I'm in the Whore Houses and the Leper Colonies (Ep. 58 - Robbie Turner)

Listener alert! If you're enjoying The Sewers of Paris, could you nominate it in the "GLBT" category for a podcast award? Deadline is April 30th!

This Week's Guest: Robbie Turner

Who taught you how to be beautiful? My guest this week made a lifelong study of the most beautiful woman he knew, his mother, even going so far as to transform into a character who bears an uncanny resemblance. You might know Robbie Turner the character from this season's Drag Race, or from her regular appearances at shows in Seattle and around the country. She might've hosted your Pride, or officiated your wedding. But on today's episode we're going to get to know Robbie Turner the man.

As a child, Robbie wanted to become a minister, and to carry on the religious traditions of his family. Instead, today he's carrying on their hair and makeup. But without meaning to, he's also managed to cultivate an unlikely flock of his own. But it wasn't an easy path.

Robbie always knew he was different -- as young boy, he loved to color his fingernails red with sharpies, much to the chagrin of his mother, who would confiscate any markers she found. But his grandma thought it was adorable, and kept him well-stocked, slipping sharpies to him every Sunday at church.

The day he was to graduate from high school, Robbie woke up and knew that he would either have to change his life or die. He was deeply closeted, terrified of being found out by his religious family and his tiny rural town. That morning, he waded into a river holding a giant stone, planning to drown himself. "We didn't have 'it gets better,'" he said. "As far as I knew, it got worse."

Even underwater, he could feel his tears welling up as he mustered the courage to stand up out of the water and walk back to shore. He made it to graduation, broke up with his girlfriend, came out to his parents, and bid his small town goodbye. "I need to find out who I am," Robbie told them, and hit the road.

He planned to be a serious actor, and took roles in various Shakespeare shows -- but then he found himself cast repeatedly in female roles, and something just seemed right about it. When a friend asked if he'd fill in for a last-minute cancellation at a drag show, Robbie was taken aback. What did he know about drag? The two of them ran to a thrift shop, grabbed whatever couture they could find, and suddenly Robbie found himself transformed into Liza Minnelli. He walked out on stage with no time to rehearse and nailed a lip-sync to Liza with a Z. That led to another booking, and another, and another -- and then he was on Drag Race.

Telling his mother what he does was particularly difficult. Robbie had idolized her for his entire life, and she received the news as he thought she might -- with hysterics. But his father surprised him. "I expected him to be like 'get out of the house,'" Robbie said. But instead, his father took a moment to compose himself, and told his son, "I'm going to level with you. You're not going to get a fair shake in life. But I'll always be here for you."

It took some time for his mother to come around. They certainly didn't understand his drag career. But when Robbie got a call that his mother was dying, he knew he had to drop everything and return to the small town he'd left years before. 

Here are some photos that I took of Robbie just before her Drag Race debut:

This Week's Recommendation: Polyester

This week's episode was all about drag and moms, it would be a crime for my recommendation to overlook Divine, the mother of modern drag queens. She's sensitive and sweet in Hairspray, and she's long-suffering in Polyester, but I think her greatest role is in Pink Flamingos. In that film, Divine plays Babs Johnson, a trailer-dweller who lives with her mother and son and has just been named the filthiest person alive. That enrages two other filthy Baltimore residents, who scheme to seize the title from Babs by any means necessary, but soon find themselves in filth far over their heads.

Divine's portrayal of maternity has never exactly been what you'd call typical, but even in this incredibly disgusting role, there's a motherliness that borders on touching. Divine's family is gross -- they engage in acts with chickens and with eggs that will leave you trembling -- but they're HER family, and she refuses to apologize for the way they live, the way they kill, and the way they eat.

There are remarkably few films about heroic moms, since strong women are so often made into villains, from Cinderella to Carrie to The Manchurian Candidate to Ordinary People. Even Divine might look at first like the bad guy in Pink Flamingos -- after all, she's responsible for a variety of grandiose murders over the course of the film. But she's not filthy just for fun, she's filthy for a cause -- that of her family. Yes, she's disgusting, but disgust is what nourishes her egg-obsessed mother and her chicken-fucking kid. 

Being a mother in this context may be exhausting, and the world may never fully understand her. But Divine never flinches from the role as matriarch of her horrifying clan, of caretaker, protector, and provider. She'll do whatever must be done to preserve her family, or eat shit and die trying.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

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

I was in Fantasy Worlds with Quests and Wizards (Ep. 57 - Dungeons & Dragons)

This Week's Guest: David Gaider

If you could create your ideal fantasy world, what would it looks like? Who would live there? And would it include you?

My guest this week is writer and game developer David Gaider, whose work appears in Baldur's Gate 2, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, several novels. He's been telling stories his whole life, with one early experience involving a game in which he gave his friends the Black Death -- in a role-playing context, of course.

