Queer Joy Isn't Easy

I just I had to do the math. For six years, Andrew Marcello has been the producer extraordinaire behind WOKF, behind WOKF when WOKF was that serious, then when it moved to DNR and d CP, and now with me still at iHeart and I can't tell you how much of a pleasure and just an extraordinary opportunity to work with someone who is just as passionate about the topics that you cover, about the work that you do as you do right. And it isn't often to have a colleague

who just gets it and gets you. And that's how I have felt about Andrew for the last six years. In the work that we've done to build woke F into a brand, into a show into something that has, you know, a footprint and robust commentary on the world that we are living in. And so today I'm very happy to welcome Andrew back on Mike to have a

conversation about what pride means to him this year. And you know what, how do we we at WOKF have made it our theme this month to say you can't ban queer joy, But we also recognize that being joyful holding joy in this moment of great despair and stress

a job in and of itself. And so we get into a very real conversation about how we hold these things, how we hold the complications of this moment, and give some advice and some thoughts on how we can all do our part to help things feel a little bit better and look a little bit better. So coming up next my conversation with my producer extraordinaire Andrew Marshella. Folks,

I am so excited to welcome to the show. This is not and it's weird to welcome in front of the camera, I guess on the actual microphone, not to the show, which is my producer extraordinaire of WOKF for the last Oh my God, five six years one does not even know Andrew Marcello, who is the person that makes wok F tick and happen, and it's here and queer with us as we wrap up Pride. You can't ban queer joy on WOKF. Andrew, Welcome in front of the mic.

this month. You know, last year, if you were not a okay if listener back then, or you know, if you recall last year, our theme was Pride as a Riot because at the time there was a lot of what we referred to as rainbow capitalism and just you know, literally like banks and all these institutions putting up rainbows for you know, on June first, and then on June thirtieth they go away and everything goes back to the

status quo. So, you know, at the time, it was like, let's remember that pride started as like a fight for our rights, and now here we are a year later and we don't have to be reminded. And so I think the idea of emphasizing queer joy was great and admirable in its intent, but the not But at the same time, the unfortunate reality is that we are fighting a lot, and so if anything, it should be a

reminder that, like queer joy is a necessity. And like you know, some people have said this month that queer joy can also be a tool for fighting, and I believe in that as well. But it's also this year strikingly difficult two be joyous in the face of everything.

get a sense from you. You know, you have been a part of a time where you've both witnessed marriage equality happened, were old enough to like be like, oh my god, look at this marriage equality it has happened, and then also watched the fierce backlash that has happened in less than a decade after that momentous day. And I want to know, like, for somebody who you know has witnessed this at a younger age than myself, like how that happened? Like what are all those emotions of like, oh,

it's possible. I guess it's not like, oh, we're making feel like it's not possible.

It's not just a desire to feel that way. I can't possibly not believe that a better world than this is not only possible theoretically, because like, how can a better world than this not be possible, but also that a better world than this is possible, a better society, a better America, whatever. But I really think a better world than this is possib in reality, but it takes so much, And that's that conversation is like so beyond I think the scope of what we're talking about today

and the scope of my own knowledge and expertise. But absolutely I believe a better world is possible. But it's I think if we had started on the path to a better world eight years ago compared to now, the fight would have been a lot less difficult. And I feel that a lot of ways. I feel that in regard to climate change and all this other stuff. But yes, unfortunately,

you know, you said a decade. I even feel like, you know, maybe five years, because I don't even feel it was, because everything was, but I don't even feel like it was a big focus of the Trump administration.

