The Key Change is Everything (Ep. 13 - Little Shop of Horrors)

We've all felt it -- that call to adventure, to become something great, to escape monotony, go out into the world, and find out who we really are. For some, that call originates in our work, for others with family. And for my guest this week, it came while riding a wheat truck on a tiny farm in eastern Washington.

From an early age, Brad Cerenzia knew he wasn't destined to be farm boy the rest of his life. His inspiration came from theater, musicals, drama. Creating a colorful world on the stage, while the world around him remained featureless and bleak. It was clear that he needed a ticket off of the farm, but for a long time it was unclear what form that ticket would take. It was hard to picture how his adventure would start, since life on the farm was so stable and monotone.

What he needed was a key change, and when it finally happened, he didn't realize that it was to be the first of many.

Here are some highlights from Little Shop of Horrors, the show that helped Brad dream of escaping the farm. Note how the singers are able to walk through the rain without getting wet. Magic!

And of course, our favorite number from The Drowsy Chaperone:

Here are a few highlights from Disenchanted!, the show Brad helped finance: 

And of course, the TV version of Tales of the City. But do read the book.

And here's Brad in his various theatrical endeavors:

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

A Werecreature Who Makes out with Dudes (Ep. 11 - Frasier and Frankenstein)

Is there any super power you could have that is not also monstrous? Clark Kent has super strength, Buffy came back from the dead, and Spiderman can shoot webbing from his wrists. But these are powers that monsters have -- a guy who can beat up anyone on Earth? A woman who drives stakes through hearts? A man who does whatever a spider can? It's great that they use their abilities for good, but these powers are as scary as they are super.

There's a line in Bride of Frankenstein in which one mad scientist toasts, "to a new world of gods and monsters!" They can be hard to tell apart, gods and monsters. Neither fits in among humans, no matter how hard they try. And both wield power that might sometimes extend beyond their control. If you're a God or a monster -- you can look in the mirror and know that you're different, but there might be no telling which side of that divide you're on. And if you can't tell, how can anyone else?

My guest this week is Chicago comedian Cody Melcher. If Cody was a superhero, his powers would likely involve fancy bowties, obscure trivia, and an invincible debate team. As a kid, he was a delicate nerd, obsessed with classic literature while some of his classmates could barely read. He was an unathletic child who shunned the out-of-doors, and whose diversions of choice involved rhetoric and fastidiousness.

But as he became an adult, he grew taller.

We talked about a ton of great stuff in this episode, including Cody's favorite books: The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein, and Moby Dick. We also talked about Louie Anderson. 

Ah, simpler times. From Louie we moved on to Eddie Izzard's Dress to Kill, the entirety of which is available on YouTube, delightfully.

Episodes of Frasier are a bit harder to come by, unless you subscribe to the Hulu Advertising Service, but here are some highlights. 

Now then, let's talk about Madeline Kahn. Or better yet, let's just watch her.  

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

All of a Sudden I had a Gay Icon (Ep. 10: Star Trek)

When you think about the science fiction, what comes to mind? Maybe some silvery uniforms, blue guys with antennas, blinking lights. You know, the future. What's great about imaginary futures is that they're places of potential, an escape to a place where where everything's better, or sometimes worse. And whatever problems we have today have all been solved. Or maybe exacerbated.

My guest today is Charlie Logan, founder of the Pink Parties, a regular series of huge queer nerd gatherings that are timed to Seattle's biggest comic and videogame conventions. Charlie started throwing Pink Parties as a way to find other gays who shared his love of anything geeky, and his hope for a better future, and his need to escape.

Because after all, as we'll hear, for a time there was a lot that he needed to escape from

I'm delighted, by the way, to have finally had a reason to talk about Star Trek on the show. Here are those tribbles: 

Here's the song from Bye Bye Birdie that Charlie had to sing about being sincere... while pretending to be heterosexual.

Once Charlie came out, he was introduced to Erasure:

And Wham! Can you believe anyone ever thought that George Michael was straight?

