What possibilities and challenges does the podcast form afford for historically marginalized counterculture music communities? As a complex social phenomenon, music is surrounded by a network of fashion, film, radio, social media, and more that shape its significance and understanding. In the study of queer music, these networked media are central to unpacking the experience and production of queer ‘world-making’ in LGBTQ+ music cultures. Podcasts, too, are an increasingly significant part of this intricate cultural network to provide a space for gender and sexuality identity formation and activism against a history of oppression and misrepresentation. This article asks, how might we approach music podcasting as a tool for sustaining ‘queer joy’ and ‘potentiality’ for LGBTQ+ communities? Established in 2011, Homoground is one of the longest-running English-language music podcasts featuring music by queer (LGBTQ & allied) artists. As a podcast working to showcase queer voices and sounds for over a decade, the show also provides a case of study to reflect on what impact the shifting affordances of the podcast form have had on LGBTQ+ music podcasters prior to and following the 2014 podcast boom into the next decade with increasing concern of discoverability, algorithmic biases, and digital content saturation. With Lynn Casper, co-founder of LGBTQ+ music podcast Homoground, this article explores the role of podcasting in music’s queer world-making conversation and the particular evocations of queer joy and potentiality found in the show’s ability to sustain within an increasingly oversaturated podcast landscape.
Introduction - What is Homoground? Questions in form and Production
By having a very gay name and describing ourselves as a queer music podcast, I feel like it’s helpful for people to find us…I think just by having ‘queer’ and ‘homo’ visible, if you’re browsing through iTunes, it’s like, ‘oh I’m gay, I’m queer, I love music’ [and] you can feel connected by listening to the show and realizing that there’s a whole community.
– Lynn Casper, founder of Homoground
Since Apple began supporting podcasts in 2005 through iTunes and launched its dedicated Apple Podcasts app in 2012, podcasts and popular music have been competing for our attention in the smartphone audio market. Today in 2023, users can choose their preferred platform, be it Spotify which integrates music and podcast listening into a single user experience or Apple’s dedicated Apple Music and Apple Podcasts interface, among a plethora of other market competitors. In fact, as Ellis Jones and Jeremy Morris outline in their 2022 study of these competing sounds, “as a broad set of actors fight for a limited amount of audiences’ time, industry figures are speaking not in terms of music markets and podcast markets, but of ‘the audio market’ as a whole.”1 The rise of ‘audio market’ discourse across industry, podcast studies, and popular music studies has certainly opened up renewed questions around user experience and audio media platform competition. Yet as a queer media theorist and podcaster myself, I am equally interested in how these shifts in audio listening due to the emergence of podcasts intersect with the roles these two kinds of sonic media play in communities historically marginalized in the mass media space. What possibilities and challenges does the podcast form afford for counterculture music communities? This article considers how we might approach music podcasting as a tool for sustaining ‘queer joy’ and ‘potentiality’ for LGBTQ+ communities.2
Music is a complex social phenomenon surrounded by a network of fashion, film, radio, social media and more that shape its significance and understanding. In the study of queer music, these networked media are central to unpacking the experience and production of queer ‘world-making’ in LGBTQ+ music cultures.3 Podcasts too are an increasingly significant part of this intricate cultural network to provide a space for gender and sexuality identity formation and activism against a history of oppression and misrepresentation. Established in 2011, Homoground is one of the longest-running English-language music podcasts featuring music by queer (LGBTQ+) artists. As a podcast working to showcase queer voices and sounds for over a decade, Homoground provides a case of study to reflect on what impact podcasts’ shifting affordances have had on LGBTQ+ music podcasters prior to and following the 2014 podcast boom into the next decade with increasing concern of discoverability, algorithmic biases, and digital content saturation.
In conversation with Lynn Casper, co-founder of Homoground, this article takes on a narrative podcasting scripting style approach through a mix of academic reflection and interview transcription. For just shy of two decades now, Casper has been an active figure in online queer community space building and event planning—working with social justice campaign groups, organizing feminist playing card fundraisers, running local music events in their hometown, working with AIR Media (Association of Independents in Radio), and steering the Homoground podcast. Together, we address the role of podcasting in music’s queer world-making conversation and the particular evocations of queer joy and potentiality found in the show’s ability to sustain within an increasingly oversaturated podcast landscape.
