Queer Voices
Queer Voices
12/11/24 Queer Voices: Artists Nick Vaughn and Jake Margolis and author Zachary Steele
Wce speak with artists Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin are Houston-based interdisciplinary artists creating an ongoing series of fifty installations made in response to little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories from each state. This multi-decade endeavor draws from recent groundbreaking academic work, the artists’ own archival research, and significant time spent learning from and collaborating with local LGBTQ community members.
Then we speak with Zachary Steele author of the book “Between the Lines”. Zachary Steele is a storyteller with a passion for blending the extraordinary and the deeply personal. From magical streets to neon-lit futures, Zachary’s novels explore love, identity, and the human condition through speculative fiction. With immersive worlds and unforgettable characters, his work spans genres like supernatural mystery, science fiction, and contemporary romance, captivating readers with heartfelt emotion and adventure.
Queer Voices airs in Houston Texas on 90.1FM KPFT and is heard as a podcast here. Queer Voices hopes to entertain as well as illuminate LGBTQ issues in Houston and beyond. Check out our socials at:
https://www.facebook.com/QueerVoicesKPFT/ and
https://www.instagram.com/queervoices90.1kpft/
Hello everybody, this is Queer Voices, a podcast version of a broadcast radio show that's been on the air in Houston, texas, for several decades. This week, debra Moncrief-Bell has a conversation with Nick Vaughn and his husband about a new art exhibit they will be creating in Houston.
Speaker 2:We're going to be making a monumental drawing that is going to be surrounding the entire space, and on our website we have some images of what those drawings have looked like.
Speaker 1:In the past, we had an exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum of these drawings, and Debra has a conversation with Zachary Steele about his new book, which was just released.
Speaker 3:I started creating music, writing lyrics for songs, I started painting, again creating digital art, and those songs are actually what led me to writing is. I had a lot of fun writing those songs, but then I wanted to tell stories through longer formats and that's how Between the Lines started.
Speaker 1:Queer Voices starts now.
Speaker 4:This is Deborah Moncrief-Bell and I'm talking with husbands and artists, nick Vaughn and Jake Margolin, creating an ongoing series of 50 installations made in response to a little-known pre-Stonewall queer histories from each state. This multi-decade endeavor draws from recent groundbreaking academic work, the artists' own archival research and significant time spent learning from and collaborating with local lgbtq community members. And one of the things well, they were kind of going around the united states and somehow ended up coming to houston and falling in love with it and were intrigued by some of the stories, and one of those events was town meeting, one which took place in 1978. They're doing a whole lot of things and they were on queer voices a number of years ago, but they're back to talk a little bit about town meeting one and hopefully connecting with more people who may have actually been there. Tell me, in particular, how this part of the project started.
Speaker 2:We are putting on an exhibition at Art League Houston in the spring. That's going to have sort of two components. It's going to have a visual art installation that is based on archival research and some original photographs we're taking that are related to Town Meeting 1. And then it's going to have a two-day symposium in which we're going to be getting together as many people as we can who are stakeholders, who are passionate in this history, and start dreaming up what we all might do to commemorate the 50th anniversary of town meeting, which is coming up in 2028. And how it started was probably in our first meeting with Ray Hill, which, as you mentioned, was 10 years ago when we moved to Houston. We thought for six months to do some research and got to meet Ray at what used to be Mary's, naturally, of course.
Speaker 5:Now Blacksmith Coffee, and I think folks who know Ray probably know this very well. But the first thing that he said when he sat down with us was there are people who are going to disagree with the way that I tell stories, but I'm one of the last ones standing so I get to tell them however I want. And one of those stories that Ray managed to embellish a little bit was about Town Meeting 1. And he told us all about how the entire queer community had descended on the Astrodome and had this astonishing meeting in the Astrodome and we were just we were blown away. He sort of talked about the degree to which Town Meeting 1 had created the queer infrastructure of Houston you know, whether that's the Montrose Center or the Montrose Clinic which became Legacy Health and we sort of filed it away as something that we wanted to be working on at some point.
Speaker 2:And then I think it was actually at his funeral that it kind of re-entered our imagination because there had been so many projects in the interim and as we started to dive into it and learned, of course, very quickly that it had happened at the Astro Arena, we started to understand the incredible impact of this event, and so many people who we talked to, who aren't deeply involved in queer activism in Houston, had never heard of this event, and as they started to learn about it, they realized my gosh, this is like a seminal, pivotal thing that we should all really be knowing and celebrating. And so we decided well, we have a platform as artists, we can put together exhibitions and we're pretty good at getting people together, uh, to talk about things. Why don't we put together an exhibition and a symposium? And that way, when all of these different organizations and people start planning whatever they are going to plan for a 50th anniversary for town meeting, we can start cross-pollinating ideas.
