End of year Q&A for 2025!

wow matt... I absolutely know as a 63-year-old gay old queen ( I knoe oxymoron) that we can be too hard on ourselves. I absoutly ab fab your work. i have been watching 20-something-year-old guys tell their coming out stories on youtube.my Heart is breaking. tt makes me cry because I know there are so many young men who are struggling as I did 40 some odd years ago.... I dont know how to do this.. but, I want these guys to watch your videos. EVERTTHING you post touches me. In my heart and in my memory. thank you matt baum.

I suspect that your journalistic standards were formed to emphasize impartiality, that the journalist should not be a part of the story. YouTube, especially, is a platform to allow you to drop that reluctance and put more of yourself into it. I welcome it, it's what differentiates you from any other video on a topic (which unfortunately now would be completely generated by AI).

Thanks for answering my question, Matt. I have been a dedicated and appreciative consumer of your content for a long time so it feels good to know I am a small part of it all. As for the UK, there is a huge untapped topic for you over here and that is queer characters in UK soap operas. I am unsure how you would even begin to tackle it because some of these soaps have been running for decades and decades with possibly hundreds of queer characters over the years. Right now I am obsessed with a soap called Emmerdale featuring a storyline of two brothers who were married to the same man. One brother is a serial killer and has his brother and ex partner held captive. Another brother of one of the captured men is also exploring feelings he has for his same sex housemate. If you ever wanted to have an exploratory chat about queer soap opera histories of the UK, I'd be more than happy!

If you guys liked Basket Case you should give Frankenhooker a try. It's sooo camp!

Alternate take: The animals in wicked could also be big ol' puppets like in Return to Oz. Nobody does big ol' puppets anymore!!

I love the idea of Queer As Folk and the whole Russell Davies queer TV universe as a topic.

Well Matt, I'm just at the part where you started singing and you've never seemed cuter! Ha! I don't know if this is appropriate, but what the hell! Your mention of Barney Miller flew me back to 1978 when I first met and started dating my now husband, and my straight roommate and I were having a party. I had just started dating my husband, and my roommate had this gay gym buddy who was a writer on Barney Miller. My roommate, whom was the first person I came out to, told his gym buddy/writer all about me and I think he had this fantasy about meeting me. So, my straight roommate was playing cupid and invited the writer/gym buddy to the party. He really didn't have a chance because I was already so into my future husband, but the writer kinda hung around me all night and at one point was standing next to me and blew on me a few times. I thought, what the hell is he doing, so I asked him, "What are you doing?" And, he said, "I'm blowing on you to cool you down because you're so hot!" Well, even at my young age at the time, I knew that was a line if I ever heard one. So, I just rolled my eyes. Awww, youth!

Not that it really matters, but I did comment in the live chat how you must have been roasting in that coat (though I think my actual words were "must have been so hot in that coat", which in retrospect might not have been the best phrasing, haha). Also, not you sitting there saying "This is gonna sound cheesy like 'you're part of the family!', but you ARE" and making me cry thinking of Edith. Thanks, Matt. haha.