Hi, I'm the Owaisha. You may know me as the former host of Visibilia. Well, I'm back with the new show called Praxy. It's about the niche emotional questions that no one in your life can relate to. That's where Praxy comes in. I'll connect you to researchers and strangers with shared experience and you'll get to ask all your questions. We're kicking things off with a three part series on the emotional and mental health toll of layoffs. Subscribe to Praxy wherever you get your podcasts.
Because.
This is episode six of Because the Bus Belongs to Us, a podcast where two queer nets get down to business, assembling their final bits of evidence in the hope of convincing other queer people that Bruce Springsteen is a queer icon. I'm Jesse and I'm Polly, and the show is almost over.
No next episode will be our last. We'll be presenting our findings to a panel of queer people. You get to decide if we have enough evidence to admit Bruce Springstea to the Queer Icon Hall of Fame.
At the very start of this mission, we came up with four checklist points.
We of course smashed check this.
Point one is Bruce Camp Yes, he is.
Our second check this point. Underdog status started.
Well with that escaping, that needing to get out.
You got to go, and you'll do anything to make sure you don't have to go back.
That to me is the essence of an underdog.
Then it ended in a full panic about the entire purpose of the show.
Sure, a lot of Bruce Brinky's lyrics make us feel seen, but can we actually relate to him? Do we even want to make a whole podcast series idolizing a rich, white, straight cis man whose politics we aren't actually sure of. But we pulled it back with checkliss point three good music.
Bruce is so much more than Bruce, and I love thunder Road, not just because Bruce said it, because we all get to say it to each other. Now we just have one checklist point to go before we can officially crown Bruce Springsteen with queer icon status. Quite simply, is there a vibe? Do other queer people agree that Bruce is a queer icon?
And we are getting nervous. Next week we'll be presenting our evidence to an expert panel of queers, and the fate of this very serious scientific investigation rests in their hands. Today is our last chance to collate our evidence, gather our findings, and prepare our ultimate argument.
So we're looking.
Just like last bits and bobs are here. So in classica style, we're back to basics. Sitting in my.
Bedroom, surrounded by Zeen's books and photos of Bruce. We're having one last nerdy evidence gathering session looking through our Bruce Springsteen ephemera.
In episode four, we put a name to a discomfort that we've been feeling throughout the series. There's a difference between the radical queer email Bruce Springsteen we've created in our heads and projected our own meanings onto, and the very real life Bruce Springsteen walking around in New Jersey.
Yeah, okay, so I'm just going to quote you to you reading my favorite line from your graphic memoir Looking for Bruce. So you're saying here, part of being a Bruce fan is getting to choose which myth or version of the truth I believe in. It's a bit like wrestling. It's both fake and very real, but it's only fun if.
You really believe.
I guess that's what we're going to put to the test next week if we can get other people to see the fun in believing too.
Yeah, it's something we touched on in episode two as well, when we talked about Bruce's esthetics. So there's this image of him in this book here. This is called Springsteen Album by Album by Ryan White. It was taken for Rolling Stone at nineteen eighty four by Aaron Rappaport. He's got the denim, he's got double bandana, and I could obviously read this image in a very queer way if I wanted to, But I'm sure loads of people saw this and thought he's just the ultimate American man.
He was a version of white male, patriotic, heterosexual American that I disidentified with.
This is a Lana Coombier.
I was born between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town.
For much of Alana's life, they were not a fan of Bruce Springsteen.
And then what happened was that I listened to Nebraska.
Oh Nebraska, the Bruce Springsteen album that Dykes have claimed as their.
Own, released in nineteen eighty two, The Legend Girls that Bruce recorded the songs on a little four track in his bedroom, just him and his guitar and his harmonica. He originally intended to re record full versions with the whole band, but then he decided to release them as is because it just felt right.
Lots of the songs on the album are pretty dark, songs about unemployment, death, debt, isolation, and a whole lot of hopelessness.
