Restful Rainbow

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...