Speaker 5:And our particular agenda is we can get artists involved in all of this, because we think that, as artists, we have a real like nimbleness of thought, of perspective and a lot of really diverse talents that our artistic community can bring to these efforts and particularly having, just you know, profoundly lost an election on a national scale to memes and social media, and it feels like in this moment there's something missing in the activist community or that we can help fill in from a creative perspective that artists may be uniquely able to do and of the many like. Obviously we know, houston has an astonishing activist history and has an astonishing artistic history and for the most part in our experience it has felt like those worlds are often siloed from each other, and so part of what we're hoping to do over the next four years and, you know, not just with a goal towards four years, but from now through the next four years and then hopefully moving forward is bring those communities together and get some of that communication happening.
Speaker 4:What has been the most intriguing thing that you've learned about town meeting so far?
Speaker 2:There are so many intriguing things about town meeting. We got to look through some of the original documents around it that are at the University of Houston Special Collections, and one of the things that really stuck out to me were the number of resolutions and proposals that you could see then play out through history, and some of those were things like a resolution to make a community center that would be able to house the entire community, and then there were other ones that we want to know more about. There was a resolution in there to change how city council members were elected at that point all of them and that there was a resolution in there to drive towards making city council members that represented individual districts, and we want to learn more about how much was that part of making that change?
Speaker 5:I think it was also just as we got in. I remember when we first heard about it, being utterly mystified as to how so much had been produced from a one-day meeting of 4,000 people, and as we started to go into the archives at U of H, beginning to realize what the structure was that had led up to it and the listening sessions and meetings that had happened before. That culminated in the creation of the workbook that in some ways, the meeting itself was just a sort of community approval or lack thereof of resolutions that had been made in these earlier meetings, and it started to open up for us different models as we, as we are pulling the community together, as we're beginning to think about what structure this might take and how we may get people to organize together, what models might be most effective, where open space meetings play a role, where Lois Weaver's long table discussions, where that form fits in, where consensus-driven governance fits in, and so it's just gotten us thinking a lot about form and the way to get really broad cross-community representation in these discussions.
Speaker 4:The community has grown a lot and it has become much more diverse. It should be very interesting to see what can come out of that, to be more inclusive and to make sure that all the diversity of the community is included. There was a town meeting too that took place in the 90s, and there were some problematic things about that. Again, it was over at what was called the Astro Hall. I did chair a platform meeting along with Linda Morales. One of the organizers apparently was not quite on the up and up, and so that event has kind of just dwindled away in history. I don't know anything that came out of it, anything positive or good. But now there's talk about a possible town meeting three, which I think would be nice to take place after your symposium. So that's something for people to put their thinking hats on and see what they think should be done with that.
Speaker 4:The original group, the core executive committee, consisted of four people. Rahil was one of them, charles Law, steve Shifflett and LaDonna Leak. Three of those people are no longer with us. We believe that LaDonna Leak is still around and possibly in Oregon, but we haven't found a way to contact her. So if anyone knows LaDonna and could put her in touch with Nick and Jake or give them information on how to reach her. That would be really great, because that would be a wonderful component to making all of this come together as it should. We have been searching out, I was asked to assist and I've been able to connect you to several people that we know were there and had an impact on the proceedings. What else are you looking for?
Speaker 2:Well, exactly the kind of connections that you've been wonderfully making for us is the main thing that we're looking for right now, and so if anybody who's listening was at Town Meeting 1 or was really active in any of the many contemporaneous movements that were happening in the late 70s in Houston, we would love to get in touch with you, we would love to hear your experiences and, of course, we would love to invite you to this symposium in the spring, which will be on June 7th and 8th at Art League Houston. We've put a link on our website where anybody can reach out to us. Our website is nickandjakestudiocom and that's Nick and Jake Studio, all spelled out, and on there we've got a link where you can just reach out to us and we will reach right back out to you. The way that we've made all of our work over the last decade of living in Houston has been a combination of doing archival research, which is incredibly fulfilling, but probably more importantly, from listening to people who have direct experience with things and with events.
Speaker 2:For this symposium, we're planning on putting together several panel discussions and some long table story sharing discussions, and then to also have some breakout sessions in which people can really share dreams and ideas, to start really thinking about what are the challenges that face our community, which, as you mentioned, is incredibly large and very diverse, and what are the different ways that we can address these needs. We know that, as artists, we have been often inclined towards making exhibitions, and it may very well be that we will come out of the symposium feeling like, oh, what we really want to do is make an exhibition that's about this history. Or it may be that we decide that what's needed is a book, or it may be that people will decide that what's needed is another gathering, or to dovetail with what's happening with the planning for town meeting three, and we just hope that all of these different, diverse perspectives are present and that out of it comes a whole lot of cross-pollinated ideas.
