The Go-Out Girls (Ep. 198 - Alaska Thunderf*ck)

October 23, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Alaska Thunderf*ck and Jeremy

We've got a special two for one deal on this episode: Drag Race star Alaska, and her friend and collaborator Jeremy. With a friendship dating back to their weird college days, Alaska and Jeremy recently released an album of songs called Amethyst Journey that is surprisingly sweet and folksy. We talk about all about their early influences, watching Rocky Horror together on a little laptop screen, and also the creation of Alaska, the time they sang Dolly Parton songs so loud the cops were called, and also how Alaska bombed her first audition from drag race -- plus we'll also have a very brief cameo from Alaska's mom.

Because of their busy travel schedule, Alaska and Jeremy were only able to do an interview from the road, so you'll hear a little background noise in our interview. I've cleaned up the sound quality a bit and I hope it doesn't distract too much from their fabulous stories.

Also, speaking of The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- I posted a brand new video in my Culture Cruise series last week. It's a deep dive on how that film went from being a commercial failure to a cultural phenomenon, and why it's such an important midnight movie for outcasts and weirdos. Head over to YouTube and search for Rocky Horror Culture Cruise to watch that.

And we're just a few days away from our weeklong livestream of games, a fundraiser for Seattle Children's Hospital! Starting on October 28, I'll be hosting a big gay game of Dungeons & Dragons featuring Comedian Bryan Safi, Culture Critic Carlos Maza, Writer Anthony Oliveira, and Scholar Bryan Wuest. Then I'll be streaming games every day from October 29 to November 3. And on Sunday, November 4th, join us for another game of D&D featuring the drag queen cast of Queens of Adventure in full drag! We'll be serving looks, interacting with viewers, and encouraging everyone to donate to Seattle Children's Hospital -- 100% of everything you give goes straight to the hospital. Get the details and watch us live at bit.ly/extralifeseattle. See you starting October 28.

BTW, I hope you'll also join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat, with special guest Seattle drag superstar Arson Nicki. It’s Saturday October 27 at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

Huge thanks to everyone who makes The Sewers of Paris possible with a pledge of a dollar or more a month on Patreon. There's rewards for folks who back the show -- just click "Support the Show on Patreon." Or you can support The Sewers of Paris for free by leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice -- that really helps people find the show.

Head over to SewersOfParis.com to see clips of the stuff we talk about on each episode of the show. And for more queer podcasting, check out Queens Of Adventure to hear drag queens on an epic Dungeons & Dragons quest. That’s at QueensOfAdventure.com.

This Week’s Recommendation: The Drag Roast of Heklina

Thanks again to Alaska and Jeremy for joining me for a lovely chat. If you're looking for more fun times with Alaska, check out the drag roast of Heklina -- a live show at the Castro theater that was filmed, and is now popping up at queer film festivals and occasionally online.

Alaska's joined onstage by drag legends Peaches Christ, Jackie Beat, Jinkx Monsoon, and why not, the Julie Brown who is not downtown. They are all merciless in their attacks on Heklina and each other, and when I watched the video in a theater last week, there were almost as many gasps as there were laughs. It is also, of course, hilarious and occasionally heartfelt, as when Peaches concludes her roasting with a genuine recognition that she can't imagine life without her good friend.

But mostly it's one solid punch line after another. I'm not usually a fan of the roast, since for heaven't sake the world is mean enough already. But behind the teasing at this particular show was a deep affection, and a camaraderie that comes of having spent years together in the smallest subculture of a subculture of a subculture.

Moving as they do in a very small community, performers like Alaska and Jinkx and Heklina get to know each other better than most friends or coworkers or even family. And when they get up on stage to tease each other, it's like a little glimpse into a private world we rarely get to see -- at least not at such length. The fact that they all laugh at each other's quips and insults lets us know there's no harm done, it's all said out of love, and they're all in on the joke. And now, as an extension of their queer performer family, we are too.

Stuff We Talked About

There's no Comedy Without Conflict (Ep. 197 - Improv)

October 18, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Michael Henry

How do you muster the nerve to keep going when it seems like the odds are stacked against you? My guest this week picked up some life advice from improv comedy -- in particular, the lesson to say yes and then heighten whatever's happened so far. Though you may know Michael Henry from his YouTube comedy videos, his acting background is far more serious, and he expected to become a serious dramatic actor. The fact that he could only seem to make audiences laugh troubled him for years -- until he realized he could say yes to comedy, and the unexpected direction it would take him.

