Hey, this is Jordan. Before today's show, I want to tell you about the amazing thing that we're doing this weekend. We're having our first live show, and if you are in the New York City area, I would love to have you there. It's going to be this Sunday, September twenty ninth at two thirty pm at the LGBT Community Center in the West Village. It will be part of the Queer Voices Film Festival, and I will be interviewing Patrick ian Polk. He's the creator of the historic queer
TV show Noah's Arc. And you can get your free ticket, yes, a free ticket at Queer VOICESNYC dot com. I'll see you this Sunday. What We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Outspoken podcast Network.
So Stewart immediately runs back to see what's going on, and the street scene was just chaotic. I mean, there were flames were roaring out of the windows. He would have seen people trapped trying to get out of the windows, people badly burned on stretchers. He would have seen ambulances. He would have heard shrieking and screaming, and so Stuart just kind of beheld all this from the street and was just utterly devastated. That was the night that really changed his life.
As a gay kid, growing up religious in the South, I felt being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll talk to Frank Perez, a gay historian from New Orleans who became an expert on the
life of Stuart Butler. We'll learn how the deadliest fire in New Orleans history that killed thirty two queer people, shaped Stewart's life, and how because of it he would go on to shape the queer landscape of New Orleans and the American South. For my Heart podcast, I'm Jordan U Solve This and this is what We Loved. It took me months to come up with a title for this show. I'd been doing months of research on queer history and interviewing tons of people, and one night I
was reviewing my notes and I got really sad. My notes were full of people that were lost to aids and people that never got to come out and stories of getting beaten up or being in prisoned just for being queer. And I had this moment where I thought to myself, I don't really know if I want to make this show, if every single episode is only going to be sad. But when I looked at my notes again, there was a word that popped out. Love. It became clear to me that the thread of queer history is
but we loved in spite of all this adversity. Every single time, there's stories of triumph. My next guest, Frank Perez, is on the show to tell us one of them. He's a gay historian from New Orleans and he wrote a book about Stuart Butler, a political force for queer rights in Louisiana. Stuart became activist after witnessing the deadliest hate crime against LGBTQ people in American history, the Upstairs Lounge Fire. But before the fire, he never thought of
himself as an activist. He didn't even think of himself as a gay man.
So my name is Frank Perez, and I serve as the executive director of the LGBT Plus Archives Project of Louisiana.
So, Frank, it's amazing to have you here. You are one of the experts on the life of Stuart Butler, who really was instrumental in shaping queer life in New Orleans, in Louisiana, and really the American South. Unfortunately, he passed away in twenty twenty, but his legacy lives on, and I'm wondering, before we get to all of that, tell me how you actually met Stuart.
There are still a lot of people today that when you mentioned Stuart's name, they smile, they cry, They have stories about how he mentored them and encouraged them and whatnot. So his legacy lives on in multiple ways. But I initially contacted Stuart for a book I was writing. I wrote a book about the history of the oldest gay
bar in the city. And as I was writing that book and researching it, everybody I interviewed is like, well, you got to interview Stuart Butler if you talked to Stuart Butler, And I was like, who the hell is Stuart Butler? And so that's how I called him, made an appointment, showed up at his house. He actually materialized when he opened the door in this thick haze of cannabis smoke, and he tho an old hippie. You know,
just think Benjamin Franklin meets a CLU lawyer. He war shorts and t shirts with tashiki hats, and he he was just piercing blue eyes, very gentle soul, curmudgeonly exterior. And he invited me in. He introduced me to his dog, poured me a cup of coffee, and the first thing he said to me is there are many spirits in this house. And I believed him. And then he told me all about him, told me about Alfred and Greg and Richard and a dozen others, and that's how I met Stuart.
So you ended up learning a lot about Stuart's life and wrote his biography, Political Animal, tell us about how he grew up and when he realized he was gay.
Stuart was born in Mobile, Alabama, in nineteen thirty. He shortly thereafter moved to New Orleans, where he spent his toddler years, and his father eventually took a job about an hour away in Carville, Louisiana. It's important, I think for people to remembermember that in the nineteen forties and fifties and well into the seventies, you know, homosexuality was discussed as primarily a criminal issue or a psychiatric disorder
of very cold clinical terms. And Stewart told me that he really didn't come to grips with it until nineteen sixty four, and he'd actually, in the interim had been married briefly. Of course that didn't last. So I think he had an inkling that he was different, and he knew that was not something he could be open about. That would come a little bit later.
So, you know, you mentioned a little bit about homosexuality being a criminal issue. Tell me more about that, Like, what was it like sort of coming of age in New Orleans and in the American South as a gay person in the fifties, sixties, and even the early seventies.
Well, homosexuality has been criminalized for most of our national history, and in New Orleans. That kind of surprises people because today New Orleans is a very open, tolerant, inclusive city and that's wonderful, But it wasn't always that way because the city actually in the nineteen fifties adopted a very
aggressive hostile posture. Actually the mayor actually formed a committee called the Committee on the Problem of Sex Deviates, and they would harass gay bars and tried to drive out all the home sexuals from the French Quarter, which did not work. Obviously, anybody who's been in the French Quarter knows that. But it was the city was very hostile for a long time toward clearness.
Well, you know, how was Stuart responding to all of this, because you mentioned that he decided to come out later. How was that process for him balancing all of this and deciding, no matter what all these people are saying about being gay, I am gay.
Well it was a gradual process, that's the short answer. So he kind of came out to himself and started exploring gay night life in the French Quarter and was out to other people at the bars, but was still not out at work, was still not out generally. And when Stuart was exploring the gay bars in the sixties and seventies, it was dangerous because if the police raided a gay or a lesbian bar, not only were you arrested and all the bs that comes with that, but
your name would often appear in the paper. You were often fired from your job, or evicted from your apartment, or cut off from your family. Worst case scenarios, you might be put in a mental institution. And unfortunately, a lot of cases being outed in such a dramatic fashion
led people to suicide. And at this time, the sixties and early seventies, there was actually a psychiatrist at Ulan University who was convinced he could cure gay men of their homosexuality by lebotom them and inserting electrodes into their brain. His name was doctor Robert Heath. That was the mentality. This was a mental illness. It was sick, it was degenerate and not good.
So these are really the forces that Stewart is sort of going up against. He's going up against criminality, fear of losing his livelihood, fear of losing his housing, fear of losing his family. And then on top of that, there's obviously the conservative religious sort of air that comes along with living in the South too.
Yes, New Orleans was for a long time a super Catholic city, and so the Catholic Church has been no friend to the gay community. To their discredit, the gay community in New Orleans was very content with the way things were. They knew their place in retrospect that was a bad thing, but they were content with.
That, and their place was quote as second class citizens, really in the criminal class.
Well, their place was in the closet.
So we're now in the late sixties and early seventies. Stewart is out now going to gay bars and discovering his sexuality. Did he find love?
He met a lot of lovers, he actually got emotionally invested in one or two. Those did not last until Marty Gras weekend of nineteen seventy three. He and his friend Stephen Duplantis, who was actually living in Texas and San Antonio in the military, but he would come in
on the weekends. They would go bar hopping in the French Quarter, and during Martin Groun weekend of seventy three, they both spotted this really attractive young guy and Stuart said he looked just like Prince Valiant, and Stuart went up and met him and took him home that night. His name was Alfred Doolittle, who was in town, and the two fell in love and spent the rest of their lives together. So he did eventually find love. To answer your question, yes.
Well, so now tell me a little bit about queer nightlife at that point and what that was even like in New Orleans during this really closeted time for queer people.
Queer nightlife at that time meant one of two things. Either going to the bars, and there were a lot of gay and lesbian bars, or it meant entertaining at home in private parties and cocktail soires and things like that. Stuart Alfred were much more of the bar scene crowd. They went to bars all the time. The French Quarter is not a large area. It's under a square mile thirteen by what six blocks. I think people that lived throughout the city have always recognized the French Quarters as
kind of an odd place for eccentric characters. The rules don't necessarily apply there. But there were a lot of queer bars, gay and lesbian bars in the French Quarter at that time, and they were regulars at all of them.
