WEBVTT - CZM Rewind: Part One: Crisis Hotlines: Of Course Queers Invented Them 0:00:03.920 --> 0:00:06.560 Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff. 0:00:06.720 --> 0:00:10.840 Your weekly reminder that even as all the terrible things happen, 0:00:11.520 --> 0:00:15.520 there's people who prevent worse things from happening all the time, 0:00:15.920 --> 0:00:20.040 and that we all rely every day on infrastructure and 0:00:20.320 --> 0:00:24.400 ideas that people have built up over generations and generations. 0:00:24.800 --> 0:00:28.640 And one of those things is the idea of running reruns. 0:00:28.720 --> 0:00:34.320 No one of those things is hotlines. Hotlines might be 0:00:34.320 --> 0:00:36.280 something you take for granted, You're like, oh, that's just 0:00:36.360 --> 0:00:40.519 the hotline for people who are feeling bad, But like 0:00:40.640 --> 0:00:45.520 everything worth anything in this country, this world, it came 0:00:45.560 --> 0:00:49.800 from people working directly with each other to make the 0:00:49.840 --> 0:00:54.560 world a better place. We change things, and systems rush 0:00:54.640 --> 0:00:57.120 to catch up. It's the way it's always been, It's 0:00:57.120 --> 0:01:00.200 the way it will always be. Anyway, this is a 0:01:00.200 --> 0:01:06.080 a rerun because I got sick. Hello and welcome to 0:01:06.120 --> 0:01:08.720 Cool peoplehooded Cool Stuff. Your weekly reminder that when there's 0:01:08.720 --> 0:01:11.959 bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things, 0:01:12.319 --> 0:01:15.480 often succeeding at doing good things. And really it's the 0:01:15.560 --> 0:01:20.679 trying that is the succeeding. That's the subtext of the show. 0:01:20.840 --> 0:01:23.479 I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy and every week I talk 0:01:23.520 --> 0:01:27.000 about coolby boodhed cool stuff. It's right there in the 0:01:27.040 --> 0:01:30.760 title of the show. And why am I vamping instead 0:01:30.760 --> 0:01:35.520 of introducing a guest, Well, it's because there's no guest. 0:01:35.680 --> 0:01:37.959 It's just me. I like to do these episodes every 0:01:37.959 --> 0:01:40.160 now and then. It gives myself a little bit of 0:01:40.240 --> 0:01:42.039 a break. I have to do just as much prep 0:01:42.040 --> 0:01:44.080 work actually, so it's not really much of a break. 0:01:44.880 --> 0:01:48.800 It's just a different way of working. And I crave variety, 0:01:49.360 --> 0:01:51.840 so I like working in different ways at different times. 0:01:52.280 --> 0:01:55.240 So that's why I like to do episodes without a 0:01:55.240 --> 0:02:01.120 guest sometimes. And this week we are going to be 0:02:01.240 --> 0:02:08.000 talking about suicide hotlines to quote the Mighty trent Resnor. 0:02:09.639 --> 0:02:12.360 How are you doing tonight? Having a good time? Ready 0:02:12.360 --> 0:02:15.760 to party? Have fun? Yeah, well that was the last guys, 0:02:16.280 --> 0:02:19.320 wrong fucking band. We're here to have a bad time 0:02:20.639 --> 0:02:24.679 because I don't know. I mean, it's actually hopefully still 0:02:24.680 --> 0:02:27.440 going to be fun. But also I would enjoy going 0:02:27.440 --> 0:02:30.080 to trent Resnor tonight and Chanelle's playing a show, so 0:02:30.400 --> 0:02:34.239 clearly it's not actually a bad time. Sometimes talking about 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:38.400 super serious stuff or dark stuff is what we like 0:02:38.480 --> 0:02:42.800 to do, and it's important to be upfront right at 0:02:42.840 --> 0:02:45.920 the top. This is not an episode about how to 0:02:46.560 --> 0:02:51.280 help yourself or others deal with suicidal ideation or any 0:02:51.320 --> 0:02:55.040 of that stuff. It is the history episode about people 0:02:55.080 --> 0:02:59.280 who've created structures to help people. And I don't know, 0:02:59.560 --> 0:03:01.720 I find that stuff fascinating and I wanted to read 0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:04.520 about it this week. I'm actually doing all right. By 0:03:04.520 --> 0:03:06.760 the way, this is a thing that a lot of 0:03:06.760 --> 0:03:10.320 my friends struggle with and always have, and so I 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.000 