 Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Taylor. That was a nice little bell that went off. Do you know what that means? An angel got its wings, right? Oh, I think it means it's time to start the show, Bea. What do you say? Oh, yeah. Start the show. All right. Welcome to the Comedy of State, and I'm Brenda Churchill. I am the LGBTQIA, Alliance of Vermont Liaison to the State House, along with my co-liaison, Keith Ghostlamp. Today, my guest is Taylor Radke, who is showing up for the second time for this show. I just want to mention that Alex and company lost the show that we taped over a month ago, and, yeah, it was one of those, oh, too bad, so sad things, but we are back doing it again, and we'll give Alex a hearty fuck you for losing it and putting us back on the map today, and I appreciate that. So, Taylor, you're recovering from your plane accident? Something like that, Brenda. Not planning on getting out on the snow soon, even though it's looking good out there? You know, I'm relieving myself of all temptation by not getting my new brace, because here's when it comes down to it. If I have all the gear I need, it doesn't matter. You've got to have the strength back in there. That's pretty much what it is. I know, having recovered from several heart episodes, that you've just got to go the whole distance, and if you get it done, you'll be glad you did, and you'll feel better and be stronger and ride better. All those good things. We're going to talk a little bit today about some things that have been happening in the state. Most recently, I attended the Rights and Democracy by State Meeting. That's New Hampshire and Vermont both have rights and democracy branches. It was a convention to honor people for their achievements, as well as elect some people to different offices and develop a people's platform, which is basically the heart of Rights and Democracy. We got to meet some wonderful transgender advocates there. They wrote a program called T-O-L-D, which I told you what that was, right? Transgender Organizing and Leadership Development, T-O-L-D. I want to do something like that here in Vermont as well. I'm going to propose that to the leadership of Rights and Democracy in a near meeting. What it would model is what the Democratic Party is actually doing is to develop a lot of queer or alternative lifestyle candidates to run for office, of which I've brought two to the Democratic Party. One transgender man, a good friend of mine, and another, I don't know if you ever heard of the Drag Queen Story Hour? You know, I've heard it mentioned, but I don't know anything about it, honestly. Drag Queen Story Hours started by my friend Justin and Taylor, and their characters are Moji Nightmare and Nicky Champagne. What they're doing is going around and doing a story hour for kids. They started it in Cambridge. I went to Cambridge with them and watched them there, and they're doing it at the, what's the library in town? Fletcher Library? Yeah, Fletcher Free. Fletcher Free Library. They're doing the Fletcher Free Library this Saturday. So I know this will be airing after that, but if you did get a chance to go, make sure you give them props for doing that. Justin is just a tremendous activist. He is a board member of outright Vermont, and Nicky is over at Pride. She works at Pride and is not only a drag queen, but she's one of my transgender sisters as well, having come out last year, and I'm so appreciative of her and her time. You know, going after some candidates through rights and democracy is an interesting proposition. I'm not sure that they're ready for me yet, but we're going to take them on. I want to model what they did in New Hampshire, and I want to come out with something. I originally called it diversity development, or DD, and then I said organizing diversity development, and that would be ODD, which would be odd, and so I just said queer. It might be misconstrued somewhere. It could be misconstrued. Queer organizing diversity development, so quad, I think would work well. And I'm going to propose that here in the next couple of weeks. Other stuff going on in the legislature? Oh, I got to say goodbye to the Department of Motor Vehicle Commissioner, Ide. He was done last Friday. I was actually the last official meeting that he had in his office, and I thanked him for working with us to develop a third-gender marker on driver's licenses and state IDs. Yeah, the X. Yeah, she's got it. And the nice part was he said, well, really, it wasn't that difficult. He went to a meeting of all the commissioners of motor vehicles in all the states, and they all noted that this was a trend that they were coming up to, and that they would rather embrace it and be ahead of it than have to catch up. And I think that's what we're doing here is we're ahead of the curve, and I'm grateful. Oregon and California have already passed legislation. We did this not legislatively. We did it administratively and took advantage of the new request for proposal that driver's licenses were going to require and IDs as well. So this probably won't affect