We'll have that conversation in a minute. But first I want to invite you to a weeklong livestream of games starting Sunday, October 28! It's the return of Extra Life, an annual fundraiser for Seattle Children's Hospital. We're kicking the week off with a big gay game of Dungeons & Dragons featuring Comedian Bryan Safi, Culture Critic Carlos Maza, Writer Anthony Oliveira, and Scholar Bryan Wuest. Then I'll be streaming games every day from October 29 to November 3. And on Sunday, November 4th, join us for another game of D&D featuring the drag queen cast of Queens of Adventure in full drag! We'll be serving looks, interacting with viewers, and encouraging everyone to donate to Seattle Children's Hospital -- 100% of everything you give goes straight to the hospital. Get the details and watch us live at bit.ly/extralifeseattle. See you starting October 28.

This Week’s Recommendation: Michael’s YouTube Channel

Thanks again to Michael for joining me. You can check out his videos on YouTube, which is my recommendation this week. They're all super short AND YET I keep finding myself spending way too much time clicking through one after another after the next. In particular, look for the video with the startling title "This video is about HIV."

As advertised, the video is about HIV. It's under 2 minutes, but in that time, we see a lightning-fast montage of gay men talking about -- or avoiding -- conversations about sex and health. Not only is it funny, with a solid punchline on average every three seconds, but it is actually one of the most educational and honest lessons on HIV I've seen in a long time, covering topics like testing and PrEP and stigma. What I love about the video is that it jumps through every conversation queer guys need to have about AIDS and feel weird about bringing up -- but hopefully a little less weird after this video deflates the somber attitude around STIs.

But that's not all! There's also a great video about why men call each other masculine nicknames; and another about the privilege of being pretty; one about how straight guys talk to gay guys about whether other men are attractive; and one about deciding whether or not to be a sex object. They're all short and pithy and refer directly to some aspect of queer culture that it is about time someone brought up. As you watch, you may feel about 50% vindicated and 50% called out. Which is about the right balance for any great work of art. Or YouTube video.

My First Job with RuPaul (Ep. 196 - Jamal Terry-Sims)

October 11, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Jamal Terry-Sims

You've seen this week's guest on RuPaul's Drag Race, and you've seen his choreography in Footloose, on the Emmys, and videos and stage shows for Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, and the Spice Girls -- despite having never taken a dance class. Jamal Sims' dream began when he saw The Wiz and knew he needed to be up on stage dancing. And now, after a career spanning nearly three decades, he's shining a spotlight on up-and-comers with the documentary When the Beat Drops.

BTW, I hope you'll also join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat, with special guest Trish Bendix -- managing editor of Into, the queer news site that's a part of Grindr. That's on Saturday October 13 at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: The Wiz

Thanks again to Jamal for joining me. He mentioned The Wiz as an early inspiration, and if you haven't seen that film for heaven's sake what are you waiting for. There have been countless iterations of the Wizard of Oz story, from a forgotten 1910 silent film to the the 1939 classic to last year's Emerald City series, cancelled after its first season.

The Wiz originated on Broadway in 1974 before heading to the screen in 1978. It's a uniquely African American take on fantasy worlds, melding contemporary music with black stars and magical cityscapes. The result is a movie infused with beauty and pride, and an empowering finale that in my opinion outdoes Glinda's "you've always had the power" scene from the 1939 version.

The Wiz is pure 70s, and not every moment ages well. But if you buy into the campy disco and Michael's somewhat prolonged clown shtick and a bit of a meander around the middle, you'll be rewarded by a joyful, empowering, uplifting climax that doesn't just belong to Dorothy but to the audience as well.

I've always felt that a weakness of the classic Wizard of Oz is that Dorothy is forced to leave her better world behind and return to the black and white, like her big lesson has been that she was wrong to dream. In the Wiz, Dorothy and the audience see a better world, where its possible to tap into inner strength and literally peel away the disguises that only served as tools of injustice.

As in other tellings, Diana Ross as Dorothy unites with a chosen family. But in this version, she returns home to the city triumphant, empowered, forever changed -- and unwilling to ever participate in her own oppression.

