Isn't It Queer

Jonny and Heather face the challenge of recording a show on a Monday afternoon before it airs on a Wednesday morning in the first week of November....in a very contentious and signficant election year. Acknowledging the challenge of recording before any results or consequences are yet known, they offer some escapes from election anxiety and, perhaps, a harsh return to one. The review and gush over...

Jonny and Heather discuss the horrors of Halloween--that is, the actual horrors of these last days of the Presidential campaign alongside the queertastic holiday celebrations of Halloween. In the back half of the show, Jonny interviews Sister Texas Hotbox of the SOIL Sisters about their holiday card project, sending holiday greetins to queer and trans folks who may not be receiving such worm wishe...

Heather and Jonny kick off the show with a geek-out over good Dr. Who news before moving into the threatened dystopia of a President Vance. They dig into the irony of the anti-LGBTQ senator's gay billionaire patron, delving into the influence ot technolibertarians and a philosophy of Dark Enlightenment. After detailing this bleakness, they check in on queers actually serving in the federal governm...

Jonny and Heather record the episode on Columb--er, Indigenous People's Day, and have some things to say about the costs of colonialism and the importance of Two Spirit/Q-Spirit. The review some events last week, one a planned pesentation on the queer history of the region and the other a grassroots protest for an anti-trans speaker brought to speak in Carbodale on National Coming Out Day. They th...

Jonny and Heather reunite and check back in on the stormy weather, from Hurricanes to politics and a a whirlwind of lies. In the back half of the show, the review some recent court cases and try to predict from their mostly favorable aoutcomes for trans folks what we might expect from forthcoming Supreme Court decisions on LGBTQ+ issues. The close out with some muche appreciated LGBTQ+ entertainme...

Jonny details his experiences with Hurricane (Tropical Storm, by the time it got to him) Helene during the 35th Annual Gay Spirit Visions Fall Conference at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center outside Highlands NC. He tells a story of adaptation and resilience and communities coming together to deal with a crisis. In the back half of the show, he takes on the misinformation already circulatin...

Jonny and Heather lean into their various fandoms and geek out a bit over genre fiction before diving into recent news. The quuer geekdom follows as they discuss 2 LGBTQ+ history making actions by Joe Biden in the last week and the queer alignments of the parties and candidates in the 2024 election. In the back half of the show the briefly check in on the St. Louis gay bar that was crashed into by...

Jonny turns over the first half of the show to fellow SOIL Sister, Sr. Benedeta Cuna-lingee, and her new podcast dealing with queer spirituality, Holy Spectrum. Episode 1, "Queer Spirituality 101," lays out the plan for the podcast's future episodes and some basic starting assumptions of queer spirituality. In the back half of the show, Jonny and Heather are joined by Sr Cuna-lingee's alter ego, D...

Jonny and Heather have to discuss yet another school shooting with yet again alleged queer overtones. First, it is the war of words between the Vice Presidential candidates over what really is a "fact of life." Second, it is the immediate and false charge that the shooter (and all recent school shooters) is trans. In the back half of the show, Jonny and Heather acknowledges former President Trump'...

Jonny is on his own this week, recording the show on Labor Day Monday. In the front half of the show, he details "autogynephilia" as a debunked pseudo-scientific theory still popular among the gender critical and transphobes. It is one of the ways LGB (No T, No Q) folks bracket out trans experience from "gay" experience. He also details its cousin, the myth of "Transing the Gay Away." In the back...

Heather returns, and she and Jonny recap the Democratic National Convention, parsing their feels and the ways the DNC did and didn't represent queer community. In the back half of the show, they continue the political campaign analysis with a dive into Twitter/X and who is and isn't Tweeting (X-crementing?) there these days. They ponder if harsh right wing social media might finally be facing some...

Jonny is on their own again this week. They offer a recognition of the 104th anniversary of the radification of the 19th Amendment and uses it to link together several stories about political change. In the back half of the show, he shares a persuasive argument from Anna Marie that transphobia and racism, binary gender and Whiteness are firmly linked. The implication of this argument is that queer...

