Black Queer Pioneers Who Shaped America

Talk with Channing Gerard Joseph. Names like Bayard Rustin, Frances Thompson and William Dorsey Swann have been largely erased from US history, but they and other Black queer leaders played central roles in monumental movements like emancipation, civil rights and LGBTQ+ pride, among others. Journalist Channing Gerard Joseph shares their little-known stories, connecting the origins of drag queen culture in the 1880s to the present day and exploring the awesome power to choose how we define ourselves.

Channing Gerard Joseph is a writer, journalist, and historian of Black Queer history. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Columbia Journalism School, and teaches journalism at the University of Southern California. His articles have been published by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others, and he won both a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship and a Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction for his biography House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens (2021).

In English

Location: d.a.i. hall

Admission: free

In cooperation with Zentrum für Gender- und Diversitätsforschung, Universität Tübingen