care about those friends, and I don't know, it was 0:03:13.080 --> 0:03:14.919 on my mind, so I wanted to read about it 0:03:15.000 --> 0:03:18.680 this week, And unfortunately it's also on my mind because 0:03:19.800 --> 0:03:25.160 the political situation is making it harder for hotlines for lifelines, 0:03:25.800 --> 0:03:30.600 and it's fucked up and we should be. You know, 0:03:30.680 --> 0:03:32.520 a lot of the subtext of a lot of the 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:36.920 episodes this year has been like stuff that we take 0:03:37.080 --> 0:03:39.440 kind of for granted that the government is trying to 0:03:39.480 --> 0:03:42.040 take away from us now that it's fascist. So this 0:03:42.080 --> 0:03:47.360 is kind of another episode in that vein crisis hotlines, 0:03:47.840 --> 0:03:50.800 you are going to be shocked, absolutely shocked. You're not 0:03:50.800 --> 0:03:53.520 going to be shocked at all to know that crisis 0:03:53.520 --> 0:03:56.760 hotlines in the United States come out of gay culture 0:03:58.560 --> 0:04:01.240 like a lot of our stories, this one starts in 0:04:01.280 --> 0:04:05.560 San Francisco. In fact, it starts tied deeply into another 0:04:05.560 --> 0:04:08.880 one of our recent stories. A few weeks or months back, 0:04:09.080 --> 0:04:11.720 What is Time these Days? I did a series of 0:04:11.760 --> 0:04:14.880 episodes about the founding of public radio and how it 0:04:14.960 --> 0:04:17.400 started in the US and the Bay with PACIFICA Radio. 0:04:17.800 --> 0:04:22.240 I didn't actually carry that story forward into time into NPR, 0:04:22.960 --> 0:04:24.880 but we're going to do that a little bit this 0:04:25.000 --> 0:04:30.159 week because the first suicide hotline was started in the 0:04:30.200 --> 0:04:35.279 early nineteen sixties by a gay British priest named Bernard Mays, 0:04:36.200 --> 0:04:41.000 who was also the first chairman of National Public Radio. 0:04:42.520 --> 0:04:45.440 He he's such a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff. 0:04:45.520 --> 0:04:48.120 I found nothing negative about him in all of the 0:04:48.320 --> 0:04:51.440 shit that I spent researching him, And to be fair, 0:04:51.480 --> 0:04:54.320 I didn't read. He did write an autobiography later in 0:04:54.360 --> 0:04:56.440 his life, and I haven't read that. I've read like 0:04:56.520 --> 0:04:58.760 people talking about it, and a lot of people talking 0:04:58.760 --> 0:05:01.880 about his life. But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt 0:05:01.960 --> 0:05:05.080 on this guy. He just actually seems really genuinely cool 0:05:05.080 --> 0:05:09.039 and interested in a ton of different things in helping people. Now, 0:05:09.040 --> 0:05:13.080 of course, I did say British Bernard Mays was British, 0:05:13.839 --> 0:05:16.640 but we can't hold that against him. No one controls 0:05:16.640 --> 0:05:19.400 how they were born, which in this case was in 0:05:19.480 --> 0:05:24.200 nineteen twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England. He 0:05:24.240 --> 0:05:27.599 went to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history 0:05:28.160 --> 0:05:31.839 and worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things. 0:05:32.440 --> 0:05:36.640 And this also means he was a teen young teen 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:39.960 during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that, 0:05:40.000 --> 0:05:44.200 but that obviously is going to impact your life. Then, 0:05:44.560 --> 0:05:46.359 you know, he's working as a high school teacher and 0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:49.920 he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah, 0:05:49.920 --> 0:05:52.920 but what if you joined the church? Though, Bernard went 0:05:53.000 --> 0:05:56.920 and became an Anglican priest. Bernard moved to the US, 0:05:57.040 --> 0:06:00.480 and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church. 