Hello!

This book isn’t about celebrity, it’s about queer heritage. And passing it on.

Today we meet Brent Love and we’re talking about the book that saved his life: Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile.

Brent Love is the author of the memoir Leap which debuted in June 2024. He is also the host/producer of the podcasts Hope Works: A Surrogacy and You and Me and Everyone We Know. Brent currently resides in Hawaii with his family.

In Broken Horses, Brandi Carlile takes readers through the events of her life that shaped her very raw art–from her start at a local singing competition where she performed Elton John’s “Honky Cat” in a bedazzled white polyester suit, to her first break opening for Dave Matthews Band, to many sleepless tours over fifteen years and six studio albums, all while raising two children with her wife, Catherine Shepherd.

Connect with Brent

website: heybrentlove.com
instagram: @heybrentlove
linkedin: @heybrentlove
podcast: Hope Works: A Surrogacy Podcast
podcast: You and Me and Everyone We Know

Our Bookshop

Visit our Bookshop for  new releases, current bestsellers, banned books, critically acclaimed LGBTQ books, or peruse the books featured on our podcasts: bookshop.org/shop/thisqueerbook

To purchase Broken Horses visit: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9780593237267

To purchase Leap visit: https://bookshop.org/a/82376/9798889260202

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Credits

Host/Founder: J.P. Der Boghossian
Executive Producer: Jim Pounds
Associate Producers: Archie Arnold, K Jason Bryan and David Rephan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kaefer, Joe Perazzo, Bill Shay, and Sean Smith
Patreon Subscribers: Stephen D., Terry D., Stephen Flamm, Ida Göteburg, Thomas Michna, and Gary Nygaard.
Creative and Accounting support provided by: Gordy Erickson
Music and SFX credits: visit thiqueerbook.com/music

Quatrefoil Library

Quatrefoil has created a curated lending library made up of the books featured on our podcast! If you can’t buy these books, then borrow them! Link: https://libbyapp.com/library/quatrefoil/curated-1404336/page-1

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated by our recording platform Squadcast. This transcript may not include episode narration and contains the original interview between J.P. Der Boghossian and today’s guests. Any time-stamps do not correspond to the released audio file and tend not to be fully generated throughout the entire interview. It is approximately 85% accurate and will include spelling and grammatical errors. For any quotation purposes, we strongly recommend referencing the audio.

J.P. Der Boghossian: Hey everyone, so as queer people, when we’re ready to start a family, it’s not quite, and forgive the expression, straightforward, but it’s true, right? The entire process is different for queer people, not least of which is the number of straight people who want to break us up and prevent us from creating families in the first place.

And that’s only part of what we’re talking about today. and a very special conversation about courage and bravery and putting your art out there for everyone to see. For new listeners, my name is J. P. Der Boghossian. I am your host, and you’re listening to This Queer Book Saved My Life.

Brent Love: My name is Brent Love, I am the author of, um, memoir. called Leap, which is a gay globe crossing memoir set in Armenia. And I’m a dad. And I think those are the two things that I am most proud of right now in my life.

J.P. Der Boghossian: Now, as too many people tell me, I don’t know everything about everything. But I do have one area of knowledge.

That some people might say that I could be considered an actual global authority on. And that is queer Armenian literature. So when I tell you that Brent’s book, Leap, is a first of its kind, then take it from me. As far as I’m aware, no one else has written anything like it. So Leap

Brent Love: is a book that just came out in June of 2024.

I don’t know when people listen to this, but June of 2024 and it is a book about coming out. I come out to my parents in a small town in Texas. It doesn’t go great. And then I leave three days later and spend a term of service in the Peace Corps in Armenia. So all my coming out experience is there. And I experienced queer culture in Armenia and my own coming out and kind of coming of age.

And it’s a book that was In my heart for a long time. I’m so glad that people can read it.

J.P. Der Boghossian: And when you read Leap for the first time, you’ll find yourself traveling throughout the entirety of Armenia. And please know, it is not Eat Pray Love. I would say, after reading it, and in my conversations with Brent, it is more appropriate to think of Leap as a queer motorcycle diaries.

Brent Love: Yeah, I haven’t talked about that in a while. Yeah, it’s um, it does have like a queer motorcycle diaries vibe. There’s a lot of people to fall in love with. I fall in love with them in the book in some ways and I think readers are falling in love with them too. We travel all over Armenia in that book and get into a lot of mischief and um, deal with a lot of things that people, you know, deal with when they’re coming out.

J.P. Der Boghossian: And now, here is my conversation with Brent.

So, Brent, what is the queer book that saved your life?

Brent Love: Queer book that saved my life is Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile. And

J.P. Der Boghossian: how did you come to read Broken Horses?

Brent Love: Uh, this will not be a surprise to people. I think, you know, Brandi Carlile, um, people who love her book are usually people who also love her music.

