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I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just Black Gen Z, but Black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders Awards.
On their Instagram page, we are golden.
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Hello, hello, hello. Praise the Lord, Saints. How we doing? Hi, everyone. Hi. I'm Sam Sanders. I'm Zach Stafford. I'm Saeed Jones, and you are listening to Vibe Check. Welcome back. This week, we're going to get into monkeypox and what we're calling the nerve.
of Harry Styles. A lot of bass, a lot of bass on that nerve. You got to go deep the nerve of Harry Styles. And I'm going to say from the start, he's got some nerve, but he also has some bops. The album is good. It's fine. It's fine. You don't already, look, you don't already have to stand manage. Okay, Sam? It's okay.
It's okay. I'm not standing. It'll be all right. I'm just saying. It was on repeat this summer for me. It was on repeat. Okay, that's fair. I like the little, what's it, music for a sushi? Anyway, we'll get into it. But first, how are we feeling this week? Zach, how are you feeling? What's your vibe, darling? I'm good. I'm finally back home after like a two-week trip. And I'm only here for a few days before I have to go back to New York. So I'm good. I'm trying to like feel rested, but also relaxed.
I don't know, contained within the restfulness because I know it's going to go away very soon. So I guess I'm trying to flourish in the rest for a little bit. But I'm good. How are you doing? I'm good. I slept more than 12 hours. How is that possible? I was like talking to my boyfriend. I was like, am I
Am I allowed to go to bed at like eight o'clock? He was like, you're allowed. Yes, you are. You know, and I was like, you know, people talk about like sleep debt. I was like, baby, I'm a sleep investor. You're in surplus. I'm a sleep VC funder. You're a sleep billionaire. I am the Andreessen Horowitz of snoozing, darling. I feel good. Question though. Do you sleep the whole 12 hours through? I do. Or do you wake up four or six? Wow. I do.
Teach me your ways. Teach me your ways. I'm a really bad sleeper. Same. I'm a fiercely, in fact, the fire alarms in my building are actually overly sensitive. And so they'll randomly go off now and that it's very annoying. And they went off this morning for about, I don't know, maybe it was between 30 seconds and three minutes. But I- Baby, that's not sleep. That's a coma. I'm worried about you. My sleeping mask did not move. What?
Wow. Do you dream during this? Do you dream during this? Oh, I do. I do. I have like, it's like entire seasons of fake television shows. Yeah. I will say I need, I do think I need a lot of sleep. That's always been true. So I feel good. Is there something wrong with that? If I get between six and seven hours, I'm gold. And six is like, okay, I can do that. I'm,
The same. Really? It's because J-Lo once said in an interview she won't get out of bed unless she's had six hours of sleep. And I heard that when I was 12. And it just imprinted on me. Wow. Not J-Lo said in your life plan. I mean, look at her. She looks incredible. I love it. She does. She also drinks like two gallons of water a day. J-Lo's like, anything less than six hours of sleep, I won't do it. But marriage on a plantation? What?
All those like, you know, enslavement vibes. Oh yes. Sam, how are you doing? You know, I'm doing all right, but I'm just like quite concerned about this story that I feel like is being forgotten, but shouldn't be forgotten.
Brittany Griner is still in Russia and can't get out. Dennis Rodman announced recently that he's going to go over there and try to get her out himself. To which I say, honestly, good luck, Dennis. I'm glad someone's trying. Right. Like if it works, it works. Yeah. But I feel so frustrated and like helpless in this because it's like I can't do anything. I can't do anything.
And the people who could do something have already said they've done all they can, yet Britney's still over there. And it just breaks my heart. So I'm feeling that today. I'm not defending the White House at all, but they did put out a statement, I think, yesterday saying that they have begun talks with the Russian diplomats. So they're having a conversation, and they're very anxious about Rodman going over there, and they're highly advising him not to.
because the underlying thing here is he also could be detained for something. Because, you know, Dennis Rodman is not a diplomat and he's not going with the permission of the United States government right now. So he's just arriving. Well, good. Maybe he will kind of embarrass and inconvenience them into doing something. So yeah, it's a weird. I really hope so. Our favorite queer icon, Dennis Rodman, who has a complicated relationship to queerness, which we're going to talk about later with Harry Styles too. Okay, okay, fair. I was
Like, how will we go? Before we move on, I did want to give a shout out to everyone who, first of all, all the love for our first episode. Thank you for listening, for subscribing. And we also got a lot of fan mail. Like, we were getting international kind of reads on, like, how our stories were kind of manifesting in different parts of the world. And that was cool. So thank you for the fan mail, for the tweets. Thank you for direct messaging us. We appreciate all of you so much. So thank you. Keep it coming. But okay, my dears, let's get into these big stories. Let's jump in, shall we?
