Jazmine (JT) Green:
A big thing in Slack or whenever we had our chats IRL was that we were going to get canceled for the “Battle Rap” episode. We were joking about that, but we didn't want to shy away from complicated people. So, Sarah, I want to start with you. When we were first making the show, why didn't you want to shy away from people like 40 B.A.R.R.S.?

Sarah Esocoff: 
When I was first conceptualizing the show, I didn't have a super clear idea of what I wanted to do, but I did have a lot of ideas about what I didn't want to do. When I was thinking about the media landscape, there are a lot of stories that are hashtag inspirational. Or there's a lot of pure tragedy where it's like upsetting laws or death. There are queer people who make stories like that and queer people who can get things out of stories like that, myself included. But they sometimes have a veneer of having been made for straight people, to make them feel better or to make them feel guilty. And my dream is that this show is for queer people in a way that makes them want to discuss it and debate it and maybe disagree with it. One thing I'm really proud of is that we come in hot with some intellectual takes. I didn't want to shy away from that nuance. 

Jazmine: 
Speaking of discourse, we have a professional scholar here. As a professional scholar, why do you think this nuance is avoided in queer media? What were you looking out for when you decided to take on this project? 

Cass Adair:
I have noticed that students really want good representation and I think that good representation is something you sell at Target. And I don't trust Target. There's a real impulse in queer media to be caught between the straight people who hate us and the precious baby people we were when we were children. But some of us suck and some of us have weird sex or some of us are problematic. There’s something that's really important to me about expanding the world of who we can be so that we don't have to be the straight person's dream of a queer person. And we don't have to be the commodified version of ourselves that is profitable for capitalism.

Jazmine: 
Yeah. And speaking of being bought and sold, make sure you listen to all the ads.

Cass:
We will sell you mattresses. Don't skip the ads. But what about you? What brought you to the team? What made you sign on as editor?

Jazmine: 
I was looking for a challenge. I worked on a show a couple years ago called The Nod. And the thing about The Nod that I really enjoyed was that it was a show about Black culture by Black folks and it was told in a way that didn't over-explain Black culture for non-Black listeners. You either got it or you didn't. And if you didn't get it, you were invited in the room and you were just meant to figure it out yourself. So then when I saw Sounds Gay pop up, I was like, this sounds exactly like that, but for queerness. And I wanted to have a challenge as a story editor to be like, how can I help to craft something of that vibe, but for queerness? 

Cass: 
Like, fuck an explanatory comma? 

Jazmine: 
Yeah. Fuck an explanatory comma.

I want to zoom out a little bit. Sarah, when you were first thinking about the show, what were your goals in terms of structure and genre?

Sarah:
In the description, we explain it as a mixtape of documentaries, which is a phrase that Casey Holford, our sound designer, came up with. Each episode is a different story, but I also wanted to play around with each episode being a different genre. So like, the CCM episode was a more historical episode. We have a couple more of those, but we also have some that are scene reporting where we're at shows hanging out with people. We have one that's a real profile in a way that I haven't heard in audio before in the way that we do it. And something that I really wanted to do is have an episode where we get to watch music being created in real time, which is episode 3.

Jazmine: 
One of our historical episodes is “Melanie Speaks." It tells the story of a VHS tape that was an instructional video on feminine voice training. We were trying to find the people who used the tape and we were also trying to find Melanie herself. How did you handle this type of documentary where you're working with not necessarily famous people and you have to think about privacy and consent? Basically, how do you do documentary in a not shitty way?

Cass: 
Most journalism is bad. When I talk to journalists about working with trans subjects, I tell them: You guys know that if you're doing work in a war zone, you treat people a certain way. You might give them anonymity, you might have trauma support for those people. You might ask questions in a way that leads up to the bad part rather than opening with like, “So what happened when you were in the war?” But when people approach marginalized people who are victims of the United States as opposed to some other country, they tend to put those ideas out the window and they're like, “So what happened when you were brutally harassed?” Or, “What happened when you got surgery and the doctors were bad to you?” And I don't understand why people in the United States don't recognize that some people in the United States are also at war. Trans people undergo trauma in this country as a matter of course on a day-to-day basis. We shouldn't ignore that in our reporting process just because we're like, “Oh, well, it's a partisan issue.”