I heard these songs about people who are having a much more ambivalent relationship to being American, to living where they are, to having this other level of sort of like procurity around class and while being who are in their white way, still subject to and worried about policing, who are trying to make these decisions about what does it mean to try to live in this place, make
a life. People who are seeking a kind of freedom that's different than the freedom that I thought Bruce was angling toward.
I always really trust people who say they got into Bruce through Nebraska. I think most queers that I know in Nebraska, for some reason, is like the album as opposed to like the more poppy stuff, even though we all have pop as well. I don't know what it is. Nebraska seems to be this thing that grabs hold of people.
It just feels so intimate to me. I was remembering that on my dating profile I had something about being a fan of Nebraska era Bruce Springsteen, which now I would just change and say I'm a fan of Bruce Springsteen, but at the time I felt it was necessary to make that little qualification.
That sends a very specific message.
At the time, Alana was getting into Nebraska era Bruce Springsteen, they were in their late twenties. They were identifying as fem but feeling quite complicated about what that marker meant to them.
My performance of fem felt really uneven. FEM was really like sparkly and glittery and polished, and my day to day embodiment was not that in any way.
There was some practical body stuff that was blocking Alana from being able to fully lean into their gender expression.
Trying to wear a dress while also trying to deal with an insulin pump, which I wear all the time and is just like dangling on this tube. It's hard to figure out if you're wearing a strapless dress, which I was doing sometimes at that time, like where is that pump going to go? In a harness? Of course that's the best place for it to rest while you're going out you know, just kind of dealing with things like that.
Elana was also trying to work out what fem meant to her as an identity beyond the esthetics. She had these legendary fem community leaders to look up to, people like Mini Briecee Pratt and Amber Holloba really.
Like badass, engaged, sexy, tenacious fems. So I was really appreciating the sort of ways in which people who I knew as FEM were really embodying care and love and community connection and solidarity, and those were all things that I was also eager and trying to embody in my life. So I had these very big shoes to fill in
my imagination of what FEM was. That was the part where I felt like really inconsistent, not in a like horribly deep struggle way, but I think that that was part of what I was just puzzling through.
Probably the most famous song on Nebraska is Atlantic City. The guy in it is in a pretty threatening situation, tied up in gambling in crime, but in the song he's speaking to his girlfriend. He tells her, put your makeup on, get your hair well pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
This guy knows what has gone into this beauty knows that it's a performance, right, Like knows that you're putting on this makeup, you're putting on these stockings, you're putting on this dress, that idea of being this person who is so desired and appreciated for their effort at looking a certain way and embodying a certain kind of femininity. I had never met a cis man where I felt the feeling of that gaze the way Bruce articulates it. But I have felt that gaze from butch lesbians and
butch people for sure. And so for me, like when I hear Bruce singing, like, oh, this is how I feel.
From this little moment of being seen by a line in a Springsteen song, things really started to snowble. She kept talking to queer fems about Bruce Springsteen.
He kept coming up across conversations with people who did not know each other or even know each other. We well.
In twenty eleven, Alana published a zine Because the Boss Belongs to Us queer femmes on Bruce Springsteen.
The zene was very much a project of sort of inviting and wanting to connect with people who could help me understand how I felt about Bruce, especially because there was this fem identification that everyone shared that it wasn't a straightforward butch identification, and I think that was part of the tangle that I was really interested in.
This scene because the boss belongs to us, is our namesake. It came out way back in twenty eleven, and both of us lapped it up. We love it. Alana is basically a celebrity to us.
We are so excited to talk to you because we are both your fan boys.
Wow, you're like one.
Of my origin story queer zine Bruce fans. And that's the same view Hollly right.
Absolutely same for me. When I started the Me and Bruce zine series, it was a way to try and find other queer Bruce fans and try and connect with that community. And instantly as soon as I did that, everyone's like, well have you read this scene?
