This Gay Week 15: Reports From Ukraine on War, LGBTQ Rights, and Global Backsliding

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/02/27

Karel Bouley is a trailblazing LGBTQ broadcaster, entertainer, and activist. As half of the first openly gay duo in U.S. drive-time radio, he made history while shaping California law on LGBTQ wrongful death cases. Karel rose to prominence as the #1 talk show host on KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles and KGO AM 810 in San Francisco, later expanding to Free Speech TV and the Karel Cast podcast. His work spans journalism (HuffPost, The Advocate, Billboard), television (CNN, MSNBC), and the music industry. A voting member of NARAS, GALECA, and SAG-AFTRA, Karel now lives and creates in Las Vegas.

From Ukraine, Scott Douglas Jacobsen tells Karel Bouley that war strips life to essentials and exposes how many LGBTQ restrictions are arbitrary. They contrast frontline reality—bombardments, power outages, displaced animals, and daily resilience—with culture-war absurdities and political cruelty. The conversation ranges from Hungary’s Pride crackdown and possible facial-recognition targeting, to trans violence in Pakistan, to Italy’s religious conservatism shaping policy. Bouley argues hypocrisy is accelerating as leaders normalize obscenity while institutions appease power. They close on a hopeful note: queer celebration in Scotland under Alan Cumming, proving community can still thrive.

Karel Bouley: We are here on a very special This Gay Week because Scott Jacobsen is not in his homeland of Canada. He is in Ukraine. I could spend 30 minutes talking to him about what is going on there, whom he is meeting, what he is seeing, and whether he is terrified. However, I guess we’re going to talk gay shit. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That stuff is here, too, if you didn’t know!

Bouley: Yes, I’m very interested in that. Like, already a subculture and now at war, the great equalizer. I imagine they don’t care if you’re gay out there in the trenches so long as you’re helping them fight the Russians. So, yeah, I can’t even imagine being there. There’s too much going on. I would be too involved. But good for you for being there and covering it. Certainly not dying would be good. Would stay alive. That’s right. So it’s going to be hard. Let me ask you. You already know what we’re going to talk about.

Hard to talk about what we are about to talk about—these gay issues—when you’re in the middle of a war zone, and you know what’s really important in life. You’re seeing well beyond the little bickerings of this, that, or DEI that, and you’re seeing actual fighting for your country, life, and death. Does it make what we talk about on this gay week seem almost ridiculous?

Jacobsen: The fabric of commentary around anything LGBT internationally has to do with restrictions. And the restrictions are, as far as I can tell from our lengthy conversations, 95 to 100% of the time, arbitrary. So war brings people back to basics.

Given it’s a long war at this point, right, since 2014, if you count them, or since 2022, if you count them, in any case, it’s a significant amount of time. People get on with life, and then air raid alarms go off, bombs hit. Last night we had a pretty significant bombardment, even in Western Ukraine. The electrical grids were hit. 

Bouley: So did we. Donald Trump posted pictures of the Obamas as apes. 

Jacobsen: I saw that. I didn’t see them; I didn’t want to.

Bouley: But I did see the people. And I was like, why? He already showed you who he is. 

Jacobsen: He’s a cultural and moral maelstrom in domestic and now international politics. 

Karel: You were going to mention that the head of UCLA DEI was fired for posting about Charlie Kirk, which I find amusing. He did it on his own time, first of all, on his own account. But second of all, the right-wing response to both Rob Reiner’s death.

They pulled no punches from the moment he died, including the president. And there are a lot of people calling out their hypocrisy, saying, “Hey, is this you going off on the left about Charlie Kirk?” And meanwhile, right after Rob Reiner died, you’re saying this. Second of all, their lack of moral outrage over the president, who yesterday doubled down and said he would not apologize for the images of the Obamas as apes and Harry Sisson on a flamingo and all this other stuff.

So it’s amazing that they went ahead and did this and fired this guy right now, because even since Charlie Kirk’s death, the bar has been moving. You know, what’s over the line? The line’s always moving, mainly because the president and the right keep getting more and more obscene. And, you know, as we have half the nation upset that tomorrow Bad Bunny is going to perform at the Super Bowl because he ain’t American, when he is, because Puerto Rico is part of America.