Speaker 5:In an ideal world, all of those happen. It's not an either-or approach, it's a yes. And every last one of these things that there's exhibitions, there's publications, there's gatherings, there's town meeting, three and that we can really mount a community response in force to this moment.
Speaker 4:Community response and force to this moment yes, that would be wonderful for it to generate more activism and more institutions or strengthen some of the current existing institutions. Your backgrounds are in theater, so how did you go from that, and what was your history in theater to doing essentially history research and making it art?
Speaker 5:We met through a devised theater company called the Team, which is a Brooklyn-based theater company that still exists and we still work with, and when I say devised theater, what I mean is that all of the work we did was written by and sort of created by the company and everyone in the room. So my background was a set and costume designer, jake's was a performer and writer, and everybody writes the show together and everybody conceives of the show together and everybody shapes the show together, and so in some ways it led very naturally into the kind of work that we wanted to be making. When it felt like, just as jake and I, as our relationship started and we started dreaming up other work, it suddenly just felt like it didn't fit in a theater, that it wasn't the kind of work that somebody might sit down and watch for 90 minutes, but was something a little more flexible in the way that viewers would experience it.
Speaker 2:I remember very clearly being in Arad, romania, with the great choreographer Yoshiko Chuma, who we were collaborating with, and we were walking down the street and we saw an empty building that we thought would be the perfect place in our dream world to house some of the ideas that we had been talking about. And then we realized, oh, that's a gallery. We're talking about galleries, we're talking about a gallery or museum space. And when we returned to the States, we received a really wonderful residency from an organization called the HERE Art Center in New York. That gave us a three-year residency with an incredible cohort of interdisciplinary artists and really let us make the shift into making visual art, making installation art, making video art. And in doing that project, we got to interview a lot of community elders, community members and activists and started to realize like, oh, this is actually, this feels like our calling.
Speaker 2:And then when we moved to Houston at the beginning of what we call our 50 states project, in which we're making installations in response to pretty old queer histories from each state, we'd moved here after completing one of these projects in Wyoming and we thought we'd be here for about six months and we absolutely fell in love with Houston, with the queer world in Houston, with the activist world and with the incredibly rich art world in Houston, and realized oh, this is where we want to be, these are the artists we want to be around, these are the activists we want to be around. And now, 10 years later, we're here and we've completed six more projects in that 50 States project. We've completed work in Colorado, in Arkansas, in Oklahoma, louisiana and in Texas, and, in particular, our Texas project has branched out into a number of other projects because we keep on learning about incredible things that we just feel absolutely compelled to make work about.
Speaker 5:And when we first showed up, I think we were sort of undercover theater artists. We came to town and we introduced ourselves as visual artists and we got a studio and we were making visual art and we still did some theater, but it was mostly in New York or out of town. And I think most of that was for just the internal shift in us and the way that we were approaching our practice and the way we were thinking about the things we were making. But as we got sort of more confident in what we were doing, I think we've come to realize that essentially everything we make, whether they're drawings or video works or lectures or gatherings are ultimately at their base all narrative and in a way that we're still just, we're making theater, just not in theatrical spaces Should.
Speaker 2:I share the story about Sheila Pepe.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, so there's an incredible artist named Sheila Pepe who was doing an exhibition at Diverse Works at the same time that we had an exhibition at Art League in 2015, I believe and that was an exhibition about our Wyoming piece, for which we had retraced this 1843 expedition of 100 same-sex attracted men from St Louis to a remote lake in Wyoming in the Wind River Mountains where they threw a six-week-long bacchanal with wagons of liquor, a trunk of Renaissance costumes, and we retraced their journey and along the way we stopped every 60 miles or so and took a soil sample and spread that over a wax panel with a sort of queered cowboy painting underneath, and we ran over that with our truck, leaving an imprint of our attire, sort of, as we were retracing this pilgrimage and Sheila Pepe came by our exhibition and we were very excited for her to see our work and she said after she saw it, she was like you know, she said complimentary things and then she said you know, if the two of you stuck with wax for a really long time, you'd get really good at it.
Speaker 4:Is that a left-handed compliment?
Speaker 2:Exactly and we were just like immediately, like oh gosh. But then we realized, as we were thinking about it, that wax was the right medium for that particular story. Other stories have required other mediums, but that the medium that we have become expert at, the one that we've stuck with for now 15 years, is the medium For 25 years. For 25 years, years, that's true is narrative and we really think of narrative as a medium that we're uh, that we're continuing to explore and excavate I think if a play came out of this, it would just be tremendous.
