The Sewers of Paris

We generally have queer guests on this show, but I’m willing to make an exception for this week’s guest: The actor Barry Bostwick, who played Brad in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A few weeks ago I ran into Barry at the pop culture convention Ancient City Con in Florida, and he very generously sat down to chat with me about Rocky Horror, what he hears from queer fans whose lives the movie changed -- and occasionally saved — and also the advice he got from a psychic for playing George Washington. 

Also, a quick heads-up that I...

As we head into spooky season this October, I want to take a peek back into the Sewers archives for a chat with Sam Irvin. As a kid, Sam Irvin loved Bride of Frankenstein, and he brought that influence with him as an adult when he co-produced the film Gods and Monsters, and directed the show Dante’s Cove and the movie Elvira’s Haunted Hills — among many other projects. Whether working with Christopher Lee, Brian DePalma, or Ian McKellen, Sam is an endless source of amazing haunted Hollywood tales.

We’ll have that conversation in just a moment...

Sorry this week's Sewers of Paris is coming a few days late -- it took a little extra time to arrange but I think it's worth it! This week I’m chatting with Scott Heim, the author of the 1995 novel Mysterious Skin, which was adapted into a film by Gregg Araki in 2004.

Scott's book is the story of two teenage boys, both dealing with the same childhood trauma in very different ways, and this conversation’s a little different from the usual Sewers of Paris interviews: Scott recently passed through Seattle, and I sat down with him at N...

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris is Damian Pelliccione, who started his career as an actor — if you watch closely, you can catch him on a 2005 episode of Gillmore Girls. Twenty years later, he’s in a very different role, as the co-founder and CEO of the streaming video service Revry. That service hosts an eclectic mix of queer-themed movies, shows, and original web series (including King of Drag, which just launched its second season).  But despite having dedicated the last decade of his life to building this business, these days Damian feels particularly nostalgic for a time...

Like everyone on Earth, I’ve been looking back at the work of both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, in absolute awe of everything they gave us. For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris, we’re revisiting an interview that touched on both Dolly and Tim: My 2018 conversation with the drag performer who now goes by Alaska, and her longtime friend and collaborator Jeremy Mikush. We talk about all about their early influences, watching Rocky Horror together on a little laptop screen, and also the creation of the Alaska drag-sona, the time they sang Dolly Parton songs...

My guest this week has a track record of going viral — whether he wanted to or not. Mike Aylesworth’s first brush with fame was as a teenager in the late 90s when he challenged the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay members… then in adulthood when he dreamed up an invention in the bathtub that changed his life, first for the better and then for the worse. He’s written about his work with the Scouts (and how that turned into work against the Scouts for awhile) in an upcoming book entitled Boy Pageant. As you’ll hear, Mike’s always been...

You might recognize the voice of this week’s Sewers of Paris guest — Tony Rodriguez plays Julio on The Simpsons, a role originated by Hank Azaria. This part didn’t come to Tony in the way you might expect. It was a combination of talent, training, taking some very bold initiative, and an intercession from the podcast Gayest Episode Ever. As you can imagine, being cast on The Simpsons was the opportunity of a lifetime … and it was fitting, since Tony’s initial inspiration to become an actor came from another, much earlier Hank Azaria role.

We’ll have that...

My guest this week is writer and historian Jack Shoulder. You might know him from his daily social media posts focusing on butts from across art history, or for his upcoming book Museum Hotties… which is about exactly what it sounds like. As a kid, Jack’s interest in classical sculpture was inspired, in part, by the muscular contours of superhero costumes… and much of his work today is an exploration of how that’s an interest shared by many folks over thousands of years. And sometimes, that means fighting against conservative forces in the art world who don’t want to ad...

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is David Lauterstein, the founder and CEO of Nasty Pig. You probably know his company for their sexy fetish-infused street wear, so you might not expect that David’s background is in writing poetry. But the closer you look at his approach to designing clothing, the more it makes sense — using fabric to build a scene like a writer uses words. David recently published a memoir called Sodomy Gods, chronicling the early days of his company and how its origins lie in a surprisingly wholesome love story.

This week marks the birthday of the author and activist James Baldwin, and to mark the occasion we’re heading into the Sewers archives for a conversation that touches on the expansiveness of Baldwin’s writing. In 2022, I spoke with a guest named Jonathan about how literature helped him discover a larger world — which led to a lifetime of eye-opening experiences, from a brief marriage to a woman to enduring the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

My guest on The Sewers of Paris this week is Iain Bell, who made a career out of his personal passion for music. But he took a winding road to get there ... and could never have predicted that a job as a personal trainer would be a crucial step towards premiering an opera in Vienna.

My guest this week grew up in challenging circumstances — a gay kid in Nigeria with a religious family, Bisi couldn’t imagine anywhere on Earth he might belong. Especially after he came out on national television, and had to apply for asylum to escape his increasingly dire living situation. It took a lot of work to get himself to a much happier place — along with the support of his friends, and inspiration from music that helped keep him going.

And just a heads-up: This episode touches on some sensitive themes, including suicide, survival sex work, and abuse.