0:06:00.920 --> 0:06:03.080 And I think that's really funny because later he's going 0:06:03.120 --> 0:06:05.560 to do a lot of the work to help the 0:06:05.560 --> 0:06:10.760 Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff. He moves to the US 0:06:11.000 --> 0:06:14.480 in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, 0:06:14.880 --> 0:06:17.320 and then he gets himself transferred by the church to 0:06:17.360 --> 0:06:21.680 San Francisco in nineteen sixty. He has been doing radio 0:06:21.720 --> 0:06:23.839 stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then. 0:06:24.600 --> 0:06:30.120 He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing 0:06:30.240 --> 0:06:35.880 story after story of people dying by suicide. In fact, 0:06:36.320 --> 0:06:39.000 at the time, it was the suicide capital of the 0:06:39.040 --> 0:06:42.880 Western world. The suicide rate there at the time was 0:06:42.920 --> 0:06:45.719 I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred 0:06:45.720 --> 0:06:49.800 thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers 0:06:49.839 --> 0:06:51.760 later are going to be. There's a place with a 0:06:51.800 --> 0:06:54.440 lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that 0:06:54.520 --> 0:06:58.599 has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that. 0:07:00.080 --> 0:07:02.680 So he gets there and he has an idea. It's 0:07:02.720 --> 0:07:05.279 also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do 0:07:05.320 --> 0:07:10.119 this idea. I've read so many contradictory things because people 0:07:10.160 --> 0:07:12.120 do a lot of myth making around this man, and 0:07:12.800 --> 0:07:14.880 he participates in some of the myth making himself. As 0:07:14.920 --> 0:07:18.280 far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco. 0:07:18.640 --> 0:07:21.760 He's like, I want to do something about this. I 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:24.800 want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal. 0:07:25.800 --> 0:07:29.040 He was like, I should use an alias and start 0:07:29.080 --> 0:07:32.760 a hotline. Now, the idea of using hot lines to 0:07:32.960 --> 0:07:35.760 organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of 0:07:35.840 --> 0:07:39.680 the only like hotlines we really have left. But in 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:42.080 other parts of the world and in the recent memory 0:07:42.120 --> 0:07:45.040 of the past, you would do things like if you 0:07:45.080 --> 0:07:48.760 wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar, 0:07:49.040 --> 0:07:52.280 you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone, 0:07:52.360 --> 0:07:54.120 this week, these are the events, and you'd put that 0:07:54.200 --> 0:07:56.280 on the answering machine and then you publicize the number, 0:07:56.800 --> 0:07:58.760 or you know, there have been all kinds of hot 0:07:58.800 --> 0:08:02.320 lines throughout time. There was even a while reading about 0:08:02.560 --> 0:08:06.880 radio in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago, 0:08:07.000 --> 0:08:09.760 something like that, there was like a hotline. There was 0:08:09.800 --> 0:08:12.400 a call an anarchist hot line where if you had 0:08:12.480 --> 0:08:15.360 questions about anarchism you could call this hot line. And 0:08:16.000 --> 0:08:20.560 also specifically, queer culture has used hotlines for a very 0:08:20.600 --> 0:08:22.560 long time because one of the things is that like 0:08:23.240 --> 0:08:28.320 queerness when it's not accepted, is a very isolating experience, 0:08:28.440 --> 0:08:31.120 and so people have been using whatever technology is available 0:08:31.720 --> 0:08:36.320 to break that isolation. And it's just so interesting because 0:08:36.400 --> 0:08:40.320 you know, those uses tend to predate crisis hotlines, but 0:08:41.320 --> 0:08:43.960 crisis hotlines are sort of what's left now that there's 0:08:44.160 --> 0:08:48.200 the Internet and all these other things. Anyway, He's like, 0:08:48.240 --> 0:08:51.480 I should use an alias start a hotline. So we 0:08:51.520 --> 0:08:53.840 starts shopping around for a room to rent to run 0:08:53.840 --> 0:08:57.720 the service out of. And there's a couple stories about 0:08:58.160 --> 0:08:59.839 how this went down, and both of them are sort 0:08:59.840 --> 0:09:03.960 of interesting. One of them, the story that he tells himself, 0:09:04.800 --> 0:09:07.440 is that landlord after landlord