Ep. 2: No Timbs allowed

MICHAELA WINBERG, HOST: Welcome back to March On: The Fight for Pride. I’m your host, Michaela Winberg.

Last episode, you met the early organizers of Philadelphia Pride. You heard how they fought to create something meaningful for the community — up against community infighting, and the deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic.

When the first round of organizers got burnt out, they handed the reins to a woman named Franny Price. She made Pride into an official nonprofit, called Philly Pride Presents. And ran the group like a hierarchical business for almost 30 years.

But her reign was about to come to a dramatic end.

In this episode, you’ll hear why Philly Pride Presents went up in flames.

[THEME MUSIC]

In the summer of 2021, Philly Pride Presents was gearing up to host its first in-person event in two years. Pride had to be virtual in 2020 because of the pandemic.

[MUSIC]

They tried to build the hype exactly how you would expect a couple of middle-aged queers to do it. By posting on Facebook.

One of the posts went like this: “Philly Pride wishes everyone a happy Memorial Day, 2021. We look forward to seeing you all in person Saturday, September 4.”

Seems pretty standard, right? But under those two sentences was an image.

Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a Black, nonbinary activist and writer, was one of many community members who saw it.

ABDUL-ALIY MUHAMMAD: What it looked like was a Blue Lives Matter flag, with the rainbow strip in the middle.

MW: You know the Blue Lives Matter flag, right? The black and white version of the American flag, but with a royal blue stripe right through the middle? It’s come to represent everything from support for police officers to white nationalism, and even that 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

So they posted that, but I guess the gay version.

About a week later, they posted again. This time, it was about the Stonewall Riots. The post painted a twisted picture of the first night. One that seemed to take the side of police officers.

AM: Whomever posted it from Philly Pride Presents made it seem like the police were under attack from people participating in civil disobedience.

MW: And of course, that’s not really how Stonewall went down. It was actually a response to police brutality, after years of police raiding gay bars and using violence against queer and trans people.

The Facebook post continued…

AM: And then it also referred to trans people, more specifically trans women, as those dressed as women, which is highly transphobic.

JOSÉ DE MARCO: I mean, that really was the worst kind of insult you could pay.

MW: That’s José de Marco, a longtime organizer with the HIV/AIDS coalition ACT UP Philadelphia.

So Philly Pride Presents put out an apology. They said those posts had never been approved by the group’s leader, Franny. That someone else in the organization had posted them, and that he had resigned.

But it was too little, too late. The community was outraged.

JD: I think people had absolutely enough of Pride and their, you know, BS.

And from there, the organization unraveled.

AM: People were upset because they had not only deleted their Facebook page, they wiped their website. You can’t tell me that you’ve held an organization for 28 years and you don’t have enough compassion or concern for the community that you would respond transparently to our concerns. And so when that didn’t happen, I think people felt like, wow, are these the gatekeepers that we need or wanted in this role, who are not responsive?

MW: It wasn’t just those few Facebook posts that took down the group that ran Pride for 30 years.

The posts were just the final straw.

[MUSIC]

In the LGBTQ community, there were deeper wounds that fueled the downfall of Pride.

To help you understand how this all went down, I gotta take you back in time… to the beginning of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood.

The neighborhood started coming to life in the 1950s. This section of Center City was buzzing with cultural hubs like jazz bars and espresso shops. And LGBTQ people claimed it.

So many gay men moved into apartments on Spruce Street that they became known as the Spruce Street Boys. Gay bars opened in the area, where LGBTQ people could finally hang out together. And by the mid-70s, the city’s first gay community center opened too.

It was a place for queer and trans people that didn’t exist anywhere else in the city. Think of the Castro District in San Francisco, the West Village in New York, or Boystown in Chicago.

But it wasn’t the lively downtown you might be imagining. Philadelphia’s Gayborhood was gritty. Gangs and organized crime had also set up camp in the area, and city officials lumped them together with LGBTQ people — calling them all, quote, “undesirables.” Police raided gay bars constantly.

Here’s a Philadelphia City Councilmember from the ‘80s.

FRANCIS RAFFERTY: What I do disapprove of is for the homosexual community to try and present to the general public that they should be proud, that they have things they should feel very good about. I think they’re sick. I think they’re ill.

MW: So yeah. Fighting for acceptance was an uphill battle, to say the least.

