How to Be a Better Human - Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Celebrating Pride

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Alison Bechdel. Eileen Myles. Kenny Fries. Saeed Jones. Four icons reflect on their journeys in this special Pride episode of Design Matters. For more episodes of Design Matters, find the podcast wherever you're listening to this. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Hey, Chris Duffy here.

I love to hear about how impressive people have thought about designing their lives and careers. It's always fascinating to me to hear how they got to where they are and what the steps are that brought them there. And for today's episode, while we're still on break with how to be a better human here, I want to share a new podcast with you. A new podcast from the TED Audio Collective that's called Design Matters with Debbie Millman. Debbie is a genius. I really think that. In every episode, she sits down with different people from every creative field you can imagine to discuss how they design the arc of their lives. In the episode that we're going to play for you right now, the lineup of guests is unbelievable.

It's just incredible the level of talent that you are about to hear. This is a special episode that Debbie made to celebrate Pride Month. And if you like it, you can hear more episodes of Design Matters wherever you're listening to this. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not.

Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy

jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Longtime listeners of Design Matters will know that over the years, I've interviewed a lot of gay men and women. I've always been interested in hearing how someone has negotiated their sexual identity in a world that is not always open to it. Long-time listeners will also know that while I'm gay, I didn't come out until I was 50. Ten years later, I'm married to a woman and more comfortable in my own skin than I've ever been. But it has been a journey. Since it's the end of Pride Month, I feel like celebrating by sharing some excerpts from

interviews with some of the LGBTQIA guests I've had on Design Matters in recent years. First up, the amazing MacArthur genius, Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel is the author of groundbreaking graphic novels like Fun Home and Are You My Mother? I spoke with her in 2016. I understand that one of your all-time favorite Mad Magazine cartoons began with a first grader's What I Did Last Summer report about visiting a farm and seeing pigs. Why is this your favorite? That's such a perfect first question because it ties in with the work and life being the same thing. So this little boy writes his What I Did This Summer report about going to a farm and seeing pigs. And it evolves over the years. For every school paper, he rewrites a version of this until he's an animal husbandry student and he's writing scientific papers about pigs. And there's these same little through lines keep showing up.

What excited me about it was this idea that there's just one thing that you're passionate about and you can just keep doing it for the rest of your life. Over and over. Over and over on a slightly higher level each time, hopefully. Hopefully. You were born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. Your father was a high school English teacher and also operated a funeral home. Your mother was an actress and also a teacher. I believe you were about four years old when you saw your first butch lesbian. What happened? I was out with my dad on some funeral home-related errand in a larger city. We grew up in a very small town, so I think we might have been in Philadelphia. And he took me to lunch, in Philadelphia. And he took me to lunch and a little luncheonette. And a woman came into the place who just blew the top of my head off, this big woman wearing men's clothes. But I just

remember seeing this person who I recognized, you know, as a version of myself. And my father recognized her too. He turned and saw her and he said to me, is that what you want to look like? Well, he was so adamant about you wearing barrettes in your hair and dresses at that time. Yeah. And of course, that was exactly what I wanted to look like. And I didn't know it was possible or that anyone else did it. But, you know, simultaneously, I was getting the message that that was not okay. this amazing universe. You write about finding and reading your kindergarten report card. And this is what your teacher wrote about you. Speaks hesitantly and seldom uses good grammar, but seems to prefer silence most of the time. Quiet, restrained, introversion, obsession with detail, contempt for leadership, inability to handle criticism, bad judgment, performs well where speaking is unnecessary, draws detail in realistic way. How much of this is still accurate?

Pretty much everything. Spot on. We are who we are, right? We've become who we've become. Spot on. We are who we are, right? We've become who we've become. While working on your book, Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, you ran across a cardboard-bound compilation you made of your best stories and drawings when you were 12. And you titled it, An Odd, Strange, and Curious Collection of Alison Bechdel's works, you felt that the parallels were alarming from the background details and the drawings to the use of marginal comments on the selected pieces. Were they really that similar,

or was it just this sort of startled realization that you'd had this desire to draw and communicate in this way since you were really little, from the time you were three? What was interesting to me about seeing that childhood compilation was not so much the drawings themselves as the act of compiling, as the act of self-archiving, you know, culling my stuff into some kind of structure that made sense to me and, you know, prizing it, investing it with meaning for my own purposes, which I continue to do. It's like an active memoir, you know, just making sure my stuff is presented in a way that makes sense to me. Dikes to Watch Out For first cropped up in the margin of a letter you were writing to a friend

