I Walked on Coals (Ep. 109 - Janet Jackson)

This Week's Guest: Gordon Bellamy

If making others happy makes you happy, what do you do when their happiness puts you in danger? My guest this week is Gordon Bellamy, one of the kindest and friendliest people I've ever met. For years, he went to great lengths to get along with people, even when he was sure those people would reject the real him. But of course, true friendship and love only came once he'd working up the nerve to be truly honest ... with the help of a song or two.

And by the way, Gordon and I will be on a panel at the upcoming DragCon -- that's the convention built around RuPaul's Drag Race. We'll be talking about LGBT gamers and queer games, joined by Pandora Box, YouTuber Will Shepherd, and Twitch streamer Dylan Zaner. It's at 2pm on Sunday, April 30th at DragCon in Los Angeles, and if you're in town, I hope to see you there.

Also, listeners, I have a question for you: have there been any episodes or guests or stories on The Sewers of Paris that you found particularly memorable? I'm going to be featuring some highlights from past episodes on the Sewers of Paris website, and I'd like to hear from you if there's anything you think is particularly worthy of sharing. Let me know your thoughts @mattbaume on Twitter.

This Week's Recommendation: I Am What I Am

No matter how early any queer person comes out of the closet, they almost always have the same lament -- that they didn't do it sooner. For my recommendation this week, take a look at a song that helped nudge me out of the closet: I am What I am, from the show La Cage aux Folles and about a billion other covers.

In our conversation, Gordon talked about the power of a song to psych you up and make you feel brave. In La Cage, this particular song comes at a point of crisis at the end of act 1, and begins on a fearful and timid note. But as the music begins to swell, so does Albin's courage, and what the audiences witnesses over the course of three-ish minutes is mounting bravery leading up to a defiant explosion from the closet. It's an anthem of honesty and self-love and pride triumphing over everything that's ever held you back.

A quick search on YouTube reveals that you can spend hours watching various versions and interpretations of the song, and I can think of no better way to spend an afternoon. 

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/

This is the Story of a Homosexual (Ep. 108 - Twin Peaks)

This Week's Guest: Glen Weldon

How much thought have you given to what your secret identity would be if you were a superhero? My guest this week is Glen Weldon, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour -- a lively chat about books, music, movies, TV, and more. As host, Glen's renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of heros and comic books. But for a long time, that comic geek was just one of his secret identities.

By the way, Pop Culture Happy Hour is coming to Chicago next week for a live show on April 12. You can go to HarrisTheaterChicago.org to get tickets.

This Week's Recommendation: Black Books

I suspect that Glen's memories of being a surly, resentful bookstore employee will be deeply familiar to many of us who have worked retail. It certainly reminded me of the time I worked at a certain one-hour photo chain, and gave up even trying to meet that deadline for orders. If someone complained, I told them, "one-hour photo is just the name of the store, we don't actually do it in an hour."

And that brings me to my recommendation this week: the British TV series Black Books. It's set in bookstore owned my a man who is comprised entirely of misanthropy and ill will, moving through life with so many defenses raised it's difficult to tell if there's even a person at the center of them.

Bernard, the misanthrope character, is a lot of fun -- witty, sardonic, ridiculous and aloof.

And ultimately, that's the most that defenses will allow a person to be -- defenses let you be fun, but they tend to get in the way of anything meaningful, or honest, or insightful. To write something that resonates, or to have relationships that last requires a dropping of those defenses, that you make yourself open, give away your secrets, allow yourself to be read. To be like an open book.

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 Can be Sad or You Can be Gay (Ep. 107 - Guy Branum)

This Week's Guest: Guy Branum

Why is "gay" the word that the world seems to have picked to describe us? My guest Guy Branum has some thoughts on the topic, and on many more. You can see Guy as the host of "Talk Show the Game Show," debuting April 5 on TruTV, where celebrities compete to be the best guest on a talk show. There could be no better environment for Guy, a brilliantly funny comedian with a superpower for first breaking rules, and then reassembling them into something far more fascinating. 

This Week's Recommendation: Talk Show the Game Show & My Fair Lady

Please do not commit the crime of missing the debut of Talk Show the Game Show on TruTV, April 5. I've seen it when it was a live show, and words cannot describe how fortunate the world is that you no longer have to fly to Los Angeles to see it -- though it woudl be entirely reasonable to do so. It's that good.