That's a vision that was particularly meaningful to the audiences that The Wiz was addressing in the 1970s. And wouldn't you know it, themes of liberation are still meaningful to this day.

Stuff We Talked About

The First Time I Could be a Gay Person (Ep. 195 - Alien)

October 4, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Nathaniel Atcheson

My guest this week is Nathaniel Atcheson, writer and director of the film Domain, which comes out this week. Like the movies that inspired him as a kid, Domain is a story about isolation and loneliness and coping with the fear of being life-threateningly disconnected from other people. That might sound grim, but behind the scenes of his work, Nathaniel is hardly disconnected -- for him, making films is a way of finding a union with other people, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And human capacity to overcome obstacles can surprise us -- for example, when Nathaniel met the man who he would, against considerable odds, one day marry.

This Week’s Recommendation: Dune

Thanks again to Nathaniel for joining me. You can check out his new film, now available to stream, at DomainTheMovie.com. For my recommendation this week, I went looking for some queer science fiction -- spoiler alert, pickings are a bit slim. That's not to say there's none -- an episode of Deep Space Nice, some Dr. Who, Wizards vs Aliens -- but the offerings pale in comparison to heterosexuals bumbling through space.

But I do think you should check out some extremely compelling -- and weird -- queer visions of the future, and those are the scenes with Baron Harkonnen in David Lynch's 1984 film Dune. Just to prepare you, it is a long and very strange film, so even though I do think you should watch the whole thing, I'll forgive you if you seek out relevant clips on YouTube. You'll want to see the scene where Sting appears in a thong that looks like a piece of scenery in an art-deco theater. And then later there's a horrifying moment when the evil Baron commits a particularly atrocious act with a young man's heart.

The scene is with the heart is, and it's important that you know this, VERY upsetting. I do not recommend this scene because it's a delightful depiction of queer desire. On the contrary, it is grotesque. But the images, if you are confident you can stomach them, are so indelible because they feature a marriage of beauty -- as represented by the healthy, attractive young men -- and the hideous, represented by the unspeakable villainy and physical decay of the Baron. There's a simultaneous attraction and repulsion that makes the cruelty on screen even more upsetting.

There are a lot of problems with this movie, and not just with the ways that Lynch chose to associate ugliness with queerness and disability and size. But the combination of the beautiful and the horrible are so effectively nauseating that they evoke to me the worst anxieties about being gay -- the longing and the terror, the appetite and the guilt. It's dark, and horrible, and if you need a palette cleanser afterwards there's fortunately some hilariously goofy wire work in the scene; so if you don't want to see blood, you can always laugh at THAT.

Stuff we Talked About

Come to the Party, it's Weird (Ep. 194 - Cheryl)

September 27, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Nick Schiarizzi

How do you make friends as an adult? Without school to throw lots of people together in far greater combinations than a workplace, it's easy to feel stuck in the wrong group -- especially when other gays are hard to find. So my guest this week did something about that. Nick Schiarizzi is the co-founder of the brutally bizarre dance party Cheryl, where everyone comes expecting something weird and leaves having something even weirder. But you'd never guess it to look at him -- Nick is calm, deadpan, and for most of his life terrified to dance. But when he found himself feeling lonely and frustrated as a young adult, he decided to find a way to break through his inhibitions to he could finally find others like him.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: Cheryl

Thanks again to Nick for joining me. I do heartily recommend those Cheryl parties. But if you're not in New York or a city where the party's on tour, you can experience a tiny taste of the next best thing by looking up their promo videos. Go to CherylWillRuinYourLife.info and click through the videos to find a lengthy collection spanning a decade of festive, colorful, and mystifying videos that capture the very strangest nocturnal queer culture that New York has to offer.

In those Cheryl videos you'll catch a glimpse of hundreds of people gathering together under cover of dark and buffeted by bass, dancing and partying and pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries. Sometimes art is meaningful, and other times the meaningless is the meaning. That, and kicking back to just enjoy yourself as extravagantly as possible while also spending as little money as possible. And what could be a more fundamental definition of queer culture than that?

So go -- watch some videos, get confused, get excited, and then find your way to creating something extremely peculiar of your own that definitely shouldn't exist, but does.

