Serving the last bite

Show Notes

What is "the last bite"? Why is it the stuff of Midwest social nightmares? And how is it actually a barrier to organizing? Join us as we serve it and flip this whole buffet table. Meet some of our humans and get a preview of what's on our radar.

★ Support this podcast ★

Creators & Guests

Host

R.B. Brooks

Director of Programs, Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity

Producer

Justin Drwencke

Executive Director, Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity

What is Take the Last Bite?

Take the Last Bite is a direct counter to the Midwest Nice mentality— highlighting advocacy & activism by queer/trans communities in the Midwest region. Each episode unearths the often disregarded and unacknowledged contributions of queer & trans folks to social change through interviews, casual conversations and reflections on Midwest queer time, space, and place.

For questions, comments and feedback: [e-mail]

To support this podcast and the Institute, please visit sgdinstitute.org/giving

Host: R.B. Brooks, they/them, director of programs for the Midwest Institute for Sexuality & Gender Diversity

Cover Art: Adrienne McCormick

R.B.:
Hey. Hello. This is R.B., your Last Bite maître d'. Today's episode is Serving the Last Bite. This is our first official episode for our new podcast adventure. Today we will be talking about that weird thing Midwesterners do when there's one slice of pizza left in the box. We'll also be talking about the work of the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity, a nostalgic conversation about our relationships with the Midwest region. And we'll be talking about the intentions behind this podcast and give a preview of what's to come. So welcome to take The Last Bite.

[Music Playing]

Y'all we cannot do this. We cannot be these stereotypical Midwesterners. Please eat the rest of this food.

We just have these conversations every day with people like this is exhausting. I don't want to do this anymore.

Why can't we be in space with hundreds of other queer and trans folks and having these necessary conversations?

I don't know who you are, but we're going to talk by the potatoes for five minutes

Because aesthetic is the only thing keeping my dysphoria at bay. I'm broke all the time, but I look amazing.

Definitely going to talk about Midwest Nice and if that's as real as it wants to think it is.

Midwest nice is white aggression. That's what it is.

[End Music]

Justin:
Hi, I'm Justin Drwencke. I am the executive director of the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity. I've been a resident of the Midwest for 30 years, and we'll talk about that magic number 30 in the future. But, I have grown up all over the Midwest, experienced both urban and rural and suburban settings. So it's been a fascinating experience growing up living within the Midwest and observing Midwest culture and growing into my queerness within that Midwest culture, so, especially when I've had opportunities to temporarily leave the Midwest, like on study abroad or vacations and like experience queerness in other pockets of the world and then to come back really is illuminating I think how the Midwest nice culture impacts queer identity.

R.B.:
That's super real. And we'll definitely talk about Midwest nice, and if that's as real as it wants to think it is later. I have only ever lived full time in the Midwest as well for a whole 30 years as well, which is a terrifying thought, but here we are. Born and raised in St. Louis and then bopped over to Kansas City, Missouri for college because it was the furthest I could get away from home while still paying in state tuition and then got duped into ending up in Lawrence, Kansas, for grad school and then decided that the lower part of the Midwest was not serving me. And so ended up in Minnesota, where I currently am, specifically Northern Minnesota, and all of those experiences have been drastically different.
Obviously, St. Louis and Kansas City, more urban spaces. Lawrence is a College town, which is very different in my opinion than like a small town. Even when we talk about rurality and like what does it mean to be in a small town versus a college town because who is centered or catered to in those spaces. So not knowing and having never lived in a small town prior to now, I've been in Duluth for five years. Small town for this city slicker is an experience that has definitely made me have to rethink a lot of things about queerness and access and resources, how information is disseminated and like what the norms are like, what is expected of queer folks in those spaces. What does it mean to get queer folks together in space? Because the commonality can't just strictly be. Oh, we're all trans. So we're like, we're all going to get along just fine, which is not real. But when you're in a more like small town type space, it impacts how you can get together with folks who also have shared interest. And so that's been a very interesting trajectory coming from St. Louis, Kansas City, Kansas, and then Minnesota. So knowing that we both have a pretty expansive and combined 60 years of experience thinking about queerness specifically in the context of the Midwest region that I think takes us into wanting to talk about the concept behind the name of the podcast where it even came from, and why it's important for us to be specifically talking about queer and trans work in the Midwest under the name sake of Take the Last Bite.

