on the fag ward for wearing women's clothes, specifically for performing in drag at a Harlem club called Gladys's Clam House, under the direction of Harlem's most famous male impersonator, Gladys Bentley. But I need a job. Uh-uh. I just need to get my foot in the door.

7:40And I said no, little boy. Go home. This ain't no place for you. I don't care what I gotta do. That's Alan, opposite J. Harrison G., reading as Bentley. In the play, finding their way in New York City and struggling to survive, Gene stumbles into the world of drag. Something changes. Like everything clicks, like it's the 4th of July, and Halloween, and Christmas, and my birthday, and New Year's all rolled up into one. Fictional Gene is naturally the star of the play within a play.

8:13The fag follies' performance at the heart of the Gorgeous Nothings. And now, for the first time here at Gladys's Clam House, we have a special treat for your white motherfuckers. We like to call her... Little Red Riding Hood. Gene's big number is How Could Red Riding Hood? A salacious, over-the-top song that melds Gene's memory of performing in Harlem with the far less glamorous world of the fag follies and the men's penitentiary.

8:43How could Red Riding Hood have been so very good and still keep the wolf from the door? Gene struts around the makeshift prison stage, putting his whole body into the song's already suggestive lyrics, turning a familiar fairy tale into a bawdy, bold burlesque number about a good girl gone very, very bad. They say she found a big, bad wolf in Granny's bed. Yes, a big, sun-body pulled over his head.

9:17This song, this rendition, is a collision of fact and fiction. Allen's Gene, as Red Riding Hood, is echoing the real Gene Mosley, who was arrested in that red frock and cape. Like most of the music in the show, How Could Red Riding Hood is a vintage American songbook tune the inmates of the real fag ward would likely have known. The song's refrain, How could Red Riding Hood have been so very good and still keep the wolf from the door? Contains a code.

9:48To keep the wolf from the door is an old idiom, meaning to struggle to earn enough to live, to survive in the world. To be able to, like, withstand and endure everything, to still be able to show up and be yourself, that's Gene. Like, Gene has never looked back and never does look back. And still keep the wolf from the door. Oh!

The Fag Follies on Welfare Island

10:25One of the things that's so notable about the real Gene Mosley's arrest is that it's one of the few independent references we have to the fag follies. This wasn't a glitzy pageant that got tons of press attention. This was a show put on by the most marginalized of the marginalized in one of the most disgusting prisons in the U.S. It's a small miracle we know anything about it at all. And yet, we do know that it meant a lot to the inmates. And we can glean that from the sneering account of a prison doctor, who wrote, More than one inmate told me about the fag follies.

10:58This was a sort of entertainment given by the dwellers in the South around the Christmas holidays. By the South, he means the South Ward, the fag ward, of the Welfare Island prison. All the, quote, talent combined to put on a show which was staged in their own cell block. The audience was composed of those with sufficient pull to permit them access to the South after the main body of prisoners were locked in. He says of the performances themselves, They were bawdy and intended to stimulate depraved eroticism.

11:32It is doubtful that these exhibitions were of much entertainment value.

11:45I'm George Chauncey. I'm a history professor at Columbia University and the author of Gay New York. George literally wrote the book on gay male history. His landmark book, Gay New York, sparked the inspiration for the gorgeous nothings. George's work is the foundation for so much of what we know about this period of history, the fag ward and the fag follies. In the show, we see something called the fag follies, which to me seemed absolutely unbelievable. The fact that it could exist is both a sign of the effervescence of queer culture outside the prison

12:20and is a sign of how institutionalized gender nonconforming life was in the prison.

The Ziegfeld Follies and stage drag

12:28So what were the fag follies? So the fag follies were a big performance put on every Christmas for prison authorities, the people who ran the prison, and a select number of prisoners, primarily the crime bosses who ran the prison. It was drawing on Siegfeld follies. So it was a form that was very familiar to the so-called fags who put it on. They're all here tonight to see the first Siegfeld follies. The curtain is going up. Listen to those gorgeous girls singing that opening chorus.

