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Atlanta gay men and lesbians among podcasters exploring ‘last true bastion of free speech’
By RYAN LEE
Friday, January 20, 2006
IN HIS MID-30s, CHRIS HOUGH quit his “big boy” job as a sales manager and trainer and started working as a night auditor at a hotel, where he wound up fighting crime while working the third shift.
Actually, Hough left the corporate world to become a 35-year-old freshman at Kennesaw State University, and he stumbled into crime fighting after meeting a hodgepodge of dysfunctional characters at his new job.
Characters like “Waffle Lady,” who works at Waffle House when she’s not high, and her husband “Daddy DrugBucks.” Then there’s a crystal meth addict named “Hot Pocket,” and “Baby Jane,” a woman modeled after Bette Davis’ character in the 1960s classic, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”
“The first year at the hotel, there was a guest that loved to help me fight crime on the property named Carol, and her attack poodle, Noah,” Hough says. “She and I would walk the property all night together, and it was always amazing what we found.”
Hough parlayed his eclectic gig at the hotel into an online podcast called “The Daily Hough.”
“I originally thought of writing a book, but the stories came out better when I verbally explained them,” he says. “I started wearing an iRiver MP3 recorder at work, and whatever I could get on file I would share with the listeners.”
Hough is among a handful of Atlanta area gay men and lesbians who are producing podcasts, essentially audio blogs like radio shows that listeners can download onto their computer or personal MP3 players, such as iPods.
The term podcast is a hybrid of “iPod” and “broadcast,” and gay podcasters are becoming known as “Queercasters,” according to Omar Marrero, whose “The Other O Show” podcast is based in Atlanta.
In a testament to the podcasting boom in 2005, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary named podcasting “Word of the Year” earlier this month.
Marrero, who teams up with his sidekick Alfredo to talk about being gay Latinos in Atlanta, considers podcasting to be “the last true bastion of free speech.”
“It’s nice to be able to have a format which you can talk about anything, and if you throw in an expletive, it’s OK —you’re not going to get shut down by the FCC,” says Marrero, 32. “I don’t think people realize how censored and how corporate-driven our media is.
“You really can say whatever the hell you want on podcasting because there’s no one telling you that you can’t do that,” he continues. “It’s really a way for people to share who they are in a forum that’s unique.”
MARRERO HAS OPERATED HIS OWN WEBSITE for several years, but the site was mainly a photo-blog for he and his friends. Since he began podcasting in August, Marrero says the number of visitors to his site has increased exponentially.
“I definitely have a lot more traffic going to the site —I can have several hundred people a day go to the site, and I never had that before,” he says. “It’s quite a thing to share your life with a whole bunch of people that you may never know, or who may never contact you.”
Marrero ventured into podcasting because he missed his college days hanging out with friends for extended talks, something he says is more difficult now that he’s in his 30s.
“If you have a busy day, or crazy things happen, or you meet a crazy person, you want to tell your friends, but they don’t necessarily want to hear it,” he says. “What’s great about podcasting is it’s a great way to decompress and verbalize what you’re thinking. It’s a way to reflect on your life in a way you usually wouldn’t do.”
Hough agrees that podcasting has therapeutic value.
“It’s an amazing feeling to speak into a black sponge and get e-mail and phone calls from people that want to respond to what I say, both positive and negative,” Hough says. “Podcasting serves as a tool to manage my thoughts, while hopefully putting my story out there for someone to relate to, or be entertained by.”
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Alfredo (left) and Omar offer humorous insight into gay Latino life in Atlanta on their podcast, ‘The Other ‘O’ Show.’ |
HEATHER SMITH GETS GIDDY when she talks about podcasting.
Unlike the narrative diaries of Hough and Marrero, Smith operates a more “FM” podcast called “Rubyfruit Radio,” where she features only independent female artists.
“My show is 99 percent music —I have very little commentary, and it’s mostly about the different artists featured on the show,” says Smith, whose podcast attracted about 1,300 unique listeners since its November launch.
Smith calls podcasting “on-demand entertainment” that people can access and listen to anytime they want.
“They don’t have to listen to the standard, bland corporate radio format when there is something else out there just for them,” says Smith, a former college DJ.
But the 30-something Smith hasn’t been able to locate any other lesbian podcasters in Atlanta, and the city’s overall podcasting scene “lacks something,” she says.
“Cities like Boston and New York have huge podcasting groups that get together fairly often and are very well organized,” Smith says. “But in Atlanta, the meetings that have been scheduled have been canceled due to a lack of interest.”
With the lack of interaction among local Queercasters, gay and lesbian bloggers rely on a national network called Q-Podder to meet each other, Hough says.
FOLKS WHO WANT TO check out podcasts can visit clearinghouse sites like Q-Podder, Yahoo! Podcast and the iTunes music store to search for and subscribe to podcasts that interest them.
“[Once you subscribe,] whenever you connect your iPod or iTunes, it’s going to go on the internet and check if there’s a new episode —if it is, it’s going to automatically download it for you,” Marrero says.
Listeners can also subscribe by going directly to any of the podcasters’ websites, but Marrero and others say being listed on iTunes exposes their work to a broader audience, including straight listeners.
“A heterosexual listener e-mailed in and said … he really considered the show to be a bridge to homosexuality for heterosexuals —it was like a glimpse into gay life that they would’ve never known about or been associated with,” Marrero says.
“I think what it does is it provides a real, concrete example of what it’s like,” he adds. “It’s a real person saying it, and not some statistic on ABC News, or some NPR thing with the Pew Institute talking about gay Latinos.”
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Kennesaw resident Chris Hough chronicles his life as a 35-year-old college freshman and night auditor at an Atlanta hotel in ‘The Daily Hough.” |
As more gay listeners catch onto this blossoming trend, media companies are taking notice. Gay television channel Here! TV started its own podcasts featuring various people involved with the station, including drag impresario and playwright Charles Busch, the cast of Here! TV’s steamy soap “Dante’s Cove,” and gay advocate and actress Judith Light.
The Bravo cable channel issues a weekly “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” podcast — one of the most popular downloads on iTunes —on its website. The Fab Five offer tips from their various areas of expertise, including choosing wines and how to best iron a shirt.
But the true appeal in podcasting still lies with independent voices sharing their everyday lives with loyal listeners.
“For once, people have an alternative to force-fed broadcasted morality that is decided and dictated by someone else other than ourselves,” Hough says. “The real beauty is in the spirit of creative individualism that branches out to like minds; anyone can say anything, and the only backlash will be the choice of participation.
“No one could wish for anything better than letting the people of our great nation decide what is best for ourselves, which undocks the God warriors from instituting their values on us against our free will,” he says.
Ryan Lee can be reached at rlee@sovo.com.