and you titled the drawing, Marianne Dissatisfied with the Breakfast Brew. And you've stated that for some reason you were moved to further label it, Dykes to Watch Out For, plate number 27, as if it were just one in a series of illustrations of what you refer to as mildly demonic lesbians. I believe this was your first published cartoon and it ran in the 1983 Lesbian Pride issue of a feminist newspaper. So how did it get to the newspaper? How did that happen? I worked at that newspaper. I was a volunteer at this feminist monthly called Woman News. And I showed up just because I wanted to meet people and do something interesting and a newspaper sounded fun. And then I got involved with the production end of the paper and

we were a collective. So we just all put this paper out together. No one got paid. And I was doing these cartoons for fun and showing them to my friends. And someone said, you know, you should show these to the collective and see if they want to put them in the paper. And they did. So I started doing one a month for this newspaper. In The Indelible, Alison Bechdel, one of your books, you write, for this newspaper. Eventually, I had a small sheaf of dykes to watch out for that I would whip out and display to acquaintances at the slightest provocation. It was at this time you began doing a cartoon for every issue of the magazine and then or the newspaper and then began sending them out. So you tried to do your own syndication. subculture happening in the 80s that I was so excited by. This whole like sort of parallel world where gay people were making their own art and newspapers and had their own bookstores and

bars. And I loved that world and I wanted to document. I wanted to like not just be part of it but to show it. So I started doing that with these comics. I just wanted to see images of people like me, which I didn't see anywhere in the culture at that point. That was Alison Bechdel from an interview I did with her in 2016. In 2016, I also interviewed the great Eileen Miles, who's been a prominent figure in American poetry for decades now. Here are some excerpts from that interview. You moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. And you said that all of your life people have asked you what you do when you say that you're a poet,

and they just kind of look at you like you've said you're a stripper. Still? No, they look at you like you said you were a mime. It would be cool if they looked at you if they thought you're a stripper still? No, they look at you like you said you were a mime. It would be cool if they looked at you if they thought you were a stripper. They just thought, why? I mean, it was just like, what does that person do? I mean, even, you know, earlier today I had a conversation with somebody and there was somebody taking pictures. And he was like, well, what do you do all day? And I just thought, that's so strange.

Well, what do you do all day, you know? Part of what's interesting about being a poet is that nobody knows, you know, that it's sort of like what people don't get is that it's almost like you're like a professional human. In what way? What do you mean? hero, but really the hero of the epic poem was the poet, the one who wrote the story, you know, who gave mind to the saga kind of. And I think that you're still that person, you know, except that the saga is kind of a day, is kind of a postmodern day. And you're sort of in it, kind of telling the story of it, you know, and it doesn't have to be a linear story, but you're just kind of saying what's – I'm making a mime gesture. You're kind of saying what's here.

You are. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's like a very ordinary but like very necessary and sort of completely surreal and phenomenal job. And yet I think that is the job of the poet. walked into the Viselka Cafe in October of 1975 and met the late New York poet Paul Violi, who invited you to a workshop at St. Mark's Church, and you went and wrote this about the experience. Suddenly, the rest of my history came out of that accidental moment. I met Allen Ginsberg, and I thought I must be in the right place. Every situation spawns another one. And those were the ones that

I had, the lives I had. What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn't met Paul? I mean, I so much wrote my novel Inferno to say what it was like to be a female coming into New York as a poet in the 70s, you know, because every dude had some book you should read. I mean, to quote the art critic Peter Sheldahl, he said, I think he was talking about art in the 70s, you know, because every dude had some book you should read. I mean, to quote the art critic Peter Sheldahl, he said, I think he was talking about art in the 80s, and he said there was no top of the heap, there were just a lot of little heaps on the top. And that's how the poetry world sort of always was and was then. So it was just like, it was a question of what other pile I could have wound up in. But Paul was my guide into all the, you know, like, quote, other schools of poetry at the time.

And I wouldn't consider other. It was like Black Mountain. It was Beat. It was New York School. It was everything that was sort of not the mainstream American canon of literature, you know. So that was the right place. And hopefully I would have found it some other way. But Paul was the guide.

