ACRN’s newest podcast, Rainbow Room will discuss LGBT affairs every Monday at 9 p.m.
The “Rock Lobsters” have a new addition to their team, and its a bit more colorful.
Hosted by students from the LGBT Center, Rainbow Room is a new podcast from Ohio University’s All Campus Radio Network and will be on air every Monday at 9 p.m. for half an hour.
The title of the podcast was coined by Oliver Stone, a junior studying psychology and English.
Stone took inspiration from The Shade Room, a radio show from a CBS radio station V-103, he said.
“The rainbow has always been the symbol of LGBT affairs, and because the rainbow has all the colors and that’s what we strive to be in terms of diversity,” Stone said. “It has like a double meaning.”
Students can access the ACRN podcast by entering the ACRN website and clicking “Listen in Browser” in the top right corner. The system will then open in your iTunes player.
ACRN proposed the idea to the LGBT Center, saying the station would like to have an LGBT-centered segment on its network, Stefan Koob, a sophomore studying screenwriting and producing, said.
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As of now, the podcast airs for half an hour, with 20 minutes of discussion regarding a topic of the week and the remaining time used to feature musicians or bands from the LGBT community.
“The goal (of the segment) is mostly to reach out and interact with people who don’t really come into the (LGBT) Center,” Koob said.
Similar to the Query-A-Queer column in The Post, people are encouraged to send in questions to Rainbow Room about topics they would like to be discussed, delfin bautista, the director of the LGBT Center, said.
People who have any questions or have any particular topics that they wish to be discussed on Rainbow Room can tweet using the hashtag #RainbowRoomOU on Twitter or use ACRN’s text messaging service.
“(The Rainbow Room) is an opportunity to raise awareness about the LGBT community (while) discussing issues that are important to us (along with) current events,” bautista, who uses they/them pronouns and the lowercase spelling of their name, said.
The podcast will feature LGBT-identifying musicians and bands and also hopes to conduct interviews with members of the LGBT community on air.
“We live in a very rural area of America and there's not much education about LGBT affairs, feminist affairs or people of color affairs,” Stone said.
The show was created to generally discuss these topics to educate people who may have not grown up surrounded by a diverse population, he said.
Koob said Rainbow Room welcomes anyone who feels “an inkling to be on the radio,” to join the podcast provided that they have an idea about a topic they wish to discuss.
“(They just need to) tell us and we’ll do what we can to discuss (the topic) or have them on (the podcast),” Koob said.
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