A Sandbox of Weirdness (Ep. 140 - Jamie Pierce)

It takes about ten hours to produce each episode of The Sewers of Paris, so if you're enjoying the show please help support it with a pledge of a dollar or more per episode.

This Week's Guest: Jamie Pierce

How do you balance a need for solitude with a need to collaborate? This week's guest is Jamie Pierce, an actor, comedian, and dancer who's no stranger to career changes. Several years ago, he decided to transform his work and his  life after an experience onstage. And just last year, he reached another turning point in part because of this show.

I originally interviewed Jamie back in 2016, but then his episode kept moving around in the schedule and a few months went by before it was going to appear. But then Jamie contacted me to let me know that our conversation started him thinking, and eventually led to him making a pretty drastic decision about his career. So I interviewed him again about that experience. This episode starts with a chat we recorded last year, then you'll hear a new interview that we recorded more recently about how one of the pieces of entertainment that changed his life wound up being this podcast.

This Week's Recommendation: Pee Wee's Big Adventure

Big thanks to Jamie for joining me. You can follow him at JamiePierceNYC on Twitter to jeep up with his adventures, whether venturing out onstage as part of an ensemble or going it alone in a solo show. 

For this week's recommendation, take a look at another notorious loner with the movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Like every Pee Wee project, it is utterly delightful, ridiculous, and queer. The plot concerns a stolen bicycle and a fever dream of a quest to recover it. Early in the movie, Pee Wee declares himself a loner and a rebel, a line that's funny enough on its own but is absolutely ludicrous given how many friends he has. At every step of his journey, Pee Wee wins over everyone, even the most hostile gang of bikers, by being completely bizarre, because that's just who he is. He is guileless, weird, not always polite but always honest about what he likes and what he doesn't. 

Back on episode 117, I recommended Pee Wee's Big Holiday and noted that he is, to be sure, a very strange boy: giddy, curious, playful, and sincere. And so is everyone else he encounters: they're all strange in their own way, from a phony psychic to a spooky truck driver to a sweet-hearted waitress. And in Pee Wee's company, they all seem completely comfortable to be strange, happy with whatever makes them weird. 

Everyone is uniquely bizarre, each a loner and rebel in their own particular oddness. But this movie has them all rebelling together -- they're loners but they're never alone.

Stuff We Talked About

Everybody Should Have Secrets (Ep. 139 - Imitation of Life)

This Week's Guest: Tim Kirkman

What are the secrets you're carrying around, and what would happen if you dropped them? This week's guest is Tim Kirkman, a storyteller with a knack for exploring the things people don't say. His film Lazy Eye is about confronting secret loves, and his documentary Dear Jesse is about his unexpected connection with America's most notorious homophobe. What Tim's found, in his work and in his life, is that the information people withhold about themselves is often the key to understanding them -- provided you can open up about yourself.

Big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. I could not make the show without you. If you're enjoying the show, please help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. Just go to SewersOfParis.com and click support the show on Patreon.

And you can also leave a review of the show -- thanks to DroidCX who wrote "My listenings leave me empowered" with a headling of "yasss queen" plus an emoji of a dancing red dress lady, which is a coincidence, because right now I'm wearing a red dress and dancing the flamenco.

You can also follow the show on Twitter and Facebook -- just search for The Sewers of Paris. I post clips of the stuff we talked about each week, and also chat with listeners about the entertainment that changed THEIR lives. And I love to hear from you -- you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

This Week's Recommendation: Keith Haring

Big thanks to Tim for joining me. And check out his film, Lazy Eye, on all the major streaming and video services and at LazyEye.com.

My recommendation this week is as simple as doing a google search. Type in Keith Haring, click over to the images tab, and then just keep scrolling. You'll probably recognize Haring's more famous pieces -- two figures holding up a heart, a dog-headed DJ, that sculpture outside the Moscone Center. Early in his career, Haring would ride the subways in New York and draw chalk doodles in advertising space, which brought him a sort of cult following of commuters.

But you might not be as familiar with his later political art. That takes a bit more digging to find, since it's not quite so commercial: a man with a cross confronting a television, an anti-apartheid image of a large figure crushing a smaller oppressor, two men jerking each other off with the caption "safe sex."

