Come to the Party, it's Weird (Ep. 194 - Cheryl)

September 27, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Nick Schiarizzi

How do you make friends as an adult? Without school to throw lots of people together in far greater combinations than a workplace, it's easy to feel stuck in the wrong group -- especially when other gays are hard to find. So my guest this week did something about that. Nick Schiarizzi is the co-founder of the brutally bizarre dance party Cheryl, where everyone comes expecting something weird and leaves having something even weirder. But you'd never guess it to look at him -- Nick is calm, deadpan, and for most of his life terrified to dance. But when he found himself feeling lonely and frustrated as a young adult, he decided to find a way to break through his inhibitions to he could finally find others like him.

Huge thanks to everyone who makes The Sewers of Paris possible with a pledge of a dollar or more a month on Patreon. There's rewards for folks who back the show -- just click "Support the Show on Patreon." Or you can support The Sewers of Paris for free by leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice -- that really helps people find the show.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

Head over to SewersOfParis.com to see clips of the stuff we talk about on each episode of the show. And for more queer podcasting, check out Queens Of Adventure to hear drag queens on an epic Dungeons & Dragons quest. That’s at QueensOfAdventure.com.

This Week’s Recommendation: Cheryl

Thanks again to Nick for joining me. I do heartily recommend those Cheryl parties. But if you're not in New York or a city where the party's on tour, you can experience a tiny taste of the next best thing by looking up their promo videos. Go to CherylWillRuinYourLife.info and click through the videos to find a lengthy collection spanning a decade of festive, colorful, and mystifying videos that capture the very strangest nocturnal queer culture that New York has to offer.

In those Cheryl videos you'll catch a glimpse of hundreds of people gathering together under cover of dark and buffeted by bass, dancing and partying and pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries. Sometimes art is meaningful, and other times the meaningless is the meaning. That, and kicking back to just enjoy yourself as extravagantly as possible while also spending as little money as possible. And what could be a more fundamental definition of queer culture than that?

So go -- watch some videos, get confused, get excited, and then find your way to creating something extremely peculiar of your own that definitely shouldn't exist, but does.

Stuff We Talked About

In my Own Way I'm a Doomsday Prepper (Ep. 193 - I Love Lucy)

September 20, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: Phuong Mai

Acts of selflessness are great, but what's in it for me? This week I'm chatting with my friend Phuong, who's made a whole lifestyle out of making things for others. Whether it's bread or soap or knitted hats, it seems like every minute of his day is dedicated to creating stuff for the people around him. But even though he gives all this stuff away, there's something important that he's getting back.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: I Like You

Thanks again to Phuong for joining me. I can't think of any better gift than hospitality, demonstrating to someone that you care about making them feel good. Mindfully being a good host or maker or companion is a simple gesture with deep meaning that says, "I like you." And that's the title of my recommendation this week, a book by Amy Sedaris about entertaining company and making them feel loved.

Whether it's building a layer cake out of cold cuts, a wreath out of meatloaf, or a party game for kids that hopefully doesn't involve fire, Amy has all the guidance you need for welcoming guests into your home and into your heart. Of course, the advice is all acerbic and strange -- but it is also, at its heart, legitimately useful and kind. There's a section on keeping a conversation pleasant and surprisingly even when dining with the most dreary business people. There's a recipe for the perfect BBQ sauce (it's just mixing two leading brands together). And there's advice for being as successful a guest as you are a host.

"I Like You" is full of weird wonderful photos and great recipes and strange fashion choices, and it should be the first book you reach for when entertaining. Amy advice for hospitality is also great advice for life: Be kind, be yourself, and party on.

Thanks again for listening and to everyone who's rated and reviewed The Sewers of Paris. Thanks to all the listeners who keep the show going -- there's rewards for backers. Head over to SewersOfParis.com and click "Support the Show on Patreon" to join the folks who make the show possible.

I'm Here, I'm Queer, I'm Tired, It's Your Turn (Ep. 192 - Secretary)

September 18, 2018 Matthew Baume

Bonus Episode Guest: Trish Bendix

My guest on this bonus episode has a difficult task ahead of her, a different kind of gay marriage -- not of people, but of industries. Trish Bendix is the managing editor of Into, the queer news site connected to Grindr. And in that role, she's in charge of bringing news of the world together with social flirty hookups that made the app famous.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: Lilith Fair

Thanks again to Trish for joining me. We talked a bit about the phenomenon of Lilith Fair, the women-focused music festival that, while it was around, was a truly wonderful experience. There's no recapturing that late 90s energy, but fortunately there are some YouTube videos that come close. So my recommendation this week is to just do some video searches for Lilith Fair and bask in the acoustic guitars, plaintive poetry, and audiences full of women and femme folks swaying in delight.

