Matt Baume

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to everyone who supports The Sewers of Paris on Patreon -- with your pledges I'm able to release monthly bonus episodes like this one. This week we'll be going beyond The Sewers of Paris with someone for whom I am truly grateful. Kate Kendell is the outgoing director of the National Center fo