Speaker 4:I love that idea. I mean just the idea of these men out on the prairie in Renaissance costumes and that that happened. It blows your mind and I have found, the more history I learn, the more I realize there must be out there and we just don't know it. And that's why the work that you're doing, work that they're doing at ufh, the work that jd doyle does, is so important and essential to our community so that it documents and preserves that history, knowing that we're a history, that we have a history, because I always say we are a people, we have our own culture and we have things that matter, that contribute to the larger society and needs to be honored and recognized and appreciated. So, jake and Nick, what is something I didn't ask you about that you want to make sure that people know about?
Speaker 2:One thing that we haven't talked about a little bit is the visual art exhibition side of what we're going to be doing for Town Meeting. We're calling the exhibition Town Meeting 1978 to 2028. And for that we're going to be making a monumental drawing that is going to be surrounding the entire space, and on our website we have some images of what those drawings have looked like.
Speaker 2:In the past we had an exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum of these drawings. But what we do to make them is we take images, photographs we've taken images from archival sources and we make absolutely mammoth stencils out of them and then stencil loose charcoal powder onto paper and then we very carefully take the stencils away and then we use an air compressor to blow away all of the charcoal. And that motion of blowing away the charcoal, that force of the wind is what actually does the mark making, is what does the drawing into the paper and embeds the charcoal into the tooth of the paper, and we wind up with this sort of ghost image that holds all of the ambiguities, all of the exuberance, but also all of the sense of loss that comes with these histories. And so we're in the middle of designing that drawing right now we think it's going to wind up being 140 feet long.
Speaker 5:The other main part of that installation is actually being created sort of for the purpose of the symposium, and it will be a large kind of modular table that's in the center of the space, so almost a conference table. But it will be designed based on the still existing pieces of the Mary's Naturally bar tops that are in the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum collection. And so we're going to do a very detailed survey of those bar tops and build handmade wood replicas of each of those bar tops and turn them into a modular conference table for the convening on June 7th and 8th.
Speaker 4:Well, it's really something to look forward to and comes along at a time where we need positivity and to celebrate our community. So I'm very excited. I love meeting the two of you. You're charming and you're just the creativity, just you can just crack holes around the two of you. So I expect something very special and I know that the Houston community will come together and support this and want to be part of it. Thank you, nick Vaughn and Jake Margolin, for being with us on Queer Voices and again give that website.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about Town Meeting 1 and talk about this exhibition. It's an honor to be on Queer Voices and our website is nickandjakestudiocom, and there you can join our mailing list or you can reach out to us if you have any wonderful stories about Town Meeting 1 or the other contemporaneous movements that were happening in Houston at the time.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I meant to touch on that about the other movements such as the feminist movement and the other things that were happening around that time. For me it was a very special time in Houston Town. Meeting 1 was a little bit before my time of activism in the queer community. That started around 1982. But there certainly I had been involved in the feminist movement, so that will be very exciting to see what comes out of that part of it as well. So again, thank you for being with us on Queer Voices.
Speaker 1:This is Glenn from Queer Voices. You're listening to KPFT. That means you're already participating just by listening, but how about doing more? Kpft is totally listener-funded, which means it's people like you who are making donations who support this community resource. Kpft has no corporate or government strings-attached funding, which means we're free to program responsibly but without outside influence. Will you participate in KPFT financially? This station needs everyone who listens to chip in a few dollars to keep the station going, because that's the way it works. Even if you're listening over the internet on another continent, you can still contribute. Please become an active member of the listener community by making a tax-deductible contribution. Please take a minute to visit kpftorg and click on the red Donate Now button. Thank you. This is KPFT, 90.1 FM Houston, 89.5 FM Galveston, 91.9 FM Huntsville and worldwide on the internet at kpftorg.
Speaker 4:This is Deborah Moncrief-Bell, and with us today is Zachary Still. Zachary actually was one of the volunteers for Queer Voices I think it was called Lesbian and Gay Voices at that time, but that was a few decades ago and his life has taken him from the Bay Area of California to now back in Texas and Dallas area, and his life has gone through some changes, but part of those changes has led him to becoming an author, and his book, between the Lines, is is it currently available?
Speaker 3:It's coming available on November 19th Wow, 10 days from now.
Speaker 4:So around the time this will air, it will be available and, of course, you can get it through Amazon. Is it available anywhere else?
Speaker 3:It'll just be through Amazon, both digital for Kindle, as well as print, paperback and hardcover.
Speaker 4:I was fortunate enough to be a beta reader while you were working on this book, but I have not seen the final version. Can you describe the book?
