38. Trans-sister Radio: Synth Icon Wendy Carlos
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 28 August 2021
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you've ever enjoyed disco, EDM, changed your voice with auto-tune, or danced along to Daft Punk, you've got the subject of today's episode to thank! In this episode of History is Gay, Leigh is joined by guest host Hannah van Rhee (they/them) of the QueerSounds Podcast to talk about Wendy Carlos, electronic music pioneer, synthesizer queen, film soundtrack composer extraordinaire, and trans woman! We'll get into all the exciting details, like weird stories about Stanley Kubrick during A Clockwork Orange, comedy albums with Weird Al Yankovic, living inside a faraday cage, and more cats than you can shake a dangly, shiny stick at.
Our wonderful guest host for this episode, Hannah van Rhee, can be found on twitter at @duchessofdeer, and you can follow their podcast QueerSounds on twitter @queersoundspod, Instagram @queersoundspod, and at www.queersounds.com.
Outline
00:00 – Introduction
5:01 – Main Topic: Trans-sister Radio: Synth Icon Wendy Carlos
7:09 – Socio-Historical Context
13:06 – A Note on Sources
14:23 – Who were they? Bio Time.
48:09 – Why do we think they're gay?
52:15 - 52:58 — Content warning: Descriptions of dysphoria and internalized transphobia
53:23 - 54:07 — Content warning: Suicidal ideation
1:07:36 – Word of the Week
1:20:46 – Main Takeaways and Final Conclusions: Wendy Carlos' Legacy
1:28:54 – How Gay were They?
1:31:34 – Closing and Where to Find us Online
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked |
| 0:05.7 | queer ladies, gents, and gentle envies that have always been there in the unexplored |
| 0:10.1 | corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. Hello, everyone. |
| 0:30.4 | Welcome to this episode of History is Gay. |
| 0:35.0 | I have a guest host that is joining me today for a fun episode that we've |
| 0:41.0 | been working on for quite some time. And I'm really excited to bring them on. And I'm also very |
| 0:46.9 | grateful to them for dealing with lots and lots of fun time zone craziness because my wonderful guest is in the netherlands so we've been doing a lot of |
| 0:57.9 | late night early morning fun things so welcome everyone to hannah van rie who is the host and producer |
| 1:05.0 | of the queer sounds podcast hi hannah hi lee how are you doing? I'm all right. As you said, it's, |
| 1:13.4 | it's always fun working with a nine-hour time difference. Yeah. Yeah, we've had to, we've had to |
| 1:19.1 | reschedule our recording a couple of times because neither of us knows how to math because we are |
| 1:24.9 | gays. So time differences like that can be really difficult, |
| 1:30.0 | especially when one likes to sleep. Shout out to everyone in Australia because, you know, |
| 1:35.6 | eight-hour time difference the other way around. Oh, God, it's more so. It's so awful. The few |
| 1:42.9 | times that I've, you know, worked with are good friends over at Queers Fact. Shout out to y'all. It's always been really interesting. Those poor folks came on for like a panel that I was doing for work. These poor kids were up at like 5 a.m. to do this like live streamed panel. So am I the first European on this podcast? |
| 2:03.2 | You might be. |
| 2:04.2 | You might be. |
| 2:04.8 | I have a couple of things kind of in the, you know, in the back burner with some folks in the |
| 2:08.6 | UK, but I believe that you are the first European on the podcast. |
| 2:12.8 | So welcome. |
| 2:13.8 | I feel honored. |
| 2:14.9 | So yes, I'm really excited to have you here with me to talk about someone that we kind of came up with together. |
... |
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