Lesbian and FLINTA* stories from around the globe, connected straight to New Zealand. Hosted by Lisa - creator of Ginger’s - with rotating guest hosts. Born from our award-winning national events and bush camps, broadcast from the back arse of the world to wherever you are.
Losing the Life You Built: Grief, Loss, and Getting Through It
This time im in yet another part of the world. I’m sat in a wee pub in Leitrim village in Ireland for this one with Gemma Gibbons. Thirty eight years later, Gemma and I have grown up together back home.
If you'd told us when we were younger that by our thirties one of us would be getting divorced and the other would be a widow, we'd have told you you were away with the fairies. Still, we decided to do a slàinte, cheers, to the state of it, and how far we've come. As Gemma says, our family survived a famine, so you can survive this.
Gemma lost her husband suddenly on a morning she will never forget, the week of Christmas, three and a half years ago now. And I've had my own life come apart in a completely different way, a different form of loss entirely, and between the two of us we've learned just how non linear grief actually is.
Sometimes I think the best way for people to actually resonate with something is just hearing someone else talk honestly about what happened to them. How it shaped them. And the good that comes out of some of the worst nightmares you'll ever face, because weirdly, there is good that comes from grief. None of us are strangers to grief. None of us will escape it.
You can be happy in your new life, and hurt at the same time. It can coexist.
So that's what we're talking about today. That light switch moment where the entire life you built changes completely, the future you thought you had, gone, on some idle, insignificant Tuesday you never saw coming. Fair warning, we get into some heavy stuff around loss in this one, but there's always a sprinkle of our Irish humour in there too.
10 Aug 2026
The Women Behind Seoul's Secret Lesbian Bars
Seoul - South Korea. I went looking for Yoon Kim Myung-woo, who has run Lesvos, South Korea's first lesbian bar, since 1996. She was the first person in Korea to come out publicly in the media, and she is a queer rights activist and a drag king theatre actor who has kept that bar open through stigma, police raids and a pandemic. There is a documentary about her, ;Home Ground', which is the first film to archive the history of Korean lesbian spaces at all.
Then I found a red neon sign on a roof, climbed the outside stairs, and went through a door saying members only. That is Horn Seoul, nine months old, run by Jang.
Running a lesbian bar in South Korea means no name on the map app, no way to tell people you exist. Customers cannot risk being seen walking in. So you build something almost nobody can find, in a country with no anti-discrimination law and no same sex marriage, and you try to keep it alive anyway.
Somehow I talked Jang and three of her friends into coming up to the roof with me to talk about it. Women who had known me an hour, handing that much trust to a stranger with a phone.
One phone, five people, two languages, one translator. It is messy but in the best way. I kept some of the the Korean in and left the mess where it was, because that is what it actually sounded like.
They talk about gaydar in a country where everyone holds hands, their sheer lack of rights, and why lesbians in Seoul go to the familiar place instead of the fancy one.
Lesvos and Horn are a five minute walk apart in Hongdae.
Horn Seoul - www.instagram.com/horn_seoul
Lesvos Bar - www.instagram.com/lesvos_sangsu/
Jang Salon - www.instagram.com/jangsalon2011
JangSalon Reserve (Wine Bar) www.instagram.com/jangsalon_reserve
Rangrarii Korean Webtoon Illustrations
www.instagram.com/rangrarii
14 Jul 2026
It's Never Too Late: Kate Smith - Came Out at 70 After a Lifetime of Marriage
Kate was married for 50 years. She raised a family, built a life, did everything the world told her a life was supposed to look like. And at 70 years old, she woke up one morning and finally asked herself who she actually was underneath all of it. The answer changed everything.
In this episode of the Ginger's Podcast, Lisa and Nat sit down with Kate, the woman who stole the whole Bush Camp's heart the moment she arrived, earlier this year in April.
From a farming village in Derbyshire, England, to six weeks at sea on the way to New Zealand in 1974, to a lifetime lived for everyone but herself, right through to the moment she finally had the courage to come out.
This isn't just a coming out story. It's a story about what it costs to live authentically after seven decades of not, and what it gives back once you do. Lisa and Nat had tears through most of it. You probably will too.
Kate's message for anyone listening: it is never, ever too late to find yourself.
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