So I’ve been listening to Brandi Carlile for a very long time. In fact, I was listening to Brandi Carlile before I came out, before I came out to myself and before long before I actually came out, um, you know, to my parents and the events that happened in my own book. I listened to this story when I was still going to school in Abilene, Texas.

And I remember listening to her song, you know, people will know it’s like one of her biggest songs and sending it to my parents to love song. It’s about age. And I fell in love with her as an artist then, and I’ve listened to her as all these albums have come out. And now she is, you know, a very famous musician and has kind of reached a level of stardom, um, that she deserves.

And also I think wanted, as you read the book, you’ll find out she wanted that, um, stardom. So I was listening to her music for quite a long time. Her book came out in 2021. So reading it was very kind of near history for me. I know, you know, Listen to the podcast quite a lot. I know a lot of the books that happen, um, people talk about on, um, this queer book are, you know, older books that they encountered when they were maybe first coming out, but I had been out for, so I first read the book in the beginning of 2023, so beginning of last year, um, book was out for a couple of years before that, and I had been out for about 14 years and, you know, had wanted to read the book and first actually listened to it.

And I don’t read celebrity memoirs, really. It’s like kind of not my genre. I have read two. I have read Caitlyn Jenner’s memoir, which I wish I could remember. I know. I wish I could remember who the ghost writer is. Um, he wrote Friday. Well, he wrote Friday night lights. And so it’s actually like a good book.

It’s a really good book. You know, depending on how you feel about Caitlyn Jenner, you may or may not have read it, but, um, it’s actually a really good book. I read that when it came out. And then I, you know, it took me a couple of years to read Broken Horses and I should not have been surprised at all. Of course, that it’s beautiful.

It’s a beautiful book. It’s beautifully written by a person who writes beautifully. Surprise, surprise. So, um, you know, I just fell in love with it when I read it. And then as I was reading it. There’s so many, there’s so much confluence between her life and my life. So, you know, we’re roughly the same age, just a little bit older.

So a lot of her book covers like a celebrity memoir often does covers, you know, her young life all the way up to the point of releasing, you know, releasing that book. So, um, it covers her early religious upbringing, covers, um, uh, early brush with death when she was very young. And I, that is something that happened to me when I was very young, uh, she was really raised in a really religious community.

I was raised in a religious community. And then, you know, throughout her life, I just found so many stories relatable and, you know, walking away from the book, I think one of the biggest takeaways was how much courage and bravery I felt like I kind of borrowed from her while I was. Reading it, which I think we all look at celebrities a certain way.

And we, we assume often the amount of privilege that they have, which is true and right and valid and fine, but it doesn’t necessarily encompass the experience that the artist has and the amount of bravery and courage that. Brandy is a queer woman and as a woman at all in the industry that she’s in had to face.

And so I really walked away from that. Um, experience of reading the book, borrowing that courage. And I would say also I was in the middle of writing leap and as an artist putting my own work into the world, I, it was incredibly meaningful to me. She actually talks in the acknowledgements about the experience of writing and how scared she is about the book coming out.

Um, but also how important it was for her to write, um, all of that was just incredibly meaningful for me.

J.P. Der Boghossian: Why do you think courage and bravery were so important to you at this particular time in your life?

Brent Love: Oh, so many things to say about that. In 2023, we’d all just been through the pandemic, you know, I think all of us were reeling from the years of 2016 to 2020 as queer people, and then to go into, uh, the pandemic.

Go into the uprising after the murder of George Floyd and living in Indianapolis at the time. And we’re trying to raise young kids through that. And then at the same time, I started writing leap, uh, the beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic started. And so I’m pursuing my own dream of putting my own art into the world.

And. A memoir is so personal, my memoir is so personal, and it includes people that are alive. And I talked about the acknowledgements and actually the acknowledgements being so important for me because she says that specifically. She says it is, you know, what does she say? She says, I have to face my characters every day and I’m willing to walk that wire and find this balance.

And to hear her say that and to acknowledge that it is a scary thing to kind of stand in your truth of your own life and talk about that, which encompasses the experience of other people as well, is a terrifying thing. And my book deals with my parents and how my early coming out was very difficult for us.

And my parents are still alive, and I’m very grateful to have a wonderful relationship with them. But it was a scary thing to put that out into the world. And so, yeah, I borrowed all of that. You know, in the book, she’s going through those things as well. She went through a religious past that was traumatic.

She talks about later in the book as she’s getting ready to publish it, or I guess send it to her publisher, whatever that process was. She talks about going through the pandemic and she talks about the kind of the reckoning of the world around the murder of George Floyd and all of the lives that have been lost to that kind of brutality.

And facing that as a parent, bringing a young baby into the world, um, into this world that can be so scary. Gosh, I just was going through all of those things at that time. Sorry. It might actually make me cry, which is not very fun for a podcast because you can’t even see the people crying, um, but it is, um, It was incredibly moving for me to hear her, um, kind of face all of those things and how she did it as a queer person.

J.P. Der Boghossian: Is there a particular instance, like chapter or passage that stood out to you the most?

