Queer Radio: OUT Cast Collective

Queer Spirit first hit the airwaves in 2019, thanks to the OUT Cast radio collective in Portland, Maine.

WMPG 90.9 FM is a community radio station sponsored by the University of Southern Maine. Of the many local shows that were broadcast through WMPG, one was a series that was shepherded by a collective known as OUT Cast, a group of LGBTQ artists and activists interested in providing an explicitly queer perspective on all facets of community and culture including the news, sports, and, soon, religion.

The OUT Cast collective belonged to a long line of LGBTQ radio programs that stretched back to at least the 1970s. "Because it was on the radio, often late at night," NPR reported, "closeted people could listen quietly and discreetly, without the fear of discovery that printed material might bring." And while Queer Spirit now aired in prime, daylight hourse, it's communal mission remained the same. For decades, from Houston, to L.A., to Maine, the radio has been a means of connecting queer communities and making queer experience visible to a wide audience.

Proposal for Queer Spirit series 2019.pdf

Initially, the OUT Cast collective imagined only a single show on religion. They reached out to their own Marvin Ellison, a scholar, activist, and faith leader in Maine, to ask if he would like to be interviewed as the subject of the one religion episode. Marvin, along with his colleague Rev. Tamara Torres McGovern, responded with a different proposal.

Marvin and Tamara envisioned a show that would capture a larger diversity of sexuality and spirituality. So instead of a single episode, Marvin and Tamara proposed a whole series. "What if we rediscover the spiritual heritage of queer saints and troublemakers?," their proposal asked.

At first, OUT Cast was largely neutral, even averse, Marvin remembered, to religion and spirituality. If religion wasn't boring, it was certainly irrelevant, right? But OUT Cast knew Marvin and Tamara and agreed to let them go forward with the series, even if they were unsure what, exactly, it would be about. "We were strangers in a strange land," Marvin said. "Evangelists in a very secular, queer space.”

Long before Marvin and Tamara crafted the Queer Spirit radio series, they had engaged in a running dialogue about the challenges of being queer in religious spaces and being religious in queer spaces. As queer religious professionals of differing generations, they had both trained at Union Theological Seminary in New York and were subsequently engaged in ordained ministry, one as an academic and public theologian and the other as a congregational pastor. As a result, in 2019, when Marvin was first approached by OUT Cast, he and Tamara quickly seized the opportunity to suggest a more ambitious alternative: a show that would provide a Maine listening audience with a set of lively conversations with various faith leaders, theologians, and visionaries who spanned multiple religious traditions, spiritualities, and queer identities.

In total, Queer Spirit interviewed over 30 queer spiritual leaders in Maine and stayed on the air for three years, until the OUT Cast collective itself closed in 2022. During that time, the message that filled the air was that spirituality and sexuality were deeply linked. “In some ways the queer community became a form of spiritual community — like a church of sort," Torres McGovern told the Bangor Daily News in 2020 [see full article below]. "A place where people found one another and confronted the hard things about life together.”

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