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Hello and welcome to Outward for the month of September.

I'm Brian Louder, editor of Outward, and I'm happy to announce that we are finally,

officially, in goddamn decorative gourd season, bitches. So get festive.

Okay. As you wish. I'm Christina Cauderucci, a staff writer at Slate and host of the Waves,

Slate's podcast about women and gender. And I'm currently calculating how much cleavage is too much cleavage for this family-friendly women's pro soccer game I'm going to this weekend. I'm taking input. And we have a very special guest host with us this month, Ruman Alam. Hi, Ramon. Hi, how are you?

I'm Raman Alam. I'm a novelist. I'm one of the Karen Feeding columnist for Slate. Such a great column. And it might be decorative gourd season for you, but to me it's back to school season. So that's what I'm dealing with at the moment. You're also a parent, yes. That is true. so not so festive in your house?

Well, actually pretty festive.

I mean, I almost wept with joy when the kids were back to school, I'm honest. Yeah, I'm sure that's exciting. Congrats to them and to you. Thank you. Yeah, some quiet time. Well, that's wonderful. So with the change of seasons, we thought we'd freshen up our format a little bit. It occurred to us, looking back

over the year, that the podcast has existed now, that there are only so many big themes in the world,

and we had used, I think, all of them, or almost all of them. So we decided to move the sort of

format of the show to looking at big stories in queer life that are happening sort of around when we record and sort of in the discourse each month and talk about those and then see what bigger discussions we can pull out of them. So it's pretty simple. I hope you all like it. This month, we're going to think through the big report from August about research into gay genes. And then we'll tackle the news that McCrae game, previously a big proponent of conversion therapy, now disavows the practice and has affirmed his identity as a gay man.

Yeah. So I guess we kind of do have a theme, which is looking at how people determine if they're gay.

It's true. Yes. Or how people believe that people're gay. It's true.

How people believe that people become gay.

But before we get into that discussion, we're going to kick things off with our September

prides and provocations.

Ruman as our new third.

Why don't you start us off?

Yeah.

I am sort of a temperamentally provoked person.

Join the club.

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