Restful Rainbow
- Épisodes
- 158
- Parution
- plusieurs fois par semaine
- Dernier épisode
- 14 Nov 2026
À propos du podcast
LGBTQ+ History bedtime and relaxation stories, aiming to offer comfort, representation, and a touch of magic to listeners drifting off to sleep. https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support
Épisodes 158
The Fa'afafine of Samoa: Samoa's Third Gender and the Heart of the Family 🌙 Trans History
A pageant night in Apia, a conch shell at dusk, and the people Samoans call fa'afafine.Tonight we travel to Samoa, where fa'afafine, people born male who live "in the manner of a woman," have long been known …
Notes de l’épisode
A pageant night in Apia, a conch shell at dusk, and the people Samoans call fa'afafine.
Tonight we travel to Samoa, where fa'afafine, people born male who live "in the manner of a woman," have long been known for tautua, service: caring for parents, raising nieces and nephews, weaving, cooking, and holding the family together. From the missionaries of 1830 and an old law against "impersonating a female," to Hollywood, a tailoring shop and house of refuge in 1960s Apia, to Roger Stanley and the Samoa Fa'afafine Association, founded in 2006, whose pageants raised money for the elderly. Along the way: Jaiyah Saelua's goal-line clearance in 2011, the law change of 2013, Yuki Kihara's Paradise Camp in Venice, and Samoa's first Pride Week in 2026. As Roger once put it, "We are the heart of the family and church."
Along the way: open-sided fale with woven blinds, the smoke of a Sunday umu, a gown of plastic bags, nuns with pandanus fans, and sewing machines humming in a shop called Hollywood.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Woman in the Green Bugatti: Tamara de Lempicka 🚗 LGBTQ+ History Sleep Story
A refugee, a poet across the landing, and the green Bugatti she never owned. The bisexual painter behind Art Deco's face.Tonight we travel to the Paris of Tamara de Lempicka (1894 to 1980), who fled the Russian …
Notes de l’épisode
A refugee, a poet across the landing, and the green Bugatti she never owned. The bisexual painter behind Art Deco's face.
Tonight we travel to the Paris of Tamara de Lempicka (1894 to 1980), who fled the Russian Revolution with little more than her family's jewels and became the defining portrait painter of Art Deco. Her first sitters were her daughter and her neighbor, the poet Ira Perrot, who became her lover and the woman she painted most, in white satin with an armful of calla lilies. She painted the model Rafaela, whom she met in the Bois de Boulogne, and painted herself at the wheel of a green Bugatti, though she really drove a little yellow Renault. Her goal, she said, was simple: "Never copy. Create a new style."
Along the way: snow on the Neva, linseed oil and turpentine, chestnut trees in the morning mist, a café in Montparnasse humming until dawn, white calla lilies in a tall vase, and a volcano far away under the stars.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
To Frankie, in Return for Sicily: Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo | LGBTQ History
A playwright, a sailor, and fifteen years behind a white picket fence in Key West.Tonight we travel to the life Tennessee Williams (1911 to 1983) shared with Frank Merlo (1921 to 1963), the Sicilian-American …
Notes de l’épisode
A playwright, a sailor, and fifteen years behind a white picket fence in Key West.
Tonight we travel to the life Tennessee Williams (1911 to 1983) shared with Frank Merlo (1921 to 1963), the Sicilian-American Navy veteran he met in Provincetown and found again in a New York deli in 1948. To the world, Frank was "the secretary." At home he ran their days, held Tennessee's hand through his fears, and took him to Sicily, a trip that became The Rose Tattoo, dedicated "To Frankie in return for Sicily." Years later, Tennessee said it simply: "He taught me life."
Along the way: egg salad under bright deli lights, French Quarter balconies and streetcars named Desire, lemon groves in Sicily, a typewriter at dawn, a pool holding the moon, and two men learning to breathe together.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Glad as Heck That You Exist: Lorraine Hansberry 🌱 LGBTQ+ History Sleep Story
Two quiet letters, three initials, and the young playwright about to change Broadway forever.Tonight we travel to Greenwich Village in 1957 to meet Lorraine Hansberry (1930 to 1965), who was finishing A Raisin …
Notes de l’épisode
Two quiet letters, three initials, and the young playwright about to change Broadway forever.
Tonight we travel to Greenwich Village in 1957 to meet Lorraine Hansberry (1930 to 1965), who was finishing A Raisin in the Sun in a book-lined apartment on Bleecker Street when she wrote to The Ladder, the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, to say she was glad as heck it existed. Two years later her play became the first by a Black woman produced on Broadway. The part of her life she wrote about in private stayed closed in a box of papers until 2013.