But, eventually, after a few decades, the area finally got official recognition.

By the ‘90s, the city started celebrating Pride and Outfest as official events. And in the 2000s, the mayor dedicated 36 rainbow street signs to be installed in the area.

But as the city started to welcome the LGBTQ community, the community wasn’t exactly welcoming everyone.

You could see that at the gay bars.

[MUSIC]

It’s a tale as old as time. The ritual of waiting in line outside the club. The flex of showing off your outfit, and the ego boost that comes with being ushered in first and skipping the crowd. The blush-inducing embarrassment if you don’t get in at all.

Mike Hinson got an even worse version of that feeling.

MIKE HINSON: They would card every Black person that came in and wouldn’t card a white person. And then depending on what kind of ID you had, it wasn’t ID enough.

MW: Mike is a Black gay man. He lives in North Philadelphia. When you ask him about his age, he’ll only get as specific as “50-plus.” Back in the ‘90s, he went to the Gayborhood to party.

He also experienced regular racism.

MH: People commenting on your hair as if it’s a thing. I mean, this is my hair. It’s not… Or touching my head, and saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nice Jheri curl.’ Like, I’m like, it’s not a it’s not a Jheri curl. What made you assume that?

MW: How Mike explains it, this stuff really impacted the culture of the Gayborhood — and where Black, Brown and trans people felt welcome.

MH: People have to understand that the club is not just a place where you go and drink and dance. It’s a place where you go to have community, because there weren’t a lot of other places for folks to go to, to have a sense of community.

MW: Around this time, a bunch of LGBTQ people got together and formed a coalition to fight racism at the bars. They showed up and studied the bars’ policies, and even put out a report — with recommendations on how they could be more welcoming to marginalized people.

But the bars didn’t change much. And Mike was still feeling racism in the Gayborhood years later.

In the 2000s, he was working for the city on issues like LGBTQ equality and HIV/AIDS. He did a ridealong with police to take a look at crime in the Gayborhood.

He says it was him, a white police chief and a white man named Mike Weiss. His family owns Philly’s most well-known gay bars that are still open today.

MH: And we were going into Mike’s restaurant. Into Mike’s restaurant. Mike was walking in front of me, I was in the middle and the inspector was in back of me. Who did they stop? I’m with the owner — the owner — and the chief police inspector. And they stopped me and carded me. How’s that happen?

MW: LGBTQ people of color would continue to endure this kind of stuff for decades. By 2016, they couldn’t put up with it much longer. In the Gayborhood, racism was reaching a boiling point.

And Inahs Akilah was on the front lines.

Inahs, who is Black and nonbinary, saw racism and sexual harassment up close at some of Philadelphia’s most well-known LGBTQ nonprofits.

So the 38-year-old activist got a few community members together and, in 2016, they formed the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative. That’s an activist group in Philly.

Their mission? To call out racism and sexual harassment directly. With public protests.

But Inahs was terrified. Like everybody, they relied on their job to survive. To build up the courage, they leaned on their spirituality.

[MUSIC]

INAHS AKILAH: It was sitting in front of my altar every night listening to my own ancestors say, like, you know what to do, you know, and me being like, but how am I going to survive? How am I going to make ends meet? I have all these bills now from grad school. And it was like, no. You know, if you do what’s right as opposed to what is easy, you will be taken care of. And it’s never failed.

MW: They started protesting, and it wasn’t long before they gained traction.

Inahs says young LGBTQ people noticed their activism.

IA: We were organizing very publicly. LGBTQ youth were watching us and they were like, oh, this is what they’re doing now. And so they would reach into us and be like, hey this is what I just experienced at this bar, can you all do something about this? Like, it was like, a very intentional, direct pulling on us in the ways that needed to happen.

[MUSIC]

MW: Flooded with young queers asking for help, Inahs set racism at the bars as their next target.

In 2016, one gay bar called iCandy got a lot of complaints. Take their dress code, which required customers to wear “neat and clean attire.” Customers said policies like that were used against people of color.

There were also no athletic clothes allowed, no work boots and specifically no Timberlands.

IA: You couldn’t wear Timbs, you couldn’t, right, things that are very explicitly racialized, and disproportionately impacts, you know, Black and Brown, Indigenous bodies, right.

