0:15

Hello, and welcome to Outwards Slate's podcast

0:17

where we support all the new years

0:19

you create in this new year as

0:21

long as they are extremely deeply

0:23

queer. I'm Brian Lowder, an editor at Slate,

0:25

and we've got a somber, but I think

0:27

really important feature for you today. But before

0:29

we get into it, I wanted to offer

0:31

just a quick content warning. This episode will

0:33

discuss suicide, not in any graphic detail, but

0:35

just as a thing that happens in the

0:37

world. And so if that's not something that's

0:40

for you, we hope to see you on

0:42

the show next week. So

0:44

last November, news surfaced of a tragic

0:46

situation down in Smith Station, Alabama. The

0:48

town's mayor and local pastor, F.L. Bubba

0:51

Copeland, committed suicide after a week-long campaign

0:53

by a conservative news site to out

0:55

Copeland as a trans woman. In the

0:57

aftermath, my Slate colleague, Evan Urquhart, was

1:00

troubled not only by Copeland's death, but

1:02

by what this vicious right-wing assault indicated

1:04

about where anti-queer and trans conservatives, who

1:06

are of course a growing force in

1:09

this country right now, would

1:11

like to take us. He decided to

1:13

write about it and look into the history

1:15

of forced outings in America, and the result

1:17

is a sobering and essential new piece titled

1:19

The Outing of Bubba Copeland. I had the

1:21

pleasure of editing the piece, and I have

1:23

the pleasure of welcoming Evan back to Outward

1:25

today. If you need a refresher,

1:27

in addition to being an Outward contributor, Evan is

1:29

Slate's comments moderator and he's also the founder and

1:32

editor of Assigned Media. We'll be back with Evan

1:34

right after the break. Welcome

1:53

back. As a starting place,

1:55

why don't you just tell us what

1:57

we know about who Bubba Copeland was?

2:00

You know, I mentioned that he was the mayor of

2:02

this town. And also maybe we can have a quick

2:04

note about pronouns here, because you and I both were

2:06

struggling a little bit with that in the writing process.

2:09

I'm kind of using he when we're talking about Bubba,

2:11

but as we'll see, it gets more complicated than that.

2:13

Maybe they is more appropriate, so you can speak on

2:15

that too. But tell us a

2:17

little bit about who we know Bubba was,

2:19

about their life, and all of that before

2:22

this tragedy happened. So I don't

2:24

think you can understand who Bubba

2:26

Copeland was without understanding the

2:28

town of Smith Station, Alabama,

2:32

where he was the mayor,

2:34

he was also the pastor, and

2:37

I believe he also owned and ran a

2:39

grocery store. So this

2:42

was someone who was sort of central

2:44

to this very small, you know,

2:47

conservative Southern community. And

2:50

you know, accounts from people

2:52

who knew him have said, you know, this

2:54

was someone who cared very deeply about the

2:57

community, you know, and sort

2:59

of had a public life that was

3:01

very much, you know, central to the

3:03

small town life. What we also found

3:05

out in early November after a right

3:08

wing news outlet called 1819 publicized

3:12

it was that Bubba Copeland had a sort

3:14

of double life. And this is where we

3:16

kind of get into the pronouns. I have

3:19

tended to use he, him pronouns for Bubba

3:21

Copeland, a sort of very

3:23

public figure in a very small town. But

3:26

there was also Brittany Summerlin, Brittany

3:29

Blair Summerlin, I believe,

3:32

who described herself

3:34

on Instagram,

3:37

on Reddit, I believe on

3:39

maybe a few other places

3:41

online, as a transgender

3:43

woman, as a transgender girl, and

3:45

would sort of engage with people as

3:48

if she was an out transgender woman. And

3:53

so, you know, I think it's very

3:55

difficult to kind of talk about what someone's,

3:57

you know, identity was when they're not here.

3:59

Yeah. I

4:01

have tended to use sort of she

4:04

her for Britney Summerlin who

4:06

used those pronouns online and he

4:08

him for Bubba Copeland because He

4:11

never asked for anything else. Yeah, I think that's

4:13

reasonable So you just mentioned 1819 to

4:16

tell us about the campaign that they waged

4:18

against Copeland and how that went down Right.

