Radical Soul

If you’re on a healing journey, you know what I mean by “ahah moments.” Those rare moments when something finally clicks and allows you to finally give up a hurtful habit or belief.

These breakthroughs can take years to get to. And it’s not uncommon to believe they’ll never come. Or that they’ll never be enough.

Sometimes it’s useful to hear stories about the work paying off. And that’s what author and journalist Donna Minkowitz provides in her newest book, Donnaville, out October 31 from Indolent Books.

Donnaville is an autobiographical novel featuring a town that’s at the heart of the author’s internal landscape. The characters are aspects of herself, and we find them on the brink of a revolution. The book is the result of a revolution in Minkowitz’s only life when, after 20 years of traditional therapy, she switched to drama therapy.

In this inaugural interview in the Queer Elder Series, I spoke to Donna about this switch and the result. We also spoke about her career, her new book, and what she’s learned about sex, love, and happiness.

Has a queer elder made a difference in your life? Nominate them to be featured on Radical Soul! Submit your nomination here.

About the Guest

Donna Minkowitz is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the memoirs GrowingUp Golem and Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God, and Fury. Author Mary Gaitskill has celebrated her as “original, energetic, witty, and meaty,” and Kirkus has praised the “defiant and playful energy” of her work. She was the Village Voice’s longtime columnist on queer politics and culture, and a columnist for The Advocate. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Slate, and Salon, and she has frequently gone undercover to report on the far right. Minkowitz is the recipient of a GLAAD Media Award, an Exceptional Merit Media Award, an Art Omi residency, and an award for outstanding journalism from NLGJA: the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists.

I’m launching a new series for Radical Soul, honoring queer elders and ancestors. What you can expect:

* Podcast interviews with queer activists and authors in their 60s and 70s reflecting on their careers, their personal journeys, and their latest work.

* Posts at radicalsoul.co on the legacies of queer activists that have passed on (hopefully a mix of content written by me and submitted by all of you!)

Listen to this episode to learn why I’m launching this new series and the inspiration behind it.

Nominate a queer elder or ancestor to be featured.

I want your submissions! Tell us about someone whose life or work has been meaningful to you, and I’ll feature them on Radical Soul! Submit your nomination here.Music from Snoozy Beats

I hope you’re lucky enough to have a friend or friends who specifically check on your mental health. Folks who genuinely want to hear about your anxiety, depression, attempts to focus, regulate sleep, etc. It’s pretty wonderful to have permission to talk about these things.

Spiritual activist Bex Mui is taking it one step further. She wants to talk about your spiritual health. In our interview, she explains:

“We've always understood physical health. That's always been a part of our system and our societies. And now we're like growing in our understanding of mental health with its own needs and its own tools. I'm really interested and invested in our spiritual health, especially as queer and trans folks. It's crisis time of isolation and of attacks and of grief and I'm really curious about and always thinking about what are the strategies for our spiritual health that exist?”

I spoke to Bex in anticipation of Radical Soul’s next book club on March 25 where we’re covering her book: House of Our Queer: Healing, Reframing, and Reclaiming Your Spiritual Practice.

The book covers her personal journey to finding the sacredness of her own queerness and how she’s incorporated it into her spiritual practices and identity. It also offers examples of practices that center queerness from Bex’s own “spiritual toolbox.”

Listen to the podcast for more of Bex’s history about growing up biracial with two cultural heritages, her spiralic relationship with the catholic church, her thoughts on spiritual leadership, and more.

About The Guest

Bex Mui, M. Ed (she/her) is a biracial, queer witch and energy worker committed to the work of LGBTQ+ affirmation.  As a spiritual organizer, Bex believes that a spiritually grounded approach to the work of LGBTQ+ advocacy is increasingly needed, as well as an expansive, shame-free, spiritually-grounded approach to sexuality. 

In 2021, Bex founded House Of Our Queer, a spiritual playspace committed to enhancing spiritual health for the LGBTQIA+ community.  In her book, House of Our Queer: Healing, Reframing, and Reclaiming Your Spiritual Practice, she shares about her spiritual journey being raised Catholic with Buddhist influences, and her current practices including astrology, tarot, sacred sexuality, and honoring ancestors. Through House Of Our Queer, Bex hosts monthly virtual and in-person workshops focused on ritual and reflection. Learn more and stay connected via email, Instagram, or LinkTree. 

When Goddess Erica and her husband opened up their marriage, her husband helped demonstrate how she deserved to be treated. “I don't want to say that he gave me the standards, but he helped me get to a point where I realized that l my low bar is worship,” she explained in our interview.