We’re going to fire the head of DEI for some pretty tame comments. I said worse. But I don’t work for UCLA. So, pretty tame comments about Charlie Kirk after he passed. He said, “I am always happy when bigots die.” He said something like along those lines, or “it always gives me joy when bigots die,” or something like that, but certainly, given the new normal is changing every day. It seems pale. So I think UCLA did this because they don’t want to incur the president’s ire. He’s going after Harvard for a billion dollars. He’s going after, you know, other universities. They’re trying to stay off his radar. And so that he already hates DEI anyway. So if he sees that UCLA fired their head of DEI, he won’t know the particulars because he’s a fucking moron, but it’ll make him happy. It’ll appease him.

They did this as an offering to the orange gods or because it was the right thing to do. It, of course, raises a lot of issues about freedom of speech, freedom of speech on college campuses, what you do in your own time, et cetera. And this guy will probably get another job, but it’s a sad move by academia and by UCLA. We’re going to talk about other LGBTQ issues with Scott Jacobsen, who’s in Ukraine as we speak, sitting right there in my apartment for Ukraine. No windows blown out or anything, you know, it’s like a nice paint job. But we’ll be right back with This Gay Week with Scott Jacobsen and me, him being in Ukraine to talk more issues, including the Winter Olympics have started and should gays go. We’ll talk about

So the UCLA thing is sad for academia, not unexpected because people are trying to curry favour with the king. But culturally, we’ve got the Super Bowl tomorrow with Bad Bunny, and he’s very pro-gay. He said he might even wear a dress to support trans people, which is great. But we also have the Winter Olympics.

And a lot of gays are flocking to Italy to see the figure skaters. And as you know or may not know, Italy is not that great for LGBTQ rights, which is shocking given that it’s part of the EU. So we have that going on. And if you’d like to elucidate on the story, feel free. I’ll have a little cocoa.

Jacobsen: Sure. Part of it has to do with the context we’ve looked at, where dominant religions shape culture. Italy has Rome.

And it’s important to note that this current Pope, he’s…

Bouley: Don’t make me spit out my cocoa! They have a guy in robes. That’s right. He is a canon guy. So he does not expect much of a budget on LGBT issues. You know he’s guarded by men who have to be under 30 and unmarried? 

Jacobsen: No. Are they called castrados? 

Bouley: No, no, no. The Swiss Guard. The Swiss Guard, which guards the Pope, requires that you be under 30 and unmarried to be in the Swiss Guard. I’m not making that up. You can look it up. Very interesting. And in the words of the church lady, “How convenient.” I always call that a buffet. He may call it the guards. I call it dinner, whatever. So, LGBTQ rights in Italy are oppressive.

Because, as you said, basically, history, Italy has a very religious, very conservative—hello, Mussolini, hello—very conservative history, and as open and loving and caring as so many Italians are. I know many gay people from Italian families, and their families adore them, you know, but as a country, it has not caught up with the current.

Wait, we’re going backwards. So anyway, as a country, it hasn’t really evolved on LGBTQ issues as much as the rest of Europe has. 

Jacobsen: The temporary, ideally regressive trend in the United States is indicative of the fact that there is no golden hand guiding us along. This is just people working hard for equality, which is why there is any progress at all. 

Bouley: Yes, that is very true. And there is no… How do I say this? Permanent fix. Other than Ireland, which once they decide something, that’s it. It’s decided. They don’t revisit it. They have abortion, they have gay rights, they have gay marriage, and they have trans rights, and they’re never going to go back and repeal those. That’s not how that country works. But in most countries, it changes with the whim of the regime. And you were mentioning the pope. The church’s attitude towards gays also changes with the pope.

So one pope might be more pro-gay than the last one. He was pro-gay. He wasn’t anti-gay, let’s just put it that way. He wasn’t a canon guy, so you put it in encyclicals and similar documents. They didn’t sound well, but they didn’t have more force. You know, he’s from America. He’s more of a turn-or-burn thing. And so, while he is not as regressive as some of the other popes, he’s certainly not as progressive as some of the other popes, and that does dictate which countries pay attention to what he has to say.

Like Italy, you know. But oppression—and it’s ironic—Heated Rivalry, the largest gay show to come from Canada that no one saw coming, is an international phenomenon. No one saw it coming. It made two big stars out of Hudson Williams and Connor Story, and Patrick Onnod, who I think is dating Connor Story—just big speculation—but it’s gaining Russian fans through word of mouth.

And the problem with that is it lands some of them in jail, because it is a criminal offence in Russia to watch Heated Rivalry. And so here we have a show about a hockey player, and they’re watching it in Russia and talking about it via word of mouth. But if they talk about it on social media or something like that, and people find out they’ve watched it, they’re going to be put in jail. 