I'm sorry.
First, we're going to talk about something that's, you know, trigger warning is complicated. It's just something we don't know much about, but it's also tapping into histories I think we all kind of share, and that is monkeypox. So before we get into how we're feeling about monkeypox and where we sit globally, let's talk about some numbers. As of this Tuesday morning, August 23rd, there are about 15,433 official cases according to the CDC. Many experts are saying that is a
dramatic undercounting for a variety of reasons, but that's the official numbers of people who have been documented by medical providers. According to the CDC, monkeypox can spread to anyone through close personal, often skin-to-skin contact.
And a person with monkeypox can spread it to others from the time symptoms start until the rash is fully healed and a fresh layer of skin has formed. The illness typically takes two to four weeks. And speaking for myself, I know many, many, many people who are currently dealing with this and they feel really abandoned and feel like they have no space to talk about it. So I wanted to talk about that with y'all today. So first, how are we feeling about our third pandemic in our life? You know, we had the AIDS crisis, we had coronavirus, which we're still in, and now we have monkeypox as gay black men.
It feels like no one is in charge and no one wants to be. I think when I compare the reaction to monkeypox from federal, state, local governments to coronavirus, it just seems like already a few weeks in, leaders have thrown their hands up in the air and said, OK, figure it out.
And I think part of it is because this disease is primarily affecting a certain subset of the population who is rarely taken seriously medically. And two, the nature of our government, governments, plural, it's just not set up to have a response that is coordinated. And I've been saying a lot these last few weeks to myself, like,
damn, federalism kind of sucks when you have an infectious disease sweeping the nation. Because who's in charge? Is the federal government in charge? Are states in charge? Are cities in charge? Are counties in charge? And based on where you are, you can get a different message. You can get a different rate of availability for vaccine. And it feels like there's no coordination and no resourcing to have a response that feels uniform across the country. And so that just, I don't know, frustrates me a lot.
Yeah. And Saeed, I'd love to hear from you because you're in Ohio. Columbus isn't a major metropolitan city. It is a really big city, but it's not New York City or in LA where we're seeing a lot of coordinated responses. Still not great. But like, I think you have the best experience of what it's like to be an American today dealing with this.
I will say I'm heartbroken. One, because this disease, thankfully, it's not fatal. It is treatable, but it's incredibly painful and expensive. Treatment isn't cheap for these symptoms. And it makes me really sad to think of anyone experiencing what's essentially unnecessary pain and harm that can take a long time to recover from. And then, yeah, in Ohio, I'll say this for Columbus. Columbus makes up about a million people.
So it's not exactly a small city. Our pride celebrations are said to often rival pride celebrations in the city of Chicago. And I just say that for a sense of scale, for a sense of the community here is actually pretty vibrant. And it's
Scary. It's been bad. Here's something from a journalist based in Cleveland, Kenyon Farrow. I really appreciate his work and his activism in terms of a Black queer person focused on public health. And he recently pointed out that the Ohio Department of Health sent out a press release about monkeypox on June 13th of this year after Ohio's first case, but then waited six weeks to post information on their website about monkeypox.
And Kenyon pointed out that the information they then posted on their website after six weeks, it wasn't even sent out as a press release. It was just like, if you happened to be actively searching on your own for information, oh, you would have seen this information. It was there, but it wasn't put out. And now there are about, I believe at last count, around 150 to 200 cases in the state of Ohio. And the reason I highlight that is both across the country and in a state like Ohio, we are very much at a point where we can...
contain this outbreak. We can deal with this. We have the vaccines, we have the access, but the information and the vaccines are not being distributed in a coherent way. And that breaks my heart. There's some new data from the CDC that's talking about who was getting monkeypox and who's getting treated for it once they have it.
So they have found that so far the majority of cases are men in their 20s and 30s who have sex with men. And most of that transmission is happening at sex parties. As of August 14th, about one in three patients with monkeypox were black. Slightly lower number over Latinx. And white people were about 30% of all cases. And those who were Asian were about 3.3%. But...
There's some data showing that black patients were less likely to get drugs to treat monkeypox than white people. And if we're already seeing this before this thing gets really big, what is anyone doing to fix that disparity? I don't see anyone doing it. You know, even this same week as we get this new data from the CDC, we see Anthony Fauci, the disease czar, stepping down.