A few months ago, I came across an incredible video. It’s the early 70s, and a local Chicago talk show is interviewing a doctor who wrote a sex education book that millions of people across the country were reading … unaware that it was full of wildly incorrect and frankly homophobic claims about homosexuals. The interview is going smoothly until suddenly a man jumps up from the studio audience and does what nobody else had dared — he confronts the doctor about his misinformation and demands he explain himself. That man in the audience was Murray Edelman, and I’m very exc...

My guest on this week's Sewers of Paris is writer/comedian Mano Agapion, whose work you may know from his appearances on Hacks and Bajillion Dollar Properties, his writing on the new Punky Brewster, or from his podcasts We Love Trash and Drag Her. Mano developed his sense of humor alongside the weirdest comedies he could find, growing up in an immigrant household, and for a long time thought that he had to keep his gay life and his comedy life separated. Until he figured out that being gay is, itself, very funny.

When you compare what queer life was like at the end of the 80s to the start of the 2000s, the differences are so shocking it’s hard to believe that those years are only separated by a single decade. The author and historian Hugh Ryan has a new book about the people who shaped that decade, entitled My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond. I spoke to Hugh back in 2020, when he released his previous book When Brooklyn was Queer. We spoke about his love for pulpy sci-fi novels that filled his middle school da...

You might’ve seen that I have a new video up on YouTube this week — it’s about the long hard fight for marriage equality, and how some Hollywood icons got involved in the cause. The battle for the freedom to marry has been very much on my mind lately, so I wanted to revisit an interview from 2022 with Chris Geidner. You may know Chris for his day job, reporting and writing on some of the most pressing legal issues of the day — including his expert attention to all matters Supreme Court. But he’s just as passionate about musical th...

Next week sees the release of a new Supergirl movie, so for this week’s Sewers of Paris we’re diving into the archives to revisit my 2020 interview with artist Joe Philips. Joe’s illustrations of handsome, happy gay men were some of the first glimpses I got of gay life, back in the 90s when I was a teenager exploring the Internet. I remember finding his art both sexy and wholesome, showing scantily-clad young men in romantic scenes. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned about his work on mainstream superhero comics … and his more eroti...

For this week’s episode, we have two guests: Andrew Klaus-Vineyard and Daniel Talbott are the directors of a new documentary short called Welcome to Tool Shed, which opens to the door to an iconic leather bar in Palm Springs. They’re just back from showing the film at Cannes, and it’ll be popping up at film festivals around the world in the coming months. Daniel and Andrew are longtime collaborators, first with daring theater projects, then with queer horror, and now with a documentary about how a generation that never expected to be senior citizens, and wh...

My guest this week is Caleb Roehrig, author of young adult mysteries and the occasional romance. Caleb had always wanted to be an author, but life intervened and he found himself living in LA, working as a producer on reality TV shows. He didn’t realize it at the time, but that work was a training ground for storytelling. Though he still might not have figured it out until an economic crisis forced him to try something new.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick heads-up that Sewers of Paris episodes will take...

The world just celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday — born in late April, a scant four hundred and sixty two years ago, which makes him almost as old as this podcast. Over the years we’ve had many guests on The Sewers of Paris for whom Shakespeare’s work was an inspiration, and this week we’ll hear my 2021 with Jeffrey Masters — then the host of the acclaimed podcast LGBTQ&A, and now a senior producer at The New Yorker Radio Hour. Jeffrey launched his career in interviews and storytelling with a move to LA, planning to be an actor. And at first, he...

My guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Jes Battis, who’s just written an appreciation and analysis of the movie Labyrinth entitled It’s Only Forever. Labyrinth turns 40 this year, which marks 40 years of Jes’ particular fascination with the goblin characters — and wondering why he’s always felt so eager to descend into their weird scrungly world. Fortunately, writing a book about it provided some clues.

To mark the recent re-re-re-rebooting of The Muppet Show, this week we’re heading into the Sewers archives to revisit my 2020 interview with Dan Steadman. Dan grew up in a household that was so religious, his parents forbade him from watching certain episodes of The Muppet Show, due to a guest appearance by Alice Cooper. His upbringing in a sheltered religious community found him placed in a lot of unusual circumstances, including a reboot of his entire identity when his family swapped lives with a family in Brazil. A career in showbiz took him to Los Angeles, where he wo...

A few weeks ago I came across an online video from a comic convention featuring a phalanx of comic book figures — life-size statues, painted to look like they’d walked off the pages of a comic book. Their creator is Greg Maraio, an actor and artist in Boston who fills his time between shows with this unique project that’s turned into an artistic calling … though for many years, it seemed like it was bringing him to financial ruin.

 We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick reminder that I host weekly livestreams every Sunday on T...

The day this episode comes out, March 26 2026, is the 115th birthday of renowned playwright Tennessee Williams. And to mark the occasion, we’re heading into the Sewers archives to hear my 2020 interview with writer William V. Madison, whose career was inspired in part by a moving experience in college involving a Streetcar Named Desire. That brought William to a series of adventurous jobs, from working on Broadway shows to producing the news alongside Dan Rather, singing to Angela Lansbury, earning a nickname from Fidel Castro, and writing a biography of Madeline Kahn. 

