Ep 18: The Kentucky Derby, the Book Club Alibi, and Choosing Each Other with Bo and Squeezy
Timestamps:
1. Intro — Wendy Interviews Bo & Squeezy — 0:00
2. Squeezy's Coming Out — The Kentucky Derby Panic Attack — 3:07
3. The Curfew and the Evaluation Ultimatum — 4:41
4. Johns Hopkins — The Evaluation — 5:39
5. Siblings and "Living Daughter or Dead Son" — 19:44
6. A Word From Only Crits Dice — 21:26
7. Squeezy's Sexuality — Bi, the Wasp, and Dabbling — 25:44
8. Bo's Coming Out — Leaving the Church — 26:41
9. Finding Siren's TikTok Live — 29:39
10. How Bo Met Siren and Wendy — The Poetry Reading — 32:19
11. NOLA — Where Everything Shifted — 33:11
12. The Book Club Cover Story Begins — 36:37
13. Leaving the Marriage, Choosing to Move In — 45:07
14. The Hardest Parts of the Throuple — 47:44
15. The Easiest Parts — 52:30
16. Why She's Waiting to Come Out — 58:29
17. Telling Her Best Friend — 1:00:25
18. Choosing Each Other — "We Had to Make It Happen" — 1:02:09
19. New Job, Losing the Cats, Wrapping Up — 1:03:13
The Kentucky Derby, the Book Club Alibi, and Choosing Each Other with Bo and Squeezy
For the first time, Wendy flips the format. Instead of being interviewed, she does the interviewing — sitting down with Bo-Dara and Squeezy, the two women you've heard reading intros, outros, and ad reads for months, and the two people who make up the rest of Siren's throuple.
Squeezy's Story
It starts in 2013, in the corner of a restaurant during the Kentucky Derby, mid-panic-attack, unable to keep covering up who she was any longer. That day she left work early, typed a letter to her parents, and handed it to them the next morning. It didn't go well. A curfew followed. Then an ultimatum: get evaluated by a "neutral" third party or lose all support.
That third party turned out to be Johns Hopkins — three hours of invasive questions about her sexual history, followed by having every answer read aloud in front of her parents and a room of twenty doctors and medical students. It was, by her own account, one of the worst experiences of her life.
What follows is the part of the story that actually redeems it: her mother, shaken and radicalized by watching her daughter be treated like an experiment, went and found the right therapist. Both parents did a complete 180 within six months. Her brother never missed a pronoun. And a therapist eventually told her parents the truth as plainly as it could be said: they could have a living, happy daughter, or a dead son.
Bo-Dara's Story
Bo-Dara's story moves differently — slower, quieter, still unfolding in real time. She knew long before she said anything, going all the way back to college, but stayed with a boyfriend, then a husband, because there was never an obvious reason to say otherwise. She left the church around 19 or 20 and let herself admit, at least internally, what she already knew.
Then she found a TikTok live that felt safe. Then she found a person in the chat named Siren. Then she flew to New Orleans to meet a community she'd only known through a screen — awkward, anxious, and sure she was only there to see everyone else.
She wasn't.
NOLA
The three of them tell the New Orleans trip like a story they still can't quite believe happened to them. The tingles that built slowly over three nights in the backseat of a van. The moment in a bar where hand-holding turned into something else. The tears in a parking lot in Ohio after dropping Bo off, and Squeezy immediately asking the only question that mattered: how do we get Bo to leave her husband and come be our third?
It wasn't an accident, and none of them pretend it was. It was a choice, made deliberately, by all three of them.
Building Something New
The back half of the episode gets refreshingly practical: what's actually hard about three people instead of two (extra feelings, extra communication, the internal experience of being a parent inside a relationship structure with no roadmap). What's surprisingly easy (cooking for more people, never having to do the dishes alone). And the ongoing, complicated reality that Bo-Dara isn't out to her family yet — her mother currently believes she moved in with friends from a book club, a cover story that is, delightfully, not even entirely a lie.
She's waiting for the right moment, on her own timeline, for reasons that are entirely her own to have.
The Rest of It
Because it's still Tongue First: an ill-fated Only Crits Dice ad read, cooter cat donut comparisons, a Kentucky-Derby-adjacent nap incident, and a promise that Squeezy will get her turn interviewing Wendy and Jess very soon.
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Tongue First is a sapphic and queer podcast hosted by Aubrey "Siren" Jones and Wendy Reeves. New episodes every Monday. Find us at tonguefirstpodcast.com and support the show on Patreon at Tongue First: After Hours.
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