One of the gay bars that Stuart frequented was called the Upstairs Lounge. You had to walk up a flight of thirteen creaky wooden stairs to get to it. It was a safe haven for Stuart, who was a land surveyor and countless other working class gay people in New Orleans. He knew that outside of this bar it was a different world. If he came out to his employer, he'd surely be fired, and if the Upstairs Lounge was rated
by the cops. He would probably go to jail and be charged with crimes against nature, and the papers would likely publish his name in the criminal section, publicly outing him. But for Stuart, spending time at the Upstairs Lounge was worth it. This was his community, his family well.
The Upstairs Lounge was a gay bar on the edge of the quarter on a street called Iberville Street, which had a number of gay bars, three or four gay bars. It was just one of his favorite places to go. It occupied the second floor of a building, so you had to go up a stairwell to access the bar, hence the name Upstairs Lounge, and everybody was welcome. Unlike a lot of the other bars at that time, a lot of the gay bars didn't want women, a lot of the lesbian bars didn't allow men, and all the
bars were racially segregated for the most part. But the Upstairs Lounge was the exception. It just had a really casual, warm, family community feel vibe, and Stewart's favorite night to go there, along with Alfred, was Sunday nights. And Sunday nights the Upstairs Lounge would host what they called a beer bust, and that was the night that really changed his life.
On the night of Sunday, June twenty fourth, nineteen seventy three, Stuart and his boyfriend Alfred Doolittle went to the Upstairs Lounge for their beer Bus special. For just one dollar, you could get two hours of unlimited draft beer. At first, it was just like any other Sunday night. Little did Stuart know this night would be the catalyst that would transform him from a low key gay man just minding his business to one of the most important figures in New Orleans history.
The Upstairs Lounge was the subject of an arson attack on June twenty fourth in nineteen seventy three and killed thirty two people. It said deadly aspire in New Orleans history, even to the day and until the pulsemasacre in Orlando in twenty sixteen. It was the deadly's crime against gays in lesbians inter nation's history, and it never really got
the attention I think it deserved. That's becoming better now, But I think one of the reasons that it has been lost in the national narratives of queer history is that it was not a traditional hate crime. It was not the arsonist was not a religious zelot trying to purge the world of evil sodomites.
Tell us what happened that night.
That weekend, Stuart and Alfred had gone bar hopping. They end up at the Upshairs Lounge, as was their custom on Sunday evenings. Stuart is at the bar talking to his hairdresser and his other friends at the bar when a fight breaks out. This young sex worker named Roger Nunez had gotten into a fight with another regular named Mike Scarborough and had been just creating problems the whole evening,
and the bartender had enough. The bartender's name was Buddy Rasmussen, who was also a friend of Stuart's, and Buddy put him out. As he is being thrown out of the bar, Roger Nunez says, I'm going to come back and burn you all out of here. Most people didn't pay much attention. It's just a kid getting thrown out of a bar, happens all the time. But Alfred overheard this. Stuart Alfred heard him make that threat. Then Alfred and Stuart get into a huge fight. Because Alfred is frightened, he takes
the threat seriously. He says Stuart we've got to go, and Stuart was like, you're overreacting, you're being paranoid. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine. So they have this huge fight and ultimately Alfred prevails upon Stewart to leave. So they exit the bar and they walk down the street to the next corner to another gay bar called Wanda's. Well, they had not even ordered a drink at Wanda's when
they heard the fire trucks. This young man had walked to a pharmacy of Walgreens right across the street from Wanda's and purchased a can of lighter fluid and brought it back to set the bar on fire. I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that Alfred and Stuart probably walked right across his path on the sidewalk when he was coming back to set the bar on fire. It was that quick, and it was all within one block.
And who was Roger Nunez.
He was actually a closeted gay mane himself, who was a member of the community. He had grown up in a small town a couple of hours west of New Orleans called Abbeville. Very Catholic, he drank a lot, probably had substance abuse issues, maybe mental issues. But he was a very troubled young man. He was the kind of guy that when he walks in the bar, all the regulars just kind of roll their eyes and say, oh God, not this one again. And he was just a part of the scene.
So Stuart, here's the fire trucks. What does he do?