MW: Inahs and their community were not going to let that fly. Right away, they organized a protest outside iCandy. They were standing at the door of the bar — calling out the racist dress codes, while customers continued to walk in.

PROTEST: This establishment said you couldn’t wear Timbs inside. Thank you for supporting racism. Thank you for being racist. We know that shit is coded. Who the fuck wears Timbs in Phila-fucking-delphia? Black people! Who wears mother fucking Timbs in Philadelphia? Black people! Working class people! Co-opting whites!

MW: The rage you’re hearing is of a community that is watching fellow queer people walk into a bar to spend their money, while they’re actively telling them: Hey! This bar is racist!

They were angry. So they kept picking up speed.

IA: We started with just hanging Timbs on the doors of bars, you know, and showing up and walking in without being told that we’re allowed to. Wearing Timbs, wearing the things that they were like, you can’t do this,. We were like, oh, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna do it, because we’re part of the gayborhood. We’re part of the LGBTQ community.

MW: The problem was getting more attention.

At the same time the accusations of racism were reaching new people, a video came out in September of 2016. It was the owner of iCandy. And it seemed like he didn’t know he was being filmed. He went on this racist rant about Black customers wanting free drinks.

Warning: He drops the n-word.

ICANDY VIDEO: Does Ray ask you for drink passes? White. Obnoxious white, but white. No, he’s never asked me. [Laughter] There you go. And he was definitely your real boyfriend. All three of them that ask you for drink passes are n—-rs. Oh my god.

MW: And he goes on to say the n-word several more times.

IA: And that seals the deal. Like after that, all we had to do was show up with our blow horn, and that recorder and play it over and over again on a loop. And that’s what we did. And we stood right in front of iCandy, and we played it. And so that people couldn’t be like, oh, you’re overreacting or you’re oversensitive. It’s like, no, here are the things we’re talking about. Here’s the person who’s running this space. And this is not disconnected from the policies here.

PROTEST: The owner of iCandy is racist. If you say you hate Trump, if you say you hate racism, if you say you hate bigotry, then you won’t give a racist your money. It’s that simple!

MW: Inahs and their group raised hell about this.

There were constant protests of Gayborhood bars, especially iCandy. They kept showing up outside, and calling out the owner by name.

PROTEST: Some of y’all off beat. If you’re off beat, don’t do it. Darryl DePiano ain’t shit. Ain’t shit. Darryl DePiano ain’t shit. Ain’t shit. Darryl DePiano ain’t shit. Ain’t shit. Ain’t shit. Ain’t shit.

They pushed so hard that something unexpected happened. The city actually listened.

City officials acknowledged the problem. They even held a hearing, where people could share their experiences with racism in the Gayborhood.

One of those people was Malcolm Kenyatta. He’s currently a state representative in Pennsylvania. But back in 2016, he was just a community member who was hurt and frustrated.

MALCOLM KENYATTA: It feels good right now, that we’re in here, we’re venting. That so many people can finally say, I wasn’t making this up. This is real. This ain’t Santa Claus. Racism is real. It’s happening every single day. As an LGBT community, as a community that understands what it means to be marginalized, we have a profound and unique responsibility to never inflict that same marginalization upon others.

IA: I just remember tears coming down my face and me thinking like, this is what it’s all about. Being able to be seen, heard. It’s going on the record.

MW: The hearing validated their experiences. But it also came with some of the classic, toothless recommendations for things like implicit bias trainings.

The head of the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs at the time, a white lesbian, stepped down. And after a few years of community pressure, iCandy closed. Another gay bar moved into its location.

I reached out to the former owner of iCandy. I also reached out to Mike Weiss, whose family owns a number of Gayborhood bars. Neither got back to me to comment for this story.

Most people agree the culture of the Gayborhood hasn’t changed.

IA: It is painful to know, like, all that we gave, and see where it still is. Right like that, I think, it very much speaks to the overt forces of resistance to progress, right. The overt the overt forces that are, like, digging their heels in, and saying like, yep, we hear you, and we are invested in maintaining the status quo. That’s what I feel when I walk into the Gayborhood.

MW: For a lot of people, THAT is what the Gayborhood felt like. And what it still feels like today.

A place where exclusivity is baked into the culture. And you can call it out, but you can’t actually change it.