13:00The Siegfeld follies were the most famous version of one of the early 20th century's most popular forms of entertainment, the live onstage variety show, a glamorous, bedazzled big sister to the simpler, bodier vaudeville shows of the era. The follies grew into massive stage productions with huge sets, glamorous costumes, big bands, and orchestras. They'd feature all sorts of acts, with elaborate song and dance numbers,

13:32comedy sketches, ballads, and more. These shows were so popular that the acts were often memorialized on records and on film for decades to come. Tonight we're broadcasting the gala opening of Florence Siegfeld's greatest show, Glorifying the American Girl. There he is. There he is, Florence Siegfeld. The 1929 film, Glorifying the American Girl, produced by Florence Siegfeld himself, contains a partial recreation of his Siegfeld follies, lavishly filmed in part using Technicolor, which was brand new.

14:07Included are a jazz band, a comedy routine, a ballet, and a piano ballad. I'll never leave him alone, I'll make his trouble with my arms. One number features girls in giant white feather headdresses doing kick lines before the curtain opens to reveal a giant tableau of sequined mermaids caught in nets by shirtless hunks. There are also sailors, and for some bizarre reason lost to history, Catholic priests. The performers just hold their poses as the music swells.

14:53And of course, drag, or female impersonation, as it was often called at the time, was part and parcel of some of these shows. Say, do you know I met a fellow friend of yours this morning? How dare you talk to me! Why, the idea, I haven't given you the least bit of encouragement. Why, a girl ain't safe in the street after three or four in the morning. Well, would you like to go for an automobile ride? No. No? I'm just walking home from one. That's a 1923 recording of You Must Come Over, a comedy routine by Bert Savoy and his stage partner Jay Brennan.

15:25Savoy, dressed in drag, was enormously popular and performed in all sorts of variety shows, including the Siegfeld follies of 1918. Say, before we go any further, tell me, are you married or single or what is it? Four. I'm not married anymore. I'm not married. It takes up so much time. I'm not married. You must come over. Someone like Jean Mosley would almost certainly have been familiar with the Siegfeld follies and its cheaper, more accessible imitators. But the fact that inmates put on a follies production in prison,

15:56not just with the blessing of the prison authorities, but if the reports of Jean's arrest record are to be believed, with casting assistance from the magistrate, sometimes the truth is truly stranger than fiction.

Laws and policing of queer life

16:08During this period that we're talking about, you could be arrested for homosexual behavior as perceived by the authorities. Yes, for sure. So there were several laws that criminalized various forms of homosexual behavior and presentation. Cross-dressing was illegal under an article of the New York Penal Code, which was originally used to punish the use of disguises to avoid paying taxes.

16:39It was later repurposed to punish party-goers. It forbade, quote, The wearing of masks, fancy dresses, or other disguise by persons on their way to or returning from such ball. Disorderly conduct empowered a cop to arrest anyone he thought was disorderly. It could be someone whose gender presentation was nonconforming. It could be someone trying to pick up another man. Not surprisingly, people of color and immigrants and queers

17:14were most likely to be arrested under this very expansive rubric. Gene Mosley, who was black, was arrested on this disorderly conduct charge. A disorderly conduct charge typically resulted in a sentence of 10 to 30 days. That was really disruptive in people's lives. It threatened to expose them and their queer lives to friends, employers, family members, and so forth. Mosley's 30-day sentence was handed down on December 3rd, 1925,

17:48landing him in the men's penitentiary on Welfare Island through the holidays, conveniently in time for that year's edition of The Fag Follies. And what really blew my mind was that some of the men were in prison because they had been cross-dressing, and then in The Fag Follies they were cross-dressing to perform in front of the whole prison. And everyone knew that the prisoners had dresses and wigs or wore their hair long and had makeup and so forth. And the prison officers actually went to see this performance.

18:19The lax attitude towards The Fag Follies was in part because of the outsized influence of organized crime in the prison. But more than that, the types of people who were in the prison's main population were far less squeamish about homosexuals than the administrators and doctors who described The Follies and Fag Ward in harsh judgmental terms in the records. In fact, queer life was more open and more accepted, especially in black and immigrant working-class neighborhoods in the early 20th century,

18:49than it would be in the 40s and 50s. So working-class people would have recognized what was going on in The Fag Annex because many of them moved in a world in which you could see fairies on the streets.

