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

July 30, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

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

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

Here are some truly wonderful sissies:

And the fabulous Stephen Stucker being amazing on Donahue:

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

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

July 23, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 16, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

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

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

Here's a little forbidden British lust for you:

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

Madonna throwing caution to the wind in Truth or Dare:

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

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

July 2, 2015 Matthew Baume

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

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

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

Here's Mamma Mia in Toronto:

And a little Harvey Milk:

The beginning of The Boys in the Band:

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

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

About The Sewers of Paris

The Sewers of Paris is a podcast about how queer lives are shaped by our favorite books, movies, music, and shows. Each week, guests open up about their secret struggles, hidden passions, and surprising triumphs by plucking a piece of entertainment from their past and answering the question: What’s the entertainment that changed your life?

About Defining Marriage

Each week on Defining Marriage, hosts Matt Baume and James Morris chat about what's happening with marriage equality, featuring frequent digressions into pop culture, silly banter, and the jokes and quibbles that have kept them together as a couple for over a decade.

The first eighteen episodes of the podcast contain the complete audiobook version of the book Defining Marriage, which traces the decades-long evolution of marriage through the personal stories of those who lived through it, featuring personal insights from the lives of Evan Wolfson, Dan Savage, Ken Mehlman, Dustin Lance Black, and many more.

About Matt's So-Cast Pod

Revisit the iconic '90s drama My So-Called Life, one episode at a time. Every week, host Matt Baume & his guests delve into the teen angst, the grown-up turmoil, and the endless flannel of the 90s -- and examine the show's impact on television and our lives.