Games were always David's hobby. He worked in hotel management and never planned to get into the game industry, even going so far as to turn down the job that would eventually change his life. 

"One does not make a job out of things you do to creatively satisfy yourself," he told himself. But there were surprises awaiting him that gave him the nudge he needed toward creative fulfilment -- though not without taking a great risk.

For David, games were an escape from real life, and his fantasy worlds never included anyone who was quite like him. The games that he wrote were always about other people, adventures that he told for and about about someone else. "People say 'write what you know' and that just wasn't something I did," he said. "I didn't think I had a story to tell that other people would be interested in."

It wasn't until his company, Bioware, included a lesbian storyline in the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that it even occurred to David that he could write queer characters. "I was blown away when I heard that this is something we were doing," he said. "I didn't know that it was something I could even question or want."

And so he wrote a mage named Dorian for Dragon Age: Inquisition. Dorian's backstory involves a disapproving father and attempts at being "ex-gay" -- in the context of magic and spells. To write Dorian, David reached down deep to tap into personal experiences he'd never used in his writing before. "I finished writing it and I burst into tears," he said.

Once he collected himself, he gave the script to his editor. She came into his office crying as well. It was his first indication that he hadn't just opened a door for himself -- he'd unlocked an undiscovered realm for players everywhere.

This Week's Recommendation: Dragon Age (and Ass-Slapping)

Thanks again to David for joining me. Not just on this episode, but every time I play Dragon Age. It's a single-player game, but just as with a book or a movie or a song, when you connect with a work of art, you're doing it in the company of the people who made it. And knowing that folks like David invited us into their creations with characters who are queer makes the fantasy all the more rich.

That's why my recommendation this week is the series that he worked on, Dragon Age. There are three games, each released about two years apart, and the most recent one -- Dragon Age Inquisition -- has tons of queer content. I've been spending the last few weeks wooing a character called The Iron Bull, a giant hulking warrior who commands a group of mercenaries and whose love for your character deepens if you kill a dragon together.

Among Bull's entourage is a trans man, and there's a scene in which the game unflinchingly explains the character's connection to his gender. Later, the player's relationship with Bull can take a turn towards BDSM, and you explore safe words and consent between fights with monsters deep underground. After a grueling adventure, your can opt into being tied up and roughly sexed in the safety of your bedroom. One character observes that in your relationship with Bull, you submit, but Bull serves, explaining BDSM terms that are clearer than you'll hear at most actual bondage events.

In one scene that I've probably watched a dozen times, Bull slaps your character on the ass, hard enough that you're seen rubbing it tenderly afterward. The scene caught me by surprise at first, and then the next time it played, I made sure my partner was nearby. "Like THAT," I told him.

Not every work of art needs to accommodate every fantasy -- and in fact, they'd be pretty messy if they did. But what I love about Dragon Age is the extent to which it invites different fantasies in.

If I could only play a straight romance, or if I couldn't negotiate power roles with my partner, then I wouldn't be playing my fantasy. I'd be playing someone else's. 

The conversations and assignations of Dragon Age happen in a imaginary setting, but they could just as easily take place in a bedroom or a bar or a basement here in the real world. And at first that might seem like reality intruding into a fantasy realm. If the game's meant to be an escape, a place where your imagination can go free, isn't it distracting to be reminded of the issues of our real lives?

Well -- no. No fantasy exists completely on its own. We all bring a bit of our real lives with us when we escape into a story or music or game, whether it's a wish to be a hero or bad guy, to be important, to be loved, to be something scary or to make something beautiful.

We carry some measure of ourselves into every escape, and some measure of the escape back with us to real life, like returning to base with an inventory bulging with treasure.

From adventures like these, you might return with life-changing loot, like the courage to come out, or a deeper understanding of those you love. And sometimes even little rewards catch you by surprise, like instructions for a good hard smack on the ass.

"I think in many ways the industry is maturing," said David, who just recently became creative director at the game company Beamdog. "Sure, we're offering escapism, but to whom, and to where? And what other sorts of stories can we tell?"

Please join me for a livestreaming of my Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough! I'm at http://twitch.tv/matthewbaume.

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 Needed to Feel at Home in my Home (Ep. 56 - Matilda)

How old were you when you first realized that no adult has any idea what they're doing? When you're a kid, it's easy to look up to your parents and teachers and bank tellers and taxi drivers like they have all the secrets about how to get by in the world -- but the truth is nobody's got a clue.

"I never felt safe enough to come out," John says on this week's episode. his religious upbringing made coming out a painful experience -- his mother broke down and cried, and that very same night he called called a girl he knew to ask if she'd be his girlfriend in the hopes of undoing his mom's pain.

The next few years were hard, and marked by occasional attempts to run away. John would look at his mom, who was once his best friend, and think, "my mom doesn't love me as much as she did."

