Everything & Anything...and a bit gay Podcast

Did aliens take them? Did life? On this week’s Gay Bit, Zach goes back to South Beach in the late ’80s and ’90s, before the celebrities and the fancy restaurants showed up. Back then the gays, lesbians, drag queens and the whole LGBTQ+ rainbow moved into a run-down retirement town and made it fabulous. Then he goes looking for the friends who disappeared from his life.

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Trans people aren't a modern trend. They've been here as long as there have been people. Zach sits down with Sophie Edwards, a Toronto-based researcher, writer and trans voice coach, and the creator of the YouTube series We Have Always Existed, which digs into transgender history in the ancient Mediterranean.

Sophie talks about why she's not surprised to find trans people throughout history, who the Galli were (the gender-crossing priestesses of the mother goddess Cybele), and how India's Hijra community fits into a much bigger picture. Then it gets personal: a mosquito-filled camping trip that started her...

Zach’s guest today is a friend, a teacher, and now a TV star. Amaris Jane is a professional remote viewer who trained under Project Stargate viewer Angela Ford. The two now teach together, and Zach has taken their remote viewing, psychic development and tarot classes. Amaris appears in episode three, “Dark Visions,” of AMC+’s Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena.

Amaris grew up in a house where the fireplace played organ music, balls of light floated through rooms, and her mom’s keys rose off the kitchen counter. Her out-of-body experiences began at 13. She explains how remote viewing ac...

On Election Day 2026, Zach drops the usual lighter tone of Everything & Anything…and a Bit Gay for an urgent, deeply personal plea to the LGBTQ+ community and its allies: vote. With every House seat, 35 Senate seats, 36 governorships and thousands of state and local offices on the ballot, he explains what’s at stake. He walks through what has happened to LGBTQ+ people over the past two years: federal rules recognizing only two sexes, the end of the X marker on passports, Kansas cancelling trans residents’ driver’s licenses, hospitals stopping gender-affirming care even in Massachusetts, the trans military ban, and hund...

Matt Rodin has spent nearly a decade with Beau the Musical, starting at the first table reads, before the script or score was finished. The show ran off-Broadway, and now its cast album is coming out. Matt plays Ace, a queer singer-songwriter from Tennessee who gets to know the grandfather he thought was dead. Matt calls it a love story, though not between two lovers. It’s about a grandfather and grandson, a mother and son, a boy and his music, and a boy and himself. The role has him singing nine of eleven songs, playing guitar and hosting th...

Zach is sick, raspy, and fully in his complaining era — and it turns into the therapy session we all needed. In this week’s Gay Bit, he recaps a wild night out in Boston the day before Halloween, from close talkers and crowded dance floors to a 3 a.m. pizza-and-burger run with a new friend named Tom. He makes the case for why bears are the nicest men in any bar (Bear Week in P-Town converted him), shares how his collab with Paul from Paul’s Shed Talk brought a wave of bear followers, and admits it might be time t...

Dr. Stephen Paul Edwards spent most of his life running. After a traumatic, controlling childhood in Blackpool, England, a psychiatric hospitalization at 16, and four marriages, he found himself at rock bottom just as he met a woman who would turn his life upside down. Their relationship, full of luxury, chaos, false accusations, and police standoffs, became the basis for his book The Venus Fly Trap.

In this conversation, Stephen explains how he came to see that relationship as a gift: the experience that finally forced him to face his patterns and heal. He talks about trauma bonds...

On Election Day 2026, Zach Randles-Friedman delivers an unfiltered call to action for LGBTQ+ listeners and allies. In this solo This Is Everything episode, he walks through the policies that have hit the community hardest over the past two years: the federal two-sex definition, the loss of the X gender marker on passports, pressure on hospitals providing gender-affirming care, the trans military ban, prison placement rules, and cuts to LGBTQ+ health programs at home and abroad. He connects those fights to the everyday costs voters are feeling, from gas and groceries to tariffs and the war in Iran.

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Pride 365 Radio launched on June 1, 2025, as a lasting legacy of WorldPride in Washington, DC. One year later, the independent LGBTQ+ station, part of the Capital Pride Alliance, is reaching listeners from Oklahoma and Kansas to Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina.

Zach sits down with on-air host Jerry Houston and special correspondent Natalie Thompson to talk about building a radio station for the community, by the community.

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From a tiny shed in Yorkshire, surrounded by tools and sawdust, Paul has built a YouTube following of nearly 22,000 people by doing something simple: talking honestly about what it’s like to be a 49-year-old man who happens to be gay.