This is my favorite thing about being part of the queer Breece Springsteen fandom. As soon as you discover it exists, you become part of this kind of underground community. People give you zcenes, send you articles, bring into a world of people who are as obsessed with Bruce as you Are.
And alana zine, published over ten years ago, went a long way into creating that community.
It was wonderful when the zine went out. People sent bootlegs, people sent CD compilations of just the songs that they would read as queer. Someone sent me a great flyer from their anarchist cafe that had a stencil of Bruce and said, the only Boss we listened to in Bruce's songs, the vision isn't just of you going alone, but that there's someone already waiting for you, someone who's ready to go with you. That part of the dream that as queer as we could go together, that you would not
be alone, that you would find your people. That's part of the dream that I feel like this music embodies for me.
Alana decided to bring all of these Queer Sprinstcene fans together. She organized a Bruce Sprinkstcene themed cabaret night named.
Prove It All Night Queer's Do the Boss March of twenty eleven at Club Cafe in Boston. The acts we had ranged from people doing readings, to burlesque, to dance, to mandolin, go go dancing.
It feels like a very beautiful coming together of things. This scene that you made over ten years ago brought me in Holly into our understanding that we're part of a community. Is part of the reason that we then met each other and decided to make this series, which we're naming after your scene. And it also really, if we're honest with ourselves, the only reason we're making this is so that we get to nerd out about Bruce with other Quick fans like you.
Yeah.
Yes, it feels like extremely fun and queer that you're like a kind of blueprint for us continuing to do community making in this way.
And I hope that this gives more people an invitation to make more and more people like complicating Bruce. It would also be great to see some critical work on Bruce that's like, why does everyone love Bruce so much? What's happening there? That would also be wonderful to see.
It's funny, isn't It feels like, Yeah, queer Bruce fans definitely definitely exist.
And the more people you talk to, the more people tell.
You that they like Bruce, will tell you that they've got a friend who's great who likes Bruce, or like put you towards.
An article and all of these things.
Yes, but it doesn't feel like, you know, if you were like, tell me a queer icon, right, you wouldn't say Bruce right?
Like?
No, what is it?
Like?
I just I think that I'm wondering if part of it is just that others have this experience of thinking about someone who's I don't know, this American hero in a certain way that that's not who we tend to identify with.
That's the challenge of what we're trying to work out. I guess, yes, is he even okay to say that he's a queer icon?
You know, I'm still hung up on this question. Is it even okay to say that this cis white, rich, straight, ma'am is a queer icon?
Yeah?
I should agree.
I would really like to get to the button of it before we have to present it to the panel next week.
That's after the break.
Hey, this is Jesse and Holly letting you know about another show you might want to listen to.
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Platform, Jesse Holly, because the bus belongs to us.
We're still sitting in my bedroom dotting the i's and crossing the t's before next week when we have to convince a panel of queers of Bruce's queer icon credentials.
I know, in episode four cj Ray told us to go on with Upenhearts and find our own joy in meeting and Bruce Bringsteen, but I still feel a bit like that's one thing in terms of finding joy in my personal fandom and another to make a decision on behalf of the whole queer community.
Yeah, if we're going to convince the panel of queers, we need to have a proper justification for putting Bruce on this I Compedistal. There's only one person I could think of to help us put this question to bed.
So on the table in front of me, I've got my almost entire zine collection. I've also put some little stickers to book mark the pages that I want to talk about. I just have performance anxieties, so I need to prep.
So my name is.
Otto and I am drag king Georgis Michael also drag daddy to Butch Springsteen, our very own producer of this wonderful podcast.
I just really wanted to fatherly advice for this one.
I was saying to my colleague today. I was like, oh, my drag son is coming later, and then she was like, can you have a drag son? And It's like, yes, I physically birth my drag son. In drag you can just give birth to children and they I'm out fully formed. An adult.
Otto or Georges Michael is an absolute legend of the London drag scene.
He is as obsessed with George Michael as.
