Ep. 279: Matt Cain: Gay Shame, His MBE & Founding Pansy Books | Full Interview

Today on Everything & Anything…and a Bit Gay, Zach sits down with British author Matt Cain — bestselling novelist, former editor-in-chief of Attitude magazine, MBE recipient, and founder of Pansy, the UK's dedicated LGBTQ+ publishing house.

Matt opens up about growing up gay in a working-class town outside Manchester during the height of the AIDS crisis, being bullied for being "too girly" before he even understood what being gay meant, and the years he spent internalizing shame he didn't create. Zach and Matt trade coming-of-age stories — including their very different first experiences stepping into gay bars and gay culture for the first time — and talk honestly about the residual shame that follows so many gay men even after coming out.

The conversation moves into Matt's career: a decade making documentaries and reporting arts and entertainment on UK broadcast news, the online abuse he faced simply for being visibly gay on camera, and his time leading Attitude magazine. Matt shares how every publisher rejected his early novels for being "too gay," how he crowdfunded his first book and broke a national fundraising record to prove them wrong, and the moment 18 months ago he received a letter from the Prime Minister informing him he'd been awarded an MBE for services to LGBTQ+ culture — presented to him personally by Prince William.

They dig into Matt's new novel, The Castle of Stories, inspired by his husband's real-life inheritance of a centuries-old hideaway in rural Italy, and Matt's lifelong fascination with erased queer history — from Michelangelo's love sonnets to Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Matt also opens up about why he founded Pansy, reclaiming a childhood slur as the name of his publishing house, and what he'd say to queer writers being told to tone down their identity to get published.

It's a conversation about shame, self-acceptance, queer history, and building something that didn't exist before — because no one else would.

📖 Get The Castle of Stories by Matt Cain — available now in the US and UK, in print, ebook, and audiobook, wherever you buy books.

Learn more about Matt and his books here: https://www.mattcainwriter.com/

🎧 Listen to more of Everything & Anything…and a Bit Gay wherever you get your podcasts.

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