So, we were both together when we collectively acknowledged what happens when a group of Midwest folks get together for a meal. And so do you remember where were we? Because it was in your neck of the woods.

Justin:
Was that when we were at Zoobies?

R.B.:
The pizza place.

Justin:
Yeah. Okay. Right. You sit a group of queer Midwesterners down to a table, split a couple of pizzas and some appetizers. Oh, yeah. Some appetizers, some Buffalo cauliflower dip, super yummy. Right. Anything with Buffalo sauce, chef kiss.

So we're sitting at this table with, I don't know, five or six Midwest queers and have some appetizers, have some pizza. And then we're getting to the end of the meal and we just look down at the table and on every single plate, there's one slice of pizza left of this one. There's one slice left of this pizza and there's like a smidge of Buffalo cauliflower dip left. And it's just like an acknowledgement. I think RB you and I just looked at each other in the eyes and was like, this is the most Midwest. And I think that anybody who has spent some time in the Midwest might have had a similar experience where out of politeness, I guess one does not take the last bite of food. Right. And I don't know where that originated, right. But it's a thing that I just have all of these vivid memories of whether it's family reunion potlucks or whatever picnic at the Lake, whatever the idyllic Midwest situation is. Right. All of those experiences are tied together by looking at the pizza tray or the casserole dish, and there being one bite remaining, the last bite. But it's not even enough to call a bite, right? Like there's that last piece of pizza. You still want some pizza, so you cut it in half and then the next person comes along and they're like, I would like some more pizza, but I don't want to take the last of it. I don't want to be rude. So they take a smidge of that. And so by the time you get down to it, there's like a quarter of the crust. But you didn't take the last of the pizza.

R.B.:
No. And maybe that's not strictly a Midwestism, but it certainly is common among folks getting together at all of the locations in which you described. And I don't know why we do that, right. Like, there's a whole Facebook group dedicated to people posting pictures of business meetings like, get togethers of any variety. And folks are like, why is this happening? Please take the last piece of this because it also means you're not the person throwing away the container, which is possibly also related to labor and work. But we'll set that aside for now. It's probably related, though, and yeah, I remember just sitting at that table. We were sitting outside once upon a time, and it was acceptable to sit outside without having to sit outside, pre-pandemic, and just being like, y'all, we cannot do this. We cannot be these stereotypical Midwesterners. Please eat the rest of this food.

And so how that applies to what we want to do with this podcast is that kind of idea that you can't take the last bite. It's either impolite or it's rude, or you're trying to give courtesy to other folks in the space to also have a bite of whatever is being taken. So you slice it down to this tiny mouth sized crumb, thinking that you're doing right by all these other people. Right? Just so it is this taboo, ominous thing, apparently, to take the last bite. And so our podcast Take the Last Bite is inviting folks and encouraging folks to talk about the things no one wants to talk about, to explore things that would otherwise be continued to be covered up or not really engaged with. Right. That is part of the Midwest culture is just not being the person who says the thing or just accepting things as they are or not knowing how to address them. Right. Avoiding conflicts is a very Midwest convention, and we are here, ideally, to turn that table over a little bit and take the last bite, serve the last bite and invite others to do the same, so that's our quirky play on something that is very ubiquitous and known by Midwesterners. I'm sure everybody is now realizing they've been that person at this point in the conversation and also thinking about other types of spaces and conversations where other things besides pieces of food are not being touched or considered or acknowledged, and that flavors the work that I think is done in what we consider the Midwest region and impacts how we do the work that we're doing with the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity.

Justin:
I'm just continuing to be stuck on what happens when you walk into the break room at work and you take the last, donut you don't pretend to be nice, right? What happens when you take the full last doughnut and you don't cut it in half because you want that last doughnut, and so you are going to take it right. And when you do that in the Midwest...

