[SPEAKER_03]: I caved in the other night, and I watched the America's next-on-model documentary.
[SPEAKER_02]: You caved?
[SPEAKER_02]: Were you like resisting it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I was kind of resisting because I was like, I don't want to hear from Tiger Banks.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I kind of came, I came to it thinking that it was a Tiger Banks' puff piece because she's like in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was proven wrong, but I was avoiding it because also, like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've watched videos about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: L. Literacy, friend of the pod, fellow YouTuber.
[SPEAKER_03]: Whoa, those words together are so hard to come out of my mouth at the same time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, she has a really great comprehensive video about America's national model and they actually feature her in the documentary, which I was like, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Good for her.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I was like, I've seen it all, but I was working.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like when I'm editing the one nice thing about it is that it's just monotonous labor, like, so tedious, that sometimes I can just throw something onto the background while I'm doing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I've been in an editing hole, and I was like, I need something to just kind of take the edge off my brain while I do this, and so I watched it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thoroughly enjoyed watching it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean look, I kind of the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wasn't necessarily resisting it, but I was like, well, what are they going to say that to you?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I watched all of those early seasons of America's next top model, and I'm the worst for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But also, I watched all of the tech talk videos of people being like, can you believe that they may them do this, blah, blah, blah, and it's like, yeah, the 2000s were fucked up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it is always funny when young people come into old's media and be like, what?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it's hilarious to me, it feels quite a historical, but yeah, I mean, I have my critiques and so we're gonna launch into these because Hannah and I we've debriefed a little bit about it, but
[SPEAKER_03]: It does not absolve Tyra of her complicity in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually really enjoyed the framing device where they basically interview the producers, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So they'll interview Tyra and the interview Ken Monk and then they interview Jay Manuel, Ms. J. and Nigel Barker, all of whom were like, I'm pretty sure producers on the show or was it just Jay Manuel that was a producer?
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, I don't think that Nigel Barker or Miss J were producers, and even though that J manual was per se, like I, he was like the creative director or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I think he was a producer on the first season, but and then he was keeping off of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not entirely sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: but the interview production and then they juxtapose that with interviews from former taught model contestants and they'll do like clever editing where like tyru will say one thing and then the model will say something completely different that just makes tyru look like such a psycho.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I appreciate it that like I don't think it was tyru kind of pulling the strings to make herself look better.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no way she can make herself look better like
[SPEAKER_03]: But in what was funny is that she instead came out looking like even more of a sadist like that woman has serious issues
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, because the documentary really let her go on on her typical spiel's about all the impact that she's had on the model industry and like the good she's done and like her job is a role model and all of these things that she kind of, I feel like she must wake up every morning and look in the mirror and like repeat all of this to herself because I have heard variations of like these speeches on top model and the tire show like,
[SPEAKER_03]: in different forms like so many times and whenever she does, she really kind of erases the black models of the 80s of which there were quite a few like who were of course not as like wildly popular as Naomi Campbell or Tyra Banks were in the 90s but like there were still
[SPEAKER_03]: Black models working E-mon, but yeah, maybe weren't as super model tier, but like it's it's a little bit like okay, but we're not acknowledging the girlies.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, her spiel is so tired at this point and I mean she's just she's like an actual narcissist.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah
[SPEAKER_02]: And she has, like, I mean, looking back now, like, watching her shows, I was like, the show's always has been.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that the documentary did a good job at sort of, like, letting her go off on these things, but, like, because we've been given so much, like, counter evidence.
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of highlighted the like self-organizing that she sort of participates in every day of her life.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a lot that it didn't go in depth with which we'll talk about, but I think what I did a good job of was putting forth this like narrative thrust that it did start out.
[SPEAKER_03]: We think.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's alleged with the intention of trying to teach younger models to, you know, be themselves, how to have a healthier intro into the industry, but the more that the show got absorbed into the industry itself, the more it actually started perpetuating and even like blowing up some of the industries, like worst qualities, which is like,
[SPEAKER_03]: Racism, colorism, like, giving people an importer.
[SPEAKER_03]: And everything you can think of, and seeing Tira, like, weaponized her own struggle against these girls who are so fucking exploited, so poor, so vulnerable, in every way you can think of.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the way that she basically turned into a status, like I think of the way that power, and maybe she was always one to begin with, but the way that power so totally corrupted her.
[SPEAKER_03]: to the point that in the end she was willing to just completely betray her closest friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that that was really well conveyed throughout the series.
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think like I have a very complicated relationship with top model in the sense that it definitely obviously taught me or like was an early example and reinforcement of all of these really harmful sort of like norms around body image and I know that but like at the same time was
[SPEAKER_02]: Weird madness of it because it was like a supposedly critical of the industry.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it was one of the earlier examples of media criticism that I engaged with.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess where it was like while somehow in the same breath telling girls they were too fat was also like, you know what?
[SPEAKER_02]: Our culture has a real problem with telling girls that they're too fat.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it could contradict itself within like a single scene.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it kind of is a really perfect example of the very confusing environment that those of us who grew up in that era were like learning to be people in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I do believe that there were like good intentions.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do believe that like Tyra Banks believes that she's done a lot of good because I think she's like crazy.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's like fully nuts, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: fully nuts.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the jocky memory was a little, again, I watched so much of top model, like love, Mr. Alexander.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of these people were like figures that were like in my living room.
[SPEAKER_02]: For a lot of my childhood, have a thorn as for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can see where they got like screwed over by the show, by Tyra, by whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: but I also think that like, while the show doesn't really give her this platform to defend herself, I think it maybe gives a little bit too much to the man involved, to kind of stick up for themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I think sometimes the way that Jay Manual is talking, it's as if he's not an adult with autonomy who can make his own decisions and is actively choosing to say in this specific job.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I understand this is a threat of the blacklist thing, but I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: The thing that kept coming into my mind was damn it's like they read Hannah or enter something like it felt like banality of evil a lot of the time where so often these people were like,
[SPEAKER_03]: I was just doing my job and it's like, oh, you're just doing your job, which is to like, absolutely fuck over extremely vulnerable young women.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and take grief from it on the show.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, Miss J. Alexander would like, they could be me and Miss J also, like, because, uh, you had a stroke.
[SPEAKER_03]: He isn't able to speak a lot during the documentary.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, he's lost a lot of his capacity at the speech, which was,
[SPEAKER_03]: Devastating and the ability to walk, but because of that, you don't really get his perspective on his involvement in the show either, and so they just cut to him kind of for comedic effect like rolling his eyes They're like, oh, and it's like, hmm, I actually wonder what he thinks of his participation in that Nigel also kind of absolpes himself a lot
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate them.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just don't try to lie though.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I just just like, I wasn't even thinking about this at the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then I did appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jay, I have sympathy for Jamie anyway, because like, there were a lot of contractual things that like forced him to be there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, I know, yeah, I understand that the blacklisting is like, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I understand that like he was doing his job and that was the position he was put in and then I understand like also yeah it's the times like people aren't necessarily going to be pointing out what was in ethical about certain things the way they would now I guess the standard to different but I still kind of feel like there is a lot of
[SPEAKER_02]: I think there's a lot of like revisionism or like revisionists history perhaps maybe in the way he's talking about it because I don't know like it cuz it ended up kind of boiling down to like him being like Tira bullied me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like okay, and you bullied like countless vulnerable young women who were like
[SPEAKER_03]: single moms and like extra graphics and like and they don't go and we'll educate it or not at all They don't really go into like because they only focus on the storylines of the women that were able to come on the show and talk Which is fine, so they talked to like Shandee who is the girl who had an extra like a blackout sex experience
[SPEAKER_03]: on camera that they filmed and completely exploited in her boyfriend finds it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a viral clip at this point of her boyfriend finding out because everyone was joking about how he's like, you had socks, which is horrible because obviously one of the more painful moments in both of those people's lives.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I thought that was really well done when they revisited that.
