Don Martin

queer folks created community in and around spaces where basically nobody else wanted them and they were allowed to exist.

So bars, bath houses, other places that kind of existed on the edges of legality.

And it's,

In those spaces, it's out of those spaces that community was formed.

Basically, if you've ever seen that cartoon where there's a whole bunch of people and they're in a little box and they're like, well, you can't be in here.

And so this other person goes and creates their own little box.

It's that.

Marginalized and oppressed communities are actually brilliant at meeting the needs of their own community and creating community spaces, which is why they are so hesitant at times to welcome outsiders into their spaces.

But if you experience an intersection of marginality, you are typically just inherently more lonely than other people because you are already experiencing being ostracized from society at large.

Yeah, focus on talking to people in overlooked or misunderstood fields.

I've really formed a huge appreciation just for expertise and for what expertise means.

Like I've talked to a mycologist about how studying fungus on fruits greatly impacts the American diet and pesticides and all of that.

I've talked to a woman who studies sound, like ocean sounds, and what we are learning about the memory of the planet.

and also how it's made her a better cellist.

I talked to Jerry Saltz, Pulitzer Prize Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine, just like about the value of opinion and the democratization of criticism and what that means and whose opinion matters.

And I've just really formed

a deep appreciation for what it means to be an expert.

And I just think it's really cool that people have these like deep wells of knowledge.

And what I've learned about it is that there is so much out there that I don't know.

And that excites me because I get to spend the rest of my life learning.