I’m Ben Kawaller, and for the next three weeks, Longview’s Reflector podcast is gay.
I know: Is nothing sacred? Must even Reflector – easily the most heterosexual podcast on the internet, the brainchild of two midwestern men whose greatest obsession is ChatGPT – curtsy to the gods of inclusion?
Look, a story’s a story, and this is a good story. But we’re gonna have to get a little gay.
When I approached Andy and Matt and said, “Hey studmuffins, want me to interview a bunch of queer people on what the hell is going on with all this gender stuff?”, they immediately said, “Who are you?” After several tense hours, I managed to sell them on the idea of letting me use their names, and my looks, to land some groundbreaking interviews with some prominent former leaders – and several incidental followers – of the movement known as LGBT. Or LGBTQ. Or LGBTQIA+. (In Canada it starts with a number.)
Reflector, I reminded them, is a show about the backstory to today’s most significant conflicts and debates, and there is nothing that sets people aflame quite like other people’s sex lives. What better subject for their podcast, I asked, keeping the door ajar with my leg, than the evolution of a movement devoted to venereal deviance?
Of course, the gay rights movement hasn’t been the gay rights movement since…well, gay rights were secured. At some point along the way, gay and lesbian rights became LGBT rights…and then some time after that, a Q started popping up. (Somehow, this has all coincided with everyone having less actual sex, but I digress.)
I watched these trends with great interest, especially as a new way of thinking about gender started gaining popularity in some circles – while incurring an enormous level of wrath in others. The influx of people, particularly young people, identifying out of their own sex (a trend that evidently peaked around 2023) always seemed to me a social phenomenon worth exploring, whatever its cause.
But so did the corresponding negative obsession with transness. Why was it, I wondered, that a subject seemingly affecting a tiny sliver of humanity seemed to take up so much space in the national psyche? What was behind the apparent support for the rolling back of trans rights since Trump’s second inauguration? How did a movement that had made such astonishing gains – not just rights for gays, but rights and recognition for trans people – find itself so quickly on the defensive?
And do we suppose that these thorny issues could be resolved once and for all, if only the concerned parties were interviewed by an egomaniac with a savior complex?
I’d gotten most of these musings out to Andy and Matt before one of them erupted: “Fine! We’ll do your gay podcast!”
So with their blessing, I set out to find out how all this started – and figure out where it might be headed.
Our first episode follows the evolution of the gay rights movement from the 1950s through Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that made gay marriage legal in the US. It tracks how a smattering of independent groups for the sexually outcast became a well-funded, powerful lobbying movement for the sexually celebrated – and what happened when these LGB Americans were approached by a different sexual minority: the Ts.
Episodes 2 and 3 get into the challenges facing a movement whose members have become increasingly diverse in their needs and their philosophies, and how the rapid progress of the LGBTQ project has fed a backlash that many saw coming…and that maybe others should have.
I hope you enjoy. And that you share this project with someone who’s one of the letters.
