The Interlude

WNYC’s Nancy podcast dropped its final episode, “Nancy Was Here,” on Monday, after four seasons of passionately relaying tales of LGBTQ love, heartbreak, politics, family tensions, and so much more. The podcast spawned a robust Facebook group, a queer money challenge complete with merit badges, and multiple “gaggles” of LGBTQ people finding their communities around the world.

Kathy Tu and Tobin Low hosted more than 100 episodes about the modern queer experience since 2017, including frank and unflinching conversations about navigating a largely cisgender, heterosexual world as people for whom it was not built. WNYC, which is part of NPR, decided to end the show after its fourth season due to an inability to grow the show’s audience, Current reports.

Nancy was revolutionary for so many reasons. Both of its hosts were young Asian Americans in a field overwhelmingly dominated by white voices, and the podcast covered topics like poor sex education in America, intimate partner violence within LGBTQ communities, the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting, being out at work, unaccepting parents, and the struggles and joys of transgender activists fighting for equal rights. The show managed to cover serious topics while simultaneously bringing queer laughter to avid listeners across the globe.

The end of Nancy comes as public media attempts to address the myriad ways it has misrepresented and underrepresented marginalized people, from radio hosts and producers to sources and guest speakers. In fiscal year 2019, NPR’s newsroom was 70 percent white.

Co-hosts Tu and Low were justifiably sad to witness the end of their show, but they made sure to provide some parting gifts for their devoted audience. For starters, the Facebook group, “Friends of Nancy” is here to stay under the leadership of Lauren Anderson, a loyal member since its beginning in 2018. With nearly 5,000 members, it has been a place for celebration over Supreme Court rulings, crowd-sourcing advice for coming out, and sharing lesser-known gay and transgender history. The Nancy team also put together a community-driven spreadsheet of other queer podcasts and episodes that is currently more than 100 entries long. Highlights include Afroqueer, History is Gay, LGBTQ&A, Making Gay History, and Gender Reveal.

Nancy got its name from “nancy boy” — a derogatory term once used to describe a seemingly effeminate or homosexual man. Beyond reclaiming the connotation of its title, the show also reclaimed space and airwaves for LGBTQ people from all walks of life asking if anyone out there felt exactly the way they did.

No episode better encapsulated this sense of recognizing yourself in other people than “Ring of Keys” from the first season. The story follows a woman, Sarah Lu, as she tracks down Maura Koutoujian, the kind owner of a general store who she met as a child. Lu realizes later in life, after coming out, that Koutoujian was the queer adult who demonstrated that LGBTQ people had a future beyond the awkwardness and pains of youth. The storekeeper became Lu’s “ring of keys person” — a reference to a song from the musical Fun Home in which a little girl struggling with her sexuality becomes enchanted with an older and confidence butch lesbian she spots across a diner one day. The episode managed to earn itself a spot in Tu and Low’s final 40-minute walk down memory lane.

Fans of the show expressed their gratitude for Nancy on social media after the announcement. “Thank you to all of the team who have worked on Nancy for all your hard work,” @BetsyEllie wrote on Twitter. “[A]nd thank you so much to Kathy & Tobin for being such amazing hosts & kind, loving people. you’ve made being queer a little bit easier for me, and I know many others feel the same. Love to you all.”