This episode begins with the continuation of our talk with Charles Holt, Broadway performer-turned-inspirational-speaker-singer-author, talking about The Lion King, and continues with our special guest Bennett Quintard.
Bennett is one of the International Youth of Unity representatives for this year, and he is about to embark upon a Global Citizen Bridge Year in Ecuador. He’s also a talented guitarist and singer, so we’ll talk about his pop culture influences and a few of our own!
And Bennett even serenades us with a love song that he wrote! (Though not for us….).
Bennett is part of the Global Citizen Year program and is raising money to help others travel and contribute to good in the world! Learn more about how to help at http://donate.globalcitizenyear.org/bennettquintard!
Stacy and Malayna welcome Charles Holt, to talk about father-themed media. As a long-time member of the cast of the musical The Lion King, and the author of Between Me and Dad: A Journey through Forgiveness to Freedom, he has some insights. Between his tales of song, stage and screen and our pop culture Dad references, you’ll enjoy on a spiritual adventure!
June is LGBT Pride month, and Malayna and Stacy are proud that Unity honors our lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered friends. The Pop Conscious gals will look to pop culture and the media to examine the depiction of LGBT characters and then look at the Unity loving and inclusive approach to the diversity of all people! Viva la difference! Join us!
We talked about our personal experiences as allies and friends of LGBT people, and of the gay rights movement as similar to the civil rights movement…where such a shift can be seen in one lifetime.
In terms of movements, civil rights, women’s movements, they’re all examples of people getting together and claiming their truth! And doing it out loud, in front of everybody, saying ‘this who I am, I am not alone, there are many of us, and we are people and deserve to be treated equally!’.
Spirituality and sexuality are not mutually exclusive. They’re all part of living as spiritual beings have a human experience in Divine Love.
Some links for great info that we shared on the show:
48 Transgender Pioneers, featuring Lana Wachowski with her cool pink and purple dreads, who with her brother (previously known as the Wachowski Brothers) wrote, directed and produced The Matrix movies, V for Vendetta, Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas and the upcoming Jupiter Ascending – which looks pretty cool.
This is where we found (and confused) many firsts, such as:
Ryan Phillippe, as daytime drama’s first gay teenager, comes to the aide of a priest who is displaying the Names Project AIDS quilt in One Life to Live(1992)
Mariette Hartley and Lynn Redgrave had to make do with a compromised peck on the forehead in the movie My Two Loves(1986; segments)
Roseanne and Mariel Hemingway lock lips in this controversial Roseanne(1994) episode
Ellen DeGeneres becomes prime time’s first gay leading character in this milestone Ellen(1997)
Will & Grace(1998), contains two male principals (Eric McCormack and Sean Hayes) who are gay
The U.S. adaptation of Britain’s Queer as Folk(2001) became the first series set predominantly in the gay community; while The L Word (2004) centers around a group of lesbian friends
And then Malayna remembered she once interviewed RuPaul for a syndicated radio interview company! If you don’t know who that is, here ya go:
RuPaul, in and out of drag
I remembered that a character on our favorite soap opera was significant in the history of gay media, so I looked it up!
From Wikipedia, we get this info on the All My Children character of Bianca Montgomery, daughter of Erica Kane:
Bianca has emerged as a gay icon within the LGBT community.[6] Newspapers such as The New York Times cite her as the first lead character on a major daytime drama to be a lesbian,[7] and The Advocate calls her “the most famous gay soap role of all time”.
Pop Conscious 