Pop Quiz: Pride Edition Answers with Fun Facts

ROUND ONE: NAME THAT LGBTQ+ THEMED MOVIE (PICTURE ROUND)

Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson, is based on a 1954 true crime case out of New Zealand. Juliet Hume (played by Kate Winslet in the film) and Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) met at Christchurch Girls’ High School, where they bonded over their respective childhood illnesses.  The pair created a rich fantasy world, which the film depicts vividly, writing stories and plays. The intensity of their friendship – and a possible sexual relationship – concerned their parents enough that they sought to keep them apart. To circumvent their separation, Pauline and Juliet bludgeoned Pauline’s mother to death with a brick. Because they were underage at the time of the murder, each served just five years in prison. After her release, Juliet returned to her native UK, assumed a new name, Anne Perry, and became an award-winning mystery novelist.

ROUND TWO: WHAT A DRAG!

1. This American drag queen, whose 1993 debut single reached #2 on the Billboard Dance Club Hits chart, is the recipient of 14 Primetime Emmys, three GLAAD Media Awards, and a Tony. RUPAUL
2. It’s not certain whether she was a trans woman or a drag queen, but there’s no doubt the titular character in this song by the Kinks blew our protagonist’s mind. LOLA
3. I Like to Watch, a web series created by Netflix for their YouTube channel, is hosted by which two iconic drag queens and RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants? TRIXIE AND KATYA
4. What actor and playwright won two Tonys at the age of 30 for Torch Song Trilogy, about a Jewish drag queen and torch singer, and another at age 50 for portraying Edna Turnblad in Hairspray? HARVEY FIERSTEIN
5. This 1990 documentary feature, filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, is an essential record of the Golden Age of drag balls in New York City, as well as an examination of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. PARIS IS BURNING
6. What is the name of the Peabody, Emmy, and GLAAD Media Award-winning HBO series that features drag queens traveling the country and recruiting small-town residents for drag shows? WE’RE HERE
7. This heroine of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who disguises herself as a young man named Cesario, shares her first name with the female protagonist of 1998 Best Picture Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love. VIOLA

In Shakespeare’s time, women were not allowed on stage, so teenage boys typically played the female roles. So, Viola was a woman played by a man disguised as a woman disguised as a man. This was depicted in Shakespeare in Love, in which a different Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance) pretends to be a man named Thomas Kent to appear on stage in a Shakespeare production and inspires the bard to write Twelfth Night.

ROUND THREE: LGBTQ+ HISTORY

1. This ancient Greek poet, who lived on the island of Lesbos, was sometimes referred to as “The Tenth Muse”. SAPPHO
2. The first US pride parades, timed to coincide with the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, were held in which two American cities? CHICAGO AND NEW YORK CITY
3. Speaking of the Stonewall uprising, what drag queen and activist, known as “The Mayor of Christopher Street”, was an instrumental figure in the riots and later co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) with her close friend and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera? MARSHA P. JOHNSON
4. She was the first American woman to fly in space and the youngest American to do so, having completed her first spaceflight at the age of 32. SALLY RIDE
5. The 2003 Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized what sex act in the US? SODOMY
6. The self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street”, he served for eleven months on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, sponsoring a bill to ban discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation, before his assassination on November 27, 1978. HARVEY MILK
7. This English mathematician and computer scientist, who was instrumental in the breaking of Nazi Germany’s Enigma codes during WWII, was prosecuted in 1952 for the crime of homosexuality. ALAN TURING

Alan Turing, one of the founders of theoretical computer science, was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Princeton, where he earned his PhD. During World War II, he worked at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where he helped crack German Enigma codes and played a significant role in helping the Allies defeat the Axis powers and ultimately win the war. After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first stored-program computers. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts and accepted chemical castration as an alternative to imprisonment. He died by self-inflicted cyanide poisoning on June 7, 1954, two weeks shy of his 42^nd birthday. If you want to learn more about Turing, check out the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which features an exquisite, Oscar-nominated performance by Benedict Cumberbatch.