And that was one of the stories that we were going to address, which is that gay Russians are watching, but fandom could lead you to prison, which is just amazing in 2026. 

Jacobsen: Larger subtext, too, if I may: you can outlaw gay as much as you want. They’re always there. 

Bouley: Well, who are you telling? That’s right. It’s just story after story. As well, you cannot lie about me, but people are still going to do it straight or gay. I mean, in this country, we finally lost until 2011, but obviously, people were still committing sodomy, both straight and gay. So yeah, you can try, but you know what we’re talking about, and what we talk about every week. It affects the psyche of LGBTQ people, whether we like to admit it or not. And to that end, a recent survey in Wales, U.K.

Is it that gays and lesbians tend to live one year less than their straight counterparts? And they attribute that to three things: drugs, alcohol, and suicide, being the top three. Do you know the number one cause of death for gays and lesbians is heart disease? You know what the number two cause of death for gays and lesbians is? 

Jacobsen: Suicide. 

Bouley: That’s horrible. That’s like here in America, the number one cause of death if you’re under 18 is gun violence.

Those are two very hard-to-find statistics. The fact that the number two cause of death for gay people across the globe is suicide, and it comes from all this stuff that we talk about—media, you and I—and I am the biggest Teflon gay there is. You take your best shot, it flies right off, slides right. I do not do that. I don’t. But not only that, that’s a lot of people I didn’t care about, and it does hurt me.

And I do—at the park, I got called a pedophile three days ago because this woman, MAGA. I told my friends, “Bye, I’m going to see Melania. I want some alone time.” And this lady said, “Oh, I saw it, it’s wonderful, she’s so classy.” And I just turned around, and I go, “She’s a whore, because she does things for money and power. That’s the biblical definition of whore.” And then she started getting into it with me, and then she thought, well, “You’re a pedophile.” And I’m like, “That’s your code word for gay.”

And I’d like to think that that didn’t bother me at all. But since that’s an old—just like what Trump posted with the monkeys is an old racist trope—calling a gay person a pedophile is an old gay trope. They used to assume that if you were gay, you were also a pedophile. They didn’t understand that those are two different things. They didn’t understand that Donald Trump is more of a pedophile than I am because he likes to screw 15-year-old girls, which is not really pedophilia, allegedly. They don’t even know.

Other than the definition of that word. Pedophilia means you like prepubescent people, so like 10, 11, 12, but they don’t bother with facts. So in my lifetime, have I cried at night to myself because of being gay and being different? Of course, of course. When Andrew died, and I was told by a court, by a judge that I didn’t matter,

That I had no standing to sue, even though the guy slept next to me every night for almost 12 years, we were never apart, but I didn’t have any standing. You know, did that hurt? Yes. That’s why I had to do the lawsuit. I had to overturn that law because it hurt. I’m like, I mattered. I count, you know? So, if you don’t know, ‘weak’ is the wrong word. If you have this inability

To realize that it doesn’t get better, but that you get more resilient. Some people can’t see that far ahead. They can’t see that being gay is not always going to be that hard, that it will get easier. Or at least it’ll get easier because they will start turning off their I-care switch and suddenly not care. But when you have countries or states or cities

That are outlawing you, saying it’s okay to fire you, saying it’s—here we have another law, I think I sent the story, I think it’s Colorado or Utah—they’re trying to pass it where it could even be illegal, or it could be legal to discriminate against gays coming to your hotel, that sort of thing. And that law is actually, looks like it’s going to pass. When you have society constantly telling you you’re wrong and you don’t fit, that’s how you get a statistic that the second cause of death is suicide.

Jacobsen: And also the category of the harassment of the community heroes, the people who have made a name for themselves, and either by their own will or against their will, they become spokespersons, in essence, for the community. And then the public harassment of them, jailings and so on. 

Bouley: Well, who are you telling? I get death threats constantly and have since KFI and KGO.

I had a guy send a letter to my house that had a photo of my house and said he was going to bag my dogs in plastic and make me watch them suffocate, then burn me to a chair in the middle of my home. And he sent photos of my house and photos of my dogs. You know, we had—when we were on KFI—some guys said, “I can’t get to LA to kill you, so I’m going to have the lesbian couple next door, who are going to have to wonder what happened to their adopted daughter.”

