I Prefer the Term "Enchanted" (Ep. 23 - Magic, Puppetry, and Mr. Rogers)

Where do you find magic in the mundane? For me, it's knitting -- there's just something enchanting about the idea that you can wrap some string around two sticks, bang them together for a while, and then suddenly there's a scarf in your lap.

My guest this week is Joe, though Minnesotans may know him as his alter ego, Girtha Rotunda. From an early age, he was obsessed with the land of make-believe, with imaginary worlds, with magic tricks and the show Bewitched.

And so as an adult, he dedicated himself to conjuring up magic wherever he went: from stages to military bases to bars to his very own private ice cream truck.

Here's a clip of Fred discussing sweaters, which sadly I can't embed here. But I can embed a little Ed Wynn!

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

There's Something About Not Giving a F*ck (Ep. 22 - Nintendo Games & John Waters)

How do you escape from an oppressive upbringing or overbearing religion when it's all you've ever known? When rules have defined your whole life, sometimes it feels like there's simply no other way to live.

My guest this week is Austin Curtis, who grew up in a massive Mormon family surrounded by midwestern prairie. It wasn't until started to become aware of a world outside of that bubble that Austin realized there might be more to life than living up to the expectations of others. 

But figuring out just what that life looked like would take some effort. Like a hero on a quest, he'd need some help. After all, it's dangerous to go alone.

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

I'm Rooting for the Pig (Ep. 21 - The Muppet Show)

Photo: Brave Lux

What's more chaotic than a life in the theater? Well, life in general, for one thing. Messier than any play, life has a way of hiding surprises in the wings, needing re-writes on the fly, and breaking legs. You might forget your blocking, and just become blocked. But every now and then, there are those moments of applause that keep us on stage.

My guest this week is Chicago actor, radio host, and comedian Scott Duff, who at an early age felt the lure of a theater, of a microphone, of a spotlight. If you set out to build the perfect performer, you could do no better than Scott. Not just because of the natural charisma he exuded during his childhood one-boy productions of the musical Annie -- but because he never allowed setbacks to stop him, onstage or off.

And there were plenty of opportunities to storm off to a dressing room and hide. But he didn't -- not through breakups, and suffering in closet. Not through times of tragedy, when family and friends were suddenly gone. Not even when Tennessee forced him for years to maintain the illusion that he was a heterosexual drama teacher did Scott ever give up dreaming of his next big performance.

And what he found is that even when the material's lame, the theater's falling apart, and the audience is lousy, the curtain might always go up on something better the following night. The show must go on.

It's hard for me to choose which Muppet clips I want to include here, because I would like to just watch Muppets on YouTube all day long. But here are a few that came up in this episode:

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

I Could be Black and Gay and Also a Writer (Ep. 20 - Will & Grace and Langston Hughes)

Perfectionism -- and I say this as a recovering perfectionist myself -- is a powerfully destructive force. It can drive you to achieve great things, but it comes at a price, since it demands that you hold yourself to an impossible standard.

That's because "perfect" doesn't really exist. Nobody's perfect, because perfection is something we make up, an unachievable ideal to measure our shortcomings.

My guest this week is Zach Stafford, a writer for The Guardian. As a kid, he couldn't figure out where he fit in the world. He was the only bi-racial kid in his little Tennessee suburb, and if that didn't set him apart enough, he was also the swishiest person he knew.

And so he set out to be perfect. Get perfect grades. Work a perfect job. Be perfect in church. Look perfect. Feel perfect. 

But that pressure took a heavy toll. And he discovered that as figments of the imagination go, perfectionism can be one of the most dangerous.

---

You can find Zach @zachstafford on Twitter, and also at TheGuardian.com. His book, Boys, is available on Amazon.

During this episode, he mentioned Giovanni's Room -- here's a link. And here's the Langston Hughes chapter, "Salvation," that I recommended at the end of this week's episode.

And speaking of Will & Grace, here is an episode that features what I think is one of Jack's best moments.

Here is a video that compiles some of Will & Grace's complex cultural attitudes:

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

Drag Clothing for GI Joes (Ep. 19 - The Birdcage)

Photo by Nicole Radja

How much freedom to you give your inner sissy? Or do you try to rein it in, like a disobedient pinkie bestride a tiny teacup?

My guest this week is Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins, who was brought up in an intensely religious home. He was basically born flaming, and the church did its best to scare the queer out of him. For a time, he gave in, but that inner sissy had a way of making itself known in strange ways, such as doll larceny, illicit drag, and inappropriately erotic playwriting.

Try though as he might to blunder and butch his way through the world, in the end there was just no way to stop that inner sissy from breaking free. It just needed a little help from Agador Spartacus.

Here are some truly wonderful sissies:

And the fabulous Stephen Stucker being amazing on Donahue:

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

The Witch's Perspective (Ep. 18 - Wicked)

How different is your life in the closet from your life out of the closet? Well on one hand, it's completely different -- living openly and honestly, giving yourself permission to do what makes you happy, refusing to feel ashamed -- when you come out, everything changes.

