transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2:
[00:05] Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that there's a podcast you listen to called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I am your host, Margaret Killjoy. This is part two of a two-parter in which I am interviewing a historian. There's also my friend named Hugh Ryan. Hi, how are you?

Speaker 3:
[00:21] Hey, I'm good, I'm so excited to be back.

Speaker 2:
[00:24] Yeah, I was like, I'm gonna interview you about history and just history, and then I read your memoir, and it's got a lot of history as we talked about in part one. But it's also a memoir. So a lot of the stuff I want to talk to you about is just kind of this personal stuff you talk about in this book. Including one of the things that you write about really interestingly and well, is you write about being a loner in scenes that are kind of based on clicks and groups. And like you write about how like even once you're like, I've like found my people and I'm hanging out all the time and I need to spend a good chunk of that alone. I really like the way you write about that. I don't know if I have a question here. If you have something you want to say about it, you should.

Speaker 3:
[01:07] You know, I'll say this. I for a long time thought wanting to be alone a lot of the time made me a bad person. That there was something fundamentally about being, I think because I spent so much time involuntarily alone, where I didn't have friends or I didn't have people I thought, you know, I could communicate with, that once I found people, that if I were to try and like remove myself from that or carve out space that I was being like antisocial with a capital A, you know, the kind of antisocial that gets you institutionalized or makes you a criminal or. But without it, I just couldn't do anything. I'm just someone who needs a lot of time by myself. People overwhelm me. I get tired really easily. I'm super social. I like people, but in measure doses. Otherwise, especially writing, writing is like a very solitary thing for me. And not just the part where I'm putting words on paper. Like I now have a practice where I go on like 20, 25 mile walks.

Speaker 2:
[02:04] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[02:04] Pretty much every weekend to think. I'll take hot baths for, you know, two or three hours. I just, if I don't have this time where I'm alone with just my head, I can't do anything.

Speaker 2:
[02:14] Yeah. No, this is incredibly relatable, which is one of the things that's so nice about reading is that it gives you this chance to see, like, another loner talk about that in a way that, like, well, I, like, there's this trap where you're not going to learn as much about introverted people by going out to parties, you know? Like, even if you're at parties, right? Like, I go to parties, I swear. I didn't pick the name Killjoy and then not go to parties for ten years. Nope, that's true, I did do that. But I do sometimes go to parties. I don't know how to put my finger on it, but this thing that, start talking about part one that I think you touch on a little bit. About this idea of you join a subculture, you join a community and you want to feel like you've just completely left the real world and now you're in this like, whether it's utopian or not, it's like stasis. There's this desire to have this like static community that you can go join, whereas actually everything's always changing. And so when you write about, I believe while you're still in college, going into New York City and going to these clubs and how at first you thought you wanted to show up with a crew. Because when we watch movies about this, you got to show up with a crew. That's how you know you're really having an experience is you're sharing it with other people. You're cool. Yeah. I love going to things like that alone. I think it's probably because I had to, right? Like, like I have adapted to this. I don't know.

Speaker 3:
[03:43] Yeah. I mean, that is definitely how I found my way there. I was going alone, you know, and then I thought I wanted people. But after a certain point, once I found those people and could go with others, I found that I'd actually just come to like it, you know? And maybe I wouldn't have if I hadn't first gone there alone. I don't know. Maybe if I'd gone there with people though, I would have felt the same way. I can't go back and change it, you know? But I loved sort of having to find my own way, especially dancing. I love to dance and I love to do things with my body. But often I want to do that on my own time schedule. I don't want to stop when someone else wants to stop, you know? Like, there's a little bit of me that like, I'm like, that's a little fascist. You know, you're like, I don't want to listen to your rules. I want to listen to my rules. And I, that's true. But I do think that it made me unafraid to do things alone. And the more that I was not afraid to do things alone, and I didn't think it meant that I was always going to be alone or that I was a bad person, the more I discovered other things I like to do alone. And then I was able to find things I like to do with other people. You know, there are times where I do want to go dancing with other people. But first, I had to get comfortable with me.

Speaker 2:
[04:48] It's not a static thing.

Speaker 3:
[04:49] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[04:50] It gets to this idea that kind of similar to sexuality or gender, introvert versus extrovert, which is not a label that I totally identify with. I'll call myself an introvert because I need a lot of recharging time. But I'm an outgoing introvert, if anything. And my whole family laughs when I call myself an introvert because they are introverts. And so yeah, I want to go to these parties, but I kind of want to do things in my own terms. I also love being around people. And so there's a sort of interesting subtext of a coming out story in this book. It's mostly a coming out story about first being gay or being complicatedly sexual. And then later you talk about coming out as being part of a throuple and hating that word, but it being the, well, actually, I was expecting you to say it was the best of the bad choices, but you actually referred to it as the worst of the bad choices.

Speaker 3:
[05:40] It's a disgusting sound. I mean, just say it, just say it one more time and feel that sound in your mouth.

Speaker 2:
[05:45] Throuple. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[05:45] It's like a bird vomiting.

Speaker 2:
[05:47] Yeah. Yeah. And so there's also this idea of like kind of being a loner, because you talk a lot about how you were convinced that coming out as gay meant you were going to die and or be alone. Right? Because you were told that very explicitly by your family and friends and the media. Yeah. And I know that I like, I mean, some of my earlier thoughts are, well, I don't want to be a trans woman. Not like just specifically, I was like, because I was around a lot of 90s representation of drag and trans women. And I was like, well, that can't do that. And it was the same like I don't want to die weird and alone. And so there's this kind of interesting thing. There's like a happy, your story is a happy ending, which is interesting because you're so live, but like, you know, it hasn't really ended. But there's also part of that about being kind of a loner, who is now, at least as of the book, in a throuple and, you know, living in a...

Speaker 3:
[06:46] 16 years now.

Speaker 2:
[06:47] That's amazing. And in a like a community house that seems to be collectively owned and cared for, and how you're like, hell yeah, I got my own office in here, and I have a place I could shut out everybody. And like, it's cool.