[SPEAKER_03]: having Danielle on, Danielle, who was like a former winner and the way she was treated and completely shut out by the fashion industry explicitly because she had been on top model, which I had always wondered about, like, oh, is there a stigma?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because the show scene is like tacky and cheap that these girls are not getting the work that they deserve to get, I guess, or that they were promised.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think it's one of those difficult things now, probably also, because now that the fashion industry is so celebrity dominated and has, you know, to some extent got an office like high horse about that and is like very much like engaged with popular culture and like celebrity models.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, since Kendall Jenner became a supermodel, I think that these women probably would have stood more of a chance, I had it, you know, all of this taken place today.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, entire is like, and they do that off the backs of all these other girls.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, shut the fuck up.
[SPEAKER_03]: no one wants to hear your opinion about this literally and she's like references like when he hurlow and stuff and like just stop none of these people like you everyone hates you it's don't take credit for people's careers because there was that whole controversy when when he hurlow got big that when he hurlow was like I'm not crediting America's next model with any of this and everyone's like how dare you you're so ungrateful
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and it's like, no, that show probably hindered her career and she found success elsewhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: But um, no, because it's focusing on those storylines, it doesn't focus on like a lot of some other really fucked up stuff that happened and like doesn't really enter the class element to that all, like a lot of these girls really
[SPEAKER_03]: unspeakably poor.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, drug addicts, I think two of the former contestants have died, and one of them has to wait for cancer jail.
[SPEAKER_03]: But on the show, like they don't touch on how, I think the most fucked up moment of the entire show was them filming jail on phone, finding out that her best friend had died.
[SPEAKER_03]: and it was like hideous that they did that and they don't talk about it at all because I guess she she's not around to be on camera to speak about this but it's like I don't know maybe you should touch on it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know it was I felt like they could have gone more in depth with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: when Angelie won America's next-the-model All Stars, and then they found out that she had been like the victim of human trafficking, but they were like, you were in escort.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they literally, they knew this going in.
[SPEAKER_02]: They like, crowned it or her.
[SPEAKER_02]: and then they like a few weeks later called her up and we're like actually you can't be in America's next on model and then took her title away.
[SPEAKER_02]: So much crazy shit.
[SPEAKER_03]: Totally nuts.
[SPEAKER_03]: They do talk about the tyra.
[SPEAKER_03]: We were all rooting for you screaming fit at Tiffany and it's kind of crazy because all of them were like oh we were like really horrified like all the other judges talk about how they were.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can even see I don't remember this but Janice Dickinson being like whoa
[SPEAKER_03]: her face kind of heavy she's like the soul she's like a gutter rat she's like from the sewage but even she is shocked and then Jay is like yeah I actually'm not even gonna say on cameras I'm the stuff that she said but it was like really bad like apparently production had to talk to her afterwards and yeah I appreciated that they're not like oh no she just felt she just saw herself in this girl it was like no she's like a sadist and this is like her true personality
[SPEAKER_02]: I rewatched a season of top model in the pandemic with my dad and just watching like this like one obviously it's like so fake but also like it is just like an accumulation or like it's like a freak show it's just like a series of like artificial like humiliation experiments or something totally well they they just turned it into like fear factor and other like they turn it into like a
[SPEAKER_03]: It turned into a lot, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even filming the model house, like doing the whole real world thing, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: It was so exploitative.
[SPEAKER_02]: They always filmed like two girls would always make out in the hot tub and they'd always filmed that and it would like, girl's gone wild.
[SPEAKER_02]: They think it was a crazy last night.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Crazy show.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciated the documentary for like examining.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a sea and like why it was so big, why it failed.
[SPEAKER_03]: I liked the way it was composed to like with the production versus the models.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, could have gone deeper.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it could have been a little harder on the J's and Nigel.
[SPEAKER_03]: Tyra Banks has a humiliation cake in that she likes to humiliate others.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in this episode, we're going to be talking about whether or not that is allowed at Pride.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is rehash, a podcast about the social media phenomena that strike a nerve in our culture, only to be quickly forgotten, but we think are due for a revisiting.
[SPEAKER_03]: This season is part two of a loose, no pun intended, history of sex on the internet, the symbiosis of our two most basic instincts, innovation and getting off.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you like our show and you want to hear more from us, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash rehashpodcast, where we have bonus episodes and early access to our regular programming.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you don't want to join the Patreon, feel free to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts because that helps us out a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you had the misfortune of being on Twitter in 2021, it's likely you came across some pretty heated discourse surrounding pride.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of pride braids have been canceled the year before due to the pandemic, and so this was the first time we were picking up again with in-person festivities, and this is around when a historic debate about whether kink should have a presence of pride really blue up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hannah Grill, I know you were on Twitter at this time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Did you see any of this?
[SPEAKER_02]: I did see like, yeah, I saw bits of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have I like taken a lot of the various hot topics of the day on Twitter and put them back into like the recesses of my mind?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but I was certainly cognizant of this debate.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did it make you feel in your inside?
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell you my emotion or give you my tape.
[SPEAKER_03]: Give me your somatic, like we're gonna do a Gestalt session.
[SPEAKER_03]: Where did you feel it in your body?
[SPEAKER_02]: You know your eyes?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know your eyes.
[SPEAKER_02]: They roll.
[SPEAKER_02]: You got floaters?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it gave me an induced mate, my eye floaters.
[SPEAKER_03]: Your floaters are going crazy, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so I went back through the annals of Twitter to dig up some raw materials if you will.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hannah, I'm gonna get you to read these tweets.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, so many tweets are making me read, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sam, this tweet has 68,000 likes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please don't bring kink slash fetishes to pride.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are minors attending that heart to understand.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, dead account, under the same threat as this one, if I have to see someone on a leadership pride then I'm leaving, kinks are not public because the people outside your home did not consent.
[SPEAKER_02]: It should not take a minor to tell people that.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're cool, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're cool, um, this tweet has 31,000 likes.
[SPEAKER_02]: A few reminders for Pride Month.
[SPEAKER_02]: 1.
[SPEAKER_02]: Large corporations just want your money.
[SPEAKER_02]: 2.
[SPEAKER_02]: Lesbian exclusion is ugly.
[SPEAKER_02]: 3.
[SPEAKER_02]: Transwoman of color are the ones that led the fight for our rights.
[SPEAKER_02]: 4.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please don't bring your kink slash fetishes to Pride.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are minors at Pride and this can sexualize the events.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ian, all caps, exclamation point.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyways, wanting to shield miners and children from hardcore kings at pride is not automatically deeming sexual experiences slash queer sexuality dirty.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just fucking shielding children from exposure to highly sexualized experiences because they're literal children.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not a fucking Puritan, I just don't think my nine-year-old nephew should see unsolicited adults ask pride.
[SPEAKER_02]: if he's coming to support his lesbian R2 twat, you twat, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Lumin, under the same threat.
[SPEAKER_02]: Plus, not everyone consents to seeing that shit.
[SPEAKER_02]: And maybe almost so any.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I sure as hell don't want to see a bunch of cis gay men violating public decency laws in my face.
[SPEAKER_02]: What?
[SPEAKER_02]: Pope Solender Man says amazing how the Puritans are the people who want us dead and were being compared to them because someone sees nothing wrong with kids being exposed
[SPEAKER_02]: MX-Bree says healthy BDSM means not showing off your kings in public where not everyone can consent.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are also minor survivors in everyone on the ace spectrum.
[SPEAKER_02]: Adult after parties exist for a reason.
