It Could Happen Here - The Debtor-Slaver, A Study in American Class Psychology

Episode Date: January 20, 2023

Mia walks through the history of a curious kind of guy responsible for vast swaths of the devastation wrought over 500 years of colonialism in AmericaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things being absolutely atrocious. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to do something a little different. Instead of our normal sort of escapades through the torment and the sort of crumbles of the modern world, we're going to take a step back into history to trace through the history and class psychology of a kind of guy who is a recurring character in the history of North America.

And who is responsible to a greater extent than you think for some of the worst atrocities this world has ever seen. I hesitate to use the word class as a way to actually describe these people because the people we're going to be talking about are from completely different economies, completely different class structures, completely different systems of production. So we're sticking with the loose term kind of guy. And this kind of guy is a kind of guy that I have termed the debtor slaver. Now, this at first glance, this is a confusing term. My word processor, at the very least, gets very, very angry with me every time I try to write it and insists that no, no, no, I must in fact mean debtor slave. But no, I do not mean debtor-slave. What I'm actually referring to is a kind of guy who is both hopelessly in debt and also in command of enormous economic and military resources, most often slaves. To get a sense of what I'm talking about here,

we're going to start with the archetypical debtor-slaver, Hernan Cortes. archetypical debtor slaver, Hernan Cortes. Hernan Cortes is, by all reputable accounts, an enormous piece of shit. A broke noble born in Spain in 1485, Cortes managed to parlay an initially successful career as an adventurer into a slave plantation in Cuba after he helped conquer the island in 1511. From there, through a combination of, I shit you not, this is actually what the historical records say about him, wearing too many gold chains and spending too much money on his wife, his finances imploded and he fell into debt. This led him to embark on his infamous conquest of Mexico in an attempt to pay off his creditors. Here I'm going to turn to the work of the anthropologist David Graeber.

Rest in peace. Miss you, buddy. Graeber describes the absolute horror of entire populations sold into slavery. Slaves with faces covered in brands indicating who they'd been bought and sold by. Entire populations worked to death in mines, empires drained of wealth by men whose lust for gold and silver seemed to know no end. And yet, somehow, both Cortes and his men seem to have come out of the other end of one of the most important conquests in human history completely broke. Now, it's easier to explain how Cortez's men came out of this broke. They came out of this broke

because Cortez and his officers were extorting and robbing them mercilessly at literally every step of the campaign by charging them utterly exorbitant prices for everything from bandages to like having to buy their own weapons which were being sold by guess who cortesanist officers who had a sort of cabal going on with everyone who could sell things and once the conquest was done cortesanist officers simply seized most of the share of the loot from their men as payment for all of the stuff that they needed and i mentioned this not to inspire sympathy for the conquistadors like these are these are some of the worst human beings who have ever lived and managing to somehow lose money on one of the most brutal sackings of a city in human history is like the least of the punishment they deserve. But, on the other hand, their debt, and the debt of Cortes himself,

goes a long way to explain what happened next. Here's Graeber. These were the men who ended up in control of the provinces, and who established local administration, taxes, and labor regimes. provinces and who establish local administration, taxes, and labor regimes. Which makes it a little easier to understand the descriptions of Indians with their faces covered by names like so many counter-endorsed Czechs or the mines surrounded by miles of rotting corpses. We are not dealing with psychology of cold, calculating greed, but a more complicated mix of shame and righteous indignation, and of the frantic urgency of debts that would only compound and accumulate. These were, almost certainly, interest-bearing loans, and the outrage at the idea that,

after all they had gone through, they should be held to owe anything to begin with. Now, this is the sort of trademark psychology of the debtor-slaver. It's an incredibly toxic mix of shame, indignation, outrage, and desperation that breeds an incredible kind of violence, and is determined in large part by the conditions of modern compound debt itself. Here's Graeber again. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself, allow it to expand, and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise.

Even human relationships become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer. now it doesn't take long until not only human relations but human beings themselves become a matter of cost-benefit calculation a set of merchandise that value could be extracted from and here emerges the debtor slaver Now, very clearly, all debtors do not behave like this. In fact, almost all debtors, across all places and all times, do not behave this way, or the world would be a place that makes even the hell we live in now look like a paradise. There's another factor at work here that distinguishes the debtor from the debtor-slaver, and that's power. The debtor-slaver already wields, or has wielded, enormous power over other people, either through direct violence or, as we'll see later, through the command of economic power.