But this realization wasn’t the only thing that led to Erica claiming her Goddess title. Becoming a mom was also a big part of the journey of learning how she felt about herself:

“I gave up my body and was willing to give up my personhood for my son. I chose to be an entity that would do anything for this kid. And then you take just a half step further and you're like, I'm willing to do anything for them —  I'm willing to do anything for myself. And if that's not God, then what is?”

To Goddess Erica, claiming divinity has everything to do with a fierce and radical self-love.

Now she’s on a mission to change the world by helping others recognize their own divinity. She runs a mission-based agency that works with businesses and individuals to provide everything from marketing support to doula services.

On the podcast, she tells us her history from growing up as the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist minister to the impact of having a child and opening up her marriage. We also explore the dynamics involved in goddess worship, how to live an orgasmic life and consider an orgasmic death.

Goddess Erica is an Orgasmic Doula, specializing in personal empowerment and pleasure- centered childbirth. With a mission of normalizing kink, gender identity, polyamory and radical self-love, her creative services agency offers group workshops, individual coaching and marketing support for sex-positive businesses. To find more information on her body of work and service offerings visit www.YesGoddessErica.com

A friend and artist Addie Hirschten recently released her first book, The Alchemy of Symbols: How to Use the Power of Images to Transform Your Life. The book is about living an intentional life filled with symbols: noticing how symbols affect you and paying attention to how the universe may be speaking to you through them, and/or how you also may be speaking to yourself. Addie asks the reader (and podcast listener) to consider what symbols you surround yourself with and why.

Symbology is just another tool to work with. It can be part of our self-care toolbox, as well as help us in our work to decondition from and challenge mainstream culture. A way to better understand what messages we absorb and what we choose to own.

About The Guest

Addie Hirschten, is a visionary painter, public speaker, and host of the Studio Alchemy Podcast. She teaches creativity classes from her studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. Learn more at studioalchemy.art.

Books Mentioned On the Podcast

* The Alchemy of Symbols by Addie Hirschten

* She Who Runs with Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola

* Goddess in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women's Lives By Jean Shinoda Bolen

* The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté

* Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a special episode of Radical Soul, my partner David Britton interviews me for a change! He asks me about growing up as a pastor’s kid and my move away from Christianity.

For the past fifteen years, we’ve been there to witness each other’s spiritual evolutions. The result is a unique glimpse into the ways two people who love each other can impact each other, as well as what remains stable about someone’s personality or essence in the midst of massive change.

During the interview, David jokes that the subtitle for this podcast could be “Spirituality, Whatever That Is Anyway,” and he’s completely right. Spirituality — whatever it is — is so often a source of hope, comfort, and meaning to others, that to rigidly define it in a way that takes away that hope, comfort, and meaning would be an act of violence.

I offered a definition of what it means to me, which was “divine mystery and connection to the unknown.” But if you asked me tomorrow, I’d probably offer a different answer.

I feel the same about defining queerness or justice or even love: these big topics that define us, how we understand ourselves, and how we interact with the world. I once heard activist Loretta Ross speak at a conference and one of the things she said that stuck with me is that a community that forces its members to believe all the same things is a cult. Instead, let’s wrestle with big ideas together and leave space for difference.

About David Britton

David Britton grew up watching Marx Brothers movies (which his mother loved) and Mystery Science Theater (which his mother hated). He is a comedian, writer, and actor who has performed all over the United States. He has written for the Hard Times, The Daily Dot, and other publications. He recently starred as Reinfield in several sold out performances of Dracula, on Bannerman Island. His newest comedy album “Possum Pals” is a split with comedian Megan Gilbert and can be heard wherever you listen to the things you listen to. Learn more at davidbrittoncomedy.com

More From Jera

I was recently interviewed by my friend Addie Herschel for her Alchemy of Art Podcast about being a sexuality writer. We talk about being “obsessed” with sexuality, what makes a relationship codependent, and all of my projects in the works!

Janet Hardy has a very public body. As a traveling kink educator and public player, it’s no leap to believe that thousands of people around the world have studied her body in public scenes or demonstrations. And as an author, much of Hardy’s work has centered around her own embodied experiences. As such, she has given us access to her body in a profoundly intimate way.

Now in her late sixties, Janet reflects on her aging body and her changing relationship with pain, sex, gender, time, and mortality.

She opens the book by talking about how she used to teach classes on pain processing which teaches you to divorce “pain from all the feelings that usually accompany it, such as fear, anger or worry.” Learning to process physical pain is exceptionally helpful for kinksters who use pain in their play, not to mention anyone living with chronic pain, preparing for childbirth, recovery from injuries, etc. But she found the same advice could be applied to emotional pain and learning to process feelings like “jealousy, displacement, or insecurity.”