We are with Bruce Springsteen, and he thinks loads about queer fandom and our relationship.
To the celebrity.
Of late, we've been feeling less confident about whether we are in fact qualified to decide that he's a queer icon.
Yeah, we got pretty cocky to start.
People.
We're more examining we are on feelings. I'm a bit uncomfortable about it having a white male millionaire on a pedestal. His politics don't necessarily line with ours. How uncomfortable does that make us feel should we be elevating or the queers rather than elevating?
Will you say, is it wrong to kind of elevate this person? But I think that the project of the queer icon is also a part of self elevation. You know, it's like community. Of course, there's like contributions to like his bottom line in terms of record sales and people going to his concerts. But the main point of fandom is for people to get their nourishment, isn't it. We're elevating ourselves through it.
Do you know what I mean?
We're getting?
Are you saying that the truths others themselves?
Maybe this one that's got a bit of a harsh edge.
This is a little recording I made the first time Otter came to mind to teach me how to do drag king.
Makeup great, you're just looking great.
Me and Otto became friends through drag. We met through another friend from the scene when I was first starting to develop my but Springsteen character, And now some could say, thanks to my love of Bruce prestein we're drag family. So this is one of Utter's zines that he gave me for my birthday last year. It's called careless whisper Confessions of a drag king. I'm just gonna read a bit from this passage in there about fandom. It's actually
a Jack Healbuson queer art of failure reference. There is a phenomenon I like to call the queer ut of fandom, reffing Ugh the queer ut of failure by Jack Halbuston. This is the near devotional further with which we revere.
Our cultural icons as queers. These icons don't need to be gay themselves, think Madonna, Elvis, Bruce Springsteen, though they sometimes are in the case of George, but either way they come to mean something particular in the ways in which queers fan them, and that is to fan as a verb. See the dance floor of a queer party when anything by Robin starts to play, or the Internet
and lesbian meme culture since twenty nineteen. Perhaps it's because as a community we have historically had to speak in codes for safety, so cultural figures become a kind of proxy, a way of recognizing ourselves and each other. This also plays out in drag, which, like zene memes and dance flaws, can be a kind of fandom. You see it in
the recurring characters who get impersonated at drag Nights. I'm not the only George Michael, and I've also seen many of Freddie Mercury and a Prince, the artists who hold a special place in our hearts.
I love this idea of thinking about too fam as a verb. It makes it feel more active and places the agency with the fans.
Some of the references Otto used to Robert on the dance Floor lesbian mean culture reminded me of something tams In from Unskinny Bop said last episode. Potentially one of the reasons our experience of finding other queer Bruce Springsteen fans has felt kind of underground is because the queering of male celebrities by Dyke's trans masks in their powers
is a more recent phenomenon. Is there a specific way our little sub sections of the queer community do fandom that's different to the people who lifted the likes of Madonna or Brittany to their queer eye com pedestals.
Someone did once come to my apartment said that they didn't like Bruce that I joked that they had to leave.
This is afy.
I'm afi yellow Duke. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I'm a queer Bruce brincetit. I feel like I laughed saying that, because it feels like a funny thing to slap as a label on myself. I don't think it's solf is part of like a larger fandom or anything like that, which is maybe why I'm sort of like it's funny to identify myself that way.
After he grew up between New York and New Jersey.
There's this bucket of like Bruce as this person with a complicated relationship to where he's from. I mean, obviously, like in real life, he still lives in New Jersey. He's very wealthy and successful. It's probably all fine, but I do think there's a way where, like so much of his music is about loving a place and not necessarily feeling part of it, or loving a place and also knowing you have to leave at some point.
And I think that's a.
Very queer relationship to home. And I think that's definitely a thing that feels relatable to me.
As AFI grew up their taste in Springsteen songs, grew with them from summers in New Jersey as a kid.