Zach first found Paul when his videos started popping up in his YouTube Shorts, and he’s been hooked ever since. In this episode, Paul shares how he spent years living a lie in a small rural town in Cumbria, going on dates with women to fit in, until a serious accident at 34 made him rethink ever...

What happens when you finally put down the weight you’ve been carrying since you were five years old?

Ray Aubel is a hypnotist and coach who works mostly with gay men on the patterns that form from growing up hidden: the masks, the performing, the feeling of being different before you even had a word for it. Zach and Ray get into how hypnosis actually works, why Ray went from atheist to believer after visiting two of his own past lives, and what he’s seeing in clients right now as political news stirs up old fear...

In a rare serious episode of the Gay Bit, Zach Randles-Friedman makes his final pre-election case for voting in the November 3 midterms. He covers the first-ever anti-trans measures to go directly to voters, including Missouri’s Amendment 3, Colorado’s measures, and Arizona’s HCR 2003, along with Virginia’s vote to remove its constitutional same-sex marriage ban and the flood of anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed in 2026. He also covers what everyone is feeling: inflation back up to 3.7%, record diesel prices, and a costly Iran war now in its eighth month. Zach reminds listeners how confident polls were in 2016, and that the race cam...

October is LGBTQ+ History Month, and on this solo episode of This Is Everything, Zach takes you on a whirlwind tour through thousands of years of queer history — the heroes, the heartbreaks, and the hard-won victories most of us were never taught in school.

Zach starts with a candid take on religion and where homophobia really comes from (spoiler: the word “homosexual” didn’t appear in an English Bible until 1946, and Jesus never said a word about same-sex love). From there, it’s a journey through ancient Greece and Rome, the poet Sappho of Lesbos, and the Two-Spirit...

What does a 25-year open marriage actually look like, and what happens when you let Showtime cameras into the bedroom? Zach sits down with KamalaDevi McClure, a sex and relationship coach, tantra teacher, author of seven books and former star of Showtime’s Polyamory: Married & Dating. She’s here to talk about her new memoir, One Fool’s Journey.

KamalaDevi explains how she told her future husband she was bisexual and polyamorous before she’d even give him her number, and how their second date included a third person. She breaks down the difference between polyamory and open rel...

Is your company committed to inclusion, or was it only ever for show? Celeste Warren, a diversity and inclusion leader with nearly 30 years at Global Fortune 100 companies and author of The Truth About Equity, joins Zach for a candid conversation about belonging at work. She shares the early-career moment that shaped her mission: presenting her own project to a room of men who directed every question to her boss. Zach and Celeste get real about tokenism, the myth that diverse hiring lowers the bar, and the wave of corporate retreats from DEI and Pride sponsorships. Celeste explains why performative...

This week on The Gay Bit, Zach goes all in on a theory that’s been all over the internet: is Donald Trump slowly coming out? With a clear disclaimer that everything here is his opinion, Zach plays a series of rally clips in which the president gushes over men’s muscles, hands and bodies, offers to kiss every guy in the room, recalls what athletes said coming out of the showers, and pantomimes with a microphone in a way no one in the crowd could miss.

Zach asks why a man who claims to be straight talk...

They met at a New York coffee shop, both quietly working on music, and didn’t speak for an hour. Eight years later, singer-songwriter John Coons and adult performer and former Broadway music director Jonah Wheeler are touring the country as self-described “adult cabaret clowns” with their new show, Double InDUMBnity.

In this episode, Zach talks with the couple about building a creative partnership inside a romantic one, from a song that took a year and a half to finish to the Monday-night cabaret bootcamp at Club Cumming that got them started. They explain what people get wrong...

A sleepless night turned into this week’s This Is Everything, where Zach asks himself the question he’s never fully answered on the mic: when did I know I was gay? From a Brady Bunch-inspired fifth-grade movie date to wearing gym shorts under oversized jeans every day to avoid the junior high locker room, Zach walks through the years he spent questioning, denying, and slowly figuring it out.

He talks about his three very different friend groups in Miami, the friends who had his back, the teachers and parents who seemed to know before he did, and...

Astrologer, tarot reader, and Reiki master Karina La Puma has spent more than 40 years studying how we create our own reality. She joins Zach to talk about her new book, Awaken Magnetic Creation: Manifesting Your Dreams, part of her series A Toolkit for Awakening.

Karina explains the core idea behind magnetic creation: you don’t get what you want, you get what you are. She shares how she used it to draw in her life partner after meeting him at an online “spiritual singles” event, why you should focus on the essence of what you want instead of the...

