Best Of: Celebrating Pride

We celebrate Pride Month and honor our LGBTQIA+ family across the world by showcasing a couple of wonderful voices from the big, broad, diverse global community who joined us on the podcast this month and shared unique stories of striving to live their truth in a world that misunderstood, typecast, and minimized them.

Today, author Wade Rouse and story doula and public speaking coach Eduardo Placer each work in service of helping others, from all backgrounds and lived experiences, to live their own truth in the world, too.

First, we're joined by former USA Today and Publishers Weekly best-selling author, Wade Rouse, who talks about his memoir, Magic Season: A Son's Story, which documents his life as a self-described "queer kid" growing up in a rural Ozarks community in the midwest in the 1970s. Wade not only stood out as different in a culture that defined gender roles in restrictive, unforgiving ways; his contentious relationship with his emotionally abusive father challenged him to pretend to be someone he wasn't.

How did Wade find, protect, and become the truth of who he was, anyway?

Then. professional speaking coach Eduardo Placer tells us about his favorite, self-revealing joke — that he is "afflicted" by something he calls "showtune-itis" — which compels him to break out into spontaneous show tunes and songs on stage in front of audiences, across the world. He tells us that his explosions of joy are self-loving antidotes and correctives to the deep shame that he has felt from insensitive, bigoted, and homophobic cultures, which have suppressed the joy, pride, and truth of many LGBTQIA+ persons for far, far too long.

How Eduardo learned to hide the truth of who he knew himself to be by "performing" a different role before others as a childThe paralyzing questions that many LGBTQIA persons ask themselves when seeking safety and acceptance in a world that prefers them to be small or hidden

This ‘Best Of’ episode highlights excerpts from these two popular, recent episodes.

To hear the full interviews, make sure you go back and listen to each author’s interview in this podcast feed or by visiting TheNewStory.Is/Podcast.

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