Matt Baume

A quick note about accessing this week's video: Oops, I accidentally set this post to be public! Sorry if you got an unexpected alert about that. I'm going to leave it accessible for all free and paid members for the this week, so if you got a notification, you'll still be able to view it. Then on F

My guest on The Sewers of Paris this week is often unrecognizable. Josh Duart creates cosplay looks that are so elaborate that as soon as he puts them on, he simply vanishes into whatever character he’s re-creating. I personally met him several times over the course of a recent weekend at a conventi

Susan Sarandon was not supposed to play Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, at least not if her agents had anything to say about it. Susan wanted the part, and the producers wanted her in the movie. But her agents insisted she was wrong for the part. How did she wind up in the movie anyway? That

As we head into spooky season this October, I want to take a peek back into the Sewers archives for a chat with Sam Irvin. As a kid, Sam loved Bride of Frankenstein, and he brought that influence with him as an adult when he co-produced the film Gods and Monsters, and directed the show Dante’s Cove

For this week's bonus video, we'll spend a few moments in the 1970s, then jump back to the 1870s, and also take a little peek into the 1770s for some hypnotic theories about the origin of queer love. (And apologies for this week's bonus video being a few days late, I'm still catching up after last w

Sorry this week's Sewers of Paris is coming a few days late -- it took a little extra time to arrange but I think it's worth it! This week I’m chatting with Scott Heim, the author of the 1995 novel Mysterious Skin, which was adapted into a film by Gregg Araki in 2004. Scott's book is the story of tw

I hadn't really ever contemplated the question "is Barry Bostwick, the actor who plays Brad in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, allowed to say the word 'queer?'" ... but then Barry Bostwick himself asked me. This weekend I'm at AncientCityCon, a pop culture convention in Florida, and I was on a panel

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris is Damian Pelliccione, who started his career as an actor — if you watch closely, you can catch him on a 2005 episode of Gillmore Girls. Twenty years later, he’s in a very different role, as the co-founder and CEO of the streaming video service Revry. That ser

I recently asked how Tim Curry's work impacted your life, and across Patreon, Bluesky, and YouTube, hundreds of people responded with amazing, deeply personal stories. I expected to hear about watching Rocky Horror at parties, but that was just one small slice: I heard about gay awakenings, bi awake

Like everyone on Earth, I’ve been looking back at the work of both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, in absolute awe of everything they gave us. For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris, we’re revisiting an interview that touched on both Dolly and Tim: My 2018 conversation with the drag performer wh

Clue is an iconic film with an iconic cast, iconic jokes, and when it came out, it was an iconic flop. So for this week's bonus video, I want to look at what went wrong, but more importantly, what went right and why. I think it is worth a revisit. We'll talk about the almost-cast (Carrie Fisher!!!),

My guest this week has a track record of going viral — whether he wanted to or not. Mike Aylesworth’s first brush with fame was as a teenager in the late 90s when he challenged the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay members… then in adulthood when he dreamed up an invention in the bathtub that changed his life,

In researching James Burrows' work for the recent video, I kept coming across little tidbits of his connection to Frasier -- first as the co-creator of the show where the character Frasier spawned, and then as the director of the spinoff pilot and any of the subsequent episodes. Several years ago, I

Hello there! I'm looking for stories about the impact of Tim Curry's work to use in an upcoming video. If you you have a story or memory to share, please reply below! And stay tuned for a Tim video in the coming weeks.

You might recognize the voice of this week’s Sewers of Paris guest — Tony Rodriguez plays Julio on The Simpsons, a role originated by Hank Azaria. This part didn’t come to Tony in the way you might expect. It was a combination of talent, training, taking some very bold initiative, and an intercessio

A new video goes live tomorrow, Sunday, at noon pacific! Click here to watch the video. Hit the "notify" bell and you'll get a heads-up when it goes live! It's about James Burrows -- the TV director who elevated sitcoms to an art form with shows like Cheers, Frasier, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show,

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is writer and historian Jack Shoulder. You might know him from his daily social media posts focusing on butts from across art history, or for his upcoming book Museum Hotties… which is about exactly what it sounds like. As a kid, Jack’s interest in classical

In the early 1980s, a young actor named Danny DeVito had a grudge against the network ABC, and he settled it the way any reasonable person would: By blowing up ABC headquarters. That started some dominoes falling that would eventually change the face of television, with shows like Cheers, Seinfeld,

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is David Lauterstein, the founder and CEO of Nasty Pig. You probably know his company for their sexy fetish-infused street wear, so you might not expect that David’s background is in writing poetry. But the closer you look at his approach to designing clothi

One of the best-written sitcoms of the 1990s never was broadcast: Gloria Vane. It's an incredibly funny show, it's got an amazing cast, it's surprisingly queer, and yet it never went to series. And I think that's actually a good thing. For this week's bonus video, we're diving into this long-lost si

This week marks the birthday of the author and activist James Baldwin, and to mark the occasion for this week's Sewers of Paris podcast, we’re heading into the archives for a conversation that touches on the expansiveness of Baldwin’s writing. In 2022, I spoke with a guest named Jonathan about how l

Recently somebody asked me, "when was the first sitcom?" And I started to answer multiple times before I realized that there's a story about sitcom history that goes back a lot further than you might think. So in this week's bonus video, I want to think a bit about what makes something a sitcom -- a

My guest on The Sewers of Paris this week is Iain Bell, who made a career out of his personal passion for music. But he took a winding road to get there ... and could never have predicted that a job as a personal trainer would be a crucial step towards premiering an opera in Vienna.