Guy mentioned his love of Pygmalion stories, and so of course my recommendation this week is for the musical My Fair Lady. It's the story of a poor rag-tag young woman who dreams of finding someplace better, and is then plucked from the street by a man of high society who wishes to trains her be a cultivated lady for his own amusement. 

As she struggles to move from grimy streets to wealth and excess, Eliza quickly becomes a person of overwhelming contrasts. She's torn between the place that she's from, the person who she is, and the world that she's entered. She finds her feet planted in two very different realms, and as they slide further and further apart she begins to lose her footing in each.

I often wonder what my life would be life if I were born in different circumstances. How much of me is me, and how much it is the house where I grew up and the city I moved to as an adult? We're all made up, to varying extents, of pieces of everywhere we've been and everyone we've met. It can be hard to fit those pieces together -- say, combining the streets of London with an ornate ballroom, or a dusty farm town with a flamboyant TV game show -- but ultimately, those pieces don't define us nearly as much as the unique connective tissue that we grow to attach them to each other.

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/

A Giraffe Gynecologist (Ep. 106 - Opera)

This Week's Guest: James Jorden

Longtime listeners may remember way back in episode 4 of The Sewers of Paris, my guest Greg talked about picking up copies of an unofficial queer opera zine called Parterre Box in the men's room of the Metropolitan Opera. The publisher of that zine is this week's guest. James Jorden always wanted to direct, but when he first moved to New York the closest he could get to the stage was in a low-paying job sweeping up bobby pins. That's when he had a a stroke of inspiration: if his career wasn't advancing through official channels, maybe more underground measures would bring him success. There's no way he could have imagined how right he would be.
 

This Week's Recommendation: What's Opera Doc

Thanks again to James for joining me and for bringing so many enlightening cultural references. But somehow, we neglected to discuss my favorite opera singer: Bugs Bunny. For my recommendation this week, take a look at the masterpiece What's Opera Doc, where Elmer Fudd chases Bugs through Wagner's Ring Cycle. Of course, there is drag.

But there is also a real affection for the source material, with references to Sigfried's horn, and the horse from the actual opera, and Valhalla and the opera The Flying Dutchman. If you find opera intimidating or confusing or dry, you couldn't ask for a better way in to the actual music and characters and story. 

That mismatch of tone -- tragic opera and goofy cartoon -- could have been a disaster, but What's Opera Doc (and the similarly brilliant Rabbit of Seville) create a perfect blend of high drama and campy slapstick. And I think it works so well because of a principle that Elmer Fudd never seems to learn: the more serious and imposing a force tries to be, the better it pairs with the absolutely ridiculous.

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 Always Wanted to be the Pretty one (Ep. 105 - Miss Universe)

This Week's Guest: Ben Fede

How do you know when you're home? Is home a place you find, or a place you make? My guest this week grew up in the US, but never quite felt like he belonged. That all changed after a chance film screening, a lucky visit to a chat room, and a surprise visit to Ireland. After a lifetime of trying to figure out where he belonged, Ben took a gamble on international romance -- and won.
 

This Week's Recommendation: Leather Pageants

As we make our way into springtime, we're coming up on what is, in many cities around the world, leather season. Atlanta Leather Pride starts April 7, Minnesota's starts March 31, Washington's is March 16, Los Angeles is March 26. Chances are good that there's leather pride happening somewhere near you in the next few weeks.

For my recommendation this week: get yourself to a leather contest. If you're not familiar, they're basically beauty pageants for masculinity. They're generally held at a bar, and there's usually a talent portion, a Q&A with judges, and some kind of jockstrap posing competition. 

There's a lot of beauty on display at these events, and not all of it physical. In addition to benefitting charity, many Leather Pride pageants celebrate diverse bodies, community service, and social support. Many contests are growing more adventuresome with gender and sexuality, pushing at the boundaries of what masculinity can mean. One of my favorite winners in recent years was Pup Tugger, who marched out on stage in a corset and high heels.

Leather competitions manage to combine the best things about beauty pageants and raunchy filthy sex -- the contrast is stark and ridiculous and super fun, especially because it's such a tiny community, so everyone knows everyone else. 

I often tell people here's nothing like live entertainment, and it's hard to get more live than a parade of hairy men bending over for a cheering crowd.

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/

It Makes Every Gay Bone in my Body Vibrate (Ep. 104 - Broadway)

This Week's Guest: Stephen Oremus

My guest this week started his musical career at a neighborhood friend's piano, hanging out and playing showtunes. These days he's doing pretty much the same, but he's accompanying Broadway stars and winning Tonys. Stephen Oremus worked on The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q, Frozen, and 9 to 5, among many others, and was music director for the 87th Academy Awards -- a role that became a little tense when one of the winners had an unexpected message to deliver from the stage. 
 

This Week's Recommendation: Showgirls

It was a real delight to reflect on musical dreams coming true, and so for my recommendation this week, I'd suggest taking a look at another story of an artist who reaches for the stars in the big city: Showgirls.

It is incomprehensible to me that I have not recommended this movie already, though episode 28 of Sewers of Paris features Patrick Bristow, who appears in the film as a choreographer with a short fuse. If you haven't seen this film, let me just prepare you: it is not what you would call cinema verite. Its proximity with reality is as close as that of some of director Paul Verhoeven's other films, like Starship Troopers and Robocop. It's the story of a woman who arrives in Las Vegas with dreams of dancing and glamour and fame, and she achieves it all -- but at the price of... well... her dignity, maybe?

I love Showgirls because it is weird and extravagant, and sexually sideways in a way that feels like the script was a mad lib. But it is not, I don't think, accidental. I don't believe there's anything on the screen that isn't supposed to be there, and as with Starship Troopers and Robocop, I suspect that the filmmakers knew exactly how insane this vision was. There are those who claim that Showgirls is a failure of seriousness, a fiasco of bad taste, and a train wreck of glitter.

But I don't think it is those things. I think it's about those things.

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/

A Weird Thing From Outer Space Having a Love Affair (Ep. 103 - RISK's Kevin Allison)

This Week's Guest: Kevin Allison

Imagine this riskiest thing you could do -- and then imagine what would happen if you did it. My guest this week knows something about taking a chance -- Kevin Allison is the host of the Risk podcast, a show where people tell true stories about the times they put everything on the line. It's a concept that came to him after he'd spent too many years playing it safe, from tiptoeing around his sexuality to his mild-mannered persona on the sketch comedy show The State. It was on the advice of his fellow troupe-member Michael Ian Black that Kevin finally decided that some risks are worth taking.

This Week's Recommendation: Richard Simmons

Thanks again to Kevin for joining me. You can check out his podcast at risk-show.com, and support the show at patreon.com/risk.

There are all kinds of risks in life -- just the other day, I served a cucumber salad made from a recipe I'd never tried before. (Don't worry, it came out fine). But there's another form of risk that many of us don't dare attempt, and that's honesty.

For my recommendation this week, I'd like to you take a look at Richard Simmons. Really any video of his is a pleasure to watch, but in particular I recommend searching YouTube for his name plus CNN for a video called "Richard Simmons breaks down in tears and cries." For most of the interview, Richard exhibits impeccable message discipline, focusing on the products he's selling and his advice for others -- in particular to be kind to yourself in the mirror. But when the host asks him what he says to himself in the mirror, the persona slips away and you see a moment of real vulnerable honesty.

I've interviewed a lot of people, and asked a lot of really invasive personal questions. Sometimes -- most of the time, in fact, people deflect or avoid or make a joke because it's weird to open up to a stranger, especially if you know you're being recorded. Giving an honest answer to a personal question feels tremendously risky -- but it's also the one risk that anyone can take. We can't all go skydiving, or elope, or make a new cucumber salad, but opening up, telling the truth, that's one risk that universal.

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/

Where's the Coming-Out Advice for Somebody in a Chair? (Ep. 102 - Narnia)

This Week's Guest: Drew Gurza

Most gay men have had the experiencing of needing to decide just how open and honest we're going to be about our lives, even when that openness is difficult for some people to hear. This week's guest makes openness about difficult topics his life's work. Andrew Gurza is the host of the podcasts Disability With Drew and Disability After Dark, in addition to being one of the organizers of a recent accessible sex party in Toronto. His mission: to demolish cultural taboos around disability and sex -- taboos that have been a nuisance ever since he first found himself attracted to masculine figures on TV.
 

