1. Fighting for Survival

The Stonewall Inn survived a police raid 51 years ago, followed by riots and decades of ups and downs — and then COVID-19. The iconic gay club in New York City had been shut for months during the pandemic and was risking permanent closure until yesterday, when it received a $250,000 donation from an organization dedicated to promoting the rights of LGBT Americans. Now it’s set to reopen — to limited visitors — in early July. Fittingly, Google’s doodle today honors Stonewall riot hero and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson.

2. A Trans Man, His Wife and Their Bear

Joseph Israel Lobdell, a master trapper, hunter and self-taught ace shot, left home in his 20s to escape a troubled marriage. While most scholars of queer history focus on Lobdell (who’d been born Lucy Ann Lobdell) as a transgender trendsetter more than a century ago, “Joe’s” relationship with Marie Louise Perry merits its own digression. The pair fell in love in a poorhouse, getting married just a few days after leaving that hopeless place and setting the stage for a whirlwind life of adventure (skipping town whenever Joe’s gender was inevitably discovered). At one point, they appeared in a village with a bear, with Joe preaching a gospel of “the new dispensation” while passing his hat around for donations. 

3. The Surprising Same-Sex Marriages of the 1900s

Between the 1800s and 1920s, “Boston marriages” were unions between two women who devotedly co-habitated. Henry James, inspired by his sister Alice’s relationship with Katharine Loring, penned The Bostonians, with one female character asking another: “Will you be my friend, my friend of friends, beyond everyone, everything, forever and forever?” Thus the association of the term Boston in reference to same-sex unions (James’ family notably tried to hide Henry’s sexuality after his death). The female roommates, and often lovers, were less financially dependent on men — many came from wealthy backgrounds — and, unlike married women, they weren’t tethered to domesticity, which freed them to pursue careers. 

4. Yasss, the Queens Who Made Madonna and RuPaul

Forget what you think you know about drag for a minute. Unlike the incarnations on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the ballroom scene wasn’t made for straight, white audiences. First and foremost, this was about choosing one’s family. In the 1970s and ’80s, at ballrooms tucked around New York, young Black and Latinx LGBT people gathered to walk down catwalks and vogue their way into a new life. People dressed in drag or as themselves in ways they couldn’t get away with outside the hall. Balls themselves were all about looking and acting fierce, with performers facing off to out-vogue, out-insult and generally outdo one another. Trans actress Dominique Jackson goes so far as to credit ballroom with saving her life.

5. How a Pioneering Lesbian Athlete Became a Nazi Spy

Speeding cars kicked up clouds of dust as they screamed past the flag, and out sprang the grinning winner, a burly, broad-shouldered, dapper fellow who wouldn’t look out of place on any racetrack in 1920s France. But a closer look revealed something peculiar about this macho figure — a few more curves and a smoother-than-expected face. This racing hero was Violette Morris, a woman designed to stun more than a few crowds in her time. Looking back, we might call her a badass pioneer for women — if only her story hadn’t taken a shocking detour onto the wrong side of history: This butch lesbian is said to have become such a sadistic Gestapo agent that the French Resistance ordered her assassination.

6. The Rogue Who Cross-Dressed and Dueled Her Way to Infamy

After attending a royal ball dressed as a man, and then romancing and kissing another woman on the dance floor, the 17th century French swordswoman Julie d’Aubigny, aka Mademoiselle Maupin, was challenged by three men. She proceeded to take them on one by one — and to dispatch all three.  She was married, had several affairs, ran off with a woman, joined a convent, escaped a convent (and the death penalty twice). Sound insane? Yep, and she kept swinging her sword to the very end.

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1. Sega Was Streaming … Back in the 1990s

The Sega Channel was the coolest thing in the world to most kids when it debuted in North America in 1994. Today, it looks like a bulky Genesis cartridge and coaxial cable port. But that port connected to a system of satellites and servers — long before broadband internet — and allowed lucky nerds  to stream games to their home systems rather than having to haul off to the local Kmart or Blockbuster to pick up a physical block of plastic and silicon. OK, so it may not seem special now, but Sega’s innovation not only predated the current game-streaming frenzy, it also predated YouTube by 11 years. For $13 a month — what most folks pay for Netflix — Sega fans in America had access to a revolving catalog of up to 50 games, some of which cost as much as $60 individually for physical copies.