Along the way: a lamp above Bleecker Street, a play read aloud after dinner, a little plant on a windowsill reaching for the light, a curtain rising on opening night, a house above the Croton River, and five bronze chairs by Lake Michigan where anyone can sit a while.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
A Genius for Flowers: Gluck and Constance Spry | LGBTQ History
A vase of white flowers, a painter known only as Gluck, and the florist who arranged them. A 1930s London love story.Tonight we travel to Hampstead and Mayfair to meet Gluck (1895 to 1978), the painter who …
Notes de l’épisode
A vase of white flowers, a painter known only as Gluck, and the florist who arranged them. A 1930s London love story.
Tonight we travel to Hampstead and Mayfair to meet Gluck (1895 to 1978), the painter who wanted "no prefix, suffix, or quotes," and Constance Spry (1886 to 1960), the florist who filled Bond Street windows with hedgerow leaves and later arranged flowers for a coronation. Their love lasted from 1932 to 1936 and left behind some of the loveliest flower paintings of the century, in frames designed to melt into the wall.
Along the way: a new studio under the north light, white lilies renewed for months while the paint dried, a gallery painted white from floor to ceiling, a geranium tucked behind an ear in Hammamet, and a pink rose that still carries her name.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Woven from Sand: Hastiin Klah, Navajo Weaver and Healer | LGBTQ History
Sandpaintings were made to be swept away. One Diné singer found a way to weave them into wool, so they would last.Tonight we travel to Diné country in northwestern New Mexico to meet Hastiin Klah (1867 to …
Notes de l’épisode
Sandpaintings were made to be swept away. One Diné singer found a way to weave them into wool, so they would last.
Tonight we travel to Diné country in northwestern New Mexico to meet Hastiin Klah (1867 to 1937), a nádleeh weaver and healer who mastered at least eight ceremonies, wove the first full sandpainting tapestry in 1919, and, with Mary Cabot Wheelwright, founded the museum in Santa Fe now known as the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.
Along the way: an upright loom in the shade of a brush arbor, a winter hogan with its door facing east, a line of blue sand pouring from a singer's fingers, the Pacific rolling in at Santa Barbara, and a house on a hill blessed by his family in November 1937. Time, at last, to see beauty.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
Restful Rainbow earns a commission when you use this link or code, at no extra cost to you.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Cherry Grove: America's First Gay and Lesbian Town | LGBTQ History
Long before Stonewall, there was a little town on the sand where people could step off the ferry and be themselves.Tonight we travel to Cherry Grove on Fire Island, often called America's first gay and lesbian …
Notes de l’épisode
Long before Stonewall, there was a little town on the sand where people could step off the ferry and be themselves.
Tonight we travel to Cherry Grove on Fire Island, often called America's first gay and lesbian town. From the black cherry trees of 1868 to the 1938 hurricane that cleared the way, from the Cherry Grove Follies of 1948 staged in a carriage house floated across the bay, to Audrey Hartmann's walk down the beach in 1953, the jury acquittals that ended the police raids in 1968, and the first Invasion of the Pines on July 4, 1976.
Along the way: a ferry crossing the Great South Bay at dusk, gray boardwalks under holly trees, women by candlelight behind a cottage window, a curtain hung on a clothesline, and a water taxi full of sequins. Revolutionary, in a really quiet way.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Pride Before Pride: A Queer History of Halloween
For decades, Halloween was the one night a year queer people could walk out the door as themselves.Tonight we travel through many Halloweens, from Alfred Finnie's 25-cent drag ball in a Chicago tavern basement …
Notes de l’épisode
For decades, Halloween was the one night a year queer people could walk out the door as themselves.
Tonight we travel through many Halloweens, from Alfred Finnie's 25-cent drag ball in a Chicago tavern basement in 1935, to Finnie's Ball at the Pershing Ballroom with crowds on the sidewalk, to José Sarria at San Francisco's Black Cat handing out "I am a boy" tags, the Halloween buses rolling from bar to bar, and the party's move from Polk Street to Castro Street in 1979.
