I often say that this show is about intimate relationships of all kinds.

Not just romantic and sexual relationships, which tend to be the only ones that our society considers to be under the umbrella of “intimacy,” but also family relationships and friendships and mentorships, platonic love affairs and business partnerships, and all the rest of the meaningful relationships a human can have.

We also deepdive into the one relationship that is intrinsic to all of these, and yet not always named as such: our relationship to ourselves.

The lion’s share of this episode is about self-intimacy. How we think to ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we treat ourselves, care for ourselves, how we mother ourselves, and how we pick ourselves up…

In this episode, recorded on my trip to Los Angeles in early December, I lie down with Bevin, aka queerfatfemme, fearless torchbearer of body-positivity and positivity in general, warrior for self-love, creator of Fat Kid Dance Party aerobics, former lawyer, empress of tea, and purveyor of radically colorful fabulosity. She’s also a reiki practitioner and a Life Purpose Coach. Go swimming in all things kind and sparkly and jubilant on queerfatfemme.com

She describes her gender as Dolly Parton and Miss Piggy. I pretty much wanted to talk to her forever. I settled for 3 hours. This is the first half of that conversation. It's a helluvan episode.

In it, we talk about a gender-expansive lifestyle, seasonal affective disorder, self-love, self-compassion, self-care for Future Us, fatphobia, multiple coming-outs, soulmates, and systems of oppression that, in Bevin’s incisive words, “intersect on the body and bloom.”

Next week's episode, 62. we can be benefits, but not friends... contains the second part of our conversation, in which I tell the entire 17-year story of the romance that led to my abortion in October, is available on Patreon to patrons of $5 and up per month.

Patreon is the love child of crowd-funding and a subscription service. When you sign up, you’ll get a special RSS feed (that’s the stream of episodes that are available to my patrons - which includes love poems of the month, for my $10 and up patrons). You add that to your podcast player, and it gives exclusive access to all the episodes, every part two, going back to the beginning. Patreon.com/horizontalwithlila 

Welcome to my darling new patrons this month: Pan, Nick, Louis, Ava, David, Emilee, Donald, Jacob, Charles, Olivia, Sheila, Trep, Renata, Greg, and Taekia, Nicole, Ariana, and an extra happy dance for Christian, who upped his patronage in December!

I’m deeply committed to Intimacy Maven as a career choice, and continuing to create work that diminishes loneliness, dispels shame, and alchemizes human connection, in multiple mediums. You can help me happen it.

Patronage begins at $2 a month, and I absolutely cherish every single patron. All patrons are invited to my secret Facebook group, where I share fascinating sex-positive articles, and behind-the-scenes things, and my Feels and goals and musings. I know some friends of mine have been hesitant to be a patron if they could only do $2 a month, but let me assure you: If everybody who was positively impacted by my writing or this podcast became a $2 a month patron, it would change my life. That’s the beauty of this new era of creation.

And here’s an extra special perk from now until the end of the year: When you become a patron by January 1st, I’ll send you a handwritten thank you love note & a saucy horizontal sticker. My handwriting has been described as "perfect!" "ridiculous!" “like a font!” I’m just saying.

For more horizontality in your life, you can receive my words in your inbox once a week(ish). I call them missives, and they are full of my personal writing, bits of the show notes for each episode with links to the whole thing, invitations to my live events, and horizontal photos, often in unexpected places. The last missive was titled “how does it feel to want?” and was all about longing.

Sign up for all that goodness on horizontalwithlila.com and add lila@horizontalwithlila.com to your address book, because email servers are frustrating and strange and sometimes treat my email like Spam, which it is Not. If you used to get my emails and don’t anymore, that might be why! Rescue them, please!

Here are the humans who helped make horizontal happen: Chad Michael Snavely edits horizontal. Check him out on chadmichael.com. Shana Shay drew horizontal. Hire her through 99designs. Alan Markley scored horizontal. Find him on Instagram as plasticcannons.

Now, dear one, come lie down with us and a Persian squashy-faced cat named Biscuit Reynolds, in Los Angeles, California.

Horizontal is a podcast of intimacies recorded while lying down. Think of it as consensual eavesdropping.

