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Hello and welcome to our special edition, Valentine's Day bonus episode of Outward. I'm Christina Caudrucci, and as a queer

Italian-American, I would like to say, you're welcome, world, for my culture's latest contribution

to our visual communication, the new pinched finger, aka.ing emoji. I'm Ramanalaam. And I'm

Brian Lauder, editor of Outward. And you guys, I'm really disappointed by the low number of candy grams I've gotten for Valentine's Day. So we really need to get on that. Thanks.

Well, it's such a treat to be able to hang out with you guys one extra time this month. So listeners, we are going to have a regular episode dropping the last week of this month.

But today, for our bonus episode, we are focusing on you and your needs because you deserve all of the happiness and fulfillment in the world.

So this week, we are going to try to give it to you.

You've asked us for advice and we've brought in an esteemed guest to help us answer

your questions. John Paul Bramer who writes the Olapapapie advice column. So we're going to

skip our prides and provocations for this episode so we can spend more time on y'all's

issues. But at the end of the episode, in the spirit of love and St. Valentine, I think, was a person.

We are going to give you a gay agenda full of queer romance.

Brian, take us away.

Yeah, so excited for this episode and to have John Paul in the studio with us in New York.

For those who don't know, he is a writer and author from rural Oklahoma, currently living in Brooklyn.

His advice column, Ola Poppy, is amazing.

I've been a big fan for years.

It's been at multiple publications, but currently it's on substack.

So that's a newsletter subscription you can do.

He's also working on a memoir of the same

name with Simon & Schuster, which will be out in 2021. That's going to be incredible. His writing

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