Along the way: balloons in a Bronzeville basement, gowns stepping down from a streetcar, a cardboard tag shaped like a black cat, a tour bus full of sequins in the fog, and a variety store window full of masks. Pride before Pride.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
🌙 Tonight’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Trust & Will. Create your will or trust online, built by attorneys for your state’s laws, so the people you love, including your chosen family, are protected in writing. Get 10% off with code RAINBOW10: https://trustandwill.sjv.io/k4KOPd
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
No Kisses Is Like Yours: The Love Letters of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus
In 1859, a young woman who had never been to school began writing love letters. Her sweetheart kept every one.Tonight we travel to Hartford, Connecticut, in the years around the Civil War, to meet Addie Brown …
Notes de l’épisode
In 1859, a young woman who had never been to school began writing love letters. Her sweetheart kept every one.
Tonight we travel to Hartford, Connecticut, in the years around the Civil War, to meet Addie Brown, a self-taught domestic worker, and Rebecca Primus, a schoolteacher who went south in 1865 to teach freedpeople in Royal Oak, Maryland, and built a schoolhouse the community named for her.
Along the way: a kitchen table at the end of a long workday, a parlor full of thread and books on Wadsworth Street, the evening steamboat gliding down the Connecticut River, a little schoolhouse on the Eastern Shore where the marsh turns silver at dusk, and a box of letters kept safe for more than a century. No kisses is like yours.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Silence = Death: ACT UP and the Monday Night Room (1987)
In 1987, a few hundred people in an old New York schoolhouse decided they would not be silent.Tonight we travel to New York City in the spring of 1987 to meet ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power: the …
Notes de l’épisode
In 1987, a few hundred people in an old New York schoolhouse decided they would not be silent.
Tonight we travel to New York City in the spring of 1987 to meet ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power: the Monday night meetings on West 13th Street, the black poster with the pink triangle that read Silence = Death, and the soft-spoken chemist from Queens who taught a movement to read the science.
Along the way: an old brick schoolhouse with its lights on late, a long table of flyers warm from the copier, a grey morning on Wall Street with church bells over the traffic, a pink neon triangle glowing in a Broadway window, and a lamp over a kitchen table, late at night. Turn anger, fear, grief into action. And action, at last, into rest.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep. This episode names the AIDS crisis plainly but briefly, and spends its time with the people who answered it.
Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.
Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Soldier With No Name: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore
Two artists in love fought an army with tissue paper, and signed each note "the soldier with no name."Tonight we travel to the island of Jersey to meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: partners for forty-five …
Notes de l’épisode
Two artists in love fought an army with tissue paper, and signed each note "the soldier with no name."
Tonight we travel to the island of Jersey to meet Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore: partners for forty-five years, makers of some of the most startling photographs of the twentieth century, and a two-person resistance during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.
Along the way: a granite house above a wide, pale bay, a Paris studio full of masks and mirrors, a cat walked on a lead through an old churchyard, the soft tap of a typewriter on a rainy evening, a square of paper slipped into a coat pocket, and a length of thread carrying three words through a prison wall. Good night. Courage. Love.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.
Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
That Is My Road: Osh-Tisch, Two-Spirit Warrior of the Crow | LGBTQ+ History
They cut her hair and dressed her as a man. Her chief told the agent to leave. Her answer never changed.Tonight we travel to the northern plains to meet Osh-Tisch of the Crow Nation: a badé, neither man nor …
Notes de l’épisode
They cut her hair and dressed her as a man. Her chief told the agent to leave. Her answer never changed.
Tonight we travel to the northern plains to meet Osh-Tisch of the Crow Nation: a badé, neither man nor woman in Crow tradition, the finest lodge-maker of her generation, a healer, and a warrior who earned her name at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876.
Along the way: the cool, honey-colored light inside the largest buffalo-hide lodge the Crow ever raised, wild roses along a creek in June, a war party riding home singing, a mirror held in a photographer's studio, a green canvas tipi tied with blue ribbons, a chief who would not look away, and an elder in a calico dress telling a general, "That is my road."
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
Tonight's episode is shared in partnership with Learn to Knit. Founder Alice O'Connell has taught knitting since 2005, slowly and kindly, to students around the world.
Learn more: https://learntoknit.nl
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the First Coming Out, 1867 | LGBTQ+ History
In 1867 one man stood before 500 German jurists and said it out loud. He was shouted down. He was also heard.Tonight we travel to Germany and Italy to meet Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: a judge who lost his career for …
Notes de l’épisode
In 1867 one man stood before 500 German jurists and said it out loud. He was shouted down. He was also heard.
Tonight we travel to Germany and Italy to meet Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: a judge who lost his career for loving men, a thinker who decided on his own that he was born this way, and the first person known to stand up in public, under his own name, and ask the law to leave love alone.