“But all my techniques and practices fall short when I think about my own aging and especially about its inevitable endpoint — which is to say, death,” she writes. “That may be one sensation that’s too big for me to process.”

The book is an attempt to process it all, from how her body is forcing her to slow down and change what she enjoys to the aging of her partner and the death of her father.

Listen to the interview for more on ageism and accessibility issues in alternative communities, Janet’s warning to folks exploring kink and other intense embodied practices, and more.

And pick up a copy of Notes of an Aging Pervert for a humorous reflection on aging as an alt-lifer.

About the Guest

Janet W. Hardy is the author or coauthor of more than a dozen groundbreaking books about relationships and sexuality, including The Ethical Slut, which has sold more than 300,000 copies to date.

She spent the first three decades of her life believing that she was the only person in the world who got turned on by thinking about spanking. She wrote her first book, The Sexually Dominant Woman, to help create a world in which nobody else would ever be that clueless.

Janet has traveled the world as a speaker and teacher on topics ranging from ethical multipartner relationships to erotic spanking and beyond. She has appeared in documentary films, television shows,and more podcasts and radio shows than she can count. She has narrated audio versions of many of her books, and looks forward to doing more.

Janet spent a quarter century as editor-in-chief of Greenery Press, the firm she founded in 1992, which went on to publish dozens of books about alternative sexuality and relationships. While she has retired from being a publisher, she goes on writing, drawing, editing and educating about sexuality.

Janet lives the life of a kinky poly queer genderbent geezer in Eugene, Oregon, with her spouse and a whole lot of pets.

Tristan Taormino’s new memoir A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten combines her relationship with her father who died from AIDS, coming into her own queer identity, and becoming the sex educator and porn creator that she is today.

As her astrologer who read her birth chart explained, Tristan is living in her dharma.

There’s a beautiful theme of learning to trust her intuition throughout the book, and I asked Tristan about this. How do we learn to build a sense of intuition? You’ll find some of the highlights about this topic below.

Listen to the full episode for more about relationships with dykes, acknowledging and exploring power dynamics, what it means to be a spiritual leader, and more.

About My Guest

Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Taormino has won four Lambda Literary Awards and eight Feminist Porn Awards. She lives in Los Angeles.Follow Tristan on Instagram or Twitter @tristantaormino. Follow Jera on Instagram or Twitter @thejerabrown.

Kai Cheng Thom’s most recent book, Falling Back in Love With Being Human, is a series of letters to people or groups of people who are hard to love. Which is everyone.  She addresses trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and trans women. She writes to sex workers and their clients. She has letters to mass shooters and their victims. She writes to J.K. Rowling. She writes to herself.

The current state of the world can make it awfully hard to ground ourselves in love. It can be hard to love ourselves when we represent something that society is raging against. And it’s just as hard to look at those doing the raging with compassion and curiosity.

In this newest episode of the podcast, I spoke to Kai Cheng about her book, what she learned from doing sex work in her twenties, and how she’s cultivating a spiritual practice grounded in love and recognizing the inherent worth of everyone. Basically: who is this wonderful person capable of writing love letters to those who hate her? And how did she become who she is?

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Kai Cheng Thom is an award-winning writer, performance artist, and community healer in Toronto. She was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers for her surrealist novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir. She is also the author of several other books, including a poetry collection, an essay collection, and two children’s picture books. Kai Cheng writes the advice column Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse for Xtra. Find her on Twitter: @razorfemme or Instagram: @kaichengthom.

“Healing our relationship to desire, and being able to acknowledge, verbalize, and celebrate our desires is key to living a life of joy, presence, and meaning,” explained conflict navigator and healer Opulence Abundance in a recent newsletter/blog post.

We spoke about Opulence’s relationship with desire for the podcast, along with the relationship between yoga and the caste system, embracing one’s identity as a healer, and the loss of wisdom in communities that shun their elders.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

* @thefatsextherapist

* Tara Brach’s podcast

* Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

* Opulence’s Substack and podcast

About the Guest

Opulence Abundance is a speaker, conflict navigator, and healing professional. As a queer intersex person of color born and raised in the Carolinas, Opulence learned how to diffuse conflict and build community at a young age. In 2014 Opulence moved to California and in 2016 they graduated from the University of Southern California with their Masters in Social Work. They went on to work in grants management and healthcare, creating one of the first healthcare programs for people exiting incarceration. Opulence now works with individuals and groups to navigate conflict in new ways so they can break patterns, harness their power, and change the world. Check out their Substack and podcast.