🌈 Rainbow parties💄 a broken man 🪨 ghost kingdoms 👻 bird dogging🕵️

🍭 👂Just use your common sense, Natasha. 🌈 🤸‍♀️

Bonjour.

Today is Monday, June 10. In case this newsletter is too long…if you loved the podcast The Girlfriends, the book Glass Castle, or Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, listen to this. One of the women who sparked #FreeBritney is back in the game. I was really into this story that smells like sea salt.

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xoxo lp

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👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋

Jordan Gonsalves

Jordan Gonsalves is the host of But We Loved. He was also the host of Unshaming.

But We Loved is based on the premise that understanding a community’s history is so important. How did you arrive at that conclusion and how does that inform who you interview, and how you conduct those interviews?
When I was living in San Francisco as a  21 year old, I had a conversation with a queer elder who had lived through the AIDS crisis. He told me that he lost all his friends to AIDS when he was my age. I frankly didn’t know much about the AIDS crisis or much about gay history at all. I realized 1) the little appreciation I had for queer history and 2) the little appreciation I had for queer elders who lived that history. 

So this show centers them and their stories. Because there’s such a large age gap between me and the guest, BWL has a beautiful element of intergenerational dialogue, which has been special for me personally.

If there was one takeaway from this podcast you’d hope the queer community came away with, what would it be?
When I was young, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. But making this show has forced me to unlearn that. Queer history is actually full of fearlessness and love. I hope other queer people are able to find generational strength through BWL.

What do you hope non-queer listeners take away from But We Loved?
Inspiration. Whether you’re queer or not, everyone can be touched by the courage, perseverance, and love in these guests and their stories.

What is something you learned from creating Unshaming that you’ve used to improve But We Loved?
Since doing Unshaming, I got my Master’s in journalism from Columbia Journalism School. I’ve been practicing the art of the interview. But this show is still really similar to Unshaming. It has this raw, vulnerable storytelling style that was part of the Unshaming DNA. I hope to bring that to each episode on But We Loved.

What other podcasts have inspired your style or approach?
How I Built This with Guy Raz is one of my favorite shows because of the storytelling and because of Guy Raz. He’s a journalist I deeply admire. He is so well prepared for each interview. That show inspires me a lot.

What is your favorite part of making the show?
My favorite part of making this show was finding all these queer elders I never had. These are the role models I wish I knew when I was growing up. Each episode feels like meeting grandparents for the first time and sitting down to hear their amazing stories. 

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🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨

I listened to the first three episodes of Come By Chance several times for a few reasons. First, it’s about three men with similar names and two of them look exactly the same—Clarence, Craig, and Clifford. Craig and Clarence are brothers. Or are they? Craig’s wife notices someone who looks exactly like Clarence at work, and he happens to have the exact same birthday as Clarence and was born at the same hospital which is weirdly called the Come by Chance hospital. Forgive me for having to listen again to make sure I had everything right—who was married/related to whom. (I was listening at a fast speed doing other things, I do not recommend.) 2: It has a great sense of place, which is Newfoundland, a place with coastline vibes. It’s a place that makes you think of whales. You can smell the sea salt. 3: The Newfoundland accents are gorgeous, flavored by Irish and Canadian English. 4: It’s really great storytelling and I am so curious what will happen next. I had no idea this podcast was coming and I feel like it’s a surprise gift I don’t deserve.

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hell yeah

✨My next Radio Bootcamp Podcast Marketing 101 class is scheduled for July 15. Please come! I promise I’ll make it fun and helpful. Sign up here.

✨The 3rd Annual BPA Summer Social For Podcast & Content Creators is Sunday, July 28 at 4 - 9pm at AUX Karaoke Box in Brooklyn. Please come, I’ll be there! Corey created a 20% off promo code for you: TINK2024. Or just go here for an immediate discount, or to learn more.

✨Yooree Losordo joined the board of the Hub & Spoke audio collective. 

✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Happily Never After in her newsletter and podcast.

✨My latest from Lifehacker: 16 of the Best Queer Podcasts to Listen to During Pride

✨Read Podcast Marketing Lessons from Astrology [via Podcast Marketing Magic.]

