CZM Rewind: Part One: Crisis Hotlines: Of Course Queers Invented Them

Margaret talks to you about the history of suicide prevention hotlines and the complications of state intervention in emergency mental health care

Original Air Date: 10.20.2025

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff.
Your weekly reminder that even as all the terrible things happen,
there's people who prevent worse things from happening all the time,
and that we all rely every day on infrastructure and
ideas that people have built up over generations and generations.

(00:24):
And one of those things is the idea of running reruns.
No one of those things is hotlines. Hotlines might be
something you take for granted, You're like, oh, that's just
the hotline for people who are feeling bad, But like
everything worth anything in this country, this world, it came

(00:45):
from people working directly with each other to make the
world a better place. We change things, and systems rush
to catch up. It's the way it's always been, It's
the way it will always be. Anyway, this is a
a rerun because I got sick. Hello and welcome to

(01:06):
Cool peoplehooded Cool Stuff. Your weekly reminder that when there's
bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things,
often succeeding at doing good things. And really it's the
trying that is the succeeding. That's the subtext of the show.
I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy and every week I talk
about coolby boodhed cool stuff. It's right there in the

(01:27):
title of the show. And why am I vamping instead
of introducing a guest, Well, it's because there's no guest.
It's just me. I like to do these episodes every
now and then. It gives myself a little bit of
a break. I have to do just as much prep
work actually, so it's not really much of a break.
It's just a different way of working. And I crave variety,

(01:49):
so I like working in different ways at different times.
So that's why I like to do episodes without a
guest sometimes. And this week we are going to be
talking about suicide hotlines to quote the Mighty trent Resnor.

(02:09):
How are you doing tonight? Having a good time? Ready
to party? Have fun? Yeah, well that was the last guys,
wrong fucking band. We're here to have a bad time
because I don't know. I mean, it's actually hopefully still
going to be fun. But also I would enjoy going
to trent Resnor tonight and Chanelle's playing a show, so

(02:30):
clearly it's not actually a bad time. Sometimes talking about
super serious stuff or dark stuff is what we like
to do, and it's important to be upfront right at
the top. This is not an episode about how to
help yourself or others deal with suicidal ideation or any

(02:51):
of that stuff. It is the history episode about people
who've created structures to help people. And I don't know,
I find that stuff fascinating and I wanted to read
about it this week. I'm actually doing all right. By
the way, this is a thing that a lot of
my friends struggle with and always have, and so I
care about those friends, and I don't know, it was

(03:13):
on my mind, so I wanted to read about it
this week, And unfortunately it's also on my mind because
the political situation is making it harder for hotlines for lifelines,
and it's fucked up and we should be. You know,
a lot of the subtext of a lot of the
episodes this year has been like stuff that we take

(03:37):
kind of for granted that the government is trying to
take away from us now that it's fascist. So this
is kind of another episode in that vein crisis hotlines,
you are going to be shocked, absolutely shocked. You're not
going to be shocked at all to know that crisis
hotlines in the United States come out of gay culture

(03:58):
like a lot of our stories, this one starts in
San Francisco. In fact, it starts tied deeply into another
one of our recent stories. A few weeks or months back,
What is Time these Days? I did a series of
episodes about the founding of public radio and how it
started in the US and the Bay with PACIFICA Radio.
I didn't actually carry that story forward into time into NPR,

(04:22):
but we're going to do that a little bit this
week because the first suicide hotline was started in the
early nineteen sixties by a gay British priest named Bernard Mays,
who was also the first chairman of National Public Radio.
He he's such a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff.

(04:45):
I found nothing negative about him in all of the
shit that I spent researching him, And to be fair,
I didn't read. He did write an autobiography later in
his life, and I haven't read that. I've read like
people talking about it, and a lot of people talking
about his life. But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt
on this guy. He just actually seems really genuinely cool
and interested in a ton of different things in helping people. Now,

(05:09):
of course, I did say British Bernard Mays was British,
but we can't hold that against him. No one controls
how they were born, which in this case was in
nineteen twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England. He
went to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history
and worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things.