would turn him down when 0:09:07.440 --> 0:09:10.760 he told them his plans. But then when he told 0:09:10.760 --> 0:09:14.280 his plans to one manager at an apartment place, he 0:09:14.400 --> 0:09:17.040 was like, Hey, I want to start talking to people 0:09:17.040 --> 0:09:20.839 who are considering suicide. And the manager said, you mean 0:09:20.960 --> 0:09:24.280 like this, and he put out his arms and he 0:09:24.320 --> 0:09:27.160 showed the slash marks on his own wrists, and that 0:09:27.240 --> 0:09:31.880 manager rented Bernard the room for half price. Now, the 0:09:32.040 --> 0:09:35.560 organization that he goes on to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention, 0:09:36.040 --> 0:09:38.440 they actually tell a different version of the story than 0:09:38.559 --> 0:09:41.439 he tells. His organization tells the story that the first 0:09:41.440 --> 0:09:44.000 office was in the basement of an apartment building and 0:09:44.040 --> 0:09:48.000 the manager assumed they were an escort service. And I've 0:09:48.040 --> 0:09:50.440 also read that it started in nineteen sixty one, and 0:09:50.480 --> 0:09:53.320 I've read that it started in nineteen sixty two, which 0:09:53.320 --> 0:09:56.080 is I think why most articles just say in the 0:09:56.120 --> 0:09:59.280 early nineteen sixties. Is they probably ran across the same 0:09:59.320 --> 0:10:03.280 thing I did. Either way, he got a room and 0:10:03.320 --> 0:10:06.040 he needed to advertise. But do you know who else 0:10:06.120 --> 0:10:12.280 needs to advertise? Advertisers? It's literally their job description. And 0:10:12.920 --> 0:10:16.760 you know who needs to sell space to advertisers? Me, 0:10:17.640 --> 0:10:21.880 because that's the way that the economics of podcast work, 0:10:21.960 --> 0:10:25.599 besides setting up like crowdfunding, and I don't want to 0:10:25.640 --> 0:10:27.920 do that, and I'm uncle's one medium, and so what 0:10:27.960 --> 0:10:32.240 we do is advertise, except actually you can sign up 0:10:32.240 --> 0:10:34.320 for Cooler Zone Media and then you don't have to 0:10:34.360 --> 0:10:36.720 listen to ads. Instead, you just get to listen to 0:10:36.760 --> 0:10:41.600 me do long, strange ad transitions twice a day a 0:10:41.679 --> 0:10:53.079 day an episode. Here's ads, and we're back, so our man. 0:10:53.280 --> 0:10:56.240 He goes and he sets up ads on buses. That's say, 0:10:56.840 --> 0:11:01.080 thinking of ending it all, call Bruce with a phone number. 0:11:01.880 --> 0:11:04.320 He also would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which 0:11:04.360 --> 0:11:06.960 is at the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay 0:11:07.040 --> 0:11:10.199 district of the city, and starts passing out matchbooks with 0:11:10.240 --> 0:11:12.280 the hot line's number on them. I've also read that 0:11:12.320 --> 0:11:14.880 he just made flyers. He goes around and he starts 0:11:15.160 --> 0:11:17.960 telling people about this, like, hey, there's this number. You 0:11:18.000 --> 0:11:21.920 can call the number. He got one caller on the 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:25.240 very first night the hotline was open. He got ten 0:11:25.360 --> 0:11:31.280 callers in the first week. These days, operators have a 0:11:31.320 --> 0:11:33.920 lot of training on what to say and what not 0:11:34.000 --> 0:11:38.320 to say, about how to listen. Bernard learned on the 0:11:38.440 --> 0:11:43.120 job by listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to. 0:11:44.800 --> 0:11:48.280 And look, I hate the British as much as the 0:11:48.280 --> 0:11:51.319 next white American girl who's pinned most of her personality 0:11:51.440 --> 0:11:56.400 on being like a third generation Irish diaspora person. But 0:11:56.600 --> 0:12:00.439 my god, are British accents easy on the ears When 0:12:00.440 --> 0:12:03.280 you're feeling down. There might be nothing nicer than picking 0:12:03.360 --> 0:12:06.240 up the phone and talking to a nice gay priest 0:12:06.240 --> 0:12:10.800 with a British accent and a radio announcer's voice. And 0:12:10.880 --> 0:12:13.600 so it worked. I mean, he actually held to the 0:12:13.679 --> 0:12:16.240 end of his life that he did not because everything 