My first thought upon hearing this was, Okay…what happens to OutQ…?

To: SIRIUS Subscribers

Today is a very exciting day for SIRIUS customers. As you may have heard, SIRIUS Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio are merging to form the nation’s premier audio entertainment provider.

This combination of our two offerings will benefit you – our loyal listeners. As a single company, we’ll provide superior programming to you every day with the best of both SIRIUS and XM. Currently, XM and SIRIUS broadcast a wide range of commercial-free music channels, exclusive sports coverage, news, talk, and entertainment programming. Howard Stern. Oprah and Friends. The NFL. MLB. NBA. ESPN. CNBC. Fox News. Additionally, the combined company will be able to improve existing services such as real-time traffic information and rear-seat video as well as introduce new ones.

You see what’s missing from that list.  No, no…  Not just OutQ, but any indication that they’ve been providing something for people to listen to, who are sick and tired of all the right wing pap being broadcast out there, posturing as non-partisan news and information.  Fox News?  They tell us about Fox News (sic) and not Talk Left?  But Clear Channel owns a major stake in XM.

I have a Honda Accord, and since it came with a factory installed XM radio, the first thing I did was bellyache to XM about their lack of a gay channel like Sirius had.  I could have been shouting my complaints up at one of their satellites for all it mattered.  So shortly after I bought the Accord I yanked the factory radio out and spent $180 plus the cost of a new radio plus the cost of installation so I could listen to OutQ on Sirius.  

At the time Sirius had two other channels going for it that XM didn’t:  Swing Street and Air America.  But then Air America defected to XM and Sirius dropped Swing Street when they picked up Howard Stern, merging it’s programming into the god awful American Standards channel, which I think they call the Old Fart’s Channel internally.  Now it’s a sickening combination of big band swing and 1950s lounge music and I hate it. 

The Trance channel is now more a electro-pop channel except some evenings when it gets back to being hard core trance.  The only thing that hasn’t changed for the worse since I subscribed to Sirius is OutQ.  Well…and the 60s channel and the New Age channel (elevator music for my generation).  Basically I’m paying their subscription fees now just to listen to Michelangelo Signorile and Sunset Cruse and a couple other channels I wouldn’t have yanked the old radio out for since XM carried them too.  Actually, XM’s 40s channel is much better then Sirius’ god awful American Standards channel.

For me the promise satellite radio wasn’t so much that you could drive from one end of the country to the other without having to constantly retune your radio all the way, but that niche content that wasn’t profitable regionally, could work on a national scale.  Radio that actually spoke to gay audiences only happened in some large cities, and then only for a few hours at week at most.  But with the ability to reach the entire country from a satellite, my hope was that we’d finally have something that regarded us as its primary target audience, instead of "oh…yeah…and you gays too."

Ironically, there’s not a lot I actually like on OutQ.  Derek & Romaine are way too crude for my liking.  I just won’t listen to that.  OutQ in the Morning is almost as bad sometimes.  But I can forgive any gay channel that kind of crap that broadcasts Signorile and Sunset Cruse.  Especially Sunset Cruse…which is a lovely gay dedicate-a-song-to-your-sweetheart program.  I just love it.  After a long week of reading about one goddamned attack on the gay community after another in the news, Sunset Cruse is just the thing I need to remind me that love still has a chance in this world.

My fear right now in this proposed merger is that all that will simply vanish just like my Swing Channel did when either the bean counters decide it isn’t pulling in enough listeners, or the stock block that belongs to Clear Channel (they own a major stake in XM), decides they don’t want any of that faggot stuff on their airwaves.  The reason competition is a good thing isn’t to drive down prices, but to encourage producers to exploit markets their competition isn’t, and to keep the top dogs responsive to All their customers.