We Were Our Own John Hughes Movie (Ep. 73 - Voyagers)

This Week's Guest: AK Miller

Would you rather travel the world to seek out new experiences, or create new experiences in your own home town? My guest this week is Chicago theater person AK Miller, who couldn't wait to leave his small town and find the big-city gay communities he'd always read about.

But before long, he discovered that being part of a gay community can go way beyond simply moving to a major metropolis. He could go even further, not just joining but creating a community, the likes of which he'd only ever read about.

This Week's Recommendation: Jobriath

Thanks again to AK Miller for joining me. You might've noticed that he mentioned Caffe Cino in New York, an experimental theater that changed performance in the 1960s. I interviewed one of the playwrights who worked there, Robert Patrick, on episode 66 of The Sewers of Paris. So if you'd like to hear about what it was like to be a gay playwright in Greenwich Village in the 1960s, just hop back a few episodes and listen to Robert Patrick's story. It's pretty incredible.

My recommendation this week is a Google search. Go look up a man named Jobriath and just start clicking and reading and watching and you will discover an incredible performer who was going to be the next David Bowie until he went too far, was too gay, and the world turned its back on him.

You owe it to yourself to learn about this man. Just click everything that comes up. Read his wikipedia article. Watch the few youtube videos that exist. Find the documentary that was made a few years ago called Jobriath AD. He was an amazing, groundbreaking artist, the first openly gay musician signed by a major record label, an early casualty of HIV, and for some reason we've allowed him to be almost completely forgotten by history. 

Well it's time to rediscover Jobriath. He was extravagant and strange and he created elaborate queer performances, such as a planned show where he would appear as "King Kong being projected upwards on a mini Empire State Building. This will turn into a giant spurting penis and I will have transformed into Marlene Dietrich."

He called himself "rock's truest fairy" and maybe it's statements like that that explain why mainstream audiences just weren't willing to embrace him. It was the 1970s, and gay musicians winked -- they didn't climb spurting penises.

But while his memory faded, his influence still lives: you can feel his fingerprint in the music of The Pet Shop Boys, Gary Numan, Siousxie Sioux, and Def Leppard. Morrissey cites him as an inspiration. So whether he's recognized or not, Jobriath's still with us. He's all around us. Like so many great artists, gay and straight, he gave us a gift when he was alive. And we're only just now figuring out how to unwrap it.

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/

A Bomb Went Through the Wall of the House (Ep. 72 - Sondheim)

This Week's Guest: Daniel Krolik

Is it better to hope for the best and risk disappointment, or expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised? My guest this week is Daniel Krolik, one of the hosts of the podcast Bad Gay Movies Bitchy Gay Men. On each episode he and his co-hosts select one bad gay movie to pick apart its flaws, and maybe if they're lucky discern some kernel of potential.

Finding flaws is a skill that Daniel unfortunately honed on himself, with a habit to be overly self-critical. Not too surprisingly, he found comfort on stage as an actor, where he could disappear into the personas of other people. That was a comfortable place for him to hide -- until the night that the character he was playing appeared in the flesh in front of him.

This Week's Recommendation: The Ladies Who Lunch

Thanks again to Daniel for joining me and for giving me any excuse to talk about Stephen Sondheim. For my recommendation this week, I want you to take a look at my two favorite versions of the Sondheim song "The Ladies Who Lunch." One is sung in  the movie Camp -- I'm not a big fan of this film but this particular scene, featuring a bitter, snarling little pre-teen Anna Kendrick accompanied by squeaky amateur band is so bizarre and uncomfortable it has to be seen.

But the other, and far superior version, was sung by Elaine Stritch in the 1970s, with a bitter acidic intensity that verges on terrifying. I'll have links to both at SewersOfParis.com. The reason I love this song is that it's both angry and forgiving; it's an indictment of the idle rich who waste their days, but also a resignation that they're never going to change. 

