Brown 'n Out Podcast

Brown 'n Out Podcast is a Vermont interview show in which Reggie Condra talks with LGBTQ+ people of color about how they got to where they are. The method is patience. Condra usually starts somewhere concrete, like a birthplace, a hometown, a school or even the weather, and then steps back while the guest builds the story in long, winding sentences that double back and qualify themselves. Episodes are named after their guests, as in 'Episode 51: Sean Brewer, Jr.' or 'Episode 44: Praise', and the naming fits, because each conversation belongs to one person. Place is the thread that ties the guests together. Shani Stoddard, born and raised in Vermont and making the trip from Cambridge to Burlington to record, describes feeling thoroughly Vermont and not Vermont at all, and names the familiar follow-up about where one was born before getting here. Sean Brewer, Jr. comes from the nation's capital. Bianca Bello talks through graduate school in Fort Collins, where a racially diverse, queer cohort became a bubble for connection, healing and laughter, and where words for identity and oppression first arrived. Noa Coffey-Moore goes through a transfer to Hampshire, difficult family stretches and a first encounter with mental health that was not perfect, then turns to what Vermont could become for Black and brown youth. That turn is typical. Conversations that start with one life tend to widen toward community and the systems around it. Golden Mystique, speaking as a Black queer woman, describes writing with bell hooks, Angela Davis and Octavia Butler as touchstones, and a blog kept to a single entry because publishing it feels so vulnerable. The same conversation closes with direct words for white listeners and a plain demand to pay Black women for their labor. Praise was recorded at a Martin Luther King Jr. community celebration at the ECHO Center. That episode notes the criticism that clinical psychology has been shaped by white, western, heteronormative standards and argues that the field needs more Black women. It also credits a partnership with Clemens Family Farm and a grant from ArtPlace America. Not everything is heavy. Sean's dating-app story arrives at a firm resolve to stop self-sacrifice for a stranger's comfort, and Shani Stoddard's dogs, Blue and Basil, get a proper introduction. Condra affirms what a guest shares before moving to the next question, and small playful asides keep the grave moments from settling too heavily. A good place to begin is 'Episode 52: Bianca', which moves from a Vermont cold snap to a graduate-school cohort and ends with the guest saying there had never been a stage that centered two important parts of who they are. In the end, the show offers full first-person accounts of queer life of color, anchored to one state and given the time to arrive whole.