Speaker 3:I would imagine what people would call some crazy dreams and I was speaking to my therapist about it where just the worlds in my dreams aren't of the world that we currently exist in. And that got me thinking like what would it be like like to actually be able to see into those worlds, and not just see into them but travel to them as well? And that's trying to be creative with the title of the book as well, between the Lines, but also just have that reference into being into other realities other than our own, and telling that story through the eyes and voice of a young 17-year-old boy coming, coming of age, learning about himself in lots of ways just his abilities, as well as coming out of the closet, his first relationship, dealing with his parents, divorce and moving to a new town certainly you had the experience of being a young gay man, but a lot of this had to come whole cloth from your imagination.
Speaker 4:Was there any particular influence that you had for this type of story?
Speaker 3:I mean we are surrounded just by so many creative people, so many creative works out there, film and books as well as music. I find a lot of inspiration just through song, through music itself, and I love how we can utilize music in just something that's two or three minutes long to tell a story that way, and I can't think of any one thing to really kind of point out and say that was my inspiration. But there's just so many sources out there in our waking moments other than just dreaming as well. But no, it's just, it really came from having these very vivid dreams and wanting to create a story that kind of portrayed really living in the moment of these various different worlds that we find ourselves in.
Speaker 4:I believe you described the book as young adult. Did it retain that? It did, okay, and they I mean me being an older person reading young adult. But I still very much enjoyed the story. I felt like I went on a journey and it was very interesting, and so I look forward to reading the final version to see how it all played out. But let's talk a little bit about how you got to the point of writing this book other than your vivid dreams. You went through some difficulties, including, I believe, a job loss, and you also have struggled with depression. So how did? Because this is not the only book you've written and you've been doing a lot of other creative things. So, zachary, what brought you here?
Speaker 3:I was just thinking about that this morning. It's been a life of transition for not just for me, but I think a lot of us have been experiencing some rough times. And, yes, I was laid off from a job that I had been in for almost 12 years, and that job gave me money to put a roof over my head and food in my stomach, but it didn't bring joy. I didn't have the chance or the time to really explore anything outside of work, and so when I was laid off, I decided I'm going to take this time for me.
Speaker 3:I received a fairly generous severance pay from the company that I had been working with, and it allowed me to not jump right back into the workforce, and I started creating music, writing lyrics for songs. I started painting again, creating digital art, and those songs are actually what led me to writing is. I had a lot of fun writing those songs, but then I wanted to tell stories through longer formats, and that's how Between the Lines started. As well as gosh, I'm up to five other books at the moment that are in various stages of completion, of writing those I have trouble reading more than one book at a time, so I can't imagine trying to write it all.
Speaker 4:I have a couple of books in my head, but I have not committed them to paper or to computer. Have you had trouble separating the various stories that you're working on?
Speaker 3:No, and that is probably my weird way of dealing with writer's block. I would get stuck in a story and my solution was to start writing a different story and in that process at least for me, it kind of got the creative juices going again, which then I would be able to spend that time thinking about my previous story and be able to go back to it with a fresher perspective on where I wanted the story to go. And in fact, between the lines I was talking with a friend of mine about it and some of the comments that you made when you had read the portion of the book before it was finished. It has changed so much from what you have read all those months ago. But you gave me also some wonderful feedback that I was able to then take and reimagine the story.
Speaker 3:I took it in a little bit of a different direction than the story that you read and it's also kind of strange. Where I look back at that and I kind of wonder about even with life itself, is, with every decision we make, it kind of branches off into the path we take versus the path we didn't take, and that makes me wonder. It's just a perfect example of between the lines of there was this story that I started writing and these characters that were in it, and then I went back and I rewrote it and I erased some of those characters from existence. And you talked earlier about, you know, my dealing with depression and anxiety and it's just one of those things I think about is is just bringing that into life, of really trying to be in the moment, um, and just appreciate what we have and the path that we're on, but also maybe kind of give thought to those other paths that we didn't take and and what might have happened had we gone down those different roads in our life.
Speaker 4:Do you anticipate a sequel?
Speaker 3:I do. I decided at the end of it I did not leave it on a cliffhanger, but I did leave it open to the possibility of a sequel and I would love to go back and explore what happens next within this world that I created for these characters, and what I love about writing is the ability to create these worlds at least for me that I would enjoy being in and maybe even writing a life that is different from my own and in some ways wish that I had taken or had those opportunities, and I'd love to go back and explore that in each of my books, just imagining what happens next for all these characters that I've created.
Speaker 4:I can see that and I know I enjoy telling myself those stories, like I said, of the books I've written in my head. And then sometimes I'll just hear something and I'll think, oh, that would be a good line to put in the book. Or, oh, this character could look like that, or this kind of scenario could happen, and I'll hear a name and I think, oh, that's a good name, I should have a character have that name Explain what a beta reader is for folks that don't know.
Speaker 3:I have learned a lot this year in that world and again, thank you, debra, for your help in my book.
