Author: jennanddavevonebers

Married couple in the Chicago area in a mixed orientation relationship.
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Episode 32: Adventures in Social Media

With the launch of Meta’s new social networking platform, Threads, we dedicate this week’s episode to the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media.

As Twitter circulates slowly down the drain (taking TweetDeck with it, apparently), we discuss the toxicity of that platform and whether Threads is a viable alternative. We also talk about the relationship between Threads and Instagram, our own various social media accounts, and learning how to deal with trolls — including one very angry, unemployed rage-aholic from Torrence, California — without losing your mind.

And speaking of our various accounts, you can follow us on: 

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! 

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Episode 31: Transitioning While Famous, and the Supreme Court Strikes Out

On this week’s episode, after reminiscing about being in New York City last year for the 4th of July and giving a shoutout to Garland and Claire Jeffreys for commenting and sharing last week’s podcast, we get down to business.

First, we talk about Elliot Page’s book Page Boy: A Memoir, which Jennifer highly recommends. Navigating becoming famous while coming to terms with being transgender is not an easy thing to do, but Elliot has managed to do it with grace.

And that brings us to a discussion of other people who’ve transitioned while in the limelight, including Grammy-winning artist Wendy Carlos, who brought the Moog synthesizer to Bach and other classical composers in the 1960s and ’70s, and Chaz Bono, who began to transition around 2008 and sat down with David Letterman for a memorable interview in 2011.  

In this same conversation, we talk about Gina Chua, former executive editor at Reuters with a decades-long, high profile career in journalism, who transitioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2021 New York Times story, she said the pandemic gave her the privacy and time to be able to “grow into her skin.” Chua is the most senior transgender journalist in the country. In the Times article she says, “There are a lot of people who are 14 years old who would like to know that this is not a death sentence.” She continues, “It’s not a millstone. It’s something you can be proud of, it’s something you can celebrate and something you can live with.”

Finally, we turn to the recent Supreme Court decision in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, where the Court considered a web designer’s challenge to a Colorado civil rights law that might, theoretically, possibly, maybe, someday … require her to create a wedding-related website for a same sex couple. The only problem is, no same sex couple has ever actually asked her to do that, so her entire case is based on mere speculation. That’s the kind of case that courts ordinarily throw out because, without an actual injury, a plaintiff has no standing to bring a lawsuit in the first place. Not so much under the current Bizarro-World Supreme Court, apparently.

But it’s actually worse than that. At some point during the case, anticipating a challenge to her standing, the plaintiff filed a declaration under penalty of perjury stating that a same sex couple named Stewart and Mike contacted her company to inquire about a wedding website. Though the documents the plaintiff filed provided Stewart’s telephone number, no one bothered to verify the story. Except for a journalist named Melissa Gira Grant, who published a piece in The New Republic on June 29, 2023, one day before the Supreme Court delivered its opinion. In her New Republic article, Grant reveals — and other media outlets have since confirmed — that the story is simply untrue. Stewart never reached out to 303 Creative, never knew that they used his name in their case, and absolutely never requested that 303 Creative design a website for him. In fact, Stewart himself is a web designer and was already married at the time of the alleged contact … to a woman, not to a man named Mike. 

Apparently, some folks are so consumed with their own hate that nothing else matters, least of all the truth.

So, anyway, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 30: 80th Birthday Tribute to Garland Jeffreys, the King of In Between

On this special joint episode of our two podcasts, In the Shadow of the Evening Trees and Two Minutes Fifty-Nine, we celebrate one of our favorite artists, Garland Jeffreys, who turned 80 on June 29.

To those who don’t know, Garland Jeffreys is a singer-songwriter from New York who wrote and performed some of the most influential, if not necessarily widely-known, music over a 50-year career from the late 1960s to 2018 or so. His first big hit “Wild in the Streets,” has been covered by multiple artists and featured in movies and on television over the years. He also traveled in the same circles as Bruce Springsteen, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Willy DeVille, Lou Reed, and the New York Dolls back in the day.