Along the way: larks over the flat green fields of East Frisia, a new word with starlight in it, brown paper parcels of forbidden booklets, hundreds of letters from men who thought they were the only one, a bright August morning at the Odeon in Munich, the soft rain of silkworms in a Stuttgart room, and a stone town in the Italian mountains where an old man sends a little Latin journal called Larks around the world.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Rough Voice of Tenderness: Chavela Vargas, Who Came Out at 81
A red wool poncho. A single guitar. A blue house. A mountain that answers back.Tonight we travel to Mexico to meet Chavela Vargas: born in the coffee hills of Costa Rica in 1919, a street singer in Mexico City …
Notes de l’épisode
A red wool poncho. A single guitar. A blue house. A mountain that answers back.
Tonight we travel to Mexico to meet Chavela Vargas: born in the coffee hills of Costa Rica in 1919, a street singer in Mexico City, a guest in Frida Kahlo's blue house, and the woman who took ranchera away from the trumpets and sang it low and slow, in trousers, to women, without changing a word.
Along the way: coffee flowers on a green hillside, sawdust and lamplight at the Tenampa, torchlit divers at Acapulco, fifteen years of silence, a small cabaret in Coyoacán where she came back from the dead, Almodóvar kissing the stage in Paris, Carnegie Hall at eighty-four, and the year she finally said the word "lesbian" out loud. She was eighty-one.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Joined in Life, Joined in Death: Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum | LGBTQ+ History
A lamp in a dark doorway. Four thousand years of color. Two men, nose to nose.Tonight we travel to Saqqara, around 2400 BCE, to meet Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep: royal manicurists to King Niuserre, royal …
Notes de l’épisode
A lamp in a dark doorway. Four thousand years of color. Two men, nose to nose.
Tonight we travel to Saqqara, around 2400 BCE, to meet Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep: royal manicurists to King Niuserre, royal confidants, and the two men who built one tomb together and had their names carved as one above its door. Inside, they walk hand in hand, feast beside harpists and dancers, and embrace in the innermost chamber in the pose Egyptian art uses for a kiss. Khnumhotep stands where a wife would stand. A wife was erased from the banquet wall. In 1964, Egyptologist Ahmed Moussa lifted a lamp and saw it all for the first time in forty-four centuries. Brothers, twins, or a couple? The men are silent. The embrace is not.
The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to ease you into sleep. Along the way you'll see the Nile spreading brown over black fields, alabaster jars and scented oil in a palace at Memphis, painters mixing copper blue by lamplight, and a door sealed with care and opened with wonder.
Perfect for falling asleep, ancient Egypt, LGBTQ+ history before the words existed, archaeology lovers, and anyone who needs a calmer story tonight.
Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Related episodes: Hatshepsut · Hadrian & Antinous · Sappho · Sacred Band of Thebes · The Cut Sleeve
Two Loves: Josephine Baker, Spy, Star, and Bisexual Icon | LGBTQ+ History
Lamplight on wet cobblestones. A cheetah on a diamond collar. A cup of coffee that changed a speech.Tonight we travel to Paris in 1925 to meet Josephine Baker: born poor in St. Louis in 1906, famous overnight …
Notes de l’épisode
Lamplight on wet cobblestones. A cheetah on a diamond collar. A cup of coffee that changed a speech.
Tonight we travel to Paris in 1925 to meet Josephine Baker: born poor in St. Louis in 1906, famous overnight at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at nineteen, a spy for French intelligence who hid secrets in her sheet music, the mother of twelve adopted children at her château in the Dordogne, the only woman to give a speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and the first Black woman inducted into the Panthéon in 2021. She sang that she had two loves, her country and Paris. Her son and biographer named six women she loved as well.
The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses to ease you into sleep. Along the way you'll see velvet seats on the Avenue Montaigne, red lamps in Montmartre, small shoes on a château staircase, a hot August afternoon on the National Mall, and a coffin of soil from four homes carried up stone steps.
Perfect for falling asleep, bisexual and Black queer history, Jazz Age Paris, women of the Resistance, and anyone who needs a calmer story tonight.
Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Related episodes: Gladys Bentley · Ma Rainey · Bessie Smith · Colette and Missy · Marlene Dietrich
The Wardrobe Door: Simon Nkoli and Africa's First Pride (1990)
Paper bags in the rain. A wardrobe door. Two parts of one person, refusing to be divided.Tonight: Simon Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who led Africa's first Pride march. Born in Soweto in 1957, he hid …
Notes de l’épisode
Paper bags in the rain. A wardrobe door. Two parts of one person, refusing to be divided.
