this is tybee diskin

My co-host, Travis McElroy, and I have hosted two podcasts together. The first, Interrobang with Travis and Tybee, was an anything-goes, freeform conversational show about culture, communication, and compassion. During the show's run, I offered my e-mail address to listeners who were going through a rough time and needed someone to talk to -- this led to a deluge of strikingly similar e-mails, which prompted me to create a pen pal program for our listeners called InterroPals. With some information from each potential pal, I was able to match about fifty listeners, many of whom have continued their correspondence. The show ended in Autumn of 2017, when we started our second show, entitled Run: A Doctor Who Fancast. In it, we rant and rave about beloved BBC television show (you guessed it), Doctor Who.I also narrated upwards of 20 of the book summaries for CatchUp, including several longer fiction pieces, and voiced the character Yvonne in Strange Street.

I didn't discover the full breadth of my sexuality until I was an adult, and I think if I had been exposed to a story like mine earlier in life, I might have found it sooner. I can't get those years back, but what I can do is use my privilege -- that is, being a white, cisgender, straight-passing woman with a supportive family and visibility in digital media spaces -- to create new avenues for queer people to share their stories and see themselves represented. At Mammoth, I did that did that directly by developing queer-centric content like our Coming Out series. With Interrobang, a large portion of our audience consisted of members of the LGBT+ community, and through InterroPals, I was able to connect them with other people who understood their unique position.

In 2018, I volunteered as a videographer and marketing consultant for Brave Trails, a leadership camp for LGBT+ teens. I edited a series of videos to help secure investors and get campers interested, and along the way, I learned a lot about what it actually means to support future generations. Outside of content creation, I am always working to learn more about queerness and its intersection with race and disability, including canvassing with the LGBT Center of LA’s Leadership Lab to talk to voters about issues that people of color currently face.