me as much as it will some generations to come, and I'm grateful to him in his office. Also met the person who's going to be the interim director of motor vehicles Commissioner Motor Vehicles and Wanda. Good luck. I hope you get appointed. She's a person who is well-versed in all aspects of that, having worked with Commissioner Eid for a little while, a few years. So that was one of the bigger pieces of things that got going the last couple months legislatively or during the summer, really during the off season. Coming up, we start back in the capital in January, and I can say immediately things that are going to heat up are the, and this was actually brought forth by Senate Leader Pro Tem Tim, Tim, Peter. No, I can't think of his name. Oh my goodness, I lost it. That's okay, it'll come back to you. Anyway, the Senate Leader Pro Tem has requested that the $15 an hour minimum wage be one of the first items on the agenda that the legislature is going to pick up. And I just recently learned that they're also going to go for universal primary care, which when you do the math, the way that it needs to be done shows that we can have that here in Vermont and that we will have it universally, which is exactly what we need. And universal primary care. That's huge. It's a little bit different than what people think is free healthcare because what this does is it actually provides your initial coverage for your visits to your doctor and it is more on the preventative end of it. So imagine going to the doctor to be well and to make sure that you remain well instead of always going in for something catastrophic or going to the emergency room. So it's going to include massages? I would hope so. Massages would be good. Maybe a little acupuncture. Maybe a little acupuncture. Could be a few other things. I'd like to see dentistry. It's critical to people's health is having good dental care. My dad was a dentist. That I didn't know. Yeah, kind of an exciting thing, but there's a weird thing about having your own father be your dentist because gloves are not as important to them. And he was a tall man, so he had very large sausage fingers to get those bear things grubbing around in your mouth. Now I would say it's worth the free dentistry, but back in the day when it didn't have a choice, it was a whole other story. Yeah, being a little kid with somebody with big hands, I've got to think that that might be a little difficult. What I remember is I hated dentists. I don't like going. I still don't like going. I have a broken tooth here and I'm just not looking forward. As opposed to all the other friends you have, they're like, oh, I fucking love going to the dentist. I haven't met anybody that says that yet. Oh, yeah, because anyone that says that is probably insane. No one likes going to the dentist. You've got to feel for the dentist, though, because could you imagine having a position in which no one's ever excited to see you? You've got to show those guys some credit. I can think of maybe one other profession. Some of those colonoscopies? No, well, that might be one, but a mortician. Okay, yeah. Yeah, nobody would like to go see a mortician. Well, they wouldn't know either way probably at that point, right? That's true, but you never know. You just never know about those things. So minimum wage, universal primary care, one of the things that I worked on last year that's coming up in this next session, it'll be before, I think, the Senate Judiciary, is gender-neutral bathrooms. I don't know what the bill's going to be called, but it was H-333 when we voted it through the House, and I testified there for that. And now I'll go back, of course, and testify with the senators on this as well. It has a lot of strong backing. Basically what it does is it takes single-use bathrooms rather than label them M or F or men or women. It'll just say restroom, and this will actually double your chances of being able to find an empty one when you go. It does not address multi-use bathrooms. Now that may be down the pike a little ways, but the University of Vermont is already addressing these as well, and I hope to have some commentary from my friend Z who started that movement up in the University campus. It spilled over to our legislator through Celine Colburn, and she was one of the lead sponsors of that movement. And so everything is connected. Everything is connected. UVM is a great resource for education, of course, and now they're also helping legislature. You got a UVM thing. I had some fun in those single-use bathrooms at UVM. Do we want to know? They got showers in them, you know. They do. I remember having fun at one of the bathrooms down at the Vermont Public Boathouse, and they do have showers down there. Afternoon delight? No, this was almost like one o'clock in the morning delight, but it was still open, and it was an awful lot of fun. Very memorable. Sunsy. And clean, too. There's also a bill that's going to go in front of the Senate to remove weapons from a scene of domestic violence for 10 days. I did learn interesting things about this when I talked