So Stuart immediately runs back to see what's going on. Alfred did not want to be a part of that. Alfred had a lot of issues himself. Alfred was paranoid, schizophrenic, and any kind of sirens or emergency vehicles would kind of set him off. He didn't like that, so he stayed at the bar. But Stuart went back to the upstairs block away and the street scene was just chaotic. I mean, there were flames were roaring out of the windows. He would have seen people trapped trying to get out
of the windows. The windows had security bars. If he were skinny enough to squeeze through the bars and drop down to safety one floor, he did that, but not everybody could do that. Buddy Resimus and the bartender had led about twenty people out of the building through a rear fire escape, which was not clearly marked. But Stuart would have been on the street along with all these
other people watching this insanity unfold. He would have maybe seen Buddy Rasmussen actually grab Roger Nunez, who was in the street as well, and present Nenez to a police officer and say this is the guy who said he was going to set the barn fire. And the police officer's reaction was move along, sir, you know, just no response whatsoever. So Stuart would have been horrified. He would have seen people badly burned on stretchers, he would have
seen ambulances. He would have heard shrieking and screaming. And let's not forget the odors. Burning flesh does not smell good, and there would have been a lot of burning flesh. Thirty two people died in that fire. A dozen or so survived, but they were badly burned as well. And so Stuart just kind of beheld all this from the street and was just utterly devastated. I mean, you can imagine the myriad of emotions one goes through. He almost died in many respects alf saved his life that.
Night well, and I guess Frank I also wanted to take a moment to just realize that these were some of his friends and in a place that he sort of considered his safe and sacred space, in a time where it wasn't really easy to be gay in any way.
That's right. And Stuart told me that the hardest part was the next day, which was a Monday, having to go to work and pretend like he had not been affected by this. You know, Suppressing all that anxiety and sadness and all the other emotions you're dealing with is bad enough, but then not reacting to homophobic slurs and jokes, and there were a lot of them. Trying to suppress all that emotion was really difficult for Stuart.
Well, how did the city sort of respond to this horrific fire that you mentioned killed thirty two people?
Not well, hardly at all. Really. The mayor had nothing to say about it. The Archbishop of the Catholic Church issued a simple statement, no Catholic funerals for anybody who died in that fire. A lot of the churches refused to host a memorial service. Radio commentators would make jokes like what doll we bury the remains in? And the punchline would be fruit jars. The city was pretty homophobic
and did not react well. That was the real hate crime, honestly, But eventually it just faded away, and even today in New Orleans, a lot of New Orleanians still don't know about the fire.
Stuart Butler had just witnessed the deadliest fire in New Orleans history and the deadliest hate crime on LGBT people in American history. Not only did the city barely respond, but justice was never served. The alleged arsonist, Nunas, was never charged by police, and a year after the fire, Nunaz died by suicide. To this day, the arson remains an unsolved crime. The city didn't seem to care because the victims were of a criminal class.
I think the whole experience affected Stuart in a couple of ways. Personally, I think it cemented his relationship with Alfred. I mean, you can only imagine they'd only been together a few months at that point. But it also rekindled in Stuart a long dormant desire to get involved with politics, and Stuart and Alfred got really politically motivated by the fire, but not really active until a few years later. What
really enabled Stuart's activism was Alfred inheriting his fortune. Alfred came from a very wealthy family, and when he inherited that fortune, he told Stuart in nineteen seventy eight, I want you to retire from your job and become a full time queer activist, and Stewart said, of course yes.
So one of the first things they did was they purchased this really historic, beautiful creole cottage on Esplanade Avenue, which is just a few blocks in the French Quarter, and a lot of organizing queer activism took place in that house. It's called the Faery Playhouse.
So what was some of the activism that Suwart got involved in.
The touchstone of the queer rights movement in New Orleans was really in nineteen seventy seven, which would have been four years after the fire, when Anita Bryant came to town. Anita Bryant was this popular singer, beauty queen kind of celebrity who was hired by the Florida Citrus Commission to sell their orange juice. And in nineteen seventy seven, Miami Dade County passed an ordnance affording protection from discrimination for gay, lesbian and employees of the city, and Anita Bryant was
really homophobic, super religious. She thought that was bad because homosexuals are evil and we're going to bring usher in the end of the world, and we worship Satan in sacrifice kittens to the devil and blah blah blah. So she launches this campaign to have that ordinance repealed, and she was successful. They overturned it, and when that happened,
she became the darling of the religious right. So she starts this national campaign called Save Our Children, and New Orleans was one of her first stops, and the local community we're like, we're going to have a protest rally.