[SPEAKER_02]: That cat boy, under the same thread.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and most prides, it stopped people walking their partner on leashes in public.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm talking about after hours events not the main events because some people argue there's no place for cakes that's BDSM that pride.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want all caps boundaries and consent is mandatory.
[SPEAKER_02]: Clara, under the same thread, says you don't need to get naked in front of people who don't consent to appreciate the BDS.
[SPEAKER_02]: I really don't know the BDS community.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know what?
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to get naked to appreciate BDS.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, you don't, so true, Queen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Nata says, people at LGBT Pride event, we just want to be treated like normal people, also people at LGBT Pride events.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, they posted a photo of a gay man wearing just like a really colorful pink costume that had a bunch of spikes coming out of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's just a gay man in like a costume.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not revealing either.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just like a gay man being silly and weird.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the last one is, what is it with gay men wanting so desperately to be naked around children at pride?
[SPEAKER_02]: What's not clicking?
[SPEAKER_02]: You are all very weird.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you Hannah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also you can't be bothered for making read all that because remember when you made me read all of those chain emails when I lost you guys?
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, so, so, a lot of these kinds of tweets were being posted as you can probably tell from some of them by very young people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why do you think young people would be feeling this way?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because they're less in touch with the history of pride and of the specific role that like sex and sexuality played in like the gay rights movement, but also because, you know, like they're 20 and they're like uncomfortable with things like, don't know how to hang.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like a can't hang problem, maybe.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I say that like my experience as being an actual child at Pride and like one of my best friends growing up like her mum's gay and they took me a few times to Pride and I remember the first time I was going there like, you know Hannah like just so you know there's gonna be like you know naked guys around and like people dressed in leather or whatever
[SPEAKER_02]: And they just like prepared me for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I went and I was like, Oh, yes, there's a naked guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ha, like, you know, you're like 12 whatever you're giggling.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And but you're like, this is like what some like this is what someone has told me is the kind of landscape of this like space that like I am entering into.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't know, maybe I just like a really cool 11-year-old, but I remained unharmed or like really unfazed by that experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will also speak for myself and say that I also would be held pride as a minor and
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, yes, nudity when you're a kid that you see.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was this place called a misbehaving that was beside this restaurant that my parents and I used to go to all the time when I was growing up and they would always have these kind of like pin-up girls in the window with like pasties all on like they were kind of in like burlesque clothing and I mean me feel kind of like shy and embarrassed but like that was kind of the extent of it and also seeing a
[SPEAKER_03]: This type of pride, like I remember just feeling a little shy and embarrassed, but not really.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I too remain unharmed and we are speaking for ourselves here, but that is our personal experience with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, Miss Behavin was right in front of my street car stop when I lived at my grandma's, and that was that made for an interesting commute to come see.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, Pima's Behavin.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I guess like in the theme of every episode we ever do at this point, I do think taking context of 2021, I think everyone's brains had kind of been festering during lockdown, I think morality discourse was reaching a peak because, you know, people had a lot of time on their hands, like the way that these are even phrase is just so 2021.
[SPEAKER_03]: I also think some younger queer generations were coming out of the pandemic to experience the parades for the first time, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was kind of just like this perfect storm for this discourse.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like really
[SPEAKER_03]: get heated.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hannah, what's your initial impression of these tweets?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, what are the main theme?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, how do they make you feel?
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I'm like, I understand the arguments that they're trying to make here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I understand, especially if you're like young and like, have a certain righteousness to you, we're like, I'm can't hang.
[SPEAKER_02]: and can't hang, but also I think especially for haps with like a sub-section of Gen Z that came up at this time where like everyone was really like think of the children, you know, you kind of like have this almost like sheltered mindset where suddenly like
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it sounds like a lot of these people are like speaking about these hypothetical children or minors of pride, but they're probably also including themselves as like generally younger people that also feel like they're a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do feel like it's a general aging up too of like, you know, how people seem to like feel younger and younger, the older they get, like, like a 50 year old feels like a 30 year old at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like when I was 14, I remember when I first, like I was 14 in high school and my friends were going around being like, when do you want to have sex for the first time and remember being like, when I'm 25.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when we talked about smoking weed, I was like, I will never smoke weed.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it was that kind of attitude, but it was like that went away the next year, basically.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like really quickly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And but I feel like the more the adolescence becomes more and more arrested and delayed, it feels now like 20 year olds are perpetuating that kind of energy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Also, I just feel like the early 2020s people were really like,
[SPEAKER_02]: trying to push these narratives where they're like endless in 20-year-olds.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are a baby.
[SPEAKER_02]: You should be walked to school.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, you need an allowance.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, everyone was sort of acting like you weren't a child.
[SPEAKER_02]: Or you're like, you weren't an adult.
[SPEAKER_02]: Until you're like, frontal cortex had formed or something.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like you need a stroller fully.
[SPEAKER_03]: And a diaper.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this debate was huge around this time.
[SPEAKER_03]: And made even bigger by that, like, you know, that YouTuber
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, uh, who I watched some times, I agree with him like 60% of the time, but the other 40% I'm like, woof, uh, strong disagree.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, he went on some pretty heavy anti-kink Applied tirades around this time, which also kind of put on the map for really agreeing with him on mass.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mostly what we're getting here for like the anti side of the debate is that the presence of people in like leatherwear or bondage or like engaging in the mime of SNM acts or personal nudity are harmful to underage queer kids or underage allies who are attending these events they're also being harmful according to the people to asexual or aromantic people who are
[SPEAKER_03]: triggered by sexual acts, and just the idea that the general populace can't consent to seeing those things in public.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you look at this debate on the surface, it's pretty hard to argue against that, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you're saying Hannah, like obviously the interest of protecting young people is important in protecting children.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you look closer at it, it becomes pretty apparent if you're coming in with even like a modicum of context to what pride
[SPEAKER_03]: is that this argument coming from within the queer community itself is actually pedaling some ideas that are pretty harmful to that community.
[SPEAKER_03]: So for the uninformed, pride is an annual parade that happens all over the world, which centers on the rights of LGBTQ people, typically also to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots, which took place in Greenwich, village in New York,
[SPEAKER_03]: These riots were in protest of the police raids that were happening frequently among queer spaces in the 1960s, as well as general police brutality against the community.
[SPEAKER_03]: Stonewall is remembered as one of the major catalysts for the fight against LGBTQ oppression in the West.
[SPEAKER_03]: There accounts very frequently these days that Marsha P. Johnson, a trans black woman through the first, I think it's like the first brick at Stonewall.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the first brick.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although this is actually kind of been debunked.
[SPEAKER_03]: It hasn't been confirmed.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was more likely that she threw a shock loss at a window, which has also been disputed since there are no official records of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Nonetheless, she was an indelible figure within LGBT activism and she will come up a bit later.
[SPEAKER_03]: First off the bat, the argument that Pride shouldn't be sexualized.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you feel this way is genuinely insane.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like a much of these early protests that were happening, that pride is commemorating we're in combat of anti-Saudami laws, the rating of places where gay sex occurred.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's this one article by a gay man I was reading which talks about how in medical offices, often he's listed as MSM, man who a sex was man.
[SPEAKER_03]: He says that, quote, we were defined by the sex we have, our risk factors, play partners, and our fuck buds.
[SPEAKER_03]: I cannot separate my identity from the sex I love.
[SPEAKER_03]: This doesn't go for everyone under the umbrella of LGBTQ plus, but it's a major part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, last week forget AIDS, where thousands and thousands of dying queer people were ignored by a government who saw it as a biblical punishment for having gay sex.