Who fills that hole? Who fills that vacuum? I do not know. It seems like the Biden White House is really concerned about the midterms and passing other kinds of bills. But I've kind of not heard them talk about it recently either. It's kind of it's very disturbing. I will say one interesting highlight from this new data from the CDC, they have found that.
that men who have sex with men have told health officials that they've reduced the number of sex partners and they're having less sex because of monkey pox.
So I'm grateful to see that our community is being safer, but I wish there was more help for us right now. I really do. Also, can I say in terms of how it feels, I was struck today as I was like doing research and looking things up that very quickly, and I'm not going to name the publication, but I will say it is a mainstream national news publication. They haven't actually written a lot about monkey pox, but one of the first articles that popped up was about like how to deal with your pet getting monkey pox.
And I was like, what? And the reason I'm pointing this out is that in addition to the fact that, of course, Black queer men are being disproportionately impacted and thus also not being able to get access to treatment and the vaccines, but also straight people are making it about them in very unproductive, melodramatic, and
It feels selfish ways. It does. And it feels like it replicates a lot of how AIDS has been treated for the past 30 to 40 years. So there is a process in which these diseases go through this kind of otherism, otherization that happens. So when we think about AIDS as...
activism or AIDS funding. We think about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which does a lot of work in Africa. We think about the Bush family does a lot of work in Africa. There's even stories every few years about a dog or a cat getting a sexually transmitted disease and people love to talk about it.
but people never like to talk about what's happening right in front of them. And that's what's really frightening here is that we're seeing monkeypox replicate how the AIDS epidemic was mishandled for so long until it became at a critical mass after Reagan to where we were like, oh, Ryan White has died, a young white boy who got a blood transfusion, and now people are afraid. And it seems like that's what's so frustrating here is that
Because it seems like the government's waiting until a white woman gets it and dies for them to act. That makes a lot of us right now feel like, what the hell is going on? And why is no one doing anything? Yeah. Well, and then I see this really weird parallel. So we see straight America trying to ignore this disease until it really hits them. But within the queer community, there is this ambivalence about how to talk about monkey pox.
Every few days, I'll see a think piece saying, well, don't talk about sex transmission. That will stigmatize gay men. And then other think pieces written by queer people will say, if we don't talk about how monkeypox is mostly spread, which is sex and sex parties, we can't really fight this. And I feel like there is this fear about being specific and nuanced about monkeypox because we are so afraid as a community of being stigmatized. Mm-hmm.
And I do not know where I stand on this. You know, I saw an AP headline a few weeks ago that called monkeypox an STD. It's not. I found it offensive. But in reality, we know how monkeypox right now is usually spread. Right.
Right. It's a certain kind of sex. Arguably, it's, I'm not saying it's not an STD, but it's arguably, you know, functioning, behaving like an STD. And that might be inconvenient, but that seems accurate. Yes. And so I understand the fear we have living with the legacy of HIV AIDS, not wanting to say things about ourselves that will lead to harm, that will lead to stigma, that might lead to violence. But I do want
more nuanced and detailed discussion of how this stuff works so we can move past it. And I think that at a certain point, the queer community, capital Q, has to say, forget about what they're saying or not saying. We have to be truthful and honest with ourselves and
to heal ourselves. And I think like what we're getting at, just to speak very plainly, is that we're talking about shame and that we still live in a homophobic environment. You know, we've drank this Kool-Aid saying that queer people have equality, they have equity. But no, people are still really uncomfortable with queer sex. And what's so interesting about monkeypox is that the pox themselves literally mark you like Carposie did in the 80s. You know, the actual like physical... Delusions.
Elysians that people got when they were HIV positive. So, you know, we're dealing with multiple things at once. Like a long history of when you got sick, your body began to be marked, which led to hate crimes spiking in the 80s and 90s. And now we as a younger queer community are dealing with our own quote unquote version of this.
