The Hi there.

Welcome to another dishcast.

This is our third with the payroll.

I just want to thank you all for subscribing.

We've had this huge bump in

subscriptions, which is hugely gratifying. We'd love you to be able to listen to the entire

episodes. We haven't actually subscribed. Do subscribe. And I think you'll find it worthwhile.

We'll give you a huge amount of the podcast for free,

but then we're going to keep the last section of it for our paid subscribers.

You need to give them a little bit more incentives and a little bit more thanks for what they're doing.

We are really viable at this point, and traffic keeps going up and we're grateful.

Over 130,000 people of you now get this every week in your email entry and we want all

130,000 of you to pay, in which case I will disappear very quickly to a desert island.

But nevertheless, today we're having someone who you may not have heard of.

In fact, a few people probably at this point, I think it's fair to say, have heard of.

But, you know, the dishes here, not just for established hacks like me, but for new emergent voices. And one of the things I've

mulled over the last couple of years as we've been swimming in a tide of LGBTQIA2S plus content everywhere is the perspective of an actual real live homosexual

man growing up and becoming coming of age in the 21st century and what that's like and how

that person can respond to what some of these new currents are saying and doing.

And I couldn't think of anyone better to talk about this than someone I've come across online.

He's a young writer in New York and his name is Ben Appel.

And he worked as a hairstylist for over a decade. And then he got a creative

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