In this week’s show, we talk about how we connected with Garland, first through the music and later through social media, and how, in a weird sort of way, we lived parallel lives without knowing it. Which is to say, we both started having kids around the same time, which led Garland to pause his musical career and us to drop out of pop culture for awhile, as parents do when their kids are young. And so we both reemerged, in a sense, around 2011, and that’s when our paths crossed in real life. Since then, we’ve gotten to know Garland and his wife, Claire, we saw Garland play live in Chicago on multiple occasions, and we ultimately traveled to New York for his farewell concert five years ago.

It’s impossible to summarize Garland’s career or what his music means to us, but he and Claire are working on a documentary of his life and music called Garland Jeffreys: The King of In Between (a fitting title, as we explain), and we’re hoping that it’s out soon. In the meantime, you can contribute to the pos-production costs here.

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 29: Solar Panels, Artificial Intelligence, and Hate Groups

This week’s episode runs a little long, but we think it will be worth your time.

We begin the show talking about solar panels and whether there is a downside to high tech solutions to environmental problems. Then we talk about artificial intelligence and how some employers use it in the hiring process. Perhaps employers use AI to cut down on the biases, implicit or otherwise, that hiring professionals may have … but what about biases that are baked into the AI? Illinois and New York have passed legislation to address some of these issues, but it remains to be seen whether that legislation will be beneficial.

That leads to a broader discussion about implicit bias and whether we’d be better off confronting it and learning to hold it in check rather than relying on technology, which may or may not have its own biases, to replace human involvement. 

And don’t get us started on age discrimination … 

Anyway, we wrap up the show talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent designation of Moms for Liberty (or, more accurately, “Moms” for “Liberty”) as a hate group. While SPLC brands them as anti-government extremists for their concerted efforts to harass school board members, teachers, administrators, and pubic libraries, they are, in fact, a pro-authoritarian organization that wants to dominate public schools and dictate what other people’s kids learn and what books they can read. And that doesn’t even get into their over-the-top anti-LGBTQIA bigotry. 

Moms for Liberty has affiliated groups throughout the country, including ironically named groups called Awake Illinois and Awake Americans that are trying to destroy our local schools. And they will try to destroy yours, too. We will follow up on this in the coming weeks, but we also briefly mention some people in Illinois who are affiliated with these groups, including a small-town (alleged) “cowboy” who posts (homoerotic?) selfies all day and is convinced that he’s the smartest guy on the planet. You’ll be surprised to learn that he’s … not.

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 28: We’ve Become a Sports Podcast

On this week’s episode, we talk about podcasts past and present, including our good friend Tim Corrimal’s show and the now-defunct Sportsball podcast, which leads to a discussion about hockey, the current sad state of Chicago sports … and the possibility that the Bears might become our neighbors?

And that leads to an even longer digression about the successes and failures of our local teams, from the White Sox threatening to leave Chicago for St. Petersburg in the late 1980s (and the political shenanigans that kept them here), to the down years of the 1960s and ’70s (with a few near misses along the way, including the Blackhawks’ appearance in the 1971 Stanley Cup Final), to the thirty year span from 1986 to 2016 when we won twelve championships across the four major sports with five separate teams: the Bears in 1986, the Bulls in 1991, ’92, ’93, ’96, ’97, and ’98, the White Sox in 2005, the Blackhawks in 2010, ’13, and ’15, and the Cubs in 2016.

Meanwhile, on a more serious note, we also talk about New York singer/songwriter/legend Jesse Malin, who recently suffered a rare form of stroke that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Jesse’s a huge supporter of the Clash (somebody’s favorite band), and he’s done a lot work raising money for other musicians and folks in the hospitality industry impacted by the pandemic. Now is the opportunity help him: if you can, please donate to the Sweet Relief Fund for Jesse, here. 

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 27: “You’re Not From Chicago”

So, we’re done talking about our Ireland trip and the Bruce Springsteen concert (for now), but we have to mention that our episode of Jesse Jackson’s Set Lusting Bruce podcast is now live, so check it out. We had a great time recording with Jesse.