Brent Love: When she writes about building her family, she talks about, you know, she marries, uh, her wife named Cass. And she and Kath are deciding how to build their family. And it’s complicated and it’s always complicated for queer people who fall in love and want to get married.

And then they want to have children. She has to do research. She has to kind of figure out and navigate all of these, uh, ways to build family. She has to reach out to a donor who can help them have a baby. And in the midst of this, she talks about how scary it is that laws exist in this country that don’t support.

Family building in a lot of ways, and that even the laws and kind of rights that are codified into the law can be taken away for queer people so easily, and how scary that is as you’re trying to build a family and have the hope of building your family, and then also be afraid that it could be taken away.

Her writing about that is honest. There isn’t a lot of writing in the world about building queer families and what it’s like to build queer families. And so, just hearing that and seeing that on the page was really important to me. And then to have her write about that in the context of, The political environment, um, and the context of, uh, culture wars that happen around queer families, um, is incredibly, uh, important.

And I felt like I saw myself in that story.

J.P. Der Boghossian: You talked about, you know, being out for a while before finding broken horses and. There’s two books that I would say, if I were a guest on the show, that were, you know, the books that saved my life, right? One of them was very early on. I hadn’t come out yet. And it shaped implicitly, I didn’t even realize how it was doing it, uh, because it was talking about poly relationships, a home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham.

The other one was the Velvet Rage. By Alan Downes and I had been in therapy prior to this book and I engaged with the process and you know, tried, you know, various, uh, modes, uh, to try to help me, you know, unpack and deal with what I had gone through. And I call that before Velvet Ridge, uh, because reading Velvet Ridge suddenly changed everything because it was written for queer men and women, right?

It was written from a queer perspective about how to address these things and the phenomena that’s going on that doesn’t necessarily get addressed in what could be coded, you know, straight heterosexual, you know, treatment when you’re not thinking about what those, you know, things look like. And I read it and immediately I went into therapy and I was like, I want to address this, this, this, this, and this because I didn’t even realize, I didn’t even realize, even though I had been doing therapy, I had been doing great work in that therapy and it was very important, you know, it got me to where I, you know, where I was at that point in my life, which was a lot healthier, right?

Uh, but reading The Velvet Rage. just unlocked something or opened a door or whatever, you know, metaphor you would like to use. It sounds like for you, Broken Horses was doing the same thing that it was beginning to again, unlock things or open doors that would it be fair to say you didn’t realize were there, or you did realize they were there.

And now suddenly you had a way of finally Addressing it.

Brent Love: Oh man, that is such a great question. And it’s kind of, you know, as a writer and it’s, you know, it’s just a human, I love insight and I love that kind of serendipity that happens. And I, I always say that like great insight, um, or these kinds of things that you’re describing, they are so powerful because they feel all at the same time, new.

And exciting. And also as if they’ve always been there and, you know, as if it’s touching a part of you, that’s always been there. And that’s why it rings true. I think broken horses, you know, she talks about religion. She talks about family building. I, in the writing of my own book and exploring my own life at the same time as reading this, this kind of idea of belonging and where to queer people belong and how do we belong and where’s our geography and where’s our heritage, her talking about Elton John.

Throughout the book, you know, as a person who like, you know, I said at the top of this show, like I don’t typically read celebrity memoirs and I will. Um, say that I think a lot of people kind of see a celebrity memoir and they’re like, Oh, okay. How serious is that? And I think, Oh, Brandi Carlile talking about Elton John.

Of course she knows Elton John, but her Elton John arc through the book is so powerful to me. And it touched on this idea of queer heritage that I had never thought about before. And the Elton John as a queer person and as a brave person in her. In his interactions with her, it’s almost like kind of handing her this queer heritage that he has built and been part of.

And now he’s encouraging her music. He’s showing up for her and almost like passing, uh, his, you know, lighting her torch with his torch and it’s kind of like passing the torch way. Right. And I had never thought about queer heritage. Um, in that way and how lucky she is and how lucky I am for the queer people in my life who are older than me, who have done so many things and who, um, pass that on.

And then, of course, I think not just for my kids, but for younger queer people as a, you know, person kind of entering middle age, like as a younger queer people who need their torches to be lit. By queer people, you know, she talks about how he calls her out of the blue and how meaningful that is and how she’ll stop anything she’s doing.

Like she’s on stage about to perform and she’ll, she’ll just tell everyone to stop everything and be quiet. It’s an unknown phone number and it could be Elton John, you know, and it’s not just about the celebrity. It’s about the handing down of that. Of that queer heritage. And I think it’s so cool that she talks about.

Uh, so that’s one of those things that I hadn’t thought about before, but also rang so true to me and made me seek out other books. The one I’m thinking of now is, uh, is a cookbook called tasty pride filled with recipes. I know it’s like, this sounds so silly. Silly to connect these two, but like this idea of queer heritage, like all of these recipes, um, if you read the notes ahead of the recipes are all about these moments, these critical moments in queer people’s lives and how this food tradition now is established and they can hand this food tradition on to more queer people.