***
I’ll press record here…okay.
My name is Lynn Casper. [pronouns] they, them and I usually go by Casper. I run a podcast called Homoground. I also currently work for the Association of Independents in Radio [AIR] as their communications and programs manager.4 It definitely aligns with the work that I’ve been doing on my own as a freelancer and with Homoground, trying to unite podcasters together. And now I can get paid to do that work.
Community Music Radio Roots, Making Ground
[I’m] curious about the early days of Homoground, so let’s begin by going back in time a little bit. Where did the name Homoground come from?
My friend had started an internet radio station and asked me if I wanted to do a radio show. We were doing local music shows in person, spotlighting different bands that were coming into town and getting people excited about that. I got an email and [my friend] was like, ‘okay, we’re going live in a week. What’s the name of your show?’ It was kind of just like, I gotta come up with something. Of course I’m playing with like ‘homo’ something, uh, ‘gay’ something…Just using all the queer gay words and seeing what puns and stuff I could come up with. Honestly I can’t remember how I landed on Homoground, but it just had this ring to it. I’m pretty sure my friend came up with the tagline, ‘same ground, different sound.’ You know, we all live on the same ground on earth, but we all have different experiences.
I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina, where I grew up since the age of five. It’s definitely changed a lot since I was living there. There were lots of farms, you had to drive all the way to the mall to get a coffee cuz there weren’t really any coffee shops. Growing up, I’m half Filipina, my mom’s Filipino from the Philippines. My dad is from New York. We just ended up in North Carolina because he got a job down there. I always kind of felt on the outside, I didn’t feel like I ever fit in, always feeling different. And then, when I started realizing my attraction to the same sex, that was also another thing where I’m like, ‘okay, I don’t know any gay people and well, the gay people that I do know always get made fun of, so I’m just not gonna tell anyone.’ So as a teenager, music was always really a big part of my life.
My dad was a musician. So naturally I gravitated towards that. I was always lugging his cassette tapes into my room and pretending I was a radio DJ. Music was my comfort. Then when I discovered the internet, that really opened my world up. I was able to meet other gay people. I was able to tell people I was gay and not be scared of getting bullied or people at my school finding out and stuff like that. For a long time, I wanted to move as soon as I graduated high school but that did not happen. I ended up staying in North Carolina, for at least 10 years after I graduated. At that time when I started Homoground in 2011, and in the years leading up to that, I got a job at a non-profit that worked with documentary filmmakers and we created outreach strategies for them and their films. A lot of the documentaries were about different social justice issues and we were kind of the link between them and the grassroots organizations that were on the ground actually doing the work. [It] really kind of gave me something to be excited about and I was like, I can’t believe this organization is based here in my hometown.
When I started Homoground, there was a group of us that were organizing lots of different events [in town]. We would do like a queer film festival and we would do just like music festivals and stuff like that. I was doing these other little podcasts and it was really a way to get people excited about the music that was happening in my town. [From there] me and a friend started just recording audio, I don’t even know if we called it podcasting at the time, but basically, we would do like, ‘here’s who’s playing in town this week and just try to get people excited, so they would come out to the show.’ I was also doing another little radio show with my partner at the time and we got a lot of flack for the name. It was called Dykes and Fags. And it was just, it was basically Homoground, where we just played music by LGBTQ people. It was just on the internet. We had a blog called Be Yr Own Queero, which was a spinoff of our main collective that was called Be Yr Own Hero, which was a Tumblr blog. We also started organizing LGBTQ events and so it was like a part of that organizing that we were doing.
I don’t know, I just really like doing music podcasts but with a focus on LGBTQ musicians because it’s what I wish I had access to when I was a teenager. I think that would’ve helped a lot in terms of me struggling with my identity and not really having positive queer role models to look up to. Or even just like there were ‘out’ LGBTQ musicians at that time, but I couldn’t really relate to their music. So, I think just having more of a variety of different genres and different life experiences, would’ve been really helpful for me when I was growing up.
