Hello, queerlings! Welcome back to History is Gay! First off, I just want to say I’m so sorry for the unexpected hiatus and disappearance! Significant life events in early 2024 threw wrench after wrench into my plans and my ability to focus on the show, and I made the difficult decision in early June to announce an official hiatus to the patreon supporters with plans to return in the fall, but never sent anything out to the wider listenership, so I imagine you all felt left hanging, and I apologize for the radio silence! If you want to read more to get a better sense of the reasons for the hiatus, that Patreon post from June is public and accessible by everyone, which you can read here.

All that being said, we are back! I’m so happy to share with you that we’ll be returning to your podfeeds tomorrow, October 1, with an episode which has been a very long time coming, where guest-host Aubree Calvin and I start a deep dive into all your favorite classic children’s book authors who, turns out, are queer! We had so many folks we wanted to get into that it’s expanded into a 2-3 part episode, so we’ve got more coming your way soon to close out 2024, including Maurice Sendak, James Marshall, Louise Fitzhugh, and more!

I also wanted to announce that going into 2025, we’ll be bringing some changes to the format and structure of the show, in an aim to make it more sustainable for us to produce and freshen things up a bit! We haven’t figured out exactly what it will look like yet, but it will likely involve switching to a seasonal format with a set number of episodes followed by a break, and having our usual research deep-dive format be only one type of episode, alternating with things like learning from other queer historians and interviewing queer historymakers. More detail and information is on another publicly available Patreon post, linked here.

I hope you’ll follow along with this new phase of History is Gay, and support us in exploring new ways to keep the show going, and let us know what you think! But for now, we’ll see you tomorrow with episode 47!