PRIDE: The Podcasts That Queered Me

Hi there. I’m a big pansexual genderqueer podcast journalist. A lot of labels, I know. 

The half-joking headline of this was originally “podcasts did a gender on me,” but–twee millennialisms aside–that’s a fair summation of what happened. When not doing podcast-related things for an internet job, I spend an obscene amount of time driving a big van through long, lonely overnight shifts. For whatever reason the summer of 2019 coalesced into me spending those multi-state drives in starlit introspective funks with only podcasts and vibes to keep me company. My identity was challenged in a van-shaped pressure cooker of my own creation until I asked the dangerous question:

“Am I… y’know?”

Turns out, a lifetime of saying “I’m a mostly straight guy” in conversations about sexuality and gender feelings was foreshadowing! I write to you now, a nearly two-year queer person in podcasting who has podcasts to thank for both coming out and continuing to feel pride in that decision. 

Fair warning, it gets horny in the middle.

Trans Questioning

When not falling down a rabbit hole of becoming a Homestuck fan fiction author (with over 200,000 words penned since April 2019, which isn’t relevant here but still an impressive achievement), video essayist Sarah Zedig has a podcast about the trans experience. The original scope of the show was distinctly personal, functioning as effectively an audio vlog of her own transition. As time passed, however, the sheer amount of ground covered by both Zedig in her own life and the experiences shared by the show’s many guests causes Trans Questioning to evolve into being about transness in a more holistic sense. 

While not its stated purpose, Zedig has crafted a fine-tuned egg-cracking machine (Editor’s note: if you know you know). Every podcast on this list has a fair bit of overlap when it comes to my big gay journey, Trans Questioning is without a doubt the hammer that dealt the final blow. The statement “if you ever question if you’re trans, you’re trans” might seem self-evident but her delivery and regular responses to audience members worried they’re not trans enough were invaluable. You don’t know what you don’t know, Trans Questioning helps alleviate some of that in a frank and caring manner.

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Transcripts not currently available

Caravan

Samir has a problem: he’s in love with his best friend who’s blissfully unaware and about to get hitched. Oh, and Samir also has fallen into a canyon that serves as a liminal space between Earth and Hell, populated with lost souls and supernatural creatures. That’s pretty high up on the list too. Sporting a cast packed with a who’s-who of audio fiction character actors, Caravan is an excellent entry in the underserved weird west corner of audio fiction (love you too, Desperado). 

Caravan swept me into a mindset where having a broader sexuality wasn’t just a possibility, I felt confident in owning it. The show may not be as on-stage explicit as full erotica, but you wouldn’t know that if you just went off the Twitter presence and word-of-mouth mentions of the show. Caravan thrives in living in that aether of anticipation for an act actually happens (which is to say: incredibly horny). Things which might induce horniness don’t simply happen in Caravan, horny is baked into the very DNA of those scenes. You don’t need to have a vampire kink to get what monsterfuckers like when encountering the earnestness of a later episode’s feeding scene.

Listen: Apple | Google | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Dreamboy

A flagship Night Vale Presents outing. One could barely move for coverage and advertisements for Dreamboy back in late 2018. Musician Dane Terry wears many hats in adapting a play of his into a fantastical story about a burned-out musician (also named Dane) waiting out winter in a small Ohio town. There’s songs, there’s bonkers characters, there’s gorgeous music, there’s dream sequences that come unstuck from reality, there’s hardcore sex. It’s very much a creative mind taking a story limited by its original format and giving it life in podcast form. Terry plays with themes of not belonging, of ennui. 

Read more: A History of Night Vale Presents

Which is to say: themes that might burrow into the brain of someone going through a bit of an identity crisis and ever-so-kindly opens the door to shout, “Welcome to the gay spectrum, kid.”

It was August. I was on my way back home from Podcast Movement, trying out Dreamboy as I walked between gates at ATL, a pair of cheap wired earbuds transporting me to Pepper Heights. I was passing an Auntie Annes when the first sex scene hit. Dane looks out a window to discover some guy getting absolutely railed. The next day I’d hit the (literally) climactic finale featuring a scene that necessitated, as creator Dane Terry joked in a behind-the-scenes episode, “butt foley.”

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Transcripts not currently available

Fuck Humans

In the fantastical world of Fuck Humans, the superpowers live in an uneasy peace. A massive wall divides a city of monsters from a city of humans, with strict laws forbidding any intermingling between the two. Given the show’s artwork is a humanoid dragon hand clutching a human one with cartoon hearts and sex-onomatopoeia floating in the air, I’m guessing you can see where this is going. An uptight human ends up over the wall at the house of a government employee dragon? And they’ve a history of being angry-horny for each other? Sublime!