You're on the board walk, you're at the beach, you're like doing your little activities. One of his hits is usually playing in the background somewhere, and I feel like it tends towards the more like poppy or stuff like dancing in the dark, like all the like big hits are the ones that I feel like I can think of as like these are like the childhood songs.
And then as a teenager, I.
Have one memory of like watching the Cheffer than the Rest video and I was like particularly sad obviously and being like, oh, like this is about being afraid of love and also like being willing to try again in a way that I thought was really poignant and beautiful. Later, as an adult, I really moved towards Nebraska Tunnel of Love. Obviously still in the Cynthia eighties era, but we're still like moving a little. Like his sound is maturing. I'm maturing, I guess.
And this pattern of Bruce kind of soundtracking AFI's emotions, his sound maturing alongside her continues even today.
I saw him for the very first time live in last September. I was very struck by like how like emotionally vulnerable he was. I mean, you know, now he's in his seventies, he's very much thinking about the end of his life. He's like very much talking about like how all of his friends are dead, like everyone he started performing with when he was a teenager, Like they're all dead now and he's mostly the one who's left and successful. That vulnerability I was sort of comforted by.
It was a little like WHOA, we're here and he's talking about dying. And also like, WHOA, we're here and he's talking about dying. That's like really cool and special. I'm not at that life stage, but I'm thinking about getting older trying to figure out some of those things.
It's interesting hearing Afy talk about how they kind of grew up with brace, especially because often in straight world upside so fandom itself is seen as this kind of childish thing. Almost that's next.
We're back because thinking about the way queers do fandom after Yellow Duke.
Had this beautiful experience of different Bruce Songs soundtrack in their life growing up, which got us thinking about the way the age and maturity play out in narratives of fandom.
My Drag Dad, Autoweights, or George's Michael thinks a lot about.
This fandom is associated quite heavily with adolescents. There's something that feels quite queer about that obsessional yeah, over extending.
Yeah, there is this idea I think you mentioned earlier about fandom is a teenage thing. It's a young thing that you grow out of. So as adults who still really are obsessed with stuff, yeah, or we kind of should. We're grown up by now and be more adult in
what we do. And there's also an element of gender as well, Like there's this idea that if you're a fan for usually a girl, you're usually very like a passive consumer and it's very silly, frivolous thing to do, as opposed to men who like football, which is a real fandom.
Yeah, but how how do queers.
The fantom differently?
I mean, I think there's something about the intensity of the fandom. For me, I think we do fandom with love. I don't see this harsh edge that you get at the football match. I kind of want to say this without like doing a dirty on football, because I don't. People have what they have and I'm happy for people to have the things that make them happy, and I think that that's probably the case with a lot of
straight culture is that it's built on this premise of competition. Now, as I say that, I'm just thinking about like drag and competitions all of that. But then I think it stems back to like the Balls in like New York, where the whole thing was a competition, but it was a satire on the competition of capitalism that we have every day, because it was like, yeah, I could win this thing. If homophobia didn't exist, I could be executive realness,
I could like own my own company. The root of it is it's coming from a place of love.
I feel like you maybe hit the name on the head, Holly, when you were saying that, Like when you're describing fandom as something which people think about as childish and something that you grow out of that is like an inherently queer experience.
Like right now, so I'm.
Thirty one, and what I want, which is like communal living and like other things like that are seen by some parts of straight society as childish.
Right, Like people talk.
Loads at being like and what you're going to do in your next stage of life, like the kind of exactly yeah, yeah, and like it's all pointing towards heteronomyas blah blah, et cetera. And I wonder whether that's like the inherent queenness of fandom is like it's this really fun thing that other people think like having that crazy obsession. Yeah, people think of that as this like and it's actually infantilizing thing, indulging in yourself.
Yeah, you're indulging a thing, but you're.
Also spending time on yourself and the things that you really love. Not many people get to do that.