Haring's work looks simple, but his causes weren't -- such as the time he painted unified figures on the Berlin wall in the colors of the German flag. His later paintings link capitalism to abuse. And then there's his collage work, accusing Ronald Reagan of being a killer -- made in 1980, a decade before Haring passed away in an epidemic fueled by Reagan's inhumanity.

If not for his political work, we might still remember Haring for his bright colors, his democratic approach to exhibiting art, and his whimsical figures. That stuff's all fun -- and, importantly, marketable. But it isn't urgent, and I have a feeling it might've gotten lost among imitators if he hadn't been willing to risk alienating casual observers with statements on HIV, racism, and economic exploitation.

The Haring we know from t-shirts and tote bags is simple, appealing, and pleasant. But Haring's best work is none of those things -- it's complex, challenging, aggressive. It's sophisticated -- despite being little more than a few outlines scratched in chalk.

Stuff We Talked About

Bonus Episode! The Lost Treasure of the Neverglades

Welcome to a special bonus episode of the Sewers of Paris! Last weekend some familiar friends and I hosted a fundraiser for Seattle Children's Hospital, bringing together a group of gays to play a custom made Dungeons and Dragons adventure for a livestream audience. Joining me were comedian Bryan Safi, Carlos Maza from Vox.com, Anthony Oliveira, and LGBT film scholar Bryan Wuest, all-role playing a D&D quest together.

I thought you might enjoy hearing these past Sewers of Paris guests improv their way through an adventure while joking around and making deep references to queer culture. 

I know this is a little different from the usual Sewers of Paris fare, so let me know if you like having these occasional bonus episodes or if you'd rather not have them in the feed. You can get in touch @sewersofparis on twitter or sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

And patreon supporters, don't worry -- you're not getting charged for this episode. 

During this recording you'll hear occasional sound effects whenever a viewer donates. And I hope you'll join them. We're currently ninety percent of our way to our fundraising stretch fundraising goal for Seattle Children's Hospital, and there's still time to donate -- just go to bit.ly/extralifeseattle . As of recording, we're about 90% of the way to our fundraising goal of $3,456.78. 

You can also check out our live show, Dungeons and Drag Queens, where we get a bunch of drag queens up on stage to role play a D&D adventure for a live audience. Go to dungeondrag.com to watch past shows and sign up for the mailing list to find out when we're doing more.

If you'd like to hear more from these adventurers, Bryan Safi's episode of Sewers of Paris is number 64, Anthony's is 114, Carlos is 130, and I hope to bring you Bryan Wuest's in the near future.

Huge thanks to our adventurers, to James Morris who wrote the adventure with me, and to everyone who donated during the stream. 

Prefer to watch a video version? Well here you go:

Putting Your Body Through a Car Wash (Ep. 138 - Spirited Away & BDSM)

Huge thanks to everyone who makes the show possible with a pledge of support on Patreon! If you're enjoying the show, help keep it going at http://patreon.com/SewersOfParis.

This Week's Guest: Ali Mushtaq

If you could step out of your body and look at yourself from the outside, how unfamiliar would you look? It's impossible to evaluate yourself with complete impartiality, but my guest this week has found ways to get as close as possible. Professor Ali Mushtaq's preferred method for clearing his mind and achieving a meditative state: flogging, leather sex, and physical transformation.

Big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. I could not make the show without you. If you're enjoying the show, please help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. Just go to SewersOfParis.com and click support the show on Patreon.

And if you've got a minute, a review would be super helpful as well. Head over to SewersOfParis.com -- there's a link right at the top of the page for writing a review. And I love to hear from listeners -- the show's @SewersOfParis on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

Also, mark your calendars for the weekend of November 4th -- I'm going to be doing a 24-hour videogame livestream to benefit Seattle Children's Hospital. We're raising funds to help care for kids and conduct groundbreaking research -- go to bit.ly/extralifeseattle for details and to donate. The stream kicks off with a game of Dungeons and Dragons played live with some Sewers of Paris guests: comedian Bryan Safi, media critic Carlos Maza, writer Anthony Olivera, and LGBT film scholar Bryan Wuest will all be joining me for a very gay adventure. And then I'll be continuing the stream over the next 24 hours with more special guests popping in and out. I hope you'll join us and help us raise money fro a good cause -- go to bit.ly/extralifeseattle to help us reach our fundraising goal, to watch, and to chat along with us.

