A Little Gay History of Maryland
A Little Gay History of Maryland
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Collecting in facsimile edition the first six gay little history zines on LGBTQ+ people in Maryland, pulled from newspaper archives, court records, letters, and stories told by community elders. Some of these stories are loud: police raids, public scandals, moments where queer life explodes into the official record. Others are quieter, pieced together from tiny blurbs and off-handed remarks.
The zines in this volume cover a 150-year span, from transmasculine horse thief George Wilson in 1838 to the passage of Baltimore's gay rights bill in 1988. In between are stories about gay bar raids, secret drag bars, lesbian murder trials of the century, Black drag pageants in the 1930s, wealthy lesbian heiresses, and the birth of the LGBTQ+ movement in Baltimore.
The historical snapshots collected here show that queer and trans people have always existed, highlight the leading roles played by Black LGBTQ+ people in Maryland's history, and underscore that the things Baltimore is often put down for-its Blackness, its working-class roots, its history as a seedy port town-are exactly what shaped these stories and make them unique.
Ben Egerman is a public librarian, historian, and homosexual who has focused on Maryland's LGBTQ+ history since 2018ish. He lives in Baltimore with his husband and a cat who, like Ben, is extremely annoying but gets away with it cuz he's so damn cute.