"More than anything, I wanted my mom to look at me the way she did before," he said.

Finally, he was old enough to move out of the house for real -- but being on his own turned out to be harder than he thought. Two years of couch-surfing and unsteady employment convinced John that he'd failed as an adult.

But his eyes were opened by a chance re-discovery of a movie he loved as a kid, and a lesson he'd forgotten as he grew up: that making mistakes is a very adult thing to do. The movie Matilda showed him that just because a person is an adult doesn't mean that they're right about everything. His past mistakes didn't make him a bad person; and his mother's disapproval could maybe change. "Maybe one day I can pull her out of it," he thought.

John moved back home and attempted a reconciliation that stretched out over years. He wasn't sure if it was working, until one day his mother unexpectedly found a way to let him know that ever since she pushed him away, she'd been silently holding onto a lot of regrets.

A few clips of things we talked about this week:

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

My Cat Makes Me Laugh a Lot (Ep. 55 - Bette Midler)

My guest this week is writer and comedian H. Alan Scott, whom you may know as co-host of the fabulous Out on the Lanai podcast. But he first came to my attention when I was working as a nightlife photographer in LA. There was this one guy I'd photograph at a bar every now and then who was shy, who hung back from the dance floor, and who whenever I took his picture would have something to say that made me laugh.

And that man ... was Howie Mandel. Just kidding, it was H. Alan Scott.

I never told him this, but I didn't just look forward to photographing him because he was funny and friendly. H Alan was a pleasure to shoot because he never posed. It may not come as a total surprise that in Los Angeles, many people are very concerned with how they are seen, and so whenever a camera is nearby they contort themselves into an improbable shape that they believe is the most flattering, and as a result, pictures of them are often more about the posture than the person. 

H Alan, on the other hand, always looked into my camera honestly, sometimes with a smile and sometimes not. I didn't know it, but at the time he was emerging from a long and difficult ordeal that had changed his life. And when I pointed my camera at him, I was pointing it at a man who had no use for putting on a happy face.

Here are some clips of things we talked about on this episode:

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

Don't Follow Rules (Ep. 54 - Indie Rock, Chiptunes, and Video Games)

How can you tell the difference between a rule that's best followed and a rule that's best broken? Some guidelines are there to help, like, stay out of the lion pit. But others are just rules for the sake of rules, like no white after labor day. And sometimes, one type looks deceptively like the other.

My guests this week are Daniel Culp, and his husband Stephen Van Doren. We'll mostly be hearing from Daniel, a musician who also goes by Aethernaut, and whose musical influences have veered from Pentecostalism to Duck Tales. Daniel grew up bound by rules, from what he should believe to what games he could play, until he made a clean break both in his life and in his songs. These days, he's enjoying some new-found freedom ... with the help of some familiar structure.

Here are some clips of stuff we talked about in this episode:

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

My Land's Only Borders Lie Around my Heart (Ep. 53 - Chess, Mariah, and Wicked)

My guest this week is Jean-Paul Bevilacqua, who's probably best known for appearing on the show One Girl Five Gays. But he's more than just a fifth of a panel. He's a bundle of raw emotions. Despite the calm, cool, collected exterior, JP can't resist chasing after intense feelings, whether it's by listening to love ballads, or by playing the devil in an opera, or by cultivating youtube playlists of people on the verge. His favorite entertainment is the kind that explodes, that overwhelms, that dares you to endure. It's a dare that for many years JP literally hid from.

And hey -- come join us for a Sewers of Paris live video chat this weekend! We'll be talking about classic TV shows and who knows what else. Hope to see you there!

A few clips mentioned on this week's episode:

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

If You Can Survive it, do it (Ep. 52 - Gay New York in the 70s & 80s)

My guest this week is Mark Finley. Again. I spoke to Mark last week about his career as an actor and talent coordinator, fleeing his small town and meeting his heroes. Mark shared so many incredible memories that I invited him back to talk more about his time in New York, traveling around the country, and how he survived after doctors told him six months to live.

As you'll hear, the audio of our conversation is a little echoey -- it's quite not as clear as a normal episode. But the memories Mark shared are just so incredible I had to share them with you, echo and all.

For my recommendation this week, I'm going to give you a choice: if you're feeling up to it, watch Longtime Companion. But be ready for a devastating experience. This is not a film that tells its story from a distant vantage point. It is embedded deep in the most painful suffering and heartbreak of the epidemic, down to its final scene. The last few moments of Longtime Companion are a reunion, of sorts, but a reunion that reminds you that sometimes you can never go home, because home has become unrecognizable. And so have you.

If that's too much for you to bear right now, take a deep breath and watch The Gang's All Here, one of the movies Mark gave me to watch. It's an all-star musical romantic comedy from 1943, and it is about as upbeat and trouble free as a movie can get. It's a perfect escape from any worry you could possibly have, and it's probably no coincidence that it was made at a time when the whole country really needed some cheering up.