Even though Stuart witnessed many of his friends die in the fire, it would be another four years before he or any other queer activists in New Orleans would take action. The turning point was a concert that Anita Bryant was giving in nineteen seventy seven. She had become the spokesperson for the anti gay movement in America. Her main talking point was that homosexuals can't reproduce, so they have to
recruit our children. She had successfully led a repeal of a gay rights ordinance in Miami, and her next move was to make sure that gay teachers would be banned from public schools. Her concert in New Orleans was a moment for the queer people there to finally organize. Stewart and several other activists planned a rally to protest it, but they weren't sure if many people would actually show up.
They were astonished at the turnout, you know, because it was still very closeted at the time. They were probably hoping for maybe five hundred people. Was more like three or four thousand, And the timing was right, and that was like the first major significant public demonstration on behalf of clearer. It's not the first, but the first big one, and that was really a touchstone for the movement in
New Orleans. And so Stuart went to the rally. He and Alfred marched and got really super involved after that.
A few years after the Anita Bryant protest, Stuart realized the importance of gay people becoming politically active. If they didn't stand up for themselves, they would have no rights and would continue to be discriminated against or worse neglected like they were in the fire. So in nineteen eighty Stuart became a founding member of the Louisiana Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus or lag PACK. He was determined
to enshrine gay protections into law. And so you know, as time goes on, what was Stuart able to accomplish as a result of this gumption to have equality for queer people after the fire.
Well, he would tell you that his proudest accomplishment was his work with lag PACK and other groups when they convinced the New Orleans City Council to adopt a non discrimination ordinance affording gay and lesbian people protection here in New Orleans.
What was the story of that ordinance and what was the significance of it.
Well, the ordinance was first proposed in nineteen eighty four and it failed, and they tried it again in nineteen eighty six, and again it did not pass. And his back room, a lot of religious preachers and religious fanatics are, you know, spouting all these conspiracy theories and how dire it's going to be if they acknowledge that gay people exist. And the vote came and it failed, and one of the council members said, I didn't vote for this because
you haven't proved your case. He said, I need evidence that you've been discriminated against, and that homophobic violence is an issue. And so they were disappointed when the vote came, but they all retired to a lesbian bar named Charlene's and they regrouped. And it was at that hearing and after party at Charlene's that Stuart met a man named Richard McGill, and McGill was very interested in getting involved. And mcgil said, if that council person wants to study done,
I can do that. He's surveyed like over four thousand people. And so when they went back again in nineteen ninety one on the third try, they produced this report based on the survey they did, called Exposing Hatred. When it came time to vote, the council person, who had voted no last time said, I finally have my proof and
I vote yes. And so when the ordinance was passed past five to two, the room just exploded in cheers and applause, and it was just a really great day for queer rights in New Orleans.
And what was sort of a stake as he was fighting for this ordinance, Like from his perspective, why was it important?
I think it was important in a very tangible way, so that people wouldn't have to worry about getting fired or being discriminated against regard to housing or employment or whatever. But more than that, more than those tangible benefits, it was a symbolic gesture that the paradigm shift in terms of public attitudes towards queerness were actually happening, that change was occurring, and it was something that he worked really
hard on. He also was a very central figure in the trans rights movement as well, not just locally but nationally, which is odd because he was as cisgender old white gay man. You know. He and a trans woman named Courtney Sharp convinced the local p FLAG chapter in New Orleans to include trans people in their mission statement, which is one of the first p FLAG chapters to do that, and then they turned their attention to the national stage
and they convinced. Took them several years, but they eventually persuaded national p FLAG in nineteen ninety eight to include trans people in their mission statement, and that was the first time a national LGB organization had done that. And so that's like a pretty important contribution to national trans history that came out of New Orleans as a direct result of Stuart Butler's activism, and I think he was pretty proud of that as well.
You know, Frank, having been an expert on Stuart's life, I wonder for you, what do you think sort of sums up Stuart's impact on New Orleans and really the American South.
I can tell you that queer organizing in New Orleans and the queer community in New Orleans would look a lot different if Stuart had not done what he did. And I think I would point to all the people, all the young people that he mentored, he saved, He actually literally provided housing for people that had been kicked out of their homes. His age activism was just profound. I mean, there are his home today, the Fairy Playhouse has a little memorial garden in the rear where there
are like twenty two activists partially buried back there. So I can't put my finger on just one thing. His effect on the queer community New Orleans was pervasive and still lingers today in just about everything.