Pride is an event built out of the Gayborhood. It’s an attempt to turn the culture of the area into one extravagant event. It was organized by people who eat, sleep, and breathe the Gayborhood every single day. And it always marched right through it.

So it makes sense that the way people feel in the Gayborhood is how they would feel about Pride.

That is why Inahs steered clear.

IA: I’m gonna be honest, I actively avoided Pride. Like, I was like, I have no desire, because I just didn’t know what I would come up against entering that space.

[MUSIC]

So Inahs stayed away from Pride on purpose. But coming up, you’ll hear how someone else was kept out.

NAIYMAH SANCHEZ: I’ve been outside the gates of the Pride festival, because I couldn’t afford as a queer youth who was experiencing houselessness, actively using and like, couldn’t even provide my basic needs to pay a Pride $15 to get a damn wristband to go watch a celebrity sing.

That’s next… on March On.

[MIDROLL BREAK]

Welcome back to March On: The Fight for Pride. I’m your host, Michaela Winberg. Now, I want you to meet someone who says she’s never felt welcome at Pride.

Naiymah Sanchez is a 38-year-old Afro Latina trans woman. She grew up in North Philadelphia. She’s tall, with dark brown curly hair and tattoos running from her forearms to her chest.

Naiymah is warm and friendly. Like, the second time I met her, she gave me a huge hug, and she tried to pass off a set of Home Goods mugs that she didn’t want anymore. I accepted the hug. Passed on the mugs.

In her day job, she works on trans rights for the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

But she didn’t always have an office job. It’s been a hard road for Naiymah. When she came out as trans to her family as an early teen, they put her into conversion therapy. She got diagnosed with a whole bunch of mental illnesses that she doesn’t actually have, like split personality disorder. For a lot of her teenage years, she was heavily medicated.

Naiymah wanted to escape all that. So she ran away from home at 15 years old and landed in the Gayborhood.

NS: For young queer folks, the Gayborhood has been that landmark for us, right? When you felt like you needed to get away or wherever you were at in the city, you made your way to the Gayborhood. This was ultimately our home. But it was also at a place where we engaged in sex work for those who, you know, had to survive.

MW: Back when Naiymah was a teenager, sex work seemed like the only way she could make ends meet on her own. She found a trans mom to help take care of her, and the two would couch surf together.

They didn’t have much money to spare, but they made it work.

When Pride became bigger and more commercialized, the executive director Franny started charging for tickets to the culminating festival. That meant Naiymah often found herself on the outside looking in.

NS: I’ve been outside the gates of the Pride festival, because I couldn’t afford as a queer youth who was experiencing houselessness, actively using and like, couldn’t even provide my basic needs to pay a Pride $15.

MW: Sometimes she would try to sneak in. But that wasn’t easy. She looked way too good to fly under the radar.

NS: You’re sitting there with booty shorts on like, people are looking at you. It’s hard for you to sneak in.

MW: I should say, there was one other way Naiymah told me about to get into the Pride festival. Free admission to anyone who was willing to get screened for HIV.

Naiymah remembers this was usually set up by some nonprofit that wanted to prevent the spread of HIV. But think about it. Would you want to find out you had a life-threatening illness on your way into the year’s biggest party?

NS: And I don’t know if they thought about that, right? Like, who wants to party when your life just changed?

MW: HIV testing has always been a big part of Pride.

In 1995, Philly was reportedly the first city in the country to offer free HIV testing at a Pride event. And although I couldn’t confirm that testing would get you into the event for free, some of my sources said that sounds right. Nonprofits often gave out incentives for HIV testing, and Pride was the biggest LGBTQ event of the year.

This creates a pretty unfair dynamic. Where people who can’t afford tickets are subject to testing if they want to have fun with their community.

NS: And for someone who was already living a risky life, the chances was high that I could be positive, right? Engaging in sex work, drug use, like child, living a life of just harm, right? So I’m more like, I’m not getting tested, because they gon’ tell me and then when they tell me, I’m gonna die, and I ain’t gon’ let them tell me today. So I can die just so I can go in there to listen to just say Cher, you know, whatever. So I just stayed outside.

MW: So testing to get into Pride wasn’t going to happen for Naiymah.

Instead, she and her friends created their own Pride.

