I'm in my room. I'm alone. A girl, a younger girl, a freshman walks into my room and she was like, we were just having this crazy conversation. Would you ever go down on a girl? Because I think I'd rather die. And I was like, of all the gin joints and all the world, you had to come into mine and ask me if I'd eat pussy. What? I don't know. You're like, who would ever want to do that? That'd be weird. Gross. Is it really hot in here?

Hello, I'm Shannon Beveridge and welcome to The Alphabet Club, a queer storytelling podcast

where every other week I will curate a personal essay by

someone in our community, stories about desire, heartbreak, gender, sex, friendship, family,

and becoming. After the reading, we sit with it together, we talk about what it brings up,

what it reflects back to us, and why queer stories just hit different. This week's essay is called

Oh God, I'm a whore and is written by Caroline Dumfie. Caroline is an Emmy-winning executive producer.

She's worked with Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, Samantha B. She built the video original slate

at Cricket Media from the ground up and is currently building

YouTube's first late night show outside tonight with Julian Shapiro Barnum. This essay centers

around the often awkward, often inconvenient, and often unexpected circumstances of our gay

awakenings. In this case, Caroline's gay awakening became an origin

story of sorts. The horror of reckoning with your sexuality as a sugar-riddled preteen at a

sleepover to the deeply misogynistic lesbian makeout scene shoved into the movie purely for the male

gays in those terrible made-for-men comedies of the early 2000s is what inspired Caroline

to follow a career path of building better queer media for the world to consume.

Content warning for this week's episode is Religious Trauma. This week's essay will be read by

our author Caroline Dumfie. Stay tuned after the reading for our conversation together. Caroline,

take it away. This episode is sponsored by Tom Boy X. More from the sponsors later in this

episode. It was 2005. I was in the fourth grade at a sleepover watching the movie Dodge Ball starring Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller.

Not where you thought this story was going to go, did you? At the end of the movie, the only main female character Kate, that they treated like a romantic prop the entire movie, had a runner joke about her character being a lesbian

because she was good at Dodgeball. It's 2005, so of course we're lucky to have a woman have

...