You have said that you feel funny about being in the New York school and you prefer, I believe you said the folk poet school. Right. I mean, I just, I think I'm just sort of wanting to be a little more, maybe even more vernacular. I mean, even the New York school is kind of precious and like we're about art, you know, and I want that to be less true. In an interview in the Paris Review, you stated, I've made myself homeless. I've cut myself off from anything I knew prior to living in New York. I did this to myself, so I know exactly how it happened. Do you think this was a necessary component to you becoming the writer you are now? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that we're always translating, right? You know, and I think, again, I think any of us who come from another class on any level can't stay home and do, you know, or make. You have to take what you have someplace else. I mean, I've even, in the poetry world, I've done that with, I mean, basically importing male avant-garde styles into kind of a queer or a lesbian world so that I feel like I've operated a lot like a translator of styles and realities or even bringing a lesbian reality into, you know, the poetry world.

I think between me and Jill Soloway, we've brought more lesbian content into the mainstream than there's been in a while. Jill Soloway, of course, the creator of the television show Transparent. Right. In 2009, you wrote a book of essays titled The Importance of Being Iceland. And you wrote that after you became sober, you began performing instead of reading your poems and even tried talking for a while and improvising after being moved by performers like Spalding Gray. And talking led you to running for political office. And in 1992, you conducted an openly female write-in candidacy for president against George Bush.

What made you do this? I've lately been thinking about the fact that I think I was a little unhappy. I think my girlfriend at the time decided to go to grad school, and I was disappointed. So you needed something to do? Well, let's run for president. So I felt like I needed a new project. I was like, really? So it's not enough to be like artists and lovers together in the East Village.

You've got to get an MFA, you know. And I was like, so what is it that I need to do exactly, you know? And I think that all these things kind of added up to this interesting possibility, you know. I mean, I had seen, you know, Pat Paulson running for president, funny candidates forever, Jello Biafra running for office, you know, mostly men, actually, if I think about it, you know, and, and it did seem like I had been really interested in figuring out how to be political in my work, like authentically political, political in a way that felt like my, my work still, but somehow, you know, like, that I could feel comfortable with being this dispenser of knowledge or information or presence or whatever, you know, so with all that and the timing of George Bush

and the new language of political correctness, and, you know, and I was interested, I was doing, like Paul DeGay, I was doing improvisational performance work, and I thought, oh, my God, a campaign would be exactly that. You mentioned the word politically correct, and I know that the whole sort of appropriation of that term in culture has pissed you off. Tell me why. Well, it's really funny because it's specifically lesbian language. That's what it was. It was just like in a lesbian community, politically correct

meant the most, that would be the person who would stand up at the reading and say, would that person with the perfume on their body or other animal products please – I mean it was just like the most – you know, it was just like I was not a Mitch Fest person and I sort of wish I went. Part of the legend of it was there was a lot of that kind of energy. And so that was our language and it was so ludicrous and shocking to see our Republican president suddenly using this lesbian language against us. Almost exactly a year ago, you and your former girlfriend, Jill Soloway, authored the Thanksgiving Paris Manifesto, Topple the Patriarchy. And from what I understand, you and Jill were feeling revolutionary after she saw Hamilton and you had both visited the White House. And you said that writing the manifesto together was an act of passion. Can you share some of the themes of what you wrote and why you wrote it?

I think we were enjoying the extreme act of creating new requirements for what art making and what of all sorts, you know, like inviting men to stop making art for 50 or 100 years and inviting men to stop making pornography for 100 years. I mean, it was just like to go out there and create a whole new space in which female work would flourish and expand and men would think twice about going forward into that space, you know? It's just like, I don't know. It's like anything I say sounds like I space, you know? I don't know. It's like anything I say sounds like I'm taking it back and I don't mean it at all. But I do mean a manifesto, the nature of a manifesto is hyperbolic because what you're trying to do is kind of like level the playing field and even create the playing field.

So I think in different ways, both of us were like wanting to have pleasure, be extreme, because I think as in civil rights, and this is civil rights, the problem is an unequal starting place. I mean, that's what the theory of justice is about, you know? And so there's never been justice for women. There's never been a place where men actually aren't making work. So why don't we start there? work. So why matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push.

Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running,

swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Eileen Miles. In 2017, Kenny Fries came on Design Matters. Kenny is a disabled gay Jewish man who has written deeply insightful books about the devastating effects of discrimination against the differently abled. The word disabled itself feels like it has real pejorative connotations. It's not an objective word. It's a word that is embedded with judgment.

And how do we as a culture try to shift that perception? Yeah, we're stuck with that word, aren't we? And the history of the word, which is why I think in a lot of ways, you know, when groups try to reclaim words in the disability community, it used to be crip and cripple. I don't know. I think we're stuck in this dialectic of disability and what I call non-disability. Most people call able-bodied, but I don't use that term. Non-disability. Most people call able-bodied, but I don't use that term. Non-disabled? Yeah, I use non-disabled. And as long as we're in that dialectic, I think we're in trouble and we can't get out of it. Because it's not a fixed category. I mean, at any moment, we will all be disabled.

Whether it's from a virus or a slip in the bathtub or old age, we will become disabled in some way. So it's something that everybody has in common. You know, people always said when Body Remember came out, I was asked on a radio show, why would somebody who's not gay, disabled, or Jewish want to read your work? So I said to them, well, my book is about the relationship between the body and memory. We all have bodies and we all remember. So we're stuck in this dialectic between disability and non-disability. And it's defined by the word that comes at the end of what we're supposedly able to do. But that's really not accurate because, you know, it goes back to Darwin again, the whole survival of the fittest.

And which is a term that Darwin did not use. It was coined by somebody else, and he didn't use it to the third edition of On the Origin of Species. But we get it wrong because we cut off the last part of the sentence. It's the survival of the fittest in a particular environment. So I can be more able, in quotes, than somebody else in certain situations. The big example of that is the scene in The History of My Shoes and The Evolution of Darwin's Theory where I'm climbing the mountain with my then-boyfriend Ian who's six foot whatever. But he is having a lot of trouble whereas my feet and my specially designed shoes fit right into what should be handholds, but I can use them as toeholds. And so it was easy for me, or easier. So you never know.

I mean, when I'm in a group of people, it depends on what the disabilities are. Sometimes I'm more able to, you know, move chairs than they are. But when I'm in a group of people that are non-disabled, they could move chairs more easily than I am. So it really depends on the context. It's really the context that defines what disability is. You tackle the subject of identity around several themes. You talk about being Jewish, being gay, being disabled. But what about being a writer? That one again. I mean, that's, I would love to just be considered a writer, to be honest with you. People always, you know, I would love somebody to just talk to me about how I put the words together or how the narrative works.

But, you know, because of the subject matter, I'm always, you know, most of my, it's about the content, which is fine. There's a lot of content there. It's about the content, which is fine. There's a lot of content there. But, you know, the joke I've been saying, I tell people, is that when I was younger, I think I was looked at more as a gay writer. And now I'm looked at as more of a disabled writer. But no, I haven't changed. It's just, you know, whatever the circumstances around. And the zeitgeist.

Yeah. Yeah. You know. In one of your poems, a poem titled Body Language, you turn the idea of body and memory into a metaphor and ask, what is a scar if not the memory of a once open wound? That really moved me. And I was wondering if you would read that poem today here on Design Matters. Sure. Body language. What is a scar if not the memory of a once open wound?

You press your finger between my toes, slide the soap up the side of my leg until you reach the scar with the two holes where the pins were inserted 20 years ago. holes where the pins were inserted 20 years ago. Leaning back, I remember how I pulled the pin from my leg, how in a waist-high cast I dragged myself from my room to show my parents what I had done. Your hand on my scar brings you back to the tub, and I want to ask you, what do you feel when you touch me there? I want you to ask me, what are you feeling now? But we do not speak. You drop the soap in the water and I continue washing alone. Do you know my father would bathe my feet as you do, as if it was the most natural thing? But up to now, I have allowed only two pair of hands to touch me there, to be the salve for what still feels like an open wound.

The skin is healed, but the scars grow deeper. When you touch them, what do they tell you about my life? Kenny Freeze. Last but not least, Saeed Jones, poet, memoirist, cultural critic, and TV talk show host. I spoke to him in 2019, just after he released his memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. Now, Saeed, is it true that you often fantasize about having sex with Paul Newman's ghost? Absolutely. We're doing it right now. That's why it's very convenient being in a very complicated relationship with a ghost, because you just never know what's going on. No one can see.