And that's why we're so silent. Like I've never in my life experienced more friends hiding monkey pox from me than an HIV diagnosis ever. And I think it's that physical marking and that when you are marked, it does make you have a conversation with people in your life that like, I have butt sex. I give my boyfriend a blow job. I do all these things. And that,
kind of illuminates the shame that we still all carry and that the government still carries, that we can't talk about queer bodies. And that's what's really sad is like, we're actually not as far as we thought because if we were, we could talk about this like we talk about complications with birth rates and death and all these other things. Yeah, and this is also about respectability politics. And I mean, you know, here's the thing. People, fascists are targeting drag queens who read children books at libraries. They're targeting queer YA book
in schools. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do. There's no self-censoring that we could achieve that would allow these people who hate us and don't want us to exist to treat us with dignity. And so I think it's also important to acknowledge the feelings. This is scary. Shame is a beast. But it's really important that we tap into our strength. I want us to live and to live fiercely more than we want to live
And I think that's just really important. Yes. But I think that I've noticed that I want y'all's feedback on as well is who gets to be a queer monkeypox spokesperson. Usually when I see people on TikTok sharing their stories of monkeypox and trying to get over it, it's a certain kind of privilege situation.
cis, gay, usually white male. And I've been thinking a lot about who gets to talk about monkeypox and own that story and who feels safe enough to do so.
If you're an hourly low-wage worker who works in close proximity to other people, could even telling your boss that you had monkeypox a month ago get you fired? If you have monkeypox and don't have health insurance or a job where you can work from home or take time off, do you have time to post to TikTok all day telling your story? You know, as happy as I am to see queer men who have this thing talk about it openly in social spaces, I can also see the privilege of
of who gets to be open about it or not. And that bothers me too. Before we move on, can I offer just one tool, one practical bit of advice that actually helped me be able to access the vaccine here in Columbus? And again, this is about access and there are certain privileges. If you use social media like Twitter, for example,
and you're waiting to get the vaccine and you're really eager to get that, and I hope you are eager, you should get vaccinated if you can, go to your local Department of Health's website, their Twitter account, and turn on notifications. Because I have found that if you're able to turn on notification for like the Columbus Department of Health, when they tweet out, okay, now we have new appointments available, I've found among people I've been talking to, that is the most reliable way, unfortunately,
to find out and very quickly access vaccines. So if you're looking for ways to find your end, I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah. And before we go to our break, if you want to read and learn more about kind of these systemic things that we're talking about, how access to a vaccine or access to healthcare ties to race, gender, class, all of these things, there's a new book that is out, I believe now, by Stephen Thrasher, a friend of some of us, who's a journalist that I work with at The Guardian, and it's called The Viral Underclass.
and explores deeply how race, class, and gender impacted the COVID rollout and how it does lead to things like a monkeypox outbreak. So go order that now. But with that being said, let's take a break and we'll be back with more on privilege and queerness and maybe not queer people. Who knows? ♪
This message is brought to you by McDonald's. Did you know only 7.3% of American fashion designers are Black? Well, McDonald's 2024 Change Leaders Program is ready to change the face of fashion. The innovative program awards a monetary grant to five emerging Black American designers and pairs each with an industry professional to help them elevate their brands. I
I know specifically and distinctly how McDonald's can support and empower not just black Gen Z, but black people. My first job was McDonald's. I learned a lot there about customer service and how to relate to people. I still love that place and go there very often. Look out for the change of fashion designers and mentors everywhere.
at events like the BET Awards and the Essence Festival of Culture. And follow the journey of the 2024 McDonald's Change Leaders on their Instagram page, We Are Golden.
All right, we're back. You're listening to Vibe Check. And we have to talk about Harry Styles. Do we have to? We have to. We have to. You can do it. We can do it. I knew this was going to happen. I knew this was coming. I knew this was coming, but I was waiting. I've been trying to mind my business when it comes to Harry Styles for so long. The tweets hit me in the face this Monday. They hit me in the face. Anywho. Long story short.
Long story short, Harry Styles is set to star in a new movie called My Policeman, which is out later this year in October. In the movie, he plays a queer policeman who falls for a queer male museum curator.
This movie is written by Ron Niswainer, who also wrote Philadelphia. And the director is a queer man as well, Michael Grandage. In a recent Rolling Stone profile of Harry Styles, he talked about his upcoming role in My Policeman. And he said he's going to do sex scenes differently than the other girls do. He said, quote,
So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it. And it kind of removes the tenderness from it. There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay. And Michael, the director, wanted to show that it's tender and loving and sensitive. As soon as that quote...
hit any queer person's eyes or ears, there was a record scratch. And my first thought is, God bless Harry Styles, play whatever role you want to play, but what makes you an expert on queer cinema? And what do you actually know about what happens in gay sex scenes? There's a lot of different kinds of gay movies and gay TV, and I've actually seen before Tinder romantic gay love scenes. You know, I want to hear from both of you
about what a person like Kary Stiles gets to do and gets to say when he's playing a queer person. He sits in this weird in-between. Some could say he's queer baiting, some could say he's queer adjacent, I don't know. But when someone like him
with such authority about gay sex on screen. I just want to say stop and do the reading. And watching. What are y'all thinking about this? I mean, okay, one, I just have to say, I have to make a joke. He may have been talking about porn. We don't know. Girl, look, I was like, what film are we talking about? I was like, well, sure, if all you watch is BreedItWrong.com. Yeah, it is two men really going. He's on Sean Cody. I'm like, wait, are we talking about like Moonlight?
