Beers with Queers A True Crime Podcast

A trusted priest with a collar and a gun walked into a funeral home, and two lives were cut down in cold blood, shaking a small Midwestern town to its core. What was Father Ryan Erickson hiding behind his vows and sacred duties?In February 2002, life in Hudson, Wisconsin was upended when funeral home director Dan O’Connell and his young intern James Ellison were found shot to death in broad daylight. The case went cold for years, until shocking leads surfaced pointing to a charismatic Catholic priest whose life of rigid conservatism, secrets, and misconduct may have masked something far darker. In this LGBTQ+ true crime podcast episode, we unpack how allegations of abuse, a failure in both the system and the church, and a double homicide intersect with broader questions about power, identity, and justice in small town America. True crime with a queer perspective isn’t just about the mystery, it’s about the systems that let these horrors persist.Hosted by Jordi and Brad, Beers With Queers brings chilling crimes, queer stories, and twisted justice to light, all with a cold one in hand. Press play, grab a drink, and join us as we uncover the darkest corners of LGBTQ+ true crime history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A celebrated playwright at the height of fame, Oscar Wilde became fodder for scandal and ruin when he chose love over self-preservation. His brilliant career was extinguished in a courtroom where his queerness became the weapon used to destroy him. In 1895 Victorian England, homosexuality was not just taboo, it was a crime, and Oscar Wilde’s passionate affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas drew the wrath of Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. What began as a libel suit against that father’s public accusation of “posing as a sodomite” thrust Wilde into a nightmarish legal spectacle that exposed his private life to the world’s prying eyes. As the libel case collapsed, the evidence gathered was turned over to authorities, leading to multiple trials for gross indecency under laws that criminalized queer intimacy. Newspapers and courtroom spectators dissected Wilde’s love, his works, and the very phrase “the love that dare not speak its name,” turning a queer history moment into a public obsession. Hostile judges, invasive testimony, and Victorian moral panic culminated in a devastating conviction, years of hard labor, and exile in France, where Wilde’s health, reputation, and family were forever altered. This episode examines the personal cost of queer desire under oppressive laws and the cultural backlash that followed one of the most infamous queer trials ever. Hosted by Jordi and Brad, Beers With Queers brings chilling crimes, queer stories, and twisted justice to light, all with a cold one in hand. Press play, grab a drink, and join us as we uncover the darkest corners of LGBTQ+ history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He was the most celebrated writer in London, adored on stage with a bright future ahead of him. But he was living a secret life that Victorian society was waiting to punish.Before courtrooms, prison cells, and public disgrace, Oscar Wilde was a literary star at the height of his power. A brilliant author and celebrated playwright, he moved through London society with wit, charm, and dangerous visibility. But beneath the applause was a rigid moral world built on repression, surveillance, and fear of difference. In this episode of our LGBTQ+ true crime podcast, we explore Wilde’s rise, the social rules of Victorian England, and the unspoken risks of queer life in an era where reputation was everything. This is not yet the scandal, but the pressure building beneath it, and the society that made his fall inevitable.Blending queer history with true crime from a queer perspective, this episode sets the stage for one of the most consequential persecutions of a gay figure in history, and why Wilde’s story still resonates today.Hosted by Jordi and Brad, Beers With Queers examines chilling crimes, queer history, and twisted justice through a sharp and thoughtful lens.Press play, grab a drink, and join us as we step inside the world Oscar Wilde ruled, just before everything collapsed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A shadow lurked in Manhattan’s gay nightlife. A quiet loner by day, a ruthless predator by night. The city’s forgotten serial killer struck from the closet, leaving tragedy and terror in his wake.In the mid-1970s, Waldo Grant moved to the Upper West Side of New York City, blending into the gay community as a soft-spoken, unassuming loner. But behind closed doors, he harbored a horrifying compulsion. Between 1973 and 1976, he killed at least four young men. Each encounter ending in brutal violence: beatings, stabbing, even dismemberment, sometimes dumping bodies in trash bins or tossing them from rooftops. Decades later, his name remains little-known, a grim footnote in queer history, buried under the weight of stigma and silence. This is an episode about queer identity, violence, and how society’s marginalization helped a monster stay free.This episode of Beers With Queers is a raw deep dive into LGBTQ+ true crime as we trace the story of a serial killer hunting gay men in 1970s New York. We reconstruct Waldo Grant’s chilling crimes: the first victim bludgeoned and thrown from a rooftop, another discovered in a trash can, a third beaten to death in an East Harlem apartment, and a 16-year-old boy dismembered and abandoned in Central Park. Through these crimes and Grant’s eventual confession, we examine a dark chapter of queer history: a time when fear, shame, and police neglect made LGBTQ+ communities uniquely vulnerable.Hosted by Jordi and Brad, Beers With Queers brings chilling crimes, queer stories, and twisted justice to light — all with a cold one in hand. Press play, grab a drink, and join us as we uncover the darkest corners of LGBTQ+ history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A burst of gunfire on a quiet November night. Two lives lost, more injured and an icon gay bar turned crime scene forever.On November 19, 1980, 38-year-old ex-transit cop Ronald K. Crumpley opened fire on patrons entering RAMROD, a beloved gay leather bar in Greenwich Village. What began as a night out ended in chaos. People ducked behind parked cars, others ran but two men, Vernon Kroening and Jörg Wenz, were killed, and many more wounded. In this episode of our LGBTQ+ true crime podcast we trace the horror of that massacre, the homophobia and mental illness behind it, and the ripple effect it had in a community already living in the shadows. We explore how a single act of hatred cracked open the illusion of safety for queer New Yorkers and why that reckoning still echoes today.Hosted by Jordi and Brad, Beers With Queers brings chilling crimes, queer stories, and twisted justice to light with a cold one in hand. Press play, grab a drink, and join us as we uncover the darkest corners of LGBTQ+ history.To sign our online petition to have a memorial or plaque added to the building that once was the RAMROD please visit: https://c.org/L6QfmV4Q6N Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.