When did this start? I think I remember probably in college starting to see some of Paul Newman's films or films featuring him. And I think that's around the time I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Oh, baby. My goodness. And what I find really, truly, I mean, he was very handsome, certainly. But also, I think as far as we know, he was a good man. He stood up for some really important causes that matter now. And I think he would be a part of the cultural conversation now in a very contemporary way. He was very kind, had a wonderful reputation. that, you know, as we see all of these men in Hollywood, you know, now in 2019, it's just like, God, you too? You're a jerk. You're a monster. You're a, you know, and to see this guy who's like, oh, no, I'm super dead. And nope, still pretty good. I like it.

You were raised by your single mom in Louisville, Texas. Not Louisville, but Louisville. It really confused me when I went to school in Kentucky and I was like, oh no. She had a job with Delta as you were growing up. She was also a Buddhist and her mother, your grandmother, was rather religious, but she was not a Buddhist. What was that like for you to be between those two sort of fierce points of view? You know, unfortunately, I think this is true for a lot of people. You know, faith, religion in our families is such a source of division often. Some of my earliest memories as a little kid, probably a toddler actually, are my family arguing with my mom about faith.

You know, you're going to go to hell. actually are my family arguing with my mom about faith. You know, you're going to go to hell. By the time I was a little older, you know, early teens, the conversation had kind of become the silence where people weren't, they just weren't talking anymore. People weren't close and no one would explain why. It just was the way things were, you know? And I remember at one point as a kid, like my mom ended up in the hospital, and it was like really serious. And her family didn't immediately come to take care of her, you know, and retrospect now as an adult. Oh, my gosh, that says a lot, you know. So by the time I was a teenager, you know, then it became, well, we're not going to have this argument with Carol anymore. She's an adult. She seems really set in her ways. But here's Saeed.

He's a teenager. He's acting worldly. He's starting to talk back. He's effeminate. And I think in an interesting way, the worldliness, the sarcasm, the you're just being too much of a teenager allowed them to not have to say head on, we think you're going to be gay. And we want to stop that. So instead, it was kind of framed as like, you're going to go to. And we want to stop that. So instead, it was kind of framed as like, you're going to go to hell like your mom. And it was like, what does that mean? So yeah, it was really awful. And it led to a lot of hurt, more silence, because I think, you know, it just got so painful that I also distanced myself from those family members. And we have

since made up and we have a better relationship, but we will never be as close as we could have been had this conflict not been a part of our lives. You realized you were gay at quite a young age. You've written about how as a kid you realized that being black can get you killed. And so it can being gay and combined, being a gay black boy is a death wish. So you felt you needed to hide who you were. Yeah, I you're right. I mean, from my earliest, most vague kind of blurry fantasies, it was always boys and men, you know, I just didn't really fantasize about women's bodies. I thought it was rude, actually. I remember...

So polite. Yeah. And when I was hosting AM2DM, the morning show for BuzzFeed, which I did for a couple of years, I got to interview Tyra Banks. And I told her that I was like, I remember when you were on the Sports Illustrated cover, because that was history making. And my guy friends at school were like, uh-huh. And I checked myself, but I remember thinking, well, it would be rude to see any more of Tyra. And that's when I was like, oh. Yeah. So I didn't have a question about attraction. It was always like, how is this going to work in terms of a life? life, you know, will I ever have love? Will I

ever get married? Because at the time, I mean, this is, you know, 2000 to 2004. For example, that's when I'm in high school. Marriage equality certainly wasn't even on the docket. Would I ever be able to be a father? If I do have a family, if I do find this man, will I be able to introduce him to my family? Will I be able to bring them home for Thanksgiving? I don't know. And so it felt like America's already perilous. You have people like Matthew Shepard or James Byrd Jr. being killed just for who they are anyway. But also, even if I'm not killed, am I just signing up for misery by being myself? That just seemed like a—and it is an unfair choice. That's not a choice. I know that you were really impacted by the deaths of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. And

