Esther Newton Won’t Make You Gay
But you might find pieces of yourself in her story and compassion for her struggle. I did.
University of Michigan
Esther Newton’s Journey from Outlier to LGBTQ+ Icon
That’s the subtitle of “Finally Celebrated,” the special Pride Month episode I hosted for the Crow’s Feet podcast, featuring cultural anthropologist Esther Newton.
I caught up with Esther at a mutual friend’s beach house in idyllic Cherry Grove, Fire Island — America’s first gay and lesbian town. Since you might not know the name, Esther Newton, let’s start with the album notes, as we used to call copy on the back of our LPs:
A fitting guest for Pride Month, Esther Newton’s personal and professional struggles mirror 60 years of LGBTQ+ history.
In the mid-1950s, catapulted out of a liberal household in New York to a rigidly-gendered southern California high school where girls were frilly and feminine, Esther was, in her own words, “a failure as a girl.” She knew she was different — a “homosexual,” as such deviants were then called. Alone as a teenager, fearing she had no chance at a normal life, Esther found comfort in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. “It showed me that the culture of the ’50s and ’60s was just one among thousands and thousands.”