Turning to this week’s episode, we talk about living in the Chicago suburbs and folks from out of town getting dunked on for mouthing off about our city … even though it’s not really our city. (For context, see this write up of Fox & Friends’ misadventures in suburban Naperville on the morning of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s inauguration.)

But it’s not all fun and games. Picking up on a part of our conversation with Jesse on his show, we also talk about the current status of LGBTQIA rights in America and the increasing threats to the community. Is it just the last angry gasp of a dying ideology, or is there a real danger that our community will lose its hard-fought rights? We take a look at a violent incident in Glendale, California, where far-right thugs attacked supporters of LGBTQIA rights and what it says about the growing desperation of anti-LGBTQIA bigots. But we also share some good news — a US District Court judge in Florida entered a preliminary injunction that temporarily prohibits the state from enforcing portions of its recently-enacted law banning gender-affirming care for minors. The ruling only protects the named plaintiffs at this point, but the court’s decision (which you can read here) is very encouraging.

However, even that good news comes with a word of caution. While this judge got it right, we know there will be further litigation and likely appeals in the Florida case, along with other challenges to these types of statutes around the country, and at some point one or more of those cases could reach the Supreme Court. In the past, we might have been somewhat optimistic about the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision in these cases — after all, this is the Court that gave us Obergefell and Bostock — but in the post-Dobbs world, all bets are off.

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 26: Ireland, Part 2

Following up on Episode 25, we continue our conversation about our recent trip to see Bruce Springsteen in Dublin, but first we talk about recording an episode of Set Lusting Bruce with our friend and podcaster, Jesse Jackson (not that Jesse Jackson; the Springsteen podcaster from Dallas). We had a really great time talking to Jesse about some serious stuff (the rising tide of anti-LGBTQIA prejudice in the US and whether it’s the last gasp of a dying ideology) and some very fun stuff (BRUCE!). 

We’ll post a link to Jesse’s podcast when it’s up. In the meantime, check out other episodes of his podcast, including the most recent episode where he talks with Warren Zanes, author of a deep-dive into the Nebraska album called Deliver Me From Nowhere.

We then we go into an extended discussion about the concert, getting there, getting in, getting close to the stage, and … getting wet. But it was a fantastic show and Bruce was in fine form. The set opened with “My Love Will Not Let You Down,” which was the opening number on his reunion tour with the E Street Band in 2000, so it holds a special place in Springsteen lore. From there, he played a fair number of songs from: 

  • The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (“Kitty’s Back,” “The E Street Shuffle”); 
  • Born to Run (“Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Backstreets,” “She’s the One”); 
  • Darkness on the Edge of Town (“The Promised Land,” “Prove it All Night,” “Badlands,” “Something in the Night”); 
  • Born in the USA (“No Surrender,” “Glory Days,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Bobby Jean”); 
  • The Rising (“The Rising,” “Mary’s Place”);
  • Wrecking Ball (“Wrecking Ball,” “Death to My Hometown”); and 
  • Letter to You (“Letter to You,” “Ghosts,” “Last Man Standing,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams”).

He also played “Out in the Street” from The River, “Nightshift” from Only the Strong Survive (his recent collection of soul covers), Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped,” “Johnny 99” from Nebraska, and “Because the Night” (an all-time favorite). He did not do some of his lesser known songs that resonate with long-timers (“Roulette,” “Held Up Without a Gun,” “Paradise by the ‘C’”), but it was a very solid retrospective of his career. You can actually down the audio of the performance here.

In addition to that, we talk about our time in Dublin, wandering around O’Connell Street, our adventures on public transport, and hiking in the Dublin Mountains, plus our visits to the James Joyce Centre and the Garden of Remembrance and our thoughts on the documentary, Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming with Dave Letterman, part of which was filmed right across the street from our hotel.

For more on our Ireland trip, the concert, and reflections on modern Ireland, you can listen to this episode of David’s Clash podcast, Two Minutes Fifty-Nine.

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

On the bus to RDS Arena
We were *this* close
Bruce and Little Steven were in fine form
Bruce comes over to our side of the stage

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Episode 25: Ireland, Part 1

In the first of (at least) two episodes on our epic trip to Ireland to visit the ancestral home of one side of the family and to see Bruce Springsteen in Dublin, we talk about the genesis of this crazy trip, flying into Dublin, driving to County Sligo in the northwest and the time we spent there, and then driving back to Dublin for the show. 

