Matt Baume

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

It's 1971 and the dreadful Dr. David Reuben, is appearing on a Chicago talk show to promote his a homophobic sex-advice book. But there's one man in the audience who isn't going to let him get away with it: Murray Edelman, who was radicalized after cops arrested him for dancing with a man, and who w

Last week we looked at the hilarious wrongness of the book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, and this week we're looking at another 1970s publication with a catchy title: GAY. That's it, that's the title. This one actually manages to get things right ... at least

Why was there a surge in TV episodes with gay couples in the 1970s, after decades of queer people basically being invisible on television? And especially at a time when gay marriage was barely a gleam in anybody's eye, why did so many queer characters start describing themselves as "married"? We're

The animated Star Trek spinoff should have been cheap and terrible ... but thanks to a fluke of timing and a very brave demand from Leonard Nimoy, it wound up having some surprising bright spots. (It was still pretty cheap, though.) So why is the writing and acting so much better than the same compa

Hello there! So, you've just been through a bank heist. Robbers have held you at gunpoint for hours, the FBI rescued you, and ... what happens next? Do you have to go in to work the next day, do you get overtime, and how does anyone know that YOU weren't one of the bank robbers? In this week's bonus

As you might’ve heard, I have a new video up on YouTube about the film Dog Day Afternoon, and a queer bank robber who stunned New York way back in the 1970s. For this week’s podcast episode, we’re diving into the Sewers of Paris archives to explore queer life (and, occasionally, crime) in New York o

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris podcast is author and architect Robert Raasch, whose recent debut novel The Summer Between is a coming-of-age adventure set in Greenwich Village of the late 1970s. It’s a topic that Robert knows well, having lived through that time himself — making the most of

Hello there! It's hard to believe how many mistakes John Wojtowicz & company made when they decided to rob a bank in August of 1972 -- the heist that was eventually dramatized in the film Dog Day Afternoon. That movie includes a few of their goofy missteps, but it leaves out some of my favorites: Th

Hello there! I have a juicy tale of revenge in this week's bonus video! It's the story of how Lance Loud made the most of a very unpleasant dinner with an insurance industry CEO. Plus! A little correction/update about what may have been some intentional deceit behind the scenes of An American Family

My guest this week is pop culture writer Frank DeCaro, whose latest book is Disco: Music, Movies, and Mania under the Mirror Ball. Frank grew up in disco’s heyday, which he experienced through teenage disco parties in the New Jersey suburbs. He also experienced the anti-disco conspiracy that sent th

Hello there! I'll have a great big new video for you next weekend about An American Family, but in the mean time here's some more fun stories about another unscripted show, Candid Camera. We'll start with the time the producer was involved in an airplane hijacking that was assumed at first to be a p

Hello there! For this week's bonus video, I want to draw your attention to a figure who appeared ever so briefly on PBS back in 1973: Holly Woodlawn, an icon of queer theater, a Warhol superstar, and a magnificently weird storyteller. Holly was a trans woman who hitchhiked from Florida to New York a

Hello there! I have to admit I get a real thrill every time an archivist comes out of a back room carrying a banker's box full of file folders, yellowed newspaper clippings, crinkled photographs, and mimeographed memos that were tucked away ten years before I was even born -- who even KNOWS what tre

Hello there! For this week's bonus video, we're going to take a brief look at Mr. Humphreys from Are You Being Served? and then a looooong look at gay TV of the 1970s. [And a quick update about Mr. Humphries & John Inman -- I'm completely wrong in the video when I say that the actor wasn't queer! I

Hello! As of this week, all of the Patreon bonus videos should be transferred from Vimeo to YouTube -- which should mean an end to the "video not found" errors. Now that the change-over is done, everything ought to play normally. But if you run into any errors or weird behavior, please let me know s

Hello there! This week I (and my assistant, Molly the dog) have some stories for you about the time that Charles Nelson Reilly got his revenge on NBC for cancelling his show by running up a HUGE bill at a very pricey hotel. And speaking of hotels, check out this ad campaign from the mid-70s that loo

Hello there! In this week's bonus video, I've got a few new clues about how "Bruce" became the name for all homosexual men. And also the story of the time that a group of lesbians got fed up with NBC airing a bunch of offensive stereotypes, and hatched a plan to infiltrate the network's headquarters

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris podcast is the fascinating Terrence Smith, also known as Joan Jett Blakk, a drag performer who ran for mayor of Chicago in the 90s, and after that, President. Terrence has some incredible stories about growing up in Detroit, seeing David Bowie and The Supremes

Well hello! The upcoming video about Dynasty is getting close! But in the mean time, I want to share with you the full interviews that I recently did -- one with Dr. Susan Stryker (who you may recognize from the Netflix documentary Disclosure) and the other with Dr. Ada-Rhodes Short (of the podcast

Hello, time for another bonus video! I've just come into a vintage copy of an important issue of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, and here' Hello, time for another bonus video! I've just come into a vintage copy of an important issue of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, and here's what I learned: S

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is New York Times bestselling author Christopher Rice, whose new book Sapphire Sunset is a passionate, steamy gay romance. Christopher didn’t think he’d grow up to be a writer, despite coming from a literary family — both his parents are authors, his mother

Hello there! In making my recent video about the show Soap, I was super fortunate to get to talk with Marsha Posner Williams, whose name you probably recognize from hundreds of episodes of television, notably Soap and The Golden Girls among many other shows. A bunch of her stories appeared in my vid

A quick note about videos: Patreon tells me they're still working on finding a way to make the video embeds work better. In the mean time, if it's not working for you, try viewing it in a browser like Safari or Chrome, instead of in the Patreon app; or try viewing it at this link: https://youtu.be/F

UPDATE: I've changed some settings on the video so hopefully it'll work better now. If not, try clicking this link: https://youtu.be/cd61Jstb8-c Oh hello! Here's some fun stories I dug up while researching my new video about Barney Miller: We'll start with some fun tidbits about the first recurring

Hello friends! Here are some fun stories and details that I wasn't able to fit into my John Waters video last week, exclusive for Patreon. From Andy Warhol's films Kiss and Blow Job to Wakefield Poole's Boys in the Sand, the '70s were a fertile time for the work that John was doing in his movies. To

You might’ve seen that the show Jeopardy just invited three of its greatest winners of all time to participate in a championship showdown this week. And I thought it would be a good time to dig back into the Sewers of Paris archives for a chat with the contestant I consider the greatest Jeopardy pla

My guest this week discovered himself somewhere in the lost dark lounges of Miami beach. He grew up in the 1970s, enduring raids on drag shows, wild drug culture, and occasionally running from the police or paddling away in an escape rowboat. Anthony's adventures took him from doing painkillers with

I don't know if you heard, but somebody tried to make a movie about Bohemian Rhapsody recently. And it's nice that the film might introduce the band to a new generation, but there are some queers among us who got to live through Queen the first time. My guest this week is Jim Provenzano, author of t

Have you ever surprised yourself with what you were able to get away with? This week's guest is writer and comedian Bruce Vilanch, who's been slipping sly queer jokes into our entertainment since before some of us were even born. Starting out as a writer for great divas of the 1970s and then moving

What happens to fussy little boys who love musical theater and have lots of feelings? If they're lucky, they grow up to be fearless women. My guest this week is the fabulous Miss Coco Peru, who you've seen in movies like Girls Will be Girls, To Wong Foo, Trick, and as a guest star in the greatest co