And of course, Charlie's Pink Parties now feature guests like Jennifer Hale, who voiced Dragon Age: Inquisition's Krem, possibly the greatest trans character in video games:

As well as the delightful Ellen McLain character GLaDOS:

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

 

Making Your Outsides Match Your Insides (Ep. 9 - Cabaret Culture)

Photo: Rachel Robinson, Nark Magazine

What happens when you grow up so fast you become an adult while you're still a kid? My guest this week is Zak, who was wise beyond his years by the time he was 14, thanks in part to a young love triangle and also being raised by a house full of strippers.

Zak had barely entered high school when he felt ready to set out on his own, and start his own life. But he found that while you can grow up fast, you can't rush adulthood. That's how he wound up spending several teenage years drifting across the state, a runaway, in every sense of the word.

We talked about some exceptional music in this week's episode, starting with the Dresden Dolls: 

And also Beats Antique:

And Gogol Bordello's delighteful "Start Wearing Purple":

We also covered the music he grew up hearing, including White Zombie:

And Pantera:

And oh gee whiz you guys, remember No Doubt?

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

Jewels and Gold and Butts (Ep. 8: Pink Narcissus)

Photo: Evans Vestal Ward 

When my guest Ian was growing up in the midwest, he couldn't even picture what life as a gay man even looked like. And he certainly couldn't have pictured what his life would become: parading up on stages as a performance artist, covered in brightly-colored phallic objects, to shout triumphantly in one-man shows about the pride he takes in being a sexual gay being.

When he came out of the closet in college, Ian felt like he'd just been dropped off alone at a gay bar, left to find his own way all by himself. Coming out was just the first step to becoming whatever a gay man is. His next step: exploring homosexuality in full view of the public, on stage.

We talked a lot about Pink Narcissus in this episode, and it's hard to find clips of it online. Here's a little bit: 

A reflection on the work of Peter Berlin:

The mortifying Doing Time on Maple Drive:

There's a brief clip of "Make it Gay" in this week's show:

And here's my recommendation: In Their Room.

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

Jodie Foster Made me a Gay Atheist Polygamist (Ep. 7: Contact)

ben

Okay, to be fair, Jodie Foster isn't singlehandedly to blame for turning Ben from a quiet church boy into a tattooed pierced atheist with a husband and a boyfriend. But her influence didn't hurt.

Ben's family moved a lot, and after a childhood of making and then losing friends, he was starting to feel lonely and sad. At the same time, school were becoming oppressive. When Jodie Foster appeared in Contact, playing an aggressive scientist who challenges the assumptions of everyone around her, he realized that he didn't have to just sit back and keep going to the classes and church services that were slowly eating him away.

These days, his tastes verge toward the decidedly more unusual: music like Loreena McKennitt, which he describes as "hippie folk," or the kind of music you play to set the mood in a Dungeons and Dragons game. He likes weird movies like Titus, The Fifth Element, and Run Lola Run. And he has a soft spot for She-Ra.

His favorite musicians and movies and characters all have a strangeness, an outcast quality, and a willingness to try something new (even She-Ra, a rare female action character who managed to go mainstream). Trying something new is risky, but it can also be just the dizzying nudge you need to break out of a bad routine.

Looking for something different yourself? Look no further than Michel Gondry, whose incredibly bizarre videos you can watch over and over and over and over, never realizing you have become trapped in a recursive loop with Kylie Minogue.

Some of Ben's favorite movies are extremely weird. How about that Titus?

And just try explaining The Fifth Element to someone who's not familiar with it. They'll never believe you.

Even Run Lola Run, which takes place in a familiar universe (well, okay, Europe, but that's not as exotic as whatever The Fifth Element is) is a little hard to wrap your head around.

And although Contact was made for a mass market, it's pretty amazing how daring and unusual the film treats the subject matter.

We also talked about some pretty distinctive music, including Loreena McKennitt:

And the difference between Björk and Joanna Newsom grows difficult to discern:

I asked ben for some musical suggestions, and he provided some excellent pointers:

And finally, here's She-Ra. I couldn't write this post without including She-Ra.

