Hey, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and today on LGBTQ and A, I'm talking to Chelsea Johnson.

Chelsea is the author of the very queer novel, Stray City.

It is set in Portland, and we talk about the queer haven that Portland was in the 90s.

We also talk about gossip in the LGBTQ community, and Chelsea says something that I hadn't

thought about before, which is that for our community, which for so long had such a little

representation in mainstream media, gossip operated as a way to tell our own stories, to document

our community and really own our narratives. So I found that really fascinating.

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discussions. All right, without further ado, here's Chelsea.

So much of the book was out chosen families. And one of the parts that struck me was when the main character's ex-partner and friends just stepped into health care for her child.

And then she in return helped care for her partners or ex-partners after her surgery.

It was small, but it's so important in our community.

Yeah, there's things about their situation that would be sort of legible to the mainstream straight reader, right?

It looks sort of homo-normative, right?

So it was important for me to also show that friend family

is still a really core essential part of who family is to them.

I think that sometimes the nuclear family can be a very isolating

...