In nineteen ninety seven, Stuart and lack Pack would champion a bill in the Louisiana State legislature that would enshrine protections for gape people at the state level. It would make Louisiana the first state in the Deep South to pass a hate crimes law protecting sexual orientation, and it would make New Orleans the official safe haven for queer
people in the South. But Stuart's final project would come close to the end of his life, and it was about finding a way to pass down all of the culture and the history that he lived through to the next generation of queer people.
The LGBT Plus Archives project was his last great project. He and I both started that when I guess he was must have been eighty two, and I'll never forget Today he called me and a few other people that were interested in queer history to his home at the Faery Playhouse and he had arranged like thirty twenty five or thirty banker's boxes. They were like, Stuart, what is
all that shit? And he was like, these are papers and from all my activism, the minutes from meetings and agendas for board meetings and membership rosters and posters for protests and drag shows and this and that. And He's like, all this shit's going to be lost when I die.
I don't know what's going to happen to it. We need to think about how we can preserve queer history because there are other people in issues too, and we thought that's a good point, and so he challenged us to meet at the Faery Playhouse once a month for a year and we just brainstormed what can we do to preserve queer history? And the result of those brainstorming meetings was the creation of a nonprofit organization called the
LGBT Plus Archives Project of Louisiana. And so since twenty twelve, this organization has facilitated countless donations of substantial collections of material to museums, archival repositories, and libraries all across the state. And I think that is a real testimony to Stewart because it was his vision, it was his challenge, and he was a big part of that and he would be proud of the work we continue to do today. And I'm privileged also to serve as that organization's executive director.
Now, Frank, for you, you're a historian, you are an LGBT storian. You're also a gay man yourself living in New Orleans, and I wonder what it was like for you to personally learn this history and to learn about Stuart and the impact that he had on your life.
Oh well, I was incredibly fortunate to have met Stuart, and Stuart and I became very good friends. Stuart was I don't want to say he was like a father to me, but maybe a spiritual activist father to me and a good friend. I mean. I was with Stuart the night that he died. His friends knew the end was near, and they had a little pot lut gathering at his place. He was in the bed, kind of bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness, and I remember holding
his hand and said I was writing the book. I hadn't published the book at that time, but I was just about done with it. And I told him, you know, the book's going to go to print soon, and I think he's going to be pleased with He squeezed my hands, so I knew he couldn't understand what I was saying. And we set our goodbyes and we went home, and I got the call the next morning that he had passed away that night. And the thing that moved me the most was the amount of history this man impacted,
the number of lives that he touched. He led a very consequential life, and I just feel so fortunate to have known him. He was an amazing name.
Frank, you had mentioned that young people and mentorship was really important to him. If Stuart were alive here today, what do you think he would tell our audience, our listeners of this show.
Well, the first thing he would say is probably a cheesy, flirtatious remark, because even at the age of eighty nine when he died, he still like to flirt with young people. He loved young people. But I think he would the advice he would give would be follow your dreams, follow your heart and if people don't share your vision, fuck him. Do what you feel is right in your heart. And I think he would say that they are perfectly capable of making a difference, even if they don't think they can.
And I think anybody, the young people I think it meets to it would would just like everybody he met and would walk away feeling strengthened, edified, emboldened, encouraged, inspired.
The show is called but We Loved. What do you think that means in the context of Stuart's life.
I think I would on the conjunction, but because that implies something before, right, So Stuart loved, and he loved well, and he loved a lot. But that came at a cost. I mean that came at a lot of heartache and a lot of pain. To me, it speaks to all the obstacles he had to overcome, and gay men and women and trans people in that time period, the threat of being arrested, the age, epidence, the whole nine yards. Despite all that, But we Loved And that's what Stuart did.
He overcame every obstacle life through at him, and he showed people his life was an example of how to love despite all this other bullshit. He really was a man who loved well.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New episodes drop ever Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at Butweloved at gmail dot com or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at but We Loved. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey pat Our executive producers
are Me and Maya Howard. Original music by Steve Boone Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Rokel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.