Gay men

Jones lost countless friends to the AIDS epidemic. He became an activist after Harvey Milk's assassination: "Meeting Harvey, seeing his death, it fixed my course." Originally broadcast Nov. 29, 2016.

Writer Michael Arceneaux has a tongue-in-cheek message for young people right now: "Please don't be as much of a mess as I was."

As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.

The recent biopic Rocketman painted a Hollywood version of Elton John's life, but a new memoir, Me, comes straight from the artist himself. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was determined to enter the music business, in spite of some misgivings about rock 'n' roll in his household. As he tells Fresh Air, "My dad, of course, hated it."

Filmmaker Rodney Evans is still making movies, despite having lost much of his vision. His new documentary is about how he and three other blind or visually impaired artists continue to do their work.

Ever since he was a little boy, Yannick Nézet-Séguin knew he wanted to be a conductor. He likens the feeling to something "almost like a religious call." "Making music in the group is what animates me," he says.
Now 44, Nézet-Séguin is the music director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, two of America's most storied musical institutions.