My first thought was moonlight. My first thought was like it was giving a lot of like, OK, so like this reminds me of that moment when Sam Smith won their Oscar for their original song from a James Bond movie. And they got on stage and said, I am the first queer person to ever win an Oscar. And everyone was like, did you Google anything at all?
And it just feels like I want queer people and people occupying queer spaces just to know a little bit more of the history here. Yeah. When you think about, as of late, how queer people occupy cinema, what are the big examples? It's Moonlight, which there was not a sex scene. Literally, the kiss was saved to the end. There is Call Me By Your Name, which were two straight identified people. And then that's kind of it, right?
like male sex. So we don't really see really explicit male sexuality in film. What I go back to is like maybe Al Pacino in Cruising, the movie where he plays an undercover cop cruising in the 80s. But I don't think Harry Styles watched that. But I think what you're picking up on, Sam, and the question that I always raise with Harry Styles is Harry is always kind of living in this gray zone where he never says, he's never explicit about it. But
But like we as queer people can kind of like read each other and know how we would respond in these situations of if we're in a movie and we're queer and how historic that is. And Harry's just not kind of like operating in that way, which makes me question like the queerness of all of it beyond like gender presentation. And that's where I'm like, well, are you as history making or as radical as, you know, an openly queer actor playing this role? And I'm looking way past the fact that he's playing a cop. Like we could spend a whole day about the cop thing, but just about sensuality and sex, like obviously,
I don't know. It feels weird with Harry Styles talking about it. Well, it's also, I don't think he understands how he fits into this long and twisted legacy of the way Hollywood treats gay men.
They usually don't like to make gay men movie stars, and they'd rather have someone who is straight or not quite gay play gay roles. In the same way, for years and years and years, we saw people who were not trans playing trans people. And so Harry needs to understand he is exercising a certain kind of privilege by getting to do this role as who he is. And it is galling to see him speak with such authority about what it means to be gay in a movie –
When historically, Hollywood's never good to actual gay men. I keep thinking when I read this Harry Styles story about the career of Rupert Everett. He was supposed to be a gay leading man. In the 90s, his breakout role was with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding. And then before you know it, his career kind of tanks. And he talked about this and said the real problem was prejudiced against his sexuality.
And he says it was more or less impossible to be gay if you wanted to aim for that top rank of show business. So what Harry doesn't acknowledge or speak to is that part of why he's getting this big role in this gay movie is because he's not too gay for Hollywood. And I would love for him to acknowledge that privilege when he makes these big blanket statements. Yeah. And I mean, just another example from the Rolling Stone interview that I just think says a lot about his blind spots specifically.
So the movie My Policeman, it's set in the 50s in the UK when, as it was in the United States, illegal to be out and be gay. And Harry Styles says, quote, it's obviously pretty unfathomable now to think, oh, you couldn't be gay. That was illegal. And I'm like, that's not unfathomable. He just now realized that? Wow. That's not. Wow. And I just...
And Harry Styles is 28 years old. He's not a child. I don't necessarily expect anyone to be an expert on queer culture and identity. But I do think it's a reasonable expectation that if you are given an opportunity to speak with this kind of platform when, as Sam points out, so many other people have not been given that opportunity and are like chomping at the bit.
to get to like talk about this, then I think if you're not an expert, if you're still on your journey, and I think it's fair to say Harry Styles is figuring stuff out, who isn't, then I think root things in that humility and say, instead of saying like, oh, it's wild to think, it's like, actually, I was shocked. I learned a lot doing this. And I realized, God, I have so much work to do. Don't come from this kind of, this really arrogant, frankly, like patriarchal naivete, where he's like, who knew this? And I'm like, we did.
And why don't you? We lived it. Why don't you? And what I don't get is that, you know, so many actors who are trying to be taken seriously as actors will tell you in all their interviews, I did research on this role for months. I got into this character for such a long time. I read this book. I went there. I did research.
Harry Styles could do that. It is actually possible for the work of him preparing for this film to be researching what queer life was like, what gay life was like for characters like his back then. Part of his work could be watching other queer movies that depict queer sex. It doesn't seem like he's done that.