As the audience, you can read the song in a variety of ways -- maybe with smug triumph, looking down on the ladies. Or maybe by defiantly identifying with them, rising proudly with a swagger at the end, because after all everybody dies and you might as well have a meal and a drink before you go.

And that's a little disorienting -- do we want to be ladies who lunch or don't we? And maybe that's why, when I watch Elaine's performance of the song, the emotions that resonates most with me is fear. Not fear that the ladies are right and I'm wrong, or the ladies are wrong and I'm wrong with them. But fear that there's no way to know who's wrong and who's right.

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/

Go and Love Some More (Ep. 71 - Harold and Maude)

This Week's Guest: Joe

Do you ever find yourself engaging in self-sabotage? Maybe you avoid important work or important people. Or you dismiss your potential. Or you lie about yourself to yourself. Or you surround yourself with people who undermine you.

My guest this week spent years working for Republicans, wavering in and out of the closet. Inside, he knew who he was. But he also desperately wanted to be accepted and to belong, even among people who might reject him if they knew the truth.

Eventually, Joe managed to shed those secrets, the sabotage, and self-medication that could have easily turned fatal. Now he's feeling a lot more free, and he works for nonprofits that expand freedoms instead of restrict them.

It's Joe's way of hopefully sparing others the pain he went through. And also working through his lingering guilt.

This Week's Recommendation: You Can't Take it With You

For my recommendation this week, I was at a bit of a loss. I wanted to find a gay movie -- or at least gay-adjacent movie -- where a character learns to kick loose and have a good time. For some reason, the only one I could think of was Overboard, with Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn. So I asked my friends on Facebook and Twitter for their ideas. 

By the way, if you'd like to be in touch and suggest recommendations for future episodes, you can follow me @mattbaume on Twitter, or under the same name, Matt Baume, on Facebook.

Unfortunately, when I put this question to the internet, the very first suggestion I got was the movie Overboard. But then dozens more came in, from Desperate Living to A Christmas Carol to Mame and Fried Green Tomatoes. I haven't seen Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day but so many people suggested it that I think I probably need to. Same goes for Now Voyager.

But it was friend of the show Alonso Duralde from the Lineoleum Knife podcast who nailed this week's recommendation: a wonderful and often-overlooked film called You Can't Take it With You.

The movie's based on a play by Moss Hart and George Kaufman, and as is so often the case, I do believe the book is better. But the movie's no slouch: it's the story of a quirky live-and-let-live family of weirdos who don't care about money and follow their dreams. When the story opens, the family's being pressured to sell their home so a millionaire can build a weapons factory in its place. Yeah, it's a little on the nose.

Jimmy Stewart plays the son of the capitalist, and because this is the era of screwball comedy, he falls in love with a company typist who just so happens to be a member of that household of crazy free spirits.

I love the movie and the play for the snappy comedy, both physical and verbal. But the meaning of it is what sticks with me -- and conveniently enough, it's encapsulated right there in the title. You can't take it with you.

Money and power sure is nice, and for some people it's all they need to be happy. That's fine -- in fact, it's a good thing, because if everyone was running around chasing their heart's desires, we'd be living in a hippie commune with no running water. We need big-picture power brokers to fight with each other over who can build the biggest, bestest infrastructure.

But for other folks, money and power just isn't enough. For them, gathering resources is meaningless if you can't spread it around, give it away, share it, and improve the lives of others.

The key is for there to be a balance of those two types: the big-picture power brokers driven to build the world up; and the folks who are happiest when they have happiness to give away.

Your job is to figure out which one of those is you. And if you realize you're in the wrong game, to find a way to switch sides.

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 was Fresh Meat and a Hustler (Ep. 70 - The Kids in the Hall)

This Week's Guest: Brent

You know that saying about finding a job where you love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life? My guest this week did just that when he became a country radio DJ and a sex worker in a tiny midwest town.

Brent was a fresh-faced young cub, just out of college, and somehow word got around to all the closeted married men that he was available -- for a price. And while the hookups were fun, it was a relationship he wanted. But he couldn't possibly have imagined the form that some of those relationships would take.

This Week's Recommendation: A Hairy Prone Companion & Brain Candy

Thanks again to Brent for joining me. And guess what -- in the time since we did this interview, he actually did start that podcast! It's call "A Hairy Prone Companion" and he shares weekly stories about fascinating kinky sex. You can find it everywhere podcasts are podcasted.

I should probably just warn you that A Hairy Prone Companion is an unflinchingly frank look into some particularly intense practices and undergarments, to the point that at times it may be challenging for those with a delicate constitution to listen. But I do recommend that you give it a listen, even if you're the type to clutch your pearls, because pushing your boundaries is how you grow as a person.

And that's why my other recommendation this week is for the movie Brain Candy, from the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe where the character Buddy originated. It's a brilliantly funny and woefully under-appreciated film about an anti-depressant drug that forces the brain to focus solely on the happiest moment of their lives to the exclusion of all else. But as it turns out, a constant good mood is not without its consequences.

The fear of feeling unhappy, or uncomfortable, or afraid can hold a lot of power over us. We'll sometimes go to great lengths to avoid those feelings, whether it's altering our brains in the movie Brain Candy, or trying a new fetish you heard about on a podcast, or how I will hide in the grocery store to avoid talking to someone. But those feelings only have power over us if we let them by ignoring them. Like a bad infection, negative feelings have a way of spreading out the more you ignore and avoid them.

And confronting those feelings -- doing something you don't want to do -- is the best way to rip up the roots of that weed. I'm not saying you should step outside your comfort zone because you might learn you like it. Chances are, you're going to suddenly enjoy being sad, or start sounding every night, or look forward to making grocery store small talk. If you think you're not going to like something, you probably won't.

But liking negative feelings isn't the point. The point is to get used to them, to lose your fear of them, to learn to control them so they don't control you.

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/

What's Gayer than Plinko? (Ep. 69 - Body Heat)

This Week's Guest: Dennis Hensley

One of the most generous gifts you can give someone is listening to them. It's a habit that some people just never picked up. But others have refined it to an art form. My guest this week is Dennis Hensley, who you might know from My Life on the D-List, from Girls Will be Girls, or from countless celebrity interviews in just about every magazine ever. These days, among his many hats, he hosts a podcast called Dennis Anyone, where he interviews creative folks about their work; and he's also the host of The MisMatch Game, a live gameshow fundraiser for the LA LGBT Center. The next MisMatch game is coming up, on July 23 and 24, and I highly recommend the experience of seeing a bunch of celebrity-impersonating comedians running circles around each other. 

As an interviewer, a listener, and a host, Dennis sometimes disappears behind the glitter of the people whose talent he's showcasing. That's a problem he's always been happy to have, whether interviewing Carrie Fisher in her bed or Celine Dion in her limousine. But these days, Dennis' industry is changing, and he's faced with a new challenge: stepping out from behind the luminaries and standing in his own spotlight.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

This Week's Recommendation: Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste

It's always a pleasure, and also a little awkward, to talk to a fellow interviewer. Journalists are often accustomed to prompting, rather than talking; to steering conversation instead of just participating in it; and to analyzing people so we can explain them to others.

But then sometimes you meet someone who simply defies analysis. For my recommendation this week, check out the book Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. It's the book I was trying and failing to remember during my conversation with Dennis, the one about why people love Celine Dion and what Celine the phenomenon has to teach us about human taste.

This book had what seemed an impossible impact on me: it changed my appreciation of Celine Dion from ironic to sincere. How could such a thing happen? Well in part, because it's about much more than just Celine -- author Carl Wilson tackles such questions as "why do we like what we like?" and "is it ok to like it?"