NS: I guess I had the best experience during Pride, right? Back then, was being around people who actually enjoyed me and supported me as a person and supported my whole existence and we supported each other, right? Even with having $5, we’re able to put your $5 in, my $5 together and go get a pizza from Pizza Hut and sit there at the park while they’re over there with their feather boas drinking their $20 beer, you’re having your $10 Pizza, enjoying your $2 blunt, you know, around where you feel safe, right.

MW: This is what Pride is all about. It’s a feeling of connection, of belonging.

But the pain of being excluded — being outside the gates — still runs deep in the community.

Mike Hinson, the guy who got carded walking in the bar with two white men, put it this way.

[MUSIC]

MH: If you’re a 15-year-old or a 14-year-old, and you’ve been ostracized by your family, you’ve been ostracized by your church, or your faith institution, you’ve not been allowed to be who you totally are in your school. And then you come to a community that is made up of people who identify like you from sexual orientation and gender identity, and other kinds of identity, and then you’re ostracized from that because you’re Black. You’re ostracized from that because you’re trans or because you’re poor. Right? When you’re excluded from Pride events, I mean, it’s very simple. What do you have to be proud about?

MW: It wasn’t just the price of admission that was off about Pride.

It was also the way they celebrated the police.

Police officers have always gotten to march in the parade. And in 2016, Franny Price — the woman running the show — gave the parade’s highest honor to a group called GOAL. That’s the Gay Officer Action League, a group of LGBTQ cops.

She wanted to name the gay officers parade grand marshal.

Yeah, you heard that right. In the middle of a citywide conversation about racism in the Gayborhood, Franny wanted to make police officers the grand marshal of the parade.

It’s not like she was just having police patrol the event. She was actively uplifting them — trying to make them the star of the show.

This didn’t sit well with a lot of queer and trans people, who don’t always feel safe around police.

When Naiymah was homeless and doing sex work in the Gayborhood, she was constantly having run-ins with officers.

NS: The police didn’t help keep us safe, because we are still being abused, robbed, raped out there. But they target us.

It was two officers in particular that I can never get out my head. They were two bike cops. And they would do nothing by harass the workers, right? They would target, how I seen it, trans femme sex workers.

And then when you’re a young person, you’re spending most of your time running from the freaking police, that you can’t make no money to survive. So at six o’clock in the morning, you don’t have no money. Where are you going to go? What are you going to eat? You know what I’m saying? And they just made it harder, where ultimately, sometimes you just gave up. Like, freak it, if they catch me, if they lock me up, it is what it is At least I have to try, because today I didn’t eat. My clothes are still dirty. And I have nowhere to sleep.

MW: After a while, it all caught up with her. The police arrested Naiymah in the Gayborhood.

She awaited trial at one of Philly’s most notorious prisons. It had leaky pipes, peeling paint and this permanent, disgusting moisture in the air that made your bed sheets moldy.

The prison was in such bad condition, it was shut down a few years ago.

When Naiymah was in prison, there was still a policy in Pennsylvania that trans people had to go to the facility that aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

So Naiymah spent almost 19 months on the men’s side in protective custody, in a cell all by herself.

NS: It’s just like solitary confinement in a way. You’re in for 22, if not 24 hours a day. Like you’re fed through a slot in the door. But the most traumatic part about that whole thing, I was being sexually assaulted by a prison guard, right? So when I would grieve that the guard was doing what he was known to me. Nothing was happening. I wound up giving in. Now I’ve let somebody else have control, and that’s the worst thing that you can do when you are being abused: to allow your abuser to have full control over you.

MW: Naiymah says after the abuse, she asked to be moved to the general population of the prison.

NS: I was fucking traumatized. Like, I mean, I remember when they put me back into general, when they put me into general population, the warden was like, well, you gon’ go in general population and because of how you look, you think one person is doing it to you, can you imagine a whole block?

I had a different experience being in a block full of inmates. You know, like, people respected me, you know what I’m saying? They protected me from other people who wanted to abuse me. And they, honestly, it was that moment where I was like, I am worth more. I can do more. People respect me as soon as I respect myself, and I show strength and respect for myself.

[MUSIC]

MW: Once she got out of prison, she was determined never to go back.

NS: When they let me out at two o’clock in the morning, my mom was sitting in her Nissan Sentra in the parking lot. Only thing I was thinking about is getting a cigarette and not going back into that mother fucking place. And I never went back.

