Why We Remember Stonewall

06/15/19 • 9 min

Fifty years after the Stonewall Uprising, we look at what happened that night, through the voices of people who were there. WNYC's Jennifer Vanasco says that Stonewall — a filthy dive bar — was a most unlikely setting for the start of a crusade.

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Oliver Sipple from Radiolab

One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. But in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of heroism turned into a rationale for making his personal life into political opportunity. What happens next makes us wonder what a moment, or a movement, or a whole society can demand of one person. And how much is too much?

Through newly unearthed archival tape, we hear Sipple himself grapple with some of the most vexing topics of his day and ours - privacy, identity, the freedom of the press - not to mention the bonds of family and friendship.

Reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte. Produced by Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte.

Special thanks to Jerry Pritikin, Michael Yamashita, Stan Smith, Duffy Jennings; Ann Dolan, Megan Filly and Ginale Harris at the Superior Court of San Francisco; Leah Gracik, Karyn Hunt, Jesse Hamlin, The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, Mike Amico, Jennifer Vanasco and Joey Plaster.

Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

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Edmund White Has "Terrible Gaydar" from New Yorker Radio Hour

Edmund White has been a central figure in gay fiction since the nineteen-seventies. His trio of autobiographical novels captured decades of gay experience and the glory days of pre-AIDS gay culture. Now seventy-six, White says that “gay life has changed so much and as a novelist, the aesthetic has changed.” He talks to his former student, The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman, and reads from his new novel, “Our Young Man.”

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