Together, we’re making private conversations public, in order to dispel shame, diminish loneliness, and alchemize human connection.

Brene Brown, the world-renowned researcher/storyteller and expert on vulnerability, shame, and courage, states that shame (in a petri dish) needs 3 things to survive: secrecy, silence, and judgement. If you put the same amount of shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.

I envision this podcast as a douse of empathy.

In this episode, I lie down with Samia Mounts in my bed at Hacienda Villa, the sex-positive intentional community in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Samia is a singer, actress, voice-over artist, creator of music, and a polyamorous podcaster of political proportions, with a voice built for stadiums and arenas. Currently based in Korea, I was fortunate enough to get horizontal with her when she was in town to sing at the Kennedy Center. She is a bisexual babe, a military kid, a half-Jordanian woman who grew up largely in South Korea, an advocate for nontraditional relationship structures, and a great believer in horizontality.

You may remember that I enthusiastically recommended Samia’s political podcast: Make America Relate Again. In it, Samia did something I'd never heard before in my life — she had respectful conversations about politics with women who voted for Donald Trump. Pretty much all the political conversations I hear between liberals and conservatives are acrimonious and combative. Make America Relate Again is based on the premise that if we can communicate respectfully with people whose viewpoints frustrate, enrage, or sadden us, we can cultivate more compassion in this sorely-divided country of ours. And if we stoke the fire of that compassion, we can work together to create positive change. Samia managed to put the humanity back into politics for me. I am impressed and astonished that she had the reserves of compassion and empathy to engage wholeheartedly in this way for two entire seasons. I find her to be brave in a way that I am lacking, and this had me tuning in.

Now in 2019, lucky for us, she'll be applying those skills to a new podcast called Future Love, one about polyamory and unconventional relationships and and sex and love, in which she aims to help people have more authentic, passionate, longer-lasting romances by forgoing the conventional rules, and instead, writing their own. To be apprised when her new podcast launches, and for all things Samia, including her articles about polyamory for Huff Post and Refinery 29, point yourself to samiamounts.com, and sign up for her mailing list!

Since our episode was recorded in my room, you’ll get a little local color from the Symphony Orchestra of Bushwick, but when you hear the crackling sounds of a Yule Log, that’s Samia, vaping.

In this first part of our episode, we discuss growing up as a horny little beast on a military base, playing lumberjack, dry-humping girls at 8, coming out as bi at 14, the year of the purge, a play I was in called An American Family Takes a Lover, Sex at Dawn, my new fashion friend, ordering food while fucking, Samia’s night with her new 48 year-old lover — we call him “Wild Man,” being multi-orgasmic, and cultivating lifelong sexy relationships. We cover a lot of ground!

To listen to the second part of my conversation with Samia, which will be released next Friday as episode 60, in which she tells me the most epic love story of her life, and the most epic friend-love story of her life, become a patron of the horizontal arts!

Patreon is the love child of crowd-funding and a subscription service. As a $5 month patron, you’ll get a special RSS feed that you can add to your podcast player, and it gives you exclusive access to all the episodes, every part two, going back to the beginning. I’ve made a little video tutorial for it, in case the RSS is confusing. It’s available on my Patreon page. (See what I did there?) Patreon.com/horizontalwithlila

And now, come lie down with us in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

***

For more horizontality, you can receive my words in your inbox once a week(ish). I call them missives, and they are full of my personal writing, bits of the show notes for each episode with links to the whole shebang, invitations to my live events, and horizontal photos, often in unexpected places. Sign up for all that goodness on horizontalwithlila.com and add lila@horizontalwithlila.com to your address book, because email servers are frustrating and strange and sometimes treat my email like a message Mr. Jim Carlos who misspells your name as well as several third grade words while asking you to wire money — which I’m pretty sure is not something that people do anymore. Please rescue my thoughtful, well-crafted emails from the depths of folders like “Spam” and “Promotions” and “Updates.” Thank you.

Here’s the credits: Chad Michael Snavely edits horizontal. Check him out on chadmichael.com. Shana Shay drew horizontal. Hire her through 99designs. Alan Markley scored horizontal. Find him on Instagram as plasticcannons.