It Makes Every Gay Bone in my Body Vibrate (Ep. 104 - Broadway)

This Week's Guest: Stephen Oremus

My guest this week started his musical career at a neighborhood friend's piano, hanging out and playing showtunes. These days he's doing pretty much the same, but he's accompanying Broadway stars and winning Tonys. Stephen Oremus worked on The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q, Frozen, and 9 to 5, among many others, and was music director for the 87th Academy Awards -- a role that became a little tense when one of the winners had an unexpected message to deliver from the stage. 
 

This Week's Recommendation: Showgirls

It was a real delight to reflect on musical dreams coming true, and so for my recommendation this week, I'd suggest taking a look at another story of an artist who reaches for the stars in the big city: Showgirls.

It is incomprehensible to me that I have not recommended this movie already, though episode 28 of Sewers of Paris features Patrick Bristow, who appears in the film as a choreographer with a short fuse. If you haven't seen this film, let me just prepare you: it is not what you would call cinema verite. Its proximity with reality is as close as that of some of director Paul Verhoeven's other films, like Starship Troopers and Robocop. It's the story of a woman who arrives in Las Vegas with dreams of dancing and glamour and fame, and she achieves it all -- but at the price of... well... her dignity, maybe?

I love Showgirls because it is weird and extravagant, and sexually sideways in a way that feels like the script was a mad lib. But it is not, I don't think, accidental. I don't believe there's anything on the screen that isn't supposed to be there, and as with Starship Troopers and Robocop, I suspect that the filmmakers knew exactly how insane this vision was. There are those who claim that Showgirls is a failure of seriousness, a fiasco of bad taste, and a train wreck of glitter.

But I don't think it is those things. I think it's about those things.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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A Weird Thing From Outer Space Having a Love Affair (Ep. 103 - RISK's Kevin Allison)

This Week's Guest: Kevin Allison

Imagine this riskiest thing you could do -- and then imagine what would happen if you did it. My guest this week knows something about taking a chance -- Kevin Allison is the host of the Risk podcast, a show where people tell true stories about the times they put everything on the line. It's a concept that came to him after he'd spent too many years playing it safe, from tiptoeing around his sexuality to his mild-mannered persona on the sketch comedy show The State. It was on the advice of his fellow troupe-member Michael Ian Black that Kevin finally decided that some risks are worth taking.

This Week's Recommendation: Richard Simmons

Thanks again to Kevin for joining me. You can check out his podcast at risk-show.com, and support the show at patreon.com/risk.

There are all kinds of risks in life -- just the other day, I served a cucumber salad made from a recipe I'd never tried before. (Don't worry, it came out fine). But there's another form of risk that many of us don't dare attempt, and that's honesty.

For my recommendation this week, I'd like to you take a look at Richard Simmons. Really any video of his is a pleasure to watch, but in particular I recommend searching YouTube for his name plus CNN for a video called "Richard Simmons breaks down in tears and cries." For most of the interview, Richard exhibits impeccable message discipline, focusing on the products he's selling and his advice for others -- in particular to be kind to yourself in the mirror. But when the host asks him what he says to himself in the mirror, the persona slips away and you see a moment of real vulnerable honesty.

I've interviewed a lot of people, and asked a lot of really invasive personal questions. Sometimes -- most of the time, in fact, people deflect or avoid or make a joke because it's weird to open up to a stranger, especially if you know you're being recorded. Giving an honest answer to a personal question feels tremendously risky -- but it's also the one risk that anyone can take. We can't all go skydiving, or elope, or make a new cucumber salad, but opening up, telling the truth, that's one risk that universal.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Where's the Coming-Out Advice for Somebody in a Chair? (Ep. 102 - Narnia)

This Week's Guest: Drew Gurza

Most gay men have had the experiencing of needing to decide just how open and honest we're going to be about our lives, even when that openness is difficult for some people to hear. This week's guest makes openness about difficult topics his life's work. Andrew Gurza is the host of the podcasts Disability With Drew and Disability After Dark, in addition to being one of the organizers of a recent accessible sex party in Toronto. His mission: to demolish cultural taboos around disability and sex -- taboos that have been a nuisance ever since he first found himself attracted to masculine figures on TV.
 