trans people are facing around the country. And I do think that that sort of started to be a focus of maybe not like the Trump administration, but certainly the right wing movement. And this is something where I think the US is often a leader around the world and hate, but I feel like this is something where like maybe there was trans not maybe there was transphobia in the US, absolutely, and it's sort of it. It diminished from if you think about like the nineties and the two thousands, comedy

movies and the things that were like to punchlines. We still have progress from that time, but we had definitely like progressed. We weren't in that society anymore. And that's a good thing, and for some people that was not

a good thing. But what I'm trying to get at is, like I think, when this stuff that we saw coming out of Great Britain and the UK, and like I'll call them by their name because they're proud of it now, TERFs the trans exclusionary radical feminists who shouldn't like that term came from Tumblr because at the time that was people who like were in the radical feminist movement, which is a fringe of a fringe. And then also those

people were radical feminists who excluded trans women. That is all that turf, And now like turf is almost like euphemistic to refer to anyone who's transphobic. You don't have to be a feminist, you don't have to be a radical feminist. If you hate trans women, you're a So that's trans misogyny, that's not terfism, yep. And you should call things by their name. And I'm not like calling you out. I'm just saying, like I'm on a big stream of consciousness. Now, there was so much I wanted to say.

you brought up a couple of really important things. I think it's really interesting that during the four years of the Trump administration, for as horrendous as it was right for people of color, for undocumented people, for you know, for a whole for you know, our national security, all of these things, the crowning, you know, jewel of the Trump administration was not to go after the LGBTQ community Like that was not what Donald Trump spent the last

the four years of his administration doing and so for me. But he's doing it. He's doing it now in order to keep pace with the other Republicans, namely Ron DeSantis out of Florida, who has made it right, who has made it his like his entree into politics in a real way. Look how big and bad I am. Look how tough I am to take on this marginalized community

and be as cruel as possible. Look, I can be cruel too, Right, He needed a target because when Donald Trump came down the escalator, he said, my target is Mexicans and Muslims, and you know, and these people of color.

Rond Desant is like, oh, that was taken, so I got to find another group that I can target and right, So I think that that is really interesting, but also a throwback to the nineteen eighties, to the Save Our Children campaign, to all of the things that this set of people white Evangelical Christians were doing in the eighties.

They've just remixed it for the twenty first century. And when I think about that, I think about everything that is old is always new again if you refuse to teach history and you refuse to create guardrails to make sure that those things can't come back and don't come back. And I just you know, you said that you like remain hopeful in terms of wanting to believe that we can do better than what we are doing right now. And I swear to God if I didn't believe that,

I wouldn't get out of bed. However, do you what are your feelings about the generations that preceded you and the mistakes that were made to not guard and ensure that we weren't going to continue to backslide every time we made a bit of progress.

very post Reagan president. I feel that, you know, having learned American history, the Clinton years were sort of a post Reagan society and through pros and cons of that, but socially, you know, my uncle is gay, and that was the era of don't ask, don't tell, and I think the don't ask, don't tell policy in the military kind of set a tone socially at least for what was going on in my white suburban world. Because my

uncle had a domestic partner. They lived in a house together and had two dogs, and it like so I would ask, you know, is uncle Tom married? Are they are the two of them married? And I would get told no. They would tell me, as a child to my face, that that my uncle's domestic partner was not his husband, which it was true, but like you know what I mean, and they at a certain point when I learned more, it became he's not gay, which was a lie. They were lying to me as a child.

And so I think about like when people say things like how am I going to talk teachers? How am I going to tell my children? How am I going to explain this to my children? It's the explanation, isn't the problem? You just don't want your kids to know? And we're going back to that. And I see so much of that, and then we went through the Bush

years and all this other stuff. But ultimately a society I alluded to, like you know, transphobia in movies, and I think just in general as a society, you know, we stopped using the f slur. There were things that were progress, and now I feel that progress is being clawed back, and maybe even to an era that I didn't exist, which is scary, like to think about the desire to go back to like the Reagan era, or even on like abortion rights, you know, back further like they.

