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We here at The Stranger are thrilled to announce that Vivian McCall is our new News Editor. She’s no, ahem, stranger around these parts.
Vivian joined our staff in 2023 and brought with her an enviable, inspirational curiosity. (And very cool clothes.) She hit the ground running, platforming voices in Seattle’s queer community and giving them a place to share their experiences and talk about how increasingly regressive federal laws impact them.
In her Forced Out series, she conducted hours and hours of interviews with trans people and their families who were having to leave their red states to (hopefully) find safety in more progressive cities.
And she still made time to dig into more creative corners of the city, too, searching for ghosts, interviewing food-focused videogame makers, hanging out with punk rock bands, and investigating why the Taco Bell on Lower Queen Anne is so much more expensive than other Taco Bells.
Oh, and she’s funny as fuck, unafraid to ask the tough questions like, “Did You See That Drone Vulva in the Sky on New Year’s Eve?” and she always lightens the mood by presenting us with fun facts about everything from Slayer to Mario Kart and sharing outtakes from her interviews with fisting experts during hectic production weeks.
Basically, we love her. She’s one of the smartest, snarkiest, kindest people we know. And we can’t be more excited for the future of The Stranger.
We’ll hand it to Vivian to (re)introduce herself and share her hopes and dreams for The Stranger’s news section.
Hey there, it’s me, Vivian McCall, The Stranger’s new News Editor. If you read this paper—rag to some, blog to many—you probably know my work. If you don’t, why is this the first thing you’re reading? Isn’t that weird? For the last two years and change, I’ve written about all the gay goings on in Seattle, good and bad.
Mostly bad, if I’m honest: Seattle Children’s on-again, off-again relationship with trans care. What documents trans people needed to change before Donald Trump took power, and how to change them. What national politics meant for queers in Washington, and what Washington laws meant for Washington queers. The Parents’ Bill of Rights, a bill that had scarcely anything to do with rights. The gay bar raid heard ’round the country. Small town fights over small town prides. The Denny Blaine saga. I even interviewed Ira Glass, who doesn’t like being interviewed. He was nice!
But my life did not begin two years ago, and neither did my career. I’m a musician. A southerner turned midwesterner turned westcoaster. A tinkerer, reader, and house re-organizer. I’ve written for newspapers and national magazines, and I gave public radio a four-year spin, which was enough for me. I came to The Stranger for something different, unconventional, with less hand-wringing and less bullshit. But I’ve always believed in the power of news. After 10-ish years, it’s evident. A couple emails and some dogged curiosity can send a shiver up a comms guy’s spine. A politician’s fear of exposure and ridicule inspires more intelligent policy than any committee. Good journalism can also give powerless people real agency. That’s the best part. The Stranger allows journalists to write it all down honestly, with some flair and absurdity, which is good, because there’s plenty absurd about Seattle.
After some initial resistance to this place, I learned to love my new home and its passive-aggressive, willingly rain-soaked bubble-dwellers. For a city with such a liberal reputation, I have never met so many self-interested, pearl-clutching, bruise-like-a-banana conservatives in my life, and I’m from Texas. Until I moved here, I’d never met a woo-ey self-described “leftist” who hated homeless people, or lived anywhere with so many wild-eyed extremists roaming the forest outside of town. I’d also never met so many deeply frustrated people so passionate about improving a place most weren’t even from. Maybe it’s the high rent driving them mad, maybe it’s the water on both sides and nowhere to go, maybe it’s how obvious those improvements really are, and how ineffectual the political process can be around here.
The Stranger has a reputation for snark, bitchiness, cattiness, and irreverence. All true, on a surface level. But it’s also host to a decades-long argument that this city shouldn’t start every morning by stepping on a rake. There’s freedom to call ridiculous stuff ridiculous, serious stuff serious, and to use the paper’s opinionated voice as an opportunity for fastidious research, when other publications would hedge on the details. It’s not about being loud. It’s about being right, loudly.
Thanks for reading,
Vivian McCall