0:12:16.280 --> 0:12:18.360 was anonymous. He could not tell you that he saved 0:12:18.360 --> 0:12:22.240 a single life. And that is not false humility, but 0:12:22.280 --> 0:12:27.280 it's humility. And because he absolutely saved a ton of 0:12:27.280 --> 0:12:31.040 people's lives. And I'm sure people told him that he 0:12:31.200 --> 0:12:36.839 wasn't specifically anti suicide. He said later quote, you want 0:12:36.840 --> 0:12:39.120 to kill yourself, kill yourself. You have every right to 0:12:39.200 --> 0:12:41.800 do so, but not in like a flippant like auge, 0:12:42.080 --> 0:12:44.560 go out and do this thing way, but rather like, 0:12:44.760 --> 0:12:48.720 you know, believing in people's agency kind of way. What 0:12:48.840 --> 0:12:51.000 he wanted to do and what he did is he 0:12:51.040 --> 0:12:53.880 wanted to help people who wanted a way forward, a 0:12:53.920 --> 0:12:56.480 way to escape those thoughts, which is what people who 0:12:56.559 --> 0:13:01.440 call hotlines are doing. Right. And over the first fifty 0:13:01.520 --> 0:13:04.679 years that that hotline was in place in San Francisco, 0:13:05.000 --> 0:13:07.600 it's now been sixty years, we're coming on probably sixty 0:13:07.600 --> 0:13:10.079 five years. Over the first fifty years that the hot 0:13:10.120 --> 0:13:12.560 line was in place, the suicide rate in San Francisco 0:13:12.640 --> 0:13:17.040 dropped a half of what it had been. And it 0:13:17.160 --> 0:13:22.480 you know, there's no proof of causality there, right, but 0:13:22.520 --> 0:13:25.360 there's no reason to doubt that it was a significant 0:13:25.400 --> 0:13:28.960 part of that. I suspect that also, like gay liberation 0:13:29.120 --> 0:13:33.120 movements and acceptance and things like that are a very 0:13:33.160 --> 0:13:35.720 big part of that as well. But those are all 0:13:35.760 --> 0:13:37.800 tied in together. We all just do the work. We 0:13:37.840 --> 0:13:42.400 can't always measure the work we do, and sometimes getting 0:13:42.400 --> 0:13:44.600 lost and trying to measure the work we do is 0:13:44.600 --> 0:13:48.120 a distraction. I think sometimes it's best to just do 0:13:48.240 --> 0:13:52.560 the work we do. Bernard stuck around with the hot 0:13:52.600 --> 0:13:56.840 line for ten years, and then he left because founder 0:13:56.880 --> 0:13:59.400 syndrome is a real thing. Founders are often bad at 0:13:59.559 --> 0:14:04.760 continue projects indefinitely because once they scale up, they demand 0:14:04.920 --> 0:14:09.240 too much control and authority just instinctually, or as Bernard 0:14:09.280 --> 0:14:13.160 put it, quote, the people who start things mustn't stay 0:14:13.160 --> 0:14:15.800 too long because if you do stay too long, you 0:14:15.840 --> 0:14:18.920 will kill it by your own oppression. I just really 0:14:18.920 --> 0:14:22.960 like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes struggles 0:14:23.000 --> 0:14:25.680 with that. Shout out to my collective mates, thanks for 0:14:25.720 --> 0:14:28.440 putting up with me at meetings. By the time that 0:14:28.440 --> 0:14:32.200 Bernard left, San Francisco Suicide Prevention was fielding two hundred 0:14:32.280 --> 0:14:35.040 calls a day and they had ten people on staff 0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:39.400 and one hundred volunteers. San Francisco's suicide prevention as a 0:14:39.440 --> 0:14:44.320 model was spreading across the country. He also, then, like 0:14:44.360 --> 0:14:48.120 in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio station KQED, 0:14:48.440 --> 0:14:51.320 partly with influence from the BBC. It was like kind 0:14:51.320 --> 0:14:53.600 of a like, how do we bring BBC shows to 0:14:53.640 --> 0:14:57.240 the United States? The United States radio landscape is entirely 0:14:57.480 --> 0:15:00.400 not entirely as PACIFICA but it is by and large 0:15:00.520 --> 0:15:04.360 not public radio, is largely commercial radio, and so they're like, well, 0:15:04.400 --> 0:15:06.080 how do we do it, and like, oh, why don't 0:15:06.080 --> 0:15:09.840 we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED, And 0:15:10.760 --> 0:15:14.120 soon KQED became the most listened to radio station in 0:15:14.120 --> 0:15:17.800 