And one more note. We had to record the conversation for this episode via Skype, so it sounds a little tinnier than usual. But we touched on so many interesting topics, from bodies to sex to race and religion, I hope you won't mind the audio quality. Now, here's Ali.

This Week's Recommendation: The Secret Life of Human Pups

Big thanks to Ali for joining me, and for opening up about how sexual misadventures are sometimes about more than just sex -- it can be a way to clear the mind, to relax, to get a different perspective on your place in the world.

For this week's recommendation, take a look at the documentary "The Secret Life of Human Pups," produced last year by Channel 4 in the UK. If you're not in England, the official website may not want you to watch, but you can find the full half-hour program on YouTube with just a little searching.

The documentary gives you a 101 on human pups, introducing you to men who find it soothing and sexy to role play as pet dogs. And we meet a few main characters, like a shy fellow named Tom who ordinarily doesn't like when people notice him. But when he puts on his Dalmatian-spotted hood, he assumes the character of Spot, a pup who craves attention.

The real heart of the doc is a woman named Rachel, who was engaged to marry Tom until he Tom chose to focus his attention on being a pup. She still supports Tom, still sees him, still spends time with him and cares for him. But he ended their romantic relationship to spend more time cultivating a four-legged persona with a handler named Colin.

At one point, Rachel sits next to tom, watching him polishing his rubber suit, and sighs wistfully: "he's a lot happier."

Off camera, someone asks, "and you?" She just looks uncomfortable, and then says, "I'm always going to love Tom."

For his part, Tom says, "the problem is I'll never get rid of Spot...the pup hood needs me and I need the pup hood."

It's a moment of honesty that lays bare the choices these people have made, and the lengths to which they're willing to go for comfort. In his relationship with Rachel, Tom had love and support -- and in fact, he still does. But from pursuing BDSM and the pup persona, he clearly derives a greater pleasure, and so he made his choice.

Ideally, we'd all be able to shift between headspaces, switching up our habits to try new things and then switching back, having learned something. That's why I like movies and books and shows and songs -- as an audience, you can step into a character's place, walk with them, and then after the show's over return to your life carrying the lessons of that journey before embarking on another.

But you can also make the choice to remain in a story that you're hearing, or a story that you're telling -- deciding to stay in one place because it's comfortable. And being comfortable is very nice -- but staying in one place, one story, one headspace, one persona means you might never see who or what is waiting for you just a little further down the road.

Thanks again for listening.

Remember to visit bit.ly/extralifeseattle for our livestream fundraiser next weekend, November 4th at 1pm pacific. I'll be playing video games live on camera for 24 hours, raising money for Seattle Children's Hospital. We're kicking it off with a D&D adventure played live with comedian Bryan Safi, media critic Carlos Maza, writer Anthony Olivera, and LGBT film scholar Bryan Wuest, then I'll be continuing for 24 hours with more special guests. You can donate, watch, chat with me live, and with some of the games you can even join in and play along. Head over to bit.ly/extralifeseattle, all one word, for details.

If you're enjoying The Sewers of Paris, head over the SewersOfParis.com and click "Support the Show on Patreon" to pledge a dollar or more per episode. Huge thanks to all the patrons who keep the show going. And you can also leave a review on iTunes, that's super helpful. 

You can also follow the show show on Twitter and Facebook -- just search for The Sewers of Paris. I post clips of the stuff we talked about each week, and also chat with listeners about the entertainment that changed THEIR lives. And I love to hear from you -- you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

The theme song for the show is Parisian by Kevin McLeod of Incompetech.com, licensed under creative commons by attribution 3.0.