Like where did that idea come from? And I hadn’t accounted it before broken horses. It’s very cool.

J.P. Der Boghossian: When I think about inheriting queer heritage, this really got me thinking. Can you tell me more about the queer heritage that you felt you were inheriting? Through Broken Horses or through just in general

Brent Love: in life?

I think after reading Broken Horses. Yeah. The most critical piece for me, I think comes through the arc that she talks about around her religious experience. She had these wild religious experiences when she was little the very first, I mean, you will know if this book is for you if you read and you get to the Teddy Ruxpin angel, let me see if I can describe this, she talks about like her, one of these First experiences with God that she had.

And she had a teddy reman and she would record, you know, different things on the tape to listen to at night. And she woke up one day and the tape had this music on it like she’d never heard before. Full of angel, like angelic music like that she felt like was coming from some other place and she couldn’t, she talked to all of her family members and nobody had done anything to this tape, you know, recorded anything.

And everybody was like, whatcha talking about? And it’s just a very. Strange experience and she talks about it and that way, then she moves on to talk about later, um, about getting, wanting to get baptized. And at the time she was a teenager and she was already having experiences with other young women, her age and, but she was in a community.

She’d been raised religious, um, she was in a community and she, that was difficult for her and she was scared and she should be really clinging to this religion and these religious experience. She had the young person, she went to get baptized and they asked her 2 questions. And the 2nd one was, have you engaged in homosexuality?

And she said, basically. Yes. Seems fine. Right. And he, and the pastor at our church wouldn’t baptize her. And she ran out of the Baptist street, like the plate, she was ready. She was in her swim trunks. She was ready to get baptized. And she ran out and she ran all the way home. And it was incredibly traumatic.

And she refers to that event throughout the book. And then, um, Later, I can’t remember the exact quote, but she basically says, in a lot of different ways, and really, I think in writing the memoir, it’s like she’s looking in the mirror and she’s saying, I know what I know, I know what I know, and no one can take that from me, and I think as queer people, we question our lives.

So much, almost daily, all of these decisions we’re making and are they right decisions? Are they morally right? Morally wrong? I had this experience, but I, did I really have that experience with God or with, uh, with other people and her as a, as an older person in the queer community, you know, at this point she’s in her forties.

For her to kind of basically take this memoir and use it as a way to bring her, bring us into her life, where she is looking in that mirror and saying, I know what I know, and no one can take that from me. That is something I felt like she handed to me. And I looked back at my own life, yes, in my memoir, but also just like throughout my religious life, throughout my family life and, and saying, I know what I know.

And no one can take that from me. And that is strength. I feel like she handed me in this book and I think anybody who reads it can take that away. And, and kind of be handed that from her when they read it.

J.P. Der Boghossian: I don’t know why that’s bringing up for me this idea that things that seem run of the mill every day of the, you know, church experience, you know, I would say, you know, Baptist, Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, you know, all these quote unquote mainstream religions that aren’t, they wouldn’t define themselves as cults, right?

Yeah. Um, but you. look at their practices from a queer perspective. And sometimes it can very much feel that way. I mean, I remember an experience where One day the senior pastor is like, I want you, I need your help. And I was like, Oh my God, the senior pastor is asking for my help. Yes, of course. And he said, I just, you know, I’m going to call you up on stage.

You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to do anything. I just, when I call you up, you’ll sit on this, you know, there’ll be a stool there for you to sit on and you just sit there. That’s all you got to do. And I’m like, Oh, well, yeah, obviously I’m going to help you out with that because I was, you know, going to become a youth pastor.

And I was like the model and the youth group. Oh my God. Yeah. I was, I was on the path, right? I had my, I was in junior high. I already had my college picked out the program. I knew exactly what was going to happen. And so time comes, he calls my name up. Everybody’s like turning like, Oh, what is this? And I get up on stage and I sit down on the stool and, um.

The pastor, I don’t remember exactly how he got to this point, but he said essentially to the effect of the challenge that he put out to the audience was, who is going to save this boy? From sexual deviance and from pornography and he just started doing all of these this litany of stuff my eyes Almost bugged out of my head.

I felt the retinas. I Felt I’m a blusher like folks will know this about me. Like I will blush at the stupidest things But this time I was brick red flaming Literally flaming red And then, my dad stood up and he read from a card what he was supposed to read, which was, you know, I will stand for him. And I never accepted any, I was like, I’m never helping this pastor again.

Like, and for the rest of my time, I always wondered, like, did they know? How did they know? How did they know? Like, why did they pick me for, you know, who’s gonna save some this kid from sexual deviancy, you know what I mean, and pornography? Like, why was I was the literal poster child. Poster child in that church.

And to this day, I have no idea why he picked me. No idea why he picked me. Um, to, to say those things and even my dad was on the church board, like it was, I’m like, you know, why don’t you pick somebody who may be on the, you know, maybe board like folks who believe, you know, that they would be into that.