Stuff We Talked About

In my Own Way I'm a Doomsday Prepper (Ep. 193 - I Love Lucy)

September 20, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Phuong Mai

Acts of selflessness are great, but what's in it for me? This week I'm chatting with my friend Phuong, who's made a whole lifestyle out of making things for others. Whether it's bread or soap or knitted hats, it seems like every minute of his day is dedicated to creating stuff for the people around him. But even though he gives all this stuff away, there's something important that he's getting back.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: I Like You

Thanks again to Phuong for joining me. I can't think of any better gift than hospitality, demonstrating to someone that you care about making them feel good. Mindfully being a good host or maker or companion is a simple gesture with deep meaning that says, "I like you." And that's the title of my recommendation this week, a book by Amy Sedaris about entertaining company and making them feel loved.

Whether it's building a layer cake out of cold cuts, a wreath out of meatloaf, or a party game for kids that hopefully doesn't involve fire, Amy has all the guidance you need for welcoming guests into your home and into your heart. Of course, the advice is all acerbic and strange -- but it is also, at its heart, legitimately useful and kind. There's a section on keeping a conversation pleasant and surprisingly even when dining with the most dreary business people. There's a recipe for the perfect BBQ sauce (it's just mixing two leading brands together). And there's advice for being as successful a guest as you are a host.

"I Like You" is full of weird wonderful photos and great recipes and strange fashion choices, and it should be the first book you reach for when entertaining. Amy advice for hospitality is also great advice for life: Be kind, be yourself, and party on.

Thanks again for listening and to everyone who's rated and reviewed The Sewers of Paris. Thanks to all the listeners who keep the show going -- there's rewards for backers. Head over to SewersOfParis.com and click "Support the Show on Patreon" to join the folks who make the show possible.

I'm Here, I'm Queer, I'm Tired, It's Your Turn (Ep. 192 - Secretary)

September 18, 2018 Matthew Baume

Bonus Episode Guest: Trish Bendix

My guest on this bonus episode has a difficult task ahead of her, a different kind of gay marriage -- not of people, but of industries. Trish Bendix is the managing editor of Into, the queer news site connected to Grindr. And in that role, she's in charge of bringing news of the world together with social flirty hookups that made the app famous.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: Lilith Fair

Thanks again to Trish for joining me. We talked a bit about the phenomenon of Lilith Fair, the women-focused music festival that, while it was around, was a truly wonderful experience. There's no recapturing that late 90s energy, but fortunately there are some YouTube videos that come close. So my recommendation this week is to just do some video searches for Lilith Fair and bask in the acoustic guitars, plaintive poetry, and audiences full of women and femme folks swaying in delight.

My own memory of going to Lilith Fair in 1997 is of sitting on a grassy hillside, far from the stage, and as evening fell Sarah McLoughlin interrupted the music to point out that it was a full moon and we should all turn and look up into the sky and appreciate its beauty. And that sums up the kind of vibe -- if you went to Lilith Fair you could look forward to a fun, friendly, relaxing experience, and an atmosphere that I would describe as grateful.

Grateful for the opportunity to all come together in one place, optimistic that people who felt otherwise marginalized might life each other up, and oh so extremely earnest in a way that went out of favor for far too long. Lilith Fair always stood in opposition to cynicism, no easy task in the 90s, and I think it's only fairly recently that as a culture we've placed new value on wholesomeness, enthusiasm, and the sort of sincerity that could prompt an entire field full of people to cheer approvingly for moon.

Stuff We Talked About

How to Grow Up: A Memoir

By Michelle Tea

Black Wave

By Michelle Tea

The Town Queen (Ep. 191 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

September 13, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: John Michael Byrd

My guest this week is an artist whose creations include the persona he's established for himself. Since childhood, John Michael Byrd has always felt like more of a cartoon character than a normal human, which wasn't a particularly easy role to play growing up in a small southern town. But after spending years disconnecting from the physical world around him, he's found a place where he's finally free to be as animated as he's always felt.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 15th at 2pm pacific with guest Bryan Lowder -- editor at Slate and co-host of the new Outward podcast. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: The Flight of Dragons

Thanks again to John Michael for joining me. Check out John_Michael_Byrd_Studio on instagram to see his work.

We talked a lot on this episode about feeling out of place, belonging to a different world. For my recommendation, check out an animated film that it's not particularly queer, at least not on the surface -- Flight of Dragons, made by the same Rankin Bass team that did The Hobbit, The Last Unicorn, and all those stop-motion Christmas specials.

