The Heart

Being naked can be scary. There you are, your whole self. No decorations, no cool skirt or shoes or shorts to look at instead of…you. This story is about one special woman, our naked hero. After undergoing surgery and getting an ostomy (a bag that sits on your hip that your poop goes into), being naked was forever changed. Nonetheless, our hero decided to continue frequenting her favorite nude beach, walking naked and free all summer long. This piece, originally titled after our hero’s Zine, “My Pink Button”, was produced by Jess MG and aired on Audio Smut a long long time ago.

Once upon a time, Kaitlin went to a radical sex education workshop. At the workshop, the facilitators spent 45 minutes going into extreme detail of the complexities of the female system of sexual arousal. Then they spent 15 minutes on the male system. The facilitator insinuated that it was very simple – touch the dick, make him come. During the question and answer period the male bodied people in the room protested, insisting that the male anatomy is just as mysterious and complicated as the female anatomy. This is when Kaitlin learned about the P-spot – the prostate orgasm. One Saturday night, Kaitlin ventured onto St. Laurent Boulevard in Montreal and asked strangers if they had ever had their P-spots touched. This is a collage of their answers.

Once upon a time, we did an episode about what happens when there is too much going on sexually. The Ethical Slut says that love isn’t finite. Loving more than one person means having more love instead of less. This can be true. However, love is a complicated emotion. And sex can often be wrapped up in all these complicated and conflicting emotions. More isn’t always better. This story was submitted to The Heart by an anonymous Dominatrix and written for podcast by Julia Alsop.

Most people remember the first time they got off, most of us conveniently forget the era before that when we have no idea what masturbation was. When all we knew is what felt good. We develop strategies that seemed very innocent to us at the time. We didn’t know that there is a name for this kind of feeling good. Or, that certain things that feel good are supposed to be done in private. There was a time when nothing had names and we were just kids.

In the summer of 1960 Joan Nestle was 20 years old and in love. At the time she lived in a Lower East Side tenement apartment and the city was hot, sweaty and humid. Joan and her girlfriend Carol would ride the subway for an hour and half to Riis Park. Riis Park was and still is an easily accessible queer beach in New York. Joan wrote about these memories in her book, A Restricted Country. Beach goer and producer Cassie Wagler brings us her adaptation of one of the essays found in Joan’s book – Lesbian Memories 1: Riis Park 1960. Poet Iris Cushing is the voice of Joan. Joan Nestle is a femme, a lesbian, a writer, activist and editor, and a scholar of butch-femme history and theory. In 1974 she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives – and the archives were housed in her apt for years. You can read more of Joan’s work on her blog.

At 5 years old, Gina was parading around the stage with a number pinned to her chest. But as the host of The Little Miss America Competition sang the national anthem, she felt he might have as well been singing,“You’re so whiiiiite, you’re so bloooooonde.” Even still, Gina, the toothless, black Shirley Temple, made it to the final round. When she didn’t hear her number called she looked out into the sea of eager parents and found her parents. Her mother, sullen and disappointed. Next to her mother, sat her father with tears streaming down his face. From that point on all Gina wanted to was to be seen, to fit in and to be beautiful. By the time Gina was 24, she didn’t feel too different from that little pageant girl. She got into theater school but her optimism didn’t last. Soon after getting accepted she was drinking beer for breakfast, failing her classes, and fantasizing about skipping town. That’s in addition to the issues she was having with her boyfriend…

Badger Clark is remembered for shaping the poetry of the Old West with striking impressions of the cowboy life. But his poem “The Lost Pardner” about the intimate love of two cowboys has a special kind of beauty. It points to the often forgotten queerness of frontier life, where there was plenty of space to be alone and plenty of cowboys to be alone with. Badger Clark wasn’t the only one out there. Queer fur trappers, stagecoach drivers, European explorers, and poets, like Clark, made their way out west looking for the freedom of a new context. And for many of them, that’s what they found.

Just after the new year, Kaitlin and Mitra take a business trip to small town Ontario to meet Steffy. At six foot two inches, Stefonknee is the tallest six year old you will ever meet. Of course, she isn’t actually six. She is an age-player, meaning she likes to pretend to be a kid. She fluidly moves in and out of her six year old self and her adult self. In addition to her male and female identities. Steffy is in a place of peace with her identities after a very traumatic falling out with her family, which for trans folks, is unfortunately, not uncommon. Here are the results of a 2011 survey the American trans community. The National Center for Transgender Equality is launching another survey this summer. You can sign up to take the survey or help distribute it here. In addition to our dynomite team, this story could not have been possible without the help of so many people. Production Assistance by Maria Dønvang. Editorial Advising by Julia Alsop, Brendan Baker, Kelsey Padgett, Tina Horn and Ignacio River

Our friend Dr. Emily Nagoski debunks tired, widely held ideas about sex and replaces them with perfectly clear, scientifically sound explanations. One of those new ideas totally blew our minds, so we’re bringing you our take on the “Dual Control Model.” Dr. Nagoski has compiled all of her brilliance into a book, called “Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Change Your Sex Life,” in stores now. Trust us, it’s a good read. If you’d like a fun illustrated guide that explains the model, check out Oh Joy Sex Toy’s version (the best webcomic in the world).