[SPEAKER_03]: Stonewall itself was also a cruising zone, people of all persuasions, especially extremely marginalized ones, like Marcia P. Johnson, who were sex workers, or trans, or sometimes homeless, or all of the above, would go there to find lovers, bars and other major cities function like this as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is where I'd like to introduce our guest for the episode, Russell Shafer, a queer film scholar and archival fellow at the Kinsey Institute who's forthcoming book Smutt and Sandwiches, a history of Stag Film, will be published by Duke University Press in the Spring of 2027.
[SPEAKER_03]: Russell's research hits as a very important intersection here that I think helps to contextualize a lot of what we're talking about in this episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello, I'd like to introduce Russell Schafer to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: Russell, can you please tell listeners a bit about yourself?
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you do?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do I do?
[SPEAKER_00]: So many things, too many things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am a scholar, a teacher, an archival junkie.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love archives that have the sexiest places in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also make films, my own experimental films.
[SPEAKER_00]: I produce film, show other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried to dip my hands into as many pices possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: and continually try to learn in the process.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've been inherent curiosity for life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: We only get to do this thing one time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to like learn as much about the experiences I can.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell the listeners a bit about the work that you're doing particularly in the realm of stag films, photography, like kind of the research that you're involved in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was the archival fellow at the Kinsey Institute, while I was disarraining on the Kinsey Institute, for those who may not know, is that Institute that was founded by Alfred Kinsey, the mid-20th century, and is one of our largest repositories of anything related to sex gender and reproduction in the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a beautiful place.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also in the middle of Indiana, Indiana University, and so it's always in the midst of culture, war, discourse in the last few years.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've faced a whole lot of financial challenges for example.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found my way there because I was co-curating a symposium called the Orphan Film Symposium when I was a master student at NYU, all sorts of like, a femurofilms that I forgot and followed out of copyright abandoned.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we watched a film from the Kinsey Institute called the Jameter, which was 10 minutes long, had more text on screen than it had images of its characters, hardcore film, and I watched it with a whole bunch of archivists like incredible historiographic luminaries in the room, and no one had any idea what to do with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was such a wonderful awkward experience in all the right ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it pushed everyone to think about how sexuality played into a conversation that sometimes seems very celibate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I went to the Kinsey research as a master student did in his study, fell in love with their archive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had 57 films that they thought were produced before the 1930s, which was the time period I was interested in at that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I dive into Spag for the next 15 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: So usually we think about Spag as a hardcore film produced early in the 20th century before the theatrical porn boom of the 1970s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And almost always, there are understeady films that were made for men, screens to groups of men in private spaces, often through Clandestine Networks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of our framework comes back to a way of the way that a film scholar famous Thomas Waw described it in a book called Hard To Imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I started digging more and more, trying to find our high-volt evidence of what it was like to be making tag films or distributing tag films or what the larger frame was for these films that existed in the Kinsey, what I found did not match with the films that were in that archive.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started to realize that at a certain point in our history,
[SPEAKER_00]: stag films as a concept did not necessarily mean hardcore porn.
[SPEAKER_00]: It meant sometimes Charlie Chaplin films, sometimes runaway horse films, sometimes things produced to end distributed by Pathet, which was a very major French distributor at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The stag nights or smokers were held at Harvard.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were also held at Elx Club's,
[SPEAKER_00]: They were also held to groups of men in private, occasionally women were invited to them as audience members.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just like so much in the discourse from the early 20th century that doesn't match with the frame that we landed on by the time we had theatrical porn in the 1970s.
[SPEAKER_03]: Whoa, with this at all impacted by the, like, the motion picture production code sending certain materials into the clandestine worlder.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a part of a larger social move post 1920s, specifically around a vice reform movement that we're cropping up in the 1920s.
[SPEAKER_00]: women's reform, vice reform, and the 1920s certainly a part of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are also organizations like that Illinois vigilance association, which was run by a very interesting man named Philip Yaro.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these groups were really interested in reclaiming or protecting the sanctity of the domestic sphere.
[SPEAKER_00]: as they proclaimed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was this move in 1920s to push I think to clarify what all different sorts of formations of vices looked like and how they would be defined.
[SPEAKER_00]: So things that felt very amorphous before, where there might have been concern about somebody watching
[SPEAKER_00]: porn with a group of men and I'm sure they did instead that term ends up sort of being co-opted by vice reformers and in the process of that the definitional landscape becomes really fixed and so the language that we have I think comes out of this larger social panic.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like your knowledge of this kind of overlaps here in the sense of, like, this concept of, I guess, protecting the domestic sphere and the ways that those attempts to kind of classify and then exclude have ripple effects on certain communities, for example.
[SPEAKER_03]: How in your opinion, like, have panics about if we're talking about pornography here, but, like, pleasure impacted the LGBTQ community in particular.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in so many ways, but I think a big part of it, I feel like I found my first queer theoretical frame in Michael Warners, the trouble with normal, and I know I've heard some great complications to that specific book since, but I really do feel like there is something to be said about the way that
[SPEAKER_00]: All sexuality in some way is linked back to shame and specifically queer sexuality is linked back to shame and one of the ways that our larger heterocentric society operates is to foreclose in Warner's words foreclose access to pleasure and possibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: So effectively, if we don't know what's out there for us, especially when like we're young folks who were exploring ourselves, maybe for the first time, very easily fall into the modes of representation that we see out in the world, the pleasures that it appears like others are enjoying.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that becomes a real
[SPEAKER_00]: problem for queer folks specifically where either we try to emulate what we see and it isn't working and we don't know how to deal with that and ultimately we need to be able to find community, we need to be able to see others who are experiencing pleasures of their own and be able to see like that one's for me that one's not for me like I feel a certain sort of way when I learn about this or I understand this is a possibility and I feel a different sort of way with these other options.
[SPEAKER_03]: As an extension of that argument that people on the anti side of things argue that like kink sexualizes pride, that being kinkie has nothing really to do with being LGBTQ and so why do people insist on displaying their kinks at pride, like the two are mutually exclusive in their minds, straight people can also be kinkie, could you see an argument for why kink would actually be inextricable from the LGBTQ community?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like what do you think the correlation between being LGBTQ and kink is?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean I think just the idea that like I mean obviously this is changed like in our lifetime is even but there was once a time where like all of all of that fell under the same umbrella because it was all taboo's not the right word.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean it is taboo obviously but I mean essentially like because I think gay sex was basically seen as equivalent to something like kink right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that all of it has been ostracized.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like all of it has been seen as like deviant behavior.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, deviant.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the movie is what I was looking for, yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, kind of like not falling under the conception of like what it's considered normal, I guess.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it all gets kind of like shoved into this one category of like wrongness, I guess.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is what you're saying?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well basically, it's like it's all abnormal, quite a quote under the eyes of the Lord and the Law.
[SPEAKER_03]: Precisely, and Anita Bryant would say so for sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yes, that is one side of it, and then there's another side that is even more like practical, which is that a lot of people who engage in King also tend to be queer.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's a 2017 study called bisexuality, pansexuality, queer identity, and King identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: which interviews a number of people who identify under the LGBTQ umbrella who also identifies being kinky and found that they were a few like major correlations between the two things.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it found that a lot of these people use kink as a way of playing with gender and sexuality.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you see how that's like, like, you know, this exchange of like gender roles within the game?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, great.
[SPEAKER_03]: Swapping and, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was kind of like a tool for exploration.
[SPEAKER_03]: It also found that people were using it as a tool for healing, kind of a way of like overcoming the experience of being marginalized by virtue of having this like historically stigmatized identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not saying at all, they're like all LGBTQ people or Kingsters, but just that there's like, there is like a positive correlation between King and the community.
