This week, Bella is joined by special guests Melia and Henry Chendo to celebrate Pride with a look at Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy:

• Totally F***ed Up (1993)
• The Doom Generation (1995)
• Nowhere (1997)

A trailblazer of New Queer Cinema, Araki captured the chaos of queer youth in the ’90s like no one else. These films are loud, sexy, surreal, and devastating — soaked in color, contradiction, and emotion.

In this episode, we talk about his portrayal of the queer experience through his signature thematic and aesthetic style — how he balances camp comedy with emotional darkness, and how sex, love, drugs, violence, and warped reality all collide in his stories.

There’s a constant tension in these films between disconnection and desire, between the feeling of being completely lost and the desperate need to be seen. Araki doesn’t offer clean resolutions or easy answers — his stories unravel in fragments, in bursts of color and chaos. Still, somewhere in the wreckage, he makes room for vulnerability, longing, and the aching need to be understood.

Happy Pride! 🌈

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Shout out to contributor and producer Sonja Mereu. A special thanks to Anselm Kennedy for creating Gimme Three's theme music. And another special thanks to Zoe Baumann for creating our exceptional cover art.