What if religion didn’t need belief at all? Zach sits down with Dr. Joshua Pritikin, a psychological counselor and Internal Family Systems (IFS) practitioner in Oregon who holds a PhD in quantitative psychology. He’s the author of Religion Unburdened by Belief: The Way of Open Inquiry. Joshua explains how IFS “parts” can help define altered states. He gives Zach a simple tweak to his transcendental meditation practice to quiet a racing mind. He also takes us inside the Santo Daime ceremonies he has attended for four years. The conversation covers psychedelics and safety, bad trips, the war on drugs...

This week’s Gay Bit goes a little bit everywhere, and that’s the point. Zach is back in his psychic medium and near-death experience era, and it has him thinking about the things he blurts out mid-interview, like his dream of being cryo-frozen and launched into space so aliens can find him a million years from now (backup plan: a seed pod under a big tree).

From there, he gets real about how this show changed what he believes about death, why he now fully believes in reincarnation, the signs his father and grandmother have sent him...

Davey and Omie, the couple behind Traveling Boyfriends, join Zach from London to talk about love, travel, and what it really takes to see the world as a gay couple.

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He made a first-ever climb of Denali’s north face, hitchhiked around the world at 22, got thrown out of two countries in one week, and was one of the last Americans standing in northern South Vietnam when the North invaded in 1972. Now 84, John Graham is “Badass Granddad” to 127,000 followers, and in this episode he tells Zach how an adrenaline junkie learned that the biggest adventure of all is finding meaning.

John opens up about the night on a freighter at 17 that turned a bullied, skinny kid from Tacoma into a thrill-seeker; the moment in Hue when he realiz...

Zach returns with a solo This Is Everything segment, working through the headlines that have been weighing on him and on the LGBTQ+ community. He starts with the Supreme Court’s two trans sports ban cases, asking how a ruling could collide with the dozens of state laws and school policies already in place, and points to Massachusetts as proof that anti-trans talking points can cost a candidate. From there he takes on HIV/AIDS funding cuts that threaten medication, testing, and clinics at home and in Africa; the Kansas move that voided trans residents’ driver’s licenses overnight; and bo...

A Baptist preacher who’d never held a gun walks into the FBI Academy, and 24 years later walks out a different man. On this episode of Everything & Anything…and a Bit Gay, Zach sits down with Eric Robinson, author of Irreverend: From Saving Souls to Chasing Sinners in the FBI, for a conversation Zach admits he might have turned down a few years ago.

Eric spent years as a youth pastor, assistant pastor, and founding pastor of his own church in Western New York, where he gave his congregation a “flinch test” to make sure everyone who walked t...

Is LinkedIn secretly the hottest dating app out there? On this week’s Gay Bit, Zach Randles-Friedman ends the week super gay with a campy deep dive into the world’s most “professional” social network, where the job posts are depressing, the headshots are suspiciously gorgeous, and the scammers never sleep.

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Why does everyone ghost? Why do dating apps feel like a hamster wheel? And is there still a way to find real, lasting love in the LGBTQ+ community?

Zach sits down with Dr. Frankie Bashan, clinical psychologist, certified sex therapist, and founder of Little Gay Book, one of the nation's leading LGBTQ+ matchmaking agencies. Since 2009, Dr. Frankie has combined her psychology training with a lifelong knack for setting people up, building a matchmaking service with an 80–85% success rate.

They get real about the state of modern dating: ghosting, gamified apps, AI-filtered photos, scam profiles pushing yo...

What happens when a Real Housewives editor decides to kill off the Housewives himself? Timothy Hedden has spent 25 years behind the scenes of reality TV, cutting Real Housewives of Atlanta, New Jersey, and Potomac, plus Mob Wives. Now he's channeled all of it into his debut novel, Dead Housewives of Philadelphia, a campy, dark-comedy murder mystery out today. And this is his very first podcast interview.

Timothy's path to the edit bay was anything but direct: a would-be actor kicked off the set of Law & Order, a fur salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue, a stand-up comic, and...

In this solo This Is Everything episode, Zach Randles-Friedman takes on the exhaustion so many people are feeling right now. He talks about doom scrolling and a news cycle that feels like a horror show. He covers a job market where AI-polished applications flood every listing, grocery prices that jumped his weekly Instacart order from $200 to $312, and a McDonald's hot fudge sundae that now costs $6.99 on DoorDash. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Zach reacts to Senator Tuberville's "furry pilots" claims, to rhetoric targeting trans people, and to calls for violence against queer people. He also explains why...

What do people really think when no one is watching? Startup founder Kiko Zang joins Zach to talk about the gap between how we perform online and what we actually believe, and why she's betting $3.6 million on closing it.