Speaker 3:Between the Lines, a beta reader a little different in our situation, but typically a beta reader will read a trans manuscript that a writer has written and offer feedback just from a reader's perspective, from the story.
Speaker 3:It's not an editor that's going to go through and, you know, tell you all of your grammatical mistakes that you might have made or spelling mistakes, but really just having a fresh perspective, a fresh pair of eyes, going through your story and giving you feedback both good and bad, constructive as well as good of maybe areas that you could improve upon in the story.
Speaker 3:Or what I loved hearing from beta readers is parts of the story that they enjoyed as well, or maybe something that they enjoyed but felt like it might have been missing, something that could be improved upon, and really having that opportunity to take all of that and create a better story through the feedback of others, those beta readers. They are very special people and it really helps people that volunteer who are willing to read what possibly would be or could be a rough manuscript, a rough first draft of a story, and that, debra, is kind of what I had given you months ago. That was one of my first iterations of a story. And that, debra, is kind of what I had given you months ago. That was one of my first iterations of the story, so it was fairly rough.
Speaker 4:Tell me about these other books. There's one that sounded pretty intriguing, I think that is set in San Francisco.
Speaker 3:I used to live in the Bay Area, san Francisco proper and as well as parts of the East Bay, for close to 20 years. After living in Houston I moved back to San Francisco. So this particular story, I think probably fairly current, is. I set it in a futuristic San Francisco. It's called Become Human and in this future there are androids that have been created for various purposes and and one of the purposes in my story is as companions um and through is so, companions of really of all aspects. And and I even stress that in the book, my android protagonist, his name is Max and he offers kind of like a pseudo therapy session and he says I'm programmed to help in all ways, in all ways human.
Speaker 3:The android finds himself falling in love with a human and realizing that he has and can experience human emotions, and that's the title is Become Human is he's discovering this kind of humanity blossoming within him and exploring that angle, and he falls in love with a police detective who is investigating a murder that happens at the, the very beginning of the book. And it was a lot of fun to write, especially with just my knowledge of san francisco, in the neighborhoods, and I felt myself reminiscing and, and, you know, missing parts of san francisco and um, just that environment, but also just imagining this futuristic world and what things could be like, and I know there's a lot of different movies and books as well with that kind of explore, this different angle of androids becoming sentient and even now people are worrying about AI, artificial intelligence, and in what does that mean for humanity going forward. So it was a lot of fun to play with that idea and create this world in my book, become Human, about what could happen with humanity and androids and artificial intelligence.
Speaker 4:We just have to remember that humans are the ones that created AI.
Speaker 3:Much like having children human children, you know. You give them the gifts and talents and knowledge and they take that and turn it into something for themselves, something unique, hopefully, within themselves and I think that is kind of what I envisioned with my book as well is, yes, humans created that spark, but we also allow them to learn from it and kind of take their own perspective, unique perspective on how they see the world. However, it is through code, through eyes, through lenses. However, it is through code, through eyes, through lenses. I think it's just a fascinating topic to explore and there's a lot of fear that we as humans have about AI taking jobs from us. I worry, I'm still unemployed.
Speaker 4:You've written some songs which I was really impressed with. The songs you wrote the lyrics and then you put it into ai to create the music part. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:that is, yes, um, which for me was also just a fascinating angle of being able to take, um, like here's some words that I wrote and, just with the speed and precision that AI can do, add the composition, add the music, and you can tell it different genres, you can specify what type of musical instruments you want if you want it to be a ballad or a chorus, and it can take all that and, within a matter of minutes, create this finished piece, which I have a friend who's a magician and I've played some of my songs for him, and he himself is like Zachary, you and AI are trying to take my job away from me. I think it's something that we have to learn to. There's still a piece of humanity that is important and influential. But you're right, there are these tools now that we have access to, and how do we balance, I guess, the humanity, the human aspect of utilizing those tools and what gets created from them?
Speaker 4:A perfect example and it was so touching to read the story behind it. But one of the songs is kind of an ode to your parents. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Speaker 3:That was fun. So my mother was from Louisiana, my dad was from Utah and they met in Louisiana when my dad was stationed outside of Lake Charles and I wanted to creatively reimagine how they met, since I obviously wasn't there, heard through stories of how they first met and I wanted to also just kind of a nod to my mother's Cajun heritage, and it's written partly's Cajun heritage and it's written partly in Cajun, french and English.
Speaker 4:And it has that Zydeco kind of sound to it.
Speaker 3:It does. Ai is like hey, I want these lyrics to go to a Zydeco musical composition and to have it put it all together and be able to tell that story the way that I imagined it. It was a lot of fun to work on and I definitely loved the result.