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💎BTW💎

🎙️I have been a fan of Tess Barker for ten years—that’s how long she has been a co-host of Lady to Lady. (I have called in with my lady problems many times—they once answered my question one on air. It was about my father being so depressed about the death of David Bowie that I was worried about his mental health.) Anyway if you don’t know Tess from that you might know her from sparking the #FreeBritney movement with her Lady to Lady cohost Babs Gray. See here.) So Tess has pop mystery-solving credentials, I’d say, making her the perfect host for Pop Mystery Pod, an investigative project that allows her to get to the bottom of the cultural puzzles that have been driving her crazy for years. It’s so Tess, it’s so fun. But Tess is a real-ass journalist! Her writing is great and thoughtful, and Tess has exclusive shit to share. So far she’s uncovered some shadiness surrounding a Bachelor stalker case I didn’t know about, the oodles of lies about the true story of The Blindside, and the tragedy of Brittany Murphy, which you might think you know all about but did you know it’s connected to Britney Spears selling her house because she thought it contained spiritual portals? Learning can be so boring sometimes, but this is what I want to save space in my brain for. I have a new can’t miss show, I can’t wait to see what else Tess covers, and I am already nervous about this show ending so everyone please listen to it now. Listen here.

🎙️Home Sleuths is about citizen investigators who have taken justice into their own hands. But wait! There’s so much more. The hosts sit back and pass the mic to the citizen investigators themselves—they take you through the story just like a friend would in a normal conversation. Then, the hosts return to interview industry experts to comment on the ethics of what we just heard from the investigator. It’s interesting to hear why people do this and whether or not we feel okay about it. Chiara Sagramola wrote about this in Orecchiabile, it’s where I discovered it. And she points out that true crime can make her feel icky but this show isn’t about icky crimes, and I wouldn’t even call it true crime. If you are looking for true crime, you might actually be disappointed! This show is about our obsession with true crime—where the obsession comes from, how it drives us to become home sleuths ourselves, and what true crime is really doing to us. Listen here.

🎙️Immaterial, the Met’s beautiful narrative podcast about art materials, has returned with an episode that opens with a shattered body on the floor. The body, one of the Met’s most famous Renaissance marble statues, Tullio Lombardo's Adam, had fallen due to…you know what? That’s not the important part. Let’s not point fingers. The important part is that museum conservator Carolyn Ricardelli spent 10 years with her team trying to seamlessly put the broken pieces back together. Carolyn didn’t just want to make it look fine, she wanted to be sure that god forbid anything else happen to it in 800 years, it would be easy to fix. (She spends a lot of time fixing art cursing the artist for making things nonreversible.) This episode is full of beautiful descriptions of stone and Carolyn makes us realize what it feels like to work on art like this, how it connects her to the artists. And when you’re repairing something for the future, the art becomes timeless. So I guess Carolyn kind of does, too. This was a perfect little episode about much more than materials. Listen here.

🎙️Family Proclamations is a collection of stories from families who aren’t checking the “man woman white picket fence 2.5 kids” boxes of what it means to be a family. I love the concept here: families need to evolve, and people on the margins (even if the margin is just getting a divorce!) are having to rewrite the rules. Sometimes the new rules are better and we can learn a lot from hearing about them. Blair Hodges interviews people who have fascinating insights into divorce, abuse, sexuality, and the episode I’m going to recommend here, adoption. “Leaving the Ghost Kingdom” is a conversation with Angela Tucker, whom I should really build a shrine to. She has guided so much of my unlearning when it comes to adoption. The Ghost Kingdom refers to the fantastical realm adoptees and birth parents tend to exist in, a kind of ambiguous place with many blank spaces and what-ifs. Angela is working to help people fill in those space and get closer to truth and allow for more humanity in adoption. I will force this episode into the ears of the next person who tells me I’m a good person for adopting. Listen here.

🎙️Taste and memory are such close friends. I think about my Great Aunt Annie every time I eat eggplant parmesan, college every time I drink a terrible beer, and eating Ribollita transports me back to Florence. On Bitter/Sweet, Natasha Miller interviews people about their memories they can almost taste, the stories about food that have never left them. The pacing of these interviews makes each episode feel like a comfort meal itself. You can hear the clanking of utensils and pots. It’s too bad we can’t small anything. These stories will make you think about food differently—even if you’re not someone obsessed with finding the perfect restaurant or making the perfect dish, you can’t deny that food can bring you back to yourself for better or worse. That feeling is universal. My favorite episodes were the ones with Natasha and her grandmother, who isn’t the snuggly type. “Just use your common sense, Natasha.” “I don’t know, Natasha!” as she stirs Jamaican soup. I wish everyone had a moment like this captured on audio with their grandmothers, making a special meal together. (My grandmother’s meal would be chips and dip and a JB & water.) Listen here.