with one of our police chiefs, and it actually may come down... Don't get me wrong. The police do like having the law or believe that this law would be beneficial to people, but there's a logistics problem of where are they going to put the weapons, how are they going to storm, how are they going to return them to people. And I think when they figure that out, we'll have this law in place. People don't consider what happens after. They confiscate weapons like that, but they have no place. They literally have no extended facilities for storage, security, and then, of course, returning them. And all of this is driven by money. So once they figure that part out, I think they'll be doing well, and it is something that, as a community, we support as well. But I think when they figure out how to bring everybody up to $15 an hour, that's going to be one of the big things that... Oh, it's Tim Ash. There you go. Tim wanted to make that a priority of this legislation. We'll move around back to that sentiment. Yeah, we did. Full circle. It was full circle. The key there is... And Taylor, you've filled me in on this, the difference between the service industry that you're part of and just a regular $15 minimum wage. Can you tell me about that again? Yeah, I mean, it's just a little different. The core minimum wage doesn't necessarily apply to people who do work in the service industry because it is known that it is a tipped position in which people will be getting extra funds, hopefully on a more of a commissioned basis. So I don't know if bumping it up to $15 an hour for a regular job would also bump it up on Maya, and that would be kind of nice. Do you find that there's days when you're short and you don't get all the tips that you want and it isn't quite as equitable as working a $15 an hour job? Oh, yeah, totally. Okay, so there might be some equity there. Well, let's hope so. Fingers crossed. I think that people can be part of that process and talk about it. I'm sure that the Senate and the House will be debating this furiously, so it may have ramifications for the service industry and testifying on behalf of that. Anybody can testify. Basically, you're telling your story. You're telling the folks there why it's important to you, and when you do that, it will evoke processes with these guys that they didn't think of, because they're not in the service industry. They're not affected by minimum wage, but yet knowing how it affects you is important. That's why I would advocate people to testify for the Gender Neutral Bathroom Bill when it comes up or minimum wage or anything that you're... Let's tip your bartender. Just do it. Don't think twice. Tip it and do it well. Do it often and early. Do you judge people? 100%. What's a judgment level on a bad tipper? Or just what happened yesterday? If someone uses a large bill to pay for a drink and then pulls you back because they have an extra single so they can get the $5 bill back instead of the singles, so then there's no incentive to tip. Am I a good tipper? Yeah, you're a champion. Oh, excellent. You can come back anytime. Thank you. I appreciate that. You got anything going on in the comedy front? Because part of you being here, the comedy of state, is to make sure that we throw some comedy in. Because it's not all that serious stuff that's on the page. Yeah, totally. It's definitely been a fun month for comedy. I was down in Barrie for the first time doing Femcom, just an all-female lineup put on by Bitsy Byron, who's this pioneer of the comedy scene. She's absolutely wonderful and she puts on this showcase once a month and it's fun because there's always one, one like a token mail that's on the Femcom list and that guy usually starts it off so it's kind of fun to have, you know, just one cock in the henhouse, you know. There's a brand new showcase that a couple good friends of mine just started and it's called Funny Girl so it's also an all-female lineup and that's going to be happening once a month at the Monkey House in Winooski. How exciting. Anything going on at the local comedy venue here in town that you're part of? The Comedy Club? Oh man, there's not that I'm part of necessarily in particular but they really have such a good system. There are so many big names coming through here just being attracted to the club as a hub itself and it's been amazing to see how much community has evolved around the comedy scene. It's a really supportive community. It feels more like a family. We're talking about the LGBTQ community or the comedian community. The comedian community but also with that as well. I mean, I definitely, we miss Kendall for sure. I was going to mention that because Kendall was my first guest on this show and we kicked it off and just had a great deal of fun and our second show which you and I were on went from PG to X without any problem and I think maybe that's why he lost it. I think that's maybe what happened there. We can't put this in the Internet. So we can certainly dive into that realm. I know we talked about coming out in that last segment and my coming out to my