Megan Milks! Minneapolis! Media recs from y’all! (Also, Casa Susana!)

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. I am effectively snowed in—as in, I could technically make it down the block to the bodega, but not too much further than that—and have spent most of the last 24 hours texting and reading about what’s going on in Minneapolis. I suspect that many of you are in a similar position: either snowed in & glued to your phones or on the street yourselves, defending your neighbors from kidnapping and worse. More on that in a minute. In the meantime, let’s talk about a podcast, I guess?

This week on the show, Ozzy and I had the pleasure of chatting with author Megan Milks. I’ve been fascinated by Megan’s work ever since Tehya read “Slug” out loud to us several years ago, and have been vaguely aware of their milk book since I heard them read about bull semen at World Transsexual Forum in 2023. So, naturally, I was thrilled to finally talk with Megan about slug sex and cross-species insemination and general freak writing (complimentary).

Tomorrow on Gender Conceal, we’re sharing my chat with Jess Darrow! Don’t recognize that name? Don’t worry, because the episode is titled “Jess Darrow is the they/them who played the butch dyke in Encanto” :) And if you’re wondering whether this interview is a direct result of this silly little post... all will be revealed in the episode :) :)

In that same episode, prior to the interview, I chat a bit about an important finding in last year’s patron survey. And while I won’t get into that here (yet), I do have more survey results to share: in an attempt to easily analyze the data, I threw all of your answers to “what other podcasts do you listen to?” and “what queer/trans media were you into this year?” into a big word cloud generator. This was very funny, because each word is parsed individually, so it looked like this:

From there, I used my powerful brain (lolol) to figure out what the hell y’all were talking about, and here’s what I puzzled out.

Most popular other podcasts, by popularity:

• Maintenance Phase (57ish mentions)

• If Books Could Kill (47ish mentions — truly y’all LOVE Michael Hobbes it’s so funny!)

• Normal Gossip (35-40ish mentions)

• Gender Spiral (30)

• You’re Wrong About (20)

• A Bit Fruity (18)

• TransLash (16)

• Handsome (15)

• 5-4 (15ish, I had never even heard of this one!)

• MBMBAM (15+, hard to count this one up tbh)

• Live Like the World Is Dying (13ish)

• This American Life (13)

• Love in a Fucked Up World (anywhere from like 12-25 idk, hard to count this one too)

Most popular other media:

• Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

• Woodworking by Emily St. James

• A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton

• Cuckoo / Black Flame / generally Gretchen Felker-Martin

• Um, Jennifer?

• The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis

• Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky

• Murderbot (idk what this is)

• Sapling Cage / Margaret Killjoy generally

• Andrew Joseph White generally

• I Saw the TV Glow

Okay, this is already long but it’s time for a biiiig Links & Stuff; here we go!

ICE-related links:

• If you’re looking for vetted places to donate money in Minneapolis, our friend Cassius suggests this fundraiser (tax-deductible!) as well as this one. He also pointed me to this person’s ongoing posts + iconic big website of links for more suggestions.

• Shout out to Icedozer all the homies love Icedozer

• NYCLU made a really helpful guide to filming ICE (and when to stop)

• NDLON is hosting a Zoom training re: best practices after someone is arrested by ICE

• I loved “there is no such thing as other people’s children,” a sweet little essay in Hell World by Minneapolis resident Erik Hane

• Ten Minneapolis residents on what their lives are like right now (Wired)

• Margaret Killjoy was on the ground in Minneapolis; Hamilton Nolan still is afaik

• Marisa Kabas recapped one specific, deeply fucked example of what ICE is doing

• Hell yeah and also hell yeah.

• Meanwhile, in the majority-Latine town of Woodburn, OR, the community banded together to chase ICE agents out of town :) :) :)

Speaking of Minneapolis: we’re working on lining up one or two guests to speak about their experiences on the ground. If you have questions for Minneapolis organizers/residents or suggestions for guests to speak with, please let me know! (One of them will probably be Cass tbqh but we might also get a non-Cass for variety or whatever.)

Storm-related links (a bit late now, whoops, but for next time?)

• Gift link to the NYT’s guide to preparing for a winter storm

• How to stay warm in a winter power outage; easier-to-share tips for staying warm

Everything else:

• I made it to the Casa Susanna exhibit right before it closed but you can view all the photos yourself here!!! My favorites are this one, this one, this xmas card, and the one on the right, below:

• Science Vs dove into the secret to happiness (it’s people) and Rax wrote about what to do if you can’t seem to access the secret to happiness (people)

• Sorry to make u remember fatphobia but this from Rusty made me laugh out loud:

• Broke: Winter Olympics. Woke: Fare Evasion Olympics

And one more thing! I’ll be chatting with Rahne Alexander in Baltimore on February 12. See you there?

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb.

And Puffin, ofc. This one just came in from my roommate a few minutes ago and WOW.

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective