My Slumber Parties Were Notorious (Ep. 66 - Greenwich Village)

Photo by Cat Gwynn

This Week's Guest: Robert Patrick

Before Pride, before gay marriage, before disco, before most of what we recognize today as gay culture, there was Greenwich Village. It's the gay enclave that invented gay enclaves, a place where you went to reject mainstream after the mainstream had rejected you. My guest today is playwright Robert Patrick, who wandered into the Village as an unsuspecting young gay man in the 1960s. He was only supposed to be there for a day, but he wound up staying for years, witnessing -- and participating in -- one of the most important periods in American theater history.

A quick note: when I interviewed Robert, there was a cement mixer pouring a foundation right outside his window. There are some huffs and puffs in the audio, but I've removed the worst of it so I hope the occasional noise doesn't distract you from Robert's incredible story.

This Week's Recommendation: The Boys in the Band

The week that this podcast comes out is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned marriage bans across the United States. (A topic that, BTW, I wrote a book about -- it's called Defining Marriage and you can pick it up on Amazon right now if you like moving stories of queer love.)

Legalizing marriage meant an end to one of the biggest, most visible ways in which queer people are oppressed. But there's more that we have in common than just our history of oppression. There's our friendship, or brotherhood, falling in love and falling into bed. 

The energy that we once had to devote to hiding we can now devote making noise, being out, being proud, and being good to each other.

For my recommendations this week,  set aside some time for The Boys in the Band. You can find the movie on YouTube, but you might enjoy reading the play on which it's based instead. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking story set in the late 60s about a group of men who assemble for a party. Over the course of the evening, we see how they use their own pain to inflict pain on others. In The Boys in the Band, we seek each other out for comfort and companionship, but we come so battered and abused by the world that we can't help battering and abusing each other.

I recommended this play and movie last year, in my episode with actor Ray Miller. And as I prepared to write this recommendation, I was thinking about how far we've come in just those twelve months -- how in only a year, it seems as though LGBTs have become even more warmly welcomed into the quilt of the country. Of course, in that time, we've also endured a horrible tragedy -- a reminder that even in our safest enclaves we're vulnerable to attack. But even in the aftermath of that tragedy, the outpouring of love and support has been nothing short of breathtaking. 

There was a time not so long ago when all we knew was rejection and abuse. We were so used to it that it's the only way we knew to treat each other. Those times are over. But let's never let them be forgotten.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Earthquakes Are Fine, I'd Just Rather not be in Eugene (Ep. 65 - Tokyo Drag Queen)

This Week's Guest: Tatianna Lee/Taylor

How far would you go to find your chosen family? Some of us are lucky enough to find our tribe in the town where we grew up. Others had to travel to the nearest big city. And my guest this week moved across an ocean. 

By Day, Taylor's a mind-mannered english teacher from Eugene, but at night, he becomes Tatianna Lee, the leader of an international band of Tokyo gender rebels. It's a long way from where he grew up, and a long way from the outcast loner he was as a kid. 

A quiet anime nerd, he used to dream of being part of an incredible family like the ones he saw on screen -- especially after suffering a series of academic failures and rejection from the gay community.

It was then that Taylor stopped dreaming of finding that family, and started making it real.

This Week's Recommendation: Bioware Needs More Gay

I don't know how many listeners I have in Japan -- hopefully a lot -- and if you happen to be in Tokyo, please check out the Tokyo Closet Ball and let me know what you think! From the sound of things, it's one of the most diverse drag-type performances in the world, pulling from all different kinds of performance.

When you have a show that's so international and so diverse, it's hard to know what to call it. But that's good problem to have -- being so unique there's no word to describe you.

For my recommendation this week, check out a YouTube video that involves two of my past Sewers of Paris guests, David Gaider and Jamie Mauer. You might know Jamie, aka Rantasmo, from his YouTube series Needs More Gay, where he talks about queer representation on screen. On a recent episode, he addressed two of the Bioware franchises that Taylor mentioned on this week's episode -- Dragon Age and Mass Effect, both of which feature writing from my past guest David Gaider.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect have been steadily improving their LGBT inclusion for years, starting with a few minor characters and blossoming into complex romance storylines. Jamie's video tackles the specific issue of tokenization -- the idea that we might be included, but only in the most perfunctory, superficial way. 

