Tracy Gilchrist on the Queer Historical Record, Our Ever Changing Cultural Landscape, and Getting Back to Community

We all know Wicked was a cultural phenomenon, there were a thousand memes — “holding space” arguably the most popular, but if you stopped there with Tracy Gilchrist, you’d be missing out. Behind the meme is a journalist, a walking queer archive, and a community-forward cultural documentarian.

In case you missed the million TikTok videos.

“I do get stage fright, I want to do a good job for the audience, but I want the people to feel like… I’m holding space for them. I had to say it.”

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Gilchrist revisits her queer historical record with Nay and Vico, taking us back to high school, to a club bumping Erasure (80s hair and all), to the days when lesbian bars weren’t a scarcity.

“When I first came out, it was under wraps.”

They talk about what it meant to have options in queer spaces back in the day, and how we went from bars with live pianos and basement piercings to the “appification” of identity. Gilchrist shares why it took her time to claim the word “lesbian,” how she still doesn’t feel quite at home in any gender label, and how sapphic courtship has evolved in these last few years.

It’s a lesson in getting personal and political, something Gilchrist achieves regularly in her work writing about entertainment and shining a light on queer stories, because our stories are just as important as policy. Our stories are how we get to good policy.

“You are part of the [queer] historical record. This podcast is a part of the record. Yeah. It's wild to think about that.”

It’s a ride from scissoring to queer censorship to the wisdom that “not everything is so serious, right? But it is big.” You are part of the historical record. We’re part of the historical record. And we can take history a bit further by continuing to protest, by not needing corporate sponsors to host Pride events, and by stepping up if you are a person of privilege because we need to get back to community, y’all.

“Protesting… I am all about a party, but we can do both.”

Tracy E. Gilchrist (gill-crist) (she/her) is VP, Editorial and Special Projects for equalpride, the parent company of The Advocate and Out magazines. She was the editor in chief of The Advocate from March 2020 to August 2022 and led The Advocate to win the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Overall Coverage for 2021 and 2022. A media veteran who went viral in 2024 with her Wicked “holding space” interview with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Her cover stories for The Advocate and Out include profiles of Erivo, Brandi Carlile, Ariana DeBose, Harvey Guillen, and Janelle Monáe.

Thank you so much, Tracy! This conversation was rich with stories from your impressive career but also had us going down some juicy tangents. Talking with you was a refueling. Thank you for your wisdom and all that you shared with us.

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