Anyone who loves winking at camp owes it to themselves to give this book a read. We all carry around a lot of assumptions about what it's ok to enjoy, and more importantly what it's ok to admit we enjoy. Meeting Celine's fans, diving into her unexpected relationships with other artists, and the depths of schmaltz may not change what you enjoy. But it might change how you enjoy it. 

Music

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

The Girlie Show (Ep. 68 - Madonna)

This Week's Guest: David Russell

What is it about strong women that gay men find so irresistible? Whether it's a golden girl or Bayonetta or, as is the case for this week's guest, Madonna, there's something extra inspiring to us about the women who run the world.

So it's no wonder that David Russell's dedicated his career to supporting fabulous lady performers. For the last few years, he's managed Sia, the Australian singer-songwriter, and his path to success was paved with heroines like Wonder Woman, Belinda Carlisle, and an extremely understanding family. A family who stood up for him when he wanted to dance, and stood up to school officials who were so scared of having a gay student that they wouldn't even allow David to talk.

This Week's Recommendation: 20 Years of Madonna in 20 Minutes

Thanks again to David for joining me. In talking to him, I realized another reason gay men might love powerful women: their ability to adapt, to transform, to reinvent themselves and always stay one step ahead of everyone else.

Speaking of quick changes, for my recommendation this week I suggest you run to YouTube and look up the incredible drag act, "20 Years of Madonna in 20 Minutes." I've also posted the video in the shownotes for this episode, which you can find at SewersOfParis.com

It's an incredible costume-changing lip sync medley of Madonna's entire career, performed by a San Francisco artist named Kimo. Half of the pleasure of the show is hearing one greatest-hit after another, and the other half is witnessing the dizzying, frantic exchange of costumes and dresses and wigs and completely different looks within seconds.

It's easy to forget just how many Madonnas we've had from the 80s to today, from Starlight to Material Girl to Open Your Heart to Like a Prayer to Vogue -- and that barely even gets us into the 90s. Watching Kimo rocket through Madonna's career is an incredible reminder of just how many times she's changed.

And I think that knack for transformation is one key to Madonna's ongoing success. When you hit on something that works, there's a temptation to keep riding it, and riding it, and riding it, and riding it. After all, if something you did worked, if people love it, that seems like the riskiest possible time to change.

But risks can be won. Not every time, and you may need to adjust your definition of what winning means. But imagine if Madonna never moved on from Material Girl -- those furs would be pretty threadbare by now. You may not love all the risks she takes. But if you don't, so what? There'll be another quick change soon enough.

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/

The Lost Year in Argentina (Ep. 67 - 80s Pop Songs)

This Week's Guest: Gustavo

Many of us grew up with some kind of authority who kept us from exploring gay culture -- it might've been a parent, or a priest, or school. Now imagine if that authority was a military dictator. And imagine what you'd do the day that dictator fell.

My guest this week grew up in post-Peron Argentina, living under a military junta until a war ended their rule. Seemingly overnight, Gustavo's country was opened to international arts and culture, and he discovered an entire world he'd been missing -- a world to which he instantly knew he belonged.

Gus has several Spanish-language podcasts you should listen to!

 

This Week's Recommendations

Many of us have had to undergo a process of discovering that we're different, putting a name to that difference, and hoping against hope that there might be someone, anyone, else out there like us.

As lonely as it was to be gay in decades past, there was a certain magic to discovering that there existed an entire community waiting to welcome you. And one of the ways that we discovered that community -- and still do -- are through clues that we leave for each other in pop culture. Like chalk marks hidden in plain sight, those of us who've found our tribe leave hints that others might follow.

The songs that Gustavo mentioned are perfect examples, and they don't stop there. Over on Facebook and Twitter, I asked folks to recommend more songs that were coded messages for queers, and I got a ton of great suggestions, from It's a Sin to The Boys of Summer to I'm Coming Out to everything The Smiths ever sang.