We turned that over to Seattle police, and they literally arrested this guy who was going to harm the daughter of the lesbian couple next door because the gay guys were on the radio. I’ve been beaten. I’ve been shot at. I’ve been held over the head of the six LAPD police officers as they took me out of a situation. I’ve been in a bar where Molotov cocktails have been thrown in. I’ve been—I mean, yeah, being out front and being first is dangerous. And your own community turns on you, you know,

What we never address as gay people is that we don’t support each other enough. We are quick to turn on each other. My friend David just said this to me this morning. He said, “Why you’re having financial troubles or why you’re not more famous anymore is ridiculous to me. All that you’ve done for the gay community, and yet they don’t prop you up.” And I said, “Name one gay icon that’s gay that they prop up indefinitely, that they don’t turn on.” We both had trouble thinking about a gay person.

That they haven’t turned on, that the gay community itself hasn’t turned on. And part of that is internalized homophobia. Part of that is just that internalized phobia.

Jacobsen: What are the patterns outside of the psychological, social, and socio-psychological diagnosis? What is the pattern of an individual coming to prominence, being betrayed by a community, and losing prominence?

Bouley: Then there’s always the rebound, by the way. Everyone loves to come back. It’s so strange how that works. You get torn down. Had Michael Jackson lived, he’d have had his most successful tour ever because everybody loves the comeback story. It’s so sad how we tear them down, then bring them back up, and then give ourselves credit for it. It’s like, well, you’re the one who tore them down. That’s how it is—American Hollywood secular Christianity. I’ve spoken with many prominent LGBTQ people. Look, look how we turned on Ellen.

Are the gays supporting Ellen? She broke barriers. So did Rosie O’Donnell. Broke barriers, broke down walls in television, was suddenly beamed into the living rooms of millions and became the number one fucking show, as popular as Oprah. That did a lot for the lesbian community. Are they standing by her? Oh, no, “She’s mean. She’s this, she’s that.” You know what? So she’s fucking mean. So what? How many men are in her job?

In television, they behave the same way and don’t get the shit that she got. I’ve been around these men, trust me. Johnny Carson was an asshole to most people. He didn’t even like Barbra Streisand, which is amazing to me. So I do think that as a community, we could do more to stand by each other. I think right now, gay men and women, lesbians, are sadly letting down the trans community.

We are not fighting as hard as we should be for them because they are under vicious attack, and we’re not really putting ourselves on the line as much as we should be for the trans community. So, that leads to what this other story said about us living a year less. One of the other things we do is substance abuse, and we do it really well. And that comes from medicating all of that noise. Meth decimated my community. I lost many friends to it. And it’s because of all that noise.

You want to deafen the noise. And some of the noises from your own… Look, my friend said this morning, to be famous in the gay community and continue to be accepted, you have to look like Jonathan Bailey or RuPaul. If you’re me or Alex Mapa or some other LGBTQ person, or if you’re a lesbian and you’re not this beautiful lesbian, then they don’t amplify you.

You know, as much as we’d like to think that we’re accepting of all body types and of all. I’ve had gay people tell me that they don’t like me because I sound too gay. And this is from a gay person. We’ll talk more about other stories that are in the news from this person who sounds really gay, including Budapest, which is how you say it. The mayor has been charged. We’ll tell you for what. We’ll talk about violence in Pakistan. Something fun is going on in the hills of Scotland, as we have our dear friend Scott in Ukraine and me here in Las Vegas, equally as dangerous but in different ways.

Scott, you kick it off. You spin the wheel of gay story roulette and see what pops up. 

Jacobsen: Well, I’m in Europe, so Budapest, Hungary, would be really good because Orban’s been an interesting character. Apparently, the Budapest mayor of the church where the defiance of Hungary’s pride ban occurred. He’s actually in this. 

Bouley: This is some retroactive punishment. Here is what’s happening. So there was a pride ban. And the mayor said, “Defy it. Go out, march, protest, be queer, be here, whether they’re used to it or not.”

Jacobsen: Protests are a right. That actually is what Stonewall was all about. So basically, what he was telling them to do is do what they did at Stonewall, which, remember, the first gay pride was a riot.

The powers that be didn’t like him encouraging the gays. And so now they’ve charged him for doing so. And, you know, there’s a joke in the movie Grease, if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter, which is supposed to be a—you got the joke. That’s a great one. God bless the lady.