[Contemplative uplifting synth instrumental provides a breath between segments]
Formulations of ‘Collective Queer Music Camaraderie’
How would you describe Homoground? Not just, you know, the tagline, but in format, in genre tone, questions of audience.
Homoground features LGBTQ musicians through story and song. It has kind of gone through various iterations and different formats since then over the past decade. The podcast was started in 2011, when I was living in North Carolina. It started out as an internet radio show, so it was mostly just playing some music, saying who the band is, the name of the song, any related news or updates if they have upcoming shows. [It] stayed within that format for a long time, especially because it was just me, and I didn’t really know that much about podcasts. Fast forward to today, our current format we’re trying to go with now is releasing in series, and [being] a little bit more intentional about making themes for each series. Over the years, the great thing about being an independent podcast is that we’ve gotten to experiment a lot and do different formats and try different things out.
Before, you know, we had an open submission process [with] an application form on the site. Bands could submit their music to us. At one point, especially when I was working other full-time jobs and wasn’t able to prioritize the podcast, the submission queue got pretty backed up and…(laughs) it got to the point where I’m like, ‘oh gosh!’ One of the things that I had said in the early days of Homoground was that I wanted to feature everyone who submitted. And I quickly realized that that is not possible, especially when, we’re only able to highlight like a handful of bands per each episode. We did foray into going into an interview format, but even though that was really interesting, and I enjoyed those conversations, we were only able to spotlight one band or one musician in those episodes.
And those episodes also take a lot of time to produce. We just weren’t able to support as many musicians doing that format. So that’s why moving into doing series is a way to be a bit more intentional. [Now] when we do put the call out for submissions, it’s based around a theme, instead of just everyone sending every single song they’ve ever made to us. That leads us to the series that we’re working on right now. Over the summer [of 2022], we put a call out for songs about queer joy, and it’s really helped in terms of the submissions that we get. It doesn’t feel as overwhelming, and it just gives us a clearer view of what we’re trying to do.
[pensive electronic beats play as we transition into academic reflections by Stacey Copeland]
***
Listening back to select episodes of Homoground over its twelve-year run, you can clearly hear the distinct shift in format and tone Casper is articulating here. For example, episode 200 released on Sept 18, 2016 opens with a hard beat and a celebratory delay effected “episode twooooo-hundreeeedddd” vocalized by Scantron (Casper) and straight into a heavy electronic track “Punished” by Cryptolect. The one-minute preview of the track fades into a promotional chat from Casper about where to catch the band next. They segue into an interview clip from The Bright Smoke sharing their love for Homoground as a special place to find fellow queer musicians and connect with them. Casper then plays The Bright Smoke’s track “Mauritania,” a self-described noir indie-rock sound that performs a stark contrast to the fast-paced dark electronic sounds of Cryptolect. Episode 200 runs just over an hour in length and like much of the Homoground catalogue, it weaves us through varied genres of music, interviews with artists, and insights from the podcast hosts all rooted in a collective queer music camaraderie.
In contrast, the podcast’s Queer Joy series Part One significantly shifts the show’s format before even pressing play. Firstly, the episode has a clear title and theme of “Be Yourself” alongside a reduced and curated showcase of just four musical acts – Papa Molly, JayceJanae, Boy Bowser and Kamerin - to focus the episode down to twenty-three minutes, less than half the runtime of episode 200. The familiar Homoground tagline and music bring us into the episode, but a new host voice, D. Orxata, Casper’s collaborator in the Queer Joy series, appears. This change in format and the show’s overall production approach, as Casper explains, is a result of many years of experimentation and perhaps just one of Homoground’s format stops before taking on new changes in the future. From episode 1 in 2011 to the 2023 Queer Joy series, Homoground has fluctuated widely in its runtime from 20 minutes to over an hour, depending on the format of the show at the time. The shift to a reduced runtime echoes larger trends in podcast production as the result of podcast listening practices as they have developed. As podcast analyst Dan Misener found through a metadata study of nearly 19 million episodes “published between June 2005 and November 2019 (representing 637,793 distinct podcast series),” episodes were getting shorter, with a median podcast length of 36 minutes.5 The logic behind this shift has been attributed to everything from the average American commute time to the more likely ability for listeners to binge on episodes of a shorter length which in turn offers producers more opportunities for advertising and to accrue those valuable listens.
