Kathy Tu and Tobin Low entered a “podcast accelerator” competition at WNYC. Podcasts don’t need accelerators and the wrong people won. Tu and Low were one half of those wrong people. (Katarína Richterová got robbed.)
Their proposed podcast Gaydio
would feature banter between the two gay Asian hosts – “Gaysians, as we say,” Low quipped – as well as “The Coming-Out Inbox,” a recurring segment in which LGBTQ people [sic] leave voicemails about their coming-out stories. Each episode would also dig into a main topic through sound-rich reported pieces on such topics as violence against transgender women of colo[u]r[.]
Now you have two problems.
I wrote this comment:
Coming-out stories, “funny” news and “banter” from the “LGBTQ” community, and exposés on “violence against transgender women of colo[u]r” are three different ways of describing existing “LGBTQ” blogs and podcasts. None of them can make a go of it, and all of them are viewed with suspicion by actual gays and lesbians because they sell us out. (Someday American public media will run an honest piece explaining why that is, which will duly be protested by transgendered persons until it is scrubbed from history. But until then let’s hear a few more pieces about transgender women of colour.)
This Gaydio show won’t be better because Gaysians run it. And if they let that word on the air, wait till they find out all the other words they’ll also have to allow.
I then wrote Gaydio’s E-mail address (it’s the only hyperlink on its homepage, which is such an accident waiting to happen I’m not going to link to it) as follows. (Links added.)
I listened to my pal Adam C. Ragusea’s segment on his podcast. Apart from your male cohost’s textbook gay voice, I heard this:
“We’ll talk about current events”: This means you will rip and read other people’s coverage, as seemingly all gay blogs and podcasts do; replicate the U.S. news media’s worst habit, herd journalism (another few segments on Kim Davis?); indeed focus on U.S. news, especially Republicans. Correct?
“The last I looked it was like ‘LGBTQQI2SAA.’ ”
“I think accepting that you… don’t know? [again, gay voice] what the acronym is is sort of accepting that you don’t know what the limits are of what a person can be.”
Can straight people be “queer”? Do some women have dicks? Is abortion a transman issue? Can a dad have a vagina?
Or, to cut to the chase: Stonewall was a riot started by transwomen of colour, right? They threw the first brick, right?
On the topic of transwymmynz of colour:
What actually reliable and verified statistics are you going to use to document this phenomenon?
Are you going to compare such statistics to those of nonwhite lesbians and (especially) gay men who are gaybashed and murdered? How about violence against actual real women of colour? (Will you explore the dubious linguistics of the phrase “people of colour”?)
Are you going to honestly document the facts about the perpetrators of those crimes, namely that they are always and without fail ostensibly heterosexualist males? (Straight guys with tranny fetishes, but still.)
Are you going to document how the transgender(ed) community pretends its actual enemies are gay men and lesbians, radical feminists, and anyone who understands penis is male? As I just documented, its mortal enemies are murderous straight guys, but that’s not how they behave.
While documenting attacks against transgendered persons, will you document transgenders’ attacks against the groups I just listed?
In short, will your show be honest or will it be just another gay blog
<slash>podcast<slash>community-radio hour that repeats queer and transgender propaganda, marginalizes the legitimate gay and lesbian community, and in fact denies “gay” and “lesbian” really exist? (Those categories are transphobic!)If you’re going to cover Truvada and its use for HIV prevention, first of all, why? (It’s been done!) Are you going to mention how few countries it’s legal in? More fundamentally, will your show do what seemingly every other blog and podcast does and cast doubt on the very concept of being HIV-negative? (Is it even definitionally possible?)
Given that gay blogs keep closing or being “consolidated,” and given the near-total lack of original journalism in the gay press, and given the complete absence of a commitment to original journalism in your pitch, and given further that gay podcasts don’t make any more money than gay blogs do, how is Gaydio different in any way, shape, or form from anything and how do you expect to make a go of it?
Upon reflection, don’t you agree that you actually created a podcast concept that mirrors every other bit of “queer” online media you read every day?
Didn’t you pitch a show that straight liberals in New York could not possibly say no to, because they have no in-depth knowledge of what’s actually going on in the “queer community” you aim to cover? They fancy themselves nonhomophobic and could never say no to any “queer” enterprise. But they know nothing of the actual facts. (That at least is less morally questionable than lying about the facts, as the rest of the “queer” media does.)
If you had to pitch your show to a funding audience of gay men and lesbians over the age of 45, do you think you would have won? Could you have answered any of my questions extemporaneously onstage?
No response.
Gaydio is probably gonna get half the $10,000 “accelerator” prize. As the No Safe Word podcast shows, you don’t need even that much money to produce a plagiaristic, warmed-over queer/transgender/LGBT podcast. We’ve got too many of those already, though this will be news to queers, transgenders, LGBTs, and the nice liberal New Yorkers who handed these Gaysians a booby prize.
Meanwhile, let me recommend Matt Baume’s Sewers of Paris as an actually original gay podcast.