R.B.
And I have frequently been that person because I tend to break that convention as much as possible. But as a fat, queer and trans person, there's also a layer of optics that I think about when I'm consuming food and shared spaces, especially in my job place or around conventionally attractive people or just like in general. Right. Like the fat phobia inherent in spaces means that I am calculating and thinking certain things about my relationship with food in front of other people because it's related to how I'm perceived in space and received in space. And I think there's something to be said about if you do take the last bite, who you are as a person is also going to dictate how it is perceived, the level of rudeness or acceptability if you make that move. And obviously we're continuing the metaphor here to say, depending on who you are along, racialized, gendered, class and size lines is going to impact the level of appropriateness or acceptability if you're the loud person in the room or the person making a particular comment or trying to unveil anything that's not vibing quite right in an organizing space or a job place or a family space or just any of the places where you are with people. And that is definitely another barrier and something that flavors doing organizing in general. But I think that there's a specificity to it in the Midwest, at least from our vantage point. Right. Like that is our point of reference.

Justin:
Right. And even relating to that, I think about multiple conversations around the dinner table with family, where it's explicitly said, you don't talk about politics, you don't talk about religion, you don't talk about race, and by not talking about those things, you lose the opportunity to expose the flaws in the system. And so every generation that that happens with perpetuates these systems and conditions, the next generation and the next generation and the next generation to uphold these systems

R.B.:
Because they become social norms. Right. It was a group of us folks at a dinner table who are doing presumably more radical work than your average arrangement of people. But we still fell into Midwest conventions around eating food. And I think again, it creates social norms about how you exist in shared space. But then also how you communicate right. Again, we'll talk more about this Midwest nice, both in this space and in future space, but directness and how you communicate in space in the Midwest in particular means something right? It means things to folks in that space to expect a certain thing around professionalism and like what is appropriate in space. And it creates these social norms around how we talk to each other, how we're allowed to be in space, who we're allowed to be in those spaces, and then kind of pushes us into creating our own spaces, which is kind of an origin story that is true to us founding the Institute, right? There was a need, there was a restlessness, there was a desire, there was a push, and there was a text message asking, do you want to do this wild thing with me to found this organization around an existing conference with quite a legacy to make sure that the integrity of that was continued.

So I don't know if this is a good segue into kind of talking about where we're coming from as representatives of this organization and how this podcast is another avenue for us to talk about the amazing and necessary work being done in the Midwest region and kind of our emerging work with the Institute.

Justin:
Yeah. I think this is a great time to talk about that. Let's take a quick break and come back.

[Music Playing]

You're listening to Take The Last Bite, a podcast produced by the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity. The Institute re-envisions an educational climate that centers the needs and experiences of systemically disadvantaged students and affirms and encourages sexuality and gender diversity. Through this podcast and other programs, the Institute provides community and connection to the next generation of leaders in the movement for our collective liberation. Building a sense of community plays a critical role in improving mental health outcomes for queer and trans youth. We are dedicated to furthering queer success in the Midwest. Our work is made possible through the generous financial support of grassroots donors. Your donation helps provide space for queer and trans students to experience the joy of being in community and helps remove barriers to accessing queer and trans centered spaces. To learn more and make a contribution today, visit sgdinstitute.org/giving.

[End Music]

Justin:
So, yeah, let's talk in to that origin story and explain a little bit more about who we are and maybe what has led us to launching Take The Last Bite. So for folks who may not be familiar with the work that we are doing or have done the Institute, as we will often refer to it as, because saying Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity takes up a lot of seconds and is a bit of a mouthful. So often throughout this podcast, you'll hear the Institute, and that's just the short way of referring to the full organization name. So the Institute is born out of the now Midwest bisexual, lesbian, gay, transgender, asexual college conference. Right. The conference, which we refer to as “mumble-tech” or “mumble-tahk”, depending on which part of the region you're from. Maybe that's a future episode.

This conference, we are going into Year 29 this coming October. We are recording this in 2021. So October of 2021 is the 29th annual conference. And so that conference has undergone a couple of name changes but has always been about bringing together queer and trans college students and college student aged youth from across the Midwest. And there was an interview that was done with one of the organizers of the second conference, I think, and the conference MBLGTACC was described as an queer Oasis in the desert of the Midwest. And so if we think back to the context in which the conference started, it was very much at a time where there was an emerging gay and lesbian liberation movement. And I use those words intentionally because it was centering, predominantly white, gay and lesbians, and that movement was generally focused on the east and west coasts. Now we can tuck into the history of black trans organizers and activists that even made that movement possible. Right. And I'm sure at some point we'll talk into that history, right. But in the context of the Midwest in the early 90s, the money was being used to advance the interests of white, gays and lesbians, and the Midwest was being ignored. And so some College students in the region took it among themselves and created this gathering of queer and trans students. That the longevity of this event speaks to the need for that community building.

