Queering Reality with Heb Murphy (@hebontheweb)

In this episode of Queering Reality, I sit down with writer, filmmaker, and contemplative thinker Cassidy Hall for an intimate exploration of death, desire, spirituality, and the beautiful uncertainty of being human. We discuss how queerness invites us to embrace mystery rather than certainty, how confronting mortality can awaken us to life, and how eroticism extends far beyond sex into our connections with nature, one another, and the divine. Along the way, we explore religious dogma, contemplative Christianity, anxiety, vulnerability, and the radical practice of surrendering to the unknown. Together, we wonder whether loosening our grip on certainty — and even on our sense of a separate self — might open us to a deeper experience of love, freedom, and what it means to be fully alive. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

What happens when you stop trying to make the art you think you’re supposed to make and start paying attention to what actually wants to come out?In this episode of Queering Reality, I talk with musician, songwriter, comedian, and internet delight Heb Murphy (@hebontheweb) about unlearning the rules we’ve inherited: about gender, conflict, creativity, success, and even what makes something worthy of being called art. Heb tells me how the pressure to become a “real” musician eventually made it almost impossible for her to pick up a guitar — and how a tiny, ridiculous song about corn unexpectedly gave her creativity back.We talk about finding softness in a world that teaches us to fight, the strange hunger of internet virality, nature and community as antidotes to despair, and what might happen after we die. Somehow we make our way from clowns and corn to patriarchy, psychedelics, collective consciousness, sex, death, and the possibility that none of us actually knows what the hell is going on.Which, really, is exactly where I like Queering Reality to begin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

In this episode of Queering Reality, I sit down with bestselling author, historian, and public intellectual Dr. Ibram X. Kendi to explore how ideas — not just policies or institutions — shape the world we live in. Drawing from his powerful new book Chain of Ideas, we discuss how narratives rooted in fear spread through communities, why authoritarian movements rely on emotion over evidence, and how racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry are connected through larger systems of power. We also talk about the responsibility that comes with privilege, the importance of teaching children how to think rather than what to think, and why books remain one of our greatest tools for expanding empathy. Along the way, we wander into fiction, Toni Morrison, the mysteries of what happens after death, and the enduring hope that liberation, like oppression, is something we build together. If you’ve ever wondered why certain ideas take hold — or how we begin to dismantle them — this conversation offers both intellectual rigor and genuine humanity.DR. IBRAM X. KENDI is one of the world’s foremost historians of racism and a leading antiracist scholar. He is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History at Howard University, and the inaugural director of Howard’s Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kendi is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest author to win that award. Stamped from the Beginning was adapted into highly acclaimed books for young readers and an Emmy-nominated documentary on Netflix. Dr. Kendi also authored the international bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist, which was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” In total, Dr. Kendi has published eighteen books for adults and children, including twelve New York Times Best Sellers, five of which were #1 New York Times Best Sellers. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. His latest critically acclaimed book and Best Seller is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, which was published in March. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

Today’s guest is Julian Randall, a poet, essayist, educator, and the author of Refuse, a collection that explores family, race, masculinity, illness, inheritance, and the complicated ways we learn who we’re supposed to be. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other publications, and he serves as an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.What draws me to Julian’s work is its refusal to flatten experience into certainty. His poems are deeply attentive to contradiction — to the ways tenderness and anger, grief and joy, vulnerability and strength can occupy the same body, the same family, the same moment. Rather than resolving those tensions, he invites us to live inside them.That feels deeply connected to what we explore on this podcast. Queering reality isn’t simply about sexuality or gender — it’s about resisting the pressure to make ourselves legible through binaries. It’s about questioning the stories we’ve inherited about what makes a family, what makes a man, what makes a body, what makes a life. Julian’s work reminds us that identity isn’t something we arrive at once and for all; it’s something we continually negotiate with memory, history, love, and loss.I’m especially excited to talk with him about poetry as a way of holding complexity without rushing toward resolution, about inheritance and the stories families pass down and leave unsaid, about vulnerability as a creative practice, and about what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be more than one thing at once. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

