Queers at the End of the World

Tonee Mae Moll joins Nino (and Nat!) to talk about You Cannot Save Here , her gorgeous 2023 book out now from the Washington Writers Publishing House. We cover teaching in and learning from the end times, polyamory as apocalypse preparedness, video games as canon, and wading into the lyric absurdity of endings. Tonee Mae Moll is a queer & trans poet & essayist. They are the author of Out o...

Sara Ahmed talks with Nino about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way, out now from Seal Press. Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of color whose work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. We talk about the radical potential of killing joy, complaining as an inter-tempor...

Nino discusses a 2006 postapocalyptic artifact from the US's "war on terror"-- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars , and talks with oral historian and librarian Kae Bara Kratcha about what it means to be a speculative oral historian, and why oral history is such a meaningful tool for recording-and imagining-queer history. Find more of Kae's work at their podcast feed,...

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi talk with Nino about Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 , their novel of oral histories that document a speculative near future of world-wide luxury communism. "Everybody in the book is queer or trans," as M.E. puts it. We talk about the erotic pleasures of mass protest, Why apocalypse movies are always destroyi...

Nino and Nat talk about Steven Universe! Created by Rebecca Sugar for Cartoon Network, Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl (and Steven!) have gotten us and many of our friends and compatriots through this very apocalypse. In this episode, we cover the show’s queer ethics of education, family making, and grief, and it’s commitment to the earth--what it means to be a human and be here. Steven Universe is a...

On this QatEotW Presents we talk to Adam Garnet Jones about his short story History of the New World, from Love After the End, an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction , edited by Joshua Whitehead, and out from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2020. Learn more about Adam and his work at adamgarnetjones.com . You can also see their gorgeous beadwork by following him on Instagram @adamgar...

Franny Choi joins us on Queers at the End of the World to talk about her upcoming book, The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On, full of magnificent poems on apocalypse, grief, and branching paths at the scale of the planet and the personal. Join us for a conversation with one of the artists we most admire, as we careen from chosen family to apocalyptic histories to snails in drag to femme b...

Nat and Nina get into Earthlings, Sayaka Murata’s novel about aliens, dissociation, hedgehogs, trauma, violence and cannibalism in our very own dystopia. Published in Japan in 2018 and translated to English by Ginny Tapley Takemori in 2020, Earthlings is like a lot of great queer art in that it’s somehow nauseating and thrilling all at once. It challenges our ideas about healing, chosen family and...

Game designer Naomi Clark joins us to talk about Consentacle, her two-player card game about consent and pleasure across very different bodies. We talk about making games in a pandemic, desire in dystopia, two-player dynamics, and the joys of flirting over your hand.  Find Consentacle here: https://metasynthie.itch.io/consentacle-print-and-play-edition Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...

Nat and Nino discuss Xenogenesis—Octavia Butler’s three-book series about alien invasion, human resistance and survival, alien-human family-making, tentacle sex, colonization, third genders, and so much more. Our conversation focuses on consent and compromise, and we’re joined in the first half of this episode by kink practitioner, performer and astrologer E. Wray, who talks with us about consent...

Nat and Nino interview Sarah Stockholm, the National Network Strategic Campaigns Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice (aka SURJ). In the Spring of 2020, as the pandemic spread in US prisons, Sarah organized white folks to support prison abolition in a campaign that got folks committed by asking them to tell their stories. We talk about storytelling and narrative as a way to bring white folks...

We’re covering The Martian ! Both the book AND the movie, in which NASA scientist Mark Watney gets left for dead on the red planet and the only billionaires who can save him are the collective coffers of the US and China because Elon blew his monthly allowance trying to buy Twitter :( Y’all! We talk poop farming, colonization, space travel and bodies, nerd masculinity and so much more. You can fin...

Poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram talks with Nat and Nino about using code to write poems, the simple pleasures of button pushing, going slow to go fast, unsupervised AI on the internet, and how to stop the machine apocalypse (hint: unplug em). This episode begins with a reading of " A New Sermon on the Warpland ." Thanks to the Poetry Society of America for letting us use this audio! You can find anoth...