R.B.:
Yeah. I think even today, we still see that the Midwest is often overlooked in, like, national conversation. We still see that the Saturation or the attention is often on our coastal counterparts East, West Coast. I think the south has often also been overlooked in conversation. The work in the south is not regarded in the emerging work around gender justice and sexual liberation. So I think there's a lot to be said about why I think there's a lot of assumptions that the Midwest and the south, but I can only really speak to the Midwest is that it's a flyover space, that there's a lot of red states and growing more red counties in our region. And I think that speaks to in some ways why we've been disregarded historically, but that we still have these college campuses who are like, well, that's bogus. And we're going to uplift and actually acknowledge that there is lots of work happening here, even if not, it's not going to reach this national platform or this kind of national recognition, because we know better, because we are here. And so I think the role of the conference up to this point has definitely been continuing to prove that the conversations, the work, the push, the movement is absolutely happening in the Midwest. And by a way of the Institute, we're also trying to harness that energy, uplift the folks who've been doing the work that might not be getting that recognition, and to talk about the specific and unique needs of folks in the Midwest related to a whole lot of social movements that we often get left out of.

So as far as our relationship, right. Like you and I came into each other's ecosystem by way of planning a conference, you in 2013 and me and 2014, as undergraduate students doing an unbelievable amount of uncompensated labor at our respective institutions.

Justin:
With incredible personal risk, right. I still cannot believe that we ran a 2000 person conference, essentially out of our own pockets, right. The liability and financial risk that we were taking on as undergraduate students was unbelievable. And that's why we connected to have this conversation about forming the Institute.

R.B.:
Yes. Because our conferences predate the existence of the Institute and the risk and liability and inconsistency really necessitated trying to figure out how do we stabilize this work of the conference and make sure that it can continue without putting undergraduate students in this weird place of signing checks for large honorariums to host a conference on campus.

Justin:
Yeah. So after many versions of conversation and many, many long meetings, the Institute was formed.

So the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity exists to connect, educate, and empower queer and trans youth and college students across the Midwest but also nationally, but with a focus on the Midwest. And what that looks like is providing support to students who are actively planning MBLGTACC each year. And that support looks different a little bit every single year, but primarily means providing a liability shield, providing tools and resources to not have to reinvent the wheel every year that this conference is being planned, and, very early on, the conversation was, what more can we do as the Institute? There's this fantastic three day conference that is a gathering of, you know, the past couple of years we're seeing 1,200 up to 2,000 queer and trans students coming together, pre-pandemic. And this gathering of people is fantastic. And the connection that happens, the empowerment that happens is life changing. And how do we take that idea and expand it beyond just the three day event? That's what we are looking at and working on as the Institute as well is not only continuing to support the amazing student activists who are planning MBLGTACC each year, but creating additional opportunities to build relationships to share resources and effect change across the region.

R.B.
Yeah. I'll always remember when I was in graduate school, I was in a position where I was advising the LGBTQ student group and was then tasked with coordinating those students to go to the 2015 conference in Normal, Illinois. Right. And when we came back, we intentionally did a debriefing just to be like, how are you feeling? What was this experience like, et cetera. And I had one student who was like, why can't every day be MBLGTACC? And I was like, that's a really great question, because that should not be a wish. That should be a reality. Right? And what I interpreted out of that students ask of “Why can't every day be MBLGTACC” is why can't we be in space with hundreds of other queer and trans folks and having these necessary conversations and learning and sharing skills and knowledge and experience and having all of this possibility and opportunity more than three days a year? Which also goes along with what you just said about, like, what else can we do to really put, like, Midwest queer and trans movement work on a map that it is often left off of to have us be viewed as folks who know what we're talking about when we talk about queer and trans liberation and justice, and to really expand the national conversation around what are the needs, because what is going on, on the coasts, might thematically. There might be some themes that are relevant and that we can cross talk, but there's things that are not the same. And I think we kind of self assigned ourselves to do that necessary work and uplift folks who are doing it and trying really hard to make more than three days a year feel like that because it's a feeling you cannot really even we can try in the next couple of minutes here to explain what that feeling is. But until you've been there, I think folks underestimate, like the experience of knowing that the entire building that you're in or the hotel lobby that you're in is truly 100% queer and trans folks, and/or folks that truly support us, and that should not be a rarity or something that students or anybody has to seek out or pay to go to that it should be something that is readily available to all people who desire that type of community and that type of space, because the freedom of being able to exist as you are in a MBLGTACC setting is just unparalleled. It’s just incomparable.

