JOHN MCMULLEN John McMullen has been in the radio business since junior high school. By the time he graduated high school, he was the nation’s youngest program director of a top-15 market hit music station (KUBE FM/Seattle), which he helped to build. John was brought to Sirius to create the company’s first fully in-house talk programming channel, Sirius OutQ. In his current role, he is the Station Manager and hosts a daily three-hour current events and entertainment-oriented talk show.

McMullen has appeared on CNBC’s Bullseye and ABC World News Tonight, and has been quoted or featured in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Advocate, and Out Magazine. He was named as one of the Out 100 in 2003 for his role as a media innovator in creating GLBT radio.

AfterElton.com: Your OutQ show is described as "a rollercoaster ride that entertains, enlightens, engages, and occasionally--enrages!” Can you relate one or two of the most "enraging" ones?
John McMullen: My show is something of a rollercoaster. Some of my colleagues like to say that The John McMullen Show is like the GLBT Community Center of the Air. I am as likely to be having one of my regular chit-chats with homophobe Fred Phelps as I am with a star from ABC Daytime's All My Children, or talking with Kate Kendell over at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, or mixing it up with the Pastor who is taking credit for thwarting Washington State's Non-Discrimination Bill by lobbying Microsoft to drop support for the Pro-GLBT legislation. I also tackle a pretty even mix of mainstream and GLBT news topics and current events. Presidential candidates come on the show, and so do freaks who make card games based on the Columbine murderers.

The audience gets really polarized around my impromptu visits with Phelps. I like him. I think he's one of the greatest tools for GLBT Civil Rights, because he freaks out even the staunchest religious conservatives. They have to look their own bigotry square in the eye. People tell me, 'Don't give him a platform.' I'm like, 'Why not? He's quite entertaining if you treat him with a little respect and he always hangs himself.'

Two summers ago, I dropped in on him while driving across the country from San Francisco to New York. I told the audience that we should call this the Sodom to Gomorrah via Topeka Tour. They pledged money for every mile driven. When I got to Topeka, we went on a tour through the Westboro Baptist Church, led by "Brother Fred." It was the most hilarious and over-the-top half hour of live radio I have probably ever done. In the process, we raised several thousand dollars for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the beneficiary of our fundraising.

Another over-the-top interview was not all that long ago, with a guy named John Wannamake, CEO of a Dallas company called Watchman Media Corp. They have launched the "Gay Is Not Normal" campaign. Between he and his wife and friends who started calling in, they insisted that the average Gay man dies at 43, that there are NO Gay seniors (60+) and that 35% of all Gays have STD's. When I challenged all of this and began to eat them for lunch, it turned ugly. And, once again proved that the religious zealots in the GLBT Civil Rights debate are full of shit.

I love this job. I love challenging people's beliefs when they are based on a monkey-see-monkey-do mentality. But, I also like talking about non-political stuff--the everyday things that affect our lives. Recently, I asked, "How do you determine your friends? How does someone become a person's 'Best Friend?' How do you transition the status of friendships?" It was a really interesting night of conversation about very personal human conditions.

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