Matt Baume

Was Bram Stoker horny for Walt Whitman? It certainly seems like that may have been the case. Bram did send a very flirtatious letter to Walt, years before Bram wrote Dracula. And Dracula may itself be based on Walt Whitman's book erotic gay poetry. So we're going to be looking into that in this week

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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),

I went to a No Kings protest this weekend and I was thinking: When terrible things happen in the world and it seems like nobody cares and things are never going to get any better, it is very easy to experience despair. So what do you do about that? How do you process those feelings and then move on

The year is 2008, and you are in charge of a campaign to convince California voters that gay marriage is good, actually. The problem is that it's 2008, and California voters aren't sure how they feel about this whole same sex marriage thing. So what do you do?I've been unearthing a lot of old interv

Maybe you saw the deliciously embarrassing depositions of the right-wing idiots brought in to cancel government grants going to anything gay. In the videos, these guys come off as totally unprepared, and rather ridiculous. But ... what happens now? Do these depositions actually DO anything? Well, wh

For this week's bonus video, we're heading to Emerald City Comic Con to meet a bunch of fabulous queer creators, learn about what they're working on, and get recommendations for more books to read. From comics to cook books to sexy big boys, there's something for everyone here. I'm making this bonus

I've been digging through some of my own archival footage recently -- interviews that I did ten to fifteen years ago around Prop 8 and the marriage equality movement. And I've rediscovered some pretty intriguing accounts of early activism for marriage, as well as a very frustrating failure during th

The opponents of marriage equality have always said something like, "for all of history, marriage has always been between one man and one woman." Oh, but has it? I'm working on a video about the history of how gay couples have been depicted in movies & TV, and so I've gathered a lot of research abou

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

I knew that the book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask might be a little dated, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer VOLUME of misunderstandings, ignorance, and outright lies! First published in the late 60s, it's probably one of the most widely-read sex education

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

I've been going to BenDeLaCreme's live holiday shows for about a decade now, and after attending the most recent I noticed something interesting about how their approach to the holidays have changed. This year's show looks at the seasons through the lens of the horror genre, which may seem like a we

I usually post bonus videos on Sundays but this one's very Christmas-themed so I wanted to get it out before the holidays pass by! So please enjoy a bonus-bonus video about The Judy Garland Christmas Special, one of the greatest Christmas specials ever made: Incredibly charming, a little bit sloppy,

The Wizard of Oz is not as he appears! He's actually a heavily edited anime, and a hellish Disney dreamscape, and a Liza Minnelli/Paul Lynde collaboration. For this week's bonus video, we're looking at some of the strangest (and most fun) Wizard of Oz adaptations that made big swings and kinda misse

Are the witches of Wicked queer? How about the witches in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz? There's a lot of rumors and speculation about the actors in both films, with some sources claiming Glinda actress Billie Burke and Wicked Witch actress Margaret Hamilton were both friends of Dorothy. So let's t

Did director Joe Pasternak and actor Anthony Perkins REALLY eat spaghetti with their hands? In this week's bonus video, we're tackling an extremely bizarre Hollywood mystery. In a documentary about MGM, Esther Williams (the synchronized swimming lady) tosses an off-hand comment about Pasternak putti

MGM musicals are known for being big, brassy, sassy musical humdingers. They're big and bold and bright and colorful and cheerful and ... very, very, very gay. Why is that, though? Well, it's thanks to a group of folks known within the industry as "Freed's Fairies." Backup link to the bonus video: h

Hello there! I wanted to get the bonus video out a few days early this week so you can join us for a very special two-day livestream on Twitch this weekend. This Saturday and Sunday, we'll be watching scenes from Young Frankenstein and comparing them to the screenplay -- looking at what was on the p

Some very fun gossip in this week's bonus video: Back in the 1940s, the actor who voiced Disney's Prince Charming had a not-very-secret affair with the actor married to The Bride of Frankenstein. Bill Phipps was the man behind Cinderella's Prince Charming, and he met a fellow actor named Charles Lau

The film Andy Warhol's Frankenstein is not actually, as the name might suggest, the work of Andy Warhol. (Aside from one visit to the set and his attendance at an after party.) So how did his name wind up on this weird piece of ... let's be polite and call it "art"? And is the star of the film, Joe

Jennifer Lopez has been waiting her whole life to be in a great big MGM-style musical... and now she is! In this week's bonus video, we're taking a look at some fun stories about how she wound up in the new Kiss of the Spider Woman, which looks shockingly good despite being a mid-budget indie film.

Of course we love Raul Julia for his Gomez Addams. But there's so much more to his career: Making Shakespeare Puerto Rican, dabbling in a sort of pre-The-Matrix cyberpunk movie, a recurring role on Sesame Street ... and of course, his later role in Street Fighter. So for this week's bonus video, we'

Back in the 1980s, the guys who wrote Conan the Destroyer wrote an X-Men film that was supposed to be the launch of a Marvel movie universe ... but then the studio fell on hard times, the script was shelved, and the project was lost to the sands of time. But not completely lost, because I dug up an

Sometimes, you can get your way through polite negotiation. And other times, you just have to be a real jerk about it. That's what happened with Northstar, the first openly gay superhero at Marvel: Top executives went "ballistic" at the idea, back in 1992, but some brave writers and editors stood up

It's hard to imagine anyone other than Hugh Jackman in the role of Wolverine, and yet ... it very nearly wasn't. And it's even harder to imagine anyone other than Ian McKellen playing Magneto (successfully) ... and yet it nearly wasn't him, either. Who do we have to thank for these two actors landin

There are two different versions of But I'm a Cheerleader -- one that looks great, and another that looks absolutely terrible. And of course, the terrible version was the only one you could get for many years, because the studio that produced it threw out all of the original elements. But there was

There are a lot of "ex-gay" "therapists" who say they can "cure" homosexuality. But they more you hear about their supposed treatments, it's hard not to notice that a lot of them seem really really really gay. So in this week's bonus video we're taking a look at some of the weirdest, the gayest, and

You might know Dante Basco as Prince Zuko from Avatar, or as Jake Long, or as Rufio from Hook. But back in the 90s, he was a break-dancer and he played a gay wrestler in But I'm a Cheerleader -- though the director was worried that he wouldn't manage to pull off the required gay kiss. Not only did h

Hello there! For this week's bonus video, I wanted to give a little context for why, in this house, we adore Natasha Lyonne -- starting with her adorable early roles in commercials and Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and then of course with her teen appearance in But I'm a Cheerleader. Things took an unpleasan

Pretty much any time a book is adapted into a movie, the book was better ... but there are a few notable exceptions, and one of them is Brokeback Mountain. And that's according to Annie Proulx, who wrote the book! In this week's bonus video, we're looking at one change to the story that she vigorous

Hello, here's a rare Monday-afternoon bonus video! Usually I post these on Sundays, but because we've had a lot of folks joining from my new Brokeback Mountain video, I didn't want to keep you in suspense for a week with this one: The best (and mostly worst) Brokeback Mountain jokes from the early 2