The street culture of fairies

19:15What was a fairy? Yes, so a fairy was a pretty capacious term, and it referred to the most visible queer figures in the streets of New York in the early 20th century, for sure. Growing up, I heard the term fairy thrown around almost as often as fag, and it wasn't a reference to Tinkerbell. In my youth, it was a generic catch-all insult for an effeminate gay guy. The term fairy, in reference to gay people, goes back to the late 1800s

19:46and encompassed much more than just gay men as we think of them today. Sometimes fairies were even referred to as a third sex.

19:59Fairy typically, most often, was male-presenting, but often had long hair, sometimes had bleached that hair, wear makeup, rouge, might pluck the eyebrows. Fairy girls typically was not cross-dressing fully, but perhaps a handful of articles of women's clothes or brighter colors than men were supposed to wear. Retrospectively, we would probably say that some fairies were people who today we would call transgender. And one of the ways some fairies described themselves

20:32was that they were people with a man's body but a woman's soul, a woman's heart. But there were clearly many other fairies who were either gender non-binary but not female-identified, or male-identified but felt a deep sense of male femininity. When I came out to my grandmother in 1987, I remember her describing a man who fit exactly this description. She asked me where all the gay people came from

21:03because the only gay person she ever encountered in the old days was someone she saw on the subway platform in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in South Brooklyn. He wore fluffy sweaters, had dyed hair, wore makeup, and squished when he walked. To her, this was what a gay man looked like. Given what I know now, it occurs to me that she was thinking about a fairy, someone closer to Jean Mosley's gay New York than the butch, mustachioed Chelsea clones of my era. I'd like to think that maybe Grandma's fairy,

21:34as out of place as they might have been in Bensonhurst, was on their way to Manhattan, where they would have been in good company.

21:43Once upon a time, there were two fairies. In New York in the 1920s and 30s, the term fairy was often used as a signal or with a wink and a nod. But not always. Ding dong, ding dong. Fairy bells are gayly ringing. Ding dong, ding dong. Everybody's gayly singing, dancing round the moondeems. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. This song, Let's All Be Fairies,

22:15by Durium Dance Band, is from 1933 and doesn't exactly try hard to hide that double meaning. And let's all be fairies Tinkle, tinkle, crash, crash, crash All dance around and go crazy It's an artifact of a time when there was an explosion of fairy talent on the stages of New York City. Among them, another gene,

22:45Gene Malin. How do you do, my smart people? I am about to sing a song. In fact, I think the boys are ready right now. Are you ready, boys? Yes, Gene. Please. Gene Malin was a full-on fairy. This is Malin in a 1932 recording called I'd Rather Be Spanish Than Manish. Oh, I'm a bull battler you never have met And you never forget when you do Professional jealousy

23:16Malin was at the vanguard of the pansy craze, the name scholars have given to a period where gay talent was on dazzling display and celebrated in a way that would be deemed shocking and out of bounds only a few years later. Pansy was more or less a synonym for fairy. When I keep my mouth shut There's room for a doubt But when I start talking The secret is out Ah, pansy!

23:46Hmm. You're telling me. So one sign of how visible queer life was and how fascinated people were by it in the 20s and early 30s is that Clara Bow the most famous and successful flapper star The silent film of the early talkies in the 20s and 30s had the lead in a 1932 film called Call Her Savage. Well, I think you're an utterly spoiled young woman and you'll never be completely happy until some man takes you by the scruff of the neck

24:17and beats the devil out of you. She is being taken on a tour of the city by her gigolo who says, Oh, let's go see something really outré. Where are we going? Well, you said you wanted to go slumming so I picked a place to eat in the village. Only wild poets and anarchists eat there. It's pretty tough. And then the film shows you them walking into a basement speakeasy cabaret where there are two waiters swishing around singing a song

24:48about how they'd like to be on a sailor's ship and all the sailors that they could pursue. The two waiters aren't in full drag exactly but in that fairy way George described they're somewhere in between. They're wearing French maid outfits flouncing about and wielding feather dusters like their majorettes. No wigs,

25:19just little bonnets and what looks like a touch of eyeliner and lipstick. It's a sailor in pajamas I should see I know it's scared the night out of me And on a great big battleship you'd like to be Walking a shade the maid is never And I tell you what they're showing you is what you could find in certain Greenwich Village cafes and certain Harlem cafes in the 20s and early 30s.