[SPEAKER_03]: leather daddy is well, yes, leather daddy's who we will talk about and what we we will talk about what we owe them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is exactly what I'm going to do right the second actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, so yeah, because of this correlation, King has been a part of Pride since it began.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hannah, like you said, historically this group was called Leather Men, or Leather Datties.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to tell me what Leather Datties are?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all in the name.
[SPEAKER_02]: I assume, it's like we gave men who were like Leather.
[SPEAKER_03]: They liked her Leather.
[SPEAKER_02]: So...
[SPEAKER_03]: So, the leather community is an LGBTQ sub-culture with its own code of ethics that hinges greatly upon the transmutation of pain into pleasure and emotional catharsis.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has a self-contained language, it involves sexual practices, like, and I will list them off for you, Hannah, so listen up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Fisting, whipping, rope-bondage, suspension, piercing, sensory deprivation, temperature play, what have you?
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about club in Berlin, what are people doing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Kit-kat club.
[SPEAKER_03]: leather bars were prominent in American cities even before World War II, uh, when home's actuality was criminalized and taboo leather became a visual signal or like shorthand for being LGBTQ.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a leather man literally in the village people, may he rest in peace, which is one of the most famous like LGBTQ musical acts of the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a really interesting comment on the Reddit thread I was reading about King that I found a very illuminating.
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously this isn't like a peer-reviewed source, it's Reddit, but I did think it was important to read from members of the community itself.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I was trying to get like a big scope of research and opinions, whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this person whose username is Falcon in the dive, said.
[SPEAKER_03]: As we went on into the 80s with the AIDS crisis, cataclysmic dust tool and gay men and right wing backlash, the muscle bound and therefore healthy, normed to find leatherman still coasting on the iconography of the previous decade, became all the more critical.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not coincidental that the Folsom Street fair, which is like, it's like a cake fair that happens in San Francisco, people like literally have sex in public.
[SPEAKER_03]: My friend went and said that he saw a guy like sitting on a fire hydrant, if you get my just.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not coincidental that the Folsom Street Fair started in the mid-80s, and that in the 90s, TV shows were still using and referencing leathermen instead of directly mentioning gamemen.
[SPEAKER_03]: So they're kind of like leather is a shorthand for being gay for these decades.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's like a leather guy on the Simpsons isn't there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know, there's like the famous episodes that John Waters was on, of the Simpsons where Homer thinks that they meet, that's like really camp guy named John, they've come friends with and like Bart really gets along with him and then Homer gets worried that Bart's gay and so he keeps trying to like
[SPEAKER_02]: Make him butch, so he takes him to all these places like the fire house and all the firemen are gay and like a construction site and they're all gay Anyways, that's not the episode of the Simpsons that you're referring to though.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was apparently a lot of random Simpsons But I haven't watched Simpsons.
[SPEAKER_03]: I wasn't a lot of the kid and I still think I'm not allowed now So I just don't watch it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's such a shame.
[SPEAKER_02]: I low everything from the Simpsons.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how I learned what pop culture was
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just not true.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like to feel a couple in all the like soft girl stuff and you know I know the Simpsons came away first.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wait wait for me first
[SPEAKER_03]: So from the beginning, Leatherman were instrumental in organizing and contributing to Pride Parades, and also at the riots that proceeded pride.
[SPEAKER_03]: In New York, there was a thing called Leather Pride Night, which was the largest financial contributor to Pride, and the Leather community generated a large portion of funding and aid during the AIDS epidemic.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were a big contingent in both the 1987 and 1993 marches on Washington as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got a lot of this information also from a paper by a queer scholar named Kyle Kingsbury, and in it, they say what I would like to emphasize here is that leather is more than simply a kink.
[SPEAKER_03]: For many, leather is the language in which they are gay.
[SPEAKER_03]: It supports structures and enriches their queer sex, love, and family.
[SPEAKER_03]: The public deployment of leather clothing, gear, and practices can be an expression of personal and cultural identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Factoring in all of the
[SPEAKER_03]: In the discourse, like this whole think of the children thing, do you think it could kind of qualify as a moral panic?
[SPEAKER_03]: The fear over cake.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can't get pride, yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: a moral panic.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess the fear of like what is perceived as deviant.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess I see it more as like a fear over like the reputation of there is a subjective gay people that like are fighting really hard to be boring.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I just think like right if you have your like marriage or quality let's wear J.
[SPEAKER_02]: Cruise sweaters and you know live in the suburbs.
[SPEAKER_02]: People fighting for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then I think that having a bunch of like, like, old guys and other vests and chokers maybe like, doesn't help so your narrative that you should be like welcomed into these communities that like have historically excluded you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I get why those people wouldn't want that to be something that was like inherently associated with like homosexuality.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, I'm not the person to be like,
[SPEAKER_02]: saying whether or not it's valid, but I think that it's a bit ignorant of the history that you just laid out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I would agree that I don't think it's like a moral panic because it's not a fear of something new happening or something new overtaking or like invading some sort of safe culture, but yeah more of like almost like a tired like we're tired, you know that yeah it's like a oh no, they're at it again, you know, but I totally yeah, but I really lose anytime anyone really like is like thinking of the children because it's almost always not actually in service of children.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, the children are like always the calling card that gets some sort of more liberal like social political cause.
[SPEAKER_02]: to be somehow married with conservative values.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's how the feminists ended up in bed with the right wing and the Christian forces.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's probably how you have all these weird gay men who are in the Trump administration.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you remember the weird gay men?
[SPEAKER_03]: And it just sent me a real that was like finally going to go on my first gay conservative cruise.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the first ever gay conservative cruise.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the talk on them was like filed a snagion television.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we'd think of the children as just like a really...
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone likes kids for the most part and everyone wants the best for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, a lot of people hate kids and a lot of people don't want them That's true Normal like nice American civilians like you know, it's like a really good to eat people who think kids like shouldn't be a lot of public
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, but I'm talking about the idea if someone is like in the culture posing like a starting behavior as somehow To the detriment of children even though like why are leather datties to the detriment of children children don't understand what that shit is But if you're doing that and like you're someone who is not engaged with that and also who like Want to see or feel or be like a nice upstanding citizen who cares about children because most of us do
[SPEAKER_02]: then it's a really easy way to like, get you accidentally working in coats with people who actually don't have the best interests of yourself or children at heart.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think the way that I can kind of inch towards being a moral panic is that it's inching towards the sect of our society who think that exposure to like drag queens will like make their kids gay or exposure to like, yeah, like a weirdness will make their kids weird and I think that that's
[SPEAKER_03]: That could very easily, it's making bedfellows with that type of person.
[SPEAKER_02]: I also though feel like a lot of the people who are like King is a pride bad for children, are the people who grew up on Rupal's Drag Race and grew up on queer eye and grew up on like TV friendly.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's got a lot of them are like Gen Z, iPad, Kid.
[SPEAKER_03]: queer kids, like it's like a lot of them aren't queer kids themselves, just eye-padded it and so it's like, you're like, terminally online and so yeah, they've definitely consumed a media diet of like weirdness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I asked Russell about this because it is kind of hard to reconcile.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, whenever children are brought into the conversation, the reason I don't like it is because it's a very flattening argument.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like something that people reach hands across the aisle and shake on.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it makes defending can get pride really difficult.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I asked Russell about this and they had some practical suggestions.
[SPEAKER_03]: which we actually see kind of brought up in those.
[SPEAKER_03]: more incendiary tweets at the top when we started.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think once you throw the words like consent into the mix and once you throw the children into the mix, it gets very difficult to kind of parse through the conversation, but a lot of times people are like, I didn't consent to seeing something sexual like that or children can't consent.
[SPEAKER_03]: And like, children should be able to come to Pride because they're young and I don't know how of you, I mean, you don't have to have a definitive answer, but like I've been having trouble racking silent that.
