Two married women met at a dinner party in 1922 and wrote to each other for the rest of one of their lives.

Drift off to sleep with the story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. They met on 14 December 1922 at Clive Bell's house in Bloomsbury, where Virginia was unimpressed and Vita was not. Three years later Virginia spent three December nights at Long Barn in Kent, and Vita's diary recorded only that it was a peaceful evening. In January 1926, unable to sleep in Milan on her way to Persia, Vita wrote the plainest sentence she ever wrote: "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia."

Out of it came Orlando, begun in October 1927 and published by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press on 11 October 1928, dedicated to Vita and illustrated with photographs of her costumed as its hero, who lives three hundred years and changes sex along the way. Vita's son later called it the longest and most charming love letter in literature. That same year Vita lost Knole, the house she was born in, because she was a daughter and the estate followed the male line. In 1930 she bought a ruin called Sissinghurst and spent the rest of her life building a garden there, including a white garden that still glows after sunset.

Woolf's last letter to Vita, six days before her death in March 1941, ends not in longing but in thanks.

Told twice, as always: once at a natural pace, then again slowly with long pauses. Winter lamplight in Kent, hand-set type in a basement, deer under old trees, pale roses at dusk.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.

Drift off to sleep learning how the rainbow flag was made: in an attic, in trash cans, by thirty people with dye on their hands.

In June 1978, Gilbert Baker and around thirty volunteers hand-dyed a thousand yards of muslin on the top floor of a San Francisco community center and stitched two flags, each thirty feet by sixty. The eight stripes carried meanings, hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic and art, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit. On June 25 they rose at United Nations Plaza, and Baker said the crowd understood in an instant, that it belonged to all of us. Tonight's story follows him from a Kansas railroad town through the Army, through Harvey Milk's election and his assassination, through the practical accidents that turned eight stripes into six, through a mile-long flag carried by ten thousand people in 1994 and a flag laid from one ocean to the other in 2003, to his death in 2017 and the rediscovered fragment of an original flag that came home to San Francisco with its colors still bright.

Told twice, once at a natural pace and once more slowly with longer pauses to carry you into sleep. Expect hot dye stirred with broom handles, stained knuckles, wet cotton, and color drying on lines in the last of the afternoon light.

💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.

Drift off to sleep learning about the Healer Stones of Kapaemahu, four boulders on Waikīkī Beach that have held a suppressed truth for five centuries.

Long before the reign of chief Kakuhihewa in the 1500s, four healers sailed from Tahiti to Oʻahu: Kapaemahu, Kahaloa, Kapuni, and Kinohi. They were māhū, people of dual male and female spirit, and in Hawaiian understanding, that duality was the source of their healing power. Beloved for their gentle ways and miraculous cures, they were honored at their departure with four great stones moved by thousands of people on the sacred night of Kāne, imbued with the healers' names and mana after a month of ceremony. Princess Kaʻiulani laid seaweed lei on the stones before her morning swims. Then missionaries arrived, the word māhū fell into forced silence, and in 1941 the stones were buried under a bowling alley. Unearthed in 1963 and restored in 1997, the monument's signage still erased the healers' identity, until Kumu Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu and filmmakers Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson brought the story back with the Oscar-shortlisted animated film "Kapaemahu" (2020), narrated in ʻŌlelo Niʻihau, a Bishop Museum exhibition, and a new bronze plaque dedicated October 24, 2023, the first signage ever to name the healers' dual male and female spirit.

Tonight's story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with longer pauses, to guide you gently into sleep.

Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support and if not, no need at all, sleep well either way.

Drift off to sleep with the most famous love story in the history of poetry. In November 1244, a wandering dervish named Shams of Tabriz stopped a professor's mule in the streets of Konya and asked him a question, and Jalal al-Din Rumi, a respected scholar who had never written a verse, became the poet whose words are still read in a hundred languages tonight. When Shams vanished in the winter of 1248, Rumi's grief became more than 40,000 verses of love poetry, gathered under his beloved's name, the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, with thousands of poems signed "Shams" instead of "Rumi." Tonight we travel through the meeting in the market street, the forty days of seclusion, the whirling that began among goldsmiths' hammers, the searches through Damascus, and the December night in 1273 that Konya still celebrates as Shab-e Arus, the Wedding Night.

As always, the story is told twice, once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with long pauses, to carry you into sleep. You are part of a long, beautiful history. And you are safe here.

Support the show (only if you'd like, no need at all, sleep well either way): https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support

An emperor wakes from an afternoon nap to find the man he loves asleep on his sleeve. Rather than wake him, he calls for a blade and cuts the sleeve off. Two thousand years later, "the cut sleeve" is still how the Chinese language remembers love between men.