(05:32):
And this also means he was a teen young teen
during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that,
but that obviously is going to impact your life. Then,
you know, he's working as a high school teacher and
he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah,
but what if you joined the church? Though, Bernard went

(05:53):
and became an Anglican priest. Bernard moved to the US,
and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church.
And I think that's really funny because later he's going
to do a lot of the work to help the
Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff. He moves to the US
in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan,

(06:14):
and then he gets himself transferred by the church to
San Francisco in nineteen sixty. He has been doing radio
stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then.
He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing
story after story of people dying by suicide. In fact,

(06:36):
at the time, it was the suicide capital of the
Western world. The suicide rate there at the time was
I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred
thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers
later are going to be. There's a place with a
lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that
has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that.

(07:00):
So he gets there and he has an idea. It's
also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do
this idea. I've read so many contradictory things because people
do a lot of myth making around this man, and
he participates in some of the myth making himself. As
far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco.
He's like, I want to do something about this. I

(07:21):
want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal.
He was like, I should use an alias and start
a hotline. Now, the idea of using hot lines to
organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of
the only like hotlines we really have left. But in
other parts of the world and in the recent memory

(07:42):
of the past, you would do things like if you
wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar,
you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone,
this week, these are the events, and you'd put that
on the answering machine and then you publicize the number,
or you know, there have been all kinds of hot
lines throughout time. There was even a while reading about

(08:02):
radio in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago,
something like that, there was like a hotline. There was
a call an anarchist hot line where if you had
questions about anarchism you could call this hot line. And
also specifically, queer culture has used hotlines for a very
long time because one of the things is that like

(08:23):
queerness when it's not accepted, is a very isolating experience,
and so people have been using whatever technology is available
to break that isolation. And it's just so interesting because
you know, those uses tend to predate crisis hotlines, but
crisis hotlines are sort of what's left now that there's

(08:44):
the Internet and all these other things. Anyway, He's like,
I should use an alias start a hotline. So we
starts shopping around for a room to rent to run
the service out of. And there's a couple stories about
how this went down, and both of them are sort
of interesting. One of them, the story that he tells himself,

(09:04):
is that landlord after landlord would turn him down when
he told them his plans. But then when he told
his plans to one manager at an apartment place, he
was like, Hey, I want to start talking to people
who are considering suicide. And the manager said, you mean
like this, and he put out his arms and he
showed the slash marks on his own wrists, and that

(09:27):
manager rented Bernard the room for half price. Now, the
organization that he goes on to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention,
they actually tell a different version of the story than
he tells. His organization tells the story that the first
office was in the basement of an apartment building and
the manager assumed they were an escort service. And I've

(09:48):
also read that it started in nineteen sixty one, and
I've read that it started in nineteen sixty two, which
is I think why most articles just say in the
early nineteen sixties. Is they probably ran across the same
thing I did. Either way, he got a room and
he needed to advertise. But do you know who else
needs to advertise? Advertisers? It's literally their job description. And

(10:12):
you know who needs to sell space to advertisers? Me,
because that's the way that the economics of podcast work,
besides setting up like crowdfunding, and I don't want to
do that, and I'm uncle's one medium, and so what
we do is advertise, except actually you can sign up
for Cooler Zone Media and then you don't have to

(10:34):
listen to ads. Instead, you just get to listen to
me do long, strange ad transitions twice a day a
day an episode. Here's ads, and we're back, so our man.
He goes and he sets up ads on buses. That's say,

(10:56):
thinking of ending it all, call Bruce with a phone number.
He also would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which
is at the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay
district of the city, and starts passing out matchbooks with
the hot line's number on them. I've also read that
he just made flyers. He goes around and he starts
telling people about this, like, hey, there's this number. You

(11:18):
can call the number. He got one caller on the
very first night the hotline was open. He got ten
callers in the first week. These days, operators have a
lot of training on what to say and what not
to say, about how to listen. Bernard learned on the

(11:38):
job by listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to.
And look, I hate the British as much as the
next white American girl who's pinned most of her personality
on being like a third generation Irish diaspora person. But
my god, are British accents easy on the ears When

(12:00):
you're feeling down. There might be nothing nicer than picking
up the phone and talking to a nice gay priest
with a British accent and a radio announcer's voice. And
so it worked. I mean, he actually held to the
end of his life that he did not because everything
was anonymous. He could not tell you that he saved
a single life. And that is not false humility, but