4:21

So to give a little bit of sort

4:23

of background. I kind of scroll Transphobic

4:27

headlines all day all day. Right,

4:29

right as part of assigned media

4:32

Which is a website dedicated to

4:34

fact-checking and providing context for anti-trans

4:37

story in the right-wing press it's

4:39

been you know

4:41

intense focus of the

4:43

right-wing press for more than a year now

4:45

and You know,

4:48

so I kind of read whatever the

4:50

latest is and kind of try and

4:52

look for you know What's the context

4:54

what's going on? Yeah, so I became

4:56

aware of this story really early on

4:58

I believe is the day after they published.

5:01

Mm-hmm, which I think was November 1st for

5:03

our listeners Yeah, right. So on November 2nd,

5:05

I became aware of it and I didn't

5:07

want to touch it Because

5:10

they were ruining a person's life. I

5:12

mean in the story, you know They

5:14

talk about this person begging them not

5:17

to publish the story and deleting all

5:19

of their accounts Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm when they're

5:21

sort of confronted with the evidence of

5:24

this double life. They went ahead

5:26

anyway They published four

5:28

stories in like less than a

5:30

week all on this

5:32

one person's kind of you know

5:34

Secret online life and they ruined

5:36

this person's life. So the first story was

5:39

sort of revealing Copeland's, you

5:41

know double life or secret life and then

5:43

they went on to publish I think what

5:45

three more pieces over the course of the

5:47

week They published four stories in in

5:50

one week. And yeah that first one

5:53

Was sort of presented as

5:56

a bombshell right and so, you know as

5:58

I said in the intro Copeland is pushed

6:00

to suicide. I mean, it becomes a really

6:02

dark situation. There's a slow speed police chase

6:04

and then he ends his life, which is

6:07

horrible. You just mentioned that you spend a

6:09

lot of time looking at stories like this,

6:11

that this is part of your job. You're

6:13

used to horror. But you write in the

6:15

piece that this one sort of hit you

6:17

a little differently, that you felt like something

6:19

else was going on here that merited a

6:21

little more analysis and thinking. Can you talk

6:23

about what that was and sort of what

6:25

drew you to wanting to write something longer

6:27

about it? Yeah, I mean,

6:29

my first interaction with this story,

6:31

I decided not to write

6:34

about it because I'm

6:36

not going to say I predicted what would happen,

6:38

but I just had an awful feeling about this

6:41

is a person's life being ruined and

6:43

the less attention I bring to it,

6:46

kind of better. And

6:48

then by the end of the week, I

6:51

saw on social media that this

6:54

person had committed suicide and I instantly

6:56

knew who it was and what

6:58

the story was. And I'm

7:00

not a historian, but

7:03

it just really felt to me

7:05

kind of instinctively like something out

7:07

of a different time that a

7:09

newspaper would make

7:11

the outing of a

7:14

queer person this kind

7:16

of story on its own

7:18

with kind of nothing else. I mean, there

7:20

were some other things that they kind of

7:23

added later in the detail,

7:26

but that was the core of it.

7:28

And for that to be a story and for

7:30

that to be just used to ruin an individual

7:32

person's life isn't something that

7:35

we've seen. I feel it

7:37

isn't something we've seen for many years.

7:39

Yeah, recently,

7:42

yeah. Yeah, and this piece really is

7:45

as much about the past, right, that past

7:47

as it is about the present. You

7:51

write about how you felt this sort

7:53

of call to look toward queer history,

7:55

particularly pre-Stonewall queer history, to understand what

7:57

that world was like and where we

7:59

are now. What were you hoping to

8:01

find there? What was your

8:03

sort of initial question about pre-Sternwall life

8:05

and outing, as it pertains to outing?

8:07

Well, you know, I've sort

8:09

of had this kind

8:11

of dark obsession for a couple of years.