Watching Jamie's video, you can see that Bioware's approach is basically a how-to manual of avoiding tokenization. It's kind of amazing to see just what lengths the company has gone to to include us -- and how that inclusion started well and got better with each new game over the years. 

After all, these games are fundamentally about balancing a party, assembling a group with varied traits that all enhance and complement each other. And romance is built into the games as part of the mechanic. For years, we've had elves that can shoot lightning, seven-foot tall aliens with four testicles, and club-wielding gnomes. 

In worlds like those, it's a little weird that two men kissing would ever have seemed far-fetched.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Villains and Hairdressers (Ep. 64 - Bryan Safi)

This Week's Guest: Bryan Safi

As a flamboyant kid in Texas, humor was Bryan's protection in situations where standing out might otherwise have been risky. He escaped to the big city he'd always dreamed of to become an actor, and for a time he tried to peel off that funny armor by taking on serious roles. But stripping down revealed something he didn't expect -- underneath the humor that he once hid behind was a man who was even funnier.

PS: Bryan's podcast, Throwing Shade, is going on a 21-city tour! Tickets are on sale at throwingshade.com/tour.

This Week's Recommendation: A Confederacy of Dunces

I'll confess that when I first started listening to Throwing Shade I would get a little frustrated when one of them got a fact wrong, or broached a topic with what I thought was insufficient gravity. But being silly is kind of the point of a comedy show, and if you try to take it seriously, well then, you're the one the joke's on. Generally speaking, the more seriously you take yourself, the funnier you actually are.

For my recommendation this week, take a look at the book A Confederacy of Dunces, written by John Kennedy Toole in the 1960s. It's the story of a man who considers himself very important, and is in fact very ridiculous. His name's Ignatius Reilly, and he's by turns a hot dog vendor, a pants manufacturer, a revolutionary, and a serial masturbator. His grasp on reality is not the strongest, but his plans are terribly grand.

For example, one day while dressed as a pirate, Ignatius makes the acquaintance of a gay man named Dorian Greene. As Ignatius learns about the basic tenets of homosexuality, it occurs to him that he might be able to achieve world peace by infiltrating the nation's army with gay men, transforming all future wars from conflicts into orgies. He commands that Dorian assemble all of his gay friends for what he expects will be a political rally, but what winds up being somewhat less sober.

This is but one of many memorable escapades in the book, all of which involve Ignatius's increasingly grandise plans and increasingly chaotic failures. The title is a reference to a Jonathan Swift quote -- "When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him." For Ignatius, this explains everything: all his failures simply confirm his genius, and motivate him to attempt ever more serious endeavors. 

When things aren't going as you might've planned, you basically have two choices. You can either panic about your wounded pride and convince yourself that the world's out to get you. Or you can just laugh about being wrong. And you might as well laugh -- expecting that you're going to be right about everything is funny. 

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

You Don't Want to See Minnie Mouse Take Her Head Off (Ep. 63 - Ben DeLaCreme)

This Week's Guest: Ben DeLaCreme

This week's guest specializes in breaking boundaries, upending order, and causing mischief. You probably know Ben DeLaCreme best from those couple of months when you were rooting for him to win Season 6 of Drag Race, or maybe from his live shows that tour the country. As it happens, can catch him onstage in his new show, "Inferno A-Go-Go," a delightful romp based on Dante's Inferno -- I'll have details at the end of this episode, or follow him on twitter @bendelacreme.

I'm so grateful to Ben for sitting down with me to talk about how Bugs Bunny and Jessica Rabbit made him the man and woman he is today, the strategy that he devised for making the most of Drag Race, and why the producers of that show hated him.

Highlights of this week's episode: Ben's early forays into showmanship and drag, starting with news reports he'd stage as a child about what was happening around the house. Later, he appeared onstage in his boxers, and as Tina Angst in Chicago -- an angry punk-rock drag girl with pink and black dreadlocks. "I had such a crazy temper then," he said.