Stuff we Talked About

Underground Culture (Ep. 137 - The Smiths & To Kill a Mockingbird)

Huge thanks to everyone supporting the show on Patreon! Help keep the show going with a pledge at http://patreon.com/SewersOfParis.

This Week's Guests: Walter Naegle & Matt Wolf

How do radical movements for justice become mainstream over time? This week I'm talking to two guests: the first is Walter Naegle, the surviving partner of Bayard Rustin; and the second is Matt Wolf, who made a documentary short about Walter entitled Bayard and Me. Bayard was a key figure in the civil rights fight starting in the 60s -- he was a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr, worked on behalf of refugees, and became an LGBT spokesperson in the 80s. Because there was no relationship recognition at the time, adopted his partner, Walter, in 1982 -- and that's just one of the subjects explored in Matt Wolf's documentary.

Big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. I could not make the show without you. If you're enjoying the show, please help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. Just go to SewersOfParis.com and click support the show on Patreon.

And if you've got a minute, a review would be super helpful as well. Head over to SewersOfParis.com -- there's a link right at the top of the page for writing a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to Nordbon who left a review in Swedish -- they used the word "kulturparlor" -- that's culture pearls -- to refer to the books and movies and songs that guests talked about, and I love that term. Tack så mycket Nordbon!

I love to hear from listeners -- the show's @SewersOfParis on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

Also, mark your calendars for the weekend of November 4th -- I'm going to be doing a 24-hour videogame livestream to benefit Seattle Children's Hospital. We're raising funds to help care for kids and conduct groundbreaking research -- go to bit.ly/extralifeseattle for details and to donate. 

This Week's Recommendation: Bayard & Me

Big thanks to Walter and Matt for joining me. This week's recommendation is to check out their short documentary, Bayard and Me. It's about 15 minutes long, and it's both tender and energizing. The tender scenes give a glimpse into the loving relationship of two men who cared deeply for each other. And the energizing scenes seize you with the passion they both shared for social justice.

One of the reasons Bayard adopted Walter was so that Walter could keep their home when Bayard passed away. There's a remarkable moment in the documentary when we see a photograph of Bayard standing on a balcony with some small plants, decades ago... and then it cuts abruptly to Walter watering large plants on the same balcony today. Bayard & Me pulls off a remarkable feat -- bridging activist causes across not just decades, but generations. 

It's so easy to forget the struggles that came before, or to assume that a struggle started when you became aware of it. Bayard & Me draws a line from Bayard's early work in India, with the followers of Ghandi, in the 1940s ... to the bus boycotts and marches on Washington in the United States  ... to the approach he shared with Walter in protecting queer rights ... and now to the activism advanced in Matt's documentary, and to the audiences watching the doc around the world. 

When Martin Luther King talked about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, I'd like to think that this is the sort of thing he meant. Ghandi's first major victory was 100 years ago, in 1917, and here we are a century later continuing to fight for what's right -- occupying just one branch of a family tree that grows continuously towards justice.

Stuff We Talked About

To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee

Royalties and a Husband (Ep. 136 - West Side Story & Eric Marcus of Making Gay History)

This Week's Guest: Eric Marcus

Is it a problem that there's "sex" in "homosexual"? My guest this week is Eric Marcus, a writer and journalist who often found himself called upon to represent the model gay man on shows like Good Morning America and The O'Reilly Factor. For years, Eric strove to put across an image of respectability and harmlessness. But these days, as the creator and host of the excellent podcast Making Gay History, and he's ready to share the pieces of our past that are enough to make anyone blush.

This Week's Recommendation: Free to be You and Me

Big thanks to Eric for joining me. Check out his podcast, Making Gay History, for absolutely spellbinding interviews with the people who shaped the queer world that we inhabit today.

The more I listen to his show, the more I note just how pivotal the sexual revolution was in queer liberation. America entered the sixties uptight and anxious, and emerged into the seventies not quite understanding how to talk about sex, but at least eager to try.

And that newfound openness even extended to the way that gender was explained to children. For my recommendation this week, take a look at the 1972 project Free to Be You and Me. It is incredibly cheesy by modern standards, but unless you are completely cynical I think you'll be won over by its adorably earnest sincerity.

