The Sewers of Paris

Next week would have been the 96th birthday of Kenneth Williams, an incredible British performer who hid queer culture in plain sight on the BBC back in the 1960s. For this week’s episode we’re diving all the way back into the Sewers of Paris archives to one of my very first episodes, a conversation with game designer Tork Shaw. Tork would listen to tapes of Kenneth Williams in the car with this f...

My guest this week is Jim Colucci, author of numerous books about the behind-the-scenes stories of the making of classic TV shows. In his work he’s had opportunities to interview greats like Norman Lear, Betty White, and Bea Arthur — but the REALLY good stories are about what happened after the interviews were over. We’ll have that conversation in a minute. And hey don’t forget to head over to mat...

My guest this week is author Jonathan Alexander, whose new book Dear Queer Self comes out in March 2022 and is a sort of conversation with his younger self, and an attempt to recapture some of younger-him’s wisdom. Though Jonathan of today has been through a lot of eye-opening experiences, from a brief marriage to a woman to a life-changing experience with Hurricane Katrina, he still pauses to lis...

My guest this week grew up alongside eight sisters, in a home so crowded his room was a tiny storage closet. Splitting his time between homeschooling and the family flea market, Caudle had a particularly insulated upbringing — until an adventure to a convention for fellow nerds opened his eyes to a big wide world, and he left home with the help of some new friends. We’ll have that conversation in...

Fifty-eight years ago this weekend, the musical Hello Dolly opened on Broadway — and this week we’re diving into the Sewers archive for a chat with Guy Branum about why, for him, the show encapsulates all the greatest joyful aspects of being gay. We’ll have that conversation in a minute. And hey don’t forget to head over to mattbaume.com to subscribe to my cute little newsletter.  Also take a...

My guest this week is one of the busiest people I’ve ever interviewed. Roo George Warren is an educator, an ecologist, a singer, an activist, a performance artist, and that’s not even half of the jobs you might find him doing on any particular day. Roo was raised with a healthy respect for skepticism and rebellion, and after venturing away from the town where he grew up, he found his calling close...

My guest this week has been a lot of different people — he grew up a meek kid in Maryland, came out of the closet when he went to school in New York to study illustration, and then had to watch his step when his first job out of college required him to move to Tennessee to work on the religious show Veggie Tales. For a while, he found solace in the fandom of queer anime. And when he was finally ab...

I hope you’re having a delightful holiday time, full of seasonal entertainment and sweaters and good cheer. For this week’s episode, we’re heading into the archives to hear my 2016 interview with Jonathan, who grew up in a deeply religious family and always found himself swept up in the pageantry of the season. These days, he's distanced himself from the faith, but unexpectedly Christmas has becom...

My guest this week is playwright Tyler Dwiggins, who grew up in an isolated, rural Indiana farm town where there wasn’t much in the way of arts — especially if someone else needed to use the school’s combination auditorium/cafeteria. That’s why today he produces the kind of stuff he was looking for back then, starting with a series of queer-inclusive plays for high schools. We’ll have that convers...

Twenty-one years ago this week, the show Queer as Folk made its American debut, and this week we’re diving into the Sewers archive to revisit one of the very first episodes of the podcast — my 2015 interview with Toronto performer 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, bl...

My guest this week is Robert Steele, author of a new book about a figure in the early modern gay liberation movement that you probably never heard of. Robert’s subject is Jim Foshee, a teen runaway who landed in Los Angeles in the middle of a time of incredible upheaval. He was also Robert’s good friend, and between the two of them are some incredible stories about gay life of the 1950s onward. We...

My guest this week is Alex Salyer, whose work you may have seen on HBO’s Animals, on Tuca and Bertie, on BoJack Horseman, and also possibly in some of your weirder dreams. Alex is an animation director whose work defies the rules of reality, and any other rules he might happen to run into. Working in adult animation, at this point Alex may have animated more dicks than anyone else in his field — q...