25:49Just an incredible openness They were very visible That visibility is also apparent in this song In it, an onlooker is comically gobsmacked by the ubiquity of these so-called masculine women, feminine men This was a time before the terms straight and gay were in mainstream use to mean sexual opposites

26:20The fairies as well as quote, normal men were part of a far more fluid male sexual culture Many working class men went to taverns not queer taverns just regular taverns where sometimes there'd be fairies bantering with the so-called normal men there propositioning them or getting propositions by the so-called normal men there with no one thinking the normal men were queer because of it George says

26:54this sexual fluidity is exactly why prison officials separated inmates like Jean Mosley from the rest of the prison population on Welfare Island and sent them to the fag ward They took it for granted that those prisoners would be attracted to the fairies and would want to have sex with them So it was a super segregation it wasn't just homosexual men it was fairies and queens Overwhelmingly the people in the fairy annex were gender non-conformists were fairies whatever they had

27:26been arrested for All of this brings us back to the real Jean Mosley who was very likely a fairy and a participant in this vibrant highly visible subculture

Newspaper records and police encounters

27:40One of the other scraps of evidence that we have of Jean's life is another newspaper article from a few months after the one we mentioned earlier Incredibly this article isn't just a reprise for Jean it also features the exact same cop George Myers in a starring role Alan K. Washington who portrays the fictional gorgeous nothings Jean read it aloud for us This is from Variety Variety? They're so obsessed

28:10with Jean Okay Colored impersonator tries kiss cop 60 days Jean Mosley 26 337 West 59th Street who said he was a female impersonator in Darktown Follies was sentenced to 60 days in the workhouse when arraigned on a charge of disorderly conduct Policeman George Myers said he was passing in front of the 59th Street address early one morning

28:41when Mosley stepped up to him threw his arms around his neck and tried to kiss him Myers said he pushed him aside and then recognized him as a man who had been arrested that December for a similar act Mosley denied the charge but could not give a satisfactory answer what he was doing out at that hour of the morning Wow I get the sense that there's a lot missing from what really happened from this little blurb this article

29:16gives us a few more breadcrumbs to follow it tells us where Gene lived the listed address 337 West 59th Street is just a block west of Central Park and a mile north of Times Square and back then it was a largely black working class neighborhood it also mentions Gene's job as a female impersonator in Darktown Follies so it's plausible he was actually a performer in a Follies but back to the big hole in this story poor policeman George Myers just happened

29:47to be passing Gene's place one morning and Gene throws himself at him it defies credibility that Gene would kiss a cop the exact same cop who arrested him months earlier unprompted outside of his own home this is making me think about the ways that I think often these policemen would lure these men into these situations because I honestly cannot imagine that Gene would just try to kiss

30:17a cop randomly for no reason he might have had it in for Gene and made it up that wouldn't surprise me exactly at all or could it be that Gene and this officer had a much longer tit for tat going back to Gene's first arrest from a few months earlier there's another shorter blurb from a different newspaper reporting the arrest which includes one intriguing detail it says Gene Mosley was quote recognized in his masquerading

30:48attire by patrolman Myers patrolman Myers recognized Gene huh sounds as though these two had some sort of history even before that first arrest maybe we'll likely never know for sure all we have are these bits and pieces of Gene Mosley's story just the outlines of a person but clues in the archive can help us paint a fuller

31:18picture of Gene's world and what might have been going on between Gene and that policeman you don't see this very often but his offense in 1937 was disorderly conduct fairy and what does that mean that means exactly what you think it means that's Brian Feree an archivist at the New York City Municipal Archives who was also part of the research team for the gorgeous nothings searching for arrest records and other clues about the people imprisoned on the fag ward Brian and I are in the Municipal Archives reading room

31:49a sterile white space filled with documents laid out on tables for us to view and he's showing me one particular arrest record you had asked about Jean Mosley which isn't someone that I was able to find any information on but when you talk about borrowing details from someone else's life this is someone who was arrested multiple times as Brian says this isn't Jean Mosley's arrest record but this case sings in the same key as

32:20Jean's it's the same time period and this person was also arrested for wearing women's clothes in this case I think they're using it because he was coming from a masquerade a masquerade ball at the Rockland Palace at the time drag masquerade balls were all the rage for both fairies and straight voyeurs and the ball held at the Rockland Palace in Harlem was the epicenter of the scene these cops could have been stationed outside waiting for people to come out in drag

