Tell Me About Your Father

Matt Phillp talks with Komail Aijazuddin, author of new memoir Manboobs about what it was like to grow up Muslim, fat, and queer in Pakistan - with no ability to hide any of those characteristics. He talks about the process of extricating himself from the oppressive silence of his family and from Lahore and what it was like to discover that the America he’d seen through pop culture was nothing like the real thing. 

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Elizabeth talks with journalist Tricia Romano, author of the new oral history The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. Tricia, who was a contributing writer at the Village Voice for nearly a decade covering New York City’s nightlife and club scenes in the early 2000s, spent six years and hundreds of hours interviewing the newspaper's former staff, dating back decades to its founding in 1955 by Norman Mailer, a psychotherapist, and an editor. Tricia discusses the white macho roots of the publication and its eventual evolution to include female, queer, and Black writers who helped the Voice redefine itself. She also talks about the Voice's prescient coverage of Donald Trump and his father Fred Trump, and the paternal influence that a complicated editor there had on her own life.

In this episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk with Margaret Wappler, author of A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry And How a Generation Grew Up, which was excerpted in Vanity Fair. The "Bad Boy" refers to Luke Perry's character on Beverly Hills 90210, Dylan McKay, a Gen-X James Dean with a tender heart. A Good Bad Boy is a dual biography of Luke Perry and Margaret as a teenager mourning her father's death.

Margaret regales us with tales of Luke's heroism, like defending Tori Spelling from her abusive boyfriend and waking Jason Priestly from a coma. We also discuss the art of the masculine identity drag show that is the WWE, which Luke admired and his son proudly performs in under the names "Jungle Boy" and "Scapegoat." Luke Perry was a good man, an acclaimed dad, and a mensch in an industry known for its hubris. We salute him this Father's Day month, five years after his loss.

It’s our PRIDE episode! Recorded a few days before her new song, SPRKL, dropped - Christian country music star and drag queen Flamy Grant talks candidly about her journey out of the evangelical southern church in which she grew up and became a worship leader, through her parent-sanctioned ex-gay therapy, and eventually out the other side as a gay man and drag queen who sings about the experience.  She talks about the estranged relationship she has with her father and how she places him in perspective in her life, about what she does to stay fortified as she takes her detractors head-on via social media, and what’s giving her life this Pride. 

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It’s our PRIDE episode! Recorded a few days before her new song SPRKL dropped - Christian country music star and drag queen Flamy Grant talks candidly about her journey out of the evangelical southern church in which she grew up and became a worship leader, through her parent-sanctioned ex-gay therapy, and eventually out the other side as a gay man and drag queen who sings about the experience.  She talks about the estranged relationship she has with her father and how she places him in perspective in her life, about what she does to stay fortified as she takes her detractors head-on via social media, and what’s giving her life this Pride. 

Follow Tell Me About Your Father: https://www.instagram.com/tellmeaboutyourfather

Follow Matt Phillp: https://www.instagram.com/mattphillp

Follow Erin Hosier: https://www.instagram.com/erinhosier

Follow Elizabeth Thompson: https://www.instagram.com/bizzyt
Visit https://www.tellmeaboutyourfather.com

Tim Alberta joins Ravi Gupta to discuss his new book, “The Power, the Glory, and the Kingdom." The book takes an in-depth, personal look at the birth and rise of America’s evangelical movement and explores how deceit, scandal, and fear have contributed to the wreckage it stands on today.

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On this Memorial Day weekend episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt talks with former Obama staffer and school principal and current co-host of both the Majority 54 podcast and the Lost Debate podcast, Ravi Gupta, about growing up with  a democrat mother and an increasingly right wing father and how the conflict between them often took form in political debate. He talks about what it was like to travel with his father to the village in India in which his father grew up for the first time since his father moved to the US decades ago, how he’s managed to find a way of engaging with his father despite their extreme political differences, and gives advice on talking with hostile right wing people who just want to “own the libs”. 

Matt talks with Alex Steed, producer and co-host of the podcast You Are Good - a feelings podcast about movies -  about choosing to live with his father in rural Maine at 12 years old - a dynamic he describes as “a 12-17 year old living with an old man as a roommate,” how his childhood led him to become a “chaos goblin” and how he worked through that, and how nursing his father through cancer helped him to let go of his fear of death. He talks about what was behind changing the name and focus of his podcast Why Are Dads? to You Are Good and explains who his dad is when it comes to Los Angeles, the upcoming election, and in the film Lake Placid.

Elizabeth and Erin chat with indie rock icon Miki Berenyi of the '90s band Lush about her critically acclaimed memoir, "Fingers Crossed," hailed by Rolling Stone and Rough Trade as one of the best autobiographies ever. Miki opens up about her unique upbringing by her eccentric Hungarian sports journalist father and her Nazi-sympathizer grandmother, the turbulent London post-punk scene, and the highs and lows of being in a band that influenced so many musicians, including Kurt Cobain. In this interview, Miki tells us about the agonies and ecstasies of life with a boundary-less, hard-partying, single dad at the helm, and the perils of being treated like an adult when you're six. She also shares the shocking family secrets uncovered in her memoir, which Miki didn't know about until the end of her father's life.

It's our annual Oscars episode with Tell Me About Your Father pal Richard Lawson, chief critic of Vanity Fair, discussing all the dad themes in this year's Academy Award-nominated films. We've got J. Robert Oppenheimer as the father of the atomic bomb in "Oppenheimer", a perma-wounded mad professor dad named "God" in "Poor Things," a philandering dead father whose shadow is cast across "American Fiction," and another dead dad who provides solid proof that writers should almost never be married to each other in "Anatomy of a Fall." Plus "Killers of the Flower Moon," snubs galore (Zac Efron in Iron Claw, you deserved more) and some quick Barbie discourse - we know when to say Kenough! Roll out the red carpet and smash play.