Free to be You and Me is an album, book, stage play, and TV special, created by Marlo Thomas to encourage kids to look beyond gender stereotypes. Through various folksy songs and stories, children are told that it's ok to cry, that boys and girls can grow up to be whatever they want, and that it feels good to like who you are no matter what you are.

To call the songs heavy-handed is putting it mildly. They basically bludgeon you with their message of tolerance. But consider the climate in which it was made. In the early 70s, gender roles were so entrenched that any message of equality HAD to be radical and impassioned to be heard. It's why Free to be You and Me has endured, and it's why we remember Stonewall.

Stuff We Talked About

The Front Runner: A Novel
By Patricia Nell Warren

I Always Thought Your Father was a Bit of a Poof (Ep. 135 - Sonnet 20)

This Week's Guest: Will Kostakis

What are the things you're not telling people -- and what's stopping you? My guest this week is Will Kostakis, author of award winning young adult novels and the upcoming book The Sidekicks. Growing up, Will and his best friend were as close as friends could be, or at least, they told themselves they were. There was something neither one was telling the other. 

Big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. If you're enjoying the show, you can help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. 

And if you've got a minute, an Apple Podcasts review would be super helpful as well. Thanks to Marshlc who writes "Almost every episode, the guests say something like 'Whew, thanks for this, it was like a therapy session!'" That does sometimes happen. What you don't know is that I'm billing my guests $200 an hour. Just kidding.

I do love to hear from listeners -- the show's @SewersOfParis on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com.

Also if you're in Seattle, I hope you'll join us for another Dungeons and Drag Queens show! We have four fabulous drag queens on stage for one night only, role-playing their way through a custom-made, very queer Dungeons and Dragons adventure. It's happening October 25th at 7pm at the Timbre Room.

This Week's Recommendation: Fraud

Fraud: Essays
By David Rakoff

Big thanks to Will for joining me, and for speaking and writing so openly about his experiences with pain. We all have a built-in survival instinct that turns us away from anything that hurts. Confronting a source of suffering is difficult enough, but processing it to the point that you're ready to share it with others is brutally difficult task.

For my recommendation this week, take a look at David Rakoff's 2001 book, Fraud. I can't believe it's taken me this long to recommend the book -- front to back, it's one of my favorite pieces of writing. It's a series of essays, all lush and hilarious but also frayed at the edges with pain like a leaf starting to turn. 

The whole book is a masterpiece, but ever time I read it, I find myself tingling with anticipation of its final two paragraphs. We've just spent 225 pages with David, accompanying him on bizarre adventures to yoga retreats, posing as Freud in a shopping mall window, and to Loch Ness, all the while feeling like a detached imposter. Sometimes he wears a disguise, sometimes he places a pane of sarcasm between himself and his subjects, and always he establishes an emotional remove.

But on the last page of the book, after describing the period in his life when he nearly died from lymphoma, he asks, "what remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories."

David passed away in 2012 when his lymphoma returned, and I think about the words at the end of this book a lot. That survival instinct we all have to turn away from pain, to avoid it or decorate it or disguise it -- that impulse can keep us alive, but it can also keep us from living.

Stuff we Talked About

The First Third
By Will Kostakis
Begin, End, Begin: A #LoveOzYA Anthology
By Amie Kaufman, Melissa Keil, Will Kostakis, Ellie Marney, Jaclyn Moriarty, Michael Pryor, Alice Pung, Gabrielle Tozer, Lili Wilkinson
The Sidekicks
By Will Kostakis

Will's book The Sidekicks comes out October 17 in the US.

Music

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

Tina Turner Realness (Ep. 134 - Proud Mary)

This Week's Guest: Tony Moore

What's it like to go from a fan to a friend? This week's guest is Tony Moore, who hosts celebrity interviews on his show Loungin' with Tony. For years, he looked up to actors and entertainers as role models. And he found that the more he worked alongside them, the more they opened up to him -- not just as personalities, but as people.

Big thanks to everyone supporting the Sewers of Paris on Patreon. If you're enjoying the show, you can help keep it independent and ad-free with your pledge of support. 

