In the most recent episode of Tommy Dorfman’s new podcast, My First Time, she speaks with the Fire Island star Joel Kim Booster about his first time having anal sex. Describing an evening filled with white Zinfandel, peak early-aughts Norah Jones, and a dorm-room rendezvous with a hot French guy, Kim Booster recounts the freedom he felt in that moment — even sans prep or lube. “I had no sense of what disaster could have opened,” he says, laughing.
The conversation feels like the intimate wind-down of a dinner party, when the candles have almost burnt through their wicks and everyone is spilling tea. It is a far cry from the social-media-induced self-consciousness that plagues so many celebrity podcasts, which seem packaged for lucrative brand deals rather than authentic human connection. In an era of constant noise and uncomfortable hubris, My First Time is delightfully intimate and forthcoming. This is in large part due to Dorfman, whose genuine interest in her guests shines through in each episode.
“Vulnerability leads to vulnerability. Intimacy leads to intimacy,” she says from Paris, where she is bouncing between fashion week couture appointments.
“First times have always been a theme in my life,” she continues, including getting sober ten years ago, which she describes as “an endless series” of firsts.
More recently, in 2021, Dorfman publicly came out as trans during an interview with the author Torrey Peters in TIME magazine. A year later, during a conversation on Rachel Bilson’s podcast, she announced she was engaged to a woman and identified as a trans lesbian. For Dorfman, the past few years have held a cascade of first-times that occurred in the public eye, challenging the mainstream idea that “coming out” is a one-time process. Instead, Dorfman insists on our lifelong right to bodily autonomy and the ongoing possibilities of self-actualization.
With the launch of My First Time, it is as if she is gathering the learnings of the past ten years and sharing her wisdom with the rest of us — revealing the beauty and abundance that lies on the other side of being honest with yourself, the people you love, and in Dorfmans’s case, the world. In one intimate moment on the podcast with the actress and writer Julia Fox, Dorfman says that she hadn’t been truly happy before the past three years. It seems she wants that peace for the rest of us and is willing to open up so that we might get it.
The podcast is produced by Dorfman’s new company Club Curran, which she launched last year. In addition to My First Time, Club Curran offers an online marketplace that exclusively sells queer and trans brands like NOTO Botanics, Collina Strada, and Alder New York. The site also features writing by LGBTQ authors, and she is hoping to launch another podcast with a queer and trans religious expert soon.
So far, the podcast has included twelve episodes, each featuring a celebrity recounting their own “first time.” In the first episode, Dylan Mulvaney describes her first experience at New York Fashion Week and the whirlwind of jumping from struggling to pay her rent to getting dressed by Kate Spade. Dorfman sounds like Mulvaney’s in-the-know older-sister as they swap stories about stylists and the liberatory experience of getting glammed. (In one sweet moment, Mulvaney shares her vision for a nonprofit that gives free glam to all trans young people).
In another episode, the curator Kimberly Drew describes the first time she ate without anxiety after recovering from an eating disorder — during a lavish meal at Questlove’s house, no less. Other guests have included the astrologer Chani Nicholas, the writer Michael Love Michael, and the actress Trace Lysette. Dorfman says that future episodes will include the fashion icons Wes Gordon and Hillary Taymor of Collina Strada, among others.
Since most guests are well-known, hearing them recount their own nerve-wracking first times feels like a relief. Even the most successful among us are in a perpetual state of figuring it out. And yet, on further listen, it becomes clear that these people are visionary because of their willingness to embrace first-times. They’re not getting stuck in antiquated ways of being; they are pushing the edges of what’s possible. As the writer Anaïs Nin writes in her own diaries of self-exploration, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
Of course, where queer and trans folks are concerned, “courage” must always be understood within the wider context of marginalization. Despite years of attraction, I had my first queer romantic experience later than many of my friends. While I’ve always felt self-conscious about that fact, something became clear as I listened to the podcast: If a culture steeped in homophobia and transphobia has spent years demanding we ignore and deny our desires, of course it will take time to let them unfurl. What’s more, we have the right, Dorfman seems to insist, to do so on our own terms. This is not always a loud “coming out." Sometimes, it is a quiet conversation with friends. When we spoke, she said her goal is to “nurture” her community through their own process of self-acceptance.
“In all the conversations I’m having with people, that feels like the central theme,” she says. “How do we nurture ourselves? How do we nurture the people around us? How do we foster intimate conversations on the podcast or big budget films with queer and trans characters we haven’t seen before?”
Indeed, My First Time is an extension of Dorfman’s work uplifting queer and trans voices in all areas of media. In March, the feature film she directed and adapted, I Wish You All The Best, will debut at South by Southwest. She is also slated to direct the film adaptation of the graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, written by the acclaimed author Mariko Tamaki, about the turmoil of a young lesbian relationship.
As I spoke to Dorfman, I sensed the exhilaration she feels when inviting someone to embody something new, even if just by revisiting one moment from their past. First times shouldn’t be cordoned off to our early years — renewal is always available to us, if only we are brave enough to seek it. As she said in the podcast with Kim Booster, the beauty of queer sex and relationships is that “we expect the unexpected.” Perhaps, if we step into that unknown, the largest version of ourselves is waiting on the other side.
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.