Speaker 3:
[07:01] Yeah, you know, I think for loners, for people who want to be alone, community is actually really important because you're not the kind of person, or at least I'm not the kind of person who's gonna like just have it all the time unless I put some energy into it, you know? And yeah, but when I think about introvert versus extrovert, I always think like, where do you get your energy? I'm great with other people. Like I socialize, but it takes energy from me every single time. And so what I needed to do in my life was to create a circumstance where I have people, they are intimately connected to me. We are bonded in real ways, ways that will not fall apart easily, ways that we have to put energy into and all of this stuff. But I also don't need to like go out and see them every day. We have our own doors, we have our own. I was part of so many collective houses at so many different times, where it was like 30 of us trying to live in two bedrooms. You know, like, let's have a nine hour meeting based on consensus every weekend to decide the chore chart, you know? And I was like, this is killing me. And yet it felt like the only option if I wanted to have community. And now I'm in a place in my life where I'm like, no, I can have really great community on really sort of like regular, like I have two queer writer friends who we meet on a supper club, like once a month, once every other month, we get together, you know? I have my house where we all have our separate apartments with our own doors, kitchens and bathrooms that we have total control over. And yet we are a building that looks after each other. We are a family. The moment our basement flooded, I instantly called our upstairs neighbors and they all, everybody came running down to help deal with all that shit. And when the time comes to move the car or deal with the house insurance or anything, I have a community. And that is important. I don't think I could live without it. I don't think I could make the art that I make without it. But I also can't be one of those people who like, I'm going out every night, I'm meeting people all the time. Like that just did not work for me.

Speaker 2:
[08:59] Yeah. I think that's brilliant. I don't know, I don't have too much more to say, but it's like, we need, you know, it's a thing that I realized at a certain point, I lived alone in a cabin during the pandemic, and I still relied on the fact that I was part of a society on a regular basis, even to the fact of like, ordering stuff. You know, I was like, I need solar panels. I did not make my own solar panels. I built my own solar system or whatever.

Speaker 3:
[09:23] You're one of the few people I would absolutely believe if you told me you had made your own solar panels that you had.

Speaker 2:
[09:27] No, I know. I've actually looked into it. I understand a lot of the basic concepts. And I was like, you know what? But I appreciate that. Thank you. And, you know, but it's like, there's this idea that freedom, you know, the American conception of individualism is actually disconnected from a sense of freedom. I think that you are a really good example of what it means to be free as an individual, which is to be part of a community. Because freedom means being able to act on what you want to do. And you can't act on what you want to do when you're alone in the woods.

Speaker 3:
[10:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:01] Because you need stuff and you need help, you know, in order to get stuff done and be free. And so there's always a give and take.

Speaker 3:
[10:10] And after a certain point, I don't know, somewhere in my 20s, I realized that I wanted to live to be old.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[10:18] Like I just had not thought about it. You know, I didn't I always thought I was going to die of AIDS first off. Like there was no thinking about getting old.

Speaker 2:
[10:24] Right.

Speaker 3:
[10:24] When I realized that, I was like, oh, if I want to be old and live the life I want to live, I need to have community. I need to survive and thrive. And that just, when you don't imagine you have a future, that fuck it, you know, whatever. You can go anywhere, you can drop everything. And many of the apologies I make in this book are for dropping people, for spending years of my life where I just made groups of friends and then walked away from them. You know, and I still feel bad about that. I didn't know how to handle friendship, how to handle people caring for me, how to care for other people. That was something I had to grow into because for so long, I had just sort of been like, whatever, nothing matters, move on.

Speaker 2:
[11:03] Right. It's interesting because we, we ended up like very often physically in the same place. And I got into queerness through punks, and you got into punks through queerness, it seems, you know?

Speaker 3:
[11:15] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[11:16] But ended up in the same place because you're talking about the same stuff, like the idea of not having a future, right? We are like, oh, I'm going to die. Like, this is part of why being gay is very punk rock, is one, it's outside the mainstream, two, literally punk originally basically kind of means the same thing as faggot. If you go back far enough.

Speaker 3:
[11:38] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[11:38] I think possibly even with the same etymology of starting fires. But I'm not sure about this. But when I think it through, punk is like loose, it's easily burnable kind of soft wood. And then, you know, a faggot is a bundle of sticks. Anyway.

Speaker 3:
[11:54] I'm going to get this wrong because I've forgotten it entirely. But like faggot, like originally gets applied to loose women.

Speaker 2:
[12:01] Oh, that's right.

Speaker 3:
[12:03] Yeah. And it's like a term sort of for like a prostitute. And so there's also this element of like, gay men are like prostitutes.

Speaker 2:
[12:11] Yeah. Which is true and also true with punks, right?

Speaker 3:
[12:15] It's like absolutely accurate.

Speaker 2:
[12:17] Real overrepresented in sex work. And yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:20] I had to be like, where is the lie?

Speaker 2:
[12:21] Yeah. Okay, wait, to tie it sort of into sex work, here's my weird segue. This is just because I think it'll be an interesting story. You have a story in here about how in your college days, now I already forget because I just read the entire book, and kind of once sitting, where you all end up having to put up gay hardcore pornography on the walls of the school. Do you remember this?

Speaker 3:
[12:42] Yes, my freshman year.

Speaker 2:
[12:44] I also, my freshman year of college, solved a social problem by putting up gay hardcore pornography on the walls.

Speaker 3:
[12:52] Maybe this is the answer to all our problems. Wait, I got to hear. What was the social problem you were solving?

Speaker 2:
[12:56] Okay. I went to art school and I was not a fan of men. And I had this theory that the only good men were gay men. And so I was a terrible person because I wasn't a gay man. I kept trying and kept not working out for me. But my roommate was a gay man. And our suitemates we shared a bathroom with were two very heterosexual men. They like wore bathrobes and smoked pipes. And I didn't even know there was a frat at this art school until they joined it, right? And they started putting up porn in the bathroom that was just trashy, heterosexual, soft core pornography. And we were like, could you take that down, please? And they were like, no, I don't see why we have to. And so then I was like, all right, my roommate is name, I'm not going to say. We should just put up some of your porn too. And but it was still soft core. And so it was like an army guy laying back on a, you know, cot with this giant cock in his hand or whatever. And then my sweet mate burned off the man's cock.

Speaker 3:
[13:58] Whoa, that's art.

Speaker 2:
[13:59] I know, I know. So I solved this problem by downloading just like the most like zipper mask, fisting, like just whatever nasty shit I could find.

Speaker 3:
[14:10] Just the hardcore of hardcore. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:13] I laminated it so they couldn't easily destroy it. And then I put it up in the bathroom and they were like, all right, no more porn in the bathroom.

Speaker 3:
[14:23] I'm so impressed that that actually worked and it did not escalate further. Like, look at you solving problems.

Speaker 2:
[14:28] Yeah, exactly. Accelerationism.

Speaker 3:
[14:31] Oh, God. We can't even get into that because that is one of my most biggest frustrations in the world right now, is I'm like, if the accelerationists are right, oh, I'm so mad. I'm so mad about all of it. All of it. But my freshman year, so in high school, I'd come out to a bunch of people sort of individually, like one at a time and then word spread the way it does. You hook up with someone who's awful and then he tells everyone.

Speaker 2:
[14:54] Right. Which somehow doesn't make him gay, it just makes you gay.