With that attitude in mind, when I call trans people on the phone, which I do both as a scholar and as a reporter, I really try to not come at them the way that most cis journalists come at them. And sometimes that's as simple as just connecting with them and being like, “So, how many cats do you have?” Trans people are always asked about their genitals and no one ever asks about their cats. And we all have cats. I just think there's some really basic humanization stuff that is missing. 

Sarah:
Something we were very aware of with this show is all of these episodes are about different scenes and I'm not a part of any of the scenes. There's this idea that a journalist can fly into a scene and interview someone for 40 minutes and get out of there. And we tried really hard not to do that. 

For example, the “Battle Rap” episode is 35 minutes long and we had 40 hours of tape. A full work week of tape. The episode is about one battle, basically. It’s about a feud between these two rappers and their battle. But I went to other battles. I talked to journalists who cover only battle rap. I interviewed tons of rappers who aren't in the story to get background. I talked to older battle rappers who have an idea of the history. I flew down to Atlanta; I hung out with 40 B.A.R.R.S. for literally days on end.

I could feel when I had an investment in a scene or a community or a person. I'm never going to be a part of that scene, but I wanted to feel that investment so that I could ethically do this work.

Jazmine: 
I wanted to talk to you, Sarah, about humor as an effective storytelling strategy.

Sarah: 
Yeah. I love hearing from other reporters about how they use their natural personalities to report better. I am someone who likes to joke, and my instinct might've been to shy away from that in interview settings. But I grew to embrace it and I think it's a good way to build rapport with someone. It allows you to push people and ask tougher questions. In general, trying to settle into my own personality in reporting settings has been really helpful for me. In interviews, you have to be very ‘on’ socially, and that's pretty exhausting for me to keep up. Some people want you to be super engaged the whole time and I can do that. But a lot of people are not used to being interviewed. And if I sense that someone is also feeling exhausted or overwhelmed, I will do what my instinct is to do, which is zone out for a minute or look at my phone or whatever. I think people can sense that authenticity, and it helps you build intimacy.

Jazmine: 
Scene reporting is usually a big part of music journalism and coverage. A reporter goes to an event and comes back with a story. I’d argue a lot of online magazines, their approach is like, here’s this cool queer scene you’ve never heard of, here’s all their Instagrams, blah blah blah. “The Pit” [which is about an all-ages trans punk show] is scene reporting. But how did you want to shake up that typical approach? 

Cass: 

We had a first draft that was so fun to write and it was also—it was hashtag inspo. We were like, we went to this scene and it was a life-changing experience for me. But no one wants to listen to 35 minutes of a man having a feeling. So we did a revision of the script where we were like, what is this really about? And what we found looking deeper was not just that we had a good time and the show was good, but also it made us think really complex things.

The revision was better because it had more to say, but it also gave us deeper relationships with each other through the writing. It was a really powerful writing experience. 

Sarah: 
Part of my vision for this show was that I didn't want to be in it that much. But one thing that arose as the three of us and then eventually Gianna [Palmer, Sounds Gay editor] worked on the show is all of our personal feelings about the stories that we were working on. It was a really amazing, collaborative process. It’s not literally in the show, but to me it is so clearly in the show. Our feeling-processing really made it in there. 

A lot of queer and trans people are asked to mine our own personal, difficult traumas in work settings, and that is not easy. I know that Cass and Jazmine would not do that for any project and I certainly would not do it for any project. And it is—no homo—one of the great honors of my life that they trusted me in that way. I think it made the show a lot better in mysterious, not always literal ways.

Cass: 
I have some professor friends named T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault and they wrote an article recently called Lesbian Processing. It's basically arguing that processing your emotions is actually intellectual work. Like, that's how you get to answers, right? They were like, it's homophobic and sexist that we don't consider processing a method of intellectual inquiry.

I read that essay and I was like, you're right. In an ideal world we would get to have our emotional selves inform our intellectual work because these are not different parts of us. Part of queer world-making to have our feelings on the surface and to dialogue about them together.

Jazmine:

I think back to summer of 2021 when I decided to join the Sounds Gay team. I was very comfortable, like, “Oh yeah, I am a bisexual cis person. That is who I am.” And over the course of working on this damn show, my pronouns shifted, my name shifted. I discovered I was trans. It's interesting to now look at the end of this process and realize that all of this processing in the work, editing these stories, having to dig into my own past and bring myself into the story, led to Sounds Gay being a record of my own gender journey.

So if you listen to Sounds Gay, it might happen to you too.