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Where did CBQ come from?  At least on two separate occasions, both of our listeners have wondered this, and I’m about to tell you.  I will ask, however, that you don’t tell anyone, because we’ll probably recycle this for a show later.  It’s just one way that CBQ is environmentally friendly.  We are also completely biodegradable except for Lindsay’s bionic arm, legs and ear.  Here is our origin story, from my point of view:

In 2002, I was in my second year of grad school for social work, and got an internship doing individual psychotherapy at a GLBT community center.  Most of my clients looked a little bit like me, in that they were predominantly white, single queer folks in their 20’s and 30’s.  In the first two weeks, a clear pattern was becoming apparent, as most of my clients said, in slightly different ways, “I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the gay world, and I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the straight world.  I feel alone.”

As a dutiful novice psychotherapist, I’d signed myself up for psychotherapy at the student counseling center.  For those of you unfamiliar with mental health work, there’s a prevailing belief that you can really screw someone else up if your own crap isn’t in check, and you should never sell something that you yourself wouldn’t buy.  In my first session with my therapist, I was surprised to find myself saying, without a hint of irony: “I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the gay world, and I don’t feel like there’s a place for me in the straight world.  I feel alone.”

My therapist, who was a perky straight girl with a sassy little haircut, put up with my whining for about three weeks.  Finally, she said this (and I’m paraphrasing): “You cling to this belief that you’re somehow different from every other gay person in the world.  What effect do you think that belief has on your goal to be more connected to other people?” I was ticked off for about thirty seconds, but then I had the closest thing to an epiphany that I’ll probably ever experience.  I’m the GLBT community.  Each one of us is the GLBT community.  We get to decide what the GLBT community is, and isn’t.

As an aside, my approach with my own clients changed dramatically.  I no longer allowed them to say “them” and “they” in reference to other gay people during our sessions; they had to use the more accurate pronouns “us” and “we”.  Sure enough, the people I was working with started to see positive changes in their lives. 

As for me, this was the beginning of a period in my life that I call “the ren-gay-sance”.  I began devouring books with new-agey, embarrassing titles like Coming Out of Shame, and (my all-time favorite) Gay Spirit Warrior.  I would see people in public who I thought were queer, and I would smile and nod as if to say, “Right on, my homo brother!” Those poor folks were probably just trying to shop at the grocery store for TV dinners, condoms, and non-comedogenic facial moisturizer unmolested.

During my ren-gay-sance, I started voraciously reading comics again.  This makes sense when you figure that comics were instrumental in my self-acceptance as a gay adolescent.  I read enough issues of Uncanny X-Men to get that different wasn’t bad, no matter what other peoples’ perceptions were.  When I returned to comics, the amount of GLBT content was overwhelming, and virtually all of it celebratory and affirming.  The last I’d heard, Northstar was finding AIDS babies in garbage cans.  Yuck.  In 2002, though, the last man on Earth was hanging out with a hip, smart lesbian doctor, the new Captain Marvel’s sister was hittin’ it with Moondragon, and there was a new super-team with Batman- and Superman-like characters that were not only gay, they were a couple!  Yay!

Podcasting came into vogue a couple of years after that.  I listened to Comic Geek Speak religiously, and kept thinking, “You know who needs this?  All the queers, that’s who.” I waited and waited, and no GLBT comics-related podcast surfaced.  I got tired of waiting and placed an ad on craigslist.com to see if anyone would be interested in doing a podcast for GLBT comics fans.  Kate and Stevie replied less than 24 hours later.  We hung out for a few months getting to know each other, and attended the big local comic convention together, and recorded our first episode last September, using Stevie’s temperamental laptop and a $25 USB microphone. 

One of our primary goals that we identified from the outset has been to build community among GLBT comics fans.  Meeting Steve and Kate was incredible.  Kate is blindingly intelligent and quick-witted, and taught me a little bit about the weirdly compelling world of gaming.  Stevie is an extremely creative, funny guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of comic book history. Brett and Lindsay, both of whom recently moved to Chicago, became regular cast members within the last several months.  Brett is wacky, wryly observant, and his enthusiasm is infectious.  Lindsay is an assaultively cute, gentle, articulate person who loves reading and art.  I love them.  The highlight of my week is getting to spend time with all of them.

An unforeseen benefit to this whole podcasting thing is that people actually started listening.  We got an email address, and notes started trickling in right from the beginning.  We’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of our listeners in person (Hot Humanitarian Chris, Other Eric), and, realistic or not, we want to meet everybody.  It’s a weird and beautiful thing to go from feeling isolated, to feeling undeniably like you’re a part of something.

If you finish reading this having learned one thing, I hope that it’s this: you can find more on Craig’s list than anonymous sex partners and used futons.

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