And if you've got a minute, an Apple Podcasts review would be super helpful as well. 

And I love to hear from listeners -- the show's @SewersOfParis on Twitter and Facebook. Or you can write to sewerspodcast@gmail.com. Thanks to Tom, who wrote in, "I’m 57 and have been with my husband nearly 18 years now ... the podcast has helped me feel a little more connected to the community at large, especially people younger than we are.  And while I haven’t listened to every episode, I have to say that I’m shocked, SHOCKED that no one has mentioned Maria Callas yet!"

Oh Tom, you're in luck: you can find conversations about Maria Callas and opera on episodes 4, 87, and 105. And check out Tom's blog, First Vine, where he writes about the wine -- and look for his two-part series Out in the Wine Industry for conversations with queer vintners. 

This Week's Recommendation: Julian Clary

Big thanks to Tony for joining me. You can find his show at LounginWithTony.com, where he gets entertainers and artists comfortable enough to say things they never expected to.

We're accustomed to celebrities being so carefully controlled that they never have anything surprising or honest to say, which is why it's such a delight when a bit of truth slips out. My recommendation this week is actually a recommendation from a listener -- after last week's interview with Scott Flashheart mentioned the comedian Julian Clary, Jon Dryden Taylor tweeted @SewersOfParis to suggest I take a look at Julian's presentation at the 1993 British Comedy Awards. It's available to watch on YouTube.

On the show, Julian comes strolling out on stage at the awards show, on a set that's been decorated to look, for some reason, like a dilapidated public park. He jokingly thanks the show for recreating Hampstead Heath -- that was a notorious gay cruising spot -- and the audience laughs. Then you can see Julian looking around, deciding whether he should go for the joke he wants to tell about an idiot politician who was then the target of widespread derision in Britan, and who was also present in the audience.

Finally he opens his mouth and says it: "In fact, I've just been fisting Norman Lamont." The audience explodes into chaos at the joke, and there's a long minute of bedlam as nobody can believe what they've just heard. Just as the laughter is dying down, Julian makes a reference to the red ministerial briefcases common in British government, quipping, "talk about a red box."

Newspapers campaigned to have Julian banned from television, and he soon found that joking about fisting the Chancellor of the Exchequer was an excellent way to clear his calendar for the next few years. 

But despite that, Julian says he's never regretted the joke. It's certainly followed him closely over the intervening twenty-four years. But it also redefined who Julian was in the eyes of the public: previously, he was seen as a safe, polite, clean comic -- campy, but never campy beyond innuendo. 

But camp, as Susan Sontag has noted, is more than just gaudy lampshades and goofy drag. Camp is a reaction to the banal, combatting bland culture with ludicrous affectation. "It is a feat," she wrote, "goaded on, in the last analysis, by boredom."

Julian's said in interviews that he dared himself to tell the joke before walking out on stage. And watching it now, I wonder if it might have been a joke not at Norman Lamont's expense -- but at his own.

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/

How to be Awesome (Ep. 133 - Terry Pratchett)

We all know life's short, so how do you make the most of the time you've got? My guest this week is Scott Flashheart, comedian and host of the podcast Probably True. He grew up in a tiny British mining town -- or at least, what WAS a mining town, before the mine was closed, sending the place he lived into a slow downward spiral. He knew he didn't belong there, but he also felt out of place among other gays. It took a lot of work -- and a major loss -- to steer him towards his true calling: telling dick jokes to the world.

By the way, you can follow The Sewers of Paris on Facebook and Twitter -- I post clips of stuff the guests talked about throughout the week, and chat with listeners like you about the entertainment that changed YOUR life. You can also get in touch at sewerspodcast@gmail.com. Listener Jim wrote in to ask for more details about the books that guests mention -- thanks Jim, I can definitely do that. Starting this week I'll include info about books in the shownotes over at SewersOfParis.com.

This Week's Recommendation: Dress to Kill

Big thanks to Scott for joining me. Head over to ProbablyTruePodcast.com to subscribe to Scott's show. For this week's recommendation we're going to go back in time, twenty years ago to the peerless Eddie Izzard comedy special Dress to Kill.

