I Was a Teenage Theater Tyrant (Ep. 117 - Pee-wee Herman)

This Week's Guest: Tom Lenk

Have you ever proved yourself wrong? My guest this week is actor Tom Lenk, who appeared as Andrew on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Tom was convinced for years that he lacked the skills that seemed to come naturally to other actors -- and so he was terrified when cast in a show that demanded more of him than he thought he could deliver. Facing that challenge changed the course of his career -- thanks in part to confidence he absorbed at an early age from the most beautiful woman in Puppetland.

By the way, Tom's the subject of a new documentary coming out this month called Nerdgasm. The film follows his quest to stage a show in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and it's available to watch on Amazon starting June 16th. 

And the Sewers of Paris is independent and ad free thanks to the support of listeners. If you're enjoying the show, head over to SewersOfParis.com and click "Support the Show on Patreon" to help keep the show going for as little as a dollar per episode.

And one more note -- I'm going to be at the Lyst Symposium in Copenhagen this coming weekend, from June 9th to June 11th, presenting a talk about queer sex, love, and relationships in games. If you're in Copenhagen, come check it out, or follow along with my travels on twitter @mattbaume. I'll be visiting several European cities all throughout this summer to report on international LGBT issues -- and hopefully, to visit the actual Sewers of Paris.

This Week's Recommendation: Pee-Wee's Big Holiday

Thanks again to Tom for joining me, and head over to TomLenk.com to check out his work -- including the documentary Nerdgasm, available June 16. The doc's about what happens when you push through self-doubt and believe in your own abilities, and for my recommendation this week, I hope you'll watch another another movie about queer self-confidence: the Netflix special Pee Wee's Big Holiday. 

Now I am not a big believer in nostalgia reboots, which are almost always unable to live up to the unreliable memories of the original. But somehow Pee Wee's Big Holiday is a bundle of unmitigated charm and delight, just like Pee Wee himself.

The film is centered around friendship, and the lengths to which we're driven by feelings of affection. Pee Wee plays a small-town boy who's never vacationed far from home. But when he meet a famous hunky actor named Joe, he takes the plunge and goes on an epic journey to New York for Joe's birthday party.

The story tingles with queerness throughout, from the breathless interest of the male leads to the suggestive insertion of a fist in a friendship bracelet. But what makes it so joyful to me is Pee Wee's confidence, self-assuredness, and comfort in his own weird skin.

He is, to be clear, a very strange boy. And at no point does it even seem possible to imagine him being anything else. Even when he's in trouble and things aren't going his way, he is unswervingly himself -- giddy, curious, playful, and sincere.

And so are the heroes he encounters, from hairdressers to bank robbers to an odd heiress. Each one is a strange, happy caricature; each one unabashedly eccentric; each one -- as we all should aspire to be -- a Pee Wee in their own big holiday.

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/

Queer Desire Has Always Been There (Ep. 116: Kurt Cobain)

This Week's guest: Hamed Sinno

What did you rebel against when you were a teenager, and are you still rebelling today? This week's guest is Hamed Sinno, whose Lebanese upbringing afforded him only brief glimpses of gay culture and queer voices in pop culture. In college, he formed a band with some friends and discovered to his surprise that his defiant songs resonated with other folks. But with that heightened visibility came new risks -- particularly when he came to America.

This Week's Recommendation: Once More With Feeling

Thanks again to Hamed for joining me, and if you're having trouble finding his band, you can try Googling the English translation -- Leila's Project. I do advise finding translations of the lyrics, because they're quite lovely: confessional, emotional, brutally honest. And so for my recommendation this week, check out the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Once More with Feeling."

The episode came a bit after a weird 90s trend of inserting surprise musicals into otherwise nonmusical TV shows, but unlike, say, The Drew Carey Show, there is an actual reason that the characters on the show burst into showtunes: a dangerous demon curse that forces them to confess feelings that are too hard to say without being sung.

As is par for the course with Buffy, the show is funny and clever but with a dark undercurrent that, when the music's over, leaves the characters to deal with the consequences of honesty. Some are brought closer together, others pushed apart, and some are closer but in a way that might not be an entirely good thing. 

What I love about this episode is how singing changes the act of communication. It comes at a point of crisis on the series, where the characters have, like so many families, spiraled into a failure to communicate. The opportunity to perform changes all that -- it turns difficult words into a show, introduces a level of remove that makes confession bearable. And then the music's over. And it's time to deal with what's been said, which may be painful for everyone -- but not as painful as the secrets they kept.