But, um, I do have a point of where I’m going to this because I’m not just wanting to sit here and share my personal traumas. What advice would you have based off of reading Broken Horses and the processing that you’ve gotten to do to folks who may still be dealing with their religious experiences as queer people in their adulthood and let’s say adulthood is anything over 18.

Brent Love: So I don’t know if you know that I studied ministry in college at a Christian college. And I did, you know, all of my undergrad work and not know that, um, I was going to be a missionary. I actually, I double majored in political science and ministry. And I, the ministry degree, I had one course left my senior year and I decided not to finish.

So this, What you shared and this experience, what Brandy writes about, about religion, you know, really does hit home for me. And it’s something that I’ve kind of grappled with my whole life. I’m not a, I don’t consider myself a Christian at this time. And it’s been a big grappling for me. The thing that changed after reading this book, I already described this idea of I know what I know, you know, I know what experiences I’ve had.

That feel beyond human. I have written them down. I have journaled them. I go back to them. I kind of mentally put myself there. I think for people who are grappling with their religious experience and the messages that they hear, the trauma they’ve been through, like you described, I would say your religion, your spirituality is yours, and it doesn’t belong to anyone else.

Your experiences are yours. No one was in your body while you were talking to God or communing with nature or however you’ve had that no one can take it from you and only you can let them go and you should let go experiences that are not good for you, but you should keep the ones that keep you afloat and you should keep the ones that.

Speak to your soul and help you move forward the ones that make you more loving the ones that make you more open to care for others and for our world and you should look yourself in the mirror before you go to church and remind yourself of who you are and the experiences that you’ve had. Right. And, and don’t let those be changed or misinterpreted or denied or, uh, or defined by other people.

Let them just be yours. They’re sacred. And if God is reaching out to you in some way, it means he’s reaching out to you. So, or she’s reaching out to you or they are reaching out to you or whatever, you know, Um, we dunno a lot about God, including God’s pronouns. Um, so yeah, that’s what I say.

J.P. Der Boghossian: They’re, he, they, and he was born in

Brent Love: America.

So get with it. . I am, uh, not, I am not snapping, but I’m waving my hand like I am. Can I, uh, talk about queer heritage a little bit more? ’cause there was something else that I wanted to say that’s not about religion. Uh, the other part of queer heritage that broken horses gave to me and kind of helped me kinda see in different ways, but also just.

Strengthened for me is Brandy putting her queer experience. Deeply embedded into family and gosh, her commitment to family is just throughout the book. And when I say family, of course, I mean, chosen family, blood family. However, you’re related to each other, the good and the bad and the ugly. She. Um, is very committed as a young person to that she is, has, you know, kind of these love, hate relationships with siblings, but honors those relationships in her writing, um, so deeply and then as she has her own children.

Um, and you know, Mary’s her wife, her commitment to them in the midst of stardom, but also her commitment to them in the midst of being a queer person in this world that is so hard to be a queer person. You can tell how much it means to her and how much her experience as a queer woman, queer mother, a wife is part of a line of family that comes before her and will go on after her and that, you know, queer families are not.

Kind of an other thing on the side of regular families, but that we are embedded in the family trees of all of the family trees in the forest that creates humanity and our love and our traditions and our art and our, and the things we share. Are so much part of that. I love how she never leaves her family side, even when she’s on tour and all buses must accommodate her wife and her daughter, how she writes about how difficult some of the tours were and how she would be on stage and know that her young baby was out there.

You know, uh, having not an easy time going through being on tour and how much that meant to her and how she grappled with that, that was really important to me, especially as a parent of young kids at the time that I read this.

J.P. Der Boghossian: I’d be curious your take on, something that’s kind of come up for me over the past 12 months specifically in terms of thinking through family of choice and biological family, right?

Is it with biological family, there is this, and particularly with, uh, You know, Arminian backgrounds of obligation by blood, right? That that is the, that is the connection. It doesn’t matter if you like each other. It doesn’t matter if you have the same interests. It doesn’t, you know what I mean? You are, there is a bloodline there and that is that.

And you are, you exist to propagate the bloodline, but also to defend the honor, right? Of the, of the bloodline. And what you do as an individual doesn’t matter, right? Which is. It’s this kind of always tension between both sides of the Atlantic that I personally have to navigate. But with Chosen Families and what queer folks have done, I think has really demonstrated that obligation isn’t enough.

You know, there has to be action. There has to be camaraderie. There has to be, um, Not just allyship, but accomplishing. You know, being an accomplice for, for one another. And I know in reading the book where you, your, your book, Leap, where you start with your family. Can you talk through, as someone who has created this very meaningful chosen family, and reading Broken Horses, and then finding a pathway of reconciliation?

And I’m actually putting that word out there, so I’m not quite sure if you would call it reconciliation with your, with your parents and your, and your bio family, but what did that look like for you?

