25 min listen
Strange Fruit #133: What's it Like to be LGBT in a Rural Community?
FromStrange Fruit
ratings:
Length:
30 minutes
Released:
Aug 21, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
We've always been proud of how cutting-edge Louisville is on LGBT rights issues (and can often be overheard bragging that our Fairness law included transgender protections even before New York's did). But what about the rest of Kentucky? We went to the Rural LGBT Summit this month in Lexington to find out. The USDA has been holding these summits throughout the country, both to shine a light on issues faced by rural LGBT Americans, and to make sure those same folks know about the assistance they can get from the USDA. We can't deny our status as city slickers (though we temporarily daydreamed about gay farmers), so the summit was a great learning opportunity for #TeamStrangeFruit. Jai and Doc co-hosted a panel featuring folks who are "champions of change" in their communities, and we bring you an excerpt of that conversation in this week's show. Stay tuned to our Soundcloud page for the whole thing. Also in this week's show, we go about as far from rural as you can get: Broadway, in New York City, where Hedwig and the Angry Inch is closing early after a poor reviews of Taye Digg's performance in the title role. Are white audiences resistant to a black man playing Hedwig? Did Broadway fans turn against him after he reportedly broke Idina Menzel's heart? Or... was he just not that good in the show? We discuss. One artwork that seems like an unmitigated success is "Hell You Talmbout," the protest anthem released last week by Janelle Monae and the Wondaland Arts Society. The verses of the song recite the names of black victims of police shootings. Half vigil, half battle cry, it's already finding its way to protests all over the country, and we listen to a group of trans rights activists adapt it to commemorate trans victims of violence. And finally, "Straight Outta Compton" came out, and it made a ton of money. We haven't seen the film yet, but we talk a little about some claims that it erases the abuse of women perpetrated by its subjects.
Released:
Aug 21, 2015
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Strange Fruit #47: Meet Gert McMullen, Original Seamstress of the AIDS Memorial Quilt: To speak to Gert McMullen about the origins of [the AIDS Memorial Quilt](http://www.aidsquilt.org/) is to go back to a scary, sad time in LGBTQ history: San Francisco in the early 1980s. "People were terrified," she explains, "because they didn't know what was happening. People were just dying. They were trying to figure out, why were these gay men dying?" Gert lost many of her friends in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and thanks to the fear and stigma surrounding the disease, she was often their only visitor. "You would go into the hospitals and there was nobody there and the nurses would put you in a moon suit, basically, to walk in there, because they didn't know what was going to happen," she recalls. No one understood how the disease was transmitted, so many people were afraid to come into close contact with their afflicted loved ones - even during their final days. "I remember a friend of by Strange Fruit