Episodios

  • When We All Get To Heaven: New Podcast Takes Us Into a Queer Church During the AIDS Crisis

    When We All Get To Heaven: New Podcast Takes Us Into a Queer Church During the AIDS Crisis
    Dec 6 2025
    This year, for the first time since it was established in 1988, the U.S. did not commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1. That’s despite more than 630,000 deaths from HIV-related illnesses in 2024, according to the World Health Organization. This week, we’re traveling back in time, to visit a queer church that provided refuge and support to San Francisco’s gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis. We’re bringing you the first episode of a new podcast called We All Get To Heaven, which draws on sound from 1,200 cassette tapes – recordings of songs, memorials, and sermons from the Metropolitan Community Church. It brings to life voices of loss, and of faith, of people who refused to abandon their spirituality or their queerness, and who built a community that could hold both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 m
  • Encore: Altadena's Lost Treasures Returned; Gathering at the Grange

    Encore: Altadena's Lost Treasures Returned; Gathering at the Grange
    Nov 29 2025
    The fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton fires into deadly infernos also spared precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, children’s art work, postcards, even pages of old sheet music. Those things sometimes blew across neighborhoods, and people are still finding them as fire cleanup continues. Reporter Steven Cuevas introduces us to an Altadena resident who has made it her mission to return these fragile paper keepsakes to their owners. And we got to the Andrerson Valley to visit a Grange hall. These community gathering places have been around for more than 150 years. Today there are more than 100 in California alone. The Grange began as a fraternal organization for farmers. Even though farming and Grange membership are down to a fraction of what they were decades ago, many rural towns still rely on Grange halls as community centers. For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse visits the Anderson Valley Grange, where many residents credit this place for bringing together groups of people that were once divided. This episode orginally aired on June 13, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    30 m
  • Bonus- Celebrating a ‘Long Lost History’ of California’s Black Trans Trailblazers

    Bonus- Celebrating a ‘Long Lost History’ of California’s Black Trans Trailblazers
    Nov 22 2025
    For the last few weeks, The California Report Magazine has been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You. As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California. These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongoing fight for safety, dignity and self-expression. This week’s story brings together Zen Blossom, a 26-year-old Black transgender rights activist at the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project in San Francisco, and Andrea Horne, a San Francisco-based actress, model and jazz singer who once performed with Sylvester, the legendary disco artist, in the 1970s. Now a historian working on her forthcoming book, How Black Trans Women Changed the World, Andrea reflects with Zen on those who came before them and those who will come after. Read the transcript for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    38 m
  • Bonus- 'It's Self-Love': Trans Elder Donna Personna Shares Advice With a Younger Generation

    Bonus- 'It's Self-Love': Trans Elder Donna Personna Shares Advice With a Younger Generation
    Nov 18 2025
    For the last few weeks, we’ve been sharing conversations between transgender and nonbinary kids and the people in their lives who love and support them — a series called Love You for You. As we enter Transgender Awareness Month, we shift the lens toward intergenerational stories — young people in their twenties in conversation with transgender elders whose lives trace the long arc of LGBTQ+ activism in California. These bonus episodes carry heavier histories and more mature themes than the family conversations featured earlier in the series. They offer deeper context to the ongoing fight for safety, dignity, and self-expression. This week, we meet Donna Personna, a 79-year-old transgender Chicana artist, activist, and playwright who grew up in San José and now lives in San Francisco. A longtime drag performer and advocate, Donna has devoted decades to uplifting the LGBTQ+ community. In 2019, she was named Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade. She also co-wrote Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, an immersive play that brings to life a 1966 uprising in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District — when trans women and drag queens stood up to police harassment, three years before Stonewall. In this episode, Donna speaks with Quetzali (who also goes by “Q”), a 23-year-old Latinx nonbinary organizer from Sacramento who uses they/them/elle pronouns and who is using only their first name to protect their identity. Together, they reflect on how Latinx gender-expansive identities have evolved across generations, from quiet survival in the shadows to living freely. Donna also shares how she continues to cultivate self-love and resilience in a world that still tests both — grounding today’s struggles in a lifetime of resistance, care, and optimism. Read the transcript of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 m
  • What Parents Can Learn About Love and Support from their Trans Kids