the country. So then they went on to help found 0:15:17.880 --> 0:15:21.160 the National Public Radio Bernard was part of in nineteen 0:15:21.200 --> 0:15:24.480 seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR. And 0:15:25.080 --> 0:15:27.040 I almost felt on this whole rabbit hole, and I 0:15:27.120 --> 0:15:29.760 didn't put it in the script, but basically there was 0:15:29.800 --> 0:15:31.520 this whole thing where it was actually very hard to 0:15:31.520 --> 0:15:33.840 start NPR because you have all these independent radio stations 0:15:33.840 --> 0:15:36.560 and they very much like being independent, and so actually 0:15:36.960 --> 0:15:39.080 trying to say, like, no, we're all going to be 0:15:39.080 --> 0:15:42.760 part of this national thing with this national branding. There 0:15:42.800 --> 0:15:45.160 was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably, we're actually, 0:15:45.200 --> 0:15:47.920 as we're going to as we talk about suicide prevention hotlines, 0:15:48.920 --> 0:15:54.040 we're going to talk about the complicated nature of creating 0:15:54.080 --> 0:15:57.560 some of these larger structures without being against it at all. 0:15:58.640 --> 0:16:01.360 And I know what you're thinking, this isn't an ad break. 0:16:01.560 --> 0:16:05.280 I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but Margaret, how 0:16:05.680 --> 0:16:10.479 this week are you going to tie suicide prevention Hotlines 0:16:11.440 --> 0:16:17.480 into JRR Tolkien. Well, I'm proud to tell you that 0:16:17.520 --> 0:16:20.640 Bernard Mays, one of the founders of NPR and the 0:16:20.680 --> 0:16:23.840 founder of Suicide Hotlines, not only adapted Lord of the 0:16:23.920 --> 0:16:27.240 Rings to radio in nineteen seventy nine for NPR, but 0:16:27.320 --> 0:16:31.000 he also voiced Gandolf and Tom Bombadil for that production. 0:16:31.840 --> 0:16:33.200 So if you want to hear this man, you can 0:16:33.240 --> 0:16:35.640 go find the nineteen seventy nine production of Lord of 0:16:35.640 --> 0:16:41.120 the Rings. He became a college professor in the nineties. 0:16:41.160 --> 0:16:43.920 I think he started an LGBT campus group while he 0:16:43.960 --> 0:16:47.080 was there. And he left the church, the Anglican Church 0:16:47.080 --> 0:16:50.160 in nineteen ninety two. I've seen it said that he 0:16:50.240 --> 0:16:53.160 became an atheist, but I don't know if that's quite right, 0:16:53.320 --> 0:16:57.640 because he actually became something that I think is more interesting. 0:16:57.680 --> 0:17:02.720 He became a soupist. He became the only soupist. He 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:06.320 wrote a book called Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of 0:17:06.320 --> 0:17:10.359 a Queer Priest and his Friends. Quoted by NPR said 0:17:10.720 --> 0:17:16.199 quote Bernard revealed why he ultimately renounced the priesthood and 0:17:16.240 --> 0:17:21.720 religion and described the interdependence, interaction, and endless exchange within 0:17:21.760 --> 0:17:27.399 the universe as the soup. For Bernard, the inter relationship 0:17:27.440 --> 0:17:31.359 of all things necessitated a particular efic that he whimsically 0:17:31.440 --> 0:17:36.520 dubbed supism. For Bernard, supism was derived from the belief 0:17:36.560 --> 0:17:41.640 that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education, and respect 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:44.200 for the planet and all that live upon it are 0:17:44.280 --> 0:17:48.600 critical for the continued health, well being and survival of 0:17:48.640 --> 0:17:52.520 the human species. And I like that. I think it's 0:17:52.520 --> 0:17:56.959 called carsonization or something, where like every evolution moves towards 0:17:57.040 --> 0:18:02.040 crab if like all plants eventually evolve towards tree like independently, 0:18:02.119 --> 0:18:05.560 and all of these things evolve towards crab independently. Right. 0:18:06.119 --> 0:18:08.200 You can also see this in the suv world, where 0:18:08.800 --> 0:18:12.920 you know, all cars are slowly becoming smallish SUVs, which 0:18:12.960 --> 0:18:14.919 is why I call them crabs. And I'm trying to 0:18:14.920 --> 0:18:17.520 spread that we should all call the little four door 0:18:17.680 --> 0:18:23.960 hatchback SUVs crabs. But I feel like soupism is kind 0:18:24.040 --> 0:18:26.880 of the crab of cool people who did cool stuff religion. 