Dr. Seema Yasmin is a physician, journalist, author, and one of the most incisive voices examining how information and misinformation shapes our understanding of the world. Her work asks urgent questions about who gets to define truth, whose expertise is trusted, and how systems of power influence what we believe. In her book What the Fact?, she explores the mechanics of misinformation and disinformation, revealing how false narratives spread not simply because people lack information, but because stories tap into identity, fear, belonging, and existing social inequalities.As a Muslim woman, physician, journalist, and advocate for health equity, she brings a deeply interdisciplinary lens to questions of power, representation, and resistance. Her work invites us to consider how misinformation functions not only as a public health threat, but also as a tool that can reinforce sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of systemic oppression.I talked with Dr. Yasmin about truth and authority, the politics of expertise, the targeting of marginalized communities through disinformation campaigns, the limits of Western frameworks for understanding justice and health, and what solidarity might look like in an increasingly polarized world. We’ll also explore whether hope is the right framework for this moment—or whether there are other ways of imagining collective action and transformation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

In Akil Kumarasamy’s work, borders rarely stay still. They flicker, blur, and sometimes dissolve entirely—between countries and within them, across generations, between the living and the dead, the remembered and the imagined. Her stories move through these thresholds with a quiet intensity, asking what it means to inhabit more than one place, more than one self, at once. Liminality, in her hands, is not just a state of in-betweenness but a charged space where identity is continually made and unmade.In this conversation, we’ll explore how her writing navigates these shifting terrains—how migration reshapes time, how history lingers in intimate ways, and how her characters negotiate belonging across fractured geographies. We’ll also turn to the intersections of queerness and feminism in her work: how desire, power, and resistance emerge within constrained worlds, and how her stories open up new possibilities for imagining selfhood beyond fixed categories.Together, these themes invite a deeper look at the porous edges of identity and the creative potential that exists in crossing—and recrossing—them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a writer whose work moves fluidly between memory, myth, and pop culture, creating narratives that are as emotionally sharp as they are surreal. Known for her background in performance poetry and her genre-bending storytelling, Lozada-Oliva invites us into a conversation about identity, desire, and the stories we inherit and disrupt.In this podcast episode, we explore how she navigates the space between realism and dream logic, what it means to rewrite cultural archetypes as a Latina writer, and how performance has shaped her understanding of voice and truth. We also dive into her nuanced approach to the body, fragmented identity, and queerness as a creative practice. At its core, this conversation asks what it means to write toward complexity — even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or refuses easy definition. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

In this episode of Queering Reality, we’re joined by poet Torrin Greathouse for a conversation that moves through the body, language, and the transformative power of queer imagination. Together, we explore how the body holds memory — and how queer identity reshapes what we inherit, remember, and reclaim.Drawing from the themes of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, we consider the ways language can both harm and liberate, asking how it constructs, distorts, and reimagines queer realities. Our discussion traces poetry not only as a form of documentation, but as a space for transformation and possibility — where new ways of being can emerge.We also turn to the question of what it means to queer language itself, and how reworking religious imagery can become an act of resistance, survival, and re-enchantment. At its heart, this episode asks: if queerness is a way of seeing differently, how can poetry help us remake reality in its image? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

Today’s episode sits right at the edge of something both deeply personal and profoundly political: female desire. Not the version we’ve inherited filtered through patriarchy, shame, and silence, but the messy, expansive, often contradictory realities of what it actually means to want.Because for so many women and queer people, desire isn’t just about attraction. It’s shaped by power, by culture, by trauma, by the quiet and loud ways we’ve been taught to disconnect from our bodies or perform them for someone else. So what does it mean to come back to ourselves? To reclaim desire not as something we owe, but something we author?I’m joined today by Sarah Barmak, a journalist and author who has spent years exploring the science, psychology, and lived experience of female sexuality. Together, we’re queering the idea that desire is fixed, linear, or even fully knowable. We talk about the myths we’ve internalized, the realities we rarely name, and the radical potential of redefining pleasure on our own terms.This conversation is about curiosity over certainty, embodiment over performance, and the courage it takes to ask: what do I actually want when no one else is watching? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com

In this episode, I’m joined by writer Lilly Dancyger, whose essay collection First Love refuses neat conclusions about desire, grief, addiction, and becoming. In these essays, love is both salvation and destruction, clarity and confusion — and Dancyger lets those tensions breathe.We explore how queering reality means resisting the cultural pressure to simplify our stories, how embracing ambiguity disrupts patriarchal certainty, and why paradox might be the most honest place to begin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.queeringreality.com