Sex for Smart People*

Dear Listeners: SFSP, in this form, is ending. BUT! It will be evolving into a new podcast in about a year!! Rather than being about sex and love through a lens of our collective liberation as SFSP has been, the new podcast will be about our collective liberation at large (transformative justice! consent culture! dismantling white supremacy! systems shift + widespread cultural healing! queering everything!) without shying away from things having to do with sex + bodies + desire that so often get swept under the rug. We’d love love love to stay in conversation with you in the meanwhile and beyond! Please stay subscribed to our feed, and/or you can join our mailing list at sexforsmartpeople.com to make certain that you hear about what we are up to next. All the episodes will stay up and available, so feel free to keep sharing with loved ones, as well! If you want to stay in touch with Dave, follow him on Twitter @davidjmcgee. And Ryan would love to stay connected to you in all the ways, including through their new dating app for kinky people (trykinkedin.com) and through their coaching practice (sexandrelationshipscoaching.com). It’s been a huge joy and honor to make this thing with each other and in conversation our guests and with all of you. Thank you thank you thank you for tuning in!

Rev. Alba Onofrio shares about their journey to embracing relationship and family beyond default scripts/labels and their work as spiritual director of Soulforce, holding authenticity and intentionality as paramount, fighting for the lives of queer and trans people everywhere! We collectively address listener questions including: How do I raise my son when I see the world as such a hostile and terrifying place, especially after the Pulse massacre? A bisexual cis woman in a relationship with a straight cis dude wonders: do I have a right to claim the term queer? We also jam about the connection of Christian Supremacy to rape culture, consent that goes far deeper than the tactical or “asking permission”, and queer identity as a rallying cry / call to action / politically based orientation to the world based in an experience of marginalization. Shout outs about the book “Revolutionary Mothering: Love On the Front Lines” to which Alba contributed, the movie “Captain Fantastic”, the Sexual Liberation Collective, and Soulforce’s healing take on the Sodom and Gomorrah story.

We found that our queer communities, friends, and families pulled together in some fucking beautiful ways to support one another in the moments and weeks after the massacre at Pulse. We wanted to create something that shows our intense sense of community, shows how we love at the same time as mourn and rage. So here is a collection of messages of love sent between and among queer folks in the weeks following June 12th. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

We are honored to be joined by actress/activist/founder-of-TransTech Angelica Ross. Hear why she believes most people are in relationships for the wrong reasons and that relationships are best when thought of as prolonged period of discovery. We address the misunderstanding of the term sex positive as pressure to have more sex than you want to, queering as a force for good, learning what your body says “yes” to in life AND in sex, and how to full our honor the fucked up truth of now and also full out hold our responsibility to imagine alternatives. When you are dating or hooking up with a new person, at what point is it important to disclose you are trans? What do you do when you and your partner both want an open relationship but you feel overwhelmed by jealousy? How do you get to be more pleasure-oriented than orgasm-centric? Plus shout outs about the amazing webseries HerStory (by and for queer and trans women, featuring Angelica Ross!), taking a walk around your neighborhood, and the beauty and importance of queer and trans choirs.

The surprising stuff, the mundane stuff, the way folks felt like they were always out or felt like they never came out at all: A moving/many-splendored collection of coming out stories that break from the most traditional narratives. This is the first of what will be many more episodes that feature stories from YOU, dear listeners. May we all be more deeply invited into radical wonder and radical welcoming toward ourselves and others, and may we keep working toward a world in which everyone is free and safe to be open about all of who they are.

Dylan Marron! It’s Dylan Marron! Writer/performer Dylan Marron joins us for a wildly multi-faceted conversation about various and sundry things including: In a longterm relationship, what do you do when you feel like you are not connecting at all anymore and that talking about things gets in the way of your already-too-infrequent sex life? When you are playing matchmaker for friends, how much do you need to disclose about them to the other? Also: sex as conversation, setting intentions in sex and conversation, where focus goes energy goes, naming how you are feeling in the moment, an interview collage about marriage from the Love Songs for the Rest of Us tour, ways of thinking about the default script of “bros before hos”, widening collective circles of care, treat your friends as lovers and your lovers as friends, cheers to the power of chosen family in all of its many forms, #gaymediasowhite, ice cream, “13 questions to ask before getting married”, The Affair, Dreamgirls, Michael R. Jackson, complex feelings about Transparent, the amazing new webseries: HerStory, and trans narratives in the media in general.

Liberating conversations about sex and shit from the extremes of knee-jerk shame response and gratuitous grotesqueness is not easy. So we teamed up with our friend Shawn “The Puru” Shafner for this crossbroadcast with his podcast! We collectively address questions including: What if you are grossed out by anal sex but your partner is really into it? How to navigate safety concerns with scat play? And we jam out about various and sundry things like bearing the vulnerability of another and being able to bear one’s own vulnerability. Menstruation, runny noses, and other leaky fluids. Being seen and accepted in your entirety is the sexiest. Did we mention there’s a whale choir? Oh yeah. There’s a whale choir. And check out more episodes of Shawn’s podcast at:http://apple.co/1WQm6D4

Healing from trauma, holding compassion and rage at the same time, transformative + restorative justice in response to sexual assault, the just world fallacy, the sexiness of holding nuance and complexity, noticing who we can communicate with based on our positionality, ways of holding safe space for a person who has experienced trauma, the beauty of leading with vulnerability, welcoming loved one’s whole selves (including their wounds), moving away from default scripts about bodies + gender + sex acts, listening each other into fullness, fuck the Valentine’s Day Industrial Complex, fuck the idea that love can or should be contained in any way, and fuck the idea that love is a finite resource. We are oh so honored and grateful that Andy Izenson (activist, attorney, consent + alternative justice models educator) joined us in this doozy of a conversation, full of much darkness and much love and much light.

How do we hold rage about abuses of power AND ALSO allow space for honoring an inspiring queer icon? How might we sit in uncomfortable nuance in order to transcend the shouting match that followed Bowie’s death? Aida Manduley joins us to discuss how celebration and critique need not be mutually exclusive, through a lens of radical love and transformative justice.

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Links and Resources!

Time To Mourn or Call Out? by Aida Manduley

transformative justice

restorative justice

related: a full PDF of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

We are honored and grateful to be joined by the multi-talented, many-splendored Shakina Nayfack, who shares about her most recent show, Post-Op, and her deep commitment to community and care in art-making. We collectively address conundrums from listeners, including: what do you do when you want to cultivate a more compassionate point of view toward trans people, but it feels challenging to you? And what about when the people you want to have sex with are not ever the same people you want to have a relationship with? Plus nods to Hamilton, Wordsworth, Richard Bock, #allofwhoyouare, various ways of thinking about virginity, the importance of simultaneously holding celebration AND critique, and the beauty of chosen family.

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And here’s Shakina sharing what is most important to her to communicate about sex and relationships:

And here’s a roundup of resources from the episode:

PEOPLE AND PLACES

Shakina Nayfack

Musical Theatre Factory

READABLES (BOOKS, PLAYS, POEMS, PERSONAL NARRATIVES)

One Woman Show

Transgender Today (New York Times series)

I’m From Driftwood

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Caroline, Or Change by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori

Dao De Jing: The Book of the Way by Laozi

Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette

Vagina by Naomi Wolf

Hamilton

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour by William Wordsworth

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

“When we allow our own light to shine, we unconsciously allow other people to do the same.” by Marianne Williamson