What Next - Mighty Real Edition
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 June 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As What Next celebrates Juneteenth, please enjoy this episode from our colleagues at Hit Parade. What Next will be back in your feed on Monday.
Little Richard was rock ‘n’ roll’s flamboyant architect. Lesley Gore sang that no one owned her. Sylvester was a gender-fluid icon who helped define disco. Freddie Mercury made rock operatic, and George Michael demanded freedom.
What all of these LGBTQ artists had in common was bold hitmaking—and fear of being fully out of the closet. For decades, queer acts topped the charts while cloaking their true identities and paving the way for today’s more openly queer stars.
For Pride Month, join Chris Molanphy as he traces the hidden history of queer hitmakers on the charts—including those that managed to be both out and No. 1, right up through our modern age of Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan. It’s a celebration of these artists’ quest to feel… mighty real.
Want more Hit Parade? Join Slate Plus to unlock monthly early-access episodes, bonus episodes of “The Bridge,” and ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Visit slate.com/hitparadeplus to get access wherever you listen.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, today is Juneteenth. That means our team is taking a little bit of time off. |
| 0:07.8 | So, there's no new episode of the show today. Instead, we're bringing you a show from our friends over at Hit Parade, |
| 0:14.3 | another Slate podcast that tells the stories behind the chart-topping songs you know and love, |
| 0:19.2 | or love to hate. Because it's Pride Month, |
| 0:22.6 | we are sharing their episode about queer hitmakers, people who have dominated the charts in recent |
| 0:27.8 | decades, whether they could be public about their sexuality or not. I will be back with more news |
| 0:34.4 | next week. Lizzie O'Leary and the TBD team have got you covered for tomorrow. |
| 0:39.1 | For now, here's Hit Parade. |
| 0:41.4 | Hey there, Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. |
| 0:48.2 | Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this |
| 0:53.4 | episode all at once the day it drops? |
| 0:56.1 | Sign up for Slate Plus. |
| 0:58.2 | It supports not only this show but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. |
| 1:04.2 | Just go to slate.com slash hit parade plus. |
| 1:08.4 | You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus, |
| 1:13.9 | Hit Parade The Bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, |
| 1:20.8 | and Popchart trivia. Once again, to join that's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks. And now, please enjoy part one of this |
| 1:31.6 | hit parade episode. Welcome to I'm coming. I'm coming out. |
| 1:50.3 | Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine, about the hits from |
| 1:57.4 | coast to coast. |
| 1:58.7 | I'm Chris Malanthe, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's |
| 2:03.0 | Why Is This Song Number One series? On today's show, 45 years ago, in November of 1980, |
... |
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