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Wow. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to be honest and say there is nothing I could have anticipated about this week. I never would have believed Trump would win. (I’m not still sure I believe he did, at least not without some outside assistance.) I never would have believed I would have such strong, visceral, involuntary emotional reactions to it. I have wept and shouted and laid in bed and stared at the wall. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I didn’t feel this strongly in 2000 - and I felt pretty fucking strongly. What a year this has been for us. Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and HB2 in North Carolina, House Bill 1523 in Mississippi, and #gaysfortrump, and now, on top of all that shit and suffering, Trump. Chuck and I constantly joke about being reclassified as a political podcast when we mean to be a sex podcast. But maybe what we need right now is a political podcast. I look at what’s going on around me and I’m not reminded of the electoral college victory-on-a-technicality of Bush in 2000, but of the ascension of Reagan and his hokey bullshit narrative of an America that never was, and the way his charismatic hornswaggle of an administration led directly to the deaths of so many of us - of queer people, and people of color, and women, and how in the ‘80s it became normal somehow for television preachers mired in their own sex scandals to moralize about you and me and our attempts at honest lives. The only fix, back then, was to get loud and to get organized and to refuse to back down from being who we were at every opportunity. The 1980’s taught us we would never change the world by asking nicely. I suspect the next 4 years are going to teach a whole new generation of queer kids - the kids who right now are scared to pieces, who are flooding the trans and queer lifelines with calls, who worry they’ll be required to transition back, or go into the closet, who are getting yelled at by classmates for the first times in their lives - I suspect those kids are going to learn how to be radicals real fucking fast. I’m ready to join them. I’m ready to pick one or two specific things I want to achieve or freedoms I want to protect, and invest serious time and my own physical presence and energy to make sure those become reality and are kept safe. If you’re listening to this, odds are you are just as horrified by the phrase “President Trump” as Chuck or I. Some of the wider cast of this podcast - our friends Katja and Jordan and Chaim and Lara and Troy - I know some of them have also had overwhelmingly emotional responses. The common thread in all of them is wanting to do something. So start thinking now about what you’re afraid will go away, or what you want to see gained despite the inmates having taken over the asylum. Find other people who care about the same thing. Make a plan. Get involved. Effect change. Don’t be shy. Don't wait for opportunities for change to come to y. As we say over and over, be safe, but have fun; in this case, be safe, but make a difference. To that end, at least one friend and I are going to be launching a new podcast in the next few weeks, tentatively titled The Queer Feminist All-Faiths All-Peoples Anti-Fascist Book Club. We’ll pick up books about the rise of fascism in other settings in history, the history of queer organization, the history of oppression and its resistance, and how to organize and effect change safely and effectively. If you thought our occasional forays into politics on the way to talking about blowjobs marked me as a radical, oh baby, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This episode's theme song: Covered by fourstones (c) copyright 2009 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/victor/21441 Ft: E_State, romancito