parents was via a letter. I actually wrote Mom and Dad a letter and said, hey, I said this is me and gave them some details and said I felt very badly I didn't want to lose their love and eventually we got together by the phone and they said, ah, we love you. You're our kid. Yeah, totally. Despite the fact that I was adopted I think they still, they didn't send the paperwork back or use the guaranteed refund. Guaranteed refund. It was my worry. It was one of my biggest fears. Were they surprised though? I'd have to say they were and then I said, well, I haven't told everybody. Who else haven't you told me? I haven't told the people at the transfer station yet. So I was taking my garbage there as a boy because I wasn't ready to come out. Absolutely strangers and for the same reason I didn't come out to my folks either. Do you recall when you came out what went on with your folks? Yeah, honestly I didn't, I didn't really, I didn't know at all that I was attracted to women until I started going to UVM and like when I first got here I was just going through like a little bit of a rebellious stage. You know, like doing everything that my Sunday school teacher told me not to do. You know, I would always be like, kids, like do not cheat. Do not steal. Do not play women's rugby. And it was always so weird to me because like, he was staring right at me in my cargo shorts every single time he said that. And I was like, what does this guy know that I don't? You know. Did you ever play rugby? I did. I played rugby. And I think that's what happened, the rugby voodoo. It got me. All right, team, huddle up. Shh, don't speak. Just let it happen. Yeah, that's when I came out to my, I came out to my mom first and I called her back on the phone in Wisconsin to tell her I had a girlfriend for the first time. And I was super nervous about it. I remember being really anxious, you know, calling her on the phone. And when I told her, she really didn't hesitate for a single moment. And I was like, oh, honey. Honey, I got to say, I'm not completely surprised. Mom's know these things. That bitch knew. She knew. It's like, she knew. And my Sunday school teacher knew. It's like, why didn't anyone think to tell me? It would have been nice. I wouldn't have had to go around my youth thinking about dicks all the time. Friend, obviously I'm kidding about that part. I never went to church. You never went to church? Oh. That's such a relief to know that you're not tainted by religion. Yeah. It's certainly tainted by me, I guess. We'll be here. That works. That works. So have you had subsequent dialogues with your mom about your new lifestyle? I mean, at this point, this happened a handful of years ago and it's just kind of, it's kind of just part of the drill. Actually, one of my older cousins just came out. She's like a good handful of years older than me. She just came out to the family this past summer. And it was really funny. She brought her girlfriend to our little big family reunion for the first time. And they're both like pretty eccentric people. They work in tech and they're into gaming and stuff. So they both have these like wild asymmetric, brightly colored dyed haircuts. And just, my mom was able to joke with me like, well, look, now you can just blend right in. Like you're not the gayest one here anymore. I was like, okay, that's great. It's interesting, mom has a perspective like that. Other relatives. She's like, look how easily you blend in now. I'm like, mom, that's not very nice. So have you gotten over being outed by friends? I mean, everybody that you and I know knows you. And I certainly had the joy of meeting your current girlfriend. Yeah, she gives awesome hugs, by the way. She's a badass queen. Does she ever? Yeah, and you know, it's funny because as a transgender woman, I find that I come out every day. I have to renew what most people show as an annual thing on their calendar as national coming out day. And I have to present as feminine. I have to present female. I have to show up and look okay for me to actually, yeah. Okay, you're beautiful. Stop it. Now you're embarrassing me, but thank you for that. I think half of it is attitude, because I do have a what the fuck attitude when I go out. It's not hard in Vermont, but I travel a lot and I travel back to Syracuse and had an interesting occurrence while I was in Syracuse. The women who live across from my parents are and have been to my dad, them dykes across the street. And I'm like, dad, they're people. I said, and they're really nice people. And I got to know both of them a lot better over the last week. I went down and we sent dad to hunting camp. So that means I got to mom's sit. And so being a good mom's sitter, I actually spent as little time bugging her as possible, but got out a lot and discovered a little brewery around the corner that rivals you guys at Zero Gravity. And what I wound up doing was making friends with a girl across the street. She is a championship dog groomer in New York State. She is one of a handful of certified master groomers. And people come to her from all over