We will post some pictures of the first part of the trip shortly, but suffice it to say that Sligo and the northwest coast of Ireland are spectacularly beautiful. Sitting on an estuary where the River Garavogue (An Gharbhóg) meets the Atlantic Ocean, the city of Sligo has about 20,000 residents, but, like most of Ireland, is quickly becoming a center of technology. The mountains of Benbulben and Knocknarea (with the massive cairn of Queen Maeve (Medb) visible at the top) dominate the views from nearly every street corner, and the city itself is just a short distance away from Strandhill beach, the Collooney Mill Falls, and the Eagles Flying raptor sanctuary, where we got to meet a couple of owls, a falcon, and other assorted birds of prey.

Meanwhile, if you ever get a chance to visit Sligo and you’re looking for accommodations, we recommend the Clayton Hotel. We had a massive room there and really enjoyed our stay. And we learned a little bit about Gaelic football from one of the bartenders, too. 

On next week’s show, we’ll talk more about our time in Dublin and Bruce Springsteen’s phenomenal show, plus wandering around O’Connell Street, our adventures on public transport, and hiking in the Dublin Mountains. 

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 24: Kids Know Who They Are

This week, we discuss a recent episode of 60 Minutes Australia on parents who refuse to assign their newborn babies a gender at birth. Though the show suggests that the parents, who refer to their kids as “theybies,” let the kids “decide their gender,” we note that that’s not really true. Rather, the kids are who they are, whether they’re cisgender, transgender or nonbinary. They’re not choosing their identities; they’re just coming to understand them. Ultimately, kids know who they are, whether their parents like it or not. So maybe it’s better to let them tell us, rather than the other way around.

This leads to a broader conversation about the assumptions we make about kids, the ways we effectively indoctrinate them in straight, cisgender “normality,” whether we mean to or not, and how damaging that is to kids who don’t fit that mold. If we don’t teach our kids that other kinds of people exist and have perfectly valid lives, we’re telling them that if they’re not straight and cisgender then they’re broken. 

We also discuss the annoying trend of parents weaponizing their status as moms and dads to demonize queer people, ban books, and bully teachers, librarians, and school boards. They’re not fighting for “parents’ rights” or “protecting kids,” they’re fighting to impose their narrow worldview on other parents and their kids. 

Finally, we couldn’t end the show without gloating — just a little — about Fox News firing Tucker Carlson in the aftermath of the network’s massive settlement with Dominion Voting Systems … not to mention Abby Grossberg’s sexual harassment suit against Carlson and Fox. 

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

Just a reminder: We’ll be off the next couple of weeks traveling, but we’ll be back in May!

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Episode 23: On the Road Again

On this week’s episode: cats don’t worry about other people’s chosen names and pronouns, so you shouldn’t either. We also revisit an old classic: the Boy Scouts of America, an organization notorious for its homophobia in the 1980s and ’90s, recently settled decades of child sex abuse claims for a cool $2.5 billion, and yet your favorite online transphobes — you know, the ones who claim to care so much about other people’s kids — remained predictably silent. It’s almost like they’re more interested in distracting attention away from real abusers than they are in keeping kids safe … 

But we spend most of this week’s episode talking about one of our favorite bands, The Mavericks. We just got back from seeing the alt-country, Latin-influenced icons in Milwaukee (a greatly underrated city, by the way), and, as always, they were outstanding. We’ve followed The Mavericks since the mid-’90s and it’s hard to explain just how great they are in concert. You just have to see them for yourselves.

And speaking of traveling to see bands, next month we’re off to Ireland to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Dublin, which means that we will take a two-week break after next week’s show. But don’t worry. We’ll have lots to talk about, not the least of which will involve driving stick-shift on the wrong side of the road.

Finally, we wrap up the show with a funny incident that happened last week: somebody hacked notorious anti-LGBTQIA troll Matt Walsh’s Twitter account, and hilarity ensued.

So, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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