Anger was his weapon of choice at first, but then he stumbled across something far better: the devastating power of well-aimed niceness.

He resisted Drag Race for years, but when the time finally came, he crafted an unusual strategy: when in drag, he'd never break character. "I wanted to represent myself in a way that I felt good about," he said.

That proved exhausting, not just for him but for the producers who desperately wanted him to engage with the other contestants as a cutting bitchy gay man. "They hated it," he said. "They wanted me to stop so badly."

And though it might've come off as a little strange, there was a method to Ben DeLaCreme's madness. 

This Week's Recommendation: Labyrinth

I cannot recommend Ben's live appearances highly enough, and you lucky thing you can see him live in a brand new solo show! It's called "Inferno A-Go-Go," based on Dante's Inferno, and it opens at the Laurie Beechman in New York in July, then Provincetown at the Crown and Anchor in August, Seattle's West hall in September, and Oasis in San Francisco in November. If you don't live in those cities, please make arrangements now to hitchhike to whichever one is closest.

There's nothing quite like seeing DeLa live, and the only word I can think of to sum up the experience is "romp." The character creates a bizarre alternate universe in the theater that grabs hold of you, pulls you in, and enchants you to the point that you're not sure why you would ever want to leave.

That's why, for my recommendation this week, I'd like you to check another gender trickster: David Bowie as the goblin king Jareth in Labyrinth. I hope you've seen this film, but if not, a quick synopsis: the otherworldly Jareth seduces young Sarah into a magical kingdom where none of the rules of everyday life apply, and to reach the center of the Labyrinth she must master the bizarre rules of a fantasy realm.

A couple of years ago, I went to a Q&A with some of the Muppet performers in the film, and one of them described the film as "having a lot of space." I think that's a fair critique, and not necessarily a criticism. Like the Labyrinth itself, the movie leaves you with plenty of mysteries and obscured connections to puzzle out on your own. It's an invitation to use your imagination, to fill in gaps and wonder what was real. 

That's what the best trickster characters do, whether it's Bugs Bunny or Jareth or Loki or Groucho Marx or Ben DeLaCreme. Spend a little time in their weird upside-down worlds, and you'll start to pick up a little of their magic yourself.

Then once you're back out in the real world, you can always recharge your imagination by calling on a little of that magic you picked up.

You know. Should you need it.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music:

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm Going to San Francisco to be a Porn Star (Ep. 62 - Conner Habib)

This Week's Guest: Conner Habib

You may think you already know a lot about Conner, given that you've probably seen him naked in such films as Dad Goes to College, Hot House Backroom Volume 18, and Brief Encounters.

But Conner actually holds his cards pretty close to his furry chest. Though you might've seen him naked in porn, you probably know less about his background growing up in Mennonite country, dabbling in the occult, getting lost in the Pennsylvania punk scene, and his secret super power.

"There was something appealing to me about being a kid with superpowers," he says, reflecting on his childhood obsession with Superfriends. He'd fantasize about having powers of his own (something he still does to this day). Back then, he longed to be able to control animals -- maybe because he had severe allergies that prevented him from even being able to touch the family dog. "It kind of just shows that I was really lonely," he says.

Later on, he stumbled across a book on the occult in the school library, and his new obsession became spells and hexes. Alone in his room -- or sometimes with a friend -- he'd open the stolen book and chant incantations and make voodoo dolls. And even when the spells seemed to have no demonstrable effect, such as when he tried to turn himself into a cat, he was confident that at least something was happening. "I look back now and think maybe I shouldn't have messed with that stuff," he says, but "I just wanted there to be more magic."

It wasn't easy being gay in his small town. There was one neighbor who he'd have sex with, then berate himself endlessly. At school, he'd beg male friends for sex, and they'd all laugh it off as a joke.

As he got a little older, he fell in with the Pennsylvania punk scene, which was a good fit for his strangeness and rule-breaking. Even though he scene was pretty homophobic, the punks that he met seemed to respect that queer people were doing something that freaked out the mainstream, and they respected him. 