This Week's Recommendation: The Princess Bride

Thanks again to Drew for joining me. Check out his podcasts Disability After Dark and Disability with Drew, both part of Cripple Content Creations. And you can find all his work at AndrewGurza.com.

I think everyone can identify with that longing to slip away into a fantasy realm, and so my recommendation this week is for the movie The Princess Bride. I'm of an age that it's simply expected that my cohorts can quote this film at length, but if it's somehow passed you by, stop everything -- everything -- and see this movie.

It's a story of love and violence and swashbuckling and pirates and giants that takes place inside a book inside the movie. And while the book is swashbuckling adventure, the movie around takes place within the bedroom of a boy home sick from school. Simply listening to grandfather read to him, the kid finds himself changed without ever leaving his bedroom -- at least, not physically. In his mind, he departs for a fantasy world. And when he comes back, he's still himself, but changed. Or maybe the world he comes back to is changed. Or maybe both. 

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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I Met my Husband in Divinity School (Ep. 101 - The Hours)

This Week's Guest: Jason DeRose

How do you cope when everything seems sad? And how do you move on and find happiness? My guest this week is Jason DeRose. His background in divinity school taught him pastoral care, and his career as a journalist taught him how to look difficult news unflinchingly in the eye. It can be tempting to let dark feelings become overwhelming, to let them control us, or simply to run from them. But whether counseling people or reporting the news, Jason's challenge has been confronting those dark emotions, and then still feeling free to experience joy. 

This Week's Recommendation: Six Degrees of Separation

Thanks again to Jason for joining me. The plan for our conversation was to talk about The Hours, a Single Man, and Six Degrees of Seperation, but we never managed to get to that last one -- so it's my recommendation for the week, a 1993 film starring Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland as a wealthy couple and Will Smith as a surprise guest who claims to know their son. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that Will's character is hiding more than he initially lets on, and the truth begins to emerge after an incident with a male hustler. But Stockard Channing's character has some secrets of her own -- secrets she was keeping even from herself.

In their guest's hidden depths, she finds depths of her own re-awakened -- a dissatisfaction to which she'd long grown numb, but once alerted to, can no longer ignore. The title of the film, Six Degrees of Separation, refers to how interconnected we all are. You're never far from knowing anyone else, and finding something of yourself in them. A chance encounter with a stranger can change not only your life, but what you expect out of life, and what makes you happy.

There's some ambiguity to the movie's ending, but ultimately I like to see it as a story about no longer waiting for permission to be free, to be happy, to be fulfilled, even when you thought all the doors to those feelings were closed -- or that there weren't even any doors worth looking for.

Thanks again for listening. The show takes about ten hours to produce each week, and it's thanks to the support of patrons like Wilfredo and Radio Free Qtopia that we're able to keep the show going. Support the show on Patreon here.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

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Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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My Life is Drama -- Make me Laugh (Ep. 100 - Dan Savage)

This Week's Guest: Dan Savage

If, like me, you are a huge fan of Dan Savage's work, you've probably heard him speak at length about sex and love and news and politics -- but this conversation is going to be a little different as we dive into 8-track tapes, secret bike rides, family arguments, and a rule-breaking theater troupe where Dan honed his sense of shock and showmanship long before he was known for dispensing Savage Love.

"Album covers in the 70s ... helped me figure out who the fuck I was," Dan recalls, thinking back to Leif Garrett records, the Rolling Stones cover with a zipper, and even the Solid Gold Dancers in the 1970s "when the objectification of male bodies was seriously really getting under way."

But it was musical comedies that had the biggest impact -- specifically from his parents' collection of 8-track tapes. His favorites ranged from Camelot to Cabaret to Carousel to shows that didn't start with a C. He heard songs like "There's a Place for Us," laments about finding a safe place to fall in love, and knew there was something speaking to him.

The film The Boys in the Band was pivotal as well. Though the characters are cruel to each other, he saw it and thought "oh -- you can be gay and have friends. I'll just have better friends." Dan was fortunate enough that his family encouraged argument and standing up for yourself, a sort of debate-club where he learned to defend himself if he was confident that he was right.

