If you tuned in to HRC’s hit show The Agenda with Joe Solmonese last night you heard our usual fun mix of news, politics and culture. Don’t forget, we’re on live from 6 to 8 p.m. Eastern on XM channel 120 with replays on XM’s Air America channel 167 every Saturday at noon Eastern and available 24/7 on XM Online.

To start out, we looked to Capitol Hill where today the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Reps. Barney Frank, Deborah Pryce, Tammy Baldwin and Chris Shays. HRC’s own vice president of programs, David Smith, was our guest.

Then we turned to HIV and AIDS issues with two leaders who are in Washington this week to talk to their elected officials about the need for prevention, care and treatment of the disease. Listen to parts one and two of our interview with Joe Interrante, the CEO of Nashville CARES, and Fortunata Kesege, a community activist from Houston.

In February we hosted Muslim dissident and author Irshad Manji on The Agenda to talk about her best-selling book, The Trouble with Islam Today. This month her film, Faith Without Fear, is featured in a sweeping PBS series entitled “America at a Crossroads,” so we thought it was just the time to re-air this important interview.

And as we always do, we took a lighter turn and had a little GLBT pop-culture fun. First, René Fris of the new hit Bravo show Shear Genius was our guest. Prior to his stint as the salon manager and contestant mentor on the show, Fris was one of the “Fab Five” in the European version of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

After that we took a look Logo’s new series, The Big Gay Sketch Show. Kate McKinnon and Amanda Bearse joined us to talk about their careers as out actors, the new show and the fine line between parody and stereotypes. Listen to the segment here.

We wrapped up the show with an interview I had had last week with Bettina Aptheker — acclaimed feminist scholar and lesbian activist whose book Intimate Politics looks at her upbringing as the daughter of communist theoretician Herbert Aptheker. She talked about growing up among the leading artistic and literary figures of the day along with the painful secret of abuse that has informed her worldview. Hear her fascinating point of view here.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.