I think it's also relational, and I think maybe because in queer communities we don't have as much this idea of like the heteronormative nuclear family unit, and we've had to do things like chosen family that also includes you know, chosen icons and aesthetics that we draw from. It's like it's a relationship that you have with this, and I think that queers are really good at relationships. And the ways that we love our friends is similar to the
ways that we love our icons. That desire to kind of hold each other up as opposed to a desire to put each other down, which I think is much more prevalent in straight culture because we already have failed because of the queer art of failure. We're already failing against those modes, so therefore we find our own ways to navigate. But we're also pushed into that space, so it's both coming from within and coming from without. We're
seen as being perpetual children. Also, because we're playful and creative and ingenious, we also make that space for ourselves. Fandom is a wonderful way to play this idea of playing with the different motifs, the different symbols, playing with the music, reading things into it. Where it may may or may not be, it doesn't really matter because it's fun and sharing that and creating culture.
Qui is also really good at creating culture. This is definitely something we can relate to. I don't care if Bruce actually chose a gender neutral name on purpose for.
Bobby g Yeah or Backstreets Yeah.
The thing I care about is that I have chosen to read a queer love story into those lyrics. It's not about Bruce. It's about me creating my own queer signified treasure hunt.
This is something Happy talks about too. When they went to see Bruce Bringsteen live last year, there was this one moment.
Born until Brene came out in the iron Core. We had been like trying to figure out when it was going to happen, Like it's going to happen? When is
he doing boring to Ren and friends? Aren't the concert with like screamed this scream that truly to this day I think about because it was just like I've never heard him scream like that before, and it was like beautiful, and we're all we're all jumping along screaming, and we're just like, yeah, like tramps like us, Like tramps like us, Like that's a different those are different traps for like you all.
Yes, the amount of times I've cried a breastcake because of queer meaning and then turned and seen a man cry next to me and thought, wait, what are you crying about?
And I was thinking about these sort of like American rights that like for me is like a queer person and a black person don't feel accessible. There's a way in which you can still find a place. Not that I like deeply long for a certain type of American life, but I do think there's a way where there's like a sliver of that that I could access through being
a Bruce fan. Not that I'm like a raging patriot either like to be very clear, like that's not what I'm trying to say, But like I do think there's a way where like, oh, like it doesn't have to look a certain way. That I think is what maybe past versions of myself were trying to work out what he means in this like American icon way. Even though his music is like critiquing the struggle that is the why of the American dream. I mean, he's also very much a symbol of that, Like he did the thing,
like he succeeded. I think that's part of what is still I think kind of complicated. I am engaging with his music because I see queer signifiers in it, you know. I mean he's describing like straight relationships and his more like romantic songs, and like I don't necessarily have to be listening to them and being like I'm assuming the character of a straight man to like relate to this. It doesn't feel like work to have to like readjust as I'm listening. We're writing ourselves in, I think, and
that can be really nice. It sometimes it feels very silly to be like zooming out of this conversation line in my brain, being like I am doing all this to talk about this like straight man, But it does feel sort of like there is an importance to people to be able to feel we can be reflected back in some way.
Yeah, it's so interesting because sometimes I think about that in terms of like a scarcity model of like, for so long queer people were so kind of like starffed of icons and role models and public figures and older figures for loads of different, you know, really difficult reasons. And so sometimes I'm like, it's the queer trait that we kind of have to find ourselves in people that we're not relatable to because we didn't have anything else.
But I like the way that you talked about it is kind of the opposite of that of being like we're just really good at it, like we just make things about us.
Yeah, we really just extremely.
Nur Disclaiming and reclaiming molding a culture to fit ourselves is something Otto's really interested in too.
I read this essay. It was by the godmother of queer theory, Kasofski Sedgwick. Also, I should say the title of this essay, which is You're so paranoid. I bet you think this essay is about.
You, Eve Kasofski centric says that often people with marginalized identities consume culture in a kind of suspicious way, automatically assuming it is not for people like them, or even that it is actively harmful to their community.