0:18:27.240 --> 0:18:31.840 This sort of like not a denial of divinity, but 0:18:31.960 --> 0:18:35.439 a sort of pantheism because it maybe I'm just thinking 0:18:35.480 --> 0:18:38.280 this because it just did the episode on secret societies 0:18:38.280 --> 0:18:40.720 and Masons and Illuminati and all that stuff, and they 0:18:40.720 --> 0:18:44.040 basically are teaching pantheism but coming out of a Christian framework. 0:18:44.400 --> 0:18:48.560 And I feel like seekers religious seekers usually come up 0:18:48.600 --> 0:18:53.040 with like, oh, everything is divine. That's the crab of religion. 0:18:53.760 --> 0:19:00.400 For good reason. Anyway, our soupist returned to the rest 0:19:00.440 --> 0:19:03.040 of the universe when he died at eighty five years 0:19:03.040 --> 0:19:08.560 old in twenty fourteen from complications from Parkinson's disease. When 0:19:08.600 --> 0:19:12.000 he died, his close friends were with him reading him 0:19:12.040 --> 0:19:16.800 Shakespeare specifically, he died while they were reading him Sonnet 0:19:16.840 --> 0:19:20.320 one hundred and sixteen. And this isn't from a play. 0:19:20.359 --> 0:19:23.280 It was a separate poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm 0:19:23.320 --> 0:19:25.159 just going to read it to you because I'm a 0:19:25.200 --> 0:19:28.199 sucker and I like this guy, and this is what 0:19:28.320 --> 0:19:30.520 people were reading him as he returned to the soup. 0:19:33.200 --> 0:19:37.160 Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments. 0:19:37.720 --> 0:19:41.840 Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds 0:19:42.359 --> 0:19:46.000 or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it 0:19:46.040 --> 0:19:49.119 is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and 0:19:49.240 --> 0:19:53.160 is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark, 0:19:53.680 --> 0:19:58.480 whose worth so unknown. Although his height be taken, Love's 0:19:58.600 --> 0:20:02.679 not time's fool. The rosy lips and cheeks within his 0:20:02.800 --> 0:20:07.439 bending sickles compass come. Love alters not with his brief 0:20:07.480 --> 0:20:10.639 hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the 0:20:10.800 --> 0:20:14.720 edge of doom. If this be air upon me proved, 0:20:15.119 --> 0:20:20.399 I never write, nor no man ever loved. Yeah, I 0:20:20.560 --> 0:20:24.760 just love alters not, you know, but bears out even 0:20:24.760 --> 0:20:29.439 to the edge of doom, thick and fucking thin. So 0:20:29.480 --> 0:20:31.480 it's not surprising at all to me that the first 0:20:31.520 --> 0:20:33.879 suicide prevention hotline in the US was started by a 0:20:33.920 --> 0:20:37.040 gay man. Queers have always been on top of caring 0:20:37.080 --> 0:20:40.320 for one another because we've always needed mutual aid and 0:20:40.359 --> 0:20:44.280 solidarity literally in order to survive. To tie. In another 0:20:44.320 --> 0:20:47.000 recent series of episodes, when we talked about mutual aid 0:20:47.000 --> 0:20:49.080 in the Animal Kingdom, we talked about how in the 0:20:49.160 --> 0:20:53.320 nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and anarchist communist Peter Kropok 0:20:53.320 --> 0:20:56.399 can prove that cooperation is at least as important of 0:20:56.440 --> 0:21:00.760 a factor and evolutionist competition, and that specifically, the harsher 0:21:00.800 --> 0:21:04.160 the environment, the more animals work together to survive that environment. 