Podcast Corner: Queer music, Ashley Madison, and social media trolls
Jake Shears of Scissor Sisters presents the Queer the Music podcast. (Picture: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
Hosted by Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears, Queer the Music celebrates the anthems that have dominated dance floors and shaped queer lives. It shines a light on the trailblazers of self-expression.
The opening episode is about Sylvester’s disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. Biographer Josh Gamson explains that Sylvester was adamant it be a disco track and almost spewed his way through the lyrics.
He died in 1988 from Aids complications - his collaborator and friend talks Shears through his time coming up in 1970s and ‘80s San Francisco, and how Prince was reportedly a fan.
Episode two of Queer the Music is with Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem, whose ‘I Do This All The Time’ is one of the best tunes of the 2020s so far.
Ashley Madison was a website set up in the early 2000s for people seeking a private space to share their public desires. Or to put it another way, people looking to cheat on their partners.
In 2015, the site was hacked and users’ details were revealed to the world - their names, address, and sexual preferences. So far, so deserved? Maybe not.
Exclusive to Audible for now, but likely to be widely available later in the year - and how nice to press play and be able to listen to the entire series ad-free, with no recaps, repetition or cliffhangers, Exposed talks to partners who cheated, the women they did the cheating with, and doesn’t judge.
It’s a tightrope act, but an interesting, presumably post-#MeToo one. There’s nothing new in the series, and the hack was a well-documented one in the US, but it’s well-told.
Narrated by Sophie Nelisse (Yellowjackets), but reported by Sophie Elmhirst and Maria Luisa Tucker, we hear about bots and hackers and shady CEOs.
Exposed asks what happens when trust is broken both online and in the real world.
Another series about the online world, Why Do You Hate Me? (BBC Sounds) asks why some people behave the way they do on social media.
Hosted by the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring, the first couple of episodes are about a woman who believed she was Madeleine McCann, leading to a wave of online hate against her; and a survivor of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, who questions what he witnessed with his own eyes due to conspiracy theorists.