Tonight: Simon Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who led Africa's first Pride march. Born in Soweto in 1957, he hid his parents from the police as a boy, came out at eighteen, and founded the first group for Black gay men in South Africa. Tried for treason alongside the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, he came out to his comrades in prison and in court, and changed their minds. On October 13, 1990, he marched through Johannesburg in the first Pride on the continent and told the crowd he could not separate being Black from being gay. Six years later, South Africa became the first country to protect sexual orientation in its constitution.
Along the way: jacarandas on wet pavement, maize fields under highveld storms, a stack of prison letters, a rainbow flag over a coffin, and two men exchanging rings in a small office eight years later, to the day.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Love Won in the Rain: Taiwan, First in Asia (2019)
Rainbow umbrellas in the rain. Sixty-six votes. A question 33 years old, finally answered.Tonight: how Taiwan became the first place in Asia where same-sex couples could marry. It begins in 1986, when Chi …
Notes de l’épisode
Rainbow umbrellas in the rain. Sixty-six votes. A question 33 years old, finally answered.
Tonight: how Taiwan became the first place in Asia where same-sex couples could marry. It begins in 1986, when Chi Chia-wei came out on national television, asked a court to notarize his marriage, and was detained for it under martial law. It ends on May 24, 2019, in a registration office beneath Taipei 101, with rainbow-colored forms on the counter and more than five hundred couples signing their names across the island.
Along the way: the soft roar of Taipei scooters, night-market steam and temple incense, the first Pride march with its masked faces, a stamped page in a city register, the 2017 court ruling that started a two-year clock, a hard referendum night, and forty thousand people waiting in the rain on May 17 until the president could write two words: love won.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Night Ellen Came Out (1997)
Forty-two million people. Two words. One microphone she didn't mean to lean on.Tonight: The Puppy Episode. The night in April 1997 when Ellen DeGeneres and her sitcom character came out together on ABC, and a …
Notes de l’épisode
Forty-two million people. Two words. One microphone she didn't mean to lean on.
Tonight: The Puppy Episode. The night in April 1997 when Ellen DeGeneres and her sitcom character came out together on ABC, and a country gathered in living rooms and bars and one rented theater in Alabama to hear it.
Along the way: an oyster counter in New Orleans, a phone call to God, Johnny Carson waving her to the couch, a network that wanted her to get a puppy instead, Oprah and Laura Dern saying yes, a Time cover that said it in three words, the sponsors who left and the ones who stayed, a Birmingham station that went dark and five thousand people who watched anyway. Then the Emmy, the parental advisory, the quiet years, and the long way back: a blue fish, a talk show, a wedding, a medal.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Related episodes: The Unfolding Story of Elliot Page · Tom Daley's Olympic Gold · George Michael · Marlene Dietrich
The Town With Three Genders: The Muxes of Juchitán
A town told for five hundred years to have two kinds of people, and it simply declined.Tonight: the muxes (MOO-sheh) of Juchitán de Zaragoza, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. A Zapotec identity …
Notes de l’épisode
A town told for five hundred years to have two kinds of people, and it simply declined.
Tonight: the muxes (MOO-sheh) of Juchitán de Zaragoza, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. A Zapotec identity for people called boys at birth who grow up into something the town has always had a name for, and a place at the table.
Along the way: the market the women open before sunrise, wind off the lagoons, the legend of San Vicente Ferrer and the three bags of seeds, a mother teaching her child to embroider flowers, the Authentic Intrepid Seekers of Danger and the vela they've held every November since the 1970s, the 2017 earthquake and the rebuilding, the first muxe on the cover of Vogue, and a single red stitch at the end of the day.
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
Related episodes: We'wha of Zuni · Kapaemāhū: The Healer Stones of Waikīkī · The Voices We Carry · The Colonel Who Rode with Zapata: Amelio Robles
The Surgeon's Secret: Dr. James Barry
He saved a mother and child on a kitchen table by candlelight. He fought cholera with clean water and open windows. And he kept one secret for fifty years.Tonight, drift off to the story of Dr. James Barry …
Notes de l’épisode
He saved a mother and child on a kitchen table by candlelight. He fought cholera with clean water and open windows. And he kept one secret for fifty years.
