This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Hey, this is Annie.

And Samantha.

And welcome to Steph and Evertold You, a production of IHart Radio.

And today, we are just continuing my journey of coming to terms of being queer-baited,

which, by the way, happened five months ago, and I am still wrestling with the fallout. And yeah, I was looking through the presentation I gave to my friend. If he missed that episode where I talked about that,

I gave a two-and-a-half-hour presentation to my friend about how I had been queer baited,

which by the way, she agreed at the end. And so I'm going through some of the beats I haven't hit

yet. But yes, that being said, I have been working through this for a while. See our episodes on internalized

homophobia, compet, our compulsory heterosexuality, and to the happy hour where I talked about

being queer-baited and how miserable it has made me. I will also add the episode we did with

Joey on pinkwashing. It kind of comes up with this. And obviously,

today we're talking about two major beats. One of them, the first one we're going to get into

is straight washing. Obviously, straight washing is related to whitewashing. This is a very

similar idea. So you're going to hear

similar things, but I wanted to make that clear. So let us get into a definition of straight washing,

since this is the first topic we're going to tackle. Straightwashing, also called hetwashing,

is a pretty straightforward thing.

No pun intended. It refers to the practice of making a queer character appear straight,

like just kind of erasing that whole part of their identity. This often includes changing personal information on fictional or historical characters and making them fit into heteronormative narratives.

Straightwashing shows up in the news, too, which we are going to talk about a little bit.

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