[pensive electronic beats play us back to Casper]
***
In the evolution of the format and the tone, [more recently] I have been able to bring on other producers to work on shows, as I mentioned experimenting with the different formats. We’ve tried like just a mixtape format where we invited other people who didn’t necessarily need to have any hosting or editing skills to curate a playlist of music that was either submitted to us or music that they went and sought out themselves. We have been thinking about, ‘okay, instead of featuring the whole song, maybe we just do segments,’ and now that we’re able to work with other producers and have somewhat of a budget, just do a little bit more in terms of sound design.
Current episodes we’re working on are merging the music with the stories a little bit more so it’s a little more integrated and flows. We’re trying to figure out ways to get people intrigued by the music and then direct them to ways that they can go and actually buy the music from the artists and support the artists. That’s one way that the tone has evolved a little. Being able to bring on different producers, giving different people a platform for them to use their voice and to highlight musicians that they care about or musicians that are from their regions. A lot of people go into podcasting because they want to hear themselves talk (Stacey laughs) and I’m the opposite. I’d rather showcase other people and that’s why I really enjoy like this new way that we’re doing it where, we’re getting the musicians to talk about themselves rather than having it be like, okay, here’s this musician and their song. I’m excited about how it’s evolving.
[That familiar pensive upbeat instrumental leads us into Stacey’s academic reflection]
***
While podcast studies is still relatively young in the academic scene compared to musicology and popular music studies, scholars such as Alyn Euritt,6 Siobhán McHugh,7 Hannah McGregor and myself,8 and numerous others have written on intimacy and human connection as key characteristics of podcasting and a hot topic in the study of podcast cultural production. In general terms, intimacy in the podcast space has come to be understood as an aesthetic that can be deliberately cultivated while also being contingent on the cultural context from which the listener is ‘tuning in.’ It is tied to the human voice and a sense of personal connection with the work. The podcast studies field can find similar discourses at play in popular music studies, too. For example, in their 1987 book Art into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne argue that the “interplay between personal absorption into music and the sense that it is, nevertheless, something out there, something public, is what makes music so important in the cultural placing of the individual in the social.”9 The connection or ‘intimacy’ one feels with a piece of music, a podcast, or in this case, a queer music podcast, plays into larger theoretical discourses of identity work and community building in relation to media consumption and production.
Homoground, as a queer music podcast with a mission to uplift queer musicians from a wide variety of genres and backgrounds, pushes back against stereotyped notions of what queer music is and in turn, what queer identity can be. As music scholar Jodie Taylor has explored in their key queer music text Playing it Queer, popular music definitions of queer and LGBTQ music is inextricably caught up in societal stereotypes of lesbian and gay identity. In their writing on the influence of the gay Berlin club scene and the dominance of stylized “youthful white gay” masculinities in queer music culture, these “stereotypes are carried over into everyday fashion and self-stylization visible on the streets and inside the clubs.”10 Adding to the already established disco influence in queer music, the Berlin BDSM sexual freedom of the sculpted white masculine ‘leather daddy’ figure continues to bring forward particular mainstream expectations of what one might hear when tuning in to a queer music podcast. This is an oversimplification of a much richer and nuanced history of queer sexual liberation and music culture of course. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny the ways in which these powerful queer club stereotypes of the disco queen and the leather daddy continue to permeate queer music culture in equally subversively liberating and constraining ways. While we can all use a little Lady Gaga, The Village People, Madonna, ABBA, and Queen dance party from time to time, these are not the artists you’ll hear on Homoground. Instead, as Casper notes above, the show is focused on fostering queer music community with “a variety of different genres and different life experiences” not represented in popular music or the historically white cisgender queer music canon.