Speaker 3:
[14:57] Oh yeah, no, I was the gay one, definitely.

Speaker 2:
[14:59] Speaking of how sexuality works, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[15:02] It's not reciprocal. There's like not an equal sign. There's like a less than and a greater than. Yeah. But I'd never met an out gay person when I started coming out. And even when I got to college, I hadn't met one yet. And the first week I was there, this woman came up to me and tried to set me up on a date with a friend of hers who I had never met. And I had only met this woman for like 15 minutes at an orientation event. And I can remember feeling this. I was like, oh, this is the moment where I decide. Am I just going to be an out gay person, or am I going to just sort of like dissemble and give a non-answer? And so I came out to her and she turned out to be incredibly religious and she freaked out in that moment. And then spent the next year, just really uncomfortable around me, saying weird things to me all the time. And at one point, we had seen each other like a month or two because we didn't live on the same floor of the dorm. And she came and she found us in our little lounge, which is at the center of our floor. And she came up to me and she was like real conciliatory. And she very tenderly took my hand and she looked me in the eyes and she said, do you think homosexuality is a personality flaw you can overcome?

Speaker 2:
[16:13] I don't know if it's Christianity.

Speaker 3:
[16:16] That's what I wish. I wish I'd been like, fuck you bitch. Do you think being a bitch is a flaw you can overcome? I did not do any of those things. But my friend Danny was sitting there and she was so offended by this. She had found this really hardcore, totally fisting gay porn mag in a bus stop on her way to New York City one day. And she thought it was really funny, so she picked it up and brought it back to the dorm. And after that, she started hanging halls of pictures around our lobby to try to drive that girl out. And you know, it worked. A lot of other people did not love it. Every single night, they would tear the pictures down and we would put them back up, and they'd tear them back down, and then after a week, it sort of stopped and we were done. Also, we were out of pictures, because we only had one magazine. It took hours to download anything from the internet.

Speaker 2:
[16:58] Yeah, this is the advantage of me being several years younger than you.

Speaker 3:
[17:02] I can remember the joy of going to a Usenet group in 1994 and being like, I shall download a single pornographic JPEG overnight. In the morning, it will be there. And then you get there in the morning and it wouldn't have worked.

Speaker 2:
[17:16] Yeah, and I hope my parents will use the same computer. Speaking of parents, not actually, but one of the other things that I wrote down that I want to talk to you about. We were talking in part one about how people are imperfect. And this is one of the better written pieces that I have read that just is really blunt about. Yeah, my parents kind of fucked this up. Also, the book is dedicated to your parents. And there's two parts in the book that kind of made me a little teary, which is about your parents coming through as just like allies. And you know, allies gets a bad rap as a word these days and it shouldn't because that's what war involves. When we have a war, we need allies, you know? And I think this is really interesting how you talk about how like people don't have to be perfect. And maybe family is a good example of the system by which we are shown that family bonds. Obviously queer kids, if your parents are absolute garbage and treating you like shit, you don't have to chuck them. Yeah. But family is intentionally resilient to throwing each other out. And we probably need that in society. We probably need bonds that are harder to break.

Speaker 3:
[18:44] Yeah. The biggest reason I didn't write this book earlier was that my parents and I had some bad years, you know, like some serious bad years when I came out. The first thing my father said was, he didn't get this from my side of the family, which was hilarious.

Speaker 2:
[18:58] And then you point out that you got it from both sides.

Speaker 3:
[19:00] Yeah. My dad's sister was like a butch dyke, like fully butch dyke. I mean, but she was paralyzed on the left side of her body. Everyone considered her non-sexual. She lived at home her entire life with her mother. She sang in the church choir, you know, so nobody looked at her. But she had like a shaved head and wore like pants and button down shirts every single day of her life.

Speaker 2:
[19:18] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[19:19] And it was rough, you know, like it was rough for years after that. They were scared that I was gonna get killed. They were worried that my younger brother was gonna get made fun of because of me. They were worried that I was gonna get AIDS. They didn't know what any of this meant. They knew that I was separating myself from the family. You know, like I was trying to like run away and have different experiences. And we were like an intensely, like my parents came from a really working class Irish community in New York City, where you survived by being family. That was the entirety of it. You worked together to make it to a better place. And so my separating myself, both on purpose, which I was doing, and just by being queer and out and weird, more than anything else weird, was really hard on them. And it scared them. And I didn't handle it very well. You know, like I was angry at them all the time. I was angry at everyone all the time. And they also did fucked up shit, you know? Like they pissed me off. They threatened to stop paying my tuition. They told me that my brother was going to get teased because of me. And I yelled he was going to get teased because he was gay. You know, it was not helpful for him as a nine year old, but I was there to help. I was there to hurt my parents, like that was my goal.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] Were you right?

Speaker 3:
[20:22] Oh yeah, absolutely, 100%.

Speaker 2:
[20:24] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[20:25] He's great, I love him. We live very close to each other now. But it was, it was hard when it became better, which it did, we worked at it. You know, like all of us. September 11th happened and I had this sudden moment where I was like, what if my parents had died? And the last thing we did was have some stupid fucking fight. And then my grandmother died and then my cousin died. And it was like all in a row. And I was like, I felt like I was losing the opportunity to make things better and that either we had to start making it better or like one day, my dad said to my mom and I were in a really bad fight one night. He said, you two are going to end up hating each other and I'm not going to stick around for that. And he walked out of the room and he took my mother with him. And that really, really started to change things. And then they really started to show up. I worked at a nonprofit that worked with Queer Street Youth and we had Fred Phelps in the Westboro Baptist Church showed up to protest us. And my parents came down to counter protest, you know, and they started really pushing like Queer stuff in their community. And they left the church because of the way that they talked about gay stuff. And really the church went after my younger brother. And they started pushing like inside my family for people to change. My cousin once used the word faggot and my dad threw him out of the house and I wasn't even there. You know, like they really stepped forward.

Speaker 2:
[21:36] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:36] And then like maybe five or six years ago, I have a younger cousin who started to come out as trans feminine, binary and their mom reached out to my mom to be like, what should I do?

Speaker 2:
[21:50] Yeah. What's the roadmap here?

Speaker 3:
[21:52] Yeah. And my cousin said to me, you know, your mom said to us, she got really serious and she said, don't do what we did.

Speaker 2:
[21:58] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:58] You know, love them and listen to them. And I just thought, God, we're all so different. And that if I didn't write it in a way where they got to be bad and make mistakes and then still care about me and change, and like I was doing them as much a disservice as I was myself. I had to let them change. And to let them change meant to show off who we were at our worst, which I still feel bad about. I wish there was a world in which my parents would never read this, even though it's good and they loved it, and they have read it. But I don't want to bring them back there.

