Sex and Relationship Advice from A Queer Sex Therapist And Your Drag NANA

Got a question for our hosts? We always accept questions and quandries of any kind about any topic (click on the "Grab Bag” button), as well as a rotating series of thematic questions. Click the one that aligns with your burning desire!

why are you doing this (to us)?

Come Inside started the way many good queer things start: through bars, variety shows, long drives home, and an unreasonable amount of talking.

Jules met Shannon sometime around 2005, when Shannon was managing the queer bar Catty Shack in Brooklyn. They didn’t become besties until years later, when both of them landed in Western Massachusetts and accidentally built an expansive queer family that has somehow survived time, distance, and several questionable life decisions. That family kept growing, and eventually led them to Maya Suess’s variety show Unprofessional, where Shannon appeared onstage as herself — a queer, femme, eco-erotic, politicized, radicalized sex therapist — giving live advice to audience members who had anonymously written their questions on slips of paper and thrown them into a bucket.

The advice was honest, funny, and unexpectedly moving. People kept coming up afterward to say how much it meant to hear sex talked about without shame, without scripts, without pretending life is normal.

That same night, Francis was also performing, in the form of Bob Voyage — a hyper-local travel expert, drag man, and general guide to strange possibilities. Watching Shannon and Francis back-to-back felt less like a show and more like some kind of portal. On the drive home, the conversation turned into: what if this was a show? What if this was a podcast? What if it was neither, or both, or something weirder?

No one wanted to make a normal advice podcast. There are already plenty of those. The goal became something closer to: Dr. Ruth meets Ren & Stimpy in an orgy with Dear Abby on the set of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

Shannon wanted it to be collaborative. Francis wanted to make the questions into surrealist sketches. Jules wanted to make something visually unhinged but emotionally sincere, somewhere between public-access television, performance art, and a queer sensory experiment. The show slowly mutated into a podcast / TV / variety / advice / sketch / feelings situation where questions don’t just get answered — they get turned over, stretched out, petted, admired from every angle, and sometimes left a little messier than when they arrived.

We called it Come Inside because it felt like an invitation.
Come inside the set.
Come inside the question.
Come inside the conversation.
Come inside yourself.

Questions can be anonymous, but they don't have to be. They don't have to be anything but real. We want intimacy, humor, oversharing, speculation, bad advice, good advice, and the kind of conversations that leave a wet spot on the couch and a hair on your tongue.

Our first three topics include:
Butts!
Body Hair!
Public Sex!

If your question doesn't fit within one of these, ask it anyway! Future topics will be many and varied and likely decided through intense, highly democratic, probably chaotic voting processes. Write it out, attach an audio file, suggest other topics and let us know if you want to come on the show! We want questions from everywhere and everyone – sex workers, therapists, performers, doms, body workers, mysterious rich widows, single moms, exes, tops, bottoms, sides, you who expresses your desires through the making of intricate stained glass windows, you who understands the sensuality of native plant cultivation. You are invited to come inside.

Thanks for coming! And please come again!