I read that you stated that just as some cultures have a hundred words for snow, there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night. How did you cope? Were you always in a state of fear? Not necessarily. And I don't know if I would have said that if you asked me at the time, like, Saeed, are you scared? I would have been like, what are you talking about? You know, I was a very creative kid. I was reading very, very passionately, particularly like when I was in middle school, we didn't have the internet dial up. And then comes like right at the beginning of high school. And of course, it was so slow. And you couldn't actually use your landline phone and be on the computer, you know, so it was like,

it took a while before that was even a part. So I was just reading a lot of books. I started writing and I had a really rich, creative life. And I think though I didn't realize I was coping, I think my writing or reading and what became my writing life as a kid manifested in this rich interiority I had. I have such an overactive imagination. That's just why now I'm married to Paul Newman's ghost. I just had elaborate fantasies and everything in a world to myself. So I think that kept me from feeling dead inside and kept me from feeling that the way America was outlining the borders of my identity and like barbed wire that that like, they were never going to get to who I really, really am. You know, for a long time growing up. I mean, just admitting that it was hard to be yourself

just felt like a risk not worth taking. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in such a state of both cultural and personal homophobia. I didn't come out until I was 50. So I totally understand. You said that gay wasn't a word that you could imagine actually hearing from your mom, that if you pictured her moving her lips, AIDS came out instead. And you finally came out to her in 2005, when you were 19 years old, and you were on the phone, you were walking to class, and you described the experience this way. You said, I had come out to my mother as a gay man, but within minutes, I realized I had not come out to her as myself. So can you elaborate? What did you mean

by that? Well, as a queer person, I just feel that the coming out narrative is so simplistic. It's so limited, because what does it mean? You know, what kind of gay? It is certainly a vital bit of information, but it is far more important to the straight person than it is to the person saying to them it's a whoa this is a huge bit of information i know so much more about you now than i did before and maybe that's true but you know we know you're coming we're coming out constantly you're at the doctor you you start a new job you're kind of reading the room is this you know like you know someone um assumes you and your partner are girlfriends or best friends and you've, you know, it is literally queer. It is fluid. It is an ongoing kind of dynamic. And of course, because I believe in intersectionality, it's just part of who we are, you know, and no one says, I'm black. You know, we don't,

we don't have this like commandment binary, You're not. And then you are dynamic for any other part of identity. Really, I think even gender, I think we have a little bit more space because it's even like there's space to say I'm a girly girl as opposed to whatever. Yeah, I came out to my mom. I said, I'm gay. She asked me some, you know, do you use protection? And I was like, yes. Have you had experiences?

Yes. Okay. Use protection? Yes. And I did appreciate that because there was no judgment she didn't say why are you having you should you know it was just i think two of the more essential questions an adult should ask their child about sex are you having it you know are you you know um well versed or getting, you know, healthcare for it. Yeah. Okay. But, you know, are you in love? Are you dating good men? Who are these men? Do you like them? Do they take you to dinner? Like

those questions about the richness of experience that are actually far more important, right? Are you happy? I wasn't, you know, We didn't get to talk about all that, both because I didn't feel – I don't know if I felt comfortable or I felt that I had the vocabulary to articulate it, but also I think my mom and many other people of her generation, I don't think they try or want to be homophobic or transphobic, but if they haven't done the reading – and at that time, my mother just had not but if they haven't done the reading, and at that time my mother just had not, if they haven't done the work, it's just like a bridge that just like ends with a sudden drop off. And they're just kind of like, I don't know, I guess I wish you well, but I'm going to wave from here while you're in your little boat going off without me. And they think

they are helpless as opposed to they are abandoning us, because that's what it means to say, I'm not going to figure this out. What would you have told her if she had asked you those questions? Yeah, I would have said, I'm a mess. And men are trash. And I'm really attracted to them. And what were some things you learned about dating, you know, in your 20s, you know, and even if it's just like men are weird, right? And I'd be like, yeah, they are. Welcome. Saeed Jones. And before that, Kenny Freeze, Eileen Miles, and Alison Bechdel. You can listen to the full interviews and sign up for our newsletter on our website, designmattersmedia.com. This is the 17th year we've been podcasting Design Matters,

and I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. And happy, happy Pride. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. In non-pandemic times, the show is recorded at the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding Program in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world.

The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Zachary Pettit, and the art director is Emily Weiland. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.

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