[SPEAKER_03]: even just like writing this episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm curious to know what you think of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that is a challenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I understand all of those concerns.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have an 8-year-old, and they come to pride.
[SPEAKER_00]: But honestly, like, just from a personal anecdotal perspective, when I take my at San Diego Pride specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll speak the experience of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kink section of pride is sort of cordoned off in its own way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need like show ID to get in to be 18 or older.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have like very clear that you're like consenting to go into this area, whereas like no one's carding the kids going into the kids area.
[SPEAKER_00]: is clearly there are different spaces for people looking for different experiences in the way that the layout is designed.
[SPEAKER_00]: That isn't necessarily the case obviously for like the parade component where folks are also in fetish gear.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that a big part of it for for me is like being open having conversations about what the space is or like why people are dressed a certain way.
[SPEAKER_00]: how people are experiencing their own bodies and their own pleasures and the situation of the space, why it is important socially that we are here doing this together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, ultimately I can realize that like the space of pride is different for everyone who's experiencing it and that some spaces can be for you, like in the same pride celebration, some spaces can be for you and some spaces cannot be for you and that is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: at least in my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a part of it, is like seeing how and where you fit in what resonates with you, what doesn't, and moving through it with that sort of intention from the start.
[SPEAKER_00]: The experience is so different when you go with kids and when you don't, and they're both beautiful, and I don't think one should foreclose or eclipse the other.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I was a baby, the first people I met was a dry queen named Berger.
[SPEAKER_02]: Berger!
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why I'm such a... Devent.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were actually dressed up as Berger from Sex and the City, and they were actually wearing a post-it note that said, that's the worst dry costume I've ever heard of.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of Carrie Ragell's boyfriends.
[SPEAKER_03]: But like, yeah, when you think about the think of the children thing, I think the best way to kind of shut that down is like you can really can't help but see the disparity when heterosexual people are being sexual and public like Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders or Beyonce or like every major pop star basically are like Calvin Klein adds like yes those things do get criticism those people get criticism but it's so much more in ubiquitous like
[SPEAKER_03]: overt sexuality within like the heterosexual sphere and it's seen as loving like it can be profited off of more so children are invoked a lot less when it comes to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Lady Gaga is like you know at like a certain point of her career was dressed essentially as a leather daddy but like her songs being played a target.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm working on a video right now about gentrification.
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, it already came out at the time of recording this.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just posted it two hours ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: And in it, I talk about how the word gentrification has become diluted in recent years more to describe like the way that it's kind of used to talk about cultural appropriation.
[SPEAKER_03]: But if I were to use it to describe the no-can get pride discourse, Hannah, how do you think it would fit in here?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like even in a literal housing sense, like how do you think gentrification has overlap with the no-can get pride discourse?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you have rich, air-won gaze.
[SPEAKER_02]: It could come in.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd ain't kicking out, like, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: The literal smoothie is kicking people out.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, um, well, yeah, I just think it's like, like, I was saying, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_02]: I keep calling gay guys boring, but I mean, like, as queer culture becomes less of like a subcultural thing and like people are able to be part of like mainstream life and then just also like happen to be like gay.
[SPEAKER_02]: You just have like normies right who are proud and who are wanting to like participate in like certain aspects of gay culture But also who like aren't necessarily at all related to any of the kind of are they boots on the ground?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they boots?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they boots are they leather boots on their ground?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are they leather boots on their ground?
[SPEAKER_02]: Are we gonna cancel?
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't do that anymore
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I just am like the gentrification sense is like you've people of a higher tax bracket who are gay and who like don't have that attachment to like yeah those original struggles and who like aren't part of this more transgressive or like countercultural and I keep signaling out gay men I don't know why I'm talking about everyone sometimes you can be the fans of them because they're they're holding down the freak which we discovered in our last episode
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, and there are some like lesbian yuppies.
[SPEAKER_03]: Corporate lesbians who wear fit bits.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's like a genre of woman.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, just sights in the city again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Power lesbians and Prada loafers.
[SPEAKER_03]: But these ones aren't buying art either.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're like corporate lesbians.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're like long, long, low ponytails and we're fit bits.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like tech lesbians.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's a ton of lesbian out there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she's like taking peptides.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyways.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's this book called Genderification of the Mind by Sarah Schillman, which I absolutely love.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about the ways of gentrification and aids impact on one another.
[SPEAKER_03]: Basically in Gabor Hoods, in New York, like Greenwich and Chelsea in the East Village and West Village, huge swaths of gay men died in their apartments.
[SPEAKER_03]: And their apartments vacated and then skyrocketed to market prices.
[SPEAKER_03]: And she says that it had both a psychic shift in the way that the new LGBTQ people moving into the city who could afford these new prices did not have the same context like you're saying Hannah of trauma and survival that the previous generation did and instead assimilated more to like general society and then also she says that there was a literal shift in housing because the new populations of the neighborhoods were like straight wasps from the suburbs
[SPEAKER_03]: And she has this quote where she says, gay life is now expected to take place in private in the West Village by people who are white, upper class, and sexually discreet.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for context, Stonewall is in the West Village.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's in Greenwich.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I do think
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea of gentrification very much applies to the can get pride debate.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we're taking into consideration both like the young demographics who have less context or access to this painful history, to a time where queer people were being brutalized and criminalized, and then also the people living in the areas where prides take place, right, who are more likely to be nimb you about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like get this gay man with his assless chaps.
[SPEAKER_03]: out of my backyard.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: To just cite sex in the city again, some of the hate crime, those trans sex workers, but she moves into the meatpacking district ever a much really mad at me that I call that a hate crime, which I know.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a hate crime.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a crime.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a marginalized population.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an assault for sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so, so, and you mentioned this earlier, but there's also another factor of gentrification, too.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to guess what that is?
[SPEAKER_03]: Aeroon?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like what she's addicted to Aeroon, she gets a talk about Aeroon, she's upset.
[SPEAKER_02]: Aeroon is like the craziest phenomenon to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, corporations, corporations like Aeroon.
[SPEAKER_03]: Good job, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, yes, so corporations like Aeroon.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, as it becomes normalized to be queer corporations wanted to profit off the popularity of that and so like you know your local freaking TD bank would have a flow in the march.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can I just say
[SPEAKER_02]: The first drag performance I ever saw was at Pride when I was 11 and it was a TD sponsored drag queen Well, she dressed in all green.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I'm not kidding.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm about to go take my rent out at a TD like right after we Talk because being a notification my landlord's a little angel and he doesn't, you know He's got that rent stabilized rent by the exchange for that is that I have to pay him at cash Which is really inconvenient.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's inconvenient
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Pride has become super corporate, and therefore corporate friendly, it doesn't vote well for these companies, which still have like mass market appeal to have their logos photographed next to someone's purest bull sack.
[SPEAKER_03]: What does vote well for corporations is a little thing called respectability politics?
[SPEAKER_03]: Ah, Hannah, what is it?
[SPEAKER_02]: The idea that like I'm marginalized group, I guess it's like the sort of internalized belief, it's like in order to further their cause or to like, you know, get out of the sort of marginalized space is to like present yourself as respectable and like assimilate into like mainstream culture and like mainstream societal norms.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's political actions through being boring.