This is one of the products of the righteous indignation Graeber described earlier. These are people who are used to wielding power, who are suddenly now beholden in a real and immediate way to someone else. And so, they set about solving the problem the way they've solved everything else in their life, throwing violence at it. Now, if you've been paying attention closely, you might realize that I've actually been describing two different sort of ranks of debtor slaves who sort of fuse into one mass in Cortez's Conquistadors. On the lower end, the people who kind of loosely be called adventurers, essentially a kind of mercenary, out for a big score, be that slaves, be that land, be that stolen loot, that could vault them out of debt and into the aristocracy. This is the sort of general military base of the conquistador army itself. base of the conquistador army itself on the higher end are people like cortez who having already technically you know who are who are already technically plantation owners but their own

ineptitude have still managed to become heavily indebted and combined they form a group responsible for three centuries of the greatest evil the world has ever seen now these two groups in a broad sense need each other the adventurers may have weapons they may have some training but at the end of the day they have very little in terms of liquid capital and liquid capital is something that you need in order to run a military campaign because in order to keep all of these people, all of these sort of adventurers, all of these sort of debtor slavers, all of these sort of would-be conquistadors in the field, you have to produce things like food, things like boots, things like medical supplies. And this is where the plantation owners come in, because those are people who, even though they're enormously in

debt and even though very often they're either fleeing their debtors or all of their debt's about to be called in, these are people who still technically have lines of credit open. And they, and also, there are also people who sometimes have allies in more sort of solvent people in their same class. So they're able to sort of funnel liquid capital into these sort of ventures and this is a process that we are going to see again after these ads welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

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Moving forward in time a few hundred years and north a few thousand miles, we come to another scene of debt, subjugation, and violence. The plantations of the American South. Now, this is not the primitive, unhallowed 1500s, where slaves would be marked like tally sticks as they were passed back and forth between sword and pike-wielding Spanish barbarians as they slaughtered their way through one of the greatest cities the world had ever known. This is the benighted 1800s.

This is the age of steam power and railroads, the age of electricity, the advent of the global telecommunications network. What would come of this new era of progress? One of the greatest of all world historical crimes the conversion of human beings into increasingly complex financial instruments plantation owners contrary to their depiction in media which they've gotten almost those those people have gotten almost as good pr as cops which is fairly incredible considering they haven't really existed as the sort of slave owning class that they used to be in you know what 100 100 ish years i don't know i discuss among yourselves when you think sharecropping has sort of decreased

to an amount where these people like are no longer around as a class but you know okay despite the sort of pr that these like southern gentlemen get these people are constantly in debt and they're you know constantly attempting to solve the problem of them being in debt with the only thing they know how to do which is slavery and when i say they're trying to solve this problem through slavery um we're going to get to the more complicated ways to try to solve this with slavery one of the big ways i try to solve this with slavery is just whipping people harder it's brutal and horrible and yeah you know this this is a system that is – the efficiency of which is just built on profound human violence. So let's establish that right off the bat.

This is the worst kind of slavery anyone's really ever done. Yeah. Now, another factor for these people essentially turning into debtor slavers is the fact that these people are constantly putting themselves in self-inflicted debt in order to do speculation. And this is the part where they start doing shit that is difficult for me to even try to explain while adequately capturing the horror of the process. capturing the horror of the process, the southern planters began to create an entire separate financial network based entirely off of the quote-unquote value of their slaves and their land. From the historian Edward B. Baptiste, Yet enslavers had already, by the end of the 1820s, created a highly innovative alternative to existing financial structure. The Consolidated Association of Louisiana Planters, despite its name that CAPL was still a bank,

created more leverage for enslavers at less cost and on longer terms. It did so by securitizing slaves, hedging even more effectively against the individual investor's loss, so long as the financial system itself did not fail. Here is how it worked. Potential borrowers mortgaged slaves and cultivated land to the CAPL, which entitled them to borrow up to half of the assessed value of their property from the CAPL and banknotes. To convince others to accept the banknotes thus distributed at face value, the CAPL convinced the Louisiana legislature to back $2.5 million in bank bonds due in 10-15 years bearing 5% interest with the faith and credit of the people of the state, the Great British Merchant Bank Baring Brothers agreed to advance the CAPL the equivalent of $2.5 million in sterling bills.

