Our nominees for Truth-Seeking Hero are all storytellers, dedicated to revealing the facts or the fiction behind their subjects’ stories.
For filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street, creators of the Lesbian Bar Project, the subjects were spaces for women and the women who created them, a dwindling number exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Vote now for LGBTQ Nation‘s 2023 Truth Seeking Hero
For journalist Erin Reed, the facts around anti-transgender legislation were an opportunity to describe the existential threat facing the LGBTQ+ community with detail and tenacity.
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For writer Melissa Gira Grant, the fictions underlying the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis were bombshell revelations casting doubt on the high court’s integrity.
And for Dr. Eric Cervini, the young “Homo historian” from Harvard behind Discovery’s The Book of Queer, both facts and fiction were the subject of his Emmy-nominated “queer history extravaganza.”
Vote now for LGBTQ Nation‘s 2023 Truth Seeking Hero
Erica Rose and Elina Street
Filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street came up with the idea for their Lesbian Bar Project during lockdown in New York in the fall of 2020.
The women were reminiscing about one of their last night’s out, at Brooklyn lesbian bar Ginger’s, before it shuttered temporarily due to the pandemic.
But the threat to Ginger’s went beyond the effects of COVID-19.
“There were all these articles coming out about the disappearance of lesbian bars even before the pandemic, and how it could be expedited because of the pandemic,” Rose told Imbibe magazine. “So it was important to raise awareness and also raise some money so the bars could have a bit of a cushion going into the hardest months of their lives.”
According to Rose and Street, the number of lesbian bars in the U.S. has dwindled from about 200 in the 1980s to under two dozen today.
The filmmakers recruited producers for a PSA, including Jägermeister through their #savethenight campaign, and wrangled Orange Is the New Black’s Lea DeLaria as the face of the effort.
In a four-week fundraising campaign, Lesbian Bar Project raised close to $120,000, which was distributed among 15 bars in need.
Attention to those endangered cultural resources continues. A short doc under the banner was followed in 2022 by a three-part documentary series on Roku, which earned Rose and Street a GLAAD Media Award and a nomination for a New York Emmy.
Erin Reed
Independent trans journalist Erin Reed speaks truth to power with some bracingly honest analysis.
Since 2021, the Louisiana native has been an outspoken voice on Twitter/X and her substack calling out injustice and discrimination targeting the trans community.
Reed’s map tracking U.S. states with the most and least legislative protection for transgender individuals has become an indispensable tool for both the trans community and news organizations alike and helps put the avalanche of anti-LGBTQ+ laws introduced in 43 states over the last three years into perspective.
Reed says she was 13 years old when she first started researching gender transition but over 30 before she came out, a delay due in part to a lack of information and access to gender-affirming health care.
That deficit of trusted information led Reed to produce her first map, detailing the location of every facility offering HRT with informed consent — meaning no signoff necessary from a physician or therapist, a common impediment to maintaining HRT, particularly in states hostile to the treatment.
In May this year, Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr (D) proposed to Reed after a longtime, long-distance relationship.
“She has made me the luckiest woman alive,” Reed posted.
Melissa Gira Grant
Like the consequential issues journalist Melissa Gira Grant regularly covers for The New Republic, her own story is worthy of a book, and was, with the publication of Playing the Whore in 2014, an account of her time as a sex worker.
Now she’s full-time with The National Review and broke two major stories this year around the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis, announced in June.
They came in quick succession as the court decided in favor of the plaintiff, Lorie Smith, who claimed Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws were an infringement of her free speech rights, and would force her to design a wedding website for a gay couple who had solicited her services via her online contact form.
But, according to Grant’s reporting, the solicitation from the gay couple, referred to as “Stewart” and “Mike” in court filings by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom, never occurred.
Furthermore, Grant found, Smith’s claim that she never designed a wedding website in anticipation of the state punishing her was false: a search through her archived portfolio uncovered a wedding website design next to an advertisement for her services.
The revelations were a bombshell, casting doubt on the high court’s integrity for issuing a decision based on falsehoods, with a plaintiff who lacked standing.
The case, Grant’s writing revealed, was purely hypothetical.
Dr. Eric Cervini
Barely 30-something Dr. Eric Cervini, the creator of six-time Emmy-nominated The Book of Queer for Discovery+, says the hardest part of producing the show was deciding which stories to tell, a fact that didn’t occur to the people he was pitching it to.
“When we were shopping around the show, the biggest concern for all these networks and production companies was if there were enough stories. ‘Is there enough queer history to tell?’” Cervini told Variety, laughing. “I was, ‘You’re joking, right?’”
A sampling of the subjects in the five-episode series — which Cervini calls a “queer history extravaganza” and presents Drunk History the Musical vibes — includes Alexander the Great, the Greek poet Sappho, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ma Rainey, and Marsha P. Johnson, to name just a few.
The show is based on Cervini’s own bite-sized Instagram posts about LGBTQ+ history.
“People were learning things that I think they were surprised that they didn’t know, like maybe Lincoln was queer or the story of Sappho and where the word ‘lesbian’ comes from,” Cervini said.
The self-described homo historian was educated at Harvard and earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge. He’s also a Pulitzer finalist for his book The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America, about gay activist Frank Kameny and a soon-to-be Amazon series from Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.