to get their dogs groomed for show. We just love dogs. So she took my mangy long-haired dog that's staying down there in Syracuse. And we got her clipped up. And she talked for hours. Well, really, it was almost two hours that we were at the groomers. And she came out to me as transgender. And I'm like, who have you come up to? She says, well, my girlfriend. I said, nobody else. So she is very much still fresh and new at this. And she probably dies when I'm talking about it, but I haven't used any names. Not everyone has the same amount of spunk that you do. I don't have a spunk. They're just pent-up demand or whatever you want to call it. I think that... I like spunk. Yeah, spunk's good. Do you have any jokes that deal with spunk in your repertoire? I mean, not necessarily spunk, I guess. I don't know. I'm kind of caught up in the way that people keep perceiving me these days. Because although it's pretty obvious where I stand, just based on looking at me, people can't help but notice that I do happen to be kind of teaming with fertility right now. I'm not sure if you could feel it. It's oozing out of every pore. It's not unnoticed on this end, just so you know. Yeah, it's sort of like my womb just does this passive-aggressive yoga routine every day. Just like it keeps reminding me to focus and breathe. Oh boy. But yeah, I don't know. I'm really fucking fertile. People can tell. So keep asking me that same question. Okay. You want to have kids? You're going to have kids? What about kids? Have you thought about kids? Do you want them? And honestly, people in the world are not fucking really right now. I'm kind of like, right in between you and I, I'm kind of like an underground hoarder when it comes to sentimental objects, love notes, old postcards, shit like that. And I played a lot of sports growing up. So the number of stupid medals and bullshit participation ribbons that I'm going to have to pack up and lug around with me wherever I go for the rest of my life because I can't seem to get rid of them. I don't need a fuck trophy too. I'd ask you to define that, but it's kind of self-evident. I told that joke in St. Almond's a couple of weeks ago and everyone was like, huh. Was it a fairly straight crowd that you were playing through there? It was like half and half. I think they're mostly, it was just the idea of, you know, referring to children as just, you know, I guess associating them with a coital act, I guess, I don't really know. So in addition to your bag of trophies, don't you want to be able to leave those to somebody when you're older and say, here's what mom did or here's what I did when I was a kid? Oh yeah, fourth place, Flight B, junior golf tournament. Everyone wants that shit. Why are you still carrying it around? Second place, Battle of the Books, second grade. Like, I don't, why does anyone need that? I don't know. I've got a lot of stuff too. I bought a whole shipping container to park stuff in that I've never looked at for years and years and years. So it is problematic. They have a show about things like that. It's called Hoarders Buried Live. You've seen that show? No. Oh my God. You've got to watch it. It's crazy. It's like an intervention show where they go in and they go in and it's actually really sad because a lot of these people are dealing with mental illness, but it goes into some of the most extreme hoarding situations you could possibly meet. Like, giant house mansions stuffed the gills. You can't even navigate around the house. You have to squeeze in this tunnel with just old textile patterns. And weird china and shit that's never going to be used, but there's a sentimental value attached to it. You've got to look it up both ways. I don't mean to joke. That was insensitive of me. I know that some people are genetically predisposed to keeping everything, or they're brought up or conditioned that way because they didn't have anything when they were kids. I think that can be catastrophic. I do want to get a little bit back on topic. I recently emceed the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is a day every year that we memorialize trans people who died very prematurely. They were murdered or killed or stone beaten. And it was over 325 names that we read. And one of the things that my folks and friends at Outright pointed out was that they don't bring the kids necessarily to these memorial circumstances, memorials, because it can profoundly affect their processes and how they grow up and how they mature with respect to what's going on in the community. We have a suggestion that was brought in by committee that we maybe change the day to not one of remembrance, but one of resistance, transgender day of resistance. And celebration. And focus it on how we survive and how we get through a very tough society. The United States is number three with the number of deaths for transgender people. We follow Brazil and Mexico. So in this half of the world, there's the most transgender people die and we're talking hundreds. And it's really got to stop. It's really got to stop. It's a painful ceremony