Building a Multimodal Space of Queer Collectivity
The defining of Homoground as a ‘queer’ podcast here then is quite intentional in signalling a particular political enactment of the term. Most commonly, queer is used in our contemporary moment as a catch-all umbrella term for communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and two-spirit people. But as many queer theory scholars such as Nikki Sullivan have argued, using queer as a catch-all term “does little if anything to deconstruct the humanist understanding of the subject” and falls short in acknowledging the differences in race, gender, ethnicity, age, class and ability that queer communities are built upon.11 Rather, as José Esteban Muñoz famously writes, queerness is “the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”12 Thus, the production, distribution, and listening acts involved in queer music culture become a collective queer world-making project which actively works to center Black, Indigenous, transgender and other historically marginalized voices within the LGBTQ+ community. Casper and the Homoground team draw on music’s significance to this project of queer world-making and pull podcasting into the fold. They do so not only through the space the podcast creates for queer artists to showcase, promote, and celebrate each other’s work but additionally through the virtual community-building efforts the team has begun to build partly as a result of the shifts to working online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
[Contemplative uplifting synth instrumental plays us out of Copeland’s academic reflection]
***
You’ve really expanded your team and community over the last few years [in and outside of the podcast], and as you’ve said before, it is important to you to have a variety of different producers coming onto the show. I’d love to hear more about the Homoground community and how you work together.
Yeah. There’s been people that have come in and out throughout the years, mostly depending on, if we are getting ads, if we have enough Patreon supporters. We have one producer who was doing a lot of the interviews which I really loved because she’s a musician herself and so she was able to ask questions that someone who might not have as good of a relationship with these musicians would’ve known to ask.
In 2020, I started doing virtual coworking because I just needed the structure myself and then I’m like, well, let me put this out to the Homoground community and see if other people want to join this with me. When COVID happened, we did a lot of virtual events and so we had some people that helped with doing those. Assessing like, okay, what do we need help with right now? What can I afford? Sometimes people are more involved and then are off doing their own things but it’s [great] having us all come together. Now we have like a little community of people and it’s been really fun because when there are producers working on Homoground, they’ll come to the co-working sessions and those really feel like we have a team. We just had for our virtual co-working, our winter party and that was fun and silly and wholesome. Also people who listen to the show now have this way for them to be kind of a little bit more involved just by having the space where people can come co-work and a virtual cafe where you can pop in and out. These are all perks for our Patreon supporters: being able to see the people who listen to Homoground and getting to know more about them and hear about the projects they’re working on. There have been a lot of collaborations that have come through that. That’s been a really cool way to build the community and also just utilize the skills that we have within our community and try to provide some financial resources to people.
Music Curation and Sounding Queer Joy
So my next question is about how you make choices of how you produce the content that goes on air. How do these community aspects of Homoground at large play into the content heard on the show? You’ve started to move towards creating themes to navigate the abundance of music choices that are out there these days and the volume of submissions you receive rather than having people submit under specific themes. It was kind of wonderful kismet because I’m quite interested in the topic of queer joy, and lo’ and behold you had an episode recently on queer joy as the theme.
