In 2024, Slate’s Critically Acclaimed Podcast Slow Burn Will Cover Gay Rights and Fox News

Slow Burn, Slate’s award-winning narrative podcast exploring the most consequential moments in American history, will return this year with two new seasons.

Launching this May and hosted by Slate’s Christina Cauterucci, Slow Burn’s ninth season will revisit the Briggs Initiative—the country’s first statewide referendum on gay rights. Four decades before Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law banned discussion of sexual orientation and gender in public schools, LGBTQ teachers in California were the target of a campaign to ban them from public education entirely—and fire anyone who acknowledged their existence. This now-familiar battle over classrooms and identity tested the new political power of two groups that were ascendant in the late ’70s: religious conservatives and the gay and lesbian community. It also captured the national spotlight, drawing the participation of everyone from Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter, and it was a major battle for up-and-coming San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk.

Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs will feature interviews with well-known politicians and activists like former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Cleve Jones (a Harvey Milk protegee who went on to start the AIDS Memorial Quilt), Anne Kronenberg (who ran Harvey Milk’s winning election campaign), and Tom Ammiano (a former California legislator who later became famous for telling Arnold Schwarzenegger to “kiss my gay ass”) among many others. In true Slow Burn fashion, the season will also excavate the lesser-known sublots of this story including a bombing plot from the Weather Underground and some alleged shady financial dealings by none other than Jerry Falwell.

“It’s a story of profound fear and anger among LGBTQ people, and of cynical politicians stoking a moral panic to further a repressive right-wing agenda. But it’s also a story of unlikely coalitions, intra-community drama, joy, sex, and the queer cultural ferment of late-‘70s San Francisco,” said host of Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs Christina Cauterucci. “It is exactly the story I want to be working on this election season, and I think it’ll be exactly what listeners will want to hear.”

Cauterucci continued, “The eeriest part of this project has been listening to the old audio from proponents of the gay teacher ban in 1978, which echoes today’s Republican Party rhetoric. Religious conservatives were accusing gay and lesbian teachers of being pedophiles, violating ‘parents’ rights,’ and recruiting children into an immoral lifestyle. But the threat of the Briggs Initiative was met with incredible ingenuity from LGBTQ people in the face of a backlash against their rising visibility and power. Tens of thousands of queer people came out and got politically engaged for the first time. They were the ultimate underdogs, basically building a movement from scratch—and they seemed to have a hell of a good time doing it.”

Then, later in the fall, Slow Burn will return for its tenth season. Hosted by Josh Levin, Slow Burn’s longtime editor and host of its fourth season on David Duke, season 10 will tackle Fox News, focusing on its rise between the 2000 and 2004 elections and the scramble on the Left to try and combat it.

“Fox News is a perfect Slow Burn subject, one of the defining institutions of modern American life,” said host Josh Levin. “Given its outsized role in the 2024 race we feel it’s the right time to look back on where it came from and how it became a cultural and political force.”

Seasons 9 and 10 follow a newsworthy eighth season on the rise of Justice Clarence Thomas and his surprising path from youthful radical to conservative icon. Hosted by Joel Anderson, Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas was recently selected as a finalist for this year’s National Magazine Awards and was nominated for two Ambies, including Podcast of the Year. Previously, Slow Burn’s seventh season on Roe v. Wade and hosted by Susan Matthews, was selected as Apple Podcasts Show of the Year. In total, episodes of Slow Burn have been downloaded more than 125 million times

Watch the teaser for Slow Burn: Gays Against Briggs below. Follow Slow Burn on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.