Books
D.C. couple’s new book is spin-off of popular LGBT Instagram page
Project took on a life of its own since launching two-and-a-half years ago
Matthew Riemer is shocked how many people think the Stonewall Riots were the beginning of the LGBT liberation movement.
“We are teaching kids from the get-go that their history started in 1969. It’s ridiculous,” Riemer says. “As queer people, we’re this group who have been denied our history.”
He and his partner Leighton Brown, both attorneys and Washington residents, run the popular @lgbt_history Instagram account and are now coming out with a book on the history of LGBT activism. “We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation” (Ten Speed Press) will be released on Tuesday, May 7 and its two authors sat down with the Blade for an interview. They’ll be at Solid State Books (600 H St., N.E.) on Wednesday, May 8. It’s free and starts at 7 p.m.
The men created the account as a personal project after realizing they didn’t know much about their own history themselves.
Riemer does the text-based research and Brown finds photos for the account.
“We were just on a personal quest to learn, and we had gotten a little bit obsessive about it,” Brown says.
“A little bit obsessive” probably doesn’t do justice to the account or the research the two men have conducted.
Brown and Riemer first posted on Jan. 17, 2016. Just over three years later, they have nearly 5,000 posts and about 380,000 followers.
Each post is an image of an event in LGBT history or simply a historical photograph of LGBT people. These photos are accompanied by anywhere from a few lines to multiple paragraphs of descriptive text.
Recent posts include a picture of the “How Gay is Gay” cover from TIME in 1979. Under it is a description of the article, which discussed the rise of gays and lesbians choosing to live openly.
Another features an image of trans activist Marsha P. Johnson in Hoboken, N.J., on Easter Sunday.
Both men say the account has seen gradual growth to where it is today.
“It’s been just steady progress,” Brown says, while also noting that Laverne Cox regrammed a couple of their photos in the early stages.
Riemer wants to emphasize that the account is more than just another social media page. It’s become a well-research archive for LGBT history.
“We hope we are taken seriously and we believe we deserve to be taken seriously,” Riemer says. “We don’t write anything that can’t be backed up with primary, or at least secondary, sources.”
They cite those sources, too.
“We’ve been very serious about crediting and, when it’s possible, tagging photographers, archivists and activists or whoever is in the picture,” Riemer says.
Brown and Riemer love the platform Instagram provides them. But they also realize it comes with restrictions.
“The account is limiting not only in that it’s 2,200 characters but also in that queer history is really all connected,” Riemer says. “We weren’t able to show that on the account. There’s no hyperlinking. We don’t know if people are reading the captions. And we don’t know when people started following.”
That’s how the idea of a book emerged. “We Are Everywhere” comes out in a few days, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
But its content stretches back long before Stonewall and details LGBT history up until the early 2000s in a near-chronological manner. Chapters include large glossy images, curated by Brown, and accompanying narrative, written by Riemer.
And it doesn’t focus on the events one might expect to see.
“You don’t read that much about gays in the military or gay marriage,” Riemer says of the book. “We want to talk about queer history, our history, not our story of how we related to the straight people.”
Reimer remembers that when he first came out as gay, he “tried to be the straight-gay.” “A lot of us did that and still do, especially gay, cis white men,” he says.
His research into LGBT history changed his mind on how he had to act and who he had to be.
“We don’t fit into the broader society,” Brown says. “And that’s great,” Riemer chimes in.
“The book isn’t just about a few moments where we have had some clear advancement with respect to the larger society,” Brown says. “It’s about all the good and bad that got us to that advancement and the setbacks in between.”
And it took hours of archival research to put the book together. Riemer left his job as an attorney to work on the book full time when he and Brown signed the deal with Ten Speed Press.
He started writing the text over a year ago and visited more than 10 archives across the country as well as a bunch more online to weave the book together.
“We just wanted to get it right, and it’s been absolutely exhausting,” Riemer says.
The book has already received praise from giants within the LGBT community.