32:51but I think you kind of have to read between the lines on a lot of these charges these aren't people that are being ripped off the stage these are people who are living their lives on the street I'm just going to read a passage if that's okay it says when interviewed the defendant stated that he had gone with a friend of his to a masquerade ball at the Rockland Palace in New York there he was approached by the detective who began to make overtures to him and asked to take him home so the

33:21detective asked to take him home the defendant was in an intoxicated condition and he agreed both entered a taxi cab where the defendant was asked by the detective to commit an abnormal sexual act with him offering to pay him five dollars the defendant states that he refused to do so as well as to go to a hotel which the detective proposed the arrest was then made the defendant insists that he is innocent I say he was innocent they were

33:52not shy to entrap people back then but that's not even that's beyond entrapment that's that's making up a case against a guy who was just living his life dressed however he was dressed that's appalling that arrest that arrest was a part of a larger sweep of history when fairies on stage and in the street faded into the background forced into

34:22the much fabled post-war closet as the great depression wore on a surge in moralistic policing saw bars and nightclubs raided and performers ripped off the stage on screen the Hays Code meant to clean up the supposed immorality of motion pictures was enacted in 1934 making film depictions of homosexuals rare and far more coded it would take until 1962 30 years after Call Her Savage for another gay bar

34:54to appear in movie theaters

35:03when the pansy craze ended so too did a kind of gay life embodied by people like Gene Mosley and now re-embodied by Alan K. Washington as Gene in The Gorgeous Nothings I'm not sure that I can articulate it but it just makes me feel like I am doing something important by representing

35:34this person that has been sort of lost to history and to sort of like present them to the world in all of their power and all of their beauty and all of their dignity feels really exciting one way Alan gets to do that is with the defiant number ain't nobody's business the show's big I am what I am moment near the end of the show in the face of pressure to change Alan's gene taunts the audience

36:05and the police to dare them to be anyone other than themselves can you imagine being in gene's shoes walking down the street as you did today can you put yourself in gene's shoes and imagine i am trying to put myself in gene's shoes and imagine walking down eighth avenue

36:36looking fabulous especially now i think people would love to see gene walking down the street and i think gene would be so celebrated and also it would be almost like nothing you know what i mean i feel like there would be people walking past gene and just not even thinking twice about it i feel like i can draw such a clear

37:06thread from gene to now it's so clear to me that like oh yeah because of the way that gene moved through the world i am able to be myself now too watching you as you describe gene you may not be aware but your shoulders go back and you sit up a little straighter that's what it does to me that's what that that idea does to me and i think that's what gene does to me as well like i i love being able

37:37to embody this character because he really makes me move differently and it it's powerful yes alan this

38:08is gonna be fucking great next time

Harlem drag balls and legacy

38:17we pick up one more thread of gene's tapestry and go uptown to one of those drag balls and spend some time at a basement bar with one of harlem's most notorious male impersonators she became well known for singing naughty versions of popular songs such as a take on the popular broadway tune sweet georgia brown and the song my alice blue gown turning them into an ode to the joys of anal sex whoa and that was in the 1930s there's been no annie oakley's

38:47as before what's the annie oakley homie you're gonna pay before you enter through her door the back door the front door girl this making gay history episode was written produced mixed and sound designed by benjamin frisch and executive produced by our founding editor sarah burningham with production help from will coley bart warshaw max miller and

39:17tarcicio longobardi our studio engineers were michael bognor kathleen conti katherine cook and charles de montebello at cdm sound studios making gay history's theme music was composed by fritz myers thanks to thanks to our listening circle including dame stewart jenna weiss burman and jeffrey masters thank you to our photo editor michael green and fact checker matt koff with editorial support for making gay history's deputy director inga detaya thank you also to the new york public library

39:48manuscripts and archives division for their ongoing assistance special thanks to historian george chauncey and archivist brian for their assistance to learn more about the people and stories featured in our episodes please visit making gay history dot org where you'll find links to additional information archival photos as well as full transcripts the queens of welfare island is a production of making gay history it was made possible with generous support from the life jacket theater company the jonathan logan family foundation ty ashford and

40:19nicholas jitkoff broadway cares equity fights aids christopher street financial the marcus family foundation rick hoffman bill cucks robert dodd maureen bennett maria lefkarides emily and david tobin richard and