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

There's no Word in Afrikaans for Gay (Ep. 6: South Africa)

"We were finally getting our high school crush that we'd missed out on," Johann says, recalling the time he fell head over heels in love. They met online, flirted for a year, and then finally met up for pizza and nachos and found a dark street where they could make out.

It took Johann a long time to get to that point. He grew up in apartheid South Africa, where there were strict limits on any access to gay culture. Sheltered and deeply religious, he could only catch brief glimpses of queer relationships in books like E.M. Forster's Maurice. Even when he tried to come out, his friends wouldn't believe him. He had a two-year relationship with a girl that started after he told her he was gay.

So what changed? Drag Race came along at just the right moment. He landed in Seattle around the time that Ben DeLaCreme was hosting weekly screenings of Season 6 at the Century Ballroom, and in the massive audiences that came to watch the show Johann discovered what a queer community looks like. Suddenly, he didn't feel quite so alone.

This episode zooms around across a wide range of topics -- here's a few snippets from the movie version of Maurice.

Adorably, most of Johann's gay cultural influences involve deeply nerdy men: studious, academic, quiet and introverted and brainy. Here's a sexy kissy scene with Michael and Ben from Queer as Folk.

And Object of My Affection, which I've been told was extremely important to shy closeted boys in the mid-'90s.

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

Funny and Salacious and Dangerous (Ep. 5: Soap)

It's a little unfair that so many gay men adore The Golden Girls, but so few have heard of Soap, without which Blanche, Rose, Sophia and Dorothy wouldn't exist.

Both shows featured strong female characters sitting around a kitchen table eating baked goods and talking openly about sex, but Soap did it first. And according to my guest Andrew, did it better. The show was essentially a parody of soap operas, told in a sitcom style -- alien abductions, evil twins, sex changes, mystery diseases, and secret affairs kept the plot humming along for several years before it was cancelled in the midst of an infuriatingly unresolved cliffhanger.

Soap became a bit of an obsession for Andrew as a kid, particularly because of the motherly power of the character of Jessica. Though her family was fractured and weird, her love never wavered. That family loyalty made such an impression on him that he still thinks about -- and aspires to it -- to this day.

Here are a few clips, starting with the basic cast of characters and their drama.

I'm not sure what's up with the color here, but this gives you a sense of the tone of the show:

And here's the show getting awfully serious:

And here's the famous MASH episode with the gay soldier. Skip to around 8 minutes for the big scene. 

And one of my all time favorite episodes of Cheers:

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

Short and Super-Perverted (Ep. 4: Salome)

greg

When he was a bassoon-playing band kid, Greg fell in love with operas and would listen to them alone in his room. But it wasn't until he fell in love with another opera nerd (a slightly older New Yorker, also named Greg, adorably) that he realized there were others like him. Soon, he was whisked away on bohemian visits to New York and deeply emotional experiences in darkened theaters -- the only place where Greg permitted himself to cry.

But like so many love affairs, this one wasn't fated to last. After devoting his entire life to opera for years, Greg started to find that his relationship to the art form had cooled ... but saying goodbye was a painful experience.

Greg did me the favor of recommending several fantastic operas to watch, which is fortunate because I would have had no idea where to begin. Behold:

Start listening at 1:39:00. Greg explains, "It's a play within a play -- and she just supposed to be a speaking actress -- but her passion grows SO HOT that she HAS to burst into song. And her singing is three times louder than her yelling which shouldn't be possible?"

In the above clip from Wagner's The Ring, Greg describes the singing that follows 1:02:00 as "choice."

Start at 46:00 for some beautiful music from Richard Strauss's Salome.

That's a particularly moving death scene from Aïda.

The above clip is a radio broadcast of Figaro from the '40s, which isn't what Greg was listening to as a kid, but "the thing is the narration was NOT THAT DIFFERENT when I started listening in the '90s," he says. "Oh did I mention they always describe the dresses during the curtain call? 'Miss Malfitano in taking another bow, in her scarlet empire-waisted gown and velvet cape,' so you can picture it in your mind."

And let's end it on one more big diva moment: Figlia impura di Bolena. Magnifico!

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