[SPEAKER_03]: like using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's using the master's tools to build another smaller house that's attached to the master's house.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's a drive away from an Aero one.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's using the master's tools to make a Hayley Bieber smoothie.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, very good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels so much to me like we have gravitated from like a lavender panic of the 1950s to I don't know what a pastel panic now like it's there there's such a similarity I think in the way that this is a cyclicality in the way that we understand who the threats to our social infrastructure are and queer folks unfortunately seem to be continually in that spiral
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess like, how do you think the idea of respectability politics plays into that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what, what a moment to be talking about respectability politics also as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like this feels like the, the Gavin News some problem to me at the moment, where it's like, we're being told so much like, we got to talk less about pronouns, we got to talk less about trans people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got to talk less about any group that diverges from,
[SPEAKER_00]: appearing as normal like quote unquote normal as humanly possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that hasn't done us well in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's going to do us any favors now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, I think respectability, politics encourages any sort of minority group, but certainly queer folks to take on behaviors or live in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: present themselves in a way that is as close to a normative lifestyle as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to my mind at least, I'm sure lots of people disagree with me, but that isn't the point of what pride is and that isn't necessarily the point of what queerness is.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a bit of boomerang like horseshoe effect with these tweets from young people in the way of actually being super homophobic like I don't know if you got that sense, especially when it's like the picture of the gay man with a spiky outfit on it's like
[SPEAKER_03]: you just want to be treated normal and this is how you're dressing as if that's like harming gay rights you're like why do gay men want to be naked around children it's like no gay men want to be naked and you're forcing your children to go to like this event well and also yeah there's like these historical implications of like oh gay men being pedophiles right and that is such an so harmful there's such an intense subtext of that in that tweet like it's doing the same
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a need of Bryant boots.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I feel like it's a similar case with Gen Z and like Gen Alpha being kind of like anti-sex and it ending up being kind of misogynistic as a result of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And while it's creating necessary that many queer people want to have the same civic rights as straight people, like totally, this can sometimes bleed into like adapting to the heteronormative society like we're saying the master's tools that oppressed queer people rather than trying to fundamentally change those structures of oppression.
[SPEAKER_03]: It does feel like a bit of a tie-up sometimes, like the presence of corporations and cops, like walking a pride, while on the surface looking like solidarity, almost feels kind of like a clandestine like boot on the neck a little bit, like, you know, we're going to keep you in order.
[SPEAKER_03]: This person says, at this person's on Reddit.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't remember their name, but they had this comment that I really liked.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll try and link these red at the reds in the description if I remember.
[SPEAKER_03]: They say, when it was all about survival, the distinction that stray people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, et cetera was irrelevant.
[SPEAKER_03]: They'd kill us all so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive.
[SPEAKER_03]: But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's kind of a way of putting forward the least threatening phases of this community as like the poster children for it Like even in the years and if we're gonna be like talking about Marcia P. Johnson all the time these days like in the years following Stonewall There was a large consideration as to whether and on Marcia P. Johnson should be credited so publicly because she was a sex worker and trans, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So like, it's funny when these people in the same tweet when they're being like anti-canca pride will also invoke Marsha P. Johnson, and it's like, there are some pretty intense ideological contradictions there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely, and they did her dirty.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they did her very dirty.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, she was very likely murdered by either the Mafia or like, in a gay bashing, and her story is extremely devastating.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so devastating.
[SPEAKER_03]: An interesting text, I would also like to point people to if you want to think more about the concept of assimilation is Lee Edelman's no future.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been like a kind of controversial since it came out, it's a book, but it basically talks about how gay people have been considered a threat to dominant society because they have sex that doesn't result in reproduction.
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, the production of children, children who will one day enter the workforce and contribute to society and so it's like interrogating like the very concept of homophobia so Edelman takes the radical stance that maybe gay people should just stop trying to even like have kids stop getting married and in doing so like protest
[SPEAKER_03]: the oppressive structure of the nuclear family unit.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's interesting when we factor like children into this discourse too.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although I know a lot of it's about like queer kids and not just like kids in general, but I just think that's something to chew on.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've always found that text really eye-opening, I guess.
[SPEAKER_03]: Although someone will probably describe with me.
[SPEAKER_03]: It really is this concept that you can have your rights only on the condition that you'll behave, which still gives all the power to the powerholders.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's the same with somebody like marginalized groups and like communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which is why we arrive at the question, what is Pride for?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is it for, Hannah?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, it's like commemorating an massive act of protest and that doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to have a consistently exclusively radical or tone to it, per se, like it can be like a celebration, but celebration also doesn't mean that it needs to be sort of like it doesn't need to be sanitized.
[SPEAKER_02]: right and like today it kind of almost feels like you know when you have like parent teacher night and it's like showing all the work that you've done on the walls it feels like it's like gay parent teacher night for straight people damn yeah good metaphor but it's just like look guys it's fun here we got drag queens reading like picture books and and you can get like a rainbow branded
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, at Chapel Roon, like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, face pain, can you get Chapel Roon?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, paint your face, like, yeah, or we'll paint Chapel Roon on your face, whichever you like.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a family-friendly event of the ages.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, like, come one, come all.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very come one, come all, which yes, but also, like, yes, but no, but also yes, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so yeah, people, yeah, people on Twitter love to be like, pride is for everyone, pride is a family event.
[SPEAKER_03]: But,
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, it's considered a polyvocal event, so like I'm hearing what you're saying Hannah, you mentioned like protest, you mentioned commemoration, you mentioned celebration and like even the event itself, like it's a march, it's a parade, it's a festival.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's all sorts of groups.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's different offshoot parades.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's like various agendas from all ends There's different nights.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's different types of walks and On top of being celebration commemoration show of community political protest.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's also like sometimes a cruising site very importantly though to me like from my research because it's all of it me very importantly though like from my research what I call is that it's a cultural protest
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, extremely integral to pride is the idea of visibility.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a reason they call it like a closet, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: You are not visible.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are now visible.
[SPEAKER_03]: Queerness has historically been shoved into the private sphere.
[SPEAKER_03]: Queer people had to meet and claim destined spaces, often putting themselves in danger to do so.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you were trans, you weren't able to embody that identity in public.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a gay leatherman who was quoted in 1991 as saying, in a world that functions on sexual oppression, the site of two queens or dikes walking down the street is a vision of the gradual cracking of the social order.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the very just concept of like a queer person existing in public,
[SPEAKER_03]: was so fraught for so long.
[SPEAKER_03]: Another thing is that the state, like the law, would not only push queerness into the private sphere, it would also impose itself into queer bedrooms with laws prohibiting LGBTQ sex.
[SPEAKER_03]: if this act like that happens in private warrants arrest and like had warranted arrest historically, then the point with pride is to bring the private onto the street.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that was a major element of it that's a major element of like the king and the sexual charge of the event, the idea that like the state made it public already, right, by criminalizing it for so long.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when people are pride or engaging in acts that are usually relegated to the bedroom, it's kind of like a fuck you to the systems of oppression that impose themselves.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, like, and I was actually waiting for you to say that I'm shocked you haven't yet, but the personal is political.
[SPEAKER_03]: You actually said it in our last episode.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know I tried to say it as like a really stupid joke.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you said it, I was like, oh, save that for the next one, and then you haven't even said it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry, I forgot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, yes, one of the personal is political.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: The presence of King of Pride is like a radical act of self-expression.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, it's expressly anti-acimulationist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Russell touched on this, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pride started as a form of very visible protest, and at a moment where there were disagreements about respectability as well, but where we're being radical in visibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we get together in public space, and we take public space,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think that there is something about those first pride marches where ownership over space became a really important part of it and in some situations like permits were granted in other situations they weren't and there is something important about like taking space to do again be visible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it all comes back to visibility.
[SPEAKER_03]: In what ways are the, I guess aesthetics of pleasure, like the aesthetics of sex used by the LGBTQ community and can these aesthetics be separated from this ongoing battle for progress or separated from pride.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I read you a section of a book?
[SPEAKER_00]: I brought some like some queer theory along with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my scholar brain here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that this speaks to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in this article that Michael Warner and Lauren Brew.