8:14

It kind of hit me, and this is a

8:16

very obvious thing to realize, but it kind of

8:18

hit me that people who were in

8:21

jazz clubs in the 1920s were

8:23

still alive in the 1940s and 50s. And

8:27

that these kind of young, vibrant,

8:29

gender-bending people would have just

8:32

been my age, would have been middle-aged at

8:34

the time when our country had kind

8:36

of the most repression. And

8:39

so this story felt

8:41

like a chance to ask about what

8:43

that was like, because I am worried

8:46

that at least for some people in

8:49

this country, that's the environment that we may

8:51

have to experience. Again, yeah. And so I

8:53

wanted to kind of go into the history

8:55

and kind of try to understand

8:58

what it would be like to live under

9:00

a situation where you

9:03

have to keep your identity secret, but

9:09

also that the press feels empowered to dig

9:12

into your account and find

9:14

out, and they can just kind of ruin you, and

9:17

that that was kind of an active concern. Well, I think

9:20

one of the things that your piece does really well

9:22

and evocatively is actually sort of paints

9:24

a picture of what that world was

9:26

like through, you know, you interview a

9:29

couple of historians in the piece. So I

9:31

wonder if you could just do that for our listeners here. What

9:34

was life kind of like in the 50s

9:36

and 60s, which is the period you're talking

9:38

about, with regard to this threat of outing?

9:40

You mentioned the press. Who were the antagonists?

9:42

Like, what were the consequences? What does that

9:44

world look like? Yeah, so, you

9:47

know, I kind of found out that my intuition

9:49

was kind of even a little bit more dead-on

9:51

than I had thought, because,

9:55

you know, newspapers in, you know, the

9:58

1940s and 50s would almost... have

10:00

like a beat reporter often whose

10:03

job was to, you know,

10:05

the police would call them up and they would

10:07

go to the local gay

10:09

club when it was being raided and

10:12

take pictures of the

10:15

gender nonconforming of the men in

10:17

dresses kind of all lined up against the

10:19

wall and the police would take down their

10:21

names and would pass it to the reporters

10:23

and ruining people's lives almost as

10:25

like a funny story or as a regular

10:28

feature. Yeah, their name, right? I mean, you write

10:30

their names and places of work and all of

10:32

this would be published like in the newspaper the

10:35

next the next day as a news story. Yeah.

10:37

And for the most part, people would be fired

10:39

from their jobs. And it's really not clear how

10:41

many committed suicide I always

10:43

really tried to stress, like most people

10:46

don't commit suicide. You

10:48

know, you know, gay people or others like most

10:50

people find a way to survive, but it certainly

10:52

was one of the

10:54

outcomes that could happen when people were publicly

10:57

shamed and humiliated and, you

10:59

know, often lost their families. These were often,

11:01

you know, people who were married men who

11:03

were married to women or

11:06

gender nonconforming people who were

11:08

married to women and who had

11:10

jobs and would just, you know, kind

11:12

of all of it would be gone. Yeah.

11:15

And that was just the way that was just sort of

11:17

the shape of life. You could expect that. Tell us one

11:19

of the things that you mentioned in your survey

11:22

in your reporting is the Mattachine Society, which

11:24

we've talked about on the show off

11:26

and on before, you know, leading part of

11:28

the homophile movement in the fifties.

11:30

Can you tell us a little bit about

11:33

who the Mattachine Society was, but also what

11:35

was their goal really with regard to the

11:37

press? Because you speak about that in particular.

11:39

Yeah. I talked to Jules Gil-Peterson, who listeners

11:42

may know, who

11:45

had kind of studied the papers of

11:47

one of the leaders who was part

11:49

of the Mattachine Society. You know, what

11:51

she found was that changing the press

11:53

coverage and changing this dynamic was one

11:55

of the major goals

11:57

of that kind of pre-Stonewall.

12:00

So, it varied in some ways, you know,

12:03

tepid, activism. And

12:06

I believe that, you know, members wouldn't

12:08

even like use their real

12:10

names with other members. This is kind of

12:12

how- Yeah, it was really underground, that's true.

12:14

How paranoid and difficult

12:17

it was to kind of have anything

12:19

like this sort of organizing. But one

12:22

of the things that the San Francisco

12:24

group really focused on was having better

12:26

relationships with the police, but also trying

12:29

to have stories in

12:31

the press that weren't uniquely, you

12:33

know, uniformly negative and trying to

12:35

shift this kind of

12:38

constant tone. And I believe

12:40

they also, you know, kind of defended

12:42

people in court who, you

12:44

know, were the victims of these kinds of raids.

12:46

Yeah. One other thing that you go into

12:48

a little bit, and it's actually, it's funny, we just

12:50

talked about it with regard to the show,

12:52

Fellow Travelers, the Showtime series, Fellow Travelers

12:54

on the podcast a couple of episodes

12:57

ago, is the Lavender Scare, which is

12:59

happening in this general period.

