Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee, All the Best.

Today is our fourth and final episode on LGBTQ history and rights, with our essential texts

being the Supreme Court case, Obergefell v. Hodges, Michael Warner's book, The Trouble

with Normal, Cruising Utopia, The Then and There of Queer Futurity by Jose

Estevan Munoz, and No Future, Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman.

And today we're going to discuss the last of those two titles.

And my reading partner is the spectacularly brilliant historian and teacher and my dear friend

Matthew Nelson. I'm so, so excited for this conversation with you today, Matthew. Thanks so much

for being here. Great to be back in conversation with you, Amy. I'm so, so glad that I read

these books because they've really helped me develop my empathy and my understanding

and even just my knowledge of history. But especially with this last text, this was probably the

most challenging. And you shared some context with me the other day that was really, really

illuminating and really helpful. So I'm wondering if you could start out our

episode by sharing that with our listeners right now. Absolutely. This is the reason why I really

wanted to study these texts with you, Amy, because of this framing that has made these texts

very meaningful to me. Few communities, like survivors of genocide, understand what

it is to face annihilation, both as an individual and a member of a group. I was just a boy when

the HIV AIDS brutalized the queer community, but as a student of history, I try to read every book, watch every movie

I can related to this extraordinary but tragic moment in order to understand it all better.

David French's How to Survive a Plague and emotionally arresting an informative book,

it's also a documentary, most certainly rank among my favorites to help me inhabit the

experiences of gay men who went through all of this and who bore the brunt of the

...