Still, he knew he was different, and it scared and intrigued him. As a teen, Dan would ride his bike through Chicago's gay neighborhood, gawking at men who walked comfortably in public while holding hands. In hindsight, he says, that was risky -- he was eager enough to dive into the world of bars and clubs that he could easily have been taken advantage of, especially since he wasn't sure he fully knew what sex was. "I knew how to put a dick in my mouth by the time I was fifteen," he laughed. "Maybe I'd have known what to do."

Like many queer people, he was drawn to the theater. "We grow up acting," he says, and as he learned that it could be an actual career, "it was all I ever wanted to do." In college, he did a lot of plays that bored him, but it was in Seattle that he was able to take risks and try new things on stage. He and some friends approached a bar and said they wanted to stage some shows, and from that emerged the Greek Active Theater Company. ("Greek active" was slang for a top.)

Their resources were few, in part because they prided themselves on pricing tickets just below the cost of a movie. By luck and scrappy talent, they managed to assemble ramshackle costumes and sets, often making creative choices based on the circumstances in which they found themselves: They staged The Miracle Worker in a gay bar, for example, because that was simply the venue they had to work with.

Dan's intention was to challenge audiences, to surprise them with works they thought they knew. During a production of Richard III, he delighted in an actor's decision to confront a disruptive audience-member with dialogue from the scene. His gay-bar Miracle Worker was shocking when it showed Hellen Keller spelling out "VODKA."

"You have to take stories people are familiar with and make them strange," he says. Audiences are "vulnerable when they're laughing," and as a director, he was able to draw viewers into the scene with comedy before startling them with real emotional catharsis. 

It was important to surprise audiences, he says, because "theater is going to die if it can't do something for us that film and television aren't already doing, and doing better." And he succeeded -- but then his sex-advice column became a huge hit, and he had to drop his drama career.

"I really miss it," he says, confessing that he'd still love to direct The Boys in the Band. But of course, in his trademark style, he'd do it strangely, by "setting it on Mars or something."

It's a little surprising to hear that like everyone, Dan has some as-yet unfulfilled dreams. But who knows, maybe they can still come true: "It's crazy that theater is my fallback career," he laughs, "in case sex-advice-columning doesn't work out."

---

I just want to add, this week, that I'm so excited to bring you this interview because Dan's work has been a major influence on my own. The very first time I read one of his columns, I was sitting at a desk at my first job, taking a break from alphabetizing video tapes and envying the people who get to write words for a living. Since then, Dan and a handful of other writers have been signposts for my work, inspiring me to write better, to write smarter, to write funnier, to write not just for myself but to use words to shine a light on ideas and connect people to each other.

So it means a lot to me that I could bring you this conversation for episode 100 of The Sewers of Paris. And it also means a lot that you, the listeners, have kept this show going for 100 episodes of interviews and insights and stories and confessions. I do the show because I love exploring the different languages of art and culture, and I'm so grateful to my guests who generously invite us into their stories, and I'm grateful to my listeners for accepting that invitation week after week.

This Week's Recommendation: Cabaret

For my recommendation this week, you have two choices. Either hop on a plane and come visit Seattle to attend the brand new production of Cabaret in the Unicorn theater, or just watch the movie Cabaret -- but with a twist. You see, this new Seattle production of Cabaret has been adjusted for modern times, moved out of pre-war Berlin and into modern-day America. What was previously a reflection of a gay man watching Nazis rise to power is now... strangely familiar.

We've talked about Cabaret on this show before, and it's become vital in a way I really never anticipated. If you can't make it to Seattle, just watch the film and watch for the parallels -- the oblivious young person insisting that politics has nothing to do with her; a woman singing "maybe next time I'll win" at the Democratic National Convention; a crowd singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" while a party official insists they can be controlled. It's not difficult to find contemporary meaning in the song "Money Makes the World Go Around."

For fifty years, Cabaret has been a reflection on the past, but now it's a shout of alarm about the future. Or at least A future. Whatever happens next still hasn't been written.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Lies That I Felt too Queasy to Tell (Ep. 99 - Game Shows)

This Week's Guest: Caleb Nelson

To what lengths are you willing to go to prove yourself? My guest this week is Caleb Nelson, who's had a lifelong fascination with game shows as a way to prove mastery and skill. As he got older, he discovered that despite always working hard to prove himself to others, he faced a far greater challenge when it came to believing in himself.

