Hey Quirro's Cameron here. First I want to thank all of you who came to our first ever live episode of Quirry. We taped it in Vancouver. It was a huge success and I appreciate you so much. As always I want to remind you that you can buy, take my wife on

iTunes, Amazon or Google Play. My television show with my wife Ria Butcher. I'm so excited about the continued success of Take My

Wife and today on the show we have the wonderful Andrea Gibson. I was kind of in like a dark place personally during the

taping of this episode and really it became a lot more about asking Andrea's advice and feedback about how to continue as an artist amidst

setbacks and while you're trying to stay true to yourself I think this is a really interesting conversation and I hope that you enjoy it.

Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. Yeah well you know what that's actually a good way to start. We sound open and friendly and excited to you know hang out with each other which I am all of those things.

It's good to film that way also. Yes so what I do on the show is I have people introduce themselves. Would you mind introducing yourself? Sure my name is Andrea Gibson. I'm a queer, gender queer

romantic political poet. I love to hear, I mean I probably say this every time somebody introduces themselves but I love to hear the words that people associate with that spread romantic. You know I don't think I've ever used that to describe

myself before but I was thinking recently about how many love poems I write compared to political poems and I've always said I'm a political poet but I write more love

poems than I do political poems. I guess that I guess that love poems are political you know I was just going to say that you know when your life and existence and identity is politicized love is like one of the more political just being outward about your love is one of the more political things you can do. Yeah you know I was doing a show and

San Francisco a few years ago with Holly Miranda do you know who she is and who she is yeah and right before I took the stage she was telling me a story about how Nina Simone spent several several years during the civil rights movement refusing to sing love songs and people would come to her shows and they'd request love songs.

And she would refuse to sing anything that was in a social justice anthem you know at the time because you know the state of the world needing that and I thought that was so badass and that night I was making my set list to go on stage.

And I didn't have any love poems on the set and then right when I got up there I realized just by the nature of a poem being about a woman a love poem being about a woman made it a political poem which is heartbreaking in a way you know and in every way it's heartbreaking.

That love is ever political but yeah. Yeah yeah I mean it is heartbreaking it's also.

Well it's certainly an interesting decision to make because it's also very personal so when you're making art that's for public.

Like presentation or consumption whatever is like the word that doesn't feel gross.

When you're making art that's supposed to leave your house or whatever like not just private journaling.

I mean because this is something I got asked about all the time my relationship I'm in a relationship with a person that I work with and our relationship has a very public side of it which is a choice that we both made.

I didn't see my relationship type being portrayed by other people and so I chose to do that because it just felt like a vast emptiness.

Yeah and it still is weird you know to like come out of fire or present to the world in any way.

A thing as personal as love.

It is I also I mean I remember when I first started seeing the two of you and you know about together and you know I wasn't following you around your neighborhood or anything.

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