And it's weird to see that because I know most of his work as a musician. He's a very thorough and thoughtful musician. His newest album, his last album, you can tell that this is a guy who takes the craft seriously and is researching various musical styles to make shit that sounds good. I want the same level of care that Harry Styles puts in his music to be put into figuring out the world he wants to occupy as an actor. Yeah.
Just do the work, Harry. You know what it's like? Okay, straight people, look, well, don't look away. Listen away. Listen away, straight people. You know what it's like? There's like that type of gay man, and we all know many versions of this, where you can tell the only book about queer culture they've ever read is The Velvet Rage. Whoop.
It's like they read The Velvet Rage. It's a helpful book. I think it's certainly part of the queer literary. But then that was it. It's a 101 situation. They haven't read anything past The Velvet. It's very 101. Yes. It's kind of like I would say, okay, straight people, listen back in. It's kind of like if for feminism and gender politics, it's like someone went to see The Vagina Monologues. And then that was the beginning and end of their gender journey. Right? Right.
And now we would go, honey, that's kind of dated. This, to me, strikes me as the queer person who hasn't even read The Velvet Rage. There you go. That's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. And also just like, let's put Harry Styles and the privilege he's exercising in a greater context. Can either of you right now name an openly gay bonafide movie star? Bonafide. Maybe Kristen Stewart. Maybe. I mean, yes.
No, the Christmas tree is kind of it. And she just got her Oscar nomination for the first time for playing Princess Diana. So nothing queer. A film that no one watched. Who was a queer icon, by the way. Princess Diana is and was a queer icon. Can you name any gay man who was an A-level movie star? They don't exist because Hollywood doesn't believe in them. And also, can you name a queer film that has gotten an Oscar nomination that had a queer lead at all?
Like it doesn't really exist. And I think that's like the problem here. And my only problem with casting straight people in queer characters is that straight people are allowed to play queer and it advances their career. Queer people come out as queer and it hurts their career. And it hurts their career. And that's a huge problem. That said, we cannot say with definitive certainty that Harry is queer or not. I want to be fair there.
But what we can't say and what we have to bring up is that Harry Styles became famous as a pop star in the group One Direction. And the one thing we know about queer theory and queer history and pop music is that using queer sensibilities for pop stars is a super big tool of the music industry so that these men, young men, can be sexualized but not too sexualized to where like parents of kids, young girls typically, can buy in a
obsess over these men who in the eyes of adults are desexualized or kind of stunted. So there's a way in which music industry uses queerness to stunt pop stars. And you look at NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, Harry Styles, One Direction, you can look at it. And that's what he, that's my frustration here is that like, you've been kind of neutered in the public eye. And as you're sexualizing yourself, you're using queer bodies to do so. And that is confusing and a privilege.
Is that why Harry Styles is always dressed like a clown? Yes. Like it's always like the aesthetic is very under the big tent. Yeah. I saw someone tweet the other day that like Harry Styles, especially in a film like My Policeman, he is a straight woman's fantasy of what a gay man should be or a mother's fantasy of what a gay man should be. And when you have people who are not openly gay occupying these roles, they get to do that. And the industry likes that.
And I ain't got nothing against Harry. I play his music and like it a lot, but I would just like for him and other artists with so much privilege to understand how they fit into these ecosystems and acknowledge their own privilege. Amen. Amen. That's all, Harry. Anywho, I will end this by quoting a tweet from one of my favorite Twitter followers, Daniel Summers, MD. He wrote,
do I think one must be queer to play queer roles? That's my preference, but I don't think it has to be demanded. But then he said, do I think non-queer actors playing queer roles should avoid posturing like experts on queer cinema? For sure. There we go. For sure. There we go. That's all we're saying. Thank you, Daniel. Boom, boom, pow. All right, it's time for a quick break, but do not go anywhere. We'll be right back with recommendations to keep your vibe right. ♪
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All right. Hello, my dears. We are back. And before we end the show, we like to share something that's helping each of us keep our vibe right this week. Zach, let's start with you. What's helping you keep your vibe right? Okay. I want to be messy. Okay. I want to say two things really quickly. One, I'm just going to say the other I'm going to go into. One, I really love the Be Real app. I feel like an old millennial on it. Are y'all familiar with Be Real? It's starting to pop
Tell me how it works again because I see the headlines and don't click. So it's an app that you get a notification randomly throughout the day. And within two minutes, you need to post a photo of whatever you're doing. It's not stylized. Oh, I didn't realize that the app tells you when to. Yeah, it pushes you into the app and then you all post and all your friends post and you can see what everyone's doing in that moment. What if it gets me while I'm on the toilet? Then girl, you better get off the toilet.