(12:22):
it's humility. And because he absolutely saved a ton of
people's lives. And I'm sure people told him that he
wasn't specifically anti suicide. He said later quote, you want
to kill yourself, kill yourself. You have every right to
do so, but not in like a flippant like auge,
go out and do this thing way, but rather like,

(12:44):
you know, believing in people's agency kind of way. What
he wanted to do and what he did is he
wanted to help people who wanted a way forward, a
way to escape those thoughts, which is what people who
call hotlines are doing. Right. And over the first fifty
years that that hotline was in place in San Francisco,

(13:05):
it's now been sixty years, we're coming on probably sixty
five years. Over the first fifty years that the hot
line was in place, the suicide rate in San Francisco
dropped a half of what it had been. And it
you know, there's no proof of causality there, right, but
there's no reason to doubt that it was a significant

(13:25):
part of that. I suspect that also, like gay liberation
movements and acceptance and things like that are a very
big part of that as well. But those are all
tied in together. We all just do the work. We
can't always measure the work we do, and sometimes getting
lost and trying to measure the work we do is
a distraction. I think sometimes it's best to just do

(13:48):
the work we do. Bernard stuck around with the hot
line for ten years, and then he left because founder
syndrome is a real thing. Founders are often bad at
continue projects indefinitely because once they scale up, they demand
too much control and authority just instinctually, or as Bernard

(14:09):
put it, quote, the people who start things mustn't stay
too long because if you do stay too long, you
will kill it by your own oppression. I just really
like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes struggles
with that. Shout out to my collective mates, thanks for
putting up with me at meetings. By the time that
Bernard left, San Francisco Suicide Prevention was fielding two hundred

(14:32):
calls a day and they had ten people on staff
and one hundred volunteers. San Francisco's suicide prevention as a
model was spreading across the country. He also, then, like
in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio station KQED,
partly with influence from the BBC. It was like kind
of a like, how do we bring BBC shows to

(14:53):
the United States? The United States radio landscape is entirely
not entirely as PACIFICA but it is by and large
not public radio, is largely commercial radio, and so they're like, well,
how do we do it, and like, oh, why don't
we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED, And
soon KQED became the most listened to radio station in

(15:14):
the country. So then they went on to help found
the National Public Radio Bernard was part of in nineteen
seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR. And
I almost felt on this whole rabbit hole, and I
didn't put it in the script, but basically there was
this whole thing where it was actually very hard to
start NPR because you have all these independent radio stations
and they very much like being independent, and so actually

(15:36):
trying to say, like, no, we're all going to be
part of this national thing with this national branding. There
was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably, we're actually,
as we're going to as we talk about suicide prevention hotlines,
we're going to talk about the complicated nature of creating
some of these larger structures without being against it at all.

(15:58):
And I know what you're thinking, this isn't an ad break.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but Margaret, how
this week are you going to tie suicide prevention Hotlines
into JRR Tolkien. Well, I'm proud to tell you that
Bernard Mays, one of the founders of NPR and the

(16:20):
founder of Suicide Hotlines, not only adapted Lord of the
Rings to radio in nineteen seventy nine for NPR, but
he also voiced Gandolf and Tom Bombadil for that production.
So if you want to hear this man, you can
go find the nineteen seventy nine production of Lord of
the Rings. He became a college professor in the nineties.

(16:41):
I think he started an LGBT campus group while he
was there. And he left the church, the Anglican Church
in nineteen ninety two. I've seen it said that he
became an atheist, but I don't know if that's quite right,
because he actually became something that I think is more interesting.
He became a soupist. He became the only soupist. He

(17:02):
wrote a book called Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of
a Queer Priest and his Friends. Quoted by NPR said
quote Bernard revealed why he ultimately renounced the priesthood and
religion and described the interdependence, interaction, and endless exchange within
the universe as the soup. For Bernard, the inter relationship

(17:27):
of all things necessitated a particular efic that he whimsically
dubbed supism. For Bernard, supism was derived from the belief
that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education, and respect
for the planet and all that live upon it are
critical for the continued health, well being and survival of

(17:48):
the human species. And I like that. I think it's
called carsonization or something, where like every evolution moves towards
crab if like all plants eventually evolve towards tree like independently,
and all of these things evolve towards crab independently. Right.
You can also see this in the suv world, where