By the way, that is an unfathomable amount of money now. That's not $2.5 million. That is an amount of money that will make your ears bleed. The equivalent of $2.5 million in sterling bills and market the bonds on European securities markets. The bonds effectively converted in slavers' biggest investment, human beings, or quote-unquote hands, from Maryland and Virginia and North Carolina and Kentucky into multiple streams of income, all under their control, since all borrowers were officially stakeholders in the bank. The sale of the bonds created a high-quality credit pool to be lent back to the planters at a significantly lower rate sorry at a rate

significantly lower than the rate of return they could expect that money to produce the pool could be used for all sorts of income generating purposes buying more slaves to produce more cotton and sugar and hence more income or or lending to other enslavers. Other borrowers could pyramid their leverage even higher by borrowing on the same collateral from multiple lenders, while also getting unsecured short-term commercial loans from the CAPL by purchasing new slaves with the money they borrowed and borrowing on them too. They had mortgaged their slaves, sometimes multiple times. By purchasing new slaves with the money they borrowed, and borrowing on them too, they had mortgaged their slaves, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes they even mortgaged fictitious slaves. But in contrast to what Walsh had promised Nolte in 1824,

this type of mortgage gave the enslaver tremendous margins, control, and flexibility. It was hard to imagine that such borrowers would be foreclosed, even if they fell behind on their payments. After all, the borrowers owned the bank. Using the CAPL model, slave owners were now able to monetize their slaves by securitizing them and then leveraging them multiple times on the international financial market. Now, okay, having just spent a decent amount of time running through the sort of finance of this, I need to reiterate, these are human beings who are being enslaved and tortured constantly.

who are being enslaved and tortured constantly. The ownership of whom is being mortgaged to a bank and then sold and traded as assets on the financial market. What they have done here is like 2008 style financial collapse, like set of collateralized loan obligations, except the loans are backed by fucking human beings they've forced into slavery. It is a level of evil that is almost incomprehensible, because the very financial language that is necessary to explain what they're doing by necessity conceals the horror of what's actually being done. And what's actually being done here is hundreds of thousands of people

are being sold into slavery and forced to clear land and work on land that has just been stolen literally, like, you know, in some cases like the day before by indigenous people who have just been sent on the Trail of Tears. And this is being done to fuel these new financial instruments now in a somewhat ironic twist the product of this entire thing the product of all of this land clearing the product of andrew jackson's war and the second bank of the u.s the product of all of this sort of speculation is the plantations wind up producing too much

cotton, too much slave cotton. And this quickly becomes an absolute fiasco. Debt suddenly outpaced the entire value of the slave crop. And, you know, the entire financial system begins to implode. So it starts in sort of the UK and the European markets that had taken a bunch of these sort of slave bonds. But eventually, the financial collapse spreads. And you know, as we heard in the article, right? The way these banks are set up, the way these, again, like these banks that are just, all of the bank is just slaves.

And I guess I should also take an aside here to mention that like the normal banks are also doing stuff like this it's just that the south not being content to just have normal banks taking you know doing mortgages like they're taking out mortgages on houses with slaves as collateral uh they've they quite decided to create like their in their own entire financial network that's just slaves and nothing else well land too but yeah slaves and land this entire thing sort of just collapses in on itself and this leads to an even larger mass of debtor slavery plantation donors. And this is where we turn from plantation slavery to some good old-fashioned

conquistadoring. One of the sort of myths of slavery, of the way that slavery has been sort of understood in the West, particularly in sort of Europe, well, particularly in the US and the UK, which have these sort of Europe, well, particularly in the US and the UK,

which have these sort of like complexes about, you know, like the sort of inevitability of abolitionism and the sort of benevolent empire against abolition or whatever. You know, there's this sort of like, you get these economic arguments too, that people will argue that, you know there's there's this sort of like that you get these economic arguments too that the people people will argue that you know slavery was like gonna collapse anyways like people just let it go it would have fell apart and that that is just sort of nonsense