[A magical echoe-y sparkle sound effect takes us into a Copeland academic reflection sidebar]
***
Queer joy – what is it? Put simply, queer joy is a concept that acknowledges the importance of joy and pleasure in the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals. It challenges the dominant narrative that being queer is exclusively rooted in pain or trauma and instead recognizes the resilience, resistance, and creativity of LGBTQ+ people. Crucially, this is not the longing for joy tied to Lauren Berlant’s ‘cruel optimism’ or Sara Ahmed’s ‘promise of happiness’.13 Rather, alongside and at an intersection with crip joy, trans joy, Black joy, and Native joy, queer joy is a symbolic term to encompass the phenomenon of producing “joy in spite of the material realities and structures of power placed upon us. It is a survival mechanism.”14 It has been picked up by scholars and artists alike as a way of articulating a rise in purposeful expressions of joy by queer people across the LGBTQ+ community amidst what is being reported as “the most violent year LGBTI people in over a decade” with anti-LGBTQ+ discourses and policies spreading across the globe.15 As Christopher Persaud and Ashon Crawley have explored in relation to queer performance and to Black queer digital placemaking practices, queer joy is an essential counter-action against the toxicity of racism, homophobia and transphobia that queers, particularly transgender and queers of color, experience in their everyday lives.16 We might even position it as a purposeful action resulting out of feelings like burnout, failure, and rage. Queer joy becomes an action-based “side affect”, to use Hil Malatino’s term.17
Queer joy works as a complimentary expression and state of being alongside other affective political tools, such as rage and grief, that can be equally effective through queer translation into action and aesthetics. Queer joy can manifest in a multiplicity of forms, whether it be through song, protest, performance, dance, or any other form of queer political expression that invites the cultivation of “a more just, equitable, and joyful world.”18 It comes as no surprise then to see queer joy taken up as a curated music theme on Homoground. Feminist music theorist Susan McClary asserts that music is “often concerned with the arousing and channelling of desire, with mapping patterns through the medium of sound that resemble those of sexuality.”19 Or as Jodie Taylor puts it quite simply, “music allows us to explore and circulate emotions and pleasures, to immerse ourselves in the ecstatic, to let go, to speed up, to slow down, to be overcome,” and I would add here, to feel joy.20 As introduced earlier, Homoground’s Queer Joy series not only aims to feature queer musicians’ work that embodies queer joy but also to invite those musicians alongside the show producers to create a flowing composition of queer joy through a careful weaving of their own understandings and experiences of queer joy through story and song.
[The same magical echoe-y sparkle sound effect takes us back into the interview]
***
Could you talk to me a bit about, you know, where that theme came from for Homoground and what queer joy means to you?
We came up with the idea to do a whole series on Queer Joy, probably like a year ago. And we were just trying to figure out, okay, how can we really execute this in a way that is going to be manageable for us? I just remember a year and a half ago, lots of people were talking about queer joy, and I just really loved every time I saw people just celebrating that because there’s a lot of really sad and depressing and horrible things going on in the world and it’s sometimes just hard to continually consume that. I always want to try to spread messages that are positive and messages that can be uplifting for people. I think through a lot of the organizing work that I was doing and that I mentioned before, things that can help inspire people, make them feel empowered.
I’ve struggled with depression throughout my life and it really helps me to surround myself with things like listening to audiobooks that are talking about like optimistic, positive, inspiring affirmations, stuff like that. I have to have that in my ear or like watch a show that’s like positive in order for it to sink into me. So just realizing that a lot of my friends also struggle with that too, and just trying to be that positive motivator. That’s always been the underlying motivation for me in the things that I share with the world, always wanting to share a positive message.
So yeah, it just made sense for a theme to be about queer joy. Then [it was] thinking, okay, how can we tie it in with the music? I can be in a funk or just be like, ‘ugh, I hate today.’ And then I turn on a song, and it’s like everything turns around. I just feel the beat and then I’m up and jumping around. That’s all I really needed. So yeah, I think having that as a theme and then through that, within the submissions that we’ve received, we’ve noticed other themes emerging within that. [For example,] there were a lot of songs that people submitted that carry joy about being your authentic self. So, we’re like, ‘okay, let’s group some these songs together and put a theme within a theme.’ Or there were a lot of songs that celebrated queer joy through love, having crushes and partnerships. Identifying these other themes within queer joy. So far, the response has been really nice. Anything that’s queer joy related or like just celebrating queer joy is nice to see rather than just like, another hate crime or something.
Sustaining an Independent Podcast Through Queer Potentiality
It’s great to see queer joy being put at the forefront of Homoground. I think for a lot of people, myself included as listeners, Homoground has always been a space of queer joy, in a sense, without making the theme explicit. There’s that kind of ethos or spirit there. So that brings me to the question of, you know, 12 years ongoing is a long time for a podcast to be in this space and to have the presence that Homoground has had. You’ve shared how Homoground really came out of your own personal experiences trying to find community and see representation and hear representation in the media space at large, and queer joy certainly seems like one element that is really sustaining the work, but I wonder what else might be behind it all. Why do you think Homoground has sustained for as long as it has?
