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Hi, I'm Peterson Toscano and this is Bubblin' Squeak.
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A podcast with uncanny sounds, funny interludes and stories, most weird, many true.
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Here's season four, episode five.
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Today's show comes in three parts.
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Part one, queer author Ryan LaSalle and the queer horror story, The Dead of Summer.
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Part two, a message from the evil spirit that lives inside Donald Trump.
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Part three.
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A sound slice from a political rally in Richmond, Virginia.
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Sala is a best-selling and award-winning queer author.
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writes about surreal things happening to queer people.
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His debut horror novel, The Honies, is in development to become a major motion picture.
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Brian, join me in the studio to talk about his most recent book, The Dead of Summer.
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I am queer.
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I use he they pronouns.
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I consider myself gender fluid.
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I'm a huge weeb.
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I love anime and video games.
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The big lamentation of my life is that I don't have more time to play a lot of the
expansive games that have come out recently because I'm too busy writing.
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If I wasn't writing books, I would be doing storytelling some other way.
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I spent all of my time alone with my cat, just sitting in a room thinking the most
horrific things I can think and then writing them down.
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uh
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Yeah, it's really I really need so much therapy and I'm really not getting enough.
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Let me tell you that
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You've written a very queer, horror-driven book, your newest book.
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For Americans, especially groups of marginalized people, we're living in a contemporary
horror story.
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Mass migrations, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, incredible climate change denial.
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So why write horror genre when life is so frightening?
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because life is so frightening, because we need the ability to talk about the things that
scare us.
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Some people find it really hard to kind of look directly at things and monsters that don't
necessarily have a face.
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But if you hold up the dark mirror of a horrific story, it gives a focal point to start to
address things that are malignant in our own world.
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Hopefully, it gives us some bravery and some idea of how we might also endure or might
also survive to the other side.
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If I had to write the genre of my own life growing up, like there's a lot of joy there and
lot of queerness and a lot of theatricality, but it would have to shelve it in horror
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because it was defined by a sense that I was being stalked by a monster that I couldn't
really even see.
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And many queer people have to commingle their joy and their victory and their triumph with
a sense that at any moment something horrific could happen to them.
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large part of why we have community is because we need sanctuary and we sort of provide
that to one another.
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It's a little bit familiar to me to put characters into these positions.
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And yet the characters I don't think would make it to the end or be able to be as
fantastic as they are if they weren't queer, they weren't approaching problem solving
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through a queer lens.
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So The Dead of Summer takes place on this queer community haven called Anchor's Mercy.
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These places, exist, Like Provincetown is the version that I was sort of unfamiliar with.
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The tourism's good for the economy of these places, but there is sort of this like sense
of invasion.
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And so that's why when writing this book, especially a book about contagion and outbreak,
I didn't want the queer community to be saddled with the stigma of causing this.
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Ultimately, the community does take measures to stop the spread of something in their
community, but it's the bachelorettes who resist and defy the stay at home order.
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because they've got to have their karaoke and they're the birthday girl and you know what
have you, right?
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That entitlement to these spaces and it ends up in peril like everybody.
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Ollie, the main character, he was born and raised on this island and has kind of watched
his mom time and time again put on this big show every summer for people and now she's
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sick and Ollie thinks that there's something about the island that is making just the
townies sick, just the people who can't leave it.
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His journey is
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figuring out what that could mean and how to get to the bottom of it and how to take those
secrets that are kind of rotting beneath the soil and pry them to the surface.
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You have been calling it an eco horror.
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Yes.
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Ecological horror, it's not just that there's something in the water kind of rising out of
the ocean to spread across the land.
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I'm also talking about like the ecology of communities and how the ecology of like a queer
community has to deal with its own types of invasions.
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Eco-horror often looks at mankind's balance against nature when it's pushed a little bit
too far and when nature lashes back out.
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There's so many things I really love about the dead of summer.
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love, maybe because I'm an old queen myself, the characterizations of the older queer
folks on the island.
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Yeah, you you don't see that many depictions of like intergenerational queerness all in
the same story.
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I wanted to set down a cast of characters where you've got generations.
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Even when those generations are gone, right, you're able to access their stories.
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A lot of these generations had to make really hard decisions in order to just survive past
that particular point.
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Part of Oli's story, at least for me in this, is coming to terms with the hard decisions
that people before him had no choice but to make so that
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a sanctuary like his could survive to the point that he's able to take that torch, make
the same sort of hard decisions and hopefully keep this place alive and available for
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future generations.