Brent Love: Yeah. Well, I want to talk a little bit about like the kind of obligation that is cultural. Um, I think it serves an amazing purpose.

Right. Because it gives you a shorthand for what that obligation looks like. You don’t have to think it up on your own. You don’t have to think up how to do that. You’re handed it. That’s it’s really nice. It’s, it’s why those things exist. Of course it can be abused and used to control, but on the, on the flip side of that traditions, like holidays, like, you know, Kind of requiring quote unquote, to like attend holidays or weddings gives you a way to show up for your family that you don’t have to create yourself.

And as queer people, when you get pushed out of your family and pushed out of those traditions, it has, I think, as a group of people required us to go deeper and required us to look more deeply at why those traditions exist, what, why that obligation exists and what’s really at the heart of wanting to show up for each other as family.

And I think it’s why the Brandy’s commitment to her family and to. And so breaking that down for the reader, right? Like really talking about why these people mean something to her, honoring them with her words. I mean, you can just feel the honor, the honor that, you know, we’re obligated to by our cultural background, right?

She goes deeper and really just. You can read how she honors, like, for instance, the, um, the donor that donated sperm for her and her wife to have children is someone from her childhood and, you know, you meet him when you’re reading about her childhood and then you see him again when she’s family building and the way that she honors him.

Describing him talking about traits that I think other people might find difficult. He’s very seen from the reading of it. He’s very, um, reserved. He doesn’t keep up with her life in a way that some people might want. I guess their sperm donor to keep up with her life. Like he, he didn’t know that she won Grammy is when she won Grammys, right?

She had to call him and tell him that kind of thing. But she honors that about him and she honors like who he is. And she takes that obligation deeper. In, you know, and I was so, I’m writing Leap at the time that I’m reading this. And I will say as people have been reading my work, one of the things that they have said to me is how, I guess, I don’t know, it’s grateful how they, how they love that even though we have, my parents and I have such a difficult beginning of that book that they can feel the love that we have for each other in the way that I continue writing through them, writing about them through the book.

And that was really important to me to honor them and honor what was good. And what was always good and what stayed good, even though we were having this really intense rift between us over my coming out. I don’t, you know, I don’t love spoilers. We’re talking about reconciliation with my parents. Um, I actually have in mind the next book that I’m going to write, which does include kind of three things.

More about how we came back together, but what I want to say about all of that is that, and I, and I, you know, I will say also read a reaction to my book includes the, this idea that even though you come out and you might have like the worst version of your coming out story that you can imagine. No, my coming out story.

I had imagined it going well, when I came out to my parents, I had imagined it going very badly. Okay. And it wasn’t the worst coming out experience that has ever happened on the earth. But for me, in my imagination, it was the worst I could imagine happening. And even on the worst night like that, it wasn’t an end for us.

And the reason it wasn’t an end for us reason we stayed in contact is that both of us were able to honor the things that were really good and that we still and had always loved about each other. I talk a lot about the idiom of the, I mean, it’s kind of silly, the idiom actions speak louder than words.

And I did, I had to do a lot of kind of interpreting words and hearing words that really hurt, but also receiving actions like care packages, like my mom. Uh, coming to visit me in Armenia, a parent who is, you know, rejecting their child after coming out does not fly across the planet to a country they’ve never been to, to spend time with their son.

Right. And so I’m interpreting, you know, and so it was really important to me to kind of repeat to myself, actually speak louder than words and really to take in some of, uh, like the good things that were happening and cherish the parts of our relationship that had always been good. And because of the way my parents were interacting with me, I could see we’re still good and that was really important to me.

J.P. Der Boghossian: You had started to describe the connection and I kind of want to tease it out more. Um, to the point that it, the connection exists between, uh, broken horses and the influence, did it have influence in how you were writing Leap? Um,

Brent Love: read so much writing about writing. I’ve been in. So many courses about writing and I’ve heard so many authors or people kind of setting out to write their memoir that said, I’m never going to write this book until the people in it have passed away because I just am so scared, you know?

And I think it’s a very common experience for writers. And so absolutely the courage that she has to put the good, bad, and the ugly on the page of people that she is still in a relationship with, um, gave me a lot of courage. I think the, I was I think there as a queer person being vulnerable in any way is scary, right?

Putting your own story out is scary as a person who has a family. As a person who, um, has like an inner child that was very, very scared growing up, I was scared to do that. And the things that she talks about and the overlapping of our lives and the kind of experiences that we were having, you know, throughout our lives that were so similar, uh, emboldened me to write about them and boldened me to write about the religious trauma of my childhood.

Um, and, and to share more about that. Um, but also emboldened me to write in that way of. Acknowledging and honoring the good things that are good, standing in front of the mirror and saying, I know what I know, being able to go to the page and be honest and offer that to the world, knowing that maybe they’ll like it.

And maybe they won’t, but it is my, it’s my gift to give, you know, uh, whether or not people need it as their choice, but it is, is the thing that I have to offer. Um, and. I really was emboldened by Broken Horses while I was writing.