Speaker 2:
[22:31] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[22:31] I didn't want to have to go back through that stuff, you know, but without it, there's no reality. It's the same thing as when I watch shows about the 90s and everyone's cool about gay stuff and every gay character knows exactly who they are and they love themselves and they have relationships in high school. You know, it's like that, if I don't allow things to be bad, they can't get good.

Speaker 2:
[22:53] No, and that whitewashing, that softening, that saying like, we come from fierce people, you know? But do you know what else is fierce? Your desire to press forward 30 seconds about, five, ten times, I don't know, till you hear the bumper music again. And we're back. One of the reasons that humans are drawn to story is character arc. It's also part of like Western storytelling, it's not present in every single version of storytelling in every culture is to have this really intense, you must have a problem and then overcome it, right? But having people change and like one of the main points of narrative is to show us change and development in all kinds of directions, because we need to remember that things can be different, because when things are bad, you have to be able to say like everyone is capable of change. Partly because it almost, it actually gets people on off the hook, it puts them back on the hook to be like, you're capable of change.

Speaker 3:
[24:01] You could be better right now.

Speaker 2:
[24:03] Yeah, and that's true of a lot of families, specifically, is that people are like, well, I guess I gotta get myself on the hook. I have to accept that I'm being fucked up and I need to be better.

Speaker 3:
[24:16] Yeah, and also to accept that, just like I did not know any out gay people when I came out, my parents weren't given a roadmap for this. Nobody was sitting there helping them through it.

Speaker 2:
[24:25] It was a big P-flag chapter in your town.

Speaker 3:
[24:28] Yeah, they had no idea what to do or who to talk to. And that's hard too, and it's not the same, you know? Like you said, I'm not letting anyone off the hook, but I have to accept, particularly now that I'm older, that like, yeah, there are times where you are called on to be an adult and you actually have no idea what to do and you fuck it up. And the only thing you can do is return to sort of the scene of the crime later and be like, I really fucked this one. Let's talk about how I fucked it up. Let's see what we can fix.

Speaker 2:
[24:54] Well, that's actually there's an abolitionist thread in what you're talking about and what you write. And I think that that ties into that is this, if we have this society where you have to be perfect all the time, that's mainstream society because if you do something wrong, they put you in a concrete box somewhere, right? And then if you're transforcibly detransitioned, you and you know, like prison is a nightmare that we've all suddenly accepted as the way that our society works.

Speaker 3:
[25:19] As we were talking about last week, the things that we'll look back on and be like, they were so fucked, prison absolutely number one.

Speaker 2:
[25:26] Absolutely. It's going to like when people like look back and be like, remember when they outlawed slavery but didn't? When they really explicitly wrote like, well, let's say steal a car.

Speaker 3:
[25:36] Some kind of slavery is okay. If they get 0.0001 cents an hour, that's not slavery.

Speaker 2:
[25:43] Yeah. I love that you wrote this memoir that is interwoven. It's about queerness and it's not directly about politics. And it's so completely woven through with politics. And the understanding of the critique of power. And my favorite example of this is you have this period, you're working in this drop-in center in, I think, Brooklyn. And you talk about how it's kind of rough, right? And they were like, some rough stuff is happening there. And you get a knife pulled on you and by someone that you care about. And, you know, the stuff. And then they institutionalize the place. And they try to say, oh, this unstructured time is why everyone's messing up, right? We're only going to let good kids in when kids go bad, we're throwing them out in the streets so that the good kids can get saved. Why should the bad kids make it hard for the good kids? Which is one of the main right wing lies in our society. And yet, here is a really specific direct example in the book, in your lived experience as you wrote it, when they do that, the violence is worse, and people are worse off.

Speaker 3:
[27:00] And those kids get abandoned in the very moment when they should be helped. And it also, you know, and this took me a long time to understand, all of those people who are making those decisions, and they were good people, I want to be clear, these were good people trying to help, but they saw themselves as the center of the story. They were the ones who were making change. And I was like, no, our students, our 15-year-olds, who are trans women out in their school, out in their neighborhood, out on the subway, are the ones who are changing the world. How dare we try to say like, oh, these are the right rules? No, we are a supporting character in this journey. We are here to help them survive. And when we don't understand that, when we say, no, no, no, our decisions matter. We pick the good kids. They're the one. We're changing the world through them. We just are like, it's like our heads are up our asses. We can only see ourselves. What we were there to do was to help them and they changed the world. They were the generation under us. And now I see them, the language that they introduced me to, they talked about clocking and they talked about cunt being the highest compliment you could give someone. And they talked about things being fierce and T. And now that's everywhere. They changed the world, not us. And so those rules, it was a way of saying we know what's best in every moment. And while I was working there, all I could think was like, you are kicking out a kid because they're wearing an outfit that's too sexual. What do you think is going to happen to that kid on the street?

Speaker 2:
[28:35] Right, in their sexual outfit, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3:
[28:38] Yeah, is it hurting me that this person's wearing basically a see-through bra in this drop-in center? No, but is it going to hurt them when they're out on the street that they're wearing that? Yeah, it might.

Speaker 2:
[28:47] Yeah. Well, and a lot of like, hey, kids don't wear sexual outfits is because adults think that the adults don't know how to behave. You're just telling on yourself if you have a problem with a teenager. You know? No, this is good. I actually really like this. It kind of full circles, because I started off the very beginning of the first episode being like, those kids, they're on our grass and they shouldn't be on our lawn. Am I right? You know? And that's not right. There's still some stuff that I'm like, hey, I think there's some lessons that are getting dropped that maybe we need to remember. But you're right. Like, we are learning from the generations that, like, you know, if we hold them up, they're the ones looking out the window, right? We're like, hey, what do you see up there?

Speaker 3:
[29:31] You know, I think the whole thing about growing up is that you, at your best, you become a platform for other people to go much further than you ever could. You know, that's what community is, right? It's looking after the people around you, but it's also saying, like, oh, God, I want so much more for the people after me.

Speaker 2:
[29:49] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[29:49] You know, and that's what I think we're here to do as, you know, I hate to say it at 47, but as elders, our job is not to uncritically accept, but to say like, you can do more, you can do better, lead the way. Yeah, I'm going to say, oh, that was wrong. Oh, I disagree with this. I'm not going to like sugar coat what I think, but like, I need to be here to support you more than to force you to be like me.

Speaker 2:
[30:11] Right. Which is a little bit of toughen up and a little bit of, sorry, we had to be so tough. You know?

Speaker 3:
[30:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[30:17] Although the kids you're talking about in this drop-in center, at least as tough as I ever, like, you know, I'm not trying to be like, oh, I'm so fierce or whatever, but.