to emcee. It's a painful day of remembrance. And as one of my transgender women of color pointed out, it is not a day to celebrate or to glorify. But we need to do something different. Now, that was Monday the 20th, I think, of November. Since then, we've debriefed that and we have some game plans for that going on. Next year, I just wanted to go over a couple of things that are coming up. Momentum and Rainbow umbrella meeting tonight down in Waterbury for dinner. Saturday, we have the drag queen story hour, flexor, we talked about that. I'm going to be meeting a lot of friends over the holidays to go out and have dinners and festivities. And tomorrow, I get to meet with the state police. And this is the guy who runs the fair and impartial policing board for the state as far as the state police goes. So I'm very interested to see what comes out of that. Do you know what that is? I don't at all. Basically, it started out, my friend Mark Hughes introduced a bill to bring some uniformity and decrease the opportunity for profiling specifically to people of color in the state of Vermont and have a board that reviews any of these actions where there's officer activity involved. So it's developing with statistics, with reporting, it's developing with folks through the community being part of a board, which is really a good thing. So I wanted to say that that is part of one of the activities that Keith and I are doing. Outright Vermont is moving. They were over here, right over here, actually, on North Champlain. And they're moving across the aisle, so to speak. They're going from their little tiny cramped offices to sort of what was the senior center. Oh, cool. And so they're going to occupy much more space, have cooking facilities as well, which is nice, bigger and broader meeting space, and I think they're going to be very happy with their new spot. Rights and Democracy is moving into their old space. They have a little bit more formal office on that. I wanted to let you know that on the 28th of December, we're going to have a community potluck with the Pride Center of Vermont, and we have decided to do that now on a regular basis. So if you're part of the community, you want to come grab some really good food. There was awesome food there last time. I would definitely invite you to come and have dinner with us. I'm going to advocate that we always check the web for events. All of my agencies that I work with, Pride Center of Vermont, I'll write Vermont Cares, Green Mountain Crossroads down in Brattleboro, and of course the Rainbow Umbrella of Central Vermont, all post their activities and fun things to do, and basically we're all responsible for community building. Hey, where are you next? Do you have an idea of what you're up to? Comedy-wise? Yeah. You know, there's going to be every Monday night, there's a free show down at Skinny Pancake. It's called Comedy and Crepes. I believe I'm going to be in the January, January edition of that one. I'm also going to be hosting one of the funny girl shows coming up in Winooski, so there will be some fun stuff on the horizon. Things just kind of pop up when they come, and I'm happy to get in there however I can. It's really fun. I'm going to give one shout out to my friend, Marcus Pizer, who was one of the speakers for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm actually going to enjoy Hanukkah with him and his parents at their home this coming Sunday for a traditional Hanukkah dinner. I want to mention, too, that Chuck and Penny have formed a group called Safe Harbor for trans teens, and they have the only foster home in Vermont that's actually certified to work with transgender youth. It's a really cool project, so if you get a chance to contribute or see them, awesome people, we are almost done. I can't think of anything else. Anything funny, quick? Add a little bit of glimmer of your comic expertise before we go. Oh, man. I don't know. But you're putting me on the spot. I sometimes go a little off the cuff. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like if we start now, I'm just going to start talking about dicks again, and that's got a lot of weird things to say about dicks. It might be better to wait until another episode when I've got some time. I can be a little long-winded. Okay, we can certainly do that. I'd like to see you back. I enjoy the rapport that we've established and have some good friends. Hey, I want to say thank you to Alex and all the people here at Channel 17. I bring in another episode of Comedy of State. Hopefully you won't lose this one, and I emphasize lose. Looking at you, man. Yeah, we're looking at you, Alex. And I want to say this is a great opportunity to talk to my community. If you like the show, please let these guys know. I want to keep doing this, and Alex said I'm good at it, but I'm skeptical that I don't have outside corroboration. So for the Comedy of State, my friend Taylor Radke and Brenda Churchill I'm going to say thank you very much and have a great holiday season. Happy fucking holidays. Happy fucking holidays. What a good thought.