Until the Lions Tell Their Story: Reclaiming LGBTQ History

Why we must tell our own stories, loudly and proudly. One person, one episode, one essay at a time.

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” (Chinua Achebe)

I borrow this metaphor knowing that Achebe may not have intended it for LGBTQ liberation. But that's exactly how liberation works: powerful ideas about who gets to tell stories belong to all who've been silenced. We don’t need permission to see ourselves in frameworks about reclaiming narrative.

For too long, LGBTQ history has been written by those who sought to erase us, criminalize us, pathologize us, or simply pretend we didn’t exist. We’ve been the lions in someone else’s story, depicted as threats, disorders, sins, or footnotes unworthy of mention.

But I’m done being told our history by hunters.

The Hunters’ Version

When the hunters tell the story, here’s what gets recorded:

• Medical journals that labeled us as mentally ill

• Court records of our arrests for loving who we loved

• Newspaper accounts that called us perverts and deviants

• Religious texts used to justify our persecution

• “Experts” who claimed to cure us

• Laws that erased us from public view

Propaganda masquerading as fact. Fox News before there was a Fox News. And for generations, this was the only version that made it into textbooks, archives, and collective memory. This was our story told by the hunters. It still is.

When the Lions Speak

Everything changes when we tell our own stories.

We discover that we've always been here, in every culture, every era, every community. We find our ancestors: the two-spirit people honored in Indigenous cultures, Sappho of Lesbos and the poets of ancient Greece, the gender-nonconforming saints and scholars, the lovers who risked everything, the activists who fought back. We find Gilbert Baker, who in 1978 turned eight colors into a symbol of hope and defiance that waves at every Pride around the world.

And we’re documenting more than just our suffering. Our families, our weddings, our art, our community, our resilience. This is the joy they tried to keep invisible. We can no longer be silent and hidden in a world we deserve to live in equally.

The language once used to shame us? We've made it our own. What was meant to hurt us now makes us stronger. Queer. Dyke. These words are badges of pride now, not slurs. We wear them along with our rainbow pins. We stand together in the streets, at Pride, in our communities, waving rainbow flags, visible and unashamed. We shine brightly and we continue to thrive.

Why This Matters Now

The fight over who tells LGBTQ history isn’t academic. It’s happening right now in school boards, legislatures, and libraries across the country. And it’s escalating rapidly.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out an explicit blueprint for erasing LGBTQ people from public life. Now they’ve released their priorities for 2025-2026 under “Restoring America’s Promise,” and the specifics are chilling.

Their “Put Family First” section explicitly states that every child deserves to be born to a married mother and father, a direct attack on same-sex parents and LGBTQ families. They denounce what they call radical ideologies that deny social and biological truths about sexual embodiment and marriage, making their opposition to marriage equality unmistakable.

In education, they decry the scourge of what they term woke ideas like radical gender ideology, pushing to dismantle the Department of Education entirely. They want to systematically remove the terms sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion from all federal rules, regulations, contracts, and grants.

This isn’t just policy. It’s erasure. The plan signals a deliberate effort to continue undermining same-sex marriage, eliminate gender-affirming care, and erase transgender people from public life and federal policy.

They’re characterizing our very existence (our families, our identities, our lives) as threats to children and American values. Our marriages aren’t “real families.” Our healthcare is “child abuse.” Our presence in schools is “pornographic ideology.”

Am I surprised by this continued assault on our existence? No. This is the hunters’ playbook, literally page by page: control the narrative, criminalize the identity, erase the history.

History is repeating itself. The Lavender Scare of the 1950s showed us what government-sanctioned erasure looks like. Stonewall showed us how we fight back.

The hunters understand something crucial: visibility equals power. If they can make us invisible again, if they can ensure that young LGBTQ people grow up never seeing themselves reflected in history or culture, if they can force us back into the closet through legislation and intimidation, then they win. We become the shameful secret again, the thing people whisper about, the identity people hide. I don’t know about you but I ain’t going back.

We’ve been here before. Stonewall wasn’t just a riot that “happened.” It was a rebellion led by trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera who said “enough.” These are heroes not because they led a rebellion. They are heroes because they had had enough. Enough of being treated as if their lives didn’t matter. Enough of police raids and arrests for existing. Enough of a world that demanded they stay invisible while it profited from their labor, their art, their creativity - as long as they never claimed it as their own.

But here’s what they don’t understand: once the lions start telling their own stories, you can’t silence them again. We’ve tasted freedom. We’ve built families and communities. We’ve documented our history. We know we’ve always existed, and we’re not going back.

From hockey rinks to podcasts, from books to social media, our stories are being told. This is our moment.

Add your voice. Share your story. Post your truth. Get loud.

My Podcast’s Mission

That’s why “A Queer POV: Friends, Loves, & Life” exists. This isn’t just a podcast. It’s living history, the kind that happens when real people share their real stories. It’s also deeply personal.

I’ve lived through love and loss, joy and grief, doubt and growth, and I know I’m not alone in that. This space is my way of holding up a mirror to the lives we live and the community we build when we dare to show up as ourselves.

I’m learning too. Just this past year, while researching ideas for a Pride episode, I stumbled across the Chicago LGBTQ Hall of Fame and learned about Henry Gerber and the Society for Human Rights, history I’d never been taught. Through my interview with Sean McCormick I discovered contemporary heroes like Woody Baldwin, the founder of Prime Timers, an organization built for older gay men who were being pushed to the margins of our community. Every conversation teaches me something new about who we've been and who we're becoming.

I believe every person has a story worth hearing. I also believe that when we really listen to each other, we open ourselves up to empathy, healing, and maybe even transformation.

Every conversation we have, every story we share, every moment of joy and struggle we document becomes part of our collective archive. We are writing our own history, not to glorify ourselves, but to ensure that future generations know: we were here, we loved fiercely, we fought back, and we survived.

We are the lions with keyboards, microphones, and platforms. And we’re telling the truth about the hunt.

Join the Story

What part of LGBTQ history do you wish you’d learned earlier? What story from your own life deserves to be preserved? Whose perspective has been missing from the narrative?

I know that for some, telling their story is scary. Sharing trauma, coming out again and again, reliving painful memories, it takes courage. If you’re ready to share, this space is built on listening with empathy and open minds. Every story shared here is a gift of trust.

Let’s tell those stories together.

Because until every lion has spoken, the story isn’t complete.

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A Queer POV: Friends, Loves, & Life with David
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