Matt Baume

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

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

For this week’s Sewers of Paris, we're doing something a little different: I’m chatting with four Oz superfans about their intense connections to films like The Wizard of Oz, books like Return to Oz, and adaptations like Wicked. (These conversations are all part of my new video about Oz and queer cu

To mark the recent release of the second Wicked film, for this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris we’re revisiting my 2020 interview with Dee Michel, author of the book Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love the Wizard of Oz. Dee’s book is an in-depth examination of queer Oz fandom, wh

For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris, we’re trying something new — I’ll interview my guest, Christian Garcia, about the movies that changed his life. And then he’ll interview me about the media that shaped mine, for his podcast. Christian’s the host of That Ol’ Gay Classic Cinema, which fo

We’re trying different for this week’s Sewers of Paris podcast. Instead of one guest, we have three — the cast of the new film Throuple. It’s a polyamorous romcom, a concert film, a coming-of-age story … and also a culmination of a long journey for Michael Doshier, Tommy Heleringer, and Stanton Plum

Before we get to this week’s episode, I have a question for you. And that question is … do you have any questions for me? I ask because we’re coming up on the 500th episode of The Sewers of Paris next month, and to celebrate I’m going to be doing a special Q&A episode where I answer questions from l

Hello from New York! I'm back for some more archive research, and also a big fabulous Pride event at the Toronto Public Library (to which you're invited! Details below!) ... but that won't stop me from recording a bonus video on some random overpass with a weird clunky-looking building in the backgr

This week I’m talking to Mayor John Bauters — yes that’s right the actual mayor of Emeryville, which are the words on the sash that was made for him by Pixar studios, just one of the constituencies in his East Bay town. John never planned to become an elected official, and he doesn’t care if people

My guest on the Sewers of Paris podcast this week is playwright Tyler Dwiggins, who grew up in an isolated, rural Indiana farm town where there wasn’t much in the way of arts — especially if someone else needed to use the school’s combination auditorium/cafeteria. That’s why today he produces the ki

My guest this week is Dee Michel, author of the book “Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Boys and Gay Men Love the Wizard of Oz.” Dee grew up in the 1950s with the threat of the red scare looming over his family — his parents met at a Communist Party meeting, and there was the constant threat that the fami