Speaker 3:
[30:25] No, these kids were so much stronger than I ever was. It was wonderful being around them. It felt like, and, you know, they were the first people. I was a women's studies major in college, and I knew lots of, like, queers.

Speaker 2:
[30:35] It shows. Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[30:38] Many of whom went on to be trans of some variety, even though we did not have that language, we were not coming out to each other about being trans, or, you know, we were not that. Right. But I had this community and they were wonderful. And I had theory and I read lots of it. But it was only when I started spending a lot of time with these younger kids, most of whom were Latino, some of whom were black, very small percentage of them were like white middle class kids, maybe like 5% or less. And these kids invariably were so much more accepting of their own genders, each other's genders, of change, of being the things that we would now call non-binary or of being fluid in ways that I had never seen anyone live that. I'd heard it written, you know, I had read the right theory, but I had never seen it lived on the ground. And I was like, oh, that's what it means to have a generation below you. They are taking our, like, what we think of as theoretical is just who they are. And that was amazing. That was healing. That did things for me that I didn't understand it was doing at the time, but it really changed me.

Speaker 2:
[31:46] At the convergence where we met, I went out on a street march, a bunch of queers in wear and all black, chanting, one in ten is not enough. Recruit, recruit, recruit, recruit. Yes. And one in ten wasn't enough. What did you say that Gen C is?

Speaker 3:
[32:07] I think they're up to like 23 percent now. Yeah, it's amazing. I love it. Love it.

Speaker 2:
[32:11] And at the time, one in ten felt like we were getting a little ahead of ourselves, you know?

Speaker 3:
[32:15] Yeah. Gen X, I think it's like three percent of us identify as queer. Maybe it's as high as four and Millennials, it's like 14 percent. And then Gen Z is like 25 percent. I love it.

Speaker 2:
[32:30] Which is still by the Kinsey Report rookie numbers.

Speaker 3:
[32:33] But, you know, Gen Alpha needs somewhere to go. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[32:36] Yeah. To get back up to the what's before the Greatest Generation. What is a adult in 1947 or whatever when I think that is Greatest Generation. Right. Kinsey Report is the 40s. Where I'm going with this is that the Kinsey Report in the 1940s said that about 40% of men had had sexual experiences with other men that led to orgasm.

Speaker 3:
[33:00] Yeah. And there's all this reporting even before that. You know, there's a woman, Katherine Bement Davis, who was a, sadly enough, she ran prisons. But before that, she was also a sexologist. And she did this research almost exclusively among college women because that was the network that she had access to. But it was like in the 19-teens, and she found that something like 30% of the women she spoke to had had relationships with other women, that whether or not anything sexual had actually happened, they understood that that relationship had a sexual component for them.

Speaker 2:
[33:31] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[33:33] Talking about 19-teens, you know, like.

Speaker 2:
[33:35] Before someone told them that they can't.

Speaker 3:
[33:37] Yeah. In some ways, I think this mid-century defining of homosexuality in the 20th century, which was so important for us in so many ways, also, like you were talking about earlier with being trans, like defined certain people out of that experience. I'm not primarily homosexual. I don't want this to be my life. I don't. But that didn't give anyone a way to talk about, like, what you did with other boys when you were 12, you know, or that intense relationship you had with your stepsister. Like those things got defined out of the conversation.

Speaker 2:
[34:10] Yeah. I find it so fascinating that our conceptions of this have changed so much. And I know I keep going back to that. But I think about, you know, there's a word that means a thousand different things now, but always in weird subcultures on Tumblr. Abedin or Abadin, right? Have you heard this word?

Speaker 3:
[34:25] I don't know this.

Speaker 2:
[34:25] Oh.

Speaker 3:
[34:26] No, no.

Speaker 2:
[34:26] It's B-A-E-D-A-E-N or something like that, actually, or Abedin. Medieval English conception of either an intersex or trans person. And it's not completely clear. And one of the first, like, there's these legal codes from, I do not have my research in front of me. I want to say the 1200s, 1100s, something like that. There are these legal codes that talk about the crime of sodomy and extramarital sex. And there's a list of like, and if a man has sex with a man, it's the following. If a woman has sex with a woman, if a bedling has sex with a man, it's this. If a bedling has sex with another bedling, it's like this. So it's a legally defined third gender purely for being a criminal.

Speaker 3:
[35:12] I mean, I'm into it.

Speaker 2:
[35:13] Yeah, no, I'm like, sometimes I'm like, you know what, a time period where there wasn't any medicalization, presumably, or if it was, it involved leeches. Like, you know, it was just like about how you live. Like, that's kind of interesting to me.

Speaker 3:
[35:29] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[35:31] It became a weird, I can't remember if it's beden or bedling. One, there's a queer nihilist journal called Beden. But two, there's a subculture of, I believe, transmedicalist, transwomen who I'm supposed to not like, and I can't remember why, but I probably don't like, I don't know, whatever. Anyway, the word has been used by a lot of people, but I'm interested in this medieval conception of it.

Speaker 3:
[35:58] Yeah, you know, it sounds very similar to me to the idea of sodomy. You know, we think we know what people mean when they talk about sodomy historically. But you go back before 1890, 1900, and sodomy was a legal category to encompass sexual violence that wasn't penile vaginal rape. It was violence against animals, violence against children, violence against someone of the same sex. That was what sodomy was. And it was a really rare crime. Like we're talking like 40 people in jail for it in any given year across the country. And it's only as homosexuality gets defined, and as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children starts to focus on older men, sexually violating younger men, that they begin to apply the word sodomy specifically to, it comes to mean gay sex or anal sex. But that's another change that happened within living, not our living conception, but there's a real specific period where it changes.

Speaker 2:
[36:58] But we've met people who are alive during this time.

Speaker 3:
[37:00] Yeah. And then we think we know what sodomy is looking backwards. And it's not. It's a very different thing. It's about violence more than it is about same-sex sexuality. And that's why it's applied to animals. And that's why it's applied to oral sex between men and women. It wasn't about homosexuality. But we don't know that anymore.

Speaker 2:
[37:18] Well, do you know what wouldn't like to be pivoted to after that? It's our advertisers. And we're back. I'm interested in the Bible as a historical document because we don't have a lot of documents that talk about social norms 2,000 years ago, right? And this is one of the best studied ones of those we have. Also one of the most clouded and people having a lot of things to say about it. But there's the whole, I am not a biblical scholar. At some point, what I've been doing this for 10 years, I'll do Jesus as a historical figure on here. But again, so clouded and stuff. But my understanding of this whole biblical argument of like, man shall not lay with man as he does with woman is an abomination, is because of sex was about power. And so it was about saying like, whoa, don't treat a man like you treat a woman. Don't put down a man. So it's actually misogyny. Like it's not, the Bible isn't even being homophobic. It's being misogynistic, you know, because there isn't a conception of a homosexual man at that time. It's not saying like men who like touching peons are inherently bad. It's about the structuring of power is my understanding of it.

