Ira Madison III presents Pure Innocent Fun: Essays

Join Magers & Quinn at Queermunity for an evening with Ira Madison III and Chris Stedman.

Queermunity's front entrance is right next door to Magers & Quinn.

Check in begins at 6pm. Come early, settle in, and shop the Queermunity cafe for refreshments!

Good to know:

• Each ticket comes with a signed copy of Pure Innocent Fun.
• Additional copies of Pure Innocent Fun, as well as books by Chris Stedman, will be available for purchase at the event.
• There will be an opportunity for Ira to sign/personalize books after the show.

About the book: Alongside hosting Crooked Media’s pop culture podcast Keep It, Ira has written for GQ, New York Magazine, Interview, MTV News, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. Nylon named him one of the “most reliably hilarious and incisive cultural critics writing now.”

You can recall the first TV show, movie, book, or song that made you feel understood—that shaped how you live, what you love, and whom you would become. It gave you an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject—and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.
In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the ’90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush’s win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver’s license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless: “a virgin who can’t drive.”Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.

Ira Madison III is the host of Crooked Media’s pop culture podcast Keep It. His television writing credits include Uncoupled, Q-Force, Nikki Fre$h, and So Help Me Todd. He has written for GQ, New York Magazine, Interview, MTV News, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. Nylon named him one of the “most reliably hilarious and incisive cultural critics writing now.” He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Watch What Happens Live, The Wendy Williams Show, and the second season of the Netflix drama You. Ira Madison III lives in New York City.

Chris Stedman is a writer, podcaster, and professor who teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. He is the author of the books , , and the forthcoming , as well as the writer and host of . Chris is the founder of Good Judy Productions, a new podcast studio based in Minneapolis committed to telling stories that, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, take the “view from below,” or “the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” The studio’s first series is currently in production and will be distributed by iHeartPodcasts. In addition to his podcast work, Chris has written popular essays for outlets including the Atlantic, Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, VICE, the Washington Post, and others.

Event Venue

Queermunity MN, 3036 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, United States