Fuck Humans is the erotica embodiment of the old meme “while you were partying, I was studying the blade.” Except swap out the blade for erotica. As a former erotica reviewer I’ve waded through the oddly-sanitized swamps of the Kindle marketplace, the porn version of exclusively reading novels from Dollar Tree. Unlike what I saw in that accursed place, showrunner Chelsea Chelsey has taken a handful of LGBTQIA+ erotica tropes and honed them to a razor’s edge. The energy radiating off her characters is enough to make one giddy with excitement as they bounce from scene to scene, alternating between dealing with their various problems and having… just the gayest sex. So much boning. 

(Editor’s note: Because some podcatchers are cowards, you may have to search for this podcast as “Screw Humans.”)

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Null/Void

Speaking of being eternally tired: Null/Void. Protagonist Piper Lee (Winona Wyatt) is going through one hell of a funk. She works a dead-end corporate job, she lives in an uncaring city, nothing’s going right for her. Then a mysterious figured named Adelaide (Danyelle Ellett) convinces Piper not to get on her usual bus, saving her life. What follows is an anti-capitalist sci-fi adventure with a hefty helping of found family goodness on the side.

Showrunner Cole Burkhardt created a protagonist who hurts in all the right ways (Disclosure: Burkhardt is a Discover Pods contributor). In the first episode his writing and Wyatt’s performance deliver a monologue from Piper about the restless and depressive fog that hangs over her life: “I forget a lot these days. It might be the weed. It

might be the depression, maybe it’s just boredom.” I may not be qualified to speak to the state of audio fiction involving depression/garbage mental states in general, but I can point to Null/Void as an example of something that absolutely speaks to personal experience.

Also Adelaide rocks, but that’s besides the point.

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Less is Morgue

In an alternate version of Tallahassee, Florida where monsters and the supernatural are a part of everyday life, a ghoul runs a podcast out of their mom’s basement with a ghost. Riley (Alexis Bristowe) finds life less-quiet after eating the corpse of Evelyn (Meg Molloy Tuten), an eternally-chipper alt rock fan who died unexpectedly during a Nickelback concert in 2004. Whenever her ghostliness isn’t disturbing the electronics, the two co-host a podcast interviewing anyone who’ll venture into the basement.

It feels reductive to just say “Riley is gender goals” but damn if they’re not a role model for those of us who’re eternally tired. They do have a propensity for unhinging their jaw and eating people, but who among us is without our vices? 

What brings Less is Morgue to this list in particular is more of a vibe generated by the sum of its parts, rather than something printed on the tin I can point at and say, “There’s the gay.” The cast and crew are smattered with LGBTQIA+ people, sure, but it exists more as a podcast that is queer rather than A Queer Podcast, and that gives me the warm fuzzies. In addition, the crew are tireless in shutting down bozos on Twitter who misgender Riley, the official show account tweets in-character as if Riley and Evelyn, and they even do occasional AU fanart. LIM is a full package deal of a feel-good (if occasionally unnerving) show. 

Also before anyone asks: no, I haven’t gotten to the horny episode yet.

Listen: Apple | Google | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Website | Transcripts | RSS

Conclusion

Thus ends our Innerspace trip through parts of my brain and the podcasts firmly lodged therein. They might not have made me a newly-minted queer with a side of trans, but they sure as hell opened some doors that’d been firmly shut my entire life. 

Given the distance of a decade or so I’m sure I would write this with more literary flair to dissuade folks from reading this as a public admission shows like Caravan and Dreamboy were horny in just the right ways they unlocked my queerness. Future-me is a coward.

Here in my second Pride I’ve come to the understanding we’re all hot messes. Everybody is at different levels of understanding themselves and getting their shit together. It’s through intimate, relatively un-gatekept mediums like podcasts where we can express that messiness in a way that brings a sense of belonging. 

I never felt a connection with a character in fiction as a kid. I used to think that was just how fiction worked. These podcasts (and tons more) gave me the gift of getting even a fleeting moment of seeing myself in something. That flash of understanding that there’s someone else out there who has felt these weird things that I’ve never seen discussed before. Expressing raw emotions and thoughts is not easy and I can never fully express my gratitude for these artists for putting themselves out there for all to see. 

Happy Pride, y’all.

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