I guess maybe I have a hard time of like letting things end (laughs). There have definitely been times where, and especially over the past couple years where I’m like, ‘this is the last year I’m doing Homoground’, but then it keeps going. I think I was at that point right before having the idea to do the Queer Joy mini-series and going the series route. I was at the point where I was overwhelmed by it all and was like, ‘I think this is it.’ Then this idea, it’ll be a little bit more manageable. Also, I’m working full-time now and so that limits my time. Financially it cannot sustain me as a job. So, a lot of the projects that I do, I just turn them into Homoground projects, like with the virtual co-working.
Homoground is more than just a podcast. It’s like a bunch of queer projects. When we were first starting out, we did a project on Kickstarter. It was called a Feminist Playing Card Project. And that was just a creative way to raise money for the show because, money, I have complicated relationships with it. I don’t like asking for it. I don’t like to come off as sales-y or whatever. So let’s just do a project that people will want to support. Then it became a whole other project where now I’m reaching out to bookstores and trying to get the cards into stores and stuff like that.
I feel like the direction of Homoground will continue to evolve. I think rebranding our website over the past couple years, instead of the podcast being like the main thing, just being one aspect of it. Homoground as an incubator for queer creators. Now we have these co-working spaces, and now we have all these other things that can help support creators. Expanding more than the podcast, more than musicians, but creators in general. We’re creating a network of support for each other. That has been really helpful in keeping me accountable and just keeping me excited about the work that I’m doing.
Yeah, I love that. It’s like Homoground becomes a literal ground, even though it’s a digital space, for community to be together.
[Pensive yet hopeful joyful string synthesizer instrumental plays and a heavy gritty electronic beat comes in as Copeland’s concluding reflection begins]
***
Over its twelve years in the music podcast sphere, Homoground has created over 250 episodes and counting to form a digital archive of the queer joy and potentiality embedded in queer music community and culture. Drawing on their own life experiences and those of fellow BIPOC and non-cisgender, we can hear in Casper’s desire to manifest queer joy. We can hear in the very sonic aesthetic choices of the show a queer future centring and celebrating trans and queer of color experience. Take for example New York based Creatrx featured in Queer Joy series Part Three aptly named “The Future Was Always Queer” who speaks to a Black queer joy on their track “Baptism.” Creatrx reflects on the track, sharing that “queer joy means freedom…to imagine differently…places and communities I can be my most extroverted self” as they speak to reproductive rights, black ancestors, and queer community. This importance of community to queer joy emerges as a through line in the series but not only in a realist sense of already present community but a community felt across temporal lines through connections to past queer ancestors as Creatrx shares and to future queer kinship to come.
I don’t think Casper or the Homoground team is necessarily thinking of the show as a future-oriented queer utopia in the way José Esteban Muñoz deconstructs it—where utopia is “an idealist mode of critique that reminds us that there is something missing, that the present and presence (and its opposite number, absence) is not enough.”21 Yet Muñoz’s concept of utopian performativity, “a manifestation of a doing that is in the horizon,” is certainly an essential aspect of the queer potentiality that sustains Homoground as not only a music podcast but a queer digital space and community.22 As both Muñoz and Rox Samer have argued in relation to queer and lesbian activism and aesthetics, Aristotle’s concept of potentiality plays a crucial role in comprehending human endeavours for survival and self-expression. The idea of potentiality refers to the inherent capability of a person to perform a specific action, regardless of whether or not they actualize it. The notion of potentiality, then, has political implications as it highlights the ways in which certain individuals or groups are limited or denied the opportunity to realize their potential due to structural barriers or systemic injustices.
Potentiality is the sustaining political sister of possibility. As Samer argues, queerness is this potentiality for Muñoz and those who have since applied his work to recover how queerness “exists in a perpetual futurity that enables those of us in the present”23 to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”24 Homoground follows in a long history of queer music and arts activism rooted in this potentiality that has sustained the political imaginations of queers past and present to envision another more palpable collective future. This potentiality is clear in Casper’s visions of what Homoground is and what it might be as “an incubator for queer creators.” While it may be challenging to recapture the euphoria and optimism of these moments each and every day among continued threats against LGBTQ rights across the globe, it’s important to recognize the power of collective joy in instigating social change, whether the impact is big or small. Queer music podcasting contributes to an ongoing complex dialogue between shame, trauma and queer that can be found throughout other media forms and queer histories. In these historical moments of “enforced happiness” through mental health campaigns and corporatized ‘wellness’ further brought to the surface during the COVID-19 pandemic, “attention to queer unhappiness” remains equally paramount.25 Although some may dismiss queer joy as a lesser political tool, we require a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the role of such actions in mobilizing and inspiring communities toward greater equity and justice. Potentiality is catching, and queer joy is collective.