Speaker 3:
[38:39] No, the most homophobic part of Leviticus, I think, is when they say, you shall not wear clothes made of two different fabrics. Like that is straight coming from my wardrobe. The rest of it has nothing to do with gay people. Yeah. I have this theory, which I call cloud theory, which for me helps to understand these things that we're talking about. Words and ideas that change over time, but we don't really understand that they change. Because I think about it like, you know, there's always, everybody's like, what is a woman? What is a homosexual? What is this? What is a tree? And it's like, if you imagine a cloud, we all look at a cloud and think we see the same thing. But where are the edges of the cloud? We're all going to define that a little bit differently. And if I'm standing in one place and you're standing in a different place, that cloud is going to look kind of different. And we can point to a singular cloud when it's on the eastern side of the horizon. And as it blows across to the west, we're tracking that same cloud, but it's going to be completely different when it gets to the other side of the sky. And in all of these ways, our ideas travel and we just don't quite realize it. It's like maybe we see the center of the cloud all the same. Maybe we all can agree that there are certain things about homosexuality, touch and peens, that's essential. But on the edges is being feminine essentially part of homosexuality? Well, I think a lot of us would say no, but then those same people would be like, I can clock a gay guy from a mile away, because we do think that there is something that's about femininity. And that's for me how ideas change over time, the same way that a cloud does. And that's how I try to understand all of these concepts in history.

Speaker 2:
[40:13] I love that because it comes up all the time on this show that I have to say like, look, there's this thing and it called itself this, and that just doesn't mean the same thing. Like even down to like Republican, right? Like an American Republican even. You can be like, ah, yes, I'm in the middle of the 19th. I'm in the 1860s. That means I hate slavery and believe in having a republic. You know? And then you're like, yeah. And then in the 20th century, Republican means like I am culturally- I love slavery. Yeah. And then now it means like I am a fascist. Right? And then you're like, go to Ireland. One of my favorite things, I probably brought this up before in the show. One of my favorite things in the world is specifically, go look at IRA songs on YouTube. I know you have.

Speaker 3:
[41:00] Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:
[41:01] And the comments will always have an American Republican being like, yeah, Republican Army. I love it. And then some Irish person being like, you fucking fascist piece of shit. Yeah, we throw bombs at people like you.

Speaker 3:
[41:15] I gotta say, as an Irish person, I love the fact that Ireland has, again, in my lifetime, totally whiplashed from being the most backward, conservative, Catholic-run country that everyone made fun of, looked down on, and wanted to get away from, to the most progressive country in Europe that is actually walking the walk. And I'm like, yes, oh, that feels good.

Speaker 2:
[41:40] Yeah, it really does. Well, even the Catholic Church, I mean, anytime you have an institution that is run by an individual, it's gonna change very dramatically based on who the individual who runs it is. But you're watching right now where they're talking about setting up a, like maybe Vance Trump threatened the Pope recently, is that the discourse for it?

Speaker 3:
[42:02] Yeah, that reference to the Avignon.

Speaker 2:
[42:03] Yeah, which is over my head.

Speaker 3:
[42:05] It's freaky.

Speaker 2:
[42:07] I only started caring about theology and religion even more recently than I started caring about history, and it's like a related caring. But you know, this idea that words fundamentally change meaning and drift, and it's beautiful and lovely when you let it be that.

Speaker 3:
[42:26] Yeah, and it can teach us so much. I think we can learn about the world by watching change. I mean, it goes right back to dramatic structure as you were talking about it. The reason stories grab us in that way is because we learn about the world when something changes. When something is static, we're not that interested in it. We get all the information right at the start. When something changes, we learn because we learn about what is changing it. It's sort of like even if a force is invisible, you can sort of see it when it pushes against something and it changes that thing.

Speaker 2:
[42:56] Yeah, I love that. And it's like we cloud watch because clouds change. We can watch clouds or fire all day. I think that is probably a animal instinct that this thing that is a definable thing, that's a campfire. It is an object. And it is constantly changing, you know?

Speaker 3:
[43:16] Yeah. And changing in every way, temperature, color, sound. Yeah. And yet we'll refer to it as the same thing over the course of the night even though it's a totally different monster.

Speaker 2:
[43:27] Right. And to get at, okay, your work is in history, right? Until this book becomes the best seller, you're not yet a professional memoirist. Well, I guess you probably got in advance. You're probably a professional memoirist. But overall, your work seems to be history and specifically museum history and like the curation of museums. And I'm kind of curious, kind of last thing I'm probably to talk about is what draws you to writing and presenting these histories. And it seems like it ties into this thing that we're talking about, about understanding how we change and understanding the past.

Speaker 3:
[44:02] Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely it. All of my books have been written because I didn't understand something, and I needed to figure it out for myself. And when I wrote the book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, I literally went to the library thinking somebody else had already written it. Like I was like, I'm just going to read somebody else's book and then I'll get the information that I need and then it wasn't there. And so then that opened up all of these questions of like, well, why isn't it there? Maybe there was no queer Brooklyn history. I had to start from that point, even though I was like pretty certain there was, but there is a real dynamic between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Maybe queer people in Brooklyn live their public lives in Manhattan. You know, there were all of these questions I needed to answer.

Speaker 2:
[44:37] That's what I would have assumed.

Speaker 3:
[44:39] Yeah, I'm always charting things. That's my favorite thing to do. Like my research process is to like assemble a huge amount of data, just as much primary source information as I can. And then to put it into timelines and onto maps and start to ask myself like, where are their commonalities? Because if something is more common in one place than another, there's a reason. And once I understand that reason, I can understand the thing I'm looking at better, and I can trace it backwards, and I can trace it forwards. For me, history is like how, like if we imagine queer people as an arrow in flight, the only way we know where we're going next is to look at the angle and the rate of acceleration behind us.

Speaker 2:
[45:20] Yeah. I like that metaphor. I've been using this metaphor about why we need to care about history. And I've been using baseball as a metaphor, which is terrible because I don't know shit about baseball. I know so much more about medieval warfare. And I genuinely know more about archery and their role at battle than I do about pitchers and their role in baseball, even though I've seen more baseball games than I've seen medieval battles.

Speaker 3:
[45:43] I believe this.

Speaker 2:
[45:44] No, no, exactly. You need multiple points of reference to understand what's happening.

Speaker 3:
[45:51] Yeah. And that's in fact, I think, part of the reason they take history from us. Because if you don't know where you've been, you cannot coherently see the future because you don't know what you're being shoved into.