You know, nothing's going to surprise me, because I already know everything is fucked. It's kind of how I would say it.
But then she describes an alternative, which she calls reparative reading, and she says.
What happens when we looked at the ways in which people and communities manage to extract sustenance from the objects of culture, films, books, traditions, even a culture who is a vowed desire has often been not to sustain them, which I think is something that really resonates with me as a person living in a culture that is like really really out to get you, especially growing up on the section twenty eight, but now also because it's a
really hostile time and we're seeing this really repressive turn, it's very easy to read things, not in a paranoid way, but in a way that like it is really out to get you, Like it's not a fantasy, it's it's real. But actually, I guess reading with a way to heel yourself through your narratives that you're finding becomes a way to take that culture just fucking love it anyway, and to find yourself there and to find nourishment despite what is ostensibly trying to hold you out.
It's not like hugely important in the grand scheme of things that like queer people can like see themselves in these like iconic straight figures like Bruce or Taylor Swift or Beyonce or whatever like.
But I do think.
There's a way where it's still important for us to be able to like stake a flag down, like we're here and we feel a relationship to this that is important to people.
That's the power of fandom is it's like I'm gonna fuck I can love you. It's trying to repair and trying to heal and finding that strength within ourselves.
I love this.
I love the idea of knowing things about to get you, but that making it even more powerful when we make the active decision to claim it for ourselves.
Yeah.
I love the pure Sassin saying you're not for me, but I'm going to fucking love you anyway.
Holly Jesse, our scientific journey is almost complete. We're just putting the finishing touches in our sea of evidence, giving a final look through lyrics, reading through fan testimonies, and spending as much time as science requires to image search. Bruce lesbian Jacket and Bruce put lag alote, of course, but will there's be enough for our final point on our checklist?
Well, I think I found the perfect quote, and I feel like it speaks to what Afi and Otto were talking about. So this is from a chapter called Fandom as Pathology the Consequences of Characterization by Jerlie Jensen, and it's from the book The Adoring Audience, Fan Culture and Popular Media by Lisa A.
Lewis.
So Julie Jensen writes fandom should be explored in relation to the larger question of what it means to desire, cherish, seek, long, admire, envy, celebrate, protect, and ally with others. Fandom is an aspect of how we make sense of the world. So, in other words, we are perfect and actually we are doing fandom exactly right.
Yes, yeah, I smatching this.
We're using fandom to make sense of our dystopian landscapes while also finding ourselves and others along the way. I feel ready to face the panel. We've proved that Bruce Bingstein is camp.
We find our struggles reflected in Bruce's music at the very least, and.
We have some thoughts and feelings about queering Bruce Springsteen as a project that ultimate that helps us find meaning in our lives.
Which we and many others have done through dancing, crying, and fucking to his music.
Will all this be enough to convince a panel of queer experts who could not give less of a shit about Bruce Springsteen that he is, in fact the queer icon.
That's next episode, Because the Bass Belongs to Us is a production of malten Hart and iHeart Podcasts were hosted by Jesse Lawson and Holly Cassio.
This series is executive produced by Jesse and Holly and created by Jesse Lawson.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Jesse Lawson, with production assistants by Molly Nugents and Tess Hazel. Michelle mackclum is our mix engineer.
Our original music and theme is by Talk Bazaar at Talk ba z aar Underscore. Our show art was designed and illustrated by Holly Cassio at Holly c Asio.
In fact Check in by Serena Serlin. Legal service is provided by Rowan, Moron and File.
Our executive producer from Malton Hart is Jasmine J. T.
Green.
Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman.
A huge thank you and shout out to Lauren Purcell for all of her support.
A reminder that our friends have released six absolutely stunning Bruce covers to celebrate the series. There's a link in our show notes for the Queer Springsteen playlist.
Listen there. Don't forget to review the show on our podcast platform.
And tell your friends to listen. It makes a huge difference because the bust, the bust, the burst