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/

Impersonating Dinosaurs (Ep. 115: Jurassic Park, Queer as Folk, and Weekend)

This Week's Guest: Adam Smith

How do you make up for lost time after spending years in the closet? My guest this week is journalist Adam Smith, who avoiding coming out for years because he felt that he needed to maintain a sort of sexual neutrality for the sake of his family. Now that he's finally experiencing the world as an out gay man, there's lots to explore -- which has meant shedding his inhibitions, and occasionally, all of his clothes.

This Week's Recommendation: The Outcast

Thanks again to Adam for joining me. He mentioned Star Trek as being a particularly meaningful laboratory for testing ethical positions, and so for my recommendation this week I'm pleased to have an excuse to recommend the Next Generation season 5 episode "The Outcast," in which the crew encounters a race that has no gender -- or at least, isn't supposed to have a gender. Those that do express an unsanctioned tendency towards male or female traits are subjected to therapy intended to "normalize" them.

Even though The Next Generation never had an explicitly queer character, this episode is as on the nose as the prosthetics on most aliens' faces. Through the metaphor of aliens, it explores the nature of gender, the fear of being subjected to conversion therapy, and issues of consent. There's even a sci-fi metaphor for the closet in the form of a phenomenon known as "null space" where objects can undetectably exist.

Star Trek is at its best when it's a venue for us to explore contemporary ethical questions, which is why the show of the 60s is so different from the show of the 90s. It makes sense, given that the episode aired in 1992, that they would attempt to grapple with sexuality. But the episode is also notable for how timidly it explores the topic. It ends on a fairly neutral opinion of conversion therapy, and of attacks on queer existence. And though the characters are gender-neutral, the casting confines the romances to opposite-sex actors. It's disappointing that to this day, the Star Trek canon remains relatively silent on the topic of sexual orientation, despite its founding captain being a essentially a walking sex gland.

But there's a new series in the franchise set to debut in a few months, this time helmed by an openly gay man. So hopefully now, over fifty years after the series first aired, it'll finally be ready to make up for decades of lost time in its own sort of null space.

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/

Failed Mystics (Ep. 114: Buffy, X-Men, He-Man, and Lwaxana Troi)

This Week's Guest: Anthony Oliveira

Have you ever been lucky enough to enjoy the sensation of villainy? My guest this week is Anthony Oliveira, who you might also know for his incisive tweeting as Meakoopa. Anthony's always felt a sympathy for monsters and villains -- or at least, the figures assumed to be monsters and villains -- even before he was old enough to realize that he might be considered one himself.
 

This Week's Recommendation: Bowser

Thanks again to Anthony for joining me and for his neverending stream of excellent tweets, which you can find at meakoopa. And that brings me to this week's recommendation -- not a book or movie or song or any kind of text, but a character. Specifically Bowser, the king of the Koopas, and an unlikely gay icon.

Let me explain.

Bowser's been around since 1985, and for those early first few years, he was depicted as your standard pixelated 8-bit monster. But as games moved into 3D and we started seeing him rendered in more detail, Bowser seems to have caught the eye of a certain fandom. He's big and burly, with leather spiked cuffs on his forearm and a perpetually wide stance. So of course, as Bowser entered his thirties, along with his earliest fans, he's become something of a heart throb.

This reached a sort of a peak in 2014, with a commercial where he was depicted in a cute polka-dot jacket with hipster glasses, and then again earlier this year when he was depicted as a responsible dad. 

As a result, it's now easy to find loving fan art, ranging from the chaste to the filthy, lovingly portraying Bowser as a sort of perfect boyfriend. My favorite is when he's styled as a "nerd dad," wearing dorky square glasses and a blazer, a tough-looking hunk with a secretly tender heart. But if you want something more explicit, I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding that, too. 

I'll always love when a character gets queered, but I'm particularly delighted by the queering of Bowser -- not just because big nerd dads are my type, but also because making him a dreamboat is about as queer as it gets. In his original incarnation, he was a literal monster, a mindless avatar for evil and fear. Turning him into various admirable gay tropes, from leather daddy to porn star to cool gay uncle, subverts every rule about what a bad guy's supposed to be -- namely, bad.