A one day’s love has a life cycle. It’s born, it lives a very brief life, and then it dies. That’s it. It’s usually cut short by circumstance, often by time or distance. Sometimes there’s only enough magic for the one night for one night of connection–just a little bit of love. But what if there’s a chance that there’s a little more magic left? Can a one day’s love live another day? After a whirlwind night on the subway with a mysterious man with an easy laugh and terrible taste in music, Caroline decided to give her one day’s love a second chance. This second installment in our “One Day’s Love” series is about trying to turn one special moment into many special moments. Can it be done?

Eintagsliebe, a sort of real German word meaning one day’s love. Or, a fling. This can be analogous to the mayfly, eintagsfliege. The mayfly sneaks in through an open window, lives her little mayfly life to the fullest, perhaps even finding her true mayfly love. Then before she knows it, death has overtaken her. She lies limply in the windowsill. It was Friday October 26th 2012 and Hurricane Sandy was slowly descending upon New York City. Mitra was at dinner with Kaitlin, feeling a bit down in the dumps, she decided to make a love plan that turned into a prophecy. Upon Mitra’s return home, she finds a man sitting on her couch that she cannot deny her attraction to. This series is an ode to the short and sweet moments in life, the ones you can never get over. The moments that you wish lasted longer because they were so intense, so perfect, so everything you’ve ever wanted to feel with another human being. You wish you could document every second of your parallel existences together, to show the world, that y

It was sometime in the early years of their marriage when Gerda Weganer asked her husband, Einar, to dress in women’s clothes and sit for a painting. The intended subject was running late, and suggested to Gerda that Einar be her stand in. “His legs and feet are as pretty as mine,” she said. All dressed up in a wig, painted with rouge and powders, and buckled into high-heeled shoes, Einar, now Lili, looked into the mirror with a singular wonder: “Was it really possible that I could be so good looking?” So begins the story of Lili Elbe, a transgender painter and painter’s muse, who underwent one of the first series of modern gender confirmation surgeries. Her third surgery, meant to implant a uterus, eventually killed her, but not before she documented her life stories into papers that would later be compiled into the book, Man into Woman. Lili Elbe’s hope was that her book fall into the hands of people like her. She wanted her words to help generations of trans people know that they weren’t alone. Unfortun

It’s fun to try to be beautiful when people are giving you positive attention for it. It hurts if you’re not meeting that standard and people treat you like you aren’t even there. You watch the people who are getting a lot of positive attention for being that certain kind of beautiful and you are made to feel invisible. Or worse, people go out of their way to make you feel bad. It’s hard to be a woman, yes. It’s a lot harder to be a woman who’s hairier, wider, bigger, taller, square instead of round, straight up and down instead of curvy, big hands, big feet, no vagina and maybe no breasts either. A woman who isn’t quite looking like what some people think a woman should look like. But who is finding her way. To these women, the world can be downright cruel. More than cruel, violent. Harassment often escalates into assault, and more often than you would like to hear, escalates into full on homicide. For these women, being womanly in the way we are told we have to is sometimes about more than beauty. It’s

Short and Sweet: Mid month we bring you something short. Whitney Jones (producer at PITCH) tells us about his first love, and 27 other firsts in chronological order. Originally produced on Cowbird.  You will also hear some previews of first kisses, which we’ll be sharing at our Launch Party.  

When we do something for the first time, we enter into a world with new rules. It’s the creation of a new path, a new possibility. We meet this threshold with no knowledge of what will happen, how we or the world will react. Once the rules of the game change, once we do something that we’ve never done before, the question of how to navigate the new world is what comes next. What do we do after the first kiss? Will it give way to the first holding of hands, the first public display of affection, the first sex, the first week sleeping in someone else’s bed every night? Or will it be the first, but also — the last? This is a story featuring Drew Denny, a singer, songwriter, filmmaker and artist. You can check out her first feature film here.

A radio show is born.  Again. We all go through phases and have an identity crisis or three. Audio Smut started as an hour long broadcast radio show at CKUT in Montreal, and has transformed into a delicately crafted podcast now part of PRX’s Radiotopia network. We cordially welcome you to The Heart.

An Interlude. This is an interview about necking (or lack thereof). A kiss over time: at the beginning, in the middle, at the end. If you don’t like how somebody kisses, can you grow into it? Samara’s Grandma tells us her story. This episode is part of our kissing series. If you want to hear more, go here: http://audiosmut.tumblr.com/

Episode Twelve. Kaitlin and Kyle. They met at a kissing booth. On their first date they went on a recording adventure (for one of the early Audio Smut documentaries about the Drag Queens). They became obsessed with each other. They ended up making audio recordings of a lot of almost everything that happened between them. This is the last episode of the season. It is also the last episode of Audio Smut. Don’t cry! We will be starting something new in a few months, better and more beautiful than ever before.

Episode Eleven. Audio Smut presents: a radio play. This episode was a documentary experiment, produced in collaboration with composer Shani Aviram. We set out asking questions about how perception is altered in early romantic relationships. How does your sense of reality fail you when you’re falling in love? After months of research and 17 interviews, we decided to write a single narrative encompassing the experiences and facts we unearthed.

A Quickie. Behold the almighty power of the V. Vaginas can hold the largest and smallest of objects with barely the slightest uncomfort. So it just makes sense to stash your weed in there. Star reporter, Ruth Eddy tells us how she came to use her natural pocket.