The Matrix came out in 1999 and captured the fears and hopes of a world newly enmeshed in the (world-wide) web. In this episode, Nat and Nino discuss the recently expanded quatrology and talk about the Matrix as an artifact of 90s idealism, a trans movie, a movie about human frailty via mechs and meat suits, plus red pill right-wingers and their blue-pill desires. Do we need The One to escape the...

Season Two of Queers at the End of the World is coming up this winter! Listen here for a teeny little preview of where we plan to go next. Music for the trailer comes from the generous hearts at free music archive, and is Siddhartha Corsus, “Oh Radiant One” from Love Is Alive. We accessed it at: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Siddhartha/love-is-alive/oh-radiant-one Sound effects hail from free...

In our FINAL SEASON ONE EPISODE (!!) Nat and Nina are joined by Ellie Yanigasawa, Delesslin "Roo" George Warren, TreaAndrea Russworm, and Austen Osworth in the second half of our live play of Dream Askew. It's post-collapse mayhem, relationship talks and glowing mushroom bacchanals with a little gang fighting thrown in there for good measure. Then we're taking a break for the fall, and we'll be ba...

Nat, Nina, Roo, Ellie, TreaAndrea, and Austen meet in the internet to imagine utopian queer post-collapse society via Avery Alder's tabletop storytelling RPG of queer strife amid the collapse, Dream Askew . Craters, trash heaps, full moon party rituals, polyamory shenanigans, and exploding sporulating puffballs ensue! 

Nat and Nina interview Avery Alder, who designs queer table top roleplaying games of monstrosity, love and community—like the acclaimed Monsterhearts 2 and the post-apocalyptic game The Quiet Year . Avery's game Dream Askew , is designed to help folks imagine what queer community looks like in a post-collapse society, and that makes it the perfect vehicle to help Queers at the End of the World put...

In this episode, we start out talking about Station 11, the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, and end up talking about Covid, grief, and the transition into a new phase of the pandemic. Nat and Nina are joined by novelist and friend of the show A.E. Osworth in the first half of this episode as they reflect on their year and the ways Station 11 has stuck with all of us through our own experience...

Just a little old 45-second hello from Nina and Nat and an update on our May hiatus, plus what to expect in June!

In this Queers at the End of the World Presents, Nat takes us through some recommendations of video games with much to say about queer identity, utopia, dystopia, and the ever popular abandoned mall. These games include Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor , Kind Words , Ooblets , and Boyfriend Dungeon and you should totally check them out. And if you're interested, you can also read Nat's Edge Effects...

Nat and Nina talk to DeLesslin George-Warren (aka Roo) about food sovereignty, indigi-queer language revitalization and why the heck the Keeper of the Seeds in Mad Max: Fury Road is carrying around a Basil start in a skull. Roo is an artist, researcher, and educator from Catawba Indian Nation whose work ranges from performance to installation art to community education. To follow his projects and...

Mad Max: Fury Road came out in 2015 and was hailed by critics as a post-apocalyptic action masterpiece. Nat and Nina revisit the film, discussing the leather-clad, snake-grabbing, dudefully alone Mad Max, and the queer possibilities and pitfalls in this mystifying and chaotic movie franchise set in a post-apocalyptic Australia where despite gasoline being scarce, everyone loves to drive.  Aft...

In this Queers at the End of the World Presents, poet Holly Raymond joins us to read from her work in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, published by Nightboat Books in 2020. We get to nerd out about poetry, goblins, slicing cold cuts at Wawa and fan translations of Final Fantasy with Holly, and she shares a bit of new work too. ALSO We Want It All is the only anthology to cont...

Mycologist Patty Kaishian and writer/educator Hasmik Djoulakian join Nina and Nat to talk about mushrooms as metaphors and creatures, non binary fungi, and the queer discipline of mycology. We talk the New Moon Mycology Summit, and the naming of the biological world. During the episode, Hasmik speaks about the violence against Armenians in Artsakh, and recommends several activist organizations whe...