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This Week's Guest: Jonathan Duffy
What are you willing to sacrifice for your freedom? My guest this week is Australian-Icelandic comedian Jonathan Duffy, who's found a way to laugh through good times and bad, whether serving as Creative Director for Iceland's entry into Eurovision... to an unexpected calling tending to people near death in a small town the Australian Outback. There used to be a time when he just sat back and let the world pass him by. But his real adventures began when he started giving up the things he loved to get even more back.
Hey, if you're in Seattle at the end of this month, I'd like to invite you to two live events that I'm hosting. The first is a show we're calling Dungeons and Drag Queens, a live comedy show where four drag queens play through a D&D adventure on stage. It's happening on Thursday, August 31st at 7pm at the Timbre Room, and you can get tickets at StrangerTickets.com.
The second is a panel at Penny Arcade Expo -- that's PAX -- about how to create queer gamer communities. Whether you live in a big city or a small town, we've assembled a panel of experts with advice for LGBTQ geeks looking to organize. Tickets to PAX are sold out but if you're going, the panel's on Saturday, September 2nd at 12:30pm.
A big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. If you're enjoying the show, you can help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. Just go to SewersOfParis.com and click support the show on Patreon.
This Week's Recommendation: It's Time
As Jonathan mentioned, it's so important to let people know that you love them. For my recommendation this week, I want you to check out an Australian ad called "It's Time." It's short, just two minutes long, and it's shot as an unseen person's point of view -- you're seeing through their eyes as they meet a boy, go on dates, fall in love, meet the family and start a life together.
Because the viewer is watching all this unfold, with characters making eye contact into the camera as though they're looking into your eyes, it's easy to get lost in that gaze -- to feel as though you're there, experiencing the rush of caring for someone and being cared about.
The whole thing flies by as a fast montage, a whole relationship from initial meeting to growing close to moving in to proposal. What's beautiful about it is how ordinary and familiar it all is: buying dinner together, sure, we all recognize that. Nervously meeting parents, sure, we've all been there. it just feels so normal. Throughout the entire relationship, there's not a moment of disapproval or skepticism or resistance about the couple's gender. And even though the ad was made to persuade straight people that we all deserve the freedom to marry, it's also an amazing gift to queer viewers: this is what it would feel like to fall in love in world where nobody thinks your love is wrong.
And then the ad fades to black just as we see two men embracing, about to begin life together as a married couple. And it's like a punch to the gut. Because that can't actually happen, at least not in Australia, not yet, or even in most countries. We don't live in that a world where nobody thinks our love is wrong. Not yet. There are still lots of people who would see that ad cut to black before the relationship can even begin.
And that's one more reason to tell the people we love how we truly feel, no matter who or what stands in our 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/