Justin:
It really is right. It'd be just the liberating feeling that comes along with existing in a place where it's, like, being queers embraced as opposed to just tolerate it. I'm not going to pretend that the conference that we work on is the only place that exists, right? There are other spaces where there are queer people gathering, right? I think about, right, so my partner and I go to a queer campground and being in that space with other queer people is incredible. And also there's something about MBLGTACC, specifically where queer people are coming together for the purpose of peer to peer education, tactic building and tactic sharing and organizing and having conversations about how we move forward in the world as a community that is truly inspiring and liberating.

R.B.;
Well, I think it has a lot to do with the age group right. Like we're generally calling in college aged folks into the space and the folks to support them, right? Because there's a level of doe eyed and bushy tailed, right? Like just being kind of queerling coming into the space because I think one of the pieces of feedback we regularly get. And this is true, this is true for a lot of folks on our team who experienced the conference as students in prior years is that we here folks say this is the first time I've been in a room with people with a certain shared experience as I, and that is both really heartbreaking and also really rewarding to know that type of space was something that could be achieved in this conference setting. And what does that mean for someone to be able to show up to this space by way of either, like their student group sponsoring them to go or their campus advisor, like setting them up to go, to know that I know what that feels like, and now I want more. Because, I think it then motivates folks to figure out what it means to achieve a version of that again, to create that type of space for others and pay it forward, because if you've never experienced that before in any setting, the conference might not be the only place. But if you've never been in space where you can explore and ideate and think about what does it mean to be a trans person, what does it mean to be a polyamorous person, right? Like you are so kind of caught in your own head at a certain time in your life. If we're thinking about 18 to 25 year olds, where, like, developmentally, there's a lot of scary things happening. There's a lot of new things happening, like it's a very stressful and also very generative age to be just because the sky's the limit, right? Be whoever you want to be. But sometimes it's nice to be in space where you have a sounding board to hear from other people, how they came into an understanding of that identity for them or that experience for them, or how they're thinking about something differently, because I would relate that to what I was talking about a bit ago. Just like being in a smaller town now is that I experience folks who kind of have this very one size fits all interpretation of what being trans means, as though there's, like, this Amazon wish list that you just have to check through. And that's the only way to be trans. I worry about how that limits folks' self exploration to say, well, I can be trans in this way because if they don't see it modeled, how are they going to know that that's an option? And so I think MBLGTACC is one of those spaces that offers that. And I think for us that is the life force that ballooned into why we're doing what we're doing with the Institute and the folks on our team have all experienced the conference in their own respective way and could probably speak to some of the same things that we're talking about. But as little undergrads in 2013, 2014, which I think is our graduation years is graduated in 2012 or 2013.
Justin:
Uh, 12.

R.B.
Yeah. So right before your conference and my senior year, last semester was the same semester as my conference, how I graduated is quite a big question mark. I wouldn't be doing the work I'm doing or know half the things that I know without the conference experience. And also it was a very significant experience for me as like a not entirely out to the whole world young person in college planning this whole ass conference for queer and trans people.

Justin:
Right. And just the sheer number of possibility models that exist in that space, right. When you're bringing together up to 2000 queer and trans people just to exist in the same space and have conversations, the opportunities that that creates for people to explore their own identities by just chatting with other people and seeing like, oh, what are you doing and what's going on over here? The thing about being queer is that, is that like, generally you do not have family members with that same identity. And so you don't grow up learning about yourself from your family, that learning generally happens later when you're connecting, maybe in college. Maybe if you're lucky in high school with other queer and trans people, right. Now, I do think that that experience might be different now with the Internet and all of the things that are available there. But I grew up in a time where you were lucky if you had a Nokia cell phone. Right. And I didn't get a cell phone until I was 17. Right. So there was no Internet access to be able to explore who I was like, the first time I had an opportunity to really explore my queerness was in College at MBLGTACC. Right. So it might be a little bit different now. But I do think there is still something really important about connecting with other queer and trans folks in person and just exploring identity.