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If you're looking at the cover, you're going to notice that there is this really sort of
beautiful coral bursting out of a human-like figure.
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That's intentional.
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I chose something sort of pelagic in nature, something Nedarian as the specific section of
taxonomy where you'll find like jellyfish and sea anemones and corals because they are an
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animal, but they require symbiosis.
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They require a really delicate and elegant balance between themselves and their own
ecosystems that when that's tilted one way or another, they can either grow out of control
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or they can bleach and whiten and vanish.
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I wanted to create something
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kind of delicate and kind of beautiful that is still scary, that is still monstrous.
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Something we haven't really seen.
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I mean, when people read or write about like zombies or things that come back from the
dead, it's always the same colors, right?
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But I wanted to create something kind of bejeweled and encrusted and oceanic that felt
completely new yet a little bit familiar at the same time.
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and a bit snotty too at first.
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They're called weepers in the book if you're curious.
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And Ollie's got a sadness in him that he really can't keep inside any longer when the book
begins.
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The monsters that he ends up confronting are these weeping, ecstatic beings.
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And you can potentially touch the ooze, but if it enters one of your orifices, your eyes,
your mouth, whatever, you're infected.
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Which reminded me about how horror movies in the nineties had a lot to do with body
fluids.
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As we were dealing with the HIV AIDS crisis, so many of the scariest creatures were oozy.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Vector for contagion that is based in tears that drown you from the inside out to me began
as a metaphor, but it definitely has real-world inspiration.
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Yes
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I am here.
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And I am pure evil.
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I am the spirit that dwells inside of one Donald Trump.
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Yes, I have possessed him.
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which, you know, is not the best gig one could have, but this has been a long-term project
of mine, possessing Donald Trump.
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Some days I'm like, what were you thinking?
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Why?
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Well, I'm evil, I'm pure evil, what do you expect?
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That's what we do, we're evil.
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Does evil have to explain itself?
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Also, I'm not happy.
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People are very apathetic.
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And this annoys me.
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I...
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They're zombies.
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I don't like zombies.
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I want people afraid.
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I want them angry.
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But zombies?
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I can't do nothing with a zombie.
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It's like making love to a corpse.
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Which can have its benefits, but you know, that gets old.
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No, there are so many things to be frightened of and angry about.
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Climate change, for instance, which was not my doing, by the way.
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I wish.
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That's brilliant.
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I think it's evil, but no, it actually was greed, which is a different division of evil.
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You know, I'm even afraid of climate change, and I'm evil.
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So, I don't know what to tell you, except that.
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Things have gone to shit.
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No, they've not gone to shit.
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Gone to hell in the handbasket.
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Yes.
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And that handbasket is on fire.
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It has been for decades.
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You're waiting for climate change, It showed up a long time ago.
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But see, you're sleepers.
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Sleepers!
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Anyway, I thought it would be a diversion to have this Donald Trump possess him, make him
do crazy shit.
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Or very easy to pull those strings.
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And I think I'm done.
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I think I've done enough chaos.
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We may just kill him at some point.
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Inside.
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Dead inside, not physically.
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What, do you think I'm crazy?
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I know that they're listening.
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You think I'm evil?
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That surveillance system that goes back to 9-11, it just kept going on and on and on in
England and the UK and the US.
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That's evil.
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Not my evil.
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That's kind of creepy evil.
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I don't do creepy evil.
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That's a different division altogether.
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Why am I telling you all this?
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I'm telling you all this because...
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Ha
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It gets boring sometimes being I'm not saying I'm getting soft and I want to do something
nice.
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God forbid.
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But I think I might want to shake things up a little bit.
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Thus, Zoran Mamdani.
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Yeah, it was not an evil move, but boy.
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uh Freaks the hell out of some people.
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uh
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I gotta go.
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We've got a Zoom meeting quarterly.
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Evil Zoom meeting, which...
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Talk about evil.
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Zoom!
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Okay.
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I gotta go.
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you
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Let me set the scene for you.
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I'm in Richmond, Virginia.
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It's 10 months after Donald Trump's reelection.
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I gathered next to the state capitol with thousands of people who showed up for the No
Kings Rally and March.
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Some are dressed as dinosaurs or pastel colored sharks.
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In the middle of the crowd, I see Waldo.
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Well, a protester dressed as the Where's Waldo character.
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A string of presenters addresses the crowd.
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First and foremost, must oppose any and all forms of U.S.
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intervention and demand our taxpayer dollars stop funding a war machine.
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From Haiti to Palestine, American intervention is never about freedom.
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It is never about democracy.