But but to address your direct question, which is how do I feel about the previous generations, it's complicated because I tend to think that like people on a on a on a micro scale, on an individual scale don't have a lot of power. And I think there was a lot of institutional uh erosion of the power of the people in the decades before I was born. And I don't entirely think of that as society's fault. I'm sure you know, people were voted into power, there were

desires that voted in people into power. I blame really those people, the people whose desire it was to take society backwards. It's hard for me to fault people in general, because you know, some people were beaten down. Some they they you know, the move in Philadelphia. It's not like

some people weren't trying the Black Panthers. There's stuff that people were doing and they really got beaten down by society, even like in my lifetime the free speech zones during the Iraq War protests, And it's easy to it's easy to be a younger person, either who was alive and young at the time, or who maybe even wasn't alive at the time during the Iraq War and look back at that and be like, well, how did people let that happen? How did people let their First Amendment rights

get taken away? How did it get reduced to a punchline on the rest of development, and it's like that wasn't you know, there was a combination of factors that led to that. It's hard for me to blame the populace for getting whipped up in Iraq War hysteria after

a national traumatizing event. People took advantage of nine to eleven and used that to sell the populace on this horrible ideology that was already in green from the Reagan years and not He Man, G I Joe and all that bowl crap, and you know that carried through to the nineties, and this whole idea that the military are heroes and the police are heroes and everybody's good guys, Like we're just as a society coming like a mainstream society coming around to the idea that, like, maybe the

police aren't the good guys, Like that is a mainstream idea in maybe like the last four years. So it is really hard for me to fault people in the past for not breaking out of their mental bubbles. You know, I once went off on my grandma, bless her when when she was still around and I was full of piss and vinegar in my college punk rock years, and I really went off on her and I was like, what did.

have jobs because of you know, the climate of capitalism and greed that you all have bought into. Right, So like there is yeah, and it's natural to have and it's right. I think that it's righteous. Right, it is it is righteous anger to be like when you had the opportunity, not again, individuals, right, but when the collective

has the opportunity to make change. It's like, it's how I feel right now as I look back on the Obama years, and I think, wow, I really was a part of this collective that thought that we made it. I really like got super complacent and thought that the sky's the limit from here. It did not occur to me. And I'm a fucking student of history and politics that like, oh no, the white lash, the backlash, all of it was coming right and it was actually happened happening concurrently.

I don't know for you, Andrew, I will ask, like I talk about this on the show all the time, about how I try and hold on to joy, about how I try and center self care and emotional wellbeing in a time where anxiety and depression are so high. I mean, the amount of people that young people and older people that became medicated during the pandemic and beyond, I think went up like I don't want to say,

but it was like over half of the population. It went up in percentage in terms of In terms of that, I talk about the fact that I'm in therapy and have been for many years, and thank God, because I don't know how I get through this time. So how do you center your self care? What does that look like for you? And how do you try and remain I don't know, somewhat balanced at a time that wants to like every headline, every tweet, every moment can literally throw you off.

from a just place. When I think about that righteous anger, though, it's like we have to remember and not just young people, we have to remember that that anger, you know, does need to be directed systematically, Like I think about like just as an example of the story of Kitty Genevieve's and for years it was presented as a psychological study in this this concept of the bystander effect. It turns

out the cops made that shit up. They just like that story was totally doctored and the cops were incompetent, but they went, well, you know, thirty eight people or however many washinged and did nothing, so it's not our fault. And so all this time we were mad at the innocent, not innocent like I'm sure some people. Some people tried

to call the cops and the cops didn't answer. But you get told a story and then it becomes well, thirty eight people washed and did nothing, So it's the thirty eight people's fault and not the NYPD whose actual job it was to help that person. And that also now to spring off that I am not a mental health professional. If you are a younger person listening to this, first of all, thank you tell your friends. Second of all, i've seen the age demographics. Please tell your young friends.

high school girls. But yeah, it's like half so one two One in two high school students is dealing with anxiety or depression. I'm not an expert, but what I do, I'm in therapy. Having miners in therapy is tricky with the parents stuff and disclosure. But if you are a good parent and you have a trusting relationship with your child and they're having issues, you know, try looking into psychiatry and psychology if you haven't already. I'm very much in that as well. I've been in therapy for years.