Speaker 4:This is Deborah Moncrief-Bell. We've been talking with Zachary Still, author of Between the the lines and other books soon to come, as well as a composer and a candle maker yes I love the creativity that was unleashed and I'm really proud of you uh, having known you for many decades and learning more about your personal story. But also it's like I'm reading something and I'm like gosh. My friend wrote this. This is so great, so I applaud you, I congratulate you, and where can people find out more and maybe hear some of that music?
Speaker 3:I have my own website. It's booksbyzacharycom. You can go there and read about the stories that I've written that are coming out soon, and I'm on SoundCloud, the platform soundcloudcom. That's a little different. I go by Zach Stahl X-A-K for Zach and Stahl S-T-A-H-L, and you can find all the music that I've written there on SoundCloud.
Speaker 4:Well, thanks for being with us on Queer Voices.
Speaker 1:This is Glenn, from all of us at Queer Voices Brian Levinka, deborah Moncrief-Bell, davis Mendoza and Brett Cullum. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanzaa and Season's Greetings. We're wishing you a Happy New Year for 2025. That's Queer Voices, wednesday nights at 8 pm here on KPFT and on our podcast worldwide.
Speaker 7:I'm Tanya Kane-Perry and I'm Marcos Najera With News Wrap, a summary of some of the news in or affecting LGBTQ communities around the world for the two weeks ending December 7, 2024. Gender-affirming health care for trans patients under the age of 18 was the issue before the United States Supreme Court this week. The historic December 4th hearings considered a constitutional challenge to Tennessee's ban on all pediatric transitioning treatments. The case is called US v Scrimetti, with Tennessee's Attorney General Jonathan Scrimetti as the named defendant. Challenging the ban on behalf of Tennessee families with trans children was the ACLU's Chase Strangio, the first transgender person to argue a case before the nation's highest court.
Speaker 8:This law we believe is unconstitutional. And perhaps the scariest thing for all of us is that Tennessee's arguments would apply if Congress tomorrow banned this care nationally for adolescents. For adults, they claim that there are no protections based on sex. For the transgender people like myself who rely on this medical care, Attorneys fighting the ban argued that it constitutes discrimination based on sex.
Speaker 7:Tennessee Solicitor General Matthew Rice said that it is not true.
Speaker 9:Tennessee lawmakers enacted SB1 to protect minors from risky, unproven medical interventions. The law imposes an across-the-board rule that allows the use of drugs and surgeries for some medical purposes, but not for others. The use of drugs and surgeries for some medical purposes but not for others. Its application turns entirely on medical purpose, not a patient's sex. That is not sex discrimination. The whole thing is imbued with sex.
Speaker 7:Progressive Justice Elena Kagan begged to differ.
Speaker 6:I mean it's based on sex. You might have reasons for thinking that it's an appropriate regulation and those reasons should be tested and respect given to them. But it's a dodge to say that this is not based on sex. It's based on medical purpose, when the medical purpose is utterly and entirely about sex.
Speaker 7:The treatment of young trans patients with reversible puberty blockers and hormone therapies can often be life-saving. Literally, that's the opinion of virtually every professional medical and mental health organization in the United States, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics Association, along with the American Academy of Pediatrics. However, the justices' questions and comments led most observers to believe that the conservative 6-3 Supreme Court majority will uphold the Tennessee ban. Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other conservatives cited the United Kingdom's discredited CAS report, which claims that pediatric gender-affirming health care is too risky. He also pointed to Sweden's backpedaling on the issue as a reason to say that the jury is still out on whether the benefits of puberty blockers and hormone therapy outweigh the risks.
Speaker 10:If it's evolving like that and changing and England's pulling back and Sweden's pulling back, it strikes me as pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light, for this court to come in the nine of us and to constitutionalize the whole area when the rest of the world, or at least the countries that have been at the forefront of this, are pumping the brakes on this kind of treatment because of concerns about the risks.
Speaker 7:Kavanaugh and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch are all Trump appointees to the court. Gorsuch famously authored the surprising 6-3 Bostock decision in 2020, the first time a ruling involving a transgender person was handed down by the court. It found that federal laws banning employment bias based on sex also protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers. However, gorsuch was notably silent during this week's two-hour-plus hearing. Us Solicitor General Elizabeth Prologer questioned the constitutionality of the Tennessee law. She asserted that transgender people should be a protected class in anti-discrimination laws.
Speaker 11:If you're approaching this from the standpoint of saying is this a group with a distinguishing characteristic that has no bearing on their ability to contribute and that needs some protection from the courts? I think if any group qualifies, this one does in light of the current laws and what might come in the future, A ruling in support of the Tennessee ban would most likely validate similar bans on pediatric gender-affirming health care.
Speaker 7:They've been enacted by Republican majorities in more than a dozen other states and some of them continue to be challenged in lower courts. A decision by the Supreme Court is not expected until next June.