Born in China and sent to an all-girls boarding school in small-town New Zealand at just 12, Kiko grew up as one of only a handful of Asian people in town. She opens up about the questions, the exclusion, and the moments of outright hostility that shaped her, including a story she's never shared publicly before. From there, her...

and Facebook and finds thousands of unread DMs waiting for him. After wading through the Nigerian princes, SEO pitches, and spam, he pulls out the real ones and reads them on air, Jimmy Kimmel mean-tweets style, except not all of them are mean.

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What happens when a surgical device inventor and serial entrepreneur discovers she can "see" inside the human body from across the world? Zach sits down with Julie Ryan — medical intuitive, psychic medium, author of eight books, and host of the Ask Julie Ryan show — for a wide-ranging conversation about what she calls "the buffet of psychicness."

Julie shares how a birthday gift of Caroline Myss's Anatomy of the Spirit sent her on a 30-year journey from hospital supply sales rep to one of the most recognized intuitive healers working today. She explains how she scans people energetically (with...

In this solo episode, Zach talks about something most of us hit eventually: the moment you just stop caring what people think. For him, it clicked at 50. Now 53, he's still cutting people out, or at least putting them "on pause." He gets candid about the second half of life and the things nobody warns you about, from a surprise frozen shoulder diagnosis to the role reversal of caring for aging parents.

Zach also takes on friendship: why the friends you've had since sixth grade are forever, why some newer ones wouldn't make the cut if you met...

At 25, Vinney Tolman was found dead on the floor of a Dairy Queen bathroom. Medics pronounced him dead, zipped him into a body bag, and loaded him into an ambulance. Then a rookie medic in the back of that ambulance got a feeling he couldn't ignore.

In this episode, Zach talks with Vinney, author of The Light After Death: My Journey to Heaven and Back, about watching his own death without realizing it was him, the life review that showed him every harm he'd caused from the other person's side, and his three days in heaven with...

Fighting for Their Lives: Jenn Garofolo on Mental Health & Raising a Trans Son

Fellow Bostonian Jenn Garofolo joins Zach to talk about her book Fighting for Their Lives, a mother's account of two separate but overlapping journeys: her son Daniel's severe mental health struggles, which began when he was a toddler, and his coming out as nonbinary and then as a transgender young man at 11.

Jenn has an Ivy League education, two master's degrees and a career in biotech, and it still took her a decade to navigate the mental health system for her child...

Zach sits down with Damian Pelliccione (he/they), co-founder and CEO of Revry, the free, ad-supported LGBTQ+ streaming network, and co-creator and Kings' Court judge of the hit competition series King of Drag. As Revry nears its 11th year and King of Drag returns for season 2, Damian opens up about the Apple keynote that sparked the whole idea, the years of pitching a drag king show to advertisers who didn't know what a drag king was, and the stories that remind him why this work matters.

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This Friday on The Gay Bit, Zach comes clean about one of his most embarrassing and most beloved talents. From junior high through college, and let's be honest, still today, he was the undisputed crank call king of his Miami friend group. Armed with a landline, a phone book, three-way calling, and a voice that could pass for a blonde teenage girl, Zach led up to ten friends at a time on late-night prank calling expeditions.

He introduces Barbara Midnight, his fake DJ from "97.3 Coast FM," who promised strangers $500 if they could sing three lines of their...

What happens when a couple married for 40 years finally says something out loud to each other for the first time? Certified sex therapist Keri Green, LMFT, CST has seen it, and she says nearly every relationship problem comes down to one thing: communication.

Zach and Keri cover a lot of ground. They talk about the three C's she looked for while dating as a single mom in her 40s. They get into why opening a relationship rarely works when only one partner wants it, and the unusual kinks that have come up in her practice. Keri explains...

What happens when you track down every person you've ever kissed, dated, or hooked up with and ask them what really happened? Zach sits down with comedic actor, writer, and fellow podcaster Miriam Katz, the creator of The Ex Appeal Podcast. Her show is built around exactly that premise, and it caught the attention of The View and the New York Post.

Miriam's list runs to 112 people. So far she's interviewed about 20 of them, from her fifth-grade first date in Boston (she asked him out on the swings) to a six-year entanglement she calls "Mr. Mayhem." She...

Zach sits down with psychic medium and mentor Alysa Conger — a working model of nearly 17 years who also teaches people how to access their own intuition. They dig into what it actually looks like to build a mediumship practice, how Alysa's own psychic path was catalyzed by her father's suicide in 2022 (three days before her birthday), and the eerie "signs" she picked up in the days before it happened.

Alysa opens up about surviving a serious car accident that same year — including a brief out-of-body experience and a traumatic brain injury she believes sharpened her intuitive abilities — and sh...