Anderson Cooper, who also follows the @LGBT_History Instagram account, wrote: “Our history hasn’t been taught in schools; it’s been passed from person to person, whispered through the ages, often in the dark of night between lovers. But whisper no more. Here we are, in these pages — our pride and power, our blood and tears, our love and laughter. This is our fight, our history, and we must learn it.”
Now that the book is finished and its release is around the corner, Riemer and Brown are focusing on promoting it. They have events at college campuses across the country and in June, they’re slated to speak at the LGBT Center in New York.
“We Are Everywhere,” the two men hope, brings to life the stories of the radicals of the LGBT liberation movement.
“What we’ve found is it’s always been the craziest, the most outlandish, the loudest — the ones who the mainstreamers say, ‘We’re not all like that’ — those were the ones who create the space for the rest of us,” Riemer says.
Books
Love or fear flying you’ll devour ‘Why Fly’
New book chronicles a lifetime obsession with aircraft
‘Why Fly’
By Caroline Paul
c. 2026, Bloomsbury
$27.99/256 pages
Tray table folded up.
Check. Your seat is in the upright position, the airflow above your head is just the way you like it, and you’re ready to go. The flight crew is making final preparations. The lights are off and the plane is backing up. All you need now is “Why Fly” by Caroline Paul, and buckle up.
When she was very young, Paul was “obsessed” with tales of adventure, devouring accounts written by men of their derring-do. The only female adventure-seeker she knew about then was Amelia Earhart; later, she learned of other adventuresome women, including aviatrix Bessie Coleman, and Paul was transfixed.
Time passed; Paul grew up to create a life of adventure all her own.
Then, the year her marriage started to fracture, she switched her obsession from general exploits to flight.
Specifically, Paul loves experimental aircraft, some of which, like her “trike,” can be made from a kit at home. Others, like Woodstock, her beloved yellow gyrocopter, are major purchases that operate under different FAA rules. All flying has rules, she says, even if it seems like it should be as freewheeling as the birds it mimics.
She loves the pre-flight checklist, which is pure anticipation as well as a series of safety measures; if only a relationship had the same ritual. Paul loves her hangar, as a place of comfort and for flight in all senses of the word. She enjoys thinking about historic tales of flying, going back before the Wright Brothers, and including a man who went aloft on a lawn chair via helium-filled weather balloons.
The mere idea that she can fly any time is like a gift to Paul.
She knows a lot of people are terrified of flying, but it’s near totally safe: generally, there’s a one in almost 14 million chance of perishing in a commercial airline disaster – although, to Paul’s embarrassment and her dismay, it’s possible that both the smallest planes and the grandest loves might crash.
If you’re a fan of flying, you know what to do here. If you fear it, pry your fingernails off the armrests, take a deep breath, and head to the shelves. “Why Fly” might help you change your mind.
It’s not just that author Caroline Paul enjoys being airborne, and she tells you. It’s not that she’s honest in her explanations of being in love and being aloft. It’s the meditative aura you’ll get as you’re reading this book that makes it so appealing, despite the sometimes technical information that may flummox you between the Zen-ness. It’s not overwhelming; it mixes well with the history Paul includes, biographies, the science, heartbreak, and exciting tales of adventure and risk, but it’s there. Readers and romantics who love the outdoors, can’t resist a good mountain, and crave activity won’t mind it, though, not at all.
If you own a plane – or want to – you’ll want this book, too. It’s a great waiting-at-the-airport tale, or a tuck-in-your-suitcase-for-later read. Find “Why Fly” and you’ll see that it’s an upright kind of book.
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Books
New book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians, documents war experiences
Tuesday marks four years since Russia attacked Ukraine
Journalist J. Lester Feder’s new book profiles LGBTQ Ukrainians and their experiences during Russia’s war against their country.