J.P. Der Boghossian: As we’re talking about the influences of Broken Horses on Leap, were there things about Broken Horses originally that surprised you?

Brent Love: Yeah. Um, I think, you know, one of the, Biggest things about this memoir that was a surprise to me. And I think one of the coolest things is, um, Brandy Carlisle includes a lot of material in between chapters. So, um, I first read this book as an audio book it’s magical because between every chapter she is singing.

She was recording, uh, original tracks of songs that influenced her, uh, as a child song, she wrote. During the period of the chapter that you had just read, um, really deeply moving stuff. And of course, if you’re a fan of Brandon Carlisle, and you love her music, it’s really special to get to kind of these like studio recordings that are clearly her honoring the story that she’s just told and also trying to connect to us.

You know about that. And then in the book, um, the printed book, there are, um, lyrics of songs. So you kind of get those lyrics and then you get, um, a lot of photos that pertain to the stories that she just told. Usually, of course, they’re chronological. Um, but you get to see the people that she is writing about.

You get to see her at the age she’s writing at the, um, She describes herself as a boy in a boy band in her first band when she was a teenager with her. Um, and she, you know, she talks about, um, her gender journey in those early chapters. You get to see it, right? Um, one of the images in the books that is the most profound for me is the birth certificate of her daughter, Evangeline.

Um, so the chapter that she, Um, had just, you know, written before these images is about becoming a parent. And of course I, you know, described all of the process she went through, but, um, uniquely as a queer woman, um, and I really identify with this. I’ve been involved in the, in, um, The surrogacy world as a, both as a parent myself, but also I worked for hope surrogacy and have joined the board of their surrogacy foundation.

So I’ve talked to a lot of women about becoming pregnant and, um, she describes. The feeling of the feeling she was having not carrying her children and her wife carrying her children and the connection that she maybe had some anxiety about that of some, as a man who cannot carry a baby was really amazing to read about.

I hadn’t read something like that before that really dealt with like I have this child and, and in my family, I’m not genetically linked to both of my children. And so that was never an issue for me as a parent. Um, I always knew I would be connected to them and that I was their dad, like regardless of blood.

Right. Um, and then these images, there’s a birth certificate. And, um, she, she had at that time also just written the song, the mother, which is beautiful. She includes some of the lyrics. It’s beautiful about how she’s the mother of Evangeline, her daughter. And how much that means to her. And then she puts the birth certificate in there and it says mother, what her wife’s name, father, her name.

And it’s such a great kind of ironic joke. And she, she treats it that way. And also, um, You know, honors herself as the mother of this baby. And I think that’s so cool and so unexpected and sometimes makes me feel like I wish I had put more photos in my book.

J.P. Der Boghossian: Um, I, I do want to ask you when it comes to your memoir, which is a first of its kind, I need to, uh, acknowledge that.

And I can literally say that as the founder of the queer Armenian library. And I track these things. Um, This is the first memoir that we see of someone who is American and then coming out and going to Armenia and then writing about that experience of queer, you know, of queer Armenia. And I think that I want to know for, for share with us, uh, with our listeners.

about that experience. Because I think there are a lot of Americans that are like, get out of Armenia if you live there, come to the States. It’s 100 percent better here in the States. And I think that’s kind of, uh, not accurate, uh, because of federal legislation, which overrides state legislation. So I think if there wasn’t federal legislation or, you know, uh, federal legal requirements that Idaho, And Missouri and Alabama would be just as restrictive and just as violent and just as, you know, um, problematic.

I wouldn’t say it’s violent, but problematic as problematic as, you know, the recurrent Republic of Armenia. So talk me through this queer awakening that you had, but you’ve got to have it in a country that is completely different in many regards from the United States.

Brent Love: I. I, first of all, I want to say, I completely agree with you.

And frankly, you know, being a queer person in America can be terrifying in a lot of places and still is in this moment that we are speaking. And so we don’t get any kind of, um, uh, as queer people, we don’t ever get to fully get away from that, no matter where we are. It’s one of the things like around queer geography, that is a concept.

Actually hadn’t thought about until reading broken horses and how these places, um, exist and how our existence and our art and our impact in those places creates that. Right. And that’s so much in my book. Uh, it’s so much a part of Armenia. I’m so honored, frankly, to be able to write about, uh, Cocoon, which doesn’t exist anymore, a queer bar where I had the very first gay bar I went to, um, is in Yerevan.

And it was the most beautiful experience with Armenian men who were able to connect to each other and find each other in this place. And to, and, and to know that that existed there and, and know that all of these men, of course, I didn’t know them. I’m just at a bar, right? But all of these men were able to find each other in Armenia.

And Somehow, right. And in a place where they can’t publicly be out, they were able to find each other and find this place to dance and to sing and to meet each other and fall in love. Right. That was it. It was such a gift to me as a gay person to see that and also to see that happen in a place that’s not America, right?

