You might’ve noticed something different about today’s episode: it’s a repeat. Due to the fires burning in L.A. County, we didn’t get to record a brand new episode for you today. BUT!!! We’ve got the lore behind Today in Gay — starting with Jasmin and Nay — for your Friday listening pleasure instead! Keep an eye out too because we’ve got more (new) lore coming at ya soon!
And because we really really love you, we’ve got a lil treat coming at ya later today….
- TiG Team ♡
Jasmin and Nay sat down with our fabulous EP, Composer and Editor, Lauren Klein, to tell the tale of how Today in Gay came to be.
Jasmin: I love podcasts, and every morning I listen to all the news ones. I listen to Up First from NPR and the headlines from the New York Times. But those are not exactly safe spaces for anyone, but not for queer people. And I was just really craving, I was like, what would my dream news podcast look like? And that happened at the same time, around the same time as meeting Nay.
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Nay: She's like, okay, I have this idea for this daily gay news podcast called Today in Gay.
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Jasmin: And so I […] was like, look, we just met, you don't know me, but I'm going to, I'm going to make you famous, kid, you know, it was like, trust me, let's go on this journey, and we did. We spent almost three years developing this, finessing it, pitching it. We pitched everywhere you can think of. And the feedback was always like, “This is so amazing, but pass.” Is that because we're two Black women? Is that because we're two queer women? Is it because we're not famous enough? I don't know.
Nay: Yeah, it was a lot of budget, stuff about budget, but also people being really intimidated by doing something Monday through Friday.
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Jasmin: So I called Nay and was like, should we just do it ourselves? And she was like, yes.
Nay: So then I was like, gassed. I was like, okay, shit. I'm about to go have lunch with Vico Ortiz tomorrow. And we met up. And it was just immediately comfortable. It was immediately fun, immediately comfortable, the chemistry was there. It was immediately a kiki. It was immediately easy. And we talked for almost two hours. I never looked at the time [ . . . ] I left it feeling excited. I left it feeling uplifted. I left it feeling the way you feel, I don't know, there's a special feeling when you interact with another queer person on a certain level. There's just some kind of effervescence that gets exchanged.
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Jasmin: So, none of us are journalists. We are all just queer people in different areas of the queer community and doing different things. For example, Nay is a producer, Vico and Bex are actors, as well as producers and podcasters. I do all of that as well. Our researcher, Hannah, is a librarian. Every day Hannah is pulling research and we are going to be sharing headlines and news that these queer journalists have reported. Sometimes it's hard to find queer journalism because it's behind a paywall or it's not well funded or you don't know exactly where to look. This is a great place to hear all of that news. We're sourcing it for you and providing it to you and then giving you our personal takes on it.
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Jasmin: Obviously our whole team is queer and so we're all in queer media. We can speak to our experiences in our community in a way that the big networks just can't…
Nay: I feel really excited to personally have a really good grasp on what is going on in the world, even if that's like, not always easy, I'm doom scrolling anyway. So I feel like there's something powerful for me to actually investigate something, to actually click a link and read the whole article. I'm motivated to click a link and read the whole article and not just read a headline because I really want to understand what's going on so that I can accurately talk about it.
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Jasmin: Yeah. As we all know, we are moving into uncertain times politically. Um, we have a new administration coming in, an old administration coming in, and we know what that looked like last time. And it's scary. And we do need places we can tune in to hear what's happening that may have a negative effect on us.
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Nay: Suddenly, I'm in a room full of queer people, like I'm in a room with my friends. I want to be that for people, I want to be that, a source of joy or comfort for all queer people, but especially for people who like, don't have community around them.
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Jasmin: Also because we're really focused on sharing good gay news. We want you to leave our show feeling better.
And tune in later today for…
- TiG Team ♡
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