Tonight we travel to Han dynasty China, around 4 BCE, into the lacquered halls and plum-blossom courtyards of the Weiyang Palace in Chang'an, where Emperor Ai fell in love with a young official named Dong Xian. Recorded plainly in the Book of Han, theirs is one of the oldest documented love stories between men anywhere in the world: the shared naps, the extravagant devotion, the rise of Dong Xian to the highest office in the empire at twenty-two, the banquet where the emperor mused about giving him the throne itself, and the single act of tenderness that outlived the dynasty, the empire, and every critic who wrote it down.

As always, the story is told twice: once at a natural pace, then again slowly, with longer pauses, to guide you gently into sleep. You are part of a long, beautiful history, and you are safe here.

Support the show (only if you'd like, no need at all): https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support

Topics: LGBTQ+ history, queer history, gay history, Chinese history, Han dynasty, Emperor Ai, Dong Xian, the cut sleeve, duanxiu, the bitten peach, sleep story for adults, bedtime story, relaxation.

They fired thousands for who they loved, and the fired found each other on the sidewalk. Tonight: the Cold War purge history nearly forgot, the ten people who walked a silent circle at the White House on April 17, 1965, the attic where every picket sign waited fifty years, and the June morning in 2009 when the U.S. government finally said sorry, and one man answered, "Apology accepted."

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

Along the way: cherry blossoms on Pennsylvania Avenue, hand-lettered signs on wooden sticks, a coat held for a friend, and seventy thousand pieces of one stubborn life resting safe in the Library of Congress.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support

Related episodes: Frank Kameny: The Astronomer Who Reached for Justice · A Mystic Bond (ONE Magazine) · Quiet Courage (Daughters of Bilitis) · Barbara Gittings, The Librarian Who Changed the World

Drift off to sleep learning about Oscar Wilde, the most famous wit in the English language, and one of the most beloved figures in LGBTQ+ history. Born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, to surgeon Sir William Wilde and the poet "Speranza," Oscar conquered Oxford, lectured across America in 1882, married Constance Lloyd, told fairy tales like The Happy Prince to his sons, and filled London's West End with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened in a snowstorm on Valentine's Day 1895 at the peak of his fame. Four days later the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde's lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, left a misspelled card at his club. Wilde's doomed libel suit led to his arrest at the Cadogan Hotel and two trials for "gross indecency," where his speech defending "the love that dare not speak its name" drew applause from the public gallery. Convicted May 25, 1895, he served two years' hard labour, writing De Profundis in Reading Gaol as prisoner C.3.3. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900, with Robbie Ross at his side, the devoted friend who paid off his debts, moved him to Père Lachaise beneath Jacob Epstein's winged monument, and in 1950 was laid inside the tomb beside him. Today the tomb sits behind glass to protect it from thousands of lipstick kisses, and in January 2017 Wilde was posthumously pardoned under the Alan Turing law.

Tonight's story is told twice, first at a natural pace, then again slowly with longer pauses to carry you gently into sleep. Along the way you'll sit in a Dublin salon, watch snow fall over a glowing London theatre, find the stars through a high cell window, and walk the golden evening avenues of Père Lachaise.

🌙 Perfect for: sleep, relaxation, LGBTQ+ history, queer literary history, bedtime stories for adults, gay history, mindful rest

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported. If these stories help you rest, you can support the show here: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support

💜 Subscribe for more LGBTQ+ history sleep stories, and tell us in the comments: what's your favorite Wilde line?

Related episodes:

• The Gentle Genius: Alan Turing
• Michelangelo's Secret Love
• John Addington Symonds
• The Unfolding Garden: André Gide

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." — Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

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Jim Obergefell and John Arthur were together for twenty years before the law learned the word for it. Tonight: the medical jet on a Maryland tarmac, the wedding that lasted only minutes, the blank death certificate that started a lawsuit, and the June morning in 2015 when the Supreme Court made marriage equal in all fifty states, "equal dignity in the eyes of the law."

Told twice, as always: first at a natural pace, then slowly, with longer pauses, to carry you into sleep.

Along the way: a New Year's Eve party in Cincinnati, a ring warmed by a July afternoon, a hushed marble courtroom, and the White House glowing in rainbow light against the summer dark.

☕ Restful Rainbow is independent and listener-supported: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/support

Related episodes: A Quiet Revolution (Section 377) · Canada Marriage Equality 2005 · The First Same-Sex Marriages in the Netherlands · A Mystic Bond (ONE Magazine)