And to see that happen in a place like Armenia, where, you know, there are devastating stories that we see come out of Armenia in Armenian news about tragedy. And I don’t even want to like kind of speak about them because they’re not my stories to tell. Real tragedy that happens there. Um, I can speak to one event, which is, uh, in the book, you get to go with me and, um, my friends to DIY bar, which is a bar that was, um, bombed.

Soon after I left Armenia, right? So, so those things are scary, but the hope and the joy and the beauty of queer life is that, gosh, we find a way we find each other. And it’s so amazing to have been in Armenia and to have traveled throughout the country and to make these relationships and see that. When things are difficult because of outside forces, um, there’s incredible resilience and that resilience comes simply because we are kind to each other and we come together and we celebrate each other for who we are, who we dream to be, and we make that space to create our lives, even in a place where.

You, you can’t really be out for me. Um, gosh, I wouldn’t, this is not a prescription for anyone who is coming out. But because of the way that my life happened, the, it just so happened that the time in which I was leaving college, where I thought I might be a missionary and then decided not to be a Christian.

And then coming out happened to coincide with me joining Peace Corps. Right. And it happened. In a way that I was able to financially be safe, you know, um, which it can be very threatening for people in America, right? That you can lose your job in a lot of places because you’re gay. Um, I was able to kind of have a livelihood and then I was able to go, um, to Armenia and be myself among, um, other American volunteers and also around queer Armenians and have a life.

Um, be welcomed into the world of queer people in that context. Um, I didn’t, uh, that was really beautiful. The part that was difficult is that I was in the closet, you know, in the places that I lived and went outside of those queer spaces, and it was an experience, of course, that I shared with queer minions and it touched.

On the fact that not only do these kind of oppressive laws or oppressive cultural norms threaten the lives, um, and the dignity and the capability of queer people to build their lives, but also it threatens, um, And takes away the richness of queer people from the people who love them. I think about the families that I, that I fell in love with that are in the book, the Armenian families that I lived with, that I had these incredibly beautiful relationships with.

And I wasn’t able to come out to them. I wasn’t able to fully be myself with them. I was counseled, frankly, not to. And wow, I wish I could, like, I know that they love me. I know that they would have welcomed me and I didn’t get to bring the fullness of myself as a queer person into their lives and to allow them to be an ally.

To be a loving, caring person. And so that’s the other thing I think that kind of woke me up about being in Armenia as a queer person is that not only are queer lives, um, at risk, queer dignity, you know, the ability to build a life, but also just the ability to be alive. Can be at risk in places like America and like Armenia, but also, gosh, the loss we have as a community, um, as families, as people who love each other, who can’t just fully be with each other in community and that way.

It’s something that felt really profound to me. Um, and something that I still think about quite often, um, about the ways that we. All are robbed by this kind of oppression. Gosh, it just, I dream of Armenia, uh, having, can you imagine pride and Armenian villages, you know, the dancing, the traditional, that the spreads of food that would happen, right?

Like the dances that would happen. The, the drinking and carrying on and like, you know, if you haven’t experienced, if you haven’t experienced Noratari in Armenia, right. New Year’s, which for people who don’t know, um, New Year’s is the celebration in Armenia and includes, you know, Christmas falls within that first week of January, so it’s just major, I have.

Um, never experienced a mini day holiday like that, um, where you, I mean, you see it in the book. I’m like walking around, um, and my first notary experience, I’m walking around all the houses of the people I love and they’re welcoming me in and they have spreads and spreads of food waiting for everyone.

Anyone who walks into their house, so you show up and you walk in and you eat all this amazing food and you talk about the new year and you celebrate each other and you make toasts. Imagine pride like that, right? Imagine like, frankly, I’m like, wait, why don’t we do pride like that? Maybe, maybe I should, maybe we should just like all have our homes open.

We just like walking around, you know, with each other from days and days. Just like toasting each other and offering the best of what we have to each other. Gosh, like what a vision. And I, and that’s also the thing that is robbed from us when we, when we can’t just fully be ourselves in the places that we live, that everybody loses, um, on being able to build beautiful life experiences like that and beautiful connections to sustain them.

J.P. Der Boghossian: I want to thank Brent for being on the podcast today. If you are an audiobook person, then you are in luck. The audiobook of Leap will be coming out this October, 2024, and as you heard him say in the conversation, Brent is mapping out his next book project. To check out his upcoming events related to Leap and to stay up to date about his next book, head to heybrentlove.

com. You can also follow him on Instagram and LinkedIn. His handle on both is at heybrentlove. Links in the show notes and on our website. And

thank you for listening today. Our podcasts are executive produced by the one and only Jim Pounds. Accounting and creative support for our podcast is provided by Gordy Erickson. Our associate producers are Archie Arnold, K. Jason Bryan and David Repan, Bob Bush, Natalie Cruz, Jonathan Fried, Paul Kafer, Joe Perrazzo, Bill Shea, and Sean Smith.

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