Ben Egerman presents "a gay little history of maryland: volume 1" in conversation w/Rahne Alexander

Book Launch: Ben Egerman presents "a gay little history of maryland: volume 1" in conversation with Rahne Alexander
Ben Egerman's zines on Maryland's queer and trans history have been nothing short of amazing—packed with unforgettable characters, gripping stories, and revelatory portraits of the gay past. Now, join us as we celebrate the book version, collecting his first six issues in one pocket-sized anthology.
Collecting in facsimile edition the first six gay little history zines on LGBTQ+ people in Maryland, pulled from newspaper archives, court records, letters, and stories told by community elders. Some of these stories are loud: police raids, public scandals, moments where queer life explodes into the official record. Others are quieter, pieced together from tiny blurbs and off-handed remarks.
The zines in this volume cover a 150-year span, from transmasculine horse thief George Wilson in 1838 to the passage of Baltimore's gay rights bill in 1988. In between are stories about gay bar raids, secret drag bars, lesbian murder trials of the century, Black drag pageants in the 1930s, wealthy lesbian heiresses, and the birth of the LGBTQ+ movement in Baltimore.
The historical snapshots collected here show that queer and trans people have always existed, highlight the leading roles played by Black LGBTQ+ people in Maryland's history, and underscore that the things Baltimore is often put down for-its Blackness, its working-class roots, its history as a seedy port town-are exactly what shaped these stories and make them unique.
Ben Egerman is a public librarian, historian, and homosexual who has focused on Maryland's LGBTQ+ history since 2018ish. He lives in Baltimore with his husband and a cat who, like Ben, is extremely annoying but gets away with it cuz he's so damn cute.
Rahne Alexander is an intermedia artist and writer from Baltimore, Maryland. She is a 2021 graduate of the Intermedia+Digital Arts MFA at UMBC, and a 2021 Baker Artist Prize Awardee. Her works in video, performance, music, and painting have been exhibited across the U.S. and around the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, and MIX NYC. She performs music as 50 Foot Woman and as the front woman of the rock band Santa Librada. She is a regular contributor to BmoreArt and UMBC Magazine, and her writing has been anthologized in OnCurating #42, Love, You (Urban Ivy, 2020), and the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology TAKE ME THERE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER EROTICA (Cleis, 2011). Her OutWrite-award-winning chapbook of collected essays HERETIC TO HOUSEWIFE was published by Neon Hemlock in 2019.