Hello, dear listeners, and happy first day of Pride Month.

I wanted to put out a re-release of one of our first episodes you may remember called The Gay Agenda,

which I made back when I was still a little baby podcaster.

But I still remember what making it meant to me, how important it was to uncover the way the ugly

myths about queer people were manufactured, sustained, and ultimately cemented in the public

consciousness. It meant way more, though, to consider how being queer had colored my life

and the lives of so many people I loved, to remember the

loneliness of being a teenager with a secret and the ecstatic experience of finding others like me.

Shit is really bad. We know this. The way forward is cloudy and the future feels petrifying. Trans and non-binary people are now

considered official enemies of the state, terrorists in fact, and none of us really know what that

will come to mean. Every day, we are plagued with an existential anxiety about our safety and the safety of the people we love, this humming in the background of a terror beyond what I thought we would ever have to feel again.

Whatever category of queerness we fall into, we've been scapegoated, turned by politicians and media figures into cartoonish villains,

vile creatures that they lay the blame of everything upon.

They do this, as we know, so that the devoted populace already in their palms looks away from them, these clammy, melting, poisoned human voids who

are robbing us of everything that makes life worth living, that makes life possible to live.

The lineage of the scapegoating is long, painful, and oftentimes fucking ridiculous, as you'll hear about in this

re-release. But the lineage of survival, of hope and joy and love, is long too, a grinding

determination to open up the world itself, not just for queer people, but for all those who want to see a new way forward,

for anyone ready to leave the chokehold of the ever cruel American status quo behind.

So this month, in the midst of so much horror and uncertainty, I want to remember those that came before and the frothing

slander that they had to push through to get us what we have now, even if it feels like

it's all being torn back down. Now we have to push through this again. I don't know how,

...