In honour of LGBT History Month in October, Australian streaming service, Binge, will release all four episodes of the powerful and provocative docu-series, EQUAL.
The series will chronicle the landmark events of the LGBTQ+ Civil Rights Movement and their fight for justice and inequality.
Honouring the rebels of yesteryear, the show will feature never-before-seen archival footage and depictions that bring to life their true backstories.
Viewers will meet a wide range of visionaries, many of whom identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community with each part, exploring a different section of history.
Part one explores the rise of early organisations while part two chronicles the 20th-century trans experience, bookended by the 1966 Compton Cafeteria riots in San Francisco.
Part three examines the contributions from the Black community on the growing LGBTQ+ civil rights movement; and finally, part four ties in the decades-long struggles with the culminated Stonewall uprising – the beginning of the Pride movement.
The series stars Grammy nominee Cheyenne Jackson (Watchmen) as Dale Jennings, a gay rights activist, playwright and author. He was one of the founding members of the Mattachine Society in the early 1950s, one of the earliest gay rights groups in the United States.
Screen Actors Guild nominee Anthony Rapp (Star Trek: Discovery) plays Harry Hay, who was the founder of The Mattachine Society. In his 1948 manifesto, The Call, Hay called for the protection and improvement of the rights of homosexuals and was the foundation on which the group was built.
Primetime Emmy nominee Shannon Purser (Stranger Things) and Heather Matarazzo best known for her role in The Princess Diaries, will play Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, a couple who were together for 56 years. The pair founded the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955, the first social and political organisation for lesbians in the United States. The Lyon’s also published The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the US. They were also the first same-sex couple to legally wed.
Alexandra Grey (pictured) will play Lucy Hicks Anderson, a socialite, chef and prohibition-era entrepreneur — and one of the first documented Black transgender persons in the USA. In 1945, a syphilis outbreak at Anderson’s brothel outed her to her community in Oxnard, California.
Sara Gilbert (Roseanne) will play J.M. from Cleaveland, an “anonymous reader” of The Ladder, representing the isolated lesbians of the 1950s who turned to the publication for solace while living closeted lives.
Actors Jamie Clayton, Isis King, Samira Wiley and Gale Harold also star while acclaimed filmmaker and producer Stephen Kijak (Sid and Judy) directed episodes one, three and four and Kimberley Reed (Prodigal Sons) helmed the second episode.
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