[The joyfully queer electro-lounge pop track “Lifetime” by Papa Molly plays us out]
Notes
Ellis Jones and Jeremy Morris, “Competing sounds? Podcasting and popular music” Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 20, no.1 (2022): 4.
On ‘queer joy’ I draw from Christopher J. Persaud and Ashon Crawley, “On Black Queer Joy and the Digital,” Social Media + Society 8, no. 2 (April 1, 2022). On ‘potentiality’ I draw from Rox Samer, Lesbian Potentiality & Feminist Media in the 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
On ‘world-making’ I draw from the concept of feminist world-making outlined by Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke University Press, 2017) to materialize alternative political worlds. See also Jodie Taylor, Playing It Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-Making (Peter Lang, 2012) for further discussion of queer music community.
This interview was conducted on December 15, 2022. Casper’s title at AIR has since changed.
Dan Misener, “Podcast Episodes Got Shorter in 2019,” Pacific Content (blog), April 27, 2021, blog.pacific-content.com.
Alyn Euritt, Podcasting as an Intimate Medium (Taylor & Francis, 2023).
Siobhán McHugh, The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound (Columbia University Press, 2022).
Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland, “Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count,” Kairos, 27, no.1 (August 15, 2022).
Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Routledge, 1987), 139.
Taylor, Playing It Queer, 203.
Nikki. A Sullivan, Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 44.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th anniversary ed. (New York University Press, 2009/2019), 1. Also see Lee Edelman (2004) for the quote on page 17: queerness “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.”
We can in brief comprehend Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” (2011) as the affective dilemma which arises when what you deeply long for becomes a hindrance to your overall well-being. It’s the experience of envisioning something that promises happiness, security, comfort, and/or joy, but ends up draining and exhausting you due to your strong attachment to it. Accompanying this is Sara Ahmed’s “promise of happiness” (2010), the theorization that happiness is not an apolitical individual pursuit but is shaped by social and political structure. She argues that when happiness is a controlled social pursuit, the imperative to be happy can be oppressive. Happiness becomes a disciplinary mechanism that reinforces social inequalities and marginalizes gendered, nonheterosexual, and racialized communities, with certain bodies and identities being excluded from the possibilities of happiness in contemporary society.
Michael Tristano, “Performing Queer of Color Joy Through Collective Crisis: Resistance, Social Science, and How I Learned to Dance Again,” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 22, no. 3 (2022): 276–81.
Lois Shearing. “We’re Currently Living the ‘Deadliest’ Rise in Violence against Queer People.” Cosmopolitan (blog). February 21, 2023, https://www.cosmopolitan.com.
Persaud and Crawley, 2022.
In their writing on trans experience and affect titled Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Hil Malatino builds on the work of Raymond Williams to theorize ‘side affects’ as the bad feelings caught up in “trans practices of disidentification, detachment, and refusal, about the ways in which we’re worn down and worn out.” These are also “the feelings that motivate justice-oriented work” (9). Side affects in trans experience may include, “fatigue, numbness, envy, rage, and burnout to such a point that they become integral parts of a trans affective commons” (Malatino, 2022, 5).
Persaud and Crawley, n.p.
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Minnesota Press, 1991/2002), 8.
Taylor, 45.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 100.
Ibid, 99.
Samer, 87.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 17.
Heather Love, “Compulsory Happiness and Queer Existence,” New Formations, no. 63 (December 22, 2007), 58. Also see Malatino in Side Affects (2022) for writing on trans affective commons, and for further reading on affects and the performativity of race, gender and sexuality, see Muñoz’ The Sense of Brown (New York University Press, 2020) for their writing on the ‘browns commons.’
University of California Press