R.B.:
And I envision that we'll definitely talk more about the conference in future conversations. But the part to impress here is that without the conference and the legacy of that conference, that the Institute would not exist. Our motivations behind doing the Institute work would be lax, and we would have never come into each other's lives. Really. So that's its own thing.

Justin:
Which would have been very sad.

R.B.:
Devastating. Our team has pretty much come together by way of having some kind of proximity or relationship to the conference. We have a lot of folks on our team who either planned a conference in the past or were around or attended when it came through at their respective universities. And that is definitely like the bonding agent, I think, for both the work of the Institute and guiding us through why we're doing the work that we're doing and then just our respective relationships because of how we all kind of came into each other's ecosystems, having planned a conference before the Institute existed and trying to figure out how do you pass on knowledge. How do you pass on support for how to do the upcoming conference? Because we were just passing along this baton and rotating conference years around the region because yours was in East Lansing, Michigan. Lansing, Michigan?

Justin:
It was technically in Lansing, Michigan, even though the university is in East Lansing.

R.B.:
Yes. So Lansing, Michigan, then to Kansas City, Missouri, then to Normal, Illinois, and so on and so forth. Right.

Justin:
And we were relying on students to pass that baton forward. And when that didn't happen, things went bad. And so that was another part of our motivation for forming the Institute was to formalize that process of knowledge sharing and like institutional memory. There's something to be said about learning from the past, and I don't know that we do that enough in a lot of places. Right. There's value in forward thinking and coming up with new ideas. But that should also be informed by what has already happened and what has already been tried. So that's a lot of what motivates the work that we're doing as the Institute is about taking the historical context and using that to inform new ideas for the advancing knowledge of sexuality and gender and creating climates that are embracing and affirming of queer and trans students.

R.B.:
Yes. Because what I'm thinking about now, too, right, is that through this process of hosting the conference at different institutions or through different institutions, different universities, students planning this conference, right. We've learned a lot in retrospect, about the different ways that campuses support LGBTQ students by hosting this conference or in the ways that they don't support LGBTQ students, either hosting this conference or in general. I think that we take for granted college campuses that have either LGBTQ support staff or centers, and even when those exist on college campuses, that doesn't mean that the institution is necessarily all in on supporting all of the various needs for LGBT College students. And so I think that the ways in which the conference has been received or supported on each campus over the years has also been very illuminating about the distant experiences that students can have just based on where they choose to go to college. Right. Your experience, planning your conference and mine are pretty starkly different. I felt like I had quite a significant amount of institutional support with the caveat that it had to be worked for. There wasn't in many ways this preexisting relationship with some of the amazing campus partners we ended up soliciting through doing the work of planning the conference, but we got it and it transcended past our conference here. You did not have that experience.

Justin:
No, not at all. Even existing on a campus where there were, I think, at the time, 14 or 15 different student organizations, registered student organizations specifically for LGBT college students. The level of University support for planning the conference specifically was not necessarily there. There were a few people who were ready to be our advocates and champions, but, and I think that part of it may have been the fear about liability, right. Obviously, it was a big undertaking. There's a big financial stake in that. And we were very fortunate that yeah, everything worked out great. But I didn't actually know what I was doing as a 21 year old college student trying to plan an event with a $150,000 budget. Right. Like, you don't actually know what you're doing. And so that's what we've tried to course correct a little bit is providing those tools and resources. But you're absolutely right. It has been incredibly illuminating working with various universities each year, the differences that exist on campuses. And that being said, not everybody in our team has a higher ed background. There's a lot of higher ed focus on our team. But as we work through this podcast, we will be highlighting various voices from our team as well as people from our ecosystems that have all sorts of backgrounds, working in a financial institution, working in local government, working on an urban farm. We've got people with marketing and communications backgrounds, software development and information technology. What else? There's all sorts of things.