0:21:05.280 --> 0:21:11.119 So yeah, queers invented this shit. It's also, though not 0:21:11.280 --> 0:21:14.920 surprising to me, that he was a priest. Before there 0:21:15.000 --> 0:21:19.600 was philosophy, there was theology, before there was therapy, there 0:21:19.640 --> 0:21:23.919 was confession. The confession booth isn't, historically, as far as 0:21:23.960 --> 0:21:26.960 I understand it, a place for punishment or self flagellation 0:21:27.080 --> 0:21:29.679 per se, but rather one where you could talk to 0:21:29.720 --> 0:21:33.040 someone about how you've been feeling and acting, and how 0:21:33.080 --> 0:21:36.920 you wish you were feeling and acting instead. The confession 0:21:37.000 --> 0:21:41.080 system is not above critique, but that was and is 0:21:41.119 --> 0:21:45.080 an important part of its social role. And I don't 0:21:45.080 --> 0:21:47.560 know a ton about the Anglican Church. To see, the 0:21:47.600 --> 0:21:53.480 aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to everything English, 0:21:53.520 --> 0:21:57.400 because why would I bother understanding nuance when I can 0:21:57.680 --> 0:22:00.480 pick an identity that is vaguely related to me and 0:22:00.720 --> 0:22:03.360 carry it too far. I don't know a ton about 0:22:03.359 --> 0:22:05.359 the Anglicans, but I do know that they do confession 0:22:05.520 --> 0:22:12.040 as well. And San Francisco's suicide prevention is still around. 0:22:12.640 --> 0:22:17.280 By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV nightline so 0:22:17.320 --> 0:22:20.240 that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the pain had 0:22:20.240 --> 0:22:24.520 someone to talk to. And I actually want to focus 0:22:24.560 --> 0:22:28.320 on this part of it for a second, because the 0:22:28.359 --> 0:22:36.280 modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized, 0:22:36.359 --> 0:22:40.360 and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police 0:22:40.400 --> 0:22:42.240 and things like that. We're going to get a lot 0:22:42.240 --> 0:22:46.120 into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode, 0:22:46.359 --> 0:22:52.800 But its roots are just I need to be listened to. 0:22:54.200 --> 0:22:58.520 I'm in pain and I want to talk to someone, 0:22:58.760 --> 0:23:02.000 ideally someone who can under or stand, someone who's been 0:23:02.000 --> 0:23:04.680 in the same situation or a comparable situation, or has 0:23:04.680 --> 0:23:08.280 been around people in this situation before. But I just 0:23:08.320 --> 0:23:11.320 need to talk to someone. I can't sleep because I'm hurting, 0:23:11.359 --> 0:23:15.440 because I'm dying. When I first read about HIV nightline 0:23:15.480 --> 0:23:17.879 for HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like, 0:23:18.280 --> 0:23:21.360 that seems related, but not directly related. But the more 0:23:21.400 --> 0:23:24.520 I think about it, the more just directly related those 0:23:24.520 --> 0:23:27.840 two things are. I need someone to listen to me. 0:23:29.000 --> 0:23:33.400 I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain. And 0:23:35.840 --> 0:23:41.080 here's to everyone whoever staffed that line. Here's to everyone 0:23:41.119 --> 0:23:45.960 who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there 0:23:46.000 --> 0:23:52.800 to listen to people. Much like you can listen to dads. No, 0:23:52.920 --> 0:23:56.760 I feel terrible. I don't like that ad transition. I'm 0:23:56.800 --> 0:23:59.960 stuck with it, so are you. I'm sorry I've failed, 0:24:04.000 --> 0:24:06.520 and we're back as far as I can tell. The 0:24:06.520 --> 0:24:09.360 San Francisco Hotline was the first. It's usually attributed as 0:24:09.400 --> 0:24:13.160 the first, but there was one that started roughly around 0:24:13.200 --> 0:24:19.639 the same time, probably shortly thereafter. Before the San Francisco Hotline, 0:24:20.040 --> 0:24:23.840 some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the National Institute 0:24:23.840 --> 0:24:27.760 of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center. 0:24:28.320 --> 0:24:32.560 And this is a very different background, right. This is 0:24:32.600 --> 0:24:35.719 a research and outreach center and it is the first 0:24:35.720 --> 0:24:38.960 one of its kind in the country. They also started 0:24:38.960 --> 0:24:42.480 a hotline in nineteen sixty two. This hotline, they're much 0:24:42.520 --> 0:24:45.920 more scientific about the whole thing. They collect anonymous data 0:24:45.920 --> 0:24:49.560 about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages. I'm 0:24:49.600 --> 0:24:52.439 actually not trying to come for that model versus a 0:24:52.440 --> 0:24:56.919 different model, right, I understand why we use data to 0:24:56.960 --> 0:25:01.679