William Jennings Bryan
“The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty — the cause of humanity.”
— William Jennings Bryan, 1896
Writing about Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith who planned a slave rebellion in the Richmond, Virginia, area in the summer of 1800, helped me uncover many other people who tried to shift the story of the United States.
A century after Gabriel’s Rebellion, William Jennings Bryan asked a similar question: “Who does this country serve, and who does it leave behind?”
Bryan was born in 1860, a year before the Civil War started. He studied law like his father, and called himself a defender of “the common people.” He didn’t sound much like a politician. He sounded like a preacher giving hope to crowds in revival tents, but he was the Democratic Party nominee for President three times before he died in 1925. He championed the cause of farmers and laborers and opposed the gold standard. He pushed for reforms that would later be adopted, such as the graduated income tax, popular election of U.S. senators, and women's suffrage. He believed, more than climbing the political ladder in Washington, D.C., that he was following a moral calling. Like a missionary for “the cause of humanity.”
William Jennings Bryan didn’t want to live in a world where wealthy elites lived off the backs of everyone else. He chose to die on some hills I would never climb, like temperance and an opposition to teaching evolution, but those hills were dwarfed by the mighty mountains he moved for the average citizen. He truly loved people.
I feel like Bryan was fighting for people just like me, but he must have known that unless there was a drastic change, the precarity of the common people wouldn’t disappear.
And he was right!
I couldn’t believe what I learned when I really dived in and investigated our history for myself. The rights of “the common people” and the oppressive power of the billionaire class is not just a hot topic in 2026 — it has been on the minds and hearts of people like Bryan for centuries.
The unequal have always organized.
More recently, in 1977, activists led by Judy Heumann helped stage the 504 Sit-in — a nearly month-long occupation of a federal building in San Francisco to demand enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (a civil rights protection for disabled people). The point was simple: the law meant nothing if it wasn’t implemented. They held their ground until the government signed the regulations. The power of the people is always stronger than a few people with power.
Many of us don’t have to imagine what it’s like to learn a history that doesn’t include us. We sit in classrooms, watch documentaries, and even celebrate holidays that are based on a narrative that doesn’t include us. The dominant narrative has always been the story of rich, property-owning, white men. If you’re not white, not rich, and not male, there’s a good chance that the history you learned is one that doesn’t include you.
But it’s more than that. The history we know best is incredibly exclusive. It’s the story of the wealthy elite — the smallest minority with a disproportionate amount of decision-making power.
I’m interested in the history of the common people. I want answers to questions like, “How has our history led us to this moment?” I want to unpack a vision for a future where thriving isn’t reserved for a few, but is open to all.
In 2016, I started a nonprofit called VideoOut. We traveled all over the United States recording and telling queer stories that were overwhelmingly erased throughout history. The team at VideoOut produced programs in 36 states in collaboration with real people who lived, worked, and played in the communities we served.
That work often led me to queer history. To organize effectively, I had to understand what queer people had already done and how they had done it.
I learned about queer people who lived and worked in community before the 1960s. People like We’wha (a Zuni Native American lhamana from New Mexico), Magnus Hirschfeld, Henry Gerber, Evelyn Hooker, Harry Hay, Phylis Lyon and Del Martin, and Christine Jorgensen (the first trans woman to be widely known in the U.S.).
Evelyn Hooker wasn’t queer, but she was one of the first psychologists to study gay men outside of prisons and institutions. Her gay student, Sam From, convinced her to try to understand gay people, not cure them. Her research changed the entire field of psychology — and the lives of countless queer people.
I also learned about the incredible work of the queer people during the explosive civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s: James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, Pauli Murray (who rewrote civil rights law), Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings (used Evelyn Hooker’s research to secure the 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), Barbara Jordan, José Sarria (the first openly gay person to run for public office), Troy Perry, Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Stormé DeLarverie, and Sylvia Rivera.
There was no shortage of folks organizing during the AIDS epidemic. People like Larry Kramer, Cleve Jones, Keith Haring, Arthur Ashe, and Elizabeth Taylor.
There were incredible women of color making a huge difference, like Miss Major, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde (who said, “Your silence will not protect you”).
People who challenged marginalization at the intersections of identity, like Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Larry Levan (a Black, gay DJ), Frankie Knuckles, Jose Xtravaganza, Willie Ninja, RuPaul, and Pedro Zamora (one of the first openly gay men with AIDS to be on TV).
I learned about storytellers like Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry (who wrote for an underground lesbian magazine using only her initials, L.H.), Tony Kushner, Mary Oliver, Eric Marcus (host of Making Gay History Podcast), Laverne Cox, Andrea Gibson (whose poetry will turn you inside out), adrienne maree brown, Bowen Yang, Alok Vaid-Menon (a present day prophet, in my opinion), and Ocean Vuong.
I even began learning about people who met the moment when history became present, like Sarah McBride (the first openly transgender person elected to Congress), Pete Buttegieg, Edie Windsor, Stacey Milbern (a South Korean and American activist for disability justice), Honey Balenciaga, Dylan Mulvaney, Chase Strangio, and so many more.
I learned about The Society for Human Rights (1924), The Mattachine Society (1950), Daughters of Bilitis (1955), and the 150 or so organizations that existed before the Stonewall riots. I was breathing in queer history as if it were lifeforce.
For years, I led an LGBTQ+ walking tour around NYC, and I presented queer history keynotes for nonprofits and fortune 500 companies.
I grew up believing I would be a missionary doctor that saved both bodies and souls. But that didn’t happen. Religion gave me a taste of what I was looking for, but my personal experience was that it didn’t give me enough.
Looking back, I think I’ve been studying power my whole life without even realizing it. Who gets comfort, and who gets scarcity? Who gets to move freely, and who doesn’t?
My queerness sharpened that lens. When I was told I didn’t fit in, I wanted to figure out why. VideoOut gave me thousands of stories of queer people, past and present, that taught me history is what happens and how we remember it. Queer history, like so many people’s histories, survives because people love it enough to refuse its erasure.
That’s how I got here. That’s why I’m so interested in the history of the common people — more speciically, the history of inequality in the United States. But it’s not just about the forces that marginalize. It’s the bravery, the intelligence, and the power of the people that stood up to those forces. It’s their resilience, and the rebellions they led, that inspire me.
Everything I’ve gone through has helped me see that the United States is a country that perfected the art of forgetting the people it harms.
My approach is equal parts science, storytelling, queerness, ethics, and the stubborn belief — instilled by my mom, by the bullied kid I once was, and the adult that now realizes my magic — that a better world is not only possible, but long, long overdue.