Jillian Eugenios

As a young ballet dancer, Adriana Pierce lived with two separate selves: the dancer at rehearsal and then, outside the studio, the queer woman exploring her identity. She did not think it possible for both selves to meet.   “I regret how I felt in ballet spaces during that time, because I had to leave so much of the best parts of me outside. I don’t think ballet got the best parts of me, and that’s a shame,” said Pierce, the founder and artistic director of Queer the Ballet, an organization promoting LGBTQ representation and visibility in professional ballet.  As Pierce […]

In 1982, David Holladay was 16 years old and about to come out to his mother. They lived in a small town in Oklahoma and attended a Baptist church. This was the era of Rock Hudson and Elton John and Billie Jean King, people whose names, he said, “were never far away from something derogatory.”  When Holladay considered his future as a gay person, he saw it only as “the fog of the unknown.”  What Holladay didn’t know then was that a movement was brewing that he and his family would be a part of for decades to come. He […]

At a public hearing in Dade County, Florida, parents were enraged. The nation, they said, was in peril and children were at risk. A recent ordinance had granted gay people housing and employment protections, and that meant teachers couldn’t be fired because of their sexuality. Florida classrooms quickly became a battleground, and opponents of the ordinance said the state’s support of civil rights for homosexuals was infringing on their rights as parents.  Action had to be taken, and a campaign to limit the legal rights of LGBTQ people — all in the name of protecting children — was enacted. A […]

In the summer of 1953, Audrey Hartmann was 23 years old and on vacation with friends. She was staying in Ocean Bay Park, a small beach town on Fire Island, 60 miles from New York City. She’d heard whispers about a place down the beach called Cherry Grove. A few miles away, it was said to be a welcoming community of gay people. She’d heard there were lesbians there.  Hartmann walked down, and what she saw is on display at a new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, as well as chronicled in the 1993 book “Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years […]