This Week's Recommendation: The Princess Bride

Thanks again to Drew for joining me. Check out his podcasts Disability After Dark and Disability with Drew, both part of Cripple Content Creations. And you can find all his work at AndrewGurza.com.

I think everyone can identify with that longing to slip away into a fantasy realm, and so my recommendation this week is for the movie The Princess Bride. I'm of an age that it's simply expected that my cohorts can quote this film at length, but if it's somehow passed you by, stop everything -- everything -- and see this movie.

It's a story of love and violence and swashbuckling and pirates and giants that takes place inside a book inside the movie. And while the book is swashbuckling adventure, the movie around takes place within the bedroom of a boy home sick from school. Simply listening to grandfather read to him, the kid finds himself changed without ever leaving his bedroom -- at least, not physically. In his mind, he departs for a fantasy world. And when he comes back, he's still himself, but changed. Or maybe the world he comes back to is changed. Or maybe both. 

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 Met my Husband in Divinity School (Ep. 101 - The Hours)

This Week's Guest: Jason DeRose

How do you cope when everything seems sad? And how do you move on and find happiness? My guest this week is Jason DeRose. His background in divinity school taught him pastoral care, and his career as a journalist taught him how to look difficult news unflinchingly in the eye. It can be tempting to let dark feelings become overwhelming, to let them control us, or simply to run from them. But whether counseling people or reporting the news, Jason's challenge has been confronting those dark emotions, and then still feeling free to experience joy. 

This Week's Recommendation: Six Degrees of Separation

Thanks again to Jason for joining me. The plan for our conversation was to talk about The Hours, a Single Man, and Six Degrees of Seperation, but we never managed to get to that last one -- so it's my recommendation for the week, a 1993 film starring Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland as a wealthy couple and Will Smith as a surprise guest who claims to know their son. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that Will's character is hiding more than he initially lets on, and the truth begins to emerge after an incident with a male hustler. But Stockard Channing's character has some secrets of her own -- secrets she was keeping even from herself.

In their guest's hidden depths, she finds depths of her own re-awakened -- a dissatisfaction to which she'd long grown numb, but once alerted to, can no longer ignore. The title of the film, Six Degrees of Separation, refers to how interconnected we all are. You're never far from knowing anyone else, and finding something of yourself in them. A chance encounter with a stranger can change not only your life, but what you expect out of life, and what makes you happy.

There's some ambiguity to the movie's ending, but ultimately I like to see it as a story about no longer waiting for permission to be free, to be happy, to be fulfilled, even when you thought all the doors to those feelings were closed -- or that there weren't even any doors worth looking for.

Thanks again for listening. The show takes about ten hours to produce each week, and it's thanks to the support of patrons like Wilfredo and Radio Free Qtopia that we're able to keep the show going. Support the show on Patreon here.

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/

My Life is Drama -- Make me Laugh (Ep. 100 - Dan Savage)

This Week's Guest: Dan Savage

If, like me, you are a huge fan of Dan Savage's work, you've probably heard him speak at length about sex and love and news and politics -- but this conversation is going to be a little different as we dive into 8-track tapes, secret bike rides, family arguments, and a rule-breaking theater troupe where Dan honed his sense of shock and showmanship long before he was known for dispensing Savage Love.

"Album covers in the 70s ... helped me figure out who the fuck I was," Dan recalls, thinking back to Leif Garrett records, the Rolling Stones cover with a zipper, and even the Solid Gold Dancers in the 1970s "when the objectification of male bodies was seriously really getting under way."

But it was musical comedies that had the biggest impact -- specifically from his parents' collection of 8-track tapes. His favorites ranged from Camelot to Cabaret to Carousel to shows that didn't start with a C. He heard songs like "There's a Place for Us," laments about finding a safe place to fall in love, and knew there was something speaking to him.