13:01

Can you just remind listeners sort of

13:03

what that was and how that fed

13:05

into this climate really of, you know,

13:07

just great terror around being outed? Yeah,

13:09

so the period that I was talking

13:11

about first where there's kind of a

13:13

beat reporter and they go down to the, you know,

13:15

gay club, is a little bit more in the

13:18

40s. And then I

13:20

believe it was in the 1950s when

13:23

McCarthyism kind of like decided that, you

13:27

know, that

13:29

gays were communists and that gays were

13:32

a blackmail risk. Now, again, this is

13:34

a very kind of self-facilic process because

13:36

the reason there's such a blackmail risk

13:38

is because anyone finds out, yeah, their

13:41

lives are gonna be ruined. So

13:44

they set out to find everyone out and

13:46

ruin their lives preemptively to

13:49

make sure they couldn't be blackmailed. So

13:53

that's very much the logic of homophobia

13:55

at the period. But, you know, so

13:57

in that case, it was national and there

13:59

were many. many people fired,

14:01

there were congressional hearings, and there

14:03

was a very public,

14:06

well-publicized suicide that was actually

14:08

the person who was outed

14:10

was the son of, I believe

14:13

it was a US senator. And

14:15

the US senator committed suicide because

14:18

his son was going to be outed. And

14:23

it is perhaps maybe

14:26

not the moment that suicide

14:28

became so associated with people's

14:31

impression of the LGBTQ community,

14:33

then gay or homosexual is

14:36

really the word they would

14:38

have used for everyone. But

14:41

it certainly kind of cemented that

14:43

and kind of put that nationwide as

14:46

sort of part of how

14:49

people could understand and

14:52

picture and stereotype gay

14:54

people or who we never were. Yeah,

14:57

I think that's actually a great place to take a break. We

15:00

will be right back with more and connecting

15:02

all of this history to sort of

15:04

our president right after a very short break. Just

15:18

before the break, you were telling us about

15:20

this association that forms between sort of queer

15:22

people or gay people and suicide. Can

15:24

you say a little bit more about that? Because

15:27

I find that that was one of the interesting

15:29

beats in your piece where you're sort of saying

15:31

that like, even if, as you said earlier, not,

15:33

we don't know how many people would have committed

15:35

suicide from this kind of thing, but certainly it

15:37

happened. But nonetheless, this idea

15:39

that like, queer people are suicidal, or

15:41

like, you know, more apt to do

15:43

that becomes very ingrained, I

15:45

guess, sort of in this period. What

15:48

did you learn about that? Because that's

15:50

an interesting idea. Yeah, so how

15:53

the history seems to have kind of gone was

15:55

that there were some of these sort

15:57

of suicides, some of them

15:59

were hoisted. high profile of

16:01

people who had been outed, people who had like

16:04

really just lost everything, lost

16:07

their entire social standing. And

16:09

then, you know, sort of a little later, you know,

16:11

psychologists started to sort of talk

16:14

about suicide more in the way that

16:16

we sort of think about it today

16:18

as being sort of more likely because

16:21

of ambient prejudice and, you

16:23

know, and bullying and sort of, and being

16:26

kind of also going along with like,

16:28

well, more drug use or more depression

16:30

or more, you know,

16:32

poverty and that kind of stuff. And

16:35

you know, I think that it's

16:37

a difficult line because it seems,

16:41

you know, pretty clear to me that,

16:43

that people, you know, gay activists, but

16:45

people who care about the welfare of,

16:47

you know, queer people

16:49

have sought to use

16:52

this kind of dramatic suicide story

16:54

as a way to try and explain

16:56

to the mainstream,

16:59

like, why is this bad? And

17:01

so this kind of Bubba Copeland story

17:03

has a lot of kind of echoes of like,

17:06

well, it would be bad for 1819

17:08

to ruin this person's life,

17:11

even if he didn't kill himself, he did

17:13

kill himself. And so it's kind of an

17:15

opportunity, but also a little bit

17:17

of a danger to kind

17:20

of reinforce the stereotype and

17:22

this, you know, kind of

17:24

persistent association between, you know,

17:26

queer people and suicide. And

17:28

again, most, most of us, you

17:31

know, actually, you know, live, most of

17:33

us make it. But

17:35

these kind of dramatic... Well, there's

17:37

something like pathologizing about it, right? Where it's