We’re careening towards Thanksgiving, and you know what that means — an onslaught of holiday specials on the horizon. One that I’m particularly looking forward to is Santa Inc, a stop-motion special featuring the voice of comedian Joel Kim Booster. I spoke with Joel back in 2017, and this week we’re diving into the Sewers of Paris archive to revisit that conversation in preparation for the holiday...

My guest this week is Lane V. Rogers , who splits his time between posting videos on YouTube, streaming on Twitch, posting nudes on OnlyFans, and getting a degree in business — all of which would be a tremendous surprise to him just a few years ago. When he graduated from high school a few years ago, Lane realized that he had spent so much time rebelling that he hadn’t developed any interests or p...

At first glance, Elvira — the late-night movie hostess — looks like a character custom-engineered to appeal to straight men. So why do so many gays love her? I’ve got a new video up on YouTube exploring that very question, with help from someone who knows a thing or two about the character — her longtime collaborator and writer, Ted Biaselli, who also happens to be Director of Original Series at N...

My guest this week is David Pevsner, writer, actor, and erotic blogger. His book Damn Shame , a memoir of desire, defiance, and show tunes comes out in January (it’s available for pre-order now) and catalogs his adventures on Broadway and on TV, as an escort, and as a naked Tumblr star. It all starts with a kid dancing in secret to Barbra Streisand records. We’ll have that conversation in a minute...

My guest this week has some catching up to do. David is a writer who grew up in a religious family, and until his early 30s was closeted and struggled through ex-gay treatments until he finally came out. Helping him to make the adjustment: Star Trek, where he came to realize he’d picked up more of his sense of right and wrong than from the church. After cutting ties with his old life, he sold almo...

Next week is the anniversary of the premiere of the show Gargoyles, an animated 90s series with queer subtext simmering just under the surface — and that’s according to the show’s creator. In honor of that anniversary, we’re diving back into the Sewers archives for a chat with Fazaad Feroze, who became obsessed with the show when he was young. The child of immigrants from Guyana before moving to t...

My guest on the Sewers of Paris podcast this week is the author of The Other Man , a forthcoming novel set in Mumbai about two men from very different cultures falling in love. Farhad Dadyburjor knows a thing or two about bridging cultures — growing up in India, he developed a deep obsession with western pop stars like Madonna and even came out to a friend via a carefully phrased comparison to Geo...

My guest on the Sewers of Paris podcast this week would like you to see him at his worst. Ian Lockwood is a New York based pop music comedian who makes goofy music videos in which he plays his messiest self. It’s a style inspired in part by his relationship with the Twilight novels — which he started reading as a joke, and was then startled to discover that he unironically loved. We’ll have that c...

My guest this week is Craig Johnson — director of the movies Skeleton Twins and Alex Strangelove, among many other projects. His creative interests straddle two very different worlds: Troubled suburban families, and weird creepy monsters … which maybe aren’t so different after all. Fortunately, he gets to explore those topics on screen — thanks to a phone call many years ago that changed his life...

Eleven years ago this week, Dan Savage founded the It Gets Better Project, and this week we’re diving into the Sewers archives to revisit my conversation with him in 2017. You've probably heard Dan 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-breakin...

My guest this week is a writer who’s found a way to blend an unlikely combination of genres — comedy and food writing. You may know Adam Roberts for his blog and his cookbook, The Amateur Gourmet, or from his work as a writer on the show The Real O’Neals. None of this was supposed to happen — Adam’s career kicked off with a short stint in law school before he realized it wasn’t for him, and food w...

My guest this week is the YouTuber who goes by the name Illusory Wall. He’s dedicated himself to unraveling the mysteries of the often-bewildering games in the Dark Souls franchise — dark gothic mysteries full of strange horrors and hidden treasures. What was once a niche interest has become an obsession, and, as of very recently, his full time job. We’ll have that conversation in a minute. First...

My guest this week is Jeffrey Masters, host of the podcast LGBTQ&A . He moved to LA with a plan to make it big as an actor, which doesn’t always work out for the best — and for a time, it looked like things were going south as he found that his Shakespearean training left him unprepared for what Hollywood was looking for. But then he stumbled upon a passion that got him more attention than he’...