[SPEAKER_00]: land, wrote, called sex in public.
[SPEAKER_00]: They write, heterosexual culture achieves much of its medical control and intelligibility through the ideologies and institutions of intimacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Intimacy is itself publicly mediated in several senses.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, it's conventional spaces presuppose a structural differentiation of personal life, quote-unquote personal life, from work, politics, and the public sphere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Second, the normativity of heterosexual culture links intimacy only to the institutions of personal life, making them privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development.
[SPEAKER_00]: Third, by making sex seem irrelevant or merely personal, heteronormative conventions of intimacy block the building of non-normative or explicit public sexual cultures.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, those conventions conjure a mirage, a home base of pre-political humanity from which citizens are thought to come into political discourse and to which they are expected to return in the always imaginary future after political conflict.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that like so much of like the discourse that you're describing comes back to that to understanding the desire for us as human people, certainly as queer people, but I think just in in general to understand sex and sexuality as something that exists in our homes, in our apartments, in our private space, although governments barge in and
[SPEAKER_00]: disrupt that all the time anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think a big part of what, certainly queer theory, but I think queer movements in general, encourage us to do is to understand that sex and sexuality, the pleasures that we find or that we desire as something that should be or that fundamentally is public, that the restraining of those to the private space is a way of mediating
[SPEAKER_00]: who can experience those pleasures, when they can experience those pleasures, and ultimately how to make them a part of a larger capitalist system.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's such a desire, I think, for some folks, that I honestly find baffling that, like, pride should be a big gay picnic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it isn't, like, that's not the history of what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, like, I love a picnic, would love to go and be around a whole bunch of other queers, you know, enjoying a space in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But pride specifically,
[SPEAKER_00]: to experience your own desires in the space of the desires of others who are being brave in that radical visibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I go to Pride, my March and Pride, or I wander around the Pride booths at San Diego Pride, there's lots of stuff where I'm like, that's really cool I get to learn about how other people are experiencing the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're being brave in being there and taking that space.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to be able to have and exchange with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to learn about how other people are experiencing their clearness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hope that I can bring that as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Kingsbury calls the people at Pride, a counter public where participants have a chance to temporarily create the culture that they wish could exist and show it to the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: But of course, as Pride got less radical following aids and people lost sight of that context and corporations are involved, it became something else entirely, less protest and more as Russell put it a big gay party.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, King, like having been there all along at the stage of LGBTQ rights, becomes abstracted by people who don't understand its value in relation to the community and it becomes, you know, shoved away or dead weight, quote unquote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's so much of that too that's like I'm a white person who can pass in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like exist in and out of what appear to be heteronormative circles all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my privilege at Pride is to be there and to experience things with people and to try to help create or contribute towards space that allows others who don't have that safety outside of.
[SPEAKER_00]: that zone to do that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think when we get to a point where we start to try to regulate the way that other people are bringing themselves to a protest that's fundamentally about being radically visible, I get uncomfortable.
[SPEAKER_03]: And can you see why turning kinksters into dead weight?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, this attitude is like, we have our rights now, so why do you have to shove it all in our faces is actually really bad
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, because even the more sanitized aspects of gay culture are being demonized heavily right now in the States, I feel like just after like they're had reached this moment of the dry queen sort of becoming completely detached from like, you know, her origins and becoming more of like this like really palatable, like marketable.
[SPEAKER_02]: face of gay culture just as that was happening now there's been like this huge like demonization of drag like that's a huge more Panic like we mentioned earlier in a way like that is made its way into the law books and so if something on like the much more like Obviously not all of drag is family friendly at all, but like something that is more family friendly than Kink like if that's being demonized then what would happen to someone who is like
[SPEAKER_02]: actually partaking in like a transgressive or like taboo.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't activity doesn't feel like the right word culture and like lifestyle like as act.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the respectable respectability politics of it all like clearly didn't work because like you're either going to be like Caitlyn Jenner who is such a confusing figure because she's like still like she's not like detransitioned but she's anti-trans,
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Republican woman or you're going to be like kind of thrown out with everyone else.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's no like you don't put everyone down to like level up because like you're everyone's the same to them to Yeah, to the powers that be at the end of the day.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, like that like
[SPEAKER_03]: person was saying like when it's about survival it's not about like who's who what's what like everyone is gonna be demonized and like yes drag queens are being demonized right now trans people are being like actively persecuted and like scapegoated around the world but like recently very much across the states
[SPEAKER_03]: And the UK, like, oh my god.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it does go to show that, like, pride once again needs to be an act of protest.
[SPEAKER_03]: It shows, like, the necessity for that.
[SPEAKER_03]: The purpose is not to find, like, a family-friendly, de-fanged poster child for the LGBTQ community.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's to make, like, the most invisible members of these groups.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, Marcia P. Johnson once was.
[SPEAKER_03]: visible and Marshal P. Johnson is often invoked by the same people saying that pride should be sexualized, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like she's a literal sex worker.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't commemorate if you're betraying the core tenets of what you're commemorating So like, yes, I do think like Russell was saying you can have like different events for different things if and like you could take your kids to certain more friendly events
[SPEAKER_03]: There can be like options there, but I do think just like ideologically the general spirit of the debate feels quite harmful and quite intocetical and I just don't think it can be a matter of like we've moved past this because quote, like we have rights now because if the last couple of years have shown as anything it's like how quickly those rights can go away.
[SPEAKER_02]: Personally, my solution is teacher kid to hang.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you kid hang?
[SPEAKER_03]: And here's Russell to close this off.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, do you think that the culture has ever gotten close to what, warner and like, Edelman, we're talking about, do you think that we've lost it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Somewhere along the way, or do you think like, we've just never gotten there, and we've just been on this path towards, I guess, like, more pure, it's in culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel like we were doing a backslide for some reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like in my archival brain, we seem to be on like a 100-year clock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we go through these cycles every 100 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, like so much of that 1920s logic around like sort of pureton vice reform.
[SPEAKER_00]: the necessity of regulating the bodies of others, the pleasures of others, the experiences that others are allowed to have, where are those experiences are allowed to occur, how class is implicated in those pleasures?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that all feels very, very current.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think to your question about like, have we ever hit a point where like the Edelman or a Warner framework is like recluse?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're right there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, I think it's changed a lot of the discourse
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that it's any less radical than it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: at the height of the AIDS crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my career since my class, we watched the greater rocky film the living end.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, you know, early 1990s to young men who are recently diagnosed with HIV who are in this sort of existential crisis, they go on a sort of violence fueled road trip together.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's murder, there's rape, there's all sorts of nasty things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the film I think is really interesting because I think it's very accessible, like it's a pleasurable watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it is also one of those texts where folks respond very differently in my experience, at least in a classroom with undergraduates, where there are folks who are like, this is really bad representation like this is harmful to see folks behaving so badly, queer folks behaving so badly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there are an equal amount of voices in the room that have the opposite response, which is like, no, when you're in the midst of a crisis, you need to have complex representation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to be able to be feeling through all of your desires and your emotions, and you need to have event for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can't just be the one version that's palatable to someone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that feels very present now, also, like... Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: that hasn't changed since 1992.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand that like we get scared of people who have desires that don't look like ours.
[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately, how did you land there and who's profiting off of your fear?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that becomes a really fundamental part of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that somewhere in the chain, somebody is making money off the fact that our fear can be mobilized.
[SPEAKER_03]: My bank, my bank is making so much money off of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a bunch of people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rainbo app, every tune.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if respectability politics is the way to get towards capital, not the way to get towards revolution, not the way to get towards larger acceptance of
[SPEAKER_00]: ourselves and our community and our bodies and each other that we got to stop that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got to be even the nasty versions of ourselves that we are.