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It's about withdrawal, exploitation, and maintaining the global order.
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oh
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that benefits billionaires at the expense of our livelihoods.
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But this is not enough.
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We need community defense.
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Richmond Defensa is the answer.
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We need a mass approach.
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We need to build towards a general strike.
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a resurgence of a World War II movement to show people you're safe.
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Resistance farms to celebrate the dude standing outside ice.
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Wow.
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Very cool.
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The ruling class fears our will to grow into our revolutionary potential and it shows
gender attacks and the propaganda alone.
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The fight is in the streets and that's where we'll stay.
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El Pueblo Unido uh
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Yeah!
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uh
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What we do us a favor, say, united we stand.
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United we stand.
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United we stand.
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United we stand.
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United United we stand.
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We'll have a couple more speeches before they start.
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There will also be partner organizations that will be tabling.
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Go to those tables, see what they are doing.
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Those are mutual aid.
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Those are direct action organizations.
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Get involved because that's the only way we are going to solve this problem.
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So the plan is we're going to take about 10 to 15 minutes.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Bubble and Squeak.
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Learn more about Ryan LaSala by visiting RyanLasala.com.
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Music on today's show comes from EpidemicSound.com.
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There's also a video version of this podcast at my YouTube channel.
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Bubble and Squeak is produced by me, Peterson.
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I mostly make this show for myself.
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Oh, and for Harlan, who listens, smiling while he walks.
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You can catch me on Blue Sky, X, and TikTok, or you can find me just walking around
Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
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Oh, and thanks for listening.
00:00:00,827 --> 00:00:04,308
Hi, I'm Peterson Toscano and this is Bubblin' Squeak.
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A podcast with uncanny sounds, funny interludes and stories, most weird, many true.
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Here's season four, episode five.
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Today's show comes in three parts.
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Part one, queer author Ryan LaSalle and the queer horror story, The Dead of Summer.
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Part two, a message from the evil spirit that lives inside Donald Trump.
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Part three.
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A sound slice from a political rally in Richmond, Virginia.
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Sala is a best-selling and award-winning queer author.
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writes about surreal things happening to queer people.
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His debut horror novel, The Honies, is in development to become a major motion picture.
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Brian, join me in the studio to talk about his most recent book, The Dead of Summer.
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I am queer.
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I use he they pronouns.
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I consider myself gender fluid.
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I'm a huge weeb.
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I love anime and video games.
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The big lamentation of my life is that I don't have more time to play a lot of the
expansive games that have come out recently because I'm too busy writing.
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If I wasn't writing books, I would be doing storytelling some other way.
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I spent all of my time alone with my cat, just sitting in a room thinking the most
horrific things I can think and then writing them down.
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uh
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Yeah, it's really I really need so much therapy and I'm really not getting enough.
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Let me tell you that
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You've written a very queer, horror-driven book, your newest book.
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For Americans, especially groups of marginalized people, we're living in a contemporary
horror story.
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Mass migrations, anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, incredible climate change denial.
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So why write horror genre when life is so frightening?
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because life is so frightening, because we need the ability to talk about the things that
scare us.
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Some people find it really hard to kind of look directly at things and monsters that don't
necessarily have a face.
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But if you hold up the dark mirror of a horrific story, it gives a focal point to start to
address things that are malignant in our own world.
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Hopefully, it gives us some bravery and some idea of how we might also endure or might
also survive to the other side.
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If I had to write the genre of my own life growing up, like there's a lot of joy there and
lot of queerness and a lot of theatricality, but it would have to shelve it in horror
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because it was defined by a sense that I was being stalked by a monster that I couldn't
really even see.
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And many queer people have to commingle their joy and their victory and their triumph with
a sense that at any moment something horrific could happen to them.
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large part of why we have community is because we need sanctuary and we sort of provide
that to one another.
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It's a little bit familiar to me to put characters into these positions.
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And yet the characters I don't think would make it to the end or be able to be as
fantastic as they are if they weren't queer, they weren't approaching problem solving
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through a queer lens.
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00:03:14,291 --> 00:03:19,424
So The Dead of Summer takes place on this queer community haven called Anchor's Mercy.
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These places, exist, Like Provincetown is the version that I was sort of unfamiliar with.
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The tourism's good for the economy of these places, but there is sort of this like sense
of invasion.
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And so that's why when writing this book, especially a book about contagion and outbreak,
I didn't want the queer community to be saddled with the stigma of causing this.
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Ultimately, the community does take measures to stop the spread of something in their
community, but it's the bachelorettes who resist and defy the stay at home order.