Eventually, he decided, he was going to move to San Francisco to become a porn star. He was teaching at the time, and his students thought it was awesome. Once again, he was going to dive into a world outside the mainstream -- whether fantasizing about superheroes, chanting spells, listening to punk rock or slipping away for gay sex. Throughout his life, he realized, he's been an outside.

But after a while, if you're an outsider in enough ways, "you're no longer an outsider. You're a bridge."

By the way, Conner's hosting a live online course on Sunday, June 5, called Pornworld that's all about what porn teaches us about sex. I'll have more details on that at the end of the show, or head over to ConnerHabib.com to find out more about the course. 

This Week's Recommendation: The First Nudie Musical

Even though these days Connor only takes off his clothes on an infrequent basis, there's still plenty of porn to be enjoyed in the world. And for this week's recommendation, I suggest you find a movie called "The First Nudie Musical." 

The film was made for a couple of bucks in the late 70s and stars, of all people, Cindy Williams from Laverne and Shirley. The story is that a low-budget porn studio is about to go out of business, but the owner -- who inherited it as a legitimate movie company from his father -- wants to keep the family business alive. His secretary, played by Cindy, suggests that they make a pornographic musical extravaganza called "Come Come Now." And there you have it: an excuse for a series of bosom-bearing scenes set to song.

As musicals go, it's, well, fine, with numbers like "Lesbian Butch Dyke" and "Dancing Dildos." As porn goes, it's probably not going to win any Grabby awards. But there's something about the blend of the two styles that's hard to look away from.

And in a way, it's a bit like sex: occasionally hot, mostly messy, sometimes funny, a little serious but mostly really really really weird. There's nothing profound about the movie, no deep truths revealed by the sight of Cindy Williams wearing a hat shaped like a middle finger, no philosophies explained by the actress who brags at an audition that she's done some minor bestiality. Like a good roll in the hay, a sexy film doesn't have to be deep or penetrating -- sometimes the best ones are just a bit of silly, harmless fun.

Music:

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

What Sets You Apart is What Makes You Stand Out (Ep. 61 - Buffy)

This Week's Guest: Terry Blas

You might be familiar with the work of this week's guest. Terry drew a comic that everyone was passing around a few months ago called "You Say Latino," that's all about the differences between Latino and Hispanic. He has a new comic up this week on Fusion.com called "Ghetto Swirl," about coming to terms with being gay and Mormon.

If you haven't seen his work, check them out -- they're both quick reads, and they're helpful guides for how to describe people around you, or yourself. And Terry knows a thing or two about labels. Nerdy, Hispanic, Mormon, gay, comic illustrator -- he's worn a lot of hats. Or at least, he's tried on a lot of hats. Some fit, and others didn't. They really really didn't.

This Week's Recommendation: Buffy

Thanks again to Terry for joining me. And also for reminding me what an amazing show Buffy is -- it's been a while since I watched, but gathering clips for this week's episode sent me down a YouTube spiral of some amazing episodes. And you should do the same -- my recommendation this week is to clear your calendar for a month or two so you can watch all seven seasons.

Now season 1 is a little rough. The touches of brilliance are all there, but you'll have to be a little patient while they all come together. Season one is very much about standard teen drama, but the show hits its stride soon enough and before long you're watching something so sophisticated that there is now an entire academic discipline known as "Buffy Studies."

One of the most amazing things about the show -- and there are a lot, but no spoilers -- is how much it changes over time. You can binge watch all 144 episodes over the course of two months, if you watch two a day. But when it aired, the story played out over seven years. And we didn't just watch Buffy journey through adolescence, we followed the show into its own adulthood, growing increasingly dark as it grapples not with popularity or parental pressure, but with life, death, the purpose of existence.

Also, in case you haven't heard, there's a musical episode, so that's pretty great.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music:

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Secrets and Family (Ep. 60 - Soap operas)

This Week's Guest: Conor Patrick

Do you know all of your family secrets? And is it possible that you might be one of them? My guest this week is Conor Patrick, whose work you can catch right now on on Cinemax -- he's a script coordinator on the show Banshee, which is about sinister mysteries hiding in a small town.

