The Sewers of Paris

My guest this week is illustrator Ricardo Bessa, whose beautiful art features lush colorful fantasy settings and characters on fabulous adventures, often very queer. Ricardo knew he was a fish out of water in the town where he grew up, and planned to move to London to find others like him … and that worked, at first, but he didn’t count on running into burnout that nea...

On last week’s episode we heard from drag comedienne Pissi Myles, and this week we’ll hear from Pissi’s husband, photographer and creative director David Ayllon. David’s specialty is weird colorful visions that lean heavily on the spooky, the queer, and the poppiest of pop art — a career that he thought he’d blown after one particularly disastrous interview and a years...

My guest this week is drag comedienne Pissi Myles, who always knew she needed to be on stage but wasn’t always sure where she fit in… thanks to a music theater education that left her feeling like she couldn’t measure up to her classmates, and comparing herself to the host of Blues Clues. That is, until she discovered a wig and heels and her calling, which these days i...

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Pokémon, and to celebrate we’re diving into the Sewers archives to hear my 2019 chat with Cody Shipman. Cody’s a graphic designer and artist here in Seattle whose work is very beautiful, very gay, and very explicit. For a long time, he felt hesitant about blending his gay interests and his nerdy interests together....

This week, I’m welcoming back Randy West, who was my guest in the Sewers of Paris way back in 2017. Randy is a TV industry veteran whose voice you might recognize from announcing on shows like The Price is Right, Supermarket Sweep, Big Brother, and countless others. From his decades behind a microphone, Randy’s been present for the creation of a lot of iconic TV shows,...

My guest this week is Steven Salvatore, author of young adult romances like And They Lived…, No Perfect Places, and When Love Gives You Lemons. Steven’s plan, when he was younger, was to be an artist… until a cruel art teacher crushed his dreams. But that set the stage for him to discover a passion for writing, and for exploring stories about young queer people in love...

My guest this week is game developer Tim Cain, who’s shown us what the end of the world looks like. Back in the mid-90s, Tim was working with a small team on a post-apocalyptic game with a 1950s aesthetic — a weird mix of styles that Tim was worried would bomb so hard he expected his next job would be serving fast food. But … that game was Fallout, which becam...

My guest this week is Massachusetts State Senator Julian Cyr, whose district includes Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket — a situation he never expected to find himself in. As a teenager, Julian was mainly focused on singing, and planned to pursue a career in the humanities. But when budget cuts threatened local arts programs, he organized people to speak up, a...

My guest this week is queer artist and illustrator Cheyne Gallarde, whose style blends drag icons with classic comic book covers. Cheyne first discovered drag in queer bars of Hawaii, and after a memorable night getting pulled up onstage, he started translating the magic that he saw in the community into literal super powers.

Congratulations to actor-writer-comedian Joel Kim Booster, who got married last month to his partner John. You might know Joel as the writer and star of the movie Fire Island, or as a voice actor in KPop Demon Hunters, or from shows like Big Mouth, Search Party, and Loot. But before all that, Joel was a guest on The Sewers of Paris, way back in 2017, when we talked abo...

You may know this week’s guest from his online persona, The Black Gay Comic Geek — an identity that grew out of his Buffy fandom, which was so intense that for a time he was an administrator of a Buffy role-playing community where he was a magic shop owner and queen of the vengeance demons. These days, Michael flies around the country covering pop culture, always looki...

My guest this week is author Jumata Emill, whose new novel is entitled I Don’t Wish You Well. It’s about a true-crime writer who uncovers a queer coverup in his hometown — based in part on Jumata’s prior work as a real-life crime reporter, before he made the jump to fiction.

We’ll have that intervi...

I can think of few better ways to spend the holidays than seeing some live queer theater, whether it’s Golden Girls Live, a sing-along to Mame, or shows with some of my local Seattle drag legends like Dina Martina and Scott Shoemaker. And one of the most iconic holiday duos to emerge from the Emerald City is Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme. Every year they create a new ...

My guest this week is Steven Milliken, author of a book of autobiographical essays entitled Late Bloomer Baby Boomer. Steven was a class clown who grew up to become a teacher in some fairly rough schools, and had to move in and out of the closet over the years as he navigated sensitive careers alongside alcoholism and sobriety

My guest this week had his big screen debut alongside Adam Baldwin and Matt Dillon in 1980; made a career getting gays online with PlanetOut in the 90s; and today work for TED Talks, bringing together who are doing, as he describes it, some of the weirdest work in he world. Tom Rielly’s had a lot of jobs, and one of the constants has been figuring out new ways to bring...

For this week’s Sewers of Paris, I’m chatting with four Oz superfans about their intense connections to films like The Wizard of Oz, books like Return to Oz, and adaptations like Wicked. These conversations are all part of my new video about Oz and queer culture that just went live on YouTube — check that out at YouTube.com/mattbaume . In this episode, you’ll hear from...

To mark the recent release of the second Wicked film, for this week’s episode we’re revisiting my 2020 interview with Dee Michel, author of the book Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love the Wizard of Oz. Dee’s book is an in-depth examination of queer Oz fandom, which for him has its roots in happy memories of watching the movie with his dad. Dee grew up in...

I am delighted to welcome back a friend of the Sewers, film critic and holiday aficionado, Linoleum Knife’s Alonso Duralde. His book, Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, is now out in a revised and updated edition, gathering even more expert recommendations for holiday films to enjoy this season and year-round. We chatted about how Christmas movies have changed sin...

The second of the Wicked films comes out later this month, and so for this week’s episode we’re jumping into the Sewers archives to hear my 2017 chat with Tony winner Stephen Oremus, who was the music director for Wicked on Broadway and conducted the orchestras for the two Wicked films. He was also music director for the Academy Awards, taught Idina Menzel how to sing ...