From the 1990s into the 2000, Republican TV commercials said some genuinely deranged things about queer people. (Of course, Republicans are still huge weirdos about queer stuff; women's sports is just their fixation du jour.) And in making my recent marriage equality video, I was surprised at just h

My guest on The Sewers of Paris this week grew up in challenging circumstances — a gay kid in Nigeria with a religious family, Bisi couldn’t imagine anywhere on Earth he might belong. Especially after he came out on national television, and had to apply for asylum to escape his increasingly dire liv

Apologies for this week's Sewers of Paris episode being a few days late! I'm just getting over a cold, as you'll probably notice in the introduction. But I'm very excited for this week's guest! A few months ago, I came across an incredible video: It’s the early 70s, and a local Chicago talk show is

Jane Espenson wrote many of your favorite episodes of Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood, Game of Thrones, and many more shows ... and about a decade ago, she got into bed to talk to me about making a rom-com/sitcom about a newlywed gay couple. It was a web series called Husbands, described as W

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris is writer/comedian Mano Agapion, whose work you may know from his appearances on Hacks and Bajillion Dollar Properties, his writing on the new Punky Brewster, or from his podcasts We Love Trash and Drag Her. Mano developed his sense of humor alongside the weir

It's hard to believe this was only about ten years ago... but as various states and finally the Supreme Court let same-sex couples get married, there was a big cluster of TV shows with episodes about queer folks getting married. There was Brooklyn 99, there was Modern Family, and one of the cutest w

When you compare what queer life was like at the end of the 80s to the start of the 2000s, the differences are so shocking it’s hard to believe that those years are only separated by a single decade. The author and historian Hugh Ryan has a new book about the people who shaped that decade, entitled

For a time, a woman named Maggie Gallagher was one of the world's most outspoken opponents of marriage equality: She was on the news, she wrote articles, she spoke at anti-equality rallies. You name it, if there was an opportunity to say something terrible about queer people getting married, she was

You might’ve seen that I have a new video up on YouTube this week — it’s about the long hard fight for marriage equality, and how some Hollywood icons got involved in the cause. The battle for the freedom to marry has been very much on my mind lately, so for this week's Sewers of Paris, I wanted to

I hope you didn't have any plans for today, because a new video is going live and it's ... wait, this can't be right. OVER FIVE HOURS LONG??? Yes indeed, it's a five-hour epic about the road to marriage equality, and how I found myself caught up in a legal battle pitting Rob Reiner against Arnold Sc

Next week sees the release of a new Supergirl movie, so for this week’s Sewers of Paris we’re diving into the archives to revisit my 2020 interview with artist Joe Philips. Joe’s illustrations of handsome, happy gay men were some of the first glimpses I got of gay life, back in the 90s when I was a

For this week's bonus video, I've been rooting around in some interview archives and dug out a very fun story about a near-disastrous ad about marriage equality recorded by the cast of Will & Grace. A whole bunch of things went wrong with this 30-second PSA, and it's a combination of sheer dumb luck

For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris, we have two guests: Andrew Klaus-Vineyard and Daniel Talbott are the directors of a new documentary short called Welcome to Tool Shed, which opens to the door to an iconic leather bar in Palm Springs. They’re just back from showing the film at Cannes,

Did you hear the one about the gay king of Bavaria who nearly abdicated his throne so he could follow Richard Wagner around Europe like a Grateful Dead groupie? He wound up deciding instead to stay in power so he could build some of the most beautiful castles in Europe, and also a precursor to Disne

I'm in Heidelberg, Germany this week, and I've encountered an excellent project that I think ought to exist in the United States. Or maybe it already does and I'm not aware of it? It's called Dorfpride, and it's essentially an annual road-trip to create new Pride events in remote villages, so queer

I'm hitting the road this week, or hitting the rail, to do some talks and some research overseas! I'm looking for the great queer sitcoms of Europe and discovering ... wait a minute, why are there so few compared to the US? I've found a few theories about why European countries take a very different

Imagine if you went to mail a letter and the post office says, "sorry, you can't. You're too gay." Essentially, that's what happened in the 1950s when the US government seized a whole bunch of copies of a magazine for queer people, and told them they couldn't use the mail to discuss homosexuality. A

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Caleb Roehrig, author of young adult mysteries and the occasional romance. Caleb had always wanted to be an author, but life intervened and he found himself living in LA, working as a producer on reality TV shows. He didn’t realize it at the time, but tha

Maybe you've seen Our Flag Means Death, a show set in the 1600s that imagines a very very queer cast of characters on board a pirate ship. I mentioned the show in a bonus video a few weeks ago, and how some aspects are based in a bit of historical fact. There almost certainly were gay pirates! But I

The world just celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday — born in late April, a scant four hundred and sixty two years ago, which makes him almost as old as this podcast. Over the years we’ve had many guests on The Sewers of Paris for whom Shakespeare’s work was an inspiration, and this week we’ll hear my

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Jes Battis, who’s just written an appreciation and analysis of the movie Labyrinth entitled It’s Only Forever. Labyrinth turns 40 this year, which marks 40 years of Jes’ particular fascination with the goblin characters — and wondering why he’s always fel

About 15 years ago, there was a trial over gay marriage, the Prop 8 trial, and it was videotaped. But the tapes of that trial were kept under lock and key because anti-gay groups didn't want anyone to see how badly they did in court. So with the tapes of the trial locked up, other groups did dramati

To mark the recent re-re-re-rebooting of The Muppet Show, this week we’re heading into the Sewers archives to revisit my 2020 interview with Dan Steadman. Dan grew up in a household that was so religious, his parents forbade him from watching certain episodes of The Muppet Show, due to a guest appea

Seinfeld, Friends, Roc, Living Single, The Golden Girls ... why did so many 90s sitcoms want to talk about gay marriage, when it wasn't even legal yet? And did those episodes help, or make people more accepting? Let's talk about what was going on, what those episodes got right (and sometimes wrong),