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because they've got to have their karaoke and they're the birthday girl and you know what
have you, right?
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That entitlement to these spaces and it ends up in peril like everybody.
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Ollie, the main character, he was born and raised on this island and has kind of watched
his mom time and time again put on this big show every summer for people and now she's
47
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sick and Ollie thinks that there's something about the island that is making just the
townies sick, just the people who can't leave it.
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His journey is
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figuring out what that could mean and how to get to the bottom of it and how to take those
secrets that are kind of rotting beneath the soil and pry them to the surface.
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You have been calling it an eco horror.
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Yes.
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Ecological horror, it's not just that there's something in the water kind of rising out of
the ocean to spread across the land.
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I'm also talking about like the ecology of communities and how the ecology of like a queer
community has to deal with its own types of invasions.
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Eco-horror often looks at mankind's balance against nature when it's pushed a little bit
too far and when nature lashes back out.
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There's so many things I really love about the dead of summer.
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love, maybe because I'm an old queen myself, the characterizations of the older queer
folks on the island.
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Yeah, you you don't see that many depictions of like intergenerational queerness all in
the same story.
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I wanted to set down a cast of characters where you've got generations.
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Even when those generations are gone, right, you're able to access their stories.
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A lot of these generations had to make really hard decisions in order to just survive past
that particular point.
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Part of Oli's story, at least for me in this, is coming to terms with the hard decisions
that people before him had no choice but to make so that
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a sanctuary like his could survive to the point that he's able to take that torch, make
the same sort of hard decisions and hopefully keep this place alive and available for
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future generations.
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If you're looking at the cover, you're going to notice that there is this really sort of
beautiful coral bursting out of a human-like figure.
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That's intentional.
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I chose something sort of pelagic in nature, something Nedarian as the specific section of
taxonomy where you'll find like jellyfish and sea anemones and corals because they are an
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animal, but they require symbiosis.
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They require a really delicate and elegant balance between themselves and their own
ecosystems that when that's tilted one way or another, they can either grow out of control
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or they can bleach and whiten and vanish.
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I wanted to create something
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kind of delicate and kind of beautiful that is still scary, that is still monstrous.
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Something we haven't really seen.
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I mean, when people read or write about like zombies or things that come back from the
dead, it's always the same colors, right?
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But I wanted to create something kind of bejeweled and encrusted and oceanic that felt
completely new yet a little bit familiar at the same time.
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and a bit snotty too at first.
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They're called weepers in the book if you're curious.
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And Ollie's got a sadness in him that he really can't keep inside any longer when the book
begins.
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The monsters that he ends up confronting are these weeping, ecstatic beings.
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And you can potentially touch the ooze, but if it enters one of your orifices, your eyes,
your mouth, whatever, you're infected.
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Which reminded me about how horror movies in the nineties had a lot to do with body
fluids.
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As we were dealing with the HIV AIDS crisis, so many of the scariest creatures were oozy.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Vector for contagion that is based in tears that drown you from the inside out to me began
as a metaphor, but it definitely has real-world inspiration.
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Yes
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I am here.
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And I am pure evil.
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I am the spirit that dwells inside of one Donald Trump.
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Yes, I have possessed him.
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which, you know, is not the best gig one could have, but this has been a long-term project
of mine, possessing Donald Trump.
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Some days I'm like, what were you thinking?
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Why?
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Well, I'm evil, I'm pure evil, what do you expect?
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That's what we do, we're evil.
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Does evil have to explain itself?
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Also, I'm not happy.
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People are very apathetic.
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And this annoys me.
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I...
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They're zombies.
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I don't like zombies.
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I want people afraid.
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I want them angry.
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But zombies?
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I can't do nothing with a zombie.
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It's like making love to a corpse.
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Which can have its benefits, but you know, that gets old.
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No, there are so many things to be frightened of and angry about.
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Climate change, for instance, which was not my doing, by the way.
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I wish.
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That's brilliant.
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I think it's evil, but no, it actually was greed, which is a different division of evil.
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You know, I'm even afraid of climate change, and I'm evil.
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So, I don't know what to tell you, except that.
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Things have gone to shit.
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No, they've not gone to shit.
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Gone to hell in the handbasket.
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Yes.
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And that handbasket is on fire.
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It has been for decades.
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You're waiting for climate change, It showed up a long time ago.
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But see, you're sleepers.
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Sleepers!
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Anyway, I thought it would be a diversion to have this Donald Trump possess him, make him
do crazy shit.
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Or very easy to pull those strings.
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And I think I'm done.