    What Parents Can Learn About Love and Support from their Trans Kids
    Nov 15 2025
    Our Love You for You series features conversations between trans and nonbinary youth from across California and the people in their lives who love and mentor them: parents, grandparents, siblings and others. This week, we’ll explore how parents stretch, adapt, and grow alongside their children, learning in real time what it means to support their trans and gender-expansive kids. We’ll hear a conversation between a 12-year-old transgender girl and her mom, that ranges from the joys of dancing and shopping, to confronting the current anti-trans climate. We’ll also meet two gender-expansive siblings, who talk to their dad about what it’s been like to support one another, and reflect on how well their parents navigated their identities. Read the transcript for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 m
  • Trans Kids Talk to Their Grandparents

    Trans Kids Talk to Their Grandparents
    Nov 8 2025
    Our Love You for You series features conversations between trans and nonbinary youth from across California and the people in their lives who love and mentor them: parents, grandparents, siblings and others. This week, we’ll hear how grandparents' hearts can be moved by having a transgender grandchild, and how that can expand the worldview of someone who may not be connected to the LGBTQ+ community. We’ll hear from a 10-year-old transgender girl in conversation with her older sister and their grandfather. He lives in a rural California county, where many of his neighbors and hunting buddies don’t have much exposure to the transgender community. We’ll also meet a 14-year-old nonbinary kid whose grandmother lives in India, where she’s become a fierce advocate for transgender and nonbinary youth. She’s taken on the challenge of explaining her grandchild’s gender to her relatives who are 90+ years old. Read the transcript for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    35 m
  • Coming Out to Love

    Coming Out to Love
    Oct 31 2025
    Part 1 of our new series Love You for You features trans and nonbinary youth in conversation with people in their lives who love, support, and mentor them. Gender-expansive kids have been in the headlines a lot lately, but we rarely hear them tell their own stories. Our series highlights kids who are thriving, with complex, multifaceted identities that go beyond gender. This week, we’ll hear from an 8-year-old in conversation with their mom, and a 16-year-old talking to his “Aunty,” his mom’s best friend, who came out as a lesbian at his age. Read the transcript for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 m
  • A Look at Prop 50; Meet the Duduk Whisperer; Altadena Homeowners Resettling in RVs

    A Look at Prop 50; Meet the Duduk Whisperer; Altadena Homeowners Resettling in RVs
    Oct 24 2025
    Election Day is almost here, and in most of California, there's just one measure on the ballot: Proposition 50. Backed by Governor Gavin Newsom, Prop 50 aims to create more Democratic-leaning districts. It's a move to counter Texas's redistricting plans favoring Republicans. And some heavy hitters are lining up on both sides, including former President Barack Obama, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. KQED Politics and Government Correspondent Guy Marzorati joins us to talk about some of the finer points of the ballot measure. Plus we meet vocalist and musician Khatchadour Khatchadourian. He plays an ancient double reed woodwind carved from apricot wood called the duduk that has cultural ties to Armenia. Khatchadourian is one of the few in the Bay Area who plays the instrument, and his followers call him the “Duduk Whisperer.” Our producer Elize Manoukian brings us this profile of Khatchadourian, who uses the duduk to push the boundaries of traditional Armenian music, and along the way, is helping to preserve cultural identity through sound. And we head to Altadena where the the first handful of new homes are under construction in parts of fire ravaged city. Most people won’t be moving back in for several months. But some neighborhoods that were completely wiped out in the Eaton Fire are already being resettled by property owners living in trailers and RV’s. As reporter Steven Cuevas discovered, these residents could be key to restoring the spirit and resilience that’s defined Altadena for decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 m