ROUND FOUR: ICONS

1. This English pianist, singer, and songwriter had a great year in 1994, winning an Oscar for Best Original Song for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from The Lion King and getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. ELTON JOHN
2. The 2013 HBO film Behind the Candelabra, which won eleven Emmy Awards, dramatizes the relationship between Scott Thorson and this flamboyant pianist and nightclub entertainer who died of AIDS in 1987. LIBERACE
3. In 2014, who became the first transgender person to be nominated for an acting Emmy, as well as the first to appear on the cover of Time magazine? LAVERNE COX
4. Widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era, this Irishman is best known for the 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray and the plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as his 1895 conviction for “gross indecency.” OSCAR WILDE
5. Born Farrokh Bulsara, his family fled the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964 and moved to Middlesex, England. In 1970, he formed an iconic rock band with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. FREDDIE MERCURY
6. Her novel Orlando: A Biography, about an Elizabethan-era nobleman who spontaneously changes genders and lives for centuries, was inspired by her close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. VIRGINIA WOOLF
7. This transgender woman, who helped develop the Moog synthesizer, is best known for her 1968 album Switched-On Bach and for scoring films like A Clockwork Orange, Tron, and The Shining. WENDY CARLOS

Born and raised in Rhode Island, Wendy Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia. It was there that she learned about transgender issues and gave a name to the gender dysphoria she had experienced since the age of 5. Carlos began living openly as a woman in 1968 and had gender affirming surgery in 1972. She was a key player in helping Robert Moog design the Moog synthesizer, the first all-electronic instrument, which she used to produce her first album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach. The album was a smash, reaching #10 on the Billboard 200, staying at the top of the classical album chart for THREE YEARS, and earning Carlos three Grammy Awards. She is believed to be the first transgender person to win a Grammy. She later composed the music for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, as well as Disney’s TRON.

ROUND FIVE: PRIDE ANTHEMS BY LYRICS

1. “When we’re out there dancin’ on the floor, darlin’ / And I feel like I need some more / And I feel your body close to mine / And I know my love, it’s about that time ” – Sylvester, 1978 “YOU MAKE ME FEEL (MIGHTY REAL)”
2. “I’m up and jaws are on the floor / Lovers in the bathroom and a line outside the door / Black lights and a mirrored disco ball / Every night’s another reason why I left it all” – Chappell Roan, 2020 “PINK PONY CLUB”
3. “You can get yourself clean / You can have a good meal / You can do whatever you feel” – The Village People, 1979 “Y.M.C.A.”
4. “God bless Mother Nature, she’s a single woman too / She took off to heaven and she did what she had to do / She taught every angel and rearranged the sky / So that each and every woman could find her perfect guy” – The Weather Girls, 1982 “IT’S RAINING MEN”
5. “Don’t be a drag, just be a queen / Whether you’re broke or evergreen” – Lady Gaga, 2011 “BORN THIS WAY”
6. “Holly came from Miami, F.L.A. / Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A. / Plucked her eyebrows on the way / Shaved her legs and then he was a she” – Lou Reed, 1972 “WALK ON THE WILD SIDE”
7. “I’ve got to show the world / All that I wanna be / And all my abilities / There’s so much more to me” – Diana Ross, 1980 “I’M COMING OUT”

After seeing CHIC in concert with her daughters in 1979, Diana Ross commissioned Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards to write and produce material for her next solo album. After seeing drag performers dressed as Ross at a nightclub called The Gilded Grape, Rodgers and Edwards decided to write a song that would serve as an anthem for her gay followers. “I’m Coming Out” went to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is considered one of the most iconic pride anthems in history.

ROUND SIX: PRIDE FLAGS (PICTURE ROUND)

ROUND SEVEN: LGBTQ+ FIRSTS

1. The first openly LGBTQ+ candidate to successfully run for political office in the U.S. was college student Kathy Kozachenko, who in 1972 was elected to the city council of what Michigan city? ANN ARBOR
2. This northwestern European country was the first nation to recognize same-sex marriage in 2001. NETHERLANDS
3. The first onscreen kiss between two men takes place in the winner of the first Academy Award for Best Picture. WINGS
4. Intersex but assigned female at birth, this German-Israeli man was the first person to receive gender-affirming surgery AND one of the first to gain legal recognition of their chosen gender identity. KARL M. BAER
5. In June 1964, which magazine became the first national publication in the U.S. to report on LGBTQ+ issues? LIFE
6. In 1971, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell became the first American same-sex couple known to have obtained a marriage license. In what Midwest U.S. state did Baker and McConnell reside? MINNESOTA
7. He was the first openly queer winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which he was awarded twice: in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire and in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. As a child, Williams almost died of diphtheria; between his illness-induced frailty and his effeminacy, he was the target of violent abuse at the hands of his father, Cornelius. Williams studied journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, but after he failed a military training course in his junior year, Cornelius pulled him out of school. He got Williams a job at the International Shoe Company factory, where Cornelius was a salesman. The monotony of factory work inspired Williams to write prodigiously. After suffering a nervous breakdown at the age of 24, Williams re-enrolled in school, ultimately studying at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Around 1939, he adopted his pen name. Five years later, Williams achieved his first significant success with a Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie. Over the next two decades, Williams wrote some of the most iconic plays of the 20^th century, including A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana. In addition to his two Pulitzers, Williams was the recipient of three New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony.