Pride Month may be over, but a new plugin ensures you get important historical moments in the LGBTQIA+ community all year round. Today is Gay is a beautifully designed calendar plugin that provides a daily look at LGBTQIA+ culture and includes everything from anniversaries to homophobic tragedies.
Created by The Ginger Beers, the LGBTQIA+ group of Wieden+Kennedy London, Today is Gay is a response to corporations removing support for the community via policies, calendars and comms. It's a free Google calendar plugin, making it compatible with the work calendars of over 500,000 companies and millions of people all over the world.
On the day that I check out the calendar, there's a fact in there about Queen Elizabeth's bodyguard, Commander Michael Trestrail, who resigned after he was found to have been in a relationship with a male prostitute. "Reports later claim the Queen stopped Prime Minister Thatcher from making “gays in the Palace” a public issue," says the calendar.
Other entries are around the legalisation of same sex marriage in Canada and the birth of celebrated LGBTQIA+ people such as historian Lillian Faderman and Lithuania's first openly gay politician Rokas Źilinskas.
There are also notes about the high-five being invented by Glenn Burke, the first major league baseball player to come out as gay to a story about Michelangelo's grandnephew doing some pronoun switching in the sculptor's poetry. It really is all fascinating stuff.
The website contains the calendar as well as the instructions for installing the plugin, and there's also an Instagram account too where you can follow along.
"This project has been a real labour of love," says Winona Wee, co-lead of The Ginger Beers and senior creative at Wieden+Kennedy London. "I feel lucky to be surrounded by friends at work who volunteered their time and care to help bring it to life.
"Each of us took charge of a different month, and the events we chose naturally reflected the diversity in our team – Wil is Australian, Andre’s Brazilian, Jonathan’s British, and I’m Singaporean. Along the way, I learnt so much about queer history: the good, the bad, and the lives and legacies that were missing from our history books."
"As institutions flee from Pride, it’s been gutting to realise how fragile progress can be," says Wil Koslowski, comms planner at Wieden+Kennedy London. "It’s such a brutal reminder that their acceptance was always provisional. But for us, the Today is Gay calendar project has been a joyful way to turn loss into gain.
"Queer history is a never-ending fight to be loud, proud, and urgently visible, no matter the resources or support. If queer people are being quietly erased from corporate calendars? We’ll put their stories right back on everyone else’s! Good luck trying to erase this one."
Good luck indeed. Visit the Today is Gay website for more information and to download the plugin.
