Pride Inside

·58 min·4 clips

A six-year-old spends an entire summer secretly living as a boy during swimming lessons — and receives a report card addressed to 'your son' that exposes everything.

1. Selected Shorts' 'Pride Inside' is a Pride Month program hosted by Meg Wolitzer featuring three short fiction pieces by queer writers, recorded live at Symphony Space in New York City. 2. Meg Wolitzer, the host, is an author and longtime Selected Shorts collaborator; the three performers are Becca Blackwell (No Bikini), Mike Doyle (Sleepless), and Michelle Beck (Snowfall). 3. The episode's core thesis is that the legacy of the 1969 Stonewall Riots includes the right to share 'ordinary, yet still extraordinary, stories of love and family' — with both defiance and acceptance present in each story. 4. 'No Bikini' by Ivan E. Coyote follows a child who, handed a red-and-blue two-piece swimsuit, simply leaves the top part behind and attends six weeks of swimming lessons as a boy. 5. The child describes the freedom of those six weeks: 'it was easier not to be afraid of things like diving boards and cannonballs when nobody expected you to be afraid' — and 'I had not covered them up in the first place' as the logic for feeling unashamed. 6. The story's comic payoff arrives when the swimming instructor's report card, read aloud in the car, opens with 'he is not afraid of water over his head' and addresses the parents as having 'your son.' 7. The child's closing line — 'She was right. I couldn't be trusted with a two-piece' — reframes the summer not as deception but as a quiet assertion of self-knowledge. 8. 'Sleepless' by Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize, The Hours) places the narrator and his partner Trask awake for three or four days at a rented coastal house 'far north,' having 'stopped setting their clocks long ago when it was always going to be too late.' 9. Their dying shepherd-retriever Pilot and their companion Heather — who leaves the next morning for massage school in Fall River after years of traveling with them — frame the story as an elegy for a particular kind of nomadic life. 10. Cunningham uses jazz as ambient texture: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and Herbie Hancock play on scratchy vinyls as Trask and the narrator dance slowly to Miles Davis who says 'with his horn, gaudy, beautiful world.' 11. The story's central tension is the narrator's observation that 'the earth is forgetting us' — and that Heather and Trask are both in the process of leaving, while the narrator describes himself as someone who 'maintain[s] that it's all homes.' 12. At dawn, Trask says 'Hello there, beautiful boy' for the first time, and the narrator recognizes immediately that Trask has already 'looked up the train times' — the story ends with them agreeing to one last dance. 13. 'Snowfall' by Deesha Philyaw, from her debut collection 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies' (finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction; winner of the Story Prize), follows Arletha (called 'Lili') and her partner Rhonda shoveling their driveway before work after Arletha overslept again. 14. The story's emotional core is an extended, lyrical catalogue of everything the couple misses from the South: grandmothers' bare arms hanging laundry, sun tea in big jars, banana pudding at oak tables, house coats scented with Absorbine Junior and White Shoulders — 'we lost all of those things when we chose each other.' 15. Arletha's estrangement from her mother — who refuses to say Rhonda's name, refused to meet her, and told Arletha 'you're all I've got in this world' as she walked out the door — underlies the night of ceiling-staring that caused the morning's friction. 16. Rhonda's own mother had put her out as a teenager; they haven't spoken in 20 years; a cousin reported that Rhonda's mother tells people Rhonda is 'probably dead somewhere.' 17. The story's crisis arrives when Arletha slips on ice outside her car on campus and, unable to move, feels a primal urge to call her mother — but calls Rhonda instead; Rhonda's response to 'I almost called my mother' is simply: 'Must be nice.' 18. The story is left unresolved at the transcript's end, with Arletha wanting to tell Rhonda 'she is home, too' but knowing 'nothing I can say will change' what her near-call revealed. 19. Meg Wolitzer frames all three stories between readings with brief literary commentary; the production is polished live performance with minimal sonic intervention between stories. 20. The episode is suited for listeners with an interest in literary short fiction, LGBTQ+ identity, and the emotional complexity of belonging and family estrangement.

As heard by us

A Pride program that finds its strength in the stories, not the speechifying.

Selected Shorts treats Pride Month as a scene for love, family, and belonging, and it works best when it lets the stories carry the weight. The strongest stretch moves cleanly between humor and hurt, from Ivan E.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want Pride stories that feel literary, humane, and quietly moving.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Selected Shorts