Through portraiture and personal narratives highlighting joy, belonging, found family and meaningful romantic and platonic relationships, KBIA’s Alphabet Soup has challenged the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ+ community is a monolith.
At the end of its year-and-a-half run, creator Bailey Stover reflects on the project with KBIA managing editor Katelynn McIlwain.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katelynn McIlwain: It’s been 15 months of Alphabet Soup, and it started shortly after we hosted a community listening session in Jefferson City, where attendees told us that they wanted to hear more stories of just queer joy, queer people just existing in the state. And so, how are you feeling as this project comes to a close?
Bailey Stover: I don’t think it feels real that it’s coming to an end, because every week for a year, basically, this has been part of my life. I’m very honored that people have let me into their lives, and that we had enough interest and openness and vulnerability from people in our community who said, “Yeah, come and talk to me for an hour. Come and do portraits with me. I want to share my story.”
Katelynn McIlwain: These portraits were released in the context of the Missouri state legislature often targeting queer folks in the state. And that was in our news coverage quite a bit, as it should have been. But, obviously, these portraits weren’t necessarily focusing on those breaking news headlines as they came.
Bailey Stover: Yeah, I think when — when we were starting out with Alphabet Soup, I always knew that I wanted it to counter negativity bias in news media. Alphabet Soup exists in the context of what is happening in the world. We’re not ignoring it. We’re not just saying, “Yes, everything’s a utopia, and everyone’s life is great, and joy is the only thing that we care about.” But we’re also intentionally cultivating this space where joy is a priority, where hope has power, where your voice and your story can exist and can have meaning and can have this impact. Where even if you’re just saying, “I’m here. I am a person. I have humanity. I hope that you can have empathy for me,” that has value.
Katelynn McIlwain: So, the news cycle continues, as it does, even though this project is ending. How do you hope that empathy will impact future journalism, whether it’s hard news, community news, or anything in between?
Bailey Stover: Empathy is paramount. Empathy is what, for me, journalism is about. This is why I got into this profession. I hope that other journalists who might look at this can say that it’s something they could replicate in their own communities.
Over time, I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of, “I’ve heard this story before,” and so with each interview with each person or couple that I met with, I hope that I approached them as a unique story — as a narrative that I hadn’t heard before, or a story that would have something unique and personal just to them — because that’s where we connect with humanity, rather than falling into these generalizations that can be harmful.