Eddie's an actor and comic who doesn't fit neatly into boxes. In his 1998 special, he comes out in ladies' wear and calls himself an executive transvestite, though these days he uses the term transgender, and in neither case is he who you might picture when you hear those words.

He's just who he is, standing somewhat to the side of easy labels and conventional wisdom. Not just in how he presents himself, but also in his comedy, which is at its foundation mischievous and very smart. In Dress to Kill, Eddie tackles religion, history, medicine, war, growing old, and it takes a bit of work to keep up but it's worth it.

One of the topics he touches on is puberty -- you know, the time in your life when you first want to attract people and are also feel more physically repulsive than ever before.

In his act, Eddie jokes about how nice it would be to get the drama of puberty over with in just one day. But in reality, it can last for years, long past the time when one's body has settled into whatever it's going to be. The self-consciousness and horror you feel when you look in the mirror may decide to linger like unwanted body hair, and for queers that can include uncomfortable realizations about who you love, how you dress, and what you want to be.

Some of these things we can change, some we can learn to live with, some we can remove by spending thousands of dollars under a laser. The angst of our teen years can set a path for the rest of our lives, and bits of that path can seem quite miserable. But whatever that journey is, you're probably not the first to make it. There's weirdos and outcasts who came before, and you might find some solace in the ones who acknowledged "This is who I am" and asked "what if I was okay with that?"

Stuff We Talked About

Here's Scott's favorite guide on reading Terry Pratchett.

 

Music

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

The Priests of Hollywood (Ep. 132 - Designing Women & Gone with the Wind)

What are the excuses you make for not doing what makes you happy? It's so easy to come up with reasons that NOW is the wrong time to launch into that project or hobby or career change you've always wanted. So where do you find permission to make a change in your life? This week's guest, Jason Powell, has only recently learned to give that permission to himself. Jason's one half of the podcast Ladywatch -- I interviewed his co-host, Ryan O'Connor, a few weeks back on episode 122. Each week on their show, Ryan and Jason talk about their shared admiration for powerful women. But off mic, they both have struggled with self-imposed limitations. We'll talk this week about the great southern belles who helped Jason find the bravery to stand up for himself to himself.
 

This Week's Recommendation: Killing all the Right People

Big thanks to Jason for joining me. Head over to LadyWatchPod.com to subscribe to Jason and Ryan's show. And visit SewersOfParis.com to see clips of the Designing Women speeches featured in this episode. Just look for Jason's episode, number 132. Also at SewersOfParis.com, you can watch a video that I made awhile back about a 1987 episode of Designing Women entitled Killing all the Right People. My recommendation this week is to check out that episode of the show -- you can find Killing All the Right People in three parts on Vimeo, and it's about what it was like to live with HIV during the dark years before reliable medication.

Remember, even into the late 1980s, very little was known about HIV, much less how to treat it. And the suffering of people with the virus was magnified by the cruelty of a country that didn't seem to care and often exhibited open glee about the epidemic. This episode of Designing Women tackled the issue head on, with a character rejected by his family for being gay and by a medical establishment that refused to treat him with dignity. 

Not only did the episode provide useful information about what HIV is and isn't, dispelling widespread medical myths at the time -- but it also shone a light on HIV stigma. 

The villains of the episode are busybody neighbors who object to queer people and to sex in general. One of them crows that the best thing about AIDS is that it's killing people who deserve to be killed. This was not an uncommon attitude at the time -- Pat Buchanan wrote an op-ed to that effect in the New York Times, and was then invited to work for Ronald Reagan as Communications Director.

It's crazy that in 1987, exhibiting compassion for people with HIV was a revolutionary act, and that Designing Women was the best education available to some people about HIV. But what's even crazier is that in some parts of the country, that's still the case. Only a handful of states offer any form of sex education relevant to queer people -- and some states actually require the teaching of inaccurate information, like in Alabama where kids are taught that same-sex intercourse is illegal. 

When Killing all the Right People aired in 1987, it was clearly ahead of its time. It would be nice to think that thirty years later, times have finally caught up. But sadly that's still not the case.

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/