Everyone listens to podcasts.  

I don’t even listen to podcasts and I still listen to podcasts, you know what I mean?  

Academics especially love podcasts, and for good reason; they’re a common-sense way to publicize what academics already do. Lectures, panel conversations, and research outcomes can be easily (or at least we try to imagine it as easily) adapted into a podcast. The popular media format meets oral history in the perfect place, with rich storytelling at the heart of both. Oral historians, or at least the ones at the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project (TTOHP) and here at the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, are thinking about podcasting as our best shot at getting publics to engage with queer and trans oral history projects.  

The TTOHP’s podcast, aptly titled Transcripts, puts the trans movement in perspective using the audio from the TTOHP oral history interviews and reflections from the project’s oral historians, Andrea Jenkins and Myrl Beam. I listened to both of the released episodes during an afternoon walk, and I was obsessed with them. No surprise there. But I could also imagine my friends, who don’t care about trans oral history nearly as much as I do, enjoying Transcripts.

This feeling prompted me to have a conversation with a good friend of mine.  

ME: Do you wish you knew more about queer and trans history?

FRIEND: I’d never seek it out, but I’m interested in learning about it when I’m told. I guess I should care more about my roots, but I feel like I can’t easily identify why it matters to me now. Is that bad?

It was a short conversation, but I got two things out of it:

1) if historical content is compelling, it’s appreciated; and

2) people want historical engagement to communicate something about the present.

Transcripts checks both boxes, and I’d like to think that the work we’ve done at the Collaboratory checks those boxes, too.  

This month, I interview Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Transcripts producer Cass Adair about the production of the first two episodes of the podcast. We cover a lot of ground, but I avoided one question on my list: numbers. I was initially curious about the listenership that Transcripts garnered since its release in June 2020, but decided that I didn’t want to get frustrated. Frustrated because I know that the episodes don’t have the hits they deserve. It’s a feeling that I’ve grown accustomed to at the Collaboratory. 

I want the stories told by the narrators of queer and trans oral history projects to be heard widely. I hope we get closer to a world where queer and trans communities have more consistent and enjoyable access to knowledge about the past. I think we’re getting there, and I hope that these conversations inspire those of us that do this work to create historical media that reaches those that need it.