Warrior Radio Podcast: A LGBTQ+ Focused Story

By Kit Goolsby

I met Jacqueline Barnes in High School and we immediately clicked because of our combined love for cameras, media, and entertainment. After graduating, I checked in on Jaqueline to see how the pandemic was going and she told me that she was transgender. Immediately I knew I wanted to tell her story because of how the LGBTQ+ community has had an impact on me. I knew that talking about some bits and pieces would be hard, because, as a progressive country we have come a long way with acceptance, but we still have a long way to go until were fortified. I asked her to come onto the Warrior Radio Podcast to tell her story.

I believe that having the interview in person created a special connection to the topic as I got to see how she reacted to the questions and how the two of us created a great repertoire. For next time, I would love to have talked more and gotten into a little bit more about how her mental health was affected by the bullying and dysphoria. I got to see her apartment, and that told me a lot about the kind of person she was. Eclectic, loves music, down to earth, and very independent. We recorded the interview into two parts, because once we stopped the interview, we started to talk about some things that I wish I would’ve asked before. Because there was no time crunch and she was available, we got to record the conversation we carried afterwards. I got so much more information I believe because we had already talked surface level, but this was getting deeper. She talked about a medical condition she was diagnosed with due to exceeding levels of stress. We set the recorder in the same place, sat back down, and couldn’t tell a difference in the audio, to me that was a successful interview.

I had tried using the pro-tools software already installed on my computer, but for some reason I couldn’t get the software to open the files. Then it was time for plan B, Audacity. It was a free download and had a lot of similarities to pro-tools, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out. I spent a couple of hours slicing and placing the audio in the correct order and got rid of long pauses, ums, and unimportant information. I think in my next interview I should ask before hand not to swear, because I did have to cut out quite a few of those words. With the way teenagers and young adults talk these days, a lot of “likes” are thrown in and it’s hard to cut all of them out, so I had to keep some in for the sake of important information.

This is something I would love to do again, and again, I can’t tell you how much I love interviewing people and getting to hear those stories. I hope we can all try to understand and accept the LGBTQ+ community and give these people a voice to let others know that they’re not alone in these experiences and their feelings are 100% valid. You can find the podcast here. Also make sure to check out my twitter and Instagram for new and exciting content.