And if there's a sexy queer future awaiting the fire-breathing lizard as he matures, well, there's hope for any of us.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

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

I Was About to Lose my Mind - (Ep. 113 - Dave Holmes)

This Week's Guest: Dave Holmes

My guest this week is Dave Holmes, who you might know from the podcast International Waters, or his articles in Esquire, or his book Party of One. I first saw Dave on MTV, in a proto-reality show competition to become a VJ back in the late 90s. On screen, it was clear that Dave was the most qualified, most knowledgable, and most engaging contestant, with an encyclopedia knowledge of music and an infectious passion for talking about it. But what nobody who was watching could know was that for Dave, entering that competition was an urgent bid to change the course of his life before he went absolutely crazy.

This Week's Recommendation: Mame

Thanks again to Dave for joining me. Check out his podcast International Waters, and his book, Party of One, now out in Paperback. The book's a memoir, structured around 21 songs that were pivotal in his adventuresome life. And as he mentioned, those adventures nearly didn't happen, since he grew up believing that his passion for art and culture and expression was something that had to be put away as an adult.

For my recommendation this week, take a look at the movie Auntie Mame with Rosalind Russell, later remade with Lucille Ball. I think the original non-musical version is more fun, but the important thing is the message of both -- that famous line, "life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death."

Mame is a flamboyant New York socialite, the kind of woman who knows where every good party is happening because she's it's not a good party unless she's there. Her nephew Patrick is tragically conventional, and the story unfolds we see Mame's indomitable spirit gradually overtake Patrick's cringing conventionality, singlehandedly stoking the family's optimism and excitement for adventures that might lay ahead.

Like Peter Pan or Puff the Magic Dragon, Mame's a guardian to a world of imagination and curiosity. But unlike them, she doesn't shut the door to that world when you reach a certain age. Life doesn't have to stop being a banquet when you become an adult. And even through growing up does require some measure of responsibility, growing up doesn't have to mean giving up.

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/

Beauty in Trash (Ep. 112 - Bruce Vilanch)

This Week's Guest: Bruce Vilanch

Have you ever surprised yourself with what you were able to get away with? This week's guest is writer and comedian Bruce Vilanch, who's been slipping sly queer jokes into our entertainment since before some of us were even born. Starting out as a writer for great divas of the 1970s and then moving on to variety shows, the Oscars, and a notorious holiday special, Bruce provided a subtle queer infusion into American showbiz for decades. And this week we'll talk about how he managed to get away with it.

Bruce's big showbiz break came when Bette Midler came to town. As an arts reporter in Chicago, he reviewed her show -- and was surprised to get a call from Bette thanking him for his coverage.

"You should talk more," he told her.

"You got any good lines?" she asked. He did, and she hired him.

From there, it was on to Hollywood, where he was delighted to slip subtle gay innuendo into programs like The Brady Bunch variety specials. The Star Wars Holiday Special was a particularly bizarre assignment, coming to him with outlandish requirements that he did his best to accommodate and that have now elevated it to cult status. 

"Did you feel exasperated that you couldn't say gay?" I asked him during our chat.

"It was challenging," he replied. "It wasn't frustrating because it hadn't been done. ... That was a couple years off."

Nevertheless, he still delighted in the sly gay references he was able to place in shows like Hollywood Squares. "It was 'inside,' we called it," he said. "The ones who get it will laugh and the ones who don't will say 'what was that?' Because you knew that, you had to apportion what you did, you had to pick where you did the jokes."

This Week's Recommendation: Rose's Turn

Thanks again to Bruce for joining me for what was an extremely enjoyable chat. I recorded this interview on a brief trip to Los Angeles, a city that has a reputation for conversations that are not always entirely straightforward. So I really appreciate how unguarded and open Bruce was when we spoke.

Personal honesty of any kind can be a challenge -- especially when taking stock of your whole life. For this week's recommendation, check out Bette Midler in the 1993 version of Gypsy -- and pay particular attention to the show-stopping song Rose's Turn, the culmination of a life spent repressing desires. Without giving away too much, Gypsy is, to me, a show about women with dreams that aren't always apparent to those around them, and the different ways that those woman answer or refuse the call of those dreams.

When Bette belts out her meltdown in Rose's Turn, it comes with a fury of having spent a lifetime denying herself, breathlessly realizing that denying herself has been torture not just for her, but for those around her who are ultimately driven away.

