Alex Abad-Santos

speaker

190 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 31 Jul

Alex Abad-Santos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

It's Been a Minute · Poppers, the FDA, & a crackdown decades in the making · 21 Mar 2025 podcast

Can't wait to talk about what we're going to talk about.

I'm like 12. It's like once a month.

I mean, could one really be a 365 party girl if we were wearing business casual to the club?

As a gay man of a certain age, I can confidently say that gay guys love poppers or have loved poppers. But I would say that it's mostly like a queer party drug now. Like the aforementioned Charli XCX, she famously had some meet and greets. She signed some poppers and they become kind of like this pop culture meme.

in pop culture, right? Like, there's symbolic shorthand for, I'm having a good time. I'm going out dancing. I'm going to maybe a queer party where the queer people will be there and will be silly. Also, there's, like, the undertone of sex.

And I think, like, the whole pop cultural, like, ephemera of, like, Charlie XCX sniffing poppers kind of makes it, like, this tongue-in-cheek joke about people who know what poppers are. So when you have this, like, serious story of an FDA rig allegedly going after business... I think there's this kind of like initial shock that's kind of like, okay, well, why?

But also like, okay, how serious is this?

I mean, I think queer people are not unfamiliar with being painted as deviants. That is the rhetoric that has come from the right wing in the last five, ten years. It's just like, oh my gosh, it's a deviant lifestyle, whatnot. Queer people are not strangers being painted in a certain way.

but I do think that like poppers puts people in a weird space of like, if you defend poppers, are you defending like this kind of like illicit lifestyle? Right. And then it becomes this idea of like respectability politics, which like it again, queer people are no stranger to respectability politics.

It's just like the whole fight for like queer rights and like trans rights and equality is like overcoming this idea that like someone who who you don't agree with, who is like maybe as different physically, emotionally, spiritually than you has the same rights as you.

And so I think the whole idea of like painting someone as a monster or someone who does poppers or painting someone who does drugs, like, Like painting queer people and associating with that like puts us in a weird position where it's like, yes, I would like to defend poppers. Right. And again, you mentioned that they're a gray zone.

And I think that makes it even more complicated of like the legality of it all.

Love to talk about poppers on NPR.

Oh my God. This is so much.

Let's go.

C is J-Lo. That's J-Lo, I believe. Oh, I guess C. Okay.

It was a huge week for Caucasian women who might have girl crushes.

Because Haim also had a new song.

I would like Rihanna to date someone who ever inspires her to make another album. That's all I want.

Maybe like Rihanna. Leave Rihanna and Beyonce.

Showing 141–160 of 190 · page 8 of 10