MW: Now Naiymah helps others in similar situations with her work at the ACLU.

But her experience left her with long-term anxiety around the police.

So when Pride chooses to celebrate them — naming a group of gay police officers the grand marshal of the parade — it doesn’t feel like the organizers understand what she’s been through. Or that they’re on her side. With police being elevated in the parade, people like Naiymah aren’t sure if they’ll be safe there.

Remember Elicia Gonzales, who proposed to her wife at Pride from the first episode? She started to feel this tension a while ago. She was rattled when Philly Pride Presents chose to name the gay police group as its grand marshal.

ELICIA GONZALES: Even from the very beginning, there was little acknowledgement of why that wasn’t a good thing. It felt from the get like it was just explaining away why there was a police presence, or why there was a need to celebrate police.

MW: Keep in mind, this is all happening in 2016, as Black Lives Matter is spreading across the country and meeting fierce resistance. It’s also the same moment that racism is being exposed at Gayborhood bars. At the same time that people were hanging Timberlands on the doors, crowding public hearings and venting about the strict dress codes and the ID checks.

Activists were ready to call out Philly Pride Presents. They created an online petition, and demanded that the executive director, Franny, revoke the honor.

Here’s the petition.

PETITION: This choice is not only grossly ironic, but participates in a revision of history that erases queer and trans resistance to state violence, as well as the ways in which the majority of queer and trans people have had to literally fight for survival in a system that has used every mechanism, including and particularly policing, to marginalize and harm us.

MW: In the end, the gay police didn’t serve as grand marshal. But that’s because the officers declined the honor — not because Franny decided to take it back.

The police group still got to march in the parade that year. And in the years since then.

Here’s Elicia again.

EG: It just seemed like it just spiraled from there, where folks were just really being like, not even disappointed. That’s the lightest of it, right. Like just disappointment to full on outrage about their lack of consideration for ways in which Pride was not accessible. And they did not see themselves reflected in what was happening at Pride.

MW: Soon the calls came for Franny to step down, and hand Pride over to the next generation.

And for a second there, it looked like she might. Franny started saying she was going to retire — but each year, she’d push the goal posts back, and stay in power a little longer.

[MUSIC]

Then came 2021, and those infamous Facebook posts. The rainbow version of the Blue Lives Matter flag, and the pro-police, transphobic slant on Stonewall.

That was something that the Pride organization couldn’t come back from. Those posts, stacked on top of the decades of racism and exclusion people felt in the city’s LGBTQ community, spelled the end for Philly Pride Presents.

When the old guard was ousted, Elicia didn’t have a lot of sympathy.

EG: Fran chose to have it this way. This was her doing. This was her holding on to power. This was her gatekeeping. This was her, you know, not allowing anybody else in. A lack of transparency.

MW: By now, a lot of the queer community seems to agree that Philly Pride Presents was flawed.

But there’s still one person who definitely does not. Franny Price herself.

[MUSIC]

FRANNY PRICE: You know, even when I die, I’m gonna be in the parade. ‘Cause there’s going to be a float with a coffin on it. And I’m gonna be in it, and people are gonna say, there’s that Franny, still doing the parade.

MW: And also… her closest friends and allies.

CHARLES TYSON: Franny’s work is, like, part of the DNA of the Gayborhood.

MW: After many turned their backs on Franny, some stood by her. They insist she did immeasurable good for the community. And they say anyone who suggests otherwise is lying.

TROY EVERWINE: Tell me you don’t know Franny Price without telling me you don’t know Franny Price.

MW: Next episode, you’re going to hear their side. What they think Franny gave to the local LGBTQ community — and why they’re still fighting to defend her legacy.

TE: We’re the ones who are dirty, we’re the ones getting bloody. And we’ve had enough of what’s being said about us. And now you made it personal.

MW: March On was reported and hosted by me, Michaela Winberg. Production and scoring by Taylor Hosking. Engineering and sound design by Charlie Kaier. Original music by Seth Kelley. Cover art by Symone Salib. Our editor is Lindsay Lazarski. Special thanks to Danya Henninger, Peter Crimmins, Elizabeth Estrada, Kenny Cooper, Emily Rizzo, Sophia Schmidt, Tom Grahsler, and Gabriel Coan.

This podcast is a production of WHYY and Billy Penn. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening.

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