My own memory of going to Lilith Fair in 1997 is of sitting on a grassy hillside, far from the stage, and as evening fell Sarah McLoughlin interrupted the music to point out that it was a full moon and we should all turn and look up into the sky and appreciate its beauty. And that sums up the kind of vibe -- if you went to Lilith Fair you could look forward to a fun, friendly, relaxing experience, and an atmosphere that I would describe as grateful.

Grateful for the opportunity to all come together in one place, optimistic that people who felt otherwise marginalized might life each other up, and oh so extremely earnest in a way that went out of favor for far too long. Lilith Fair always stood in opposition to cynicism, no easy task in the 90s, and I think it's only fairly recently that as a culture we've placed new value on wholesomeness, enthusiasm, and the sort of sincerity that could prompt an entire field full of people to cheer approvingly for moon.

Stuff We Talked About

How to Grow Up: A Memoir

By Michelle Tea

Black Wave

By Michelle Tea

The Town Queen (Ep. 191 - Who Framed Roger Rabbit?)

September 13, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week’s Guest: John Michael Byrd

My guest this week is an artist whose creations include the persona he's established for himself. Since childhood, John Michael Byrd has always felt like more of a cartoon character than a normal human, which wasn't a particularly easy role to play growing up in a small southern town. But after spending years disconnecting from the physical world around him, he's found a place where he's finally free to be as animated as he's always felt.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 15th at 2pm pacific with guest Bryan Lowder -- editor at Slate and co-host of the new Outward podcast. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

This Week’s Recommendation: The Flight of Dragons

Thanks again to John Michael for joining me. Check out John_Michael_Byrd_Studio on instagram to see his work.

We talked a lot on this episode about feeling out of place, belonging to a different world. For my recommendation, check out an animated film that it's not particularly queer, at least not on the surface -- Flight of Dragons, made by the same Rankin Bass team that did The Hobbit, The Last Unicorn, and all those stop-motion Christmas specials.

Flight of Dragons is set in your standard Tolkien-style realm, where the encroaching forces of science threaten to destroy all magic in the world. To protect themselves, the most powerful wizards in the world unite to create a safe refuge, hidden away from mankind. But an evil sorcerer has other idea -- he plans to corrupt mankind with greed so that humans will destroy themselves.

It's into this mix that someone unexpected steps: a human from our current-day world -- which at the time the movie was made was 1982. An accident of magic transports a modern scientist to the realm of magic, where he finds himself inhabiting the body of a dragon, the last hope to save a magical world his science cannot explain. Or can it? There's a surprisingly smart tension throughout the movie, with the worldly logic of the human world jostling with the ineffable enchantment of the magical realm. And at the heart is the unlikely hero, forced to walk a line and choose the world in which he truly belongs. So I guess I take it back -- it is, in fact, a particularly queer film.

Stuff We Talked About

I Don't Want to Go Quietly - (Ep. 190 - Metallica)

September 6, 2018 Matthew Baume

This Week's Guest: Dan Corkery

You can't accuse this week's guest of ever making things easy for himself. Growing up south of Boston, he was the town's only gay metalhead before he decide to join the army, deploying to the middle east in the 1990s. Now he's enjoying his retirement by going back to school to become a physician's assistant, while also occasionally noodling around with other musicians and singing on military bases. It's hard to imagine that anyone else on Earth has lived a life like Dan's, or so many different lives from his small town to metal bands to Saudi Arabia to supporting the health of his community.

BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 15th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.

Check out the podcast Queens Of Adventure to hear me lead a troupe of drag queens on an epic Dungeons & Dragons adventure -- that's at QueensOfAdventure.com. We just started a new story arc this week, so if you've been waiting for a time to jump in, look for episode 8: Operation Watersport.

This Week's Recommendation: The Glory Hole

Thanks again to Dan for joining me, and for recommending the men's bathroom on the base in Saudi Arabia. It's easy to forget how recently queer people had to engage in subterfuge even to acknowledge each other's existence, and how in many places, they still do. For my recommendation this week, keep your eyes peeled at queer film festivals for a short documentary called The Glory Hole. It's a quick watch -- just four minutes -- and it's about how an adorable elderly gay couple met many decades ago under circumstances that we can call "not safe for work."

The interview with the two men is woven effectively with footage of a dramatic recreation, and it really takes you back to the seedy, often dangerous underbellies where gay men cruised and met up and sometimes even found love. There's a lot of stigma around glory holes and bathrooms and peep shows. But when mainstream culture pushes good queer folks underground, thriving in the dark isn't something to be ashamed of -- it's something to be proud of.

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.