This Week's Recommendation: Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly

For my recommendation this week, I want you to do a YouTube search for two names: Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde. Both were fixtures of various gameshows throughout the 70s, a time when audiences were happy to watch fancy men lounging around playing leisurely games. Charles and Paul were the gay princes of this genre, always ready with a witty retort and a florid outfit.

Watching what clips of them exist on YouTube is like taking a peek into a time portal, when you could be as extravagantly gay as you wanted as long as you never said the word gay. It's a fascinating queer tightrope walk -- Paul makes jokes about fairies and foreplay, Charles jokes about streaking -- and throughout it all they trace a delicate path around homosexuality, queering every quip and costume but never, under any circumstances, confirming what Lord Alfred Douglas called "the love that dare not speak its name."

Charles and Paul and TV personalities like them managed to slip a gay performance under the closet door. And its subversive, creative naughtiness is at times queerer than anything you can see in the media today. I'd never suggest that things were better back then, that I'm nostalgic for the closet. But the ingenuity, the inventiveness, is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

It just goes to show -- even when closeted, silenced, and rendered invisible, it would be a terrible mistake to underestimate a man with a pink bowtie and extra-wide paisley lapels.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Screaming on the Inside, Placid on the Outside (Ep. 98 - Mary Tyler Moore)

This Week's Guest: Chris Schleicher

How will you make it on your own? This week's guest is Chris Schleicher, who moved to a big city all by himself with some dreams, some talent, and a determination to stop living for other people. He started his career inspired by sitcoms like the Mary Tyler Moore show, and now he makes sitcoms as a writer on The Mindy Project. Season 5 starts February 14 on Hulu, and you can catch Chris on episode 513, playing "Nurse Chris."

This Week's Recommendation: Mary's Incredible Dream

We all felt the passing of Mary Tyler Moore this week, and I'm overflowing with recommendations for her work. Go to IMDB to see a ranked list of the best episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, or listen to her interviews on Fresh Air to hear about her big break on the Dick Van Dyke Show. You can find some of her more obscure appearances on YouTube, such as the variety show The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, where she begins the pilot by shrugging to the camera, "So, variety. Okay, let's give it a try."

But at the top of my list is an incredibly strange special called Mary's Incredible Dream. It aired in 1976 and stars Mary, Ben Vereen, and the Manhattan Transfer, and it's an hourlong quasi-religious musical dream sequence that is absolutely bananas, and also very very catchy. On the show, Mary and Ben and the band drift from song to song, vaguely suggesting a narrative that always seems just out of reach. My favorite part is when she talk-sings, a la Rex Harrison, through "I'm Still Here" while standing next to giant hand with a nail in it. 

It's kitschy and campy and weird and jaw-dropping and also great great fun. You might feel some guilt for laughing at what was clearly a passion project for all involved, but as Mary Richards was once reminded, don't try to hold it back. Go ahead, laugh out loud.

Nothing would have made her happier. 

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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Going to the Beach with John Waters (Ep. 97 - Peaches Christ)

This Week's Guest: Joshua Grannell

My guest this week is Joshua Grannell, but you may know him as Peaches Christ -- the host of San Francisco's wild midnight mass shows and creator of outlandish drag exploitation films. Even as a kid, Joshua orchestrated elaborate halloween shows that his whole family got in on. And as an adult, he's crafted an entire media empire dedicated to exposing the uneasy frights that hide just below the surface of suburbia.

You can see that media empire at work on the west coast -- Joshua has an upcoming show called Legally Black, starring Bob the Drag Queen, and it's coming soon to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. Tickets are at PeachesChrist.com .

Also, check out the podcast Gayme Bar -- that's Gayme with a Y -- I'm on the episode posted Wednesday, January 18th, sharing stories about my queer gamer community and Nintendo's gay cowboys.

This Week's Recommendation: Nightmare on Elm Street II

For this week's recommendation I hope your delicate constitution can withstand a few frights, because I'd like you to take a look at Nightmare on Elm Street II, a film that's half about a murderer invading your dreams and half about the real-life torment of the gay actor who starred in the film.

Mark Preston plays Jesse in Nightmare 2, and he is the most budding homosexual teen who ever budded. I won't itemize every homoerotic symbol in the film, because spotting them is a fun scavenger hunt. But remember, in the mid-1980s, seeing clues that you might be gay was like something out of a horror film. You could be rejected by your family, lose your home, and there was a scary epidemic just getting underway.

