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The Gondolier

What happens when doing what you love means giving up who you really are?
Duration
1h 17m
Broadcast on
26 Jun 2026
Audio Format
other

Back in 2017, reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad came to us with a story that dug into the difficult and often dark places discrimination creates. We start in Venice, Italy, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon. 

We circled back to Alex in 2026, to find out where the canal of life ended up leading after our initial reporting, and we’ve included some heartbreaking and heartwarming updates on Alex’s life at the end of this episode. 

Special thanks to Alexis Ungerer, Summer, Alex Hai, Kevin Gotkin, Silvia Del Fabbro, Sandro Mariot, Aldo Rosso and Marta Vannucci, The Longest Shortest Time (Hillary Frank, Peter Clowney and Abigail Keel), Tim Howard, Nick Adams/GLAAD, Valentina Powers, Florence Ursino, Ann Marie Somma, Alex Overington, Jeremy Bloom and the people of Little Italy. 

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - David Conrad and Kristen Clark.
Produced by - Annie McEwen and Molly Webster.
with help from - Anisa Vietze
Fact-checking for the update by - Angely Mercado

OTHER COOL THINGS:

Books -

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WNYC Studios is supported by WISE. WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a WISE account, you can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get WISE. Download the WISE app today. Terms and conditions apply. WNYC Studios is supported by Odo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odo at ODOO.com. That's ODOO.com. Radio Lab supporters include the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Picture this, years of guarantee research support in a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you're a PhD student, postdoc, or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with a people-not-projects approach, long-term support, and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. Find your program at HHMI.org/RadioLab. This is Radio Lab. I'm Storm Wheeler, the executive editor here at the show, and I want to play you an episode today that we first put out in 2017. And the reason is because I still think about this story all the time. It was both a real challenge and a joy to work on, because it's the story of a person who had to face off against literally the entire world and against our most ingrained ways of seeing the world and each other, all just to be who they really are. That person is named Alex High. And in this episode, we meet Alex sort of in the middle of that struggle. And as you'll hear in the show, it doesn't end at the end of this story. So I gotta hold Alex to find out what happened next. So if you stick around for the end, you'll hear Alex telling me about a whole second act to this story, which honestly I found very moving. But first, I'm just gonna play you the original piece, which is called the Gondolaire. You're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. Hey, I'm Chad Abumran. I'm Robert Krollich. This is Radio Lab. Today we have the story of just how hard it can be to be who you actually are. What it seems like the entire world is doing its best to make you who you actually aren't. Well, I guess I could. I mean, this could be too many details, but... The story starts for us with reporter David Conrad. So for me, it was back in late 2014, I was living in Philadelphia as a grad student. And at the time, David was applying for jobs. And one of the jobs he was applying for was at a radio show that was doing a series about international women's issues. And so I had this on my mind, and I was taking a bus to the university, and I just overheard somebody talking about their recent trip to Venice. And of course, the classic tourist thing to do when you go to Venice is to take a ride on the canal boats, the gondolas. You know, go down the canal, maybe someone sings to the famous song. It's very romantic. In any case, the person sitting on the bus next to David was telling their friend that they had taken a gondola ride with this first ever woman gondolaie in Venice. Yeah, and then we were like poking around and we realized like how... But how did this become a we? No, I... Who are you? I'm Kristen. Kristen Clark, also a journalist and radio producer. And she and David are partners and collaborators. I mean, and this is what was interesting is like, we realized like how big a deal it is to be

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What happens when doing what you love means giving up who you really are?