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I think I've done enough chaos.
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We may just kill him at some point.
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Inside.
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Dead inside, not physically.
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What, do you think I'm crazy?
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I know that they're listening.
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You think I'm evil?
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That surveillance system that goes back to 9-11, it just kept going on and on and on in
England and the UK and the US.
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That's evil.
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Not my evil.
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That's kind of creepy evil.
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00:10:03,643 --> 00:10:05,193
I don't do creepy evil.
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That's a different division altogether.
139
00:10:08,292 --> 00:10:09,551
Why am I telling you all this?
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I'm telling you all this because...
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Ha
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It gets boring sometimes being I'm not saying I'm getting soft and I want to do something
nice.
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God forbid.
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But I think I might want to shake things up a little bit.
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Thus, Zoran Mamdani.
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00:10:30,060 --> 00:10:34,213
Yeah, it was not an evil move, but boy.
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uh Freaks the hell out of some people.
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uh
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I gotta go.
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We've got a Zoom meeting quarterly.
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Evil Zoom meeting, which...
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Talk about evil.
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Zoom!
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00:10:48,381 --> 00:10:49,081
Okay.
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I gotta go.
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you
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Let me set the scene for you.
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I'm in Richmond, Virginia.
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00:11:00,608 --> 00:11:03,671
It's 10 months after Donald Trump's reelection.
160
00:11:03,671 --> 00:11:10,475
I gathered next to the state capitol with thousands of people who showed up for the No
Kings Rally and March.
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00:11:10,475 --> 00:11:15,538
Some are dressed as dinosaurs or pastel colored sharks.
162
00:11:15,619 --> 00:11:18,501
In the middle of the crowd, I see Waldo.
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00:11:18,501 --> 00:11:23,126
Well, a protester dressed as the Where's Waldo character.
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00:11:23,126 --> 00:11:26,306
A string of presenters addresses the crowd.
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00:11:26,982 --> 00:11:30,576
First and foremost, must oppose any and all forms of U.S.
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intervention and demand our taxpayer dollars stop funding a war machine.
167
00:11:39,734 --> 00:11:46,199
From Haiti to Palestine, American intervention is never about freedom.
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It is never about democracy.
169
00:11:49,102 --> 00:11:53,525
It's about withdrawal, exploitation, and maintaining the global order.
170
00:11:53,525 --> 00:11:54,188
oh
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that benefits billionaires at the expense of our livelihoods.
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But this is not enough.
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00:12:01,213 --> 00:12:04,485
We need community defense.
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00:12:05,126 --> 00:12:07,808
Richmond Defensa is the answer.
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00:12:08,909 --> 00:12:11,490
We need a mass approach.
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00:12:12,551 --> 00:12:16,514
We need to build towards a general strike.
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a resurgence of a World War II movement to show people you're safe.
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Resistance farms to celebrate the dude standing outside ice.
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Wow.
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Very cool.
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00:12:31,766 --> 00:12:41,048
The ruling class fears our will to grow into our revolutionary potential and it shows
gender attacks and the propaganda alone.
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The fight is in the streets and that's where we'll stay.
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El Pueblo Unido uh
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Yeah!
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00:13:17,538 --> 00:13:38,406
uh
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00:13:41,048 --> 00:13:44,921
What we do us a favor, say, united we stand.
187
00:13:45,061 --> 00:13:47,463
United we stand.
188
00:13:47,463 --> 00:13:49,165
United we stand.
189
00:13:49,165 --> 00:13:50,786
United we stand.
190
00:13:50,786 --> 00:13:52,608
United United we stand.
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00:13:52,608 --> 00:13:57,031
We'll have a couple more speeches before they start.
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00:13:57,031 --> 00:14:01,554
There will also be partner organizations that will be tabling.
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Go to those tables, see what they are doing.
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Those are mutual aid.
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Those are direct action organizations.
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Get involved because that's the only way we are going to solve this problem.
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So the plan is we're going to take about 10 to 15 minutes.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Bubble and Squeak.
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00:14:23,579 --> 00:14:29,312
Learn more about Ryan LaSala by visiting RyanLasala.com.
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Music on today's show comes from EpidemicSound.com.
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There's also a video version of this podcast at my YouTube channel.
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Bubble and Squeak is produced by me, Peterson.
203
00:14:41,365 --> 00:14:43,407
I mostly make this show for myself.
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Oh, and for Harlan, who listens, smiling while he walks.
205
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You can catch me on Blue Sky, X, and TikTok, or you can find me just walking around
Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
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Oh, and thanks for listening.
