Restful Rainbow

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.

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☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

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.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

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.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support And if not, no need at all. Sleep well either way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.