As a kid, Conor obsessed over the convoluted family plots of soap operas. His parents were prominent local celebrities in the town where he grew up, which meant his family was always in the spotlight. And that meant HE was always in the spotlight. And the secrets he harbored might someday be exposed as well. 

This Week's Recommendation: Billy Elliot

Thanks again to Conor for joining me. You can catch his work as script supervisor on Banshee -- the show's reaching its series finale on May 20th, so it's a perfect time to binge watch.

Banshee's all about hidden secrets and coded behavior in an isolated town, and if you like that sort of story I cannot recommend highly enough the film Billy Elliot. Set during the UK miners strike in the 1980s, it's the story of a rough rural family and a boy who, when sent to learn to fight, instead discovers his gift for dance. 

There are a lot of feelings happening in this movie. But at its core is a boy who wants to be appreciated, and a parent who isn't sure he knows his own son. Throughout the movie, they orbit each other, drawing closer and further, experiencing moments of honesty between periods of distance.

As obvious as it is that Billy has a gift, it seems just as clear that his father, a miner, will never understand it. But the most beautiful moment of the film -- and no spoilers -- is its last five seconds. Don't skip to the end, because it won't mean anything unless you've watched it through. But there comes a point at which both characters, Billy and his father, take a leap. For Billy, it's a leap to becoming the man he'd always wanted to be. For his father, it's meeting his son in midair -- despite being at a physical distance -- to finally see someone he thought he knew for the first time.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music:

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

She Made me Dress up as the Pink Carebear (Ep. 59 - Boy Bands)

This Week's Guest: Kevin Yee

What would you do if you sacrificed everything for your dreams -- and then your dreams change? My guest this week is Kevin Yee, who's been a professional performer almost as long as he's been alive. As a teenager, he got the chance of a lifetime when he was cast in a late-90s boy band. Three years later, things hadn't quite turned out as he'd hoped, and he thought his dreams of performing were over before he had even reached adulthood. 

These days things are looking a bit better -- you can catch him performing at the Cafe Fear Comedy Festival in Wilmington NC from May 18-21, and the Highlarious Comedy Festival in Seattle this August. You can get details on the performances at KevinYee.com... and you can get the story of his journey from boy band to stand up right now in our conversation.

This Week's Recommendation: Double Life

I met Kevin a couple years ago, long after he put the boy band and clothing store behind him and found his calling in comedy. He is even more fun and funny in person than he is on stage, and I'm so glad I know THAT Kevin, the real Kevin, and that as awful as his time in the band surely was, that it only strengthened his resolve to live a life that's genuine.

And as glitzy and glamorous and gay as showbusiness is, it's long had a way of forcing people to repress their true selves, forcing queer entertainers to adopt a straight facade. That a disservice not just to artists, but also to audiences -- whether and actor or a singer or painter or a poet, art need honesty in order to work.

For my recommendation this week, I'd like to check out the book Double Life, by Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine. The two men met in June of 1958, when Norman spotted Alan onstage on the Broadway show Jamaica. And over their six decades together, they've worked onstage, in television, in advertising, in visual arts -- and the memoir they wrote a few years back is a meticulous chronicle of how their lives were shaped by the various closets they endured.

Double Life is a fascinating glimpse at the ways that the entertainment industry forced gay men to remain closeted, to deny their own existence. It's also a tender love letter between two men who shared each other's lives, often through times when only they and their closest friends could know what those lives truly were. And it's a reminder of how lucky we are to live in a time when artists and their art can be honest, and are no longer forced to wear a straight face.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About This Week

Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

I'm in the Whore Houses and the Leper Colonies (Ep. 58 - Robbie Turner)

Listener alert! If you're enjoying The Sewers of Paris, could you nominate it in the "GLBT" category for a podcast award? Deadline is April 30th!

This Week's Guest: Robbie Turner

Who taught you how to be beautiful? My guest this week made a lifelong study of the most beautiful woman he knew, his mother, even going so far as to transform into a character who bears an uncanny resemblance. You might know Robbie Turner the character from this season's Drag Race, or from her regular appearances at shows in Seattle and around the country. She might've hosted your Pride, or officiated your wedding. But on today's episode we're going to get to know Robbie Turner the man.