17:39

like, right, it's like assigning this, this thing,

17:42

it almost becomes a

17:44

kind of homophobia or something. Well, and

17:46

very, very explicitly in

17:48

the right wing kind of propaganda

17:50

stuff that I read, you

17:53

know, and I saw this, you know, when I was much

17:55

younger, used against lesbian

17:58

and gay people, but they will, you know... point

18:00

to the increased risk of suicide for

18:02

trans people and say this is why

18:04

you can't allow people to transition because

18:07

they're at a higher risk of suicide. And

18:11

it was absolutely the same for suicide

18:14

statistics that were more about lesbians and gays

18:16

20 years ago. That's interesting

18:18

because one of the quotes you have in

18:20

the piece from the historian Charles Kaiser, he

18:23

suggests that the trans folks today are basically

18:26

in a similar place to gay men and then the period

18:28

that we were talking about, the pre Stonewall period that we

18:30

were talking about. Can you like,

18:32

do you agree with that? Can you unpack that a little

18:34

bit? I thought that was an interesting idea.

18:38

There are definitely resonances. I mean,

18:40

I think I'm in Charlottesville,

18:43

which you might imagine as like an analog to a San

18:45

Francisco, but I think there are a lot more of them.

18:49

You know what I mean? My life

18:51

is not lived under

18:54

this shadow and this constant thrall.

18:58

But for trans people who are in

19:01

smaller towns or in

19:03

red states or especially both, there

19:06

is I think people

19:08

who live their whole lives in the closet

19:10

knowing that they're trans but never transitioning. And

19:13

then the other side of that

19:15

is people who are stealth, people who no

19:17

one knows that they're transgender and

19:21

transitioned and kind of moved away

19:23

and kind of reinvented their life, but who live

19:25

with the fear that someone

19:27

might find that out. And

19:29

I think the current kind of, I think that

19:32

was kind of felt like it was kind of

19:34

easing. It felt like it was kind of going

19:36

away. I think I had a lot of hope

19:38

that the stealth trans people that I kind of

19:40

knew of would either not need to

19:42

do that or be able to come out or that

19:44

we wouldn't need to have younger generations

19:47

wouldn't feel quite as much of a need to

19:49

do that. And what

19:51

this kind of, you know,

19:54

this current moral panic is doing is really

19:56

I think putting people back into that fear

19:58

of, you know, there's There's no

20:00

way that if anyone knew this about me, that

20:02

I could continue to have a normal life or

20:04

be accepted in my community. That's a

20:06

great segue actually to the sort of last

20:09

big chunk of your piece, which goes into

20:11

sort of where we are

20:13

now. So you talk about the

20:15

various ways that the right is

20:17

trying to reinvent this

20:19

climate of terror for

20:22

2024. What are

20:24

some of those ways and how do you sort

20:26

of see that climate and how it connects again

20:28

to this history that you looked at? Yeah,

20:30

I mean, I think that the right explicitly

20:32

wants to take us back to a time

20:35

when gay people stayed

20:37

in the closet or when they didn't exist,

20:39

depending on... At the very least

20:41

out of public, but yeah. Right.

20:43

I mean, we always existed. We

20:45

always will exist. You can't sort

20:48

of extinguish natural human variation, but

20:51

you can make it so difficult

20:53

that anyone who is publicly out,

20:56

but also anyone who is outed, their life is ruined

21:04

or they're facing

21:06

criminal... I mean, I think this is

21:08

this interesting thing where it doesn't have to be...

21:10

You don't have to be putting people in jail.

21:13

The possibility that you could lose your job or that

21:15

you could go to jail or that at any point

21:17

down the line, that kind of thing could happen,

21:19

is enough to create

21:21

a kind of climate of

21:23

fear. In

21:27

Florida, you can

21:29

see me. The listeners

21:31

can't see me, but I would need to use

21:33

female pronouns and use women's bathrooms

21:35

and I wouldn't be able to

21:37

explain to the schoolchildren

21:41

why this was. It would be illegal for me to explain

21:43

that I was transgender. And

21:45

as you can see, I just look like a man. So

21:48

how is the school going to hire me under those

21:51

circumstances? How am I going to... I

21:53

just can't have that job. You've been legislated

21:55

out of that arena of existence. Yeah. Right.