Feder for “The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine” interviewed and photographed LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kyiv, the country’s capital, and in other cities. They include Olena Hloba, the co-founder of Tergo, a support group for parents and friends of LGBTQ Ukrainians, who fled her home in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha shortly after Russia launched its war on Feb. 24, 2022.
Russian soldiers killed civilians as they withdrew from Bucha. Videos and photographs that emerged from the Kyiv suburb showed dead bodies with their hands tied behind their back and other signs of torture.
Olena Shevchenko, chair of Insight, a Ukrainian LGBTQ rights group, wrote the book’s forward.
The book also profiles Viktor Pylypenko, a gay man who the Ukrainian military assigned to the 72nd Mechanized Black Cossack Brigade after the war began. Feder writes Pylypenko’s unit “was deployed to some of the fiercest and most important battles of the war.”
“The brigade was pivotal to beating Russian forces back from Kyiv in their initial attempt to take the capital, helping them liberate territory near Kharkiv and defending the front lines in Donbas,” wrote Feder.
Pylypenko spent two years fighting “on Ukraine’s most dangerous battlefields, serving primarily as a medic.”
“At times he felt he was living in a horror movie, watching tank shells tear his fellow soldiers apart before his eyes,” wrote Feder. “He held many men as they took their final breaths. Of the roughly one hundred who entered the unit with him, only six remained when he was discharged in 2024. He didn’t leave by choice: he went home to take care of his father, who had suffered a stroke.”
Feder notes one of Pylypenko’s former commanders attacked him online when he came out. Pylypenko said another commander defended him.
Feder also profiled Diana and Oleksii Polukhin, two residents of Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine that is near the mouth of the Dnieper River.
Ukrainian forces regained control of Kherson in November 2022, nine months after Russia occupied it.
Diana, a cigarette vender, and Polukhin told Feder that Russian forces demanded they disclose the names of other LGBTQ Ukrainians in Kherson. Russian forces also tortured Diana and Polukhin while in their custody.
Polukhim is the first LGBTQ victim of Russian persecution to report their case to Ukrainian prosecutors.
Feder, who is of Ukrainian descent, first visited Ukraine in 2013 when he wrote for BuzzFeed.
He was Outright International’s Senior Fellow for Emergency Research from 2021-2023. Feder last traveled to Ukraine in December 2024.
Feder spoke about his book at Politics and Prose at the Wharf in Southwest D.C. on Feb. 6. The Washington Blade spoke with Feder on Feb. 20.
Feder told the Blade he began to work on the book when he was at Outright International and working with humanitarian groups on how to better serve LGBTQ Ukrainians. Feder said military service requirements, a lack of access to hormone therapy and documents that accurately reflect a person’s gender identity and LGBTQ-friendly shelters are among the myriad challenges that LGBTQ Ukrainians have faced since the war began.
“All of these were components of a queer experience of war that was not well documented, and we had never seen in one place, especially with photos,” he told the Blade. “I felt really called to do that, not only because of what was happening in Ukraine, but also as a way to bring to the surface issues that we’d had seen in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan.”
Feder also spoke with the Blade about the war’s geopolitical implications.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013 signed a law that bans the “promotion of homosexuality” to minors.
The 2014 Winter Olympics took place in Sochi, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine a few weeks after the games ended.
Russia’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown has continued over the last decade.
The Russian Supreme Court in 2023 ruled the “international LGBT movement” is an extremist organization and banned it. The Russian Justice Ministry last month designated ILGA World, a global LGBTQ and intersex rights group, as an “undesirable” organization.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has sought to align itself with Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after a 2021 meeting with then-President Joe Biden at the White House said his country would continue to fight discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. (Zelenskyy’s relationship with the U.S. has grown more tense since the Trump-Vance administration took office.) Zelenskyy in 2022 publicly backed civil partnerships for same-sex couples.
Then-Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova in 2023 applauded Kyiv Pride and other LGBTQ and intersex rights groups in her country when she spoke at a photo exhibit at Ukraine House in D.C. that highlighted LGBTQ and intersex soldiers. Then-Kyiv Pride Executive Director Lenny Emson, who Feder profiles in his book, was among those who attended the event.