Flight of Dragons is set in your standard Tolkien-style realm, where the encroaching forces of science threaten to destroy all magic in the world. To protect themselves, the most powerful wizards in the world unite to create a safe refuge, hidden away from mankind. But an evil sorcerer has other idea -- he plans to corrupt mankind with greed so that humans will destroy themselves.

It's into this mix that someone unexpected steps: a human from our current-day world -- which at the time the movie was made was 1982. An accident of magic transports a modern scientist to the realm of magic, where he finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon, the last hope to save a magical world his science cannot explain. Or can it? There's a surprisingly smart tension throughout the movie, with the worldly logic of the human world jostling with the ineffable enchantment of the magical realm. And at the heart is the unlikely hero, forced to walk a line and choose the world in which he truly belongs. So I guess I take it back -- it is, in fact, a particularly queer film.

Stuff We Talked About

I Don't Want to Go Quietly - (Ep. 190 - Metallica)

September 6, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week's Guest: Dan Corkery

You can't accuse this week's guest of ever making things easy for himself. Growing up south of Boston, he was the town's only gay metalhead before he decide to join the army, deploying to the middle east in the 1990s. Now he's enjoying his retirement by going back to school to become a physician's assistant, while also occasionally noodling around with other musicians and singing on military bases. It's hard to imagine that anyone else on Earth has lived a life like Dan's, or so many different lives from his small town to metal bands to Saudi Arabia to supporting the health of his community.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 15th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

Check out the podcast Queens Of Adventure to hear me lead a troupe of drag queens on an epic Dungeons & Dragons adventure -- that's at QueensOfAdventure.com. We just started a new story arc this week, so if you've been waiting for a time to jump in, look for episode 8: Operation Watersport.

This Week's Recommendation: The Glory Hole

Thanks again to Dan for joining me, and for recommending the men's bathroom on the base in Saudi Arabia. It's easy to forget how recently queer people had to engage in subterfuge even to acknowledge each other's existence, and how in many places, they still do. For my recommendation this week, keep your eyes peeled at queer film festivals for a short documentary called The Glory Hole. It's a quick watch -- just four minutes -- and it's about how an adorable elderly gay couple met many decades ago under circumstances that we can call "not safe for work."

The interview with the two men is woven effectively with footage of a dramatic recreation, and it really takes you back to the seedy, often dangerous underbellies where gay men cruised and met up and sometimes even found love. There's a lot of stigma around glory holes and bathrooms and peep shows. But when mainstream culture pushes good queer folks underground, thriving in the dark isn't something to be ashamed of -- it's something to be proud of.

A Party to Call Home (Ep. 189 - Pink Party Prime)

August 30, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week's Guest: Charlie Logan

Hello friends! This weekend is the 10-year anniversary of the Pink Party, a queer geek gathering in Seattle. In honor of that milestone, I'm digging into the Sewers of Paris archive this week to bring you an interview with its founder, Charlie Logan, originally posted in 2015. Charlie's story is full of twists and turns, from terrible danger to finding his place at Pride to living in the woods with gold prospectors to befriending his childhood heroes. Charlie's story is nothing short of amazing. So here's that episode, originally published three years ago.

About The Sewers of Paris

The Sewers of Paris is a podcast about how queer lives are shaped by our favorite books, movies, music, and shows. Each week, guests open up about their secret struggles, hidden passions, and surprising triumphs by plucking a piece of entertainment from their past and answering the question: What’s the entertainment that changed your life?

About Defining Marriage

Each week on Defining Marriage, hosts Matt Baume and James Morris chat about what's happening with marriage equality, featuring frequent digressions into pop culture, silly banter, and the jokes and quibbles that have kept them together as a couple for over a decade.

The first eighteen episodes of the podcast contain the complete audiobook version of the book Defining Marriage, which traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it, featuring personal insights from the lives of Evan Wolfson, Dan Savage, Ken Mehlman, Dustin Lance Black, and many more.

About Matt's So-Cast Pod

Revisit the iconic '90s drama My So-Called Life, one episode at a time. Every week, host Matt Baume & his guests delve into the teen angst, the grown-up turmoil, and the endless flannel of the 90s -- and examine the show's impact on television and our lives.