Tonight, drift off to the story of Dr. James Barry, born Margaret Ann Bulkley in Cork around 1789, who sailed to Edinburgh in 1809 under a new name, qualified as a doctor in 1812, and joined the British Army in 1813. In Cape Town he reformed the prison, the asylum, and the leper settlement, and in 1826 performed the first caesarean in the British Empire where both mother and baby lived. He served in Mauritius, Jamaica, St Helena, Malta, Corfu, and Canada, rose to Inspector General of Hospitals, and scolded Florence Nightingale for standing in the sun without a hat. When he died in 1865, his wish not to be examined was ignored, and the whole empire learned what he had never told anyone. The army sealed his records for a century. His headstone says what he wanted it to say.
You'll walk the tidal quays of Cork, sit in a chalk-and-lamp-oil lecture hall, watch cloud pour over Table Mountain, stand beside a candlelit kitchen table, ride a sleigh over the frozen St. Lawrence, and rest at a quiet stone in long grass.
Told twice: once at a natural pace, then slowly, with long pauses, to guide you into sleep.
Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Sword and the Silk: The Chevalier d'Éon
London bet a fortune on whether the Chevalier d'Éon was a man or a woman. She never answered. She just got dressed.Tonight, drift off to the story of Charles-Geneviève d'Éon de Beaumont, born in Tonnerre …
Notes de l’épisode
London bet a fortune on whether the Chevalier d'Éon was a man or a woman. She never answered. She just got dressed.
Tonight, drift off to the story of Charles-Geneviève d'Éon de Beaumont, born in Tonnerre, Burgundy, in 1728: a spy in Louis XV's secret network, a wounded captain of dragoons, a diplomat who helped end the Seven Years' War and then refused to go home, holding the king's own invasion plans as insurance. When a new king sent the playwright Beaumarchais to get them back, the price of the deal was strange: d'Éon would be recognized as a woman and must live as one for the rest of her life. Dressed by Marie Antoinette's own dressmaker, presented at Versailles in 1777, mocked, impoverished by the Revolution, she returned to London and earned her living fencing in a black silk gown, beating men half her age before the Prince of Wales, with the Cross of Saint Louis pinned over her heart. She died in a small room in Holborn in 1810, nursed by a widow named Mrs. Cole, and rests under the plane trees at St Pancras Old Church.
You'll walk through a blue-green spring rising from limestone, candlelight on Russian snow, coffee-house London loud with wagers, a dressmaker's rooms full of silk and pins, the ring of steel in a fencing hall, and a warm bed near a window at the end.
The story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with long pauses, to carry you into sleep.
Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
The Middle Place: We'wha of Zuni
A Two-Spirit Zuni weaver charmed 1886 Washington, met the President, and walked forty miles home. She was six feet tall, wove blankets on the lawn of the Smithsonian, and shook the President's hand. Washington …
Notes de l’épisode
A Two-Spirit Zuni weaver charmed 1886 Washington, met the President, and walked forty miles home.
She was six feet tall, wove blankets on the lawn of the Smithsonian, and shook the President's hand. Washington never knew she was lhamana.
Tonight's story is We'wha of Zuni (c. 1849 to 1896), a master potter and weaver, a ceremonial dancer, and the most famous lhamana, a Zuni Two-Spirit gender role, on record. Orphaned by smallpox, raised at the heart of her village, We'wha built a bridge to the outside world one silver dollar and one woven blanket at a time. In 1885 she rode the train to Washington with anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson and spent six months as the toast of the capital, then called on President Grover Cleveland on June 23, 1886 with a wedding gift made by her own hands. Seven years later she was jailed by soldiers for defending her home, and walked forty miles home through the winter desert. She died during the Sha'lako ceremony of 1896, mourned by her whole village.
You'll drift off to juniper smoke at dusk, corn ground on a stone, red clay under strong hands, a shuttle passing through a loom, and the red face of Corn Mountain at evening. The story is told once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses for sleep.
Support the show at https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
My Beloved and I: The Ladies of Llangollen
Two women climbed out of their windows in 1778, dressed as men, and ran for the sea.Drift off to sleep with the story of the Ladies of Llangollen. Lady Eleanor Butler of Kilkenny Castle and the orphaned Sarah …
Notes de l’épisode
Two women climbed out of their windows in 1778, dressed as men, and ran for the sea.
Drift off to sleep with the story of the Ladies of Llangollen. Lady Eleanor Butler of Kilkenny Castle and the orphaned Sarah Ponsonby met in 1768, planned a life together for ten years, and eloped on the night of 30 March 1778 with a pistol and a small dog. They were caught and brought home. They refused to give up. With the help of Sarah's maid, Mary Carryl, they wore their families down, and in May 1778 the "two fugitive ladies" crossed to Wales.