Speaker 2:
[46:02] Yeah. There's a couple types of history that I keep finding no one knows about, or if they do know about, it's the only part of it they know about. Because Victor's right to history. Honestly, whenever I read about socialist revolutionaries who weren't the Bolsheviks, this is like the clearest example I ever get of this. It's like you can like literally see like, ah, starting in 1906, this man was entirely written out of history. I'm working on this episode about Peter the Painter right now is a Latvian revolutionary. He leaves the party in 1906. He's gone from history. It took someone decades of their life and didn't until 2003 to figure out about this shit from 100 years ago. Because Victor's right to history, there's all of this stuff that's buried. The categories that I see this in the most, because they're kind of what I'm looking for, is queer history, anarchist history, and sex work history. And often people will only know about, if someone's like, I know about sex work or history, they have had to do so much work to unearth that, that they'll only know how that relates to mainstream history. So they might not be able to get, many people do, but I'm saying it's harder to get the intersections when you have multiple buried things. And so like the criminal queers are harder to find information about than the like respectable queers, right?

Speaker 3:
[47:24] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[47:25] Like, I'm not trying to talk shit on the Madison Society, but it's a lot easier to find information about them than like the queer gangsters and even them, you can find information about because they're part of the mafia and so there's a power structure attached.

Speaker 3:
[47:38] And I would say this, you know, the more I have dug into recent queer history, like by recent I mean post 1800, the more I see that part of what is happening is that the sort of carceral state, the police state, doctors, journalists have always, always kept track very carefully of criminal queers. What happens is that 10, 15 years down the line, we look back at what every prison we have ever built, every police force we have ever made has done, and we're like, oh my God, that is horrible. Those people, we were evil. Let's destroy every record. Let's make sure nothing ever gets fished out. There's so much queer history inside police and carceral history, but it shows how bad those institutions are. When I was writing about the Women's House of Detention, it was like every avenue to finding real information about the prison had been destroyed by the prison itself. I talked to a journalist who told me after the prison was closed, he walked by one day and the doors were just open. And so he walked in and he found one of their office rooms, and in it was all the paperwork, just reams and reams of files. Homeless people had been living there, burning them to stay warm. He took a whole bunch just to keep them, you know? But the system did not want to keep that record, because that record was a record of cruelty, and that if anyone knew about it, but that's where so much of our queer history comes from. And the thing that for me really made it possible is that social workers and the police are kind of developed at the same time. They're really two different ways of dealing with social distortion. They're both problematic. They're both coercive. Obviously, I like social work better than policing. But they come from the same route. And so I ended up using social work records because those people kept their records. They didn't want them destroyed in the same way that the police and prisons wanted those records destroyed.

Speaker 2:
[49:28] Right. This is fascinating to me. And okay, I want to run a theory past you. And I don't like this theory. Well, I don't like that I believe in this theory. I've been referring to it as the sawtooth of history. You ever hang out with enough trans women to know enough about noise music to know the difference between saw waves and sine waves?

Speaker 3:
[49:47] No. That sounds like math, which scares me.

Speaker 2:
[49:50] Yeah, fair enough. Noise musicians will know about this. And I'm also other musicians. I just was trying to go with a trans woman cliche here. And a saw wave is a wave form that moves up and collapses. So it looks like a sawtooth, right?

Speaker 3:
[50:04] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[50:05] It's a triangle, but not a, well, there's a triangle wave that looks like a normal right-sided triangle. A saw wave goes up and collapses, goes up and collapses. Versus a sine wave is like an ebb and flow, you know, a little like smooth up and down, right?

Speaker 3:
[50:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[50:19] And they create different sounds. That part's not important. And I think what I've come to realize is that history moves not just in saw waves where like, oh, rights come and go, there's an ebb and a flow. I see a lot of sawtooths when it comes to queer rights and other like marginalized people's rights, where the first time I noticed this, I wasn't looking for it, so I didn't write it down. There was an island in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, and I don't remember what island it was because again, wasn't paying attention. It was a side quest on a thing I was reading years ago. And it was one of the gay havens, all throughout history of these gay havens, right? For a long time as the Ottoman Empire, right? The Protestant and Catholic world was incredibly shitty to gay men, so they would go to the Ottoman Empire where the Muslims were like, sick, whatever, we don't give a shit, right? But there was this island for decades, everyone would go there, queer paradise. And then they all got killed.

Speaker 3:
[51:21] Love that.

Speaker 2:
[51:22] Society just changed overnight. People were like, we don't like you anymore. And so there's this thing that I keep seeing, that progress is incremental, and destruction can be overnight. And making the world better is this slow step-by-step process. But destroying everything good happens very quickly. Now, you could also say that like a fascist state, the Nazis were sort of a sawtooth that they built and built and then got crushed. I don't know, but.

Speaker 3:
[51:58] I think I agree with that. But I would also push back or offer like a slightly different way of viewing it, because this is the thing I returned to in American queer history over and over again. And it's happening to us right now. The society changes, right? Everything changes and queer people change along with it because we are a reflection of our society. We are not outside of history. We change as everything else changes. And then society notices us. So urbanization, like we talked about last time, urbanization happens, suddenly they can notice same-sex homosexuals who are gender normative, and then they get really concerned, they study us, and that happens in like the 1890s. The first laws against specifically homosexuality, like the same-sex activity written to target gay people, not sodomy laws, which are sort of forced into this, or even cross-dressing laws, which are also not really about queerness at first, but are forced into this. Those laws don't get written until 1920s, right? It takes a while for repression to catch up with us.

Speaker 2:
[52:59] Yeah, and be like, oh shit, those people are just touching peens. Can't have that.

Speaker 3:
[53:03] Yeah. And they go crazy. And this, you know, with urbanization, it really leads us to World War II. The Nazis are the epithelious of this, like, eugenic, anti-urban, anti-immigration, anti-mixing, anti-cultural, anti, you know, that its urbanization is their biggest fear in a certain way. And they destroy so much, right? But they're too fucking late. They have no idea what they're fighting against. Urbanization is what changed their world. Not the Jews, not the gays, not the gypsies. They're bound to lose because they have no idea what they're doing. And that is what is happening right now. It is awful. And they are awful people who are doing awful things, and so many of us are going to be hurt or killed because of it. But they are fucking idiots who will never get this right because they have no idea what they're doing. They're 30 years too late. And the thing they think they're fighting is the wrong thing. And so while yes, that destruction is so cataclysmic, it's mistargeted. And in the wake of it, this is going back to Accelerationist and how I hate the idea that they might be somewhat right. In the wake of it, what will remain is the stuff they did not want to destroy, the internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi. And that is the stuff that reimagined or allowed queer people to reimagine who we are. And so yeah, they're going to fuck with all of us. And we're still going to be here when they're done, because they don't know what they're trying to do. And so that's my hope these days, you know, is that I think that the other side on this fight is really stupid. Like really, like egregiously so, and that that destruction that they will cause is awful, but it's awful for everyone. And it will never actually hit us in the way they think it will, because they don't know what they're fighting against.