The film The Boys in the Band was pivotal as well. Though the characters are cruel to each other, he saw it and thought "oh -- you can be gay and have friends. I'll just have better friends." Dan was fortunate enough that his family encouraged argument and standing up for yourself, a sort of debate-club where he learned to defend himself if he was confident that he was right.

Still, he knew he was different, and it scared and intrigued him. As a teen, Dan would ride his bike through Chicago's gay neighborhood, gawking at men who walked comfortably in public while holding hands. In hindsight, he says, that was risky -- he was eager enough to dive into the world of bars and clubs that he could easily have been taken advantage of, especially since he wasn't sure he fully knew what sex was. "I knew how to put a dick in my mouth by the time I was fifteen," he laughed. "Maybe I'd have known what to do."

Like many queer people, he was drawn to the theater. "We grow up acting," he says, and as he learned that it could be an actual career, "it was all I ever wanted to do." In college, he did a lot of plays that bored him, but it was in Seattle that he was able to take risks and try new things on stage. He and some friends approached a bar and said they wanted to stage some shows, and from that emerged the Greek Active Theater Company. ("Greek active" was slang for a top.)

Their resources were few, in part because they prided themselves on pricing tickets just below the cost of a movie. By luck and scrappy talent, they managed to assemble ramshackle costumes and sets, often making creative choices based on the circumstances in which they found themselves: They staged The Miracle Worker in a gay bar, for example, because that was simply the venue they had to work with.

Dan's intention was to challenge audiences, to surprise them with works they thought they knew. During a production of Richard III, he delighted in an actor's decision to confront a disruptive audience-member with dialogue from the scene. His gay-bar Miracle Worker was shocking when it showed Hellen Keller spelling out "VODKA."

"You have to take stories people are familiar with and make them strange," he says. Audiences are "vulnerable when they're laughing," and as a director, he was able to draw viewers into the scene with comedy before startling them with real emotional catharsis. 

It was important to surprise audiences, he says, because "theater is going to die if it can't do something for us that film and television aren't already doing, and doing better." And he succeeded -- but then his sex-advice column became a huge hit, and he had to drop his drama career.

"I really miss it," he says, confessing that he'd still love to direct The Boys in the Band. But of course, in his trademark style, he'd do it strangely, by "setting it on Mars or something."

It's a little surprising to hear that like everyone, Dan has some as-yet unfulfilled dreams. But who knows, maybe they can still come true: "It's crazy that theater is my fallback career," he laughs, "in case sex-advice-columning doesn't work out."

---

I just want to add, this week, that I'm so excited to bring you this interview because Dan's work has been a major influence on my own. The very first time I read one of his columns, I was sitting at a desk at my first job, taking a break from alphabetizing video tapes and envying the people who get to write words for a living. Since then, Dan and a handful of other writers have been signposts for my work, inspiring me to write better, to write smarter, to write funnier, to write not just for myself but to use words to shine a light on ideas and connect people to each other.

So it means a lot to me that I could bring you this conversation for episode 100 of The Sewers of Paris. And it also means a lot that you, the listeners, have kept this show going for 100 episodes of interviews and insights and stories and confessions. I do the show because I love exploring the different languages of art and culture, and I'm so grateful to my guests who generously invite us into their stories, and I'm grateful to my listeners for accepting that invitation week after week.

This Week's Recommendation: Cabaret

For my recommendation this week, you have two choices. Either hop on a plane and come visit Seattle to attend the brand new production of Cabaret in the Unicorn theater, or just watch the movie Cabaret -- but with a twist. You see, this new Seattle production of Cabaret has been adjusted for modern times, moved out of pre-war Berlin and into modern-day America. What was previously a reflection of a gay man watching Nazis rise to power is now... strangely familiar.

We've talked about Cabaret on this show before, and it's become vital in a way I really never anticipated. If you can't make it to Seattle, just watch the film and watch for the parallels -- the oblivious young person insisting that politics has nothing to do with her; a woman singing "maybe next time I'll win" at the Democratic National Convention; a crowd singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" while a party official insists they can be controlled. It's not difficult to find contemporary meaning in the song "Money Makes the World Go Around."

For fifty years, Cabaret has been a reflection on the past, but now it's a shout of alarm about the future. Or at least A future. Whatever happens next still hasn't been written.

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/