"That production was really close to my heart because I was a musical theater dancer in the eighties and so that whole storytelling was something that I personally had lived through and really understood. You know, I was that kid at the Pineapple Dance Studios. And gradually, as friends around me sort of began to become unwell, and actually, one of the first people that I knew who died from HIV was my singing teacher at the time, a guy called Chris Edwards. He was the first person that...

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process? Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited...

"I had the first ever lesbian makeout scene on network television on a short-lived show called Relativity. That was another role where I felt really honored to be asked to do that, having been in and around the gay community my whole adult life. In the club scene, it was like all my friends were gay. So I was really happy to represent doing that. When I did my show Positive Me, we were in the middle of a horrible crisis. The AIDS crisis was very real to me and my friends and not real to the...

How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world? From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons....

What are we willing to give up to find meaning, connection, and a sense of belonging? What happens if we don't self-promote, self-create, and self-brand on social media? Will we find the right partner? Will we get into the right college? Or find the best job? Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci...

“I was fortunate to be able to be out in Hollywood in the 90s and to be able to work early on seminal LGBT-presenting shows like Tales of the City series, and Six Feet Under with Alan Ball. When it comes to Tokyo Vice, I did push hard for there to be a queer storyline because in the late 90s, in Japan, there was a huge thriving gay subculture. But it wasn't on the table to come out because your sexual orientation was considered irrelevant to your obligations to society.”

What does learning another language and living in another culture do for your humanity and creative process? Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known...

“The legal system is a colonial legal system that is designed to preserve capitalist extraction and all the racial dynamics required to produce racial capitalism. The system is already completely captured by our opponents. And anything that looks like it's good for us is probably actually not. People don't get what they're supposed to get. It's undermined in several ways, or it can get flipped all the time. Like the law in the books is not happening on the streets. The police are not supposed...

 Dean Spade is an organizer, speaker, author, and professor at Seattle University's School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Spade has been organizing racial and economic movements for queer and trans liberation for the past 20 years. Spade's books include Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law and Mutual Aid, Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). In 2002, Dean founded...

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite? How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and...

"I think when the novel went through many revisions and reiterations, a lot of Richard de Zoysa's biography got shared, and Maali Almeida emerged as a character. But that one detail stayed, the fact that he was a closeted gay man. Again, you write by instinct, and also I had to explain why was this privileged Colombo kid, going to these very dangerous places and hanging out with very dodgy characters. So one reason was perhaps ego. He found something he was very good at, and he thought he was...

What happens when we die? What happens to our memories and consciousness when our bodies cease to be?  In the end, is it the things we did and the people we loved that give our lives meaning? Shehan Karunatilaka is the multi-award winning author. He is known for his novels dealing with the history, politics, and folklore of his home country of Sri Lanka. He won the Commonwealth Book Prize and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his debut novel, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep...

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu interviews Ching-In Chen & Kate Hao about the cancellation of the Asian American Literary Festival 2023. This August, the Asian American Literary Festival was to take place in Washington, DC.. The longstanding event had been on hiatus because of the pandemic, so this year’s event had generated a lot of buzz.  Organized by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (APAC), the event had already garnered...

"So you're afraid to change cause you don't want people to call you strange. So I sort of get that. But I grew up in a very different situation. I'm actually always surprised that I'm even in communication with my parents at all. I didn't think anybody in my family would want to have anything to do with me cause that was the message I got from the world when I was a kid, that people do not want to have anything to do with queer people other than queer people. That was what I understood, that...

How do you find your voice? As a writer, how do you take what you know and what you believe to share your stories with the world? How do we let young writers know just how powerful they are and that what they do matters? In How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill Pulitzer Prize winning, and National Book Award finalist author Jericho Brown brings together more than 30 acclaimed writers, including the likes of Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Natasha Trethewey, among many...

Have you ever experienced the feeling of being alone and not having a community? How can we build an atmosphere of inclusion and greater understanding? Brooklyn-based artist Elliot Lee fuses dark pop melodies with edgy vocals and innovative electronic-rock soundscapes to create an unpredictable sound, acting as a voice for the voiceless. Elliot Lee holds an awareness of what music that is unhindered by norms can do for the underrepresented. Elliot’s single "Easy To Be You” is dedicated to...

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third...

"So there is a small genetic but significant genetic component to sexual orientation. And it's slightly different in males and females. And interestingly, it's not general. So for example, if I were to have a gay brother, then the chance of me being gay would become higher. But if I have a lesbian sister, that does not change the chance of me being gay or vice versa."

David J. Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good, and Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart, and Mind. His laboratory has worked for...

“Creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones and Team Downey, this was a sort of a thing that they came up with, but I think what we wanted to explore in season two was really to dig more into this idea of what is it to be a woman with ambition in this era, 3% of attorneys were women in the entire nation in 1933. So that alone is an uphill battle. And then when you add the complication of being queer in this time, and that there are laws against it that you have to make sure every step you take...

Michael Begler is showrunner, writer, and executive producer of Perry Mason, which debuted as HBO’s most-watched series in nearly two years upon its premiere in June 2020. The critically-acclaimed show stars Emmy-winner Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Katherine Waterston, Hope Davis. In the second season of the Emmy-nominated series, the scion of a powerful oil family is brutally murdered. Power, social justice, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and what it truly means to be guilty, are among the...

“So after coming out, I went to Mexico, which is where my mother's from, and spent most of my time there interacting in queer communities and queer spaces. And it just made such a huge difference. It was, again, such a flip from what I had seen in the US where so much of queer media and queer representation is mostly white, right? And creates this idea that the queer community automatically means the white community and Thankfully, I think that's shifted a lot. I think shows like Vida that...

Amanda E. Machado is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work explores how race, gender, sexuality, and power affect the way we travel and experience the outdoors. She has written and facilitated on topics of social justice and adventure and lived in Cape Town, Havana, Mexico City, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. She has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, NPR, and other publications. She is also the founder of Reclaiming...

"So when you go into parole, like when you're on your way, your friends will tell you, the ones who have been there, "Don't let them like upset you. Don't let them get you out of your character." And I remember the first time I went up to parole, I survived a police-involved shooting. So I was shot multiple times. And it was my time to go down there and talk about this situation."