and one of the things that this one of the things that this conceals is that slave power was constantly expansionary it's never sort of like slavery was never a system that was sort of just contained in one place right it was always pushing it was always attempting to you know seize new land it was always attempting to seize new slaves

it was a system that could only really survive if it was constantly able to seize new territory and seize new slaves in was it was a system that could only really survive if it was constantly able to seize new territory and seize new slaves in order to work it and so there's a lot of sort of products of this right one of the sort of earlier ones you get these settlers pushing west attempting to turn sort of new states into slave states and these are you know these are often like the settlers here often the sort of men like euphemistically described as advent And these are, you know, these are often, like the settlers here are often the sort of men like euphemistically described as adventurers who are like, you know,

these are the people who fought for Cortez, right? Like they are people desperately attempting to stay one step ahead of their creditors by invoking the time-honored American tradition of slaughtering indigenous people for their land, which, you know, could then be turned over to speculators or could be turned over to the sort of wealthier backers and these men and in this period these are almost always men although that's going to change uh pretty soon but these men are so violent and so disruptive

that at various points in the late 1700s and early 1800s the u.s like attempts to stop them from settling any further lest they sort of disturb american foreign policy efforts um and these efforts fail and the product of this is that manifest destiny's you know trail of corpses pushes even further and further west Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the

brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, by the 1850s, there's a new sort of conquistador who's setting out to, you know, conquer in the name of the cross and paying off the creditors. And they're called filibusters. Now, this is actually where these people are where the term filibuster is a sort of like thing that you do in the Senate to not let people do stuff. This is where that comes from. It's these people.

These are. OK, so, you know, the official descriptions of them will say things like private armies. I there are more these kind of like ragged bands of like slavery mongering genocide years who are backed by, you know, largely by southern plantation owners sometimes by southern states occasionally by just northern banks because the place they're trying to go is somewhere the banks the northern banks want to sort of seize control of and you know these people set out to conquer new slave states by you know straight up seizing control of places like cuba or mexico they do a bunch of this stuff in texas it doesn't really work but you know

i mean part of the complicated thing of talking about the filibuster is is that like in some sense the most successful like attempt to do something like this was actually texas but those people weren't really filibuster. The people who actually successfully seized control of Texas like Sam Adam and his crew of very miscreant slave owners. Those guys aren't technically filibusters, but they do sort of succeed

in bringing in Texas as a slave state. But yeah, these people keep launching invasions of fucking Cuba. They keep launching these invasions everywhere. There's a really great movie called Walker. That's a sort of fictionalized account of probably the most famous

filibuster, a guy named William Walker. And well, okay. So it starts with his attempt to like conquer Mexico, which doesn't go well. But then it sets out for his attempt to conquer Nicaragua, which like kind of works. Like he actually takes nicaragua for a little bit you know but this this movie

version of it's also like it's an anti-war film about the u.s backing the contras and it rules i'm talking about it because nobody's ever watched this thing and the studio when they when they like actually figured out what walker was and that it was you know like an anti-war film about the contrast uh they literally killed the entire movie and the director alex cox who's the guy who did repo man like he literally never worked in hollywood again after this so yeah go watch walker understand it's a little it's a bit fictionalized. It's mostly an anti-war film.

About the Contras. But you know. Part of what he's trying to trace out. Part of something that is very important about this. Is that. You know. There's these sort of lineages of American colonialism. And part of these lineages. Is that.

You know. Like. That literally does not matter. Like what century you're in, the U.S. is trying to seize control of Nicaragua. Now, okay, so, but back to the sort of filibusters mainline. Unlike the conquistadors, who were kind of like, I don't know, they had a combination of being

really, really lucky, and also, like, genuinely having some pretty good leadership, even though, you know, good leadership even though you know good leadership but for evil those guys were really successful the filibusterers they mostly failed

because again these are mostly sort of just like bands of like marauders they barely have supply lines like I don't know sometimes they have real weapons but they're not especially competent and but what what they did do is they kill a lot of people and this this is one of those things that's sort of like i don't know it gets sort of romanticized or gets sort of brushed over.