It is also, of course, wildly unrealistic, as musicals usually are. So take your pick: a devastating story that's unflinchingly honest, or a cheerful romp that's unachievably cheerful. I recommend balancing both.

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

That's a Life in the Theater (Ep. 51 - Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett)

"There was an incident and I was found to be insane," Mark reveals on this week's episode, "because my flamboyant behavior was disruptive."

Mark's been around long enough to remember when being gay was assumed to be a mental illness, and the very presence of an openly gay teenager was too much for anyone to bear. He fled his small hometown as quickly as he could, spending time in Japan, Cal Arts, and for a time at Brigham Young University where he says "I felt mighty comfortable. But apparently they didn't."

An unannounced exorcism made him aware that his presence might not have been entirely welcome at BYU. "I was sleeping with a lot of guys," he says. "Always there to lend a helping hand. I haven't been called 'The Golden Throat' all my life for nothing."

His wild life in the theater eventually took him to New York, where he took some advice given to him by Carol Burnett to heart: "you sound like you really love theater," she told him when he was young and wrote to her for advice. "And if you love it, keep doing it."

Some clips mentioned on this week's show:

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

I Embrace Being High-Strung (Ep. 50 - Louis Virtel & Jeopardy!)

"For trivia people, Jeopardy! is The Hajj," Louis Virtel says on this week's episode of The Sewers of Paris. "You don't know what The Hajj has in store for you, but you have to make it once in your lifetime."

Louis' infamous snap, captured and deployed in countless GIFs since he appeared on Jeopardy!, happened in the spur of the moment. But in the lead up to his appearance, he was one big bundle of nerves.

"There was a week when I read every Jeopardy! board in existence," he said. Some categories of information, like economics of football trophies, presented a challenge. "But then you look up the movies of Sandy Dennis and do a little backflip."

In the midst of cramming, he had to take a step back just to relax. "Louis," he told himself, "you better enjoy this while it lasts, because you're going to be on Jeopardy! and then it will be over. Eat up this excitement while you have it."

Appearing on the show was more than a lifelong dream -- for Louis, it approached something like a religious vision. 

The earliest childhood photographs of Louis feature him rapt with attention before the spinning Wheel of Fortune, and his family were all trivia buffs growing up. "When I think about my childhood and playing games with people, that's when I was happiest," he said. "It was cooperative and social, but you weren't just talking to each other. You were learning about the other people from how they played."

At school, he shunned all computer games not based on game shows. Even as a kid, he was a master of memory and accessing arcane knowledge. "It's so cool to trust yourself in front of other people," he said. "It feels like a superpower when you memorize something that nobody else knows."

His appearance on the show was possibly the most stressful day of his life. During rehearsal, "there was a woman she beat me on the buzzer like three times in a row," he recalled. "As somebody who grew up playing video games, that was pretty grim. Why is this woman who is like my mom's age destroying me on this thing where I feel genetically programmed to operate a button better than she does? It was pretty tough at first."

Then the show taped, the snap happened, and the rest was history. He didn't realize at first that he'd done something that would become meaningful to millions. But as soon as the episode aired, Louis noticed that people began to treat him differently than they had when he was best-known for his YouTube series, Verbal Voguing.

"Because of Verbal Voguing, I'd have people come up to me in a bar, like, 'you're funny.' After the Jeopardy! snap, some guy came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'thank you.'"

When we say "gay pride," we're usually talking about a loud parade. But Louis had demonstrated a form of gay pride that was more fundamental: a personal feeling of self-worth for being gay and accomplished and earning recognition.

So now what? He's certain it won't be the last time he's gay on television. As surely as he knew for years that he'd be on Jeopardy!, he knows that "I will host a gay version of Jeopardy! And I want it to be deep, hard knowledge that you basically have to have a drag queen teach you."

His hope is that he can keep showing the world what successful gay men look like, and how different they can be from one another. After all, the key to trivia success is diverse knowledge. When it comes to quiz shows, "your differences are your assets," he said. "There's a level playing field, and the only thing separating you from victory is a buzzer."

Some clips mentioned in this week's episode:

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

You've Got to Appeal to the Queens (Ep. 49 - Judy Garland & Shelley Duvall)

My guest this week has been putting out a podcast of his own for years, and yet listeners have never heard his voice. Or at least not his real voice. They've heard him as Judy Garland, or as Carol Channing, or as Bernadette Peters or as Gollum. But today I'm just talking to Bill, the creator of Judycast: the Entertainment Beat with Francis Gumm.

Bill's always had lots to say, but was too shy to say it out loud. So he kept quiet, kept to himself, buried his true self so he wouldn't cause a fuss. Until one day he opened his mouth to speak and someone else's words came out.

A few clips from this episode:

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