I've gathered up as many of those suggestions as I could, and those are my recommendations this week. We have hours of queer-coded music videos from the 1980s embedded below. Some of these songs are just on the edge of queer and open to some debate -- like I Think We're Alone Now -- and others are a little plainer, like Go West.

But of course everyone's experience is different, and we're all putting together the pieces of different puzzles -- so the shapes that make sense to some of us might not make sense to others. Together, though, these songs paint a pretty amazing portrait of gay life from one end of the decade to the other. From being an outsider all alone to finding an inner strength to declaring your existence and resilience and survival, it's all there. If you know where to look.

 

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/

My Slumber Parties Were Notorious (Ep. 66 - Greenwich Village)

Photo by Cat Gwynn

This Week's Guest: Robert Patrick

Before Pride, before gay marriage, before disco, before most of what we recognize today as gay culture, there was Greenwich Village. It's the gay enclave that invented gay enclaves, a place where you went to reject mainstream after the mainstream had rejected you. My guest today is playwright Robert Patrick, who wandered into the Village as an unsuspecting young gay man in the 1960s. He was only supposed to be there for a day, but he wound up staying for years, witnessing -- and participating in -- one of the most important periods in American theater history.

A quick note: when I interviewed Robert, there was a cement mixer pouring a foundation right outside his window. There are some huffs and puffs in the audio, but I've removed the worst of it so I hope the occasional noise doesn't distract you from Robert's incredible story.

This Week's Recommendation: The Boys in the Band

The week that this podcast comes out is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned marriage bans across the United States. (A topic that, BTW, I wrote a book about -- it's called Defining Marriage and you can pick it up on Amazon right now if you like moving stories of queer love.)

Legalizing marriage meant an end to one of the biggest, most visible ways in which queer people are oppressed. But there's more that we have in common than just our history of oppression. There's our friendship, or brotherhood, falling in love and falling into bed. 

The energy that we once had to devote to hiding we can now devote making noise, being out, being proud, and being good to each other.

For my recommendations this week,  set aside some time for The Boys in the Band. You can find the movie on YouTube, but you might enjoy reading the play on which it's based instead. It's a beautiful and heartbreaking story set in the late 60s about a group of men who assemble for a party. Over the course of the evening, we see how they use their own pain to inflict pain on others. In The Boys in the Band, we seek each other out for comfort and companionship, but we come so battered and abused by the world that we can't help battering and abusing each other.

I recommended this play and movie last year, in my episode with actor Ray Miller. And as I prepared to write this recommendation, I was thinking about how far we've come in just those twelve months -- how in only a year, it seems as though LGBTs have become even more warmly welcomed into the quilt of the country. Of course, in that time, we've also endured a horrible tragedy -- a reminder that even in our safest enclaves we're vulnerable to attack. But even in the aftermath of that tragedy, the outpouring of love and support has been nothing short of breathtaking. 

There was a time not so long ago when all we knew was rejection and abuse. We were so used to it that it's the only way we knew to treat each other. Those times are over. But let's never let them be forgotten.

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/

Earthquakes Are Fine, I'd Just Rather not be in Eugene (Ep. 65 - Tokyo Drag Queen)

This Week's Guest: Tatianna Lee/Taylor

How far would you go to find your chosen family? Some of us are lucky enough to find our tribe in the town where we grew up. Others had to travel to the nearest big city. And my guest this week moved across an ocean. 

By Day, Taylor's a mind-mannered english teacher from Eugene, but at night, he becomes Tatianna Lee, the leader of an international band of Tokyo gender rebels. It's a long way from where he grew up, and a long way from the outcast loner he was as a kid. 

A quiet anime nerd, he used to dream of being part of an incredible family like the ones he saw on screen -- especially after suffering a series of academic failures and rejection from the gay community.

It was then that Taylor stopped dreaming of finding that family, and started making it real.