As a child, Robbie wanted to become a minister, and to carry on the religious traditions of his family. Instead, today he's carrying on their hair and makeup. But without meaning to, he's also managed to cultivate an unlikely flock of his own. But it wasn't an easy path.

Robbie always knew he was different -- as young boy, he loved to color his fingernails red with sharpies, much to the chagrin of his mother, who would confiscate any markers she found. But his grandma thought it was adorable, and kept him well-stocked, slipping sharpies to him every Sunday at church.

The day he was to graduate from high school, Robbie woke up and knew that he would either have to change his life or die. He was deeply closeted, terrified of being found out by his religious family and his tiny rural town. That morning, he waded into a river holding a giant stone, planning to drown himself. "We didn't have 'it gets better,'" he said. "As far as I knew, it got worse."

Even underwater, he could feel his tears welling up as he mustered the courage to stand up out of the water and walk back to shore. He made it to graduation, broke up with his girlfriend, came out to his parents, and bid his small town goodbye. "I need to find out who I am," Robbie told them, and hit the road.

He planned to be a serious actor, and took roles in various Shakespeare shows -- but then he found himself cast repeatedly in female roles, and something just seemed right about it. When a friend asked if he'd fill in for a last-minute cancellation at a drag show, Robbie was taken aback. What did he know about drag? The two of them ran to a thrift shop, grabbed whatever couture they could find, and suddenly Robbie found himself transformed into Liza Minnelli. He walked out on stage with no time to rehearse and nailed a lip-sync to Liza with a Z. That led to another booking, and another, and another -- and then he was on Drag Race.

Telling his mother what he does was particularly difficult. Robbie had idolized her for his entire life, and she received the news as he thought she might -- with hysterics. But his father surprised him. "I expected him to be like 'get out of the house,'" Robbie said. But instead, his father took a moment to compose himself, and told his son, "I'm going to level with you. You're not going to get a fair shake in life. But I'll always be here for you."

It took some time for his mother to come around. They certainly didn't understand his drag career. But when Robbie got a call that his mother was dying, he knew he had to drop everything and return to the small town he'd left years before. 

Here are some photos that I took of Robbie just before her Drag Race debut:

This Week's Recommendation: Polyester

This week's episode was all about drag and moms, it would be a crime for my recommendation to overlook Divine, the mother of modern drag queens. She's sensitive and sweet in Hairspray, and she's long-suffering in Polyester, but I think her greatest role is in Pink Flamingos. In that film, Divine plays Babs Johnson, a trailer-dweller who lives with her mother and son and has just been named the filthiest person alive. That enrages two other filthy Baltimore residents, who scheme to seize the title from Babs by any means necessary, but soon find themselves in filth far over their heads.

Divine's portrayal of maternity has never exactly been what you'd call typical, but even in this incredibly disgusting role, there's a motherliness that borders on touching. Divine's family is gross -- they engage in acts with chickens and with eggs that will leave you trembling -- but they're HER family, and she refuses to apologize for the way they live, the way they kill, and the way they eat.

There are remarkably few films about heroic moms, since strong women are so often made into villains, from Cinderella to Carrie to The Manchurian Candidate to Ordinary People. Even Divine might look at first like the bad guy in Pink Flamingos -- after all, she's responsible for a variety of grandiose murders over the course of the film. But she's not filthy just for fun, she's filthy for a cause -- that of her family. Yes, she's disgusting, but disgust is what nourishes her egg-obsessed mother and her chicken-fucking kid. 

Being a mother in this context may be exhausting, and the world may never fully understand her. But Divine never flinches from the role as matriarch of her horrifying clan, of caretaker, protector, and provider. She'll do whatever must be done to preserve her family, or eat shit and die trying.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

I was in Fantasy Worlds with Quests and Wizards (Ep. 57 - Dungeons & Dragons)

This Week's Guest: David Gaider

If you could create your ideal fantasy world, what would it looks like? Who would live there? And would it include you?

My guest this week is writer and game developer David Gaider, whose work appears in Baldur's Gate 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, several novels. He's been telling stories his whole life, with one early experience involving a game in which he gave his friends the Black Death -- in a role-playing context, of course.