Well, maybe not everything. My guest today is Michael Price, whose Mormon upbringing prepared him for a life of productive heterosexual matrimony. Nothing was more important than family. Family defined who he was. And when he realized that he'd rather dance with boys than girls, it seemed like he'd have to abandon all of the plans he'd laid out for his life, since as he learned from television, the gay lifestyle is one of debauchery and hedonism and endless loneliness.

He thought he might overcome his crisis by simply turning it off, he assumed he was literally the only gay kid at his school of 30,000 students, and he was terrified that the people he loved would abandon him. Worst of all, Michael thought that being gay meant that his dreams of marrying and having a family were over.

And it's true that coming out radically transformed his life. He'd always thought that being gay made him a villain. But it discovered that wickedness can depend on your point of view. And more importantly, he found that while being honest about yourself might change your plans, it doesn't have to mean changing who you are.

Here's the big number, Defying Gravity, at the Tonys:

And while we're at it, Turn it Off from Book of Mormon:

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

Libraries Have Always Felt Safe (Ep. 17 - Redwall and The Virgin Mary)

What's the place where you feel the most safe and protected and secure? It's something different for everyone. I grew up playing in trees, so for me, it's any forest. And for Richard, my guest this week, it's a library.

I visited Richard at his home in Chicago, which is why you'll hear a the train rumbling by in the background every now and then. Richard's home is piled high with books, to the point that the stacks are starting to morph into furniture. It's amazing and I'm pretty jealous, because it's a lot easier to fit a library into your apartment than a forest.

There's no better feeling than creating a sanctuary where you live, whatever that sanctuary happens to be. If you're lucky, and you're in control of your surroundings, you can shape your whole world into anything you want it to be. But what if you live in someone else's world -- for example, a queer person surrounded by hostile heterosexuals? Well then you have to do the best you can -- often by creating a secret little pocket of a world that you can escape into. For a long, long time, that's what LGBTs have had to do, with gay ghettos and windowless bars and drag balls and certain seminaries. 

And although he's free to enjoy his own library today, for years Richard was forced to create a secret sanctuary of his own, growing up in surroundings that he simultaneously loved and feared.

Redwall was turned into an animated show -- here's the pilot: 

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

Important Fiction with Wieners (Ep. 16 - E.M. Forster)

Photo by Adrian Sotomayor

For as long as there has been sex, men have been having it with men. Homosexuality is nothing new. So why does it seem like gay men have been completely invisible in entertainment until relatively recently? Well, probably because for hundreds of years, we were considered forbidden and taboo, too dangerous to discuss or even acknowledge. 

But as it turns out, we HAVE been there. You just had to know where to look. My guest this week is Zan Christensen, founder of the LGBT-focused comic book publisher Northwest Press. The first book Zan ever published was a graphic novel adaptation of a same-sex love story written in the 1800s.

The original work was written anonymously, since association with homosexuality was a punishable offense in repressed Victorian England. Back then, gay men were forced to hide. Zan grew up in a somewhat repressed environment himself, but hiding his homosexuality was wasn't an option for long.

---

Here's a little forbidden British lust for you:

And the gay romance of Maurice, which will always leave me fanning myself:

Madonna throwing caution to the wind in Truth or Dare:

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

I'm Not Gay, I'm Just a Dance Major (Ep. 15 - The Boys in the Band)

What does it mean to let your gayness define you -- and is that necessarily a bad thing?

My guest this week is actor Raymond Miller. If you were a teenager in Toronto in 2002, you saw him every afternoon hosting a local after-school TV show. He's also appeared on stage in Mamma Mia, blink and you'll miss him in an episode of Queer as Folk, and you might've caught him performing with the Canadian Opera Company.

When Raymond was newly out, he fell in with a circle of friends who told each other that even though they were all men attracted to men, they shouldn't define themselves as gay. That attitude was echoed by an acting teacher who told him to tone down his proclivities during auditions. At the TV show that he hosted, management told him to get rid of his lisp. And if he couldn't on his own, they told him, they had a solution to straighten him out: hockey.

Here's Mamma Mia in Toronto:

And a little Harvey Milk:

The beginning of The Boys in the Band:

And our friend Kevin Yee, who was coached on acting straighter by his management. It didn't work!

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

It's OK to Like Everything (Ep. 14 - My So Called Life)

There's a certain pleasure in changing your skin, being a chameleon and reinventing who you are. My guest this week is J.P., whose only constant is that he's constantly changing. I met Jay years ago, when he was something of an internet celebrity for, among other things, running elections for a Russian blogging company and posting frequent pictures of his cats. These days he's doing his best to keep a low profile, though you might be able to spot him at the Applebee's in Queen Anne. Then again, you might not -- J's changed his persona so many times his own friends might have trouble recognizing him.

We talked about so many different things in this episode! Let's start with poor Ricky on My So-Called Life:

And then there's Ab Fab, from around the same time:

And Queer as Folk. Sure is a lot of '90s going on here.

Musically, J.P. listened to Skinny Puppy:

And Infected Mushroom:

And, improbably, Kenny Chesney:

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