This Week's Recommendation: Bioware Needs More Gay

I don't know how many listeners I have in Japan -- hopefully a lot -- and if you happen to be in Tokyo, please check out the Tokyo Closet Ball and let me know what you think! From the sound of things, it's one of the most diverse drag-type performances in the world, pulling from all different kinds of performance.

When you have a show that's so international and so diverse, it's hard to know what to call it. But that's good problem to have -- being so unique there's no word to describe you.

For my recommendation this week, check out a YouTube video that involves two of my past Sewers of Paris guests, David Gaider and Jamie Mauer. You might know Jamie, aka Rantasmo, from his YouTube series Needs More Gay, where he talks about queer representation on screen. On a recent episode, he addressed two of the Bioware franchises that Taylor mentioned on this week's episode -- Dragon Age and Mass Effect, both of which feature writing from my past guest David Gaider.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect have been steadily improving their LGBT inclusion for years, starting with a few minor characters and blossoming into complex romance storylines. Jamie's video tackles the specific issue of tokenization -- the idea that we might be included, but only in the most perfunctory, superficial way. 

Watching Jamie's video, you can see that Bioware's approach is basically a how-to manual of avoiding tokenization. It's kind of amazing to see just what lengths the company has gone to to include us -- and how that inclusion started well and got better with each new game over the years. 

After all, these games are fundamentally about balancing a party, assembling a group with varied traits that all enhance and complement each other. And romance is built into the games as part of the mechanic. For years, we've had elves that can shoot lightning, seven-foot tall aliens with four testicles, and club-wielding gnomes. 

In worlds like those, it's a little weird that two men kissing would ever have seemed far-fetched.

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/

Villains and Hairdressers (Ep. 64 - Bryan Safi)

This Week's Guest: Bryan Safi

As a flamboyant kid in Texas, humor was Bryan's protection in situations where standing out might otherwise have been risky. He escaped to the big city he'd always dreamed of to become an actor, and for a time he tried to peel off that funny armor by taking on serious roles. But stripping down revealed something he didn't expect -- underneath the humor that he once hid behind was a man who was even funnier.

PS: Bryan's podcast, Throwing Shade, is going on a 21-city tour! Tickets are on sale at throwingshade.com/tour.

This Week's Recommendation: A Confederacy of Dunces

I'll confess that when I first started listening to Throwing Shade I would get a little frustrated when one of them got a fact wrong, or broached a topic with what I thought was insufficient gravity. But being silly is kind of the point of a comedy show, and if you try to take it seriously, well then, you're the one the joke's on. Generally speaking, the more seriously you take yourself, the funnier you actually are.

For my recommendation this week, take a look at the book A Confederacy of Dunces, written by John Kennedy Toole in the 1960s. It's the story of a man who considers himself very important, and is in fact very ridiculous. His name's Ignatius Reilly, and he's by turns a hot dog vendor, a pants manufacturer, a revolutionary, and a serial masturbator. His grasp on reality is not the strongest, but his plans are terribly grand.

For example, one day while dressed as a pirate, Ignatius makes the acquaintance of a gay man named Dorian Greene. As Ignatius learns about the basic tenets of homosexuality, it occurs to him that he might be able to achieve world peace by infiltrating the nation's army with gay men, transforming all future wars from conflicts into orgies. He commands that Dorian assemble all of his gay friends for what he expects will be a political rally, but what winds up being somewhat less sober.

This is but one of many memorable escapades in the book, all of which involve Ignatius's increasingly grandise plans and increasingly chaotic failures. The title is a reference to a Jonathan Swift quote -- "When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him." For Ignatius, this explains everything: all his failures simply confirm his genius, and motivate him to attempt ever more serious endeavors. 

When things aren't going as you might've planned, you basically have two choices. You can either panic about your wounded pride and convince yourself that the world's out to get you. Or you can just laugh about being wrong. And you might as well laugh -- expecting that you're going to be right about everything is funny. 

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/