Queerly Beloved
Join your host, Wil Fisher (AKA "I Am Sylvia Wil Gather Rainbow"), for playful and profound interviews with amazing LGBTQIA+ peeps working in the field of spirituality and personal growth. Wil is a life coach, spiritual healer, and drag queen who loves getting super wu and chatting with fascinating folx about all things spiritually queer and queerly spiritual. You'll love hearing guests' spiritual path stories and gain knowledge as they share discoveries, insights and wisdom. Plus, these interviews tend to be a lot of fun- so expect to have some of that as well...!
Queerly Beloved
Hedwig, Wholeness & Queer Magic with John Cameron Mitchell
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In this episode of Queerly Beloved, Wil Fisher (aka. Sylvia Wil Gather Rainbor) sits down with the legendary John Cameron Mitchell, the actor, writer, director, singer, and cultural icon best known for creating, directing, and starring in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. John also wrote and directed Shortbus, directed Rabbit Hole, co-wrote and directed How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and created the podcast series Anthem: Homunculus and Cancellation Island.
In this rich, funny, provocative, and deeply human conversation, John shares reflections on the 25th anniversary of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the ways this beloved story continues to offer queer people a sense of complexity, liberation, and hope. He and Wil explore Hedwig not simply as a story about trauma, patriarchy, identity, survival, and the longing to become whole.
John also speaks about his relationship with Catholicism, ritual, queer spirituality, and the way queer people often learn early how to live inside nuance and contradiction. Together, explore humor as a queer survival tool, the limits of labels, the Radical Faerie community, psychedelics, dancing as medicine, AI, punk, and the sacred importance of staying human in a time of fear and disconnection.
They also discuss:
- John’s first remembered role as the Virgin Mary at a boys’ boarding school in Scotland
- Catholicism, ritual, theater, and queer complexity
- The danger of reducing people to labels or stereotypes
- Radical Faeries, Harry Hay, queer magic, and non-corporate expressions of queerness
- The difference between substances that expand connection and substances that deepen isolation
- AI, creativity, heartbreak, and why human art still matters
- Punk as kindness, courage, DIY action, and real-life connection
- The importance of feeling fully instead of letting fear shut us down
This conversation is a beautiful reminder that queer wisdom is often found in the in-between places, in humor, contradiction, grief, glitter, resistance, ritual, and the courage to keep becoming.
John Cameron Mitchell on Instagram here:
https://www.instagram.com/johncameronmitchell/?hl=en
Learn more about Hedwig 25 here:
https://www.hedwig25.com/
Learn more about Wil Fisher and his work here:
https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/
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