Gay Today Is Your Podcast LGBTQ History Lesson

It took the ghost of the AIDS crisis for Michael Fell to realize he knew embarrassingly little about LGBTQ history and the people who helped pave the way for today's community. After seeing a production of The Normal Heart, Fell turned his embarrassment into an eagerness to learn, and now he's teaching others.

In his podcast, "Gay Today," Fell teams up with friend Sara Turner to hold conversational history lessons about the LGBTQ community and culture. "We decided that the podcast would be more fun if we were teaching each other our history," said Turner, "the culture of queerness that we never learned."

Until the ubiquity of the internet it would have been almost impossible for more remote members of the younger LGBTQ generation to get access to any sort of history. "It's my hope we can reach young queers who are living in places that won't accept them for who they are and tell them: 'Look how amazing you are,'" Fell said, "'look at what a great part of society you belong to.'"

Since its October launch, Fell and Turner have recorded eight episodes of the bi-weekly "Gay Today" which, above all, they want to use to start a dialogue. "We're not qualified to teach anyone anything," Fell says in the third episode of the podcast, "we don't know shit." But Fell, like any younger, intelligent member of the community knows that the past can't be forgotten. "We're going to learn and you're going to learn with us," he said. Listen to "Gay Today" for free on iTunes, here.