2. How the Japanese Mafia Inspired Pac-Man

Arcade machines were all the rage in the 1970s, with Atari cornering the market with hits like Pong  and Breakout. To grow its global business, it inked a deal with Namco to ship Breakout cabinets to Japan. But Namco’s founder, Masaya Nakamura, soon noticed an influx of counterfeit machines flooding the market. Frustrated, Nakamura instructed his staff to monitor factories pumping out the counterfeit machines. Eventually, he made contact with the leader of the racket — a member of the yakuza, or Japanese mob, which was known to peddle in popular entertainment that turned a quick profit. Nakamura asked that the counterfeit production be halted; instead, the yakuza leader made him a counteroffer: The criminal gang would put the squeeze on Namco’s competitors. Nakamura declined, but his tangle with the Japanese mafia was incentive enough for Namco to start manufacturing its own arcade hits, including the iconic Pac-Man.

3. Moscow Was Home to Tetris Until a Bidding War Made the Tiles Fly

Developed in the 1980s by Russian mathematician Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris was owned by the Soviet government. Moscow sold the distribution rights to a British developer, who went on a spree selling licenses to many different platforms, including Atari. But there was a catch: what the Brit was doing was illegal. Enter Henk Rogers, a salesman for Nintendo, who swooped in, befriended the inventor and sweet-talked the Soviet government into giving the distribution rights to Nintendo instead. All the other versions were illegal and Nintendo made a boatload of money. Eventually, Pajitnov reclaimed the rights and formed the Tetris Company with his good friend Rogers — and while he lost an estimated $100 million in potential royalties, things probably stacked up in his favor, given that the game has sold nearly half a billion copies.

1. The Atheist Who Pulled Off America’s Biggest Hoax

In the years following the Civil War, Americans grew increasingly fascinated by natural science, fossils, evolution and prehistoric worlds. Fascinated, but not particularly savvy. So when a new generation of hucksters arose, no one questioned a discovery made in October 1869 when two workers digging a well on the farm of William Newell hit a large stone three feet down. “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here,” one reportedly observed when they unearthed a giant foot. It was a remarkable, but extremely well-engineered, find. Newell and his cousin had planted the giant stone statue there a year earlier. Thousands flocked to see the 3,000-pound figure with nails, nostrils, ribs, a serene expression and, ummm ... bulging genitalia, and Newell and his fellow hoax-ter were ready for them. They erected a tent, charged 50 cents a head and eventually sold the attraction to local businessmen for more than $20,000.

2. How One False News Story Panicked a Nation

Thousands of New Yorkers picked up their morning papers on May 18, 1864, to discover that President Abraham Lincoln was drafting another 400,000 men to replenish the ranks of the Union Army. Most thought the Civil War was finally approaching its end, but this story told readers that the new offensive in Virginia wasn’t going as well as everyone had been led to believe. Fear of a new round of conscription of Union soldiers caused shock waves on Wall Street — but none of it was true. The globe-trotting lie had emanated from a forged Associated Press dispatch — a fraudulent document added to the AP “flimsies” delivered by courier in the early morning hours. History would repeat itself nearly 150 years later when a spurious tweet that Barack Obama had been injured in two explosions at the White House wiped $136 billion from the S&P 500 index in minutes in 2013.

3. The Mysterious Lake Monster You’ve Never Heard Of

“Black and about 35 feet long with a snakelike head,” read the quote in the LA Times. On a warm September day in 1990, Harold Bricker and his wife and son set out from Ohio’s Sandusky Bay to go fishing on Lake Erie. While Bricker was baiting his hook, he noticed something moving in the water about 1,000 feet from their boat. Peering in that direction, he saw what looked like a long, sleek sea serpent swimming through the choppy waves. For many Ohio residents, it was merely the most recent sighting of the Lake Erie monster, or Bessie, the American cousin of Scotland’s famed Nessie of Loch Ness. She may not have the same international profile, but since the late 18th century, Bessie has given Ohioans a reason to whisper about their very own snakelike creature living in the depths. Or not.