(18:08):
you know, all cars are slowly becoming smallish SUVs, which
is why I call them crabs. And I'm trying to
spread that we should all call the little four door
hatchback SUVs crabs. But I feel like soupism is kind
of the crab of cool people who did cool stuff religion.
This sort of like not a denial of divinity, but

(18:31):
a sort of pantheism because it maybe I'm just thinking
this because it just did the episode on secret societies
and Masons and Illuminati and all that stuff, and they
basically are teaching pantheism but coming out of a Christian framework.
And I feel like seekers religious seekers usually come up
with like, oh, everything is divine. That's the crab of religion.

(18:53):
For good reason. Anyway, our soupist returned to the rest
of the universe when he died at eighty five years
old in twenty fourteen from complications from Parkinson's disease. When
he died, his close friends were with him reading him
Shakespeare specifically, he died while they were reading him Sonnet

(19:16):
one hundred and sixteen. And this isn't from a play.
It was a separate poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm
just going to read it to you because I'm a
sucker and I like this guy, and this is what
people were reading him as he returned to the soup.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.

(19:37):
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it
is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and
is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth so unknown. Although his height be taken, Love's

(19:58):
not time's fool. The rosy lips and cheeks within his
bending sickles compass come. Love alters not with his brief
hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the
edge of doom. If this be air upon me proved,
I never write, nor no man ever loved. Yeah, I

(20:20):
just love alters not, you know, but bears out even
to the edge of doom, thick and fucking thin. So
it's not surprising at all to me that the first
suicide prevention hotline in the US was started by a
gay man. Queers have always been on top of caring
for one another because we've always needed mutual aid and
solidarity literally in order to survive. To tie. In another

(20:44):
recent series of episodes, when we talked about mutual aid
in the Animal Kingdom, we talked about how in the
nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and anarchist communist Peter Kropok
can prove that cooperation is at least as important of
a factor and evolutionist competition, and that specifically, the harsher
the environment, the more animals work together to survive that environment.

(21:05):
So yeah, queers invented this shit. It's also, though not
surprising to me, that he was a priest. Before there
was philosophy, there was theology, before there was therapy, there
was confession. The confession booth isn't, historically, as far as
I understand it, a place for punishment or self flagellation

(21:27):
per se, but rather one where you could talk to
someone about how you've been feeling and acting, and how
you wish you were feeling and acting instead. The confession
system is not above critique, but that was and is
an important part of its social role. And I don't
know a ton about the Anglican Church. To see, the

(21:47):
aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to everything English,
because why would I bother understanding nuance when I can
pick an identity that is vaguely related to me and
carry it too far. I don't know a ton about
the Anglicans, but I do know that they do confession
as well. And San Francisco's suicide prevention is still around.

(22:12):
By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV nightline so
that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the pain had
someone to talk to. And I actually want to focus
on this part of it for a second, because the
modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized,

(22:36):
and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police
and things like that. We're going to get a lot
into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode,
But its roots are just I need to be listened to.
I'm in pain and I want to talk to someone,

(22:58):
ideally someone who can under or stand, someone who's been
in the same situation or a comparable situation, or has
been around people in this situation before. But I just
need to talk to someone. I can't sleep because I'm hurting,
because I'm dying. When I first read about HIV nightline
for HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like,
that seems related, but not directly related. But the more

(23:21):
I think about it, the more just directly related those
two things are. I need someone to listen to me.
I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain. And
here's to everyone whoever staffed that line. Here's to everyone
who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there

(23:46):
to listen to people. Much like you can listen to dads. No,
I feel terrible. I don't like that ad transition. I'm
stuck with it, so are you. I'm sorry I've failed,
and we're back as far as I can tell. The

(24:06):
San Francisco Hotline was the first. It's usually attributed as
the first, but there was one that started roughly around
the same time, probably shortly thereafter. Before the San Francisco Hotline,
some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the National Institute
of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center.