It's never ending. Some of it comes from my own stuff, but sometimes it is the horrors of the world. When I started therapy, I would go to my therapist and I'd be like, what am I supposed to do? I'm just one person and the world is falling apart, and one person of the population has all the money, like one percent of one percent of the population has all the money and all this and you can't So here's what I do. You can't do anything about it. That does not mean that a better give up on the

idea that a better world is possible. That does not mean stop doing stuff. That does not mean stop caring That does not mean stop being active in community. That actually means be more active in your community, because all you can do is the change that you can create as an individual person is the change in your community.

If you get collectively organized with a group of people in your community, and you are a type of person who is a leader, even if you are a young person, you have a community, get your community organized, or if you have a friend who is a leader type and is like minded, link up with them and organize with them. The more we get organized, the more we can do things on mass and then we can start to affect things.

But all we can do is individual Like you know, I know that you're into plants, Danielle, I'm not so much into plants. The community garden is important, you know, community kitchens or food pantries, like being involved with the people around you. If you're a person I think who thinks like Danielle and I do, and you care about the world and you're compassionate and you're sensitive to negativity going on in the world on a massive macro scale,

try making the little world around you better. Where you are, plant things, feed people, take care of those around you, get to know the people in your community if you don't already, and I'm not talking about it's a good first step, but I'm not talking about getting on nextdoor, like actually know your neighbors, know what they're If you live in an apartment building, know the people around you. If you have leftover food, don't just throw it out,

ask your neighbors if they want some. You know, just the little things that I wasn't alive in this society for that. I grew up in the era of lock your doors, no one is trustworthy, but my grandparents came from it. Can I borrow a cup of sugar? I bake the pie and I have way too much? Would you like a slice of pie? There's nothing you're not gonna hurt anyone with that. You're not going to hurt anyone.

largest scale. Final question for you, Andrew, which is, you know, we did this big Pride month, you know, special every single day, but Pride is three hundred and sixty five days of the year. So for those people who you know, like the corporations that will take down their rainbow flags or just put it away, what do you want people to sit with in terms of like how we look at Pride for the other eleven months of the year. Uh.

down on June thirtieth, keep it up. You know. In some places like the these are fringe examples, but like the gaming subreddit has had a Pride banner for like over a year because Pride ended and enough people were like, don't you fucking change that? That they just never changed it,

and why not? And that's I think that was a good focus to like, because queer people don't stop existing on June and the Yeah, and like you mentioned before, now we're seeing this backlash where companies like bud Light and Target and not even the ones that are facing backlash. But in the face of that, you know, Starbucks is telling stores not to put up pride displays. They're being preemptive about it. That's horrifying. They do want to put

us back into the closet. And so an important thing I would say, even if it's not joyous, if your queerness doesn't manifest, enjoy it this time, that's okay. It's just be out and loud and proud if you can. You should be three hundred and sixty five or three hundred and sixty six days a year. I stream on on Twitch. I play video games and give commentary, and I'm on camera and I have some people I very much emphasize I'm in the lgbt Q tag, I'm in

the queer tag, I'm in the pan sexual tag. And you know, when I talk on stream, I will openly you know, like thirst over characters of any gender that are in games. I'll make jokes about it. I'll make references to it. And some people who know me, like in real life, who I've known for years initially, like would message me and be like, you know, why are you playing up your queerness on stream? Like why are you? Like are you making that part of your image? I

would get these different questions. It's like, no, this is who I am. You just didn't see it so much. And this is a place for me to be me and for me to show myself to the world. And so if you want to know me better, this is like authentic. This isn't a performance, and this is me using my platform, unfettered by anyone else, to be myself. And so that's what I would say for anyone else out there in whatever way, that you have the power and the ability to self express and be yourself and

be loud. And hey, if you're pushing back against something, push back as far as you can whatever is safe for you. You should try to push back because it's the only way that you know, we all get out of the closet. We thought the closet, I mean I thought I thought the closet was like done for I didn't even think about it anymore. It was like, well, when

you're you know, when you're ready, you come out. It's I didn't like they're they're trying to bring back the closet and then shove it us all back in it, and we can't let them. That's what we say.