Speaker 12:The justice system in Russia can move swiftly with its so-called part-of-measures to combat LGBT propaganda. That's how the official state-run TASS news agency described the November 30th raids on three queer-welcoming night spots in Moscow. Described the November 30th raids on three queer-welcoming night spots in Moscow. Seven patrons of ARMA, Inferno and Mono were soon thereafter convicted of petty hooliganism and disrupting public order. According to the press service for the Lefortova District Court in Moscow, the defendants were charged with what was called an administrative offense, which was expressed in obvious disrespect for society, accompanied by obscene language in a public place. Raids like this have been going on sporadically since President Vladimir Putin's regime declared the non-existent international public LGBT movement to be extremist in 2023. Young men netted in the raid on the Mono Night Spot were handed military draft notices. Per reports and local news outlet Vyotska, One of the arrested patrons is the director of a travel agency for gay men. According to the Moscow Times, he was also detained for organizing tours for members of the LGBT community.
Speaker 7:Walmart is abandoning its policies promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. The largest retailer in the United States will no longer participate in the corporate equity index of the national queer advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign. It's the latest major US multinational company to jump the DEI ship. Walmart has additionally promised to be sure that inappropriate sexual and or transgender products are not marketed to children. According to USA Today, items like chest binders for trans youth will disappear from the website. The term Latinx and any vestiges of what critics consider part of the woke agenda will be erased from corporate communications. Walmart's 1.6 million employees at nearly 5,000 locations in the US alone will no longer receive racial equity training.
Speaker 7:Far-right social media influencer Robbie Starbuck is taking credit for this latest attack on corporate DEI programs. He's convinced a growing list of multinationals to abandon their diversity efforts Companies like Tractor Supply, john Deere, lowe's Ford, harley-davidson and Jack Daniels. Starbuck's victory post called Walmart's capitulation the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America. Finally, I've got a meeting in the ladies' room. I don't need this. I'll be back real soon. That's what I did for being in the ladies' room.
Speaker 12:More than two dozen trans activists and cisgender allies failed to disperse while dancing to the strains of climaxes. Meeting in the ladies room in a US Capitol bathroom close to the offices of House Speaker Mike Johnson, they were protesting Republican efforts in the lower chamber to force transgender Democratic Congressperson-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware to use male bathrooms and changing rooms. Trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning was among those arrested for what they called this week's act of joyful resistance. Speaker Johnson has backed South Carolina congressperson Nancy Mace's effort to blockade the House's first trans member. Banners displayed by supporters in the hallway declared Flush bathroom bigotry and Congress. Stop on our rights.
Speaker 12:It's a different picture in the Republican-dominated Montana State House, where a bid to force a trans woman to use male facilities failed. A House committee rejected a proposal against outspoken transgender state lawmaker, zoe Zephyr in a narrow vote of 10 yes and 12 no. Zephyr celebrated the win in a social media post that read I'm happy to see that this proposed ban failed and I'm grateful for my colleagues, particularly my Republican colleagues, who recognize this as a distraction from the work we were elected to do.
Speaker 7:That's News Wrap, global, queer news with attitude for the two weeks ending December 7th 2024. Follow the news in your area and around the world. An informed community is a strong community.
Speaker 12:News Wrap is written by Greg Gordon and Lucia Chappelle, produced by Brian DeShazer and brought to you by you. Thank you.
Speaker 7:Help keep us in ears around the world at thiswayoutorg, where you can also read the text of this newscast and much more. For this Way Out, I'm Tonya Kane-Perry. Stay healthy.
Speaker 12:And I'm Marcos Najera, stay safe.
Speaker 1:Martha, what'd that fella on the wireless? Just say Something about them, interwebs. You don't have to ask Martha. We've got all the names, dates and webpage links for people, events and anything else mentioned in the show right on our own website. It's QueerVoicesorg. We even link to past shows and other tidbits of information, so check it out, queervoicesorg. Besides, martha is a cat. She doesn't know anything about websites. This has been Queer Voices, heard on KPFT Houston and as a podcast available from several podcasting sources. Check our webpage QueerVoicesorg for more information. Queer Voices executive producer is Brian Levinka, deborah Moncrief-Bell is co-producer, brett Cullum and David Mendoza-Druzman are contributors, and Brett is also our webmaster. The News Wrap segment is part of another podcast called this Way Out, which is produced in Los Angeles.
Speaker 13:Some of the material in this program has been edited to improve clarity and runtime. This program does not endorse any political views or animal species. Views, opinions and endorsements are those of the participants and the organizations they represent. In case of death, please discontinue use and discard remaining products.
Speaker 1:For Queer Voices. I'm Glenn Holt, Thank you.