🎙️Oh, man. If you loved the podcast The Girlfriends, the book Glass Castle, or Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, do I have something for you: You Probably Think This Story’s About You is technically the story about Brittani Ard, who fell hard for a guy who was a master of deception. (When Brit remembers some of the details in episode one I think I felt tingles in my spine.) But it’s also about the other women this guy was conning, people Brit actually found. (It’s absolutely not about the guy, as the title implies.) This is a podcast about women coming together as a force to be reckoned with. And episode one leaves on a note that will make you angry if you have to wait for episode two. Listen here.

🎙️Who Replaced Avril Lavigne? is a great example of one of my favorite podcast genres—silly things taken with the utmost seriousness. The silly thing is that many people believe that Avril Lavigne was replaced by a body double in 2003, a woman named Melissa, because Avril didn’t want to be a super star. Like most conspiracy theories, all the extremely likely explanations for all of this pale into comparison to the idea that this has actually happened. And host Joanne McNally explores all of these things with the vigor of a spy on a mission to save the human race. Seriously, every angle is dug into and tested. Joanne sees if she can find her own body double, goes to the town where Avril grew up, and devil’s advocates all of the theories out there. There’s also an episode about how all of this started in the first place, and I actually think that’s the most interesting part of all. I want that podcast—tracking down the first person to start conspiracy theories like this. Listen here.

🎙️If you liked Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding, I have another shit-based mystery for you: for Backed Up, Becca Costello and Ella Rowen are diving into our sewers, one of the most complex systems of public infrastructure, to figure out why they’re so effed up, telling stories of flooded basements, waterways contaminated with raw sewage, and the people suffering under decades of waste mismanagement. They’re recording from Cincinnati and that is their focus, but they point out that combined or partially combined sewer systems run rampant and your own city might have them. For some reason nobody can get it fixed, even though climate change is making it worse and I’m pretty sure that if you lived through this once you would do anything you can to make sure it would never happen again. (Maybe sewers need a rebranding? Bring in the Ninja Turtles?) Backed Up isn’t quite as funny as Who Shat?, but it is funny and playful, and you can tell Becca and Ella had a blast making it. Listen here.

🎙️Celebrity Book Club covered Bethenny Frankel’s Business is Personal, which could easily be funny to hear about, but Steven and Lily do the entire episode with the energy and attempted voice of Bethenny herself, which must have been exhausting. (Physically and mentally, they’re practically screaming.) They really commit to the bit, cramming in so many of Bethenny’s aphorisms that I’m not really sure were real but they might as well have been. (Push the wagon, tie up the horse, get in the chair, start driving, no map? Draw a map. Grab the wheel, even if it turned into two boats. Buy the ticket, take the ride and sink the ship.) This episode is 75% Bethenny aphorisms in a good way, even the credits. Don’t skip the credits. Start with the credits? That sounds like something Bethenny’d say. Listen here.

🎙️Miles Gray (The Daily Zeitgeist) was on My Momma Told Me (“the most exciting, groundbreaking and sometimes problematic Black conspiracy theories”) to debunk rainbow parties. Everyone knows that the idea of rainbow parties are preposterous, but Langston, David and Miles go through the logistics in such detail, punching up the entire thing into a really funny conversation about moral panics, boomers, sex, and Oprah Winfrey. They also play, frame by frame, that famous Oprah episode that convinced mothers everywhere their teens were spending their free time blowing each other at sex parties, featuring a bunch of women who seem to really want it to be true. These guys are hilarious, this episode had me laughing out loud. But it got me mildly outraged. I don’t think we talk about this enough. Oprah needs to right some wrongs, here—make a statement that there are no rainbow parties and never were. Anyway, I listen to all of Miles’ guest appearances and this was one of my favorites. Listen here.

🎙️I love you!