It's like, yeah, no, these people, these groups are basically like rolling lynch mobs. So, you know, they'll be doing something. They'll run into a town. They'll just kill everyone. They will enslave people. They will rape people.

They do shit that is just they're absolutely abhorrent and that's that's the sort of legacy of this stuff and you know they probably would have kept doing it and you know except they were stopped right one of the sort of like legacies of these people is eventually the sort of slave powers like wind up in bleeding kansas which is a sort of semi-civil war between the pro-slavery anti-slavery forces in kansas that like leads to the regular civil war but you know i mean i think i think it's sort of important to understand about this entire thing is that these people just kept accumulating power and kept

accumulating power and kept accumulating power until someone stopped them and that was also true of the conquistadors right like i mean you know and like arguably arguably the sort of descendants of those people are still in power but like you know the the spanish were not run out of the places that they had conquered until people sort of fought them now the last thing i want to do is i we're also not free of this kind of guy um it kind of manifests in different ways in in sort of more recent times i i think probably the the the closest we have to the sort of like corporate cortez thing are the people behind the sort of,

I guess it gets re-branded as mergers and acquisitions, but the, the, the people behind the like leverage buyout like corporate Raider stuff on wall street in the eighties who, you know, and then the reason, the reason they sort of,

they, they behave and they think in a lot of the very, in a lot of the same ways as the debtor slavers is that their financial techniques leave them in basically the same situation as your Cortez, which is that the way that these people take over a company and these, these are basically finance people. These are investors who are figured out a way to seize control of companies. And the way they figured out to do it is they, they essentially, they sell bonds to other investors. So the short version of it is that the, they go into an enormous amount of debt personally, right.

In order to, you know, have enough money to just buy up the stock prices of the company. And, you know, they, they, they say, okay, we're going to buy, say, say, say buy up the stock prices of the company. And they say, okay, we're going to buy, say your stock price is $35. They're like, okay, we're going to buy the stock at $40. And unless the company can somehow raise their stock price above that in order to fend them off, this one person who's taken on an enormous amount of debt now suddenly just owns the company.

And he can transfer the debt onto the company and then he has to start, you know, just stripping assets from it, right? He has to find ways to make money. He has to find ways to sort of raise the stock price of this thing. You know, and this is usually done by like stripping people's pensions,

by firing people, by just destroying entire, like entire sort of like people's livelihoods. This is done by just dismantling companies wholesale like toys r us is the last company that sort of famously had this happen to them they just get completely dismembered and they get completely dismembered because the the people who buy these companies right and you know this eventually sort of turns into firms etc etc etc but those people are also unbelievably in debt right and you know it's debt that they

impose on themselves but doesn't that you know the sort of psychological effects of it are very similar and you know i i i think i think the thing about sort of like the late 20th nearly 21st, is that the violence gets outsourced. So, you know, these people still have slaves, but the slaves are like, you know, the slaves are owned by a contractor who's a contractor of a contractor, like somewhere way down the line.

But, you know, the sort of strategic stuff and the way that these people behave is very similar and i think it's worth noting that there's there's two there's people who there's people who come out of this era who are very important now one is that one of the people who comes out of this sort of 80s 90s era who was also constantly in debt and is also just sort of like a murderous like incredibly vengeful person who's also sort of dealing with these same kinds of like you know the the who's tapping into the sort of emotions of the sort of like indignation and outrage and desperation like is donald trump and you know donald trump i think is a sort of tragedy version of it and you get to see it

we've been getting to see it with um with elon musk as a sort of farce version of it where he's you know increasingly desperate to try to like dig himself out of the hole that he got by buying by having to leverage himself so much to buy twitter but yeah we are we remain haunted by the specter of this kind of guy and they've done they've done enormous harm to the world they're probably going to keep doing enormous harm in the world and yeah but but again i i i think it is worth thinking about them psychologically and worth understanding that it's not that you know like at the core of sort of like the capitalist death machine are not necessarily these like incredibly cold rational

calculating people it's a bunch of people who are frantic who are desperate who are very very angry and that doesn't make them sort of you know it doesn't make them more sympathetic it just makes them more violent it could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds

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