The Sewers of Paris

This is the three hundredth episode of the show, and I just want to take a moment to say how incredibly grateful I am to the hundreds of amazing guests who’ve made time to talk to me, listeners like you who download the show and recommend it to friends, and of course everyone on Patreon whose support allows me to create the show week after week. In the nearly five and a half years that I’ve been d...

On this episode we’re remembering Chi Chi DeVayne, performer and Drag Race star who passed away last week at the age of 34. I spoke to Chi Chi back in 2018, when she was appearing on All Stars, about her roots, her religion, and how she drew on military training as she discovered her love of drag. This week I’ll also be posting some clips on the Sewers of Paris Twitter and Facebook of stuff that C...

The topic this week: Tori Amos, Steel Magnolias, and Alice in Wonderland. What piece of media gets you through your rough patches? For my guest this week, it’s Steel Magnolias, a movie that helped him understand his place as a little gay kid among powerful southern women. It’s also the film that got him through election night 2016. First, a reminder that The Sewers of Paris is on Twitter and Faceb...

Imagine if there was someone out there who could, in a matter of minutes, help you make sense of the unanswered questions you’ve asked about yourself for as long as your can remember. My guest this week is JP Karliak, a voice actor and writer who you might recognize as the voice of the characters Boss Baby, Wile E Coyote on those occasions when he speaks, as Spider-Man and Willy Wonka and tons of...

You might’ve seen the news this week that after three decades, NBC cancelled the entertainment show E! News. For this week’s episode, we’re revisiting my 2015 conversation with one of the hosts of E! News, Steve Kmetko. Steve was the face of the E! cable network from 1994 to 2002, and in addition to hosting the news show he also anchored countless Oscar and Emmy broadcasts, reported from film fest...

My guest this week is Tom Zohar, whose love for stories about powerful women led him to movies like Death Becomes Her and The Joy Luck Club, and whose hippie parents brought him to musicals like Hair. A common thread through a lot of Tom’s favorite media is characters who are completely and totally un-repressed, but self-repression was an issue he had to deal with as a teenager when he re-closeted...

My guest this week is Hamish Steele, whose graphic novel Deadendia is being adapted into an animated series at Netflix. The show will feature a gay trans man as the lead character, and it’s inspired both by Hamish’s friends and his love of shows like Dr Who and movies like The Addams Family Values, which feature queer-ish if not explicitly queer ensembles. Hamish is also running a Kickstarter righ...

You might have seen that Disney is about to release a new documentary called Howard, all about the legacy of the great Howard Ashman whose music gave live to stories like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and many more. For this week’s episode, we’re diving into the Sewers of Paris archive to revisit my 2015 conversation about another of Howard Ashman’s projects: the musical Little Shop of...

Hello and welcome to the Sewers of Paris. This week’s guest, Terry LaBolt, was suggested to me by a Sewers of Paris listener, and I’m so glad that they did. Terry has an absolutely amazing collection of stories from across his career, starting as a young kid transfixed by musical theater, then later as Carol Channing’s music director, and now as a teacher sharing his wisdom with the next generatio...

My guest this week is illustrator and film obsessive Dashiell Silva , who you might know from his excellent Oscar guides and also as an artist on the just announced Netflix series Deadendia, which looks, by the way, amazing. Dashiell grew up in the West of Ireland where nobody understood his taste in film that was, in hindsight, extremely queer. His devotion to Sunset Blvd and Mommie Dearest made...

As we reach the conclusion of a particularly busy Pride month, I wanted to dive back into the Sewers of Paris archives for a conversation with someone who knew Greenwich Village in the years before Stonewall. The Village is the gay enclave that was the model for many of the enclaves we know today, a place where people went to reject the mainstream after the mainstream had rejected them. Playwright...

This week’s guest is Michael Hobbes, writer for the Huffington Post and co-host of the fantastic podcast You’re Wrong About. Michael’s influences are like the jump cut in the movie 2001: one of the pieces of media that shaped him as a person takes place in prehistoric Eurasia; and another is set in early 2000s gay bars of Pittsburgh. The thing that unites them is that they’re both about clans and...