22:00

I think school teachers, maybe

22:02

daycare workers, people who are working with children are

22:05

the kind of most vulnerable

22:07

right now, but it's also a sign

22:09

of where the climate

22:11

that they want to bring back, where

22:13

it's just not possible to live as

22:15

a trans person in any kind

22:17

of safety or comfort. And again, as

22:20

you said, if you do try, whether that's

22:22

through maybe being stealth or not transition,

22:24

like not socially transitioning or whatever it may be,

22:26

there's still that outing fear

22:28

hanging over your head. I think this is

22:31

honestly the part about the Bubba Copeland story

22:33

that I find the most chilling is

22:35

that Bubba Copeland followed the rule. Right, right.

22:38

Bubba Copeland did not come out.

22:40

Bubba Copeland was not gender nonconforming.

22:43

Bubba Copeland had a private life

22:45

that I think he

22:48

had every reason to believe would be

22:50

respected by other white men of his

22:52

community. And what 81919 said was no, like

22:54

you're not allowed to have a private

22:56

secret trans

23:02

existence. We will

23:04

come into that private life and we

23:06

will make sure you're not able to

23:09

continue. And so that kind of changing of

23:11

the rules, I

23:13

didn't grow up in the South, but I believe you- I did, I did,

23:15

yeah. Yeah, yeah. You

23:17

know, it's no longer, well, you can,

23:19

you know, you can do whatever you want,

23:21

just don't be public about it. It's we're going

23:24

to come into your bedroom. And that's

23:26

a changing of the

23:28

code, I believe, that represents how

23:30

far they're willing to take this. That's such

23:32

an interesting point, because I think we've seen

23:34

a similar changing of the rules around, which

23:36

we knew would happen, but, you know, all

23:39

of this, the anti-trans legislation started with like,

23:41

it's just about the kids, right? We're just

23:43

protecting the children, you know, everybody else will

23:45

be- the adults will be fine, adults can

23:47

do what they want. And of course, within

23:49

like six months, they were going after adult

23:51

medical care and like all of the things

23:53

that we knew they would, but it's the

23:55

goalposts, you know, shifted immediately. And I think

23:58

that's exactly what you're describing here. where

24:00

you're right, in the South, I would

24:03

say that for a very long time, there was

24:05

a kind of a,

24:07

I don't know, like a detente

24:09

or kind of like a live and let live

24:11

idea that like, as long as you kept it

24:13

quiet and out of people's faces, quote unquote, like,

24:16

you could probably get away with

24:18

living the way you want to, certainly as like a

24:20

cis gay or cis lesbian. And

24:22

maybe even as a trans person, depending on where

24:25

you were, and you'd

24:27

be left alone, right, people might know about

24:29

it, but they kind of leave it be.

24:31

And I think you're entirely right that this

24:33

represents a kind of a shift, like a

24:35

violation of that agreement, you know,

24:37

that tacit kind of agreement, which is

24:39

really, really terrifying. I think, you

24:42

know, your piece, maybe this is the place we

24:44

can sort of end your piece is not prescriptive.

24:46

But I do wonder if you have any thoughts

24:48

about what we can do to combat this? Like,

24:50

is there a way to resist a return to

24:53

this world? Where shame and fear are running everything?

24:55

Or are you pessimistic about it?

24:57

Because that might be that's fine, too. You know, I

24:59

don't know if there's an answer. But I'm just curious

25:01

if you have thoughts about that. I think it is.

25:07

I think that coming out of the closet was a,

25:11

like a political act. When I was

25:13

a college student, I was still

25:16

I was kind of on the tail end

25:18

of that. But it was still seen as like, this

25:20

is how we resist. And I

25:22

think that it's really come to be seen

25:24

as kind of the stakes have lowered. It's

25:26

really come to be seen as a personal

25:28

choice. And, you know,

25:30

outing someone against their will has been, you

25:32

know, seen as like just

25:34

really completely beyond the pale, because

25:36

it's a personal, because it's

25:38

a personal choice. And while I continue to

25:40

think, you know, 1819 shouldn't

25:43

be outing people against their will.

25:45

And neither should we, I think it is

25:47

important to kind of understand

25:49

that no one can ruin you.