When I watch this film, I can't help thinking that Mark the actor must've been as afraid of his sexuality as the character Jesse is about his deadly dreams. It's not a very gory film, but the secrecy is frightening -- especially when it's a secret that could be a danger to everyone around you. 

Behind the scenes, Mark's manager was telling him that he had to lie and stay closeted. He wasn't allowed to go to gay bars, or do interviews with The Advocate. He was told to dress straighter. This was at a time when many of Mark's friends and colleagues were dying of AIDS, and after a while he finally decided that he'd had enough of giving in to fear and simply walked away from acting. He came out, he became an activist, and he learned what a lot of us have discovered: that being gay is only scary if you let it be.

Clips of Stuff We Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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A Big Purple Man in a Loin Cloth (Ep. 96 - Gargoyles)

This Week's Guest: Fazaad Feroze

How far up your family tree would you have to go before the way your family lives became unrecognizable? My guest this week is Fazaad Feroze, whose parents grew up in huts in Guyana before moving to the United States. As you can imagine, assimilation into American culture wasn't always easy.

Check out Fazaad's lovely artwork at FazaadFeroze.com.

Also, check out the podcast Polygamer -- I'm on the episode posted Wednesday, January 11th, sharing stories about my queer gamer project PlayingWithPride.

This Week's Recommendation: Coraline

 We often talk on The Sewers of Paris about the enduring appeal of dark, scary stories, so for my recommendation this week, check out the movie Coraline. It's based on the book by Neil Gaiman, and tells the story of a young girl who's dissatisfied with her boring parents. Coraline discovers a portal to an Other World, complete with copies of everyone she knows from real life, and with its bright colors and attentive adults this Other World seems better in every respect.

But of course, not all is as it seems, and Coraline's temptations are soon revealed to lead to danger -- namely, plucking out her eyes and replacing them with buttons.

I love a lot of things about this film -- namely that it's one of those kids' movies that is so creepy and alarming that it will frighten adults as much as children. There are some creatures in this movie that are truly terrifying, but what unsettles me is the reminder that happiness sometimes comes at a price, and that price is blindness. 

It's the corollary to the saying that ignorance is bliss -- bliss requires some measure of ignorance. And I don't think that's something you need to feel guilty or ashamed about. It would be impossible to make it through life if you didn't anesthetize yourself every now and then. 

So despite it being a super creepy movie, I actually find Coraline comforting. It reminds me that a little darkness can be good, and that closing your eyes can make you happy -- as long as you don't let them be plucked out altogether.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

Parisian Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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A Need to be Doused in Black Culture - (Ep. 95 - Sonari Glinton)

This Week's Guest: Sonari Glinton

When you look back on your life, who are the adults who were wiser than you realized at the time? My guest this week is NPR's Sonari Glinton. He grew up in Chicago, surrounded by amazing artists and curators who managed to steer him in the directions that were exactly what a little queer kid needed.

This Week's Recommendation: Frank Sinatra's letter to George Michael

For my recommendation this week, do a search for Frank Sinatra George Michael. Sadly, you will not find them doing a duet together, which would have been awesome. But you will find a letter that Sinatra wrote to George Michael in 1990. At the time, George had just done an interview with a magazine about how he didn't like the pressure of celebrity. Sinatra, in response, wrote a letter (on a typewriter!) expressing his disbelief that "he wants to quit doing what tons of gifted youngsters all over the world would shoot grandma for."

Sinatra's advice was to "loosen up" and "be grateful to carry the baggage we've all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments." 

The letter concludes "talent must not be wasted. ... Those who have talent must hug it, embrace it, nurture it and share it lest it be taken away from you as fast as it was loaned to you."

Now, to be fair, Frank didn't always take this advice to heart. When he married Mia Farrow, he famously demanded that she give up her acting career to be a wife. Her response was to be in the movie Rosemary's Baby, and that was the end of that relationship.

So I guess we should take Frank's advice like Mia Farrow did -- and like George Michael, whose solo career was just launching when he got that letter. Whatever your talent is, you can either choose to pass it up, or pass it along to everyone around you.

Clips of Stuff we Talked About

Music

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