In this 4-part series, I sit down with my lifelong friend Ashe to discuss the history of body image in the gay community and how the obsession over appearance has manifested itself in the 21st Century (hint: it involves steroids). 

We can trace the modern phenomenon of body dysmorphia down to modern advertising and three groundbreaking revelations about the consumer. If you want to keep the customer clamoring for more, just appeal to their desires, habits, and fears.

Women and gay men process advertising and media in similar ways - both groups are statistically more likely to take appeals to appearance and body image personally. Straight men, it seems, are oblivious.

While advertising has come a long way in including women of all sizes, gay men are still internalizing a lot of negative media and engaging in a lot of unhealthy behaviors.

We get personal about our own body image issues and explore how gay male body image has changed throughout the 20th-21st centuries.

We also discuss: forest porn, stealing the inserts from men's underwear packages, monkey pox, HIV/AIDS, the Stonewall Riots, and the beefcake magazines from the 1950s and 60s. 

In this 3-part series, my sister Jessi and I reflect on two lifetimes of an abusive, narcissistic man who pretended to be our father. We have wildly different stories with a common thread: we'd both be better off if this man was dead. 

My relationship with my father is and always has been non-existent. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. We didn't show affection. As his son, the man was physically and verbally abusive. A textbook narcissist, my childhood memories of him are a combination of gaslighting and delusions of grandeur and constant one-upsmanship. 

Jessi's relationship with the man was much darker and much more abusive. To her, he was a predator whose violence was ratcheted up to an unbearable degree. Hers is a story of sexual abuse and neglect. Ours is the story of resilience. Jessi and I air out the dark secrets of our childhood and get some kind of closure together. 

What do model trains have to do with it? Not a lot but also not a little. 

Trigger Warning: This episode has graphic descriptions of child physical and sexual abuse.

In this 2-part series I sit down to discuss race and cowboys with my good friend, Kenny. Kenny has possibly the best outlook on life of anyone I know, and we have talked for countless hours about all sorts of topics. I was honored and grateful and downright giddy to get to sit with him for 2 hours to discuss The Talk, dog whistles, and the history of the American Cowboy. 

In this episode: Trump, police brutality, what it means to call someone 'racist', pizza recipes, and the American Cowboy. 

You Can Buy it Here! 

You can download the full PDF here.

You can download the .mobi file here.

You can download the .epub zip file here.