(24:28):
And this is a very different background, right. This is
a research and outreach center and it is the first
one of its kind in the country. They also started
a hotline in nineteen sixty two. This hotline, they're much
more scientific about the whole thing. They collect anonymous data
about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages. I'm

(24:49):
actually not trying to come for that model versus a
different model, right, I understand why we use data to
try and make decisions as a society. This led to
the American Association of Suicideology in nineteen sixty eight, which
researched all this stuff and they started an accredittion program

(25:09):
for crisis centers by nineteen seventy six, which was necessary
because the LA and San Francisco programs kind of proved
how important they were. Although actually we'll get into it.
They didn't necessarily, like statistically prove that, but they were
ideas that people were into. There was no evidence against
them either. It's still very hard to measure the success

(25:31):
of these sorts of things. By nineteen seventy one, there's
two hundred different centers around the US, but while a
lot of them ran hotlines, they tended not to focus
on these hotlines at all. The point of the phone
calls were to screen people for in person consultations, because
I think they're coming from more of the scientific model,

(25:53):
and or they thought that in person consultations were like
you know, oh, you have a medical problem, go see
the doctor, versus like I just fucking need someone to
talk to. It's such a fascinating dichotomy, and like all dichotomies,
it's false, and there's like things to be advantages and disadvantages,
and oh, I don't want to get as dialectics, but

(26:14):
sometimes two things that seem really opposite. If you take
the things that are good about each other and the
ways that are in conflict. You can come up with
something really beautiful synthesis as it were, for you theory
nerds out there. And then the government, for better or worse,
started to get involved in this stuff. In the nineteen nineties,
the Substance Abuse in Mental Health Services Administration SAMSUH SAM SAMPSA,

(26:39):
I'm gonna call it SAMSAI, even the its an h
in there. They started a new center for Mental Health
Services and started surveying what the various clinics and crisis
centers were up to to try and come up with
a plan, and the federal government starts getting more involved
and things get Don't get me wrong, I think every

(27:03):
volunteer in staffer who works these lines is a hero,
a bonafide cool person who did cool stuff. But the
more these services started getting tied into governmental framework, the
more they started working with other emergency services, including less
savory emergency services aka the police. If you haven't, you

(27:23):
should go back and listen to Robert Evans and prop
doing a very long series called Behind the Police. It's
a subsection of Behind the Bastards, and it traces the
fact that the United States police come from slave patrols
in the US South and then like bad shit and
I can't remember exactly the details of it, but like

(27:44):
different bad shit in the North, and the police have
never gotten better. They are an instrument of white supremacy.
People have attempted various ways of making them not be
that way. I don't think that they're currently succeeding anyway.
So even when they first started interacting with the state,
these emergency services like mental health as emergency service, it's

(28:08):
then tied into other emergency services like the cops. To
say nothing about how things have gone this year twenty
twenty five with the whole fascism thing, well, actually we're
going to say a decent bit about that part. But later,
so in two thousand and one, Congress was like, sure,
we'll give some money to a national hotline to stop suicide.

(28:29):
The idea was and is, a single number that people
can call that will direct them to a more local,
specialized organization for help. This is not a bad idea.
And you know, one of these local organizations is San
Francisco's Suicide Prevention. They've been part of this framework for
a long time now. It took a couple of years,

(28:50):
but By two thousand and five, the National Suicide Prevention
Hotline opened, and it got forty six thousand calls in
the first year it was open. Soon enough, they started
doing sub sections for people who are like specifically at
risk and or need kind of specific kinds of care
and help. So they partnered with a Department of Veterans

(29:10):
Affairs to add a Press one option for veterans specific counseling,
and then a Press two option for Spanish language help. Eventually,
like decades later, they're going to add a Press three
option for LGBTQ plus specific folks who need help and
want to be able to talk to someone who has

(29:32):
dealt with a similar situation. I can't actually tell you
about the efficacy of this hotline because suicide rates in
the US have been steadily on the rise since the
year two thousand, which is the furthest back I found
data on the CDC website. There's one exception one year
in the past twenty five years where suicide rates fell

(29:53):
markedly before returning to normal the next year, and that
was the year of Our Lord twenty twenty, which is
not what I would have expected. There have been studies
and studies of studies to determine the efficacy of these hotlines. Literally,
the study of study I read has studied hundreds of studies,
but the data isn't conclusive yet. It does seem to

(30:16):
indicate that they help, especially in the short term and
the near long term. It's not that they don't help
long term, it's that it is incredibly hard to effectively study. Right,
people who call suicide hotlines are more likely than other
people to die by suicide. Much is the same as