They settled in a stone cottage above Llangollen and named it Plas Newydd, "new place." Over fifty years they filled it with carved oak, built a library in five languages, kept a garden with a brook running through it, and dressed in dark riding habits and tall black hats. The world came up the hill to see them: Wordsworth, Wellington, Walter Scott, Anna Seward, and in 1822 a woman from Yorkshire named Anne Lister, who went home and married her own love. In her journal, Eleanor called Sarah the same thing every day for five decades: "my Beloved."
Told twice, as always: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses. Candlelight on old oak, rain over a green valley, a ruined castle on a hill, and the sound of water over stones all night.
💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support. And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.
A Thing That Wants Virginia: Woolf, Vita, and Twenty Years of Letters
Two married women met at a dinner party in 1922 and wrote to each other for the rest of one of their lives.Drift off to sleep with the story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. They met on 14 December …
Notes de l’épisode
Two married women met at a dinner party in 1922 and wrote to each other for the rest of one of their lives.
Drift off to sleep with the story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. They met on 14 December 1922 at Clive Bell's house in Bloomsbury, where Virginia was unimpressed and Vita was not. Three years later Virginia spent three December nights at Long Barn in Kent, and Vita's diary recorded only that it was a peaceful evening. In January 1926, unable to sleep in Milan on her way to Persia, Vita wrote the plainest sentence she ever wrote: "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia."
Out of it came Orlando, begun in October 1927 and published by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press on 11 October 1928, dedicated to Vita and illustrated with photographs of her costumed as its hero, who lives three hundred years and changes sex along the way. Vita's son later called it the longest and most charming love letter in literature. That same year Vita lost Knole, the house she was born in, because she was a daughter and the estate followed the male line. In 1930 she bought a ruin called Sissinghurst and spent the rest of her life building a garden there, including a white garden that still glows after sunset.
Woolf's last letter to Vita, six days before her death in March 1941, ends not in longing but in thanks.
Told twice, as always: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses. Winter lamplight in Kent, hand-set type in a basement, deer under old trees, pale roses at dusk.
Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.
It Belonged to All of Us: Gilbert Baker and the First Rainbow Flag
Drift off to sleep learning how the rainbow flag was made: in an attic, in trash cans, by thirty people with dye on their hands.In June 1978, Gilbert Baker and around thirty volunteers hand-dyed a thousand …
Notes de l’épisode
Drift off to sleep learning how the rainbow flag was made: in an attic, in trash cans, by thirty people with dye on their hands.
In June 1978, Gilbert Baker and around thirty volunteers hand-dyed a thousand yards of muslin on the top floor of a San Francisco community center and stitched two flags, each thirty feet by sixty. The eight stripes carried meanings, hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit. On June 25 they rose at United Nations Plaza, and Baker said the crowd understood in an instant, that it belonged to all of us. Tonight's story follows him from a Kansas railroad town through the Army, through Harvey Milk's election and his assassination, through the practical accidents that turned eight stripes into six, through a mile-long flag carried by ten thousand people in 1994 and a flag laid from one ocean to the other in 2003, to his death in 2017 and the rediscovered fragment of an original flag that came home to San Francisco with its colors still bright.
Told twice, once at a natural pace and once more slowly with longer pauses to carry you into sleep. Expect hot dye stirred with broom handles, stained knuckles, wet cotton, and color drying on lines in the last of the afternoon light.
💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.
The Stones That Remembered: Hawaii's Māhū Healers of Kapaemahu
Drift off to sleep learning about the Healer Stones of Kapaemahu, four boulders on Waikīkī Beach that have held a suppressed truth for five centuries.Long before the reign of chief Kakuhihewa in the 1500s, four …
Notes de l’épisode
Drift off to sleep learning about the Healer Stones of Kapaemahu, four boulders on Waikīkī Beach that have held a suppressed truth for five centuries.
Long before the reign of chief Kakuhihewa in the 1500s, four healers sailed from Tahiti to Oʻahu: Kapaemahu, Kahaloa, Kapuni, and Kinohi. They were māhū, people of dual male and female spirit, and in Hawaiian understanding, that duality was the source of their healing power. Beloved for their gentle ways and miraculous cures, they were honored at their departure with four great stones moved by thousands of people on the sacred night of Kāne, imbued with the healers' names and mana after a month of ceremony. Princess Kaʻiulani laid seaweed lei on the stones before her morning swims. Then missionaries arrived, the word māhū fell into forced silence, and in 1941 the stones were buried under a bowling alley. Unearthed in 1963 and restored in 1997, the monument's signage still erased the healers' identity, until Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu and filmmakers Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson brought the story back with the Oscar-shortlisted animated film "Kapaemahu" (2020), narrated in ʻŌlelo Niʻihau, a Bishop Museum exhibition, and a new bronze plaque dedicated October 24, 2023, the first signage ever to name the healers' dual male and female spirit.