Jonny is on his own this week and digs into why this current election season is so rough for LGBTQ+ and particualrly trans people. He shows how the Harris-Walz ticket is being challenged with mischaracterizations of their LGBTQ+ advocacy, but also why such advocacy is a distinguishing element of their candidacy. In the back half of the show, he digs into Project 2025 and Agenda 47, which are parti...

Heather returns to the show to share some her experiences with CoVid as the Country experiences another surge in cases. Jonny and Heather then turn their attention to the Olympics and the social media kerfuffle about women's boxing, particularly continued misogynist gender critical attacks against the elligibility of Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting. In the back half of the show, they discuss recent d...

Jonny is joined again this week by Craig as Heather still struggles to get a negative test with CoVid. They discuss the Olympics and particularly the opening ceremony and the (misplaced) Christian outrage at its content. They also discuss the status of LGBTQ Olympians as the contest continues. In the back half of the show they turn to the Democratic Party's successful use of "weird" to mark he pol...

Jonny is joined by his husband, Craig, to discuss the slew of recent political dramas at the national level. They use their perspective as scholars of Performance Studies (and queer theory and popular culture and...) to review the Republican National Convention, the selection of J.D. Vance as the GOP Vice President candidate, and the elevation of Kamala Harris to potential Democratic Presidential...

Jonny interviews Dr. Joe Hassert who was a resident of Carbondale from 2000 to 2012 and was remarkably active in making community art projects happen here. Joe now lives in Las Vegas where he is a professor of Communication Studies at the College of Southern Nevada. He is the current president of the queer faculty and staff advocacy group there and works with students in the student LGBTQ organiza...

Jonny yields the microphone (mostly) to SIU's The Intersectuionality Project and the Black and Queer Roundtable for a discussion of the importance of education and the educational disparities that face Black, Brown, and queer youth. Daniel, Janine, and Mendez pull from their own experience and recent research to drive a lively and informative discussion.

Jonny and Heather process their desire for a month of hibernation following a very active Pride Month. They then turn their attention to recent developments in presidential politics and connections between agism and homophobia/transphobia. Also, maybe why presidential immunity isn't such a good thing. In the back half of the show, they review a SCOTUS decision on states' rights when dealing with u...

Jonny interviews Jo Clifford, playwright and performer of "The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven," being presented at The Church of the Good Shepherd in Carbondale in the coming week (June 29 and July 2). They discuss the topic of the play, which considers,"What would happen if Jesus did come back to earth in the present day as a trans woman?" In the back third of the show, Heather and Jo...

Jonny and Heather interview Shay Miller, the director of Mae West's "The Drag," a Stage Company performance coming up for the last two weekends of Pride Month. A 1931 play by queer icon Mae West adapted by Darrin J. Pufall Purdy and Minerva Jayne, "The Drag" has many resonances with current attempts to ban drag performance. While focusing on the play, Jonny, Heather, and Shay also touch on other e...

Jonny interviews Carrie Vine of Rainbow Cafe and the Southern Illinois Pride Collective about the incredibly full weekend of SI PrideFest activities in Carbondale this coming weekend (June 15). In the back half of the show, he and Heather discuss some recent "historical moments" impacting the LGBTQ community. 

Jonny and Heather update on some upcoming Pride events in Carbondale and respond to some in the community's disdain for Pride Month. They then turn to the Trump's "hush money" court case and the jury's verdict of guilty on all 34 counts. They link this to other court cases, Congressional hearings, and current events where attention to actual evidence and due process yield meaningful and believable...

After a brief digression on the challenges of travel on aging queer bodies, Jonny and Heather review the slew of Pride activities coming up in Southern Illinois in June. In the back half of the show, th discuss "rules" for those non-queer folks resistant to Pride festivities and some of the various people or practices banned from Pride. They conclude with a study of the obvious, that X (formerly T...

Jonny sits down with Janine Armstrong and Daniel Killins, both members of the Southern Illinois University Registered Student Organization (RSO), The Intersectionality Project (TIP), to discuss the Black and Queer Roundtable. They discuss very personal experiences of intersectional identities and articulate why identiy affirming organizations that explore intersectionality are so important for stu...