R.B.:
Yeah. We've got quite a threshed group with different experiences. And I think what positions us, then is that even though not everybody has a higher education background, we have a vantage point as folks who kind of exist outside of the university network, right. That we can name some of the things and the limitations at universities that are creating barriers for LGBT college students. And we've learned a lot of that by way of experience as folks who've gone to universities in the Midwest. Is that like we learned by way of planning this conference, as students about some of the politics involved at College campuses, which maybe wasn't news. But we learned at a certain level, like, what does it mean to ask for things? What does it mean to expect certain support? Is it conditional or is it readily available? Where is the money going? Is the money got contingencies on it? Right. Like we're learning all of these things. And I'd like to believe that as we do the work by way of the Institute, that gives us kind of this vantage point to be voices kind of on the periphery of higher education, to be able to say this is what we've experienced. This is what we're hearing. This is what we're seeing. This is what we know to be able to continue to push on these ways in which universities are not readily willing to support LGBTQ college students because it's vast and it's real, and it's a whole thing. And it also impacts the folks who are in positions to support those students because it creates more work for them. It creates a lot of limitations for those folks as they're trying to do this really vital, necessary work. If those positions exist at all.

There's always someone right. Whether it's the token faculty who isn't really assigned to do this work, or it's someone who actually has the job description to support LGBTQ students, there's somebody who's getting kind of the shit end of the stick to say we can't give you any more resources, even though we have plenty of money or resource to put in other places. So that's another flavor. And I think that we have a really nice positionality to be able to challenge and say we understand what the circumstances were when we were College students and circa 2021, here's what we still know to be true about how things are not being done right by queer and trans students on college campuses. So fix it.

Justin:
Yeah. That's a pretty decent summary of who we are as an organization and why we exist. And I'm sure we'll continue to tuck into that as we continue to in future episodes. And that being said, I don't think higher ed specifically is the sole focus of this podcast, right. So maybe let's talk a little bit about what you the listener can expect from Take the Last Bite. And, I think that what we are covering is anything and everything related to queer place space time. Yeah. What are some of the upcoming topics, R.B.?

R.B.:
Yeah. So for the first batch of last bites, we are looking at tucking into some of the things that we've already talked about this conversation. Right. So we're absolutely going to go hard into a conversation about Midwest nights, because even as you and I have talked about it here, it is a barrier. It is a thing, right? It shows up as passive aggressiveness. It shows up as conflict evasion. It shows up as respectability politics. So we'll have a long form conversation about how folks have experienced Midwest nice, how it might impact how they show up in spaces and what that means for doing, organizing or coordinating work. As mentioned earlier, Justin and I both turned big ole 30 this calendar year, not too far apart from each other either. And we were reminiscing on how we were kind of raised or, like came into our queerness kind of being told that hurting 30 was queer death, like just that, like your potentials in your life kind of like, peter out at that point. So we're going to have a broader conversation about being a queer elder, like aging and being queer. And we'll also have some insight from one of our team members who is studying to be a death doula to talk about what do we need to think about when we think about queer elders and after life, right. What else we got?

Justin:
I think that we're going to have a cool conversation about queerness in rural versus urban settings. And this one speaks to me a lot because I was born and raised in Chicago, and we lived in the Chicago suburbs for a while and then moved to a farm in Southeast Michigan. And so experiencing queerness in the city versus in a rural environment, two totally different experiences. And then, R.B., you mentioned earlier, like, small town is different than college town. And so we'll tuck in to that conversation a little bit there. And then there's a conversation upcoming with a group of queer brewers. Can you talk about that a little bit?

R.B.:
Yeah. So we've got a human on our team who works in the brewing industry, beer brewing and other micro brewery related things. And we're going to have this dope conversation about the service industry and how a lot of folks like post college or just like, in general, kind of saturate the service industry and this being one example and talking about just existence of queer folks who do brewing work because of how dominated is by cis het white people and how that influences being able to do that work that challenges kind of those norms and conventions. So kind of excited about that one and learning more from some folks who are actually starting an organization that centers queer and trans folks who work in the industry.
Justin:
Yes. And I think there's a lot more on the horizon as we look to season two and season three and what those look like. So all sorts of thoughts floating around, but this is going to be Take the Last Bite. This is Take the Last Bite, and we are serving you the last bite on a regular basis.

[Music Playing]

Our inbox is open for all of your insight, feedback, questions, boycotts, memes and other forms of written correspondence. You can contact us at [e-mail]. This podcast is made possible by the labor and commitment of the Midwest Institute for Sexuality and Gender Diversity staff. Particular shout out to Justin, Andy and Nick for all of your support with editing, promotion and production. Our amazing and queer as fuck cover art was designed by Adrienne McCormick.

[End music]