“Thank you for everything you do in Kyiv, and thank you for everything that you do in order to fight the discrimination that still is somewhere in Ukraine,” said Markarova. “Not everything is perfect yet, but you know, I think we are moving in the right direction. And we together will not only fight the external enemy, but also will see equality.”
Feder in response to the Blade’s question about why he decided to write his book said he “didn’t feel” the “significance of Russia’s war against Ukraine” for LGBTQ people around the world “was fully understood.”
“This was an opportunity to tell that big story,” he said.
“The crackdown on LGBT rights inside Russia was essentially a laboratory for a strategy of attacking democratic values by attacking queer rights and it was one as Ukraine was getting closet to Europe back in 2013, 2014,” he added. “It was a strategy they were using as part of their foreign policy, and it was one they were using not only in Ukraine over the past decade, but around the world.”
Feder said Republicans are using “that same strategy to attack queer people, to attack democracy itself.”
“I felt like it was important that Americans understand that history,” he said.
Books
New book explores homosexuality in ancient cultures
‘Queer Thing About Sin’ explains impact of religious credo in Greece, Rome
‘The Queer Thing About Sin’
By Harry Tanner
c.2025, Bloomsbury
$28/259 pages
Nobody likes you very much.
That’s how it seems sometimes, doesn’t it? Nobody wants to see you around, they don’t want to hear your voice, they can’t stand the thought of your existence and they’d really rather you just go away. It’s infuriating, and in the new book “The Queer Thing About Sin” by Harry Tanner, you’ll see how we got to this point.
When he was a teenager, Harry Tanner says that he thought he “was going to hell.”
For years, he’d been attracted to men and he prayed that it would stop. He asked for help from a lay minister who offered Tanner websites meant to repress his urges, but they weren’t the panacea Tanner hoped for. It wasn’t until he went to college that he found the answers he needed and “stopped fearing God’s retribution.”
Being gay wasn’t a sin. Not ever, but he “still wanted to know why Western culture believed it was for so long.”
Historically, many believe that older men were sexual “mentors” for teenage boys, but Tanner says that in ancient Greece and Rome, same-sex relationships were common between male partners of equal age and between differently-aged pairs, alike. Clarity comes by understanding relationships between husbands and wives then, and careful translation of the word “boy,” to show that age wasn’t a factor, but superiority and inferiority were.
In ancient Athens, queer love was considered to be “noble” but after the Persians sacked Athens, sex between men instead became an acceptable act of aggression aimed at conquered enemies. Raping a male prisoner was encouraged but, “Gay men became symbols of a depraved lack of self-control and abstinence.”
Later Greeks believed that men could turn into women “if they weren’t sufficiently virile.” Biblical interpretations point to more conflict; Leviticus specifically bans queer sex but “the Sumerians actively encouraged it.” The Egyptians hated it, but “there are sporadic clues that same-sex partners lived together in ancient Egypt.”
Says Tanner, “all is not what it seems.”
So you say you’re not really into ancient history. If it’s not your thing, then “The Queer Thing About Sin” won’t be, either.
Just know that if you skip this book, you’re missing out on the kind of excitement you get from reading mythology, but what’s here is true, and a much wider view than mere folklore. Author Harry Tanner invites readers to go deep inside philosophy, religion, and ancient culture, but the information he brings is not dry. No, there are major battles brought to life here, vanquished enemies and death – but also love, acceptance, even encouragement that the citizens of yore in many societies embraced and enjoyed. Tanner explains carefully how religious credo tied in with homosexuality (or didn’t) and he brings readers up to speed through recent times.
While this is not a breezy vacation read or a curl-up-with-a-blanket kind of book, “The Queer Thing About Sin” is absolutely worth spending time with. If you’re a thinking person and can give yourself a chance to ponder, you’ll like it very much.
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