You remember what they say, if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. And then she’s all, did I say that? So he’s not gay. He’s an athlete, you know, he was a gay supporter, and he’s getting punished for that. But I mean, to quote Johnny Mathis and Denise Williams, it’s kind of too much, too little, too late because they had their protest and they went and they did their, they went and did their thing. They would have done it with or without his encouragement.

But he has now been charged in Budapest for encouraging gays. And we don’t know whether he’ll go to prison, be fined, or what will happen to him. But he has been charged. So we will see how that story unfolds. 

Jacobsen: Right at the end of the story, they mentioned that people could face up to a year in jail, and they are considering using facial recognition software to find the gays.

Bouley: I wish all these people would realize that being gay is not that fucking interesting. It’s really just not. I want to get laid, first of all. But it’s just not that interesting or detrimental. What have we done throughout history except give them beautiful art, fashion, and hair? What is our big crime? Giving them art?

Disco? What is the big crime? 

Jacobsen: The real answer for many folks is that it defies what they see as God’s law. 

Bouley: But that’s untrue. Christ, if he existed, which he never did, but if he existed, he would have loved gay people. In fact, Christ, in the story, went out back behind the church after he threw all the good pious people out.

He went back behind the church and talked to the outcast, which back then meant the women, the gays, the this and that. If Christ existed, he’d be at my clubs. He wouldn’t be at theirs. You know, so there’s that. Of course, outside of Pakistan, we have rising trans violence. Now, look, I read this story, and I was like, well, no, you’re in fucking Pakistan. But they’re being shot at. Trans women are being shot at in public. And in the story, one friend nearly got shot.

And the violence in Pakistan is rising now. In a normal world, with a normal set of world leaders, they would condemn this. They would put pressure on Pakistan to stop it, and they would get a hold of this. Unfortunately, Trump and other world leaders are not going to do it. Starmer is so busy he’s going to probably lose his job, because he hired some of the Epstein files. At least they’re doing something about it over there.

By the way, who wasn’t in the Epstein files? Queers. That’s who wasn’t in the Epstein files. Gay people. Not in the Epstein files. Okay? Not one queer is in the Epstein files. Okay? So I’m putting that out there. Trump’s name appears more than Christ’s name in the Bible. I brought that up last week, and now it’s all over. I really did. I made a meme about it. I said it on my show. Two days later, Harry Sisson is saying it. Everyone else is saying it. But it’s true.

Christ’s name is in the Bible 1,170 times. Donald Trump’s in the Epstein files over 50,000. So, yeah, 50,000. But he said, “Hell, but there are millions of documents.” Oh, that makes it better, right? And that’s what really boggles the mind of gay people. Here you have this scandal where rich, white, straight men are trafficking in young girls, and that is less controversial and getting less punishment and less legislation than being trans or gay.

And it’s like, what? Are you worried about drag queens reading books to your kids? And meanwhile, the president’s, you know, at Mar-a-Lago, selling girls? It’s like, so I told the lady in the park when she said—because after I apologized to this MAGA lady who called me a pedophile the next day, she accepted my apology, but then said, “Could you keep your voice down while you’re at the park? And I looked at her like, what the fuck? And she said, “You make these sexual jokes, and nobody likes them.” And I go, OK, I already know how you feel about queers.

So if you don’t like my voice or what I’m saying, you know, go someplace else. And she goes, well, you’re vulgar. And I said, but you voted for a guy that said, grab him by the pussy. So you’re telling me I’m too sexual, but you know. 

Jacobsen: Also, the frame of no one finding your jokes funny is a similar cop-out to God not finding your joke funny. Own your own, “I don’t find it funny.”

Bouley: In closing, a happy story: McKellen, who did the best Shakespeare monologue on Stephen Colbert about immigrants and uprising. It was powerful. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. But Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, and others—Alan Cumming has taken over the directorship of a theatre and a theatre festival in Scotland. And he did a big gay festival, and he had Ian McKellen come over, and he had all these other big gay celebrities come over.

And they had the best time in the hills of Scotland being as queer as possible. And they just thought it was so great that here we are in the middle of fucking Scotland having this big old gay festival for a week where they did plays. They did music, and they did everything, all at the behest of Alan Cumming under his new title as the director of a theatre there. And so it’s a good story. It was right in the middle of Scotland. It was a new festival. It included McKellen. He did a monologue.