Speaker 2:
[54:47] I genuinely hope you're right, and not even in a dismissive, I think you're wrong way. Like I just like, I genuinely hope you're right. And one of the things that I think about, that I want to ask you about, is your opinion on, it's not necessarily a history thing, but you're one of the smarter about gay stuff people I've ever met, and the person I always call when I have questions about this. Why do they hate trans people so much? I have a theory. And that theory is that fascism is the ultimate institutionalization of everything. The same kind of like control that took over that nonprofit or the drop-in center and institutionalized it. I'm not calling them fascists. As you pointed out, they also got better, and there was well-meaning people trying to do it. But that instinct, right, to be like, I'm going to solve these problems through control. I think fascism is an attempt to create, it's a lot of things, but it's an attempt to create a rigid society of control. Or authoritarianism. Maybe I could say that more about them, fascism specifically, which is a specific branch of authoritarianism. And trans people, fuck with that. Because we don't fit neatly into categories, and we fight amongst ourselves about categories constantly. Like, the bathroom thing. Like, why the fuck do they care? And it's not really because they think that their wife is going to be assaulted by a trans woman. Right? No. It's because it breaks their fucking small-hearted brains that things could be different than the things that they, like, have built their entire way of understanding the world on. And so, I think we're not a big deal. I actually, I don't talk about queerness and transness all this much on the show, and I sometimes feel bad about it. But it's probably because it's like, I don't care all that much about it, right? That's not, like, the core of my identity. I have no problem with it when it is the core of other people's identities. But, like, that's just, like, not the part of me that I think about, right? And they think about it all the fucking time. They can't stand that I'm wearing a dress, and I'm like, why do you give a shit? That's my theory, and I'm curious.

Speaker 3:
[57:00] I think some is useful pretext, right? That, like, you know, the sports issue, let's say, like, trans women in sports is very useful. They can really make it about the kids. It's always about the children, protecting the children. They don't care about children, honestly, but it's easy to activate people that way. The other side of it, which I think is very similar to what you're saying, is that queer people, trans people specifically, but all queer people, represent or are instability, right? Movement between categories. And like you said, fascism is all about the categorization and the rules. And on a really visual level, it's the same reason, again, going back to the 19th century, I can't help myself, I always do it. Miscegenation was such a big deal for them, right? The mixing, that that was where everything falls apart. And-

Speaker 2:
[57:46] Because they can't have their race rules if-

Speaker 3:
[57:48] Right. Whenever anyone, you go back historically, they try to imagine the future. You always get this vision where everyone is racially mixed and gender doesn't matter anymore, you know? But it's like, the future is a margin. And those of us who exist on the margins, that's one of our places, right? And they know that, they recognize that in some way. And seeing us, seeing that movement, seeing that instability, seeing that like finger to in the air to everything that they are trying to hold, routinized, particularly in moments where like, the world feels like it's on fire, where there's economic downturn or ecological downturn or war. I think that the impetus to destroy the things that cause any feeling of instability or fear or falling apart or change gets stronger and you cannot look at trans people and not say like they are changing. They are changing. And that freaks them out.

Speaker 2:
[58:47] Yeah. That makes so much sense. Just go back to the Ireland thing for a second. There's this real that goes around right now of like a right wing Irish dude who's on the street trying to get people to sign a petition to stop the mega mosque. And he's like going up to random Irish people on the street somewhere in Ireland. And he's like, will you sign this petition to stop the mega mosque? And it's all these like middle aged Irish people just turn around and be like, I don't give a fuck. I love it. I'm a fucking internationalist. Like, and the right wing guy posted this, his own self-own about it. And yeah, like, like not being afraid of change. And like, it's interesting because it's like, I don't think we're going to have a future where there's no more ethnicity and we're all the same or there's no more gender and we're all like, no, it's just going to be different. And it's going to be a mess and it's going to be a beautiful complicated mess with individualization and non-individualization all happening at once. And God bless it. I love it.

Speaker 3:
[59:48] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[59:49] This seems like a reasonable place to end it where you told me that actually it's going to be okay. And I really like that.

Speaker 3:
[59:54] So it gets better.

Speaker 2:
[59:57] Yeah. Or the your version of it, which is when you were learning how to ride a bike, the punk who told you the way you learn how to ride a bike is three simple words.

Speaker 3:
[60:08] Go fuck yourself.

Speaker 2:
[60:10] The essential part, which was when I was like, I am reading an East Coast man.

Speaker 3:
[60:17] Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the West Coast, it's like, I'm going to get myself in trouble here. But I have a really hard time with like the broad West Coast where it's like the word no is never used. I just am not that person. I just, when people say maybe, I think they mean maybe, not no. And it took me a long time to learn that on the West Coast, that was not the same. All right.

Speaker 2:
[60:37] Well, you have a new book called My Bad coming out May 26th. And you don't need to apologize for writing the book because it's very good. Although you do kind of apologize for writing the book near the very end.

Speaker 3:
[60:49] But well, the truth is, I wouldn't have written it if I could just write history, you know, but there's only a narrow market. And I get into this in the book. I've been a sex worker before. There are things I'm willing to sell and my story is one of them.

Speaker 2:
[61:03] It makes sense. I'm grateful for it. I enjoyed reading it. People can preorder it wherever they like getting their books. I've mentioned this time after time on the show, but I'll continue to hit at home. Preorders matter an incredible amount to authors. Preorders are how a publisher decides what books are worth their investment. And that shouldn't be the way it is, maybe, but it is. And so preorders also give this huge boost of sales all on one day. Algorithms shouldn't run our world, but here's at least a way to like enter strange math into algorithms is to preorder My Bad by Hugh Ryan.

Speaker 3:
[61:42] Margaret, I just want to say thank you so much for this because you're the first real interview I've done about the book and it feels so good to do it with someone who like, one cares, two is smart, three I have a history with. You just made this so much easier. I feel like now I'm walking into this world of this book coming out with like, I don't know, a little bit of a sigh of relief. Like I can do this. So thank you.

Speaker 2:
[62:05] Oh, amazing. You could do some incredible things, including escape for people who are like, oh, it's just a bunch of feelings. No, this is like, you beat up a rapist and escape a murderer in this book.

Speaker 3:
[62:16] Oh yeah, that happens too.

Speaker 2:
[62:18] So, yep, check it out. It's My Bad, Hugh Ryan. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
[62:28] Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.