When Lukoff is washing dishes or putting away laundry, there’s a good chance that the voice purring in his headphones is that of Morgan M Page, host of the podcast “One From the Vaults.”
On the show, Page dishes “all the dirt, gossip and glamour of trans history,” from the Victorian era to the present day. The series kicked off in December 2015, with an episode about Rachel Humphreys, a girlfriend and muse of legendary rock singer and guitarist Lou Reed. (Page describes her as a “tall, long-haired, Mexican American transsexual.”) Subsequent episodes cover activist Sylvia Rivera, artist Greer Lankton and bootlegger cowboy Harry Allen.
The history Page covers is wide-ranging, stretching far back enough that it predates our modern definitions of “transgender.” But Page treats these figures with care, Lukoff said, without “shoehorning them” into our contemporary understanding. One such episode covers Stormé DeLarverie, a community activist and drag king who appointed herself “guardian of the lesbians” in New York’s Greenwich Village. DeLarverie did not identify as trans, but didn’t adhere to the gender expectations of her time, either. Her scuffle with police outside the Stonewall Inn in 1969 — allegedly for wearing clothing inappropriate for her gender — is believed by some to be the “spark” that ignited the Stonewall Uprising, a seminal moment in the fight for LGBTQ rights.
Page “makes all these people feel real, and like if they were alive today, you could have a conversation with them,” Lukoff said. “She gives me new ways to think about history and new ways to talk about people in the past.” (Available on Apple podcasts and SoundCloud)