(30:36):
if you have I don't know Parkinson's, you're more likely
to call a Parkinson's Help hotline than someone who doesn't,
And it doesn't mean that the hotline is why you
die to Parkinson's anyway. That study of study does show, however,
that counselors who've taken the training course Applied Suicide Intervention

(31:00):
Skills Training Assist did a better job than counselors who
did not, So there is evidence that some level of
formalization has had positive impacts. I want to be clear
about that because I'm kind of coming out strong for
the like you just want to talk to a gay
Anglican priest a model, but like, well, not just that,

(31:21):
I'm just using them as an example. But there's a
lot of different ways to try and do this. But
suicide rates were going up throughout the twenty first century
and have been, and by twenty eighteen the government was like,
all right, we should probably make this a three digit
number instead of a ten digit number. And by twenty
twenty two it happened nine eight eight is the national

(31:43):
crisis number. And as soon as it was a number
you could actually remember, nine eight eight, call volume went
up nationally by forty percent. And these calls are routed
to a national network of more than two hundred crisis centers,
many of which started off as independent hotlines. However, many
of them are in literally the same building as nine
to one one operators and are very deeply tied into

(32:05):
that system. And these independent hotlines immediately get access to
one point five billion dollars set aside to fund the program.
In the first two years of nine eight eight it
fielded ten million calls and texts and chats. And yeah,
you've still got the Press one option, which saw just
for numbers, for the fact that these are useful, these

(32:27):
separate ones Press one option. In twenty twenty four, the
Press one option for veterans help saw sixty five thousand calls.
The Press two option for Spanish saw ten thousand calls,
and they had the Press three option for LGBTQ plus
folks saw thirty seven thousand calls. But it's tied into
that first responder network. Ostensibly, part of nine eight eight's

(32:50):
goal and like why it was set up, is to
move emergency mental health away from the police focused nine
to one to one so that fewer cops need to
be in crisis intervention. But it's part of the government,
so it's not exactly coming out acab. In exchange for
access to federal funding, these local crisis centers have to

(33:14):
agree to what you could call non consensual intervention. So
this thing that was supposed to mean the police wouldn't
get involved in your crisis gets the police involved, not
just ambulances, although even that's contentious and it brands itself
that is private and confidential if you call it, but
it's not. It talks to the police. I'm going to

(33:37):
get into alternatives in a little bit, but the trans Lifeline,
which is not part of the nine eight eight network,
spent years trying to get transparency out of the nine
eight eight network about how often the police were called,
and how often non consensual intervention was done. Most of
the higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight it's
very complicated. SAMSA like basically pays a grant to another

(34:01):
organization and then all of these smaller organizations like take
part of it whatever. Most of the higher up organizations
involved in nine eight eight blocked the requests for data
from the people studying it at every turn, including people
like putting in Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of
the local organizations involved in nine eight eight, like the
Trevor Project, which supports especially LGBT youth, were open and

(34:26):
forthcoming about their data and as for what they found
the trans Lifeline researchers. I hate breaking this episode here,
but this is where I'm going to break it because
it's halfway through my script. As for what they found
and what the trans Lifeline is all about, you have
to wait until Wednesday unless you can't wait. I feel
this is just not an okay place to break it.

(34:46):
Translfeline does not do non contenual intervention and their number
in the US is eight seven seven five six five
eight eight six zero. In Canada it's eight seven seven
three three zero six three sixty six and their hours
are every day from one pm to nine pm Eastern.
But again, this is not an episode about how to

(35:09):
get help. This is not an episode about how to
help your friends. This is an episode about some of
the cool people who try to help people, whether they
do it in the formal structure like nine eight eight,
or whether they do it in a actually still formal
structure just not tied into you know, governmental stuff like
the trans lifeline. Anyway, I hope you all are doing

(35:30):
as well as you can, and I hope y'all are
taking care of each other and telling your friends that
you love each other and doing all those things because
you should. Because it's better to just be earnest and
be about what you're about and care for each other.
Right see a couple of days Cool People Who Did

(35:56):
Cool Stop is a production of cool Zone Media. More podcast.
To Goole Zone Media, visit our website Gorlezonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.