25:52

If you are out in public about who you

25:54

are. So my first suggestion

25:56

would be to have a renewed emphasis

25:58

on encouraging people to come out, not

26:01

in a shaming way, not in a,

26:03

everyone has to live in the exact same way way, but

26:05

in just a like, this is how you protect yourself is

26:08

you, you can't have

26:10

those secrets and expect that you'll

26:12

be left alone in this kind of

26:16

climate. I think

26:18

that doing a lot of work to try to welcome

26:20

people who are fleeing

26:22

states where the

26:24

situation is worse, you know,

26:27

trying to, you know, have, have

26:29

a day a month or something where people

26:31

are really encouraged to come and meet new people

26:33

or, you know, in bigger cities or whatever. Like

26:35

I think there's more we can do to kind

26:37

of make sure that people can leave and

26:40

can not just leave, but like

26:42

find somewhere somewhere in terms of, you

26:46

know, I am very optimistic over the longterm.

26:48

I think that for trans

26:51

people specifically the fact that

26:53

this medical treatment works

26:55

and that it's so life transforming and

26:58

positive, that knowledge can't go

27:00

back. Like we have an internet, we have, you

27:02

know, there's just too much of it out there. I

27:04

think over the short term, I am concerned. I mean,

27:07

this is why I've been obsessed with people

27:09

in the 1920s and imagining what they were

27:11

doing in the 1950s is because I do imagine, is

27:13

this going to be me? And I would probably move

27:16

to some place where I wouldn't have to live that

27:19

way. But it's, I do think we're going

27:21

to have a rough, I mean, let's be optimistic a rough

27:23

decade or something, maybe a couple decades. It's

27:26

going to be very tough in rough red States and

27:28

encouraging people and making room for people

27:30

to leave and encouraging people to be

27:32

out and to see being out as

27:35

protective and necessary

27:37

and not just this kind of personal choice that

27:41

no one can kind of say anything on either

27:43

way. Cause I worry about, you know, I did

27:46

a piece for you several years back on stealth

27:48

trans men in the South.

27:51

I don't think that they,

27:53

the safety that they had when

27:55

I wrote that just a couple of years ago obtains any

27:58

more. Yeah. Yeah. I

28:00

think those are great, really great suggestions. Okay,

28:02

I think there's more we could talk about

28:04

with this piece, but I think people should

28:06

probably just go read it because it's so

28:08

wonderful. The piece is titled The Outing of

28:10

Bubba Copeland and you can read it now

28:12

in Slate. Evan, before you go, I thought

28:15

I would ask if you have a Gay Agenda

28:17

item for us. That is, if listeners don't know

28:19

it, we tend to do that on the show

28:21

at the end, little recommendation section, updates

28:24

to the Gay Agenda. Evan, did you bring anything for

28:26

us? Well, luckily you

28:28

warned me because I

28:31

mostly consume other people playing video

28:33

games on Twitch, but there's

28:36

this short documentary called Victoria

28:40

by, I believe it's Eloisa Diaz,

28:45

and it

28:47

is the story of a out

28:49

transgender man in

28:51

a conservative small town in Mexico

28:54

who gets pregnant

28:56

and has a baby. This

28:58

is a guy who's on testosterone, who's very

29:00

kind of male passing, and he decides to

29:03

have a child. It's

29:05

a beautiful documentary. I

29:08

don't think many people know about it. Little

29:11

bit of transmasculine representation

29:13

there, so I'd encourage people to check it out.

29:15

Oh, that sounds wonderful, yeah. I hadn't heard of

29:17

it until you mentioned it, so that's great to

29:19

know. All right, well, our guest

29:21

today has been Evan Urquhart. He's the founder and

29:23

editor of Assigned Media, which we've talked about on

29:25

the show before. You can go check that out

29:28

at assignedmedia.org. Also an Outward

29:30

contributor and our fantastic community moderator

29:32

here at Slate. Evan, thanks

29:34

so much for writing this piece and for joining us

29:36

today on the show. I'm always

29:38

so glad to come. All

29:45

right, that is the show for today, but

29:47

just a reminder before we go, we're trying

29:49

to do more advice on the show with

29:52

Danny, Labrie, and friends, and so we need

29:54

you to send us advice questions for that

29:56

to happen. So send them to us at

29:58

outwardpodcasts.com. I really prefer voice memos

30:01

for this so that we can hear your beautiful

30:03

voices. The email works too. You'll just have to

30:05

let me read it. We're looking for stuff about

30:07

queer relationship dynamics, friendships, and

30:48

voices withbrajutz.