Games were always David's hobby. He worked in hotel management and never planned to get into the game industry, even going so far as to turn down the job that would eventually change his life. 

"One does not make a job out of things you do to creatively satisfy yourself," he told himself. But there were surprises awaiting him that gave him the nudge he needed toward creative fulfilment -- though not without taking a great risk.

For David, games were an escape from real life, and his fantasy worlds never included anyone who was quite like him. The games that he wrote were always about other people, adventures that he told for and about about someone else. "People say 'write what you know' and that just wasn't something I did," he said. "I didn't think I had a story to tell that other people would be interested in."

It wasn't until his company, Bioware, included a lesbian storyline in the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that it even occurred to David that he could write queer characters. "I was blown away when I heard that this is something we were doing," he said. "I didn't know that it was something I could even question or want."

And so he wrote a mage named Dorian for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Dorian's backstory involves a disapproving father and attempts at being "ex-gay" -- in the context of magic and spells. To write Dorian, David reached down deep to tap into personal experiences he'd never used in his writing before. "I finished writing it and I burst into tears," he said.

Once he collected himself, he gave the script to his editor. She came into his office crying as well. It was his first indication that he hadn't just opened a door for himself -- he'd unlocked an undiscovered realm for players everywhere.

This Week's Recommendation: Dragon Age (and Ass-Slapping)

Thanks again to David for joining me. Not just on this episode, but every time I play Dragon Age. It's a single-player game, but just as with a book or a movie or a song, when you connect with a work of art, you're doing it in the company of the people who made it. And knowing that folks like David invited us into their creations with characters who are queer makes the fantasy all the more rich.

That's why my recommendation this week is the series that he worked on, Dragon Age. There are three games, each released about two years apart, and the most recent one -- Dragon Age Inquisition -- has tons of queer content. I've been spending the last few weeks wooing a character called The Iron Bull, a giant hulking warrior who commands a group of mercenaries and whose love for your character deepens if you kill a dragon together.

Among Bull's entourage is a trans man, and there's a scene in which the game unflinchingly explains the character's connection to his gender. Later, the player's relationship with Bull can take a turn towards BDSM, and you explore safe words and consent between fights with monsters deep underground. After a grueling adventure, your can opt into being tied up and roughly sexed in the safety of your bedroom. One character observes that in your relationship with Bull, you submit, but Bull serves, explaining BDSM terms that are clearer than you'll hear at most actual bondage events.

In one scene that I've probably watched a dozen times, Bull slaps your character on the ass, hard enough that you're seen rubbing it tenderly afterward. The scene caught me by surprise at first, and then the next time it played, I made sure my partner was nearby. "Like THAT," I told him.

Not every work of art needs to accommodate every fantasy -- and in fact, they'd be pretty messy if they did. But what I love about Dragon Age is the extent to which it invites different fantasies in.

If I could only play a straight romance, or if I couldn't negotiate power roles with my partner, then I wouldn't be playing my fantasy. I'd be playing someone else's. 

The conversations and assignations of Dragon Age happen in a imaginary setting, but they could just as easily take place in a bedroom or a bar or a basement here in the real world. And at first that might seem like reality intruding into a fantasy realm. If the game's meant to be an escape, a place where your imagination can go free, isn't it distracting to be reminded of the issues of our real lives?

Well -- no. No fantasy exists completely on its own. We all bring a bit of our real lives with us when we escape into a story or music or game, whether it's a wish to be a hero or bad guy, to be important, to be loved, to be something scary or to make something beautiful.

We carry some measure of ourselves into every escape, and some measure of the escape back with us to real life, like returning to base with an inventory bulging with treasure.

From adventures like these, you might return with life-changing loot, like the courage to come out, or a deeper understanding of those you love. And sometimes even little rewards catch you by surprise, like instructions for a good hard smack on the ass.

"I think in many ways the industry is maturing," said David, who just recently became creative director at the game company Beamdog. "Sure, we're offering escapism, but to whom, and to where? And what other sorts of stories can we tell?"

Please join me for a livestreaming of my Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough! I'm at http://twitch.tv/matthewbaume.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music:
Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/