There are various ways that different productions of Gypsy have concluded: some bleak, with Rose's growing madness, and others optimistic with the possibility of reconciliation. The Bette version is my favorite, I think because it suggests that there's power in catharsis, in honesty, and admitting out loud the things we've always been scared to hear ourselves say.

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 Made 30 Rock my Home (Ep. 111 - Talk Shows & Game Shows)

This Week's Guest: Randy West

Last week's guest was Jeffery Self, a relatively young actor and writer who's broken into the entertainment industry often on his own terms. This week, I'm speaking with Randy West, an industry veteran whose experience was vastly different. From sweet-talking his way onto sets to chasing big breaks with a single-minded determination, Randy learned to play the game at a time when the rules were very unforgiving.

This Week's Recommendation: The Music Man

Thanks again to Randy for joining me. And although he said that he considers a lot of his career faking it, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing -- in fact, there's a nobility in making it up as you go along. For this week's recommendation, check out the movie The Music Man, starring Robert Preston (who played gay in Victor Victoria) and Shirley Jones, the mom from the Partridge Family who off-camera had a remarkably wild sex life.

Her character in The Music Man is comparatively prim. It's the story of a con man who lands in a small Iowa town, planning to cheat the residents out of their money before vanishing. But fate has other plans, and as so often happens in a musical he finds himself falling in love with the wrong woman -- in this case, the prim town librarian who accidentally makes an honest man out of him even while he's doing his best to be a swindler.

Minor spoiler warning -- the story ends happily, with the con man becoming a hero to the town despite never really being the musician he claims to be. He's just faking it -- but here's the thing: so is everybody. We're all just making it up as we go, in constant terror we'll be caught. And just because you're not sure what you're doing doesn't mean you might not create a thing of beauty along the way.

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/

Serial Killers Shake Things Up (Ep. 110 - Torch Song Trilogy & Steel Magnolias)

This Week's Guest: Jeffery Self

Do you have an inner performer lurking just below the surface -- or has your inner performer burst above the surface, resolutely refusing to ever be ignored? My guest this week is the fantastic Jeffery Self, who has for his entire life been every inch an entertainer -- whether forming a rebel theater troupe as a teen in his small southern hometown; testing his capacity for sass in the various TV roles where you've probably seen him; and creating the books and shows and circle of friends that he knew he needed in his life.

Also, just a quick announcement: after two years of doing this podcast, The Sewers of Paris is finally on Twitter and Facebook. Follow @SewersOfParis and search for the Sewers of Paris Facebook page. I'll be posting video clips of stuff we talked about, previews of upcoming episodes, answering questions and listening to your feedback.

And big thanks to brand new patrons James, Joe, Kyi, Mark, and Grant. The Sewers of Paris is independent and ad-free thanks to the folks supporting the show with a dollar or more per episode. If you like to listen, you can join them by going to SewersOfParis.com and clicking "support the show on Patreon."

This Week's Recommendation: Waiting for Guffman

There are always approximately five billion interesting Jeffery Self projects happening at any particular time -- his book Drag Teen is currently being made into a musical, he's also occasionally the host of a wildly popular show on Facebook called Jeffery Live, and he was also recently on Drew Droege's magnificent podcast Minor Revelations. There is simply no end to Jeffery's capacity to entertain, and I'm so grateful he has the platform he does to share it with us.

But not every great artist needs a large audience. For my recommendation this week, check out the documentary Waiting for Guffman, the one-hundred-percent definitely-true story of a small-town theater troupe that comes together against incredible odds to discover the performer within.

The documentary follows a man who looks uncannily like Christopher Guest, and chronicles the staging of a sesqui-centennial show for the town of Blaine, Missouri. Cast in the musical revue are local travel agents, a Dairy Queen queen, a taxidermist, a dentist, and a fancy choreographer who assures us he has a wife, though we never seem to see her.

And sure, their performance is goofy and hilarious. But as the town dentist who looks a lot like Eugene Levy says, the experience has taught him something he was never quite sure of before: that he does have talent. Our talents might not be what we expected, they might not be what we wanted, and they might not make sense to everyone who sees them. But when you do find something that you can do, something that you love, there's no greater feeling than letting that talent run wild, and refusing to wait for anyone.

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 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/