Or, go to the toilet. Or, bitch, it's time to be real. Be real. Everyone goes. I don't know. It'll be realer than that. As someone who, like, forgets to take pictures, like, I was just with friends on a camping trip this weekend. Like, I'm really bad at taking pictures. It's been pushing me to, like, document more. And I really like that. So, I love it. Try it out. It's really lo-fi, easy breezy. And it's not even about followers or anything. It's about who you know.
So there's that. But the thing I wanted to talk to y'all about was, have y'all been following Amanda Steinberg and Lena Wilson drama lately? Honestly, trying not to. I have followed all of it in detail and I love it. They're both so annoying. But I love how annoying they are because it's like the perfect counterweight to the actual film that Amanda is in. It's called Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. It's this new A24 horror film that's actually really fun. The whole thing is a send up of self-absorbed Gen Z-ers.
And the drama between Amandla and Lena is that. Oh, so this is very like life imitating A24. 100%. 100%. And like the lack of self-awareness through all of this for people who aren't following this. Lena Wilson writes for the New York Times, wrote a criticism of the film saying she doesn't like it and that it's a advertisement for cleavage. Amandla Steinberg, the star of it, who's the only person showing cleavage? Well,
Most of the film. Well, Lee Pace showed more cleavage than all the girls. Let's be real. Bless him. Bless him. That was a blessing. But Amanda slid in her DMs, did not tweet, did not quote tweet, nothing, and said privately something really funny that was like, if you stop staring at my tits for the entire movie, maybe you would have enjoyed it, which is hilarious. Kind of a joke as a jest. She says she was cool with this because two lesbians talking to each other. Ha ha, funny, funny, funny.
Yeah. And Lena said, no, she went off. She posted some TikTok rants talking about how talented she is. She's posted on like every social media app, which is why I can't get away from it. She said that that DM was homophobic. And she said, it's really painful when the homophobia comes from inside the house. Yes. But,
But why I love it so much is that when we talk about race, gender within queer community and how white queers are more privileged than blacks and they kind of are accidentally racist and Karens all the time, this drama has it all. Because it has Lena being casually racist towards Amanda and using this language to make her seem violent and all this stuff. So anyway, dive into it. You'll have a lot of fun. And it's just wonderful. It's wonderful. What is it about Lena's? Lena's always in it, aren't they? Yeah.
It's like they take turns. Let me not. I will say, this is the thing about that story that I find so fascinating. 15 years ago, if someone had wrote a review of a movie and the actor or actress didn't like it, nobody would ever know. Nobody would ever know. And now, because we all have Twitter fingers, this...
Negative review of a negative review has a life cycle of a week. It's crazy. The internet's fucking crazy. Anywho, I'm obsessed. I mean, I will say, and I really have been trying because I'm like, I haven't even seen the movie, but I certainly have seen more discourse around this back and forth between the two of them than about the movie itself. Well, yeah. And that's why I want to use my time and my recommendation to actually recommend that people go see Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Is it good?
You enjoyed it? It's a fun movie. It's fun. Every young person in that film is like acting. And on top of just being a fun romp with a really interesting twist at the end, it is the first film that I've seen that sends up Gen Z in a really fun and smart way. And it is the first thing I've ever seen that has proven to me that, oh, wait, actually Pete Davidson can act. Correct.
Pete Davidson was really good in this movie. You know, I've talked about A24 on my other show. I think they're doing some really cool stuff as a studio, but they keep making stuff that I like. And I think Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is just fun and smart and I like it.
What type of movie is it though? It's a horror movie. It's a slasher, who kills who kind of movie. Oh. It's like really fun horror. And what I would say, like, hey, A24, you want us to do a whole episode on Bodies, Bodies, Bodies? Call us because I can dive into it because I don't agree with the Pete Davidson acting. I think Pete Davidson is Pete Davidson. But I think it was really good for Pete Davidson to be Pete Davidson on the screen. So what I like most about it though is that it asks a really big existential question to Gen Z, which I won't share now. And that's why I want to talk about this later when
people have seen it more. I think it's a really interesting film for Gen Z to reflect on itself and its current politics. For me, it's like, is
is Gen Z's politics performative or actual? And it is, is it a tool for personal advancement or societal growth and change? Yeah. Are you doing structural work or personal work? Boop, boop, boop. Are you clout chasing or seeking change? Right? But I also like that this is a movie that could have just had one black girl in it, but had two. Thank y'all. I always liked that. Oh God. I love that.