Tonight's story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with longer pauses, to guide you gently into sleep.
Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.
The Sun of Tabriz: Rumi & Shams and the Love That Created 40,000 Poems
Drift off to sleep with the most famous love story in the history of poetry. In November 1244, a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz stopped a professor's mule in the streets of Konya and asked him a …
Notes de l’épisode
Drift off to sleep with the most famous love story in the history of poetry. In November 1244, a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz stopped a professor's mule in the streets of Konya and asked him a question, and Jalal al-Din Rumi, a respected scholar who had never written a verse, became the poet whose words are still read in a hundred languages tonight. When Shams vanished in the winter of 1248, Rumi's grief became more than 40,000 verses of love poetry, gathered under his beloved's name, the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, with thousands of poems signed "Shams" instead of "Rumi." Tonight we travel through the meeting in the market street, the forty days of seclusion, the whirling that began among goldsmiths' hammers, the searches through Damascus, and the December night in 1273 that Konya still celebrates as Shab-e Arus, the Wedding Night.
As always, the story is told twice, once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with long pauses, to carry you into sleep. You are part of a long, beautiful history. And you are safe here.
Support the show (only if you'd like, no need at all, sleep well either way): https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support
The Emperor Who Cut His Sleeve for Love: Ancient China's 2,000-Year-Old Love Story (Emperor Ai & Dong Xian)
An emperor wakes from an afternoon nap to find the man he loves asleep on his sleeve. Rather than wake him, he calls for a blade and cuts the sleeve off. Two thousand years later, "the cut sleeve" is still how …
Notes de l’épisode
An emperor wakes from an afternoon nap to find the man he loves asleep on his sleeve. Rather than wake him, he calls for a blade and cuts the sleeve off. Two thousand years later, "the cut sleeve" is still how the Chinese language remembers love between men.
Tonight we travel to Han dynasty China, around 4 BCE, into the lacquered halls and plum-blossom courtyards of the Weiyang Palace in Chang'an, where Emperor Ai fell in love with a young official named Dong Xian. Recorded plainly in the Book of Han, theirs is one of the oldest documented love stories between men anywhere in the world: the shared naps, the extravagant devotion, the rise of Dong Xian to the highest office in the empire at twenty-two, the banquet where the emperor mused about giving him the throne itself, and the single act of tenderness that outlived the dynasty, the empire, and every critic who wrote it down.
As always, the story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with longer pauses, to guide you gently into sleep. You are part of a long, beautiful history, and you are safe here.
Support the show (only if you'd like, no need at all): https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support
Topics: LGBTQ+ history, queer history, gay history, Chinese history, Han dynasty, Emperor Ai, Dong Xian, the cut sleeve, duanxiu, the bitten peach, sleep story for adults, bedtime story, relaxation.
Apology Accepted: The Lavender Scare and the First White House Picket (1950–2009)
They fired thousands for who they loved, and the fired found each other on the sidewalk. Tonight: the Cold War purge history nearly forgot, the ten people who walked a silent circle at the White House on April …
Notes de l’épisode
They fired thousands for who they loved, and the fired found each other on the sidewalk. Tonight: the Cold War purge history nearly forgot, the ten people who walked a silent circle at the White House on April 17, 1965, the attic where every picket sign waited fifty years, and the June morning in 2009 when the U.S. government finally said sorry, and one man answered, "Apology accepted."
Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.
Along the way: cherry blossoms on Pennsylvania Avenue, hand-lettered signs on wooden sticks, a coat held for a friend, and seventy thousand pieces of one stubborn life resting safe in the Library of Congress.
☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support
Related episodes: Frank Kameny: The Astronomer Who Reached for Justice · A Mystic Bond (ONE Magazine) · Quiet Courage (Daughters of Bilitis) · Barbara Gittings, The Librarian Who Changed the World
Voici les 40 derniers épisodes sur 158. Les épisodes plus anciens se trouvent dans le flux du podcast.
Podcasts similaires
Plus de podcasts : Histoire
C’est votre podcast ?
Confirmez-le avec une entrée dans votre flux : vous recevez ici un code, vous l’ajoutez comme podcast:txt dans le canal de votre flux, et nous le vérifions. Votre podcast apparaît ensuite comme « vérifié » sur SoundNode.