How do you deal with the past when it hurts too much to spend time there? My guest this week is writer and journalist Daniel Villareal, who found himself questioning his purpose in life when the authorities he’d always trusted, like he church and his father, revealed themselves not to have his best interests at heart. He managed to cut himself free from harmful relationships, but he was still left...

Hello and welcome to the Sewers of Paris. Fifty-one years ago, a riot against police brutality helped kick off the modern Pride movement, and on this episode we’ll hear from one of the people who were there. He earned the nickname Tree thanks to his six-foot-five stature, and he’s been a part of New York’s gay community going back to the fifties, when he didn’t even know a community existed. Tree’...

My guest this week is Steven Capsuto, whose book Alternate Channels documents the history of queer images on television across the twentieth century. An updated edition was released last year and it’s absolutely vital reading for anyone interested in LGBTQ culture — which I suspect is you. Steven’s work as a historian began as a personal project, videotaping gay episodes of TV in the 80s because i...

My guest this week is comic book author Marc Andreyko, who’s written for Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Dr. Strange, and more. You might know him for his work on Love is Love, an anthology to benefit the victims of the Pulse shooting. Mark got his big break in comics at a young age, almost entirely by accident, and since then he’s been peppering queer stories into comics wherever he can. Also, a reminder...

My guest this week is Dee Michel, author of the book “Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love the Wizard of Oz.” Dee grew up in the 1950s with the threat of the red scare looming over his family — his parents met at a Communist Party meeting, and there was the constant threat that the family would be exposed. Added to the general chaos of the time was the discovery that his father was ga...

My guest this week is Amos Mac, one of the founders of the magazine Original Plumbing a decade ago, and more recently one of the writers on the reboot of the show Gossip Girl. Amos was working in queer nightlife when he started the magazine as a fun sexy side project, but it was a runaway hit and took on a life of its own, giving him a foot in the door to launch his career in television. Also, a r...

My guest this week is Broadway’s Seth Rudetsky, writer singer actor and radio host among his many many jobs. You may know him from his Sirius XM shows On Broadway and Seth Speaks, or from the show Disaster which he co-wrote with Jack Plotnick, or from his brand new podcast Seth Rudetsky’s Back to School. Seth is a bundle of energy and enthusiasm for entertainment, and it’s impossible to listen to...

I’m very excited to bring you this week’s guest — the fabulous actor and playwright Charles Busch, who first rose to prominence in the 1980s with the show Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and followed up with such hits as Die Mommy Die, Psycho Beach Party, and The Allergist’s Wife, for which he earned a Tony nomination. For the first decade of his career, Charles was a struggling writer who traveled the...

Some of the most groundbreaking queer moments on television happened on a show that if you’re American, you’ve probably never heard of. Number 96 is one of the most popular TV shows in Australia’s history, but it never managed to successfully make the jump to the US — maybe because its content, in the mid 1970s, was way too risqué for American audiences. My guest this week is a scholar of Australi...

My guest this week is Trystan Reese, who starred as Yitzhak in the original LA production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. From an early age, Trystan was laser focused on going to Broadway and becoming a famous actor. But the experience of being an actor, it turns out, helped him learn about passions he never knew he had, and shaped him into the advocate and dad that he is today. We’ll have that conv...

Last week I chatted with comic book author Dale Lazarov, and this week we’ll hear from a comic artist — Joe Phillips. Jos images were some of the first glimpses of gay life I ever saw, back in the 90s as a teenager. His art was simultaneously sexy and wholesome, depicting smiling scantily clad young muscle men in tenet romantic scenes. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned about his mor...

Hello and welcome to the Sewers of Paris. My guest this week is Dale Lazarov, a comic book writer who specializes in sexy character-based stories. Dale grew up in Puerto Rico, amidst a conservative culture of machismo, and as a young adult he was scandalized by anything sexual. His writing helped him overcome the social baggage that kept him in the closet, and now his novels serve as a sort of wis...