The queer Celtic people killed to be able to—and it was all under Alan Cumming’s direction—and it was received so well by the people in Scotland. They did not protest. They did not picket. In fact, they went and enjoyed it. So it’s nice to end on a good story where Alan Cumming is bringing his success from The Traitors—I’ve loved him, I’ve interviewed him several times—to the middle of Scotland with a big gay festival that everybody adored.

That’s probably from our home in Ukraine. So, have you run into any queers in Ukraine? Have you run into any gays? 

Jacobsen: No, I’ve been to three art galleries and written some quick stories about them. I haven’t come up yet, but the art is very austere, a lot of it. 

Bouley: You think? I wonder if that will change after the war, if art will get more flowery and pretty. 

Jacobsen: It’s a very good question.

Bouley: What are you even eating?

Jacobsen: A lot of breaded meats. 

Bouley: I’m a vegan. Will I die there?

Jacobsen: They have a little triangle bread, but it has like dried spinach in it. That’s really quite tasty. 

Bouley: I hate to belabour this, but I don’t know anyone in Ukraine. Do they have any restaurants open where you can go? 

Jacobsen: McDonald’s reopened. 

Bouley: Oh dear Lord. Well, of course they did, you know. No bombing is going to stop that Ronald McDonald. 

Jacobsen: It did when I was first here in 2023. In 2025–6, it reopened. No, they have a lot of it.

Bouley: Is the war less visible in bigger cities? Like Kyiv, have you been to Kyiv? Are you in Kyiv? 

Jacobsen: I’ve been there for two other trips. And I’ve also been to frontline cities for those two other trips. I will be in Kyiv on our next call. And there, they’re bombing significantly. 

Bouley: Are the cities outside getting supplies? Is the supply chain working? There, like deliveries of food and electricity and all of that? 

Jacobsen: There are deliveries of food. You have two factors that cause electricity issues. One, you have power shortages. Based on the grid not having that much power. So they have to put it on a spigot. Then, secondary, our bombardments hit the power out. So this morning, when we had a huge bombardment, I woke up, and the lights wouldn’t turn on, the heating was off, everything.

Bouley: Do you feel in danger? Is the danger palpable? Do you feel in danger?

Jacobsen: No, I only felt danger on day two. I was in a very great hostel. I’d gotten sick. The power was out. It was minus 19 Celsius, and there was no heat. Yes, just being sick, being in the new place, readjusting again. And there was the time zone switch, the jet lag. And hypothermia.

Bouley: Let’s throw that in. And then, but now the place is good for now. What about pets? I’m a dog lover. Are there many displaced animals? 

Jacobsen: Tons, tons. 

Bouley: Many organizations deal with displaced pets, such as Paws of War. I donate to them every month. It’s called Paws of War. Its primary focus right now is Ukraine because of the animals there. 

Jacobsen: There’s one site I visited in 2023 or 2024, and just through the rubble, then it looked like a Looney Tune, like a flattened, dead cat. 

Bouley: I’m really interested in just everyday life there. Because you know, it’s in the news every day on the BBC and not in America, but every day on the BBC, we know that Russia has actually stepped up their aggression and not throttled it down. Kyiv is getting bombed at a record high. We know that Putin shows no signs of really giving in. And while Europe is its biggest benefactor right now, the U.S. is fucking him.

So I imagine the people there are tired. I would imagine they’re tired. 

Jacobsen: Since it’s been a slow burn, we’re resilient. But as I’ve been repeatedly told, either in private or in interviews, we’re still just human beings. We get tired. 

Bouley: If I were there, I’d be hosting big gay parties. Or trying. I’d probably—no. I don’t know. I don’t know what.

I have such empathy. I don’t know what I would be doing if I were there except crying a lot.

Jacobsen: One colleague is vegan, to the earlier point. He’s been here for five, six times as long as I have. And so he can survive as a vegan, as a journalist. 

Bouley: But he’s thin, right? 

Jacobsen: He’s of a healthy weight. 

Bouley: All right, we’ll talk to you next week. You’d better stay safe and OK until next week. And you’ll be in Kyiv next week. So who knows if there’ll be power. But hopefully you’ll be OK until then. And we’ll do another This Gay Week, although I will say what I said at the beginning.

With what you’re seeing daily, all of these issues, to me, just become ridiculous because there’s a bigger picture of what we need to be concentrating on: peace and unity and stopping dictators. 

Jacobsen: And all the other stuff is secondary, lower tier. It’s a clarifier. I like how ridiculous and not useful restrictions on equal rights are. Thank you, Karel. 

Bouley: Stay safe.

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