I always love to see more than one black woman on the screen at the same time. The bar is in hell. And a note, because of the show, two black women that do queer stuff in TV and film a lot. Both of those actors, one's openly queer, the other has played queer before too. A24, dare I say, unlike Harry Styles, has done the reading.
This is the same studio that gave you Moonlight. You know I live for some A24, so I agree. Well, then I'm going to be this week's basic Betty. What's actually been helping me keep my vibe right? I can't explain. So, one, vibe commentary. Do not ask me to explain this in a very specific way. Wait, new segment? Vibe commentary? Vibe commentary. Summer is over. Summer is over. No, it's not. This is my time. This is my vibe recommendation.
I've decided that summer's over. The vibe suddenly feels autumnal. And thus to align with that shift, it's a fact, not a feeling, Sam. Sam is glaring at me right now. I really am. I really am. You're in LA. We don't even have weather, so you wouldn't be like, it's winter. We're going to fight. Let me go fight. Go ahead.
I don't know why, but I associate the original run of Will & Grace with fall. Really? I just do. That was the gayest thing you've ever said, by the way. Huh. How, Sway? How, Sway? I just like a half, and I was like, oh, it's time to rewatch Will & Grace. I'm like eight episodes back into the first season, and I'm just really enjoying it because, and this aligns with so much of what we talked today. Obviously, we know Will & Grace was the first gay sitcom, but
Like, how gay is it? And I just realized, you know, when Will & Grace came on, I was in middle school. I had a girlfriend in school, gal pal named Lindsey. We would call each other on the phone and listen to each episode and then reenact Karen and Jack's lines during the commercial breaks. Who was Karen? Of course.
Of course she was Karen. I wanted you to be Karen. Now I would be Karen. But you know, it was really important. And as a kid, I would watch it because I was desperately trying to live vicariously through the show, which is part of the issue with gay baiting and queer baiting. It's often, especially for young people, a deep need when you're coming to media. And
I'm grateful. Listen, I'm in my mid-30s. I don't have that deep need. I know who I am. I know how I feel. I'm not looking to someone like Harry Styles to tell me how to live.
And so like watching Will and Grace now, I just feel like it's just a show about some people. It's just fun. Yeah, it's just fun. If anything, to me, it's about two friends who are slowly but surely realizing that loving each other isn't enough. Like, you know, you have to learn how to like live together because they love each other fiercely, but they treat each other terribly. And that's just really fun.
fun to me. I don't know. It's total nostalgia. That said, Megan Mullally in that show is one of the best comedic performances in sitcom history. She eats up her timing, her pacing. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. If you haven't watched the original run of Will & Grace, you should watch it. And don't watch the reboot.
Don't watch the reason. I didn't like the reason. Also, that said, before we close this up, I'm going to recommend that Saeed read about LA seasons because we have them. September is our really hot month and it's going to be a little rainy season in November, December. It's still there. As an Angeleno, the seasons are hot, hotter, less hot, and a sprinkle. Those are the seasons. That so sounds like a you problem. That so sounds like a you problem.
Anywho, listeners, we want to hear from you. What's keeping your vibe right? What recommendations do you have for us? Email us at vibecheckatstitcher.com. Vibecheckatstitcher.com. And honestly, email us and say whatever you want to say. Let's just talk. How do you decide when fall has indeed fell? How do you know? Yeah.
More talks and laughs next week. Until then, thank you all for listening to this week's episode of Vibe Check. A huge thank you to our producer, Chantel Holder, who keeps us right and tight and always says, wrap that fucking segment up. We appreciate you, Chantel.
Thanks to our engineer, Brendan Burns. Thanks to Marcus Holm for our theme music and sound design. And special thanks to our executive producers, Nora Ritchie at Stitcher and Brandon Sharp from Agenda Management and Production. And last but not least, thank you to Jared O'Connell and Imelda Skender for all of their help. And again, we want to hear from you. Don't forget, you can email us at vibecheckatstitcher.com and keep in touch with us on Twitter at
at TheFerocity, at Zach Stafford, and at Sam Sanders. And follow us on our new TikTok. Did y'all know we had a TikTok? I saw it on the download TikTok. Has it popped up in your... I'm used to watching my TikToks through Instagram, and now I gotta be on TikTok. Fair. Follow us on our new TikTok at VibeCheckPod. Stay tuned for a new episode next Wednesday. Stay safe out there, and if you can't stay safe, stay cute. Bye. Bye, y'all. Bye.
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