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Welcome to the double X Gap Fest for Thursday, December 26, the Stay Seated Bro edition.

Merry Christmas, everyone, says the only a Jew on this podcast. I'm Hannah Rosen, recording from the DC studio,

and I am joined in New York by June Thomas from Slate. Hi, June. Hey, Hannah. And Noreen Malone of the New

Republic. Hi, Noreen. Hello. So you have a cold, June. I do. But, you know, I'm struggling

through just for the sake of the Double X Cab Fest. And for Christmas merriment, of course. Oh, of course. Christmas merriment. Yes. I hope there are no big family fights out there, anything like that. Oh, no. No, not yet. This is our first ever call-in show, meaning that you, our listeners, have gamely called and sent us in questions to answer,

and we're going to do that very shortly. But before we do, we want to announce that we'll be having a live show in D.C. It's a repeat of last year's Valentine's Day show at Sixth and I. It's not posted yet on the Sixth and I site, but we will tell you when it is, and we hope you all come. And then before we

really, really start, I want to run a letter that we got. I got several letters, and especially to my

email about our male friendship show by men who were wounded or intrigued or something like that.

My own husband was kind of irritated because people were tweeting at him that he didn't have any

friends. So I felt a little bad about that. Like I wasn't really saying that. I was saying, you know, he has friends in a different way than I have friends. But people read that as David doesn't have any friends. So he actually got offers to, you know, go for drinks and stuff like that. Like, I'll be your friend kind of tweets. So I'm going to read from Bob Cahagan, who wrote me an email, and he says, I think there is a gay thing concern with male friends.

My close friend and I live 90 minutes apart, so we occasionally meet halfway at McDonald's.

We always hug when we meet and depart, and we occasionally make some comment about, I guess everybody here thinks we're gay.

Both of us are very liberal and older,

but there's still that lingering attitude in our past about what we were taught about being gay.

I thought that was fairly honest, you know, complicated letter.

We also got an interesting note from a trans guy, a female to male transsexual, who said that

he was very interested in the way that his friendships had differed,

...