To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, we will host a conversation featuring Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown, creators of Instagram’s @lgbt_history, and acclaimed author Garrard Conley (Boy Erased). The three authors and activists will talk about Riemer and Brown’s wildly popular @lgbt_history page and their debut book, We Are Everywhere, a rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, along with Garrard Conley’s best-selling memoir. Boy Erased was adapted for the 2018 film of the same name, as well as the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. Their shared experience casts a powerful light on the LGBTQ+ community’s hardships in the past, its challenges for the future, and what Stonewall means to us today.

Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown, creators of Instagram’s massively popular @lgbt_history, live in Washington, D.C., where Brown is an attorney and Riemer, a former attorney, is a writer and lecturer. They enjoying fighting fascists, spending time with their dog, and disrupting fundamentalists’ worldviews. Essential and empowering, We Are Everywhere, the couple’s first book, is a rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, combining exhaustively researched narrative with meticulously curated photographs, just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Garrard Conley is the author of the New York Times best-seller Boy Erased (Penguin 2016), now a major motion picture. Boy Erased was nominated for a Lamdba Literary Award and was featured as a top 2016 nonfiction book by O Magazine, Buzzfeed Books, and Shelf Awareness, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Conley is also a producer and creator of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America. His work has been published in the New York Times, TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Them, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Huffington Post. He is currently at work on a novel about queer eighteenth-century lives.