My guest this week is illustrator Ricardo Bessa, whose beautiful art features lush colorful fantasy settings and characters on fabulous adventures, often very queer. Ricardo knew he was a fish out of water in the town where he grew up, and planned to move to London to find others like him … and that worked, at first, but he didn’t count on running into burnout that nearly ended his career.

On last week’s episode we heard from drag comedienne Pissi Myles, and this week we’ll hear from Pissi’s husband, photographer and creative director David Ayllon. David’s specialty is weird colorful visions that lean heavily on the spooky, the queer, and the poppiest of pop art — a career that he thought he’d blown after one particularly disastrous interview and a years-long search for something that seemed, for a long time, impossible: A job that pays the bills and is creatively fulfilling. 

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick reminder that I host wee...

My guest this week is drag comedienne Pissi Myles, who always knew she needed to be on stage but wasn’t always sure where she fit in… thanks to a music theater education that left her feeling like she couldn’t measure up to her classmates, and comparing herself to the host of Blues Clues. That is, until she discovered a wig and heels and her calling, which these days involves ruining showbiz classics, in a loving way.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick reminder that I host weekly livestreams every Sunday o...

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Pokémon, and to celebrate we’re diving into the Sewers archives to hear my 2019 chat with Cody Shipman. Cody’s a graphic designer and artist here in Seattle whose work is very beautiful, very gay, and very explicit. For a long time, he felt hesitant about blending his gay interests and his nerdy interests together. But it was when he finally merged them that he found inspiration for some of his most rewarding work to date.

Check out Cody’s (not safe work work!) art here: https...

This week, I’m welcoming back Randy West, who was my guest in the Sewers of Paris way back in 2017. Randy is a TV industry veteran whose voice you might recognize from announcing on shows like The Price is Right, Supermarket Sweep, Big Brother, and countless others. From his decades behind a microphone, Randy’s been present for the creation of a lot of iconic TV shows, and these days he’s helping to preserve that past at one of the most important production studios in the world.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick...

My guest this week is Steven Salvatore, author of young adult romances like And They Lived…, No Perfect Places, and When Love Gives You Lemons. Steven’s plan, when he was younger, was to be an artist… until a cruel art teacher crushed his dreams. But that set the stage for him to discover a passion for writing, and for exploring stories about young queer people in love.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick heads up that I’m planning a European book tour this spring and summer, where I’ll be readin...

My guest this week is game developer Tim Cain, who’s shown us what the end of the world looks like. Back in the mid-90s, Tim was working with a small team on a post-apocalyptic game with a 1950s aesthetic — a weird mix of styles that Tim was worried would bomb so hard he expected his next job would be serving fast food. But … that game was Fallout, which became a massive phenomenon, with multiple sequels and a TV series based on the game that just wrapped its second season. One of the recurring themes of Fallout is people...

My guest this week is Massachusetts State Senator Julian Cyr, whose district includes Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket — a situation he never expected to find himself in. As a teenager, Julian was mainly focused on singing, and planned to pursue a career in the humanities. But when budget cuts threatened local arts programs, he organized people to speak up, and discovered he had a knack for leadership that eventually brought him to a specialized program at NYU, the Obama White House, and now to the last place on Earth he ever thought he’d go — the place where he gre...

My guest this week is queer artist and illustrator Cheyne Gallarde, whose style blends drag icons with classic comic book covers. Cheyne first discovered drag in queer bars of Hawaii, and after a memorable night getting pulled up onstage, he started translating the magic that he saw in the community into literal super powers.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick reminder that I host weekly livestreams every Sunday on Twitch, and I hope you’ll join me for those; also check out my book Hi Honey, I’m Homo! at GaySitcoms.com; s...

Congratulations to actor-writer-comedian Joel Kim Booster, who got married last month to his partner John. You might know Joel as the writer and star of the movie Fire Island, or as a voice actor in KPop Demon Hunters, or from shows like Big Mouth, Search Party, and Loot. But before all that, Joel was a guest on The Sewers of Paris, way back in 2017, when we talked about his childhood, his coming out, and a period when he was homeless. To celebrate his wedding, we’re taking a trip back to that conversation for this week’s episode.

A...

You may know this week’s guest from his online persona, The Black Gay Comic Geek — an identity that grew out of his Buffy fandom, which was so intense that for a time he was an administrator of a Buffy role-playing community where he was a magic shop owner and queen of the vengeance demons. These days, Michael flies around the country covering pop culture, always looking for his great passions: Blood, sex, gore, and magic.

Check out Michael’s work at https://linktr.ee/blackgaycomicgeek

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First a quick...

My guest this week is author Jumata Emill, whose new novel is entitled I Don’t Wish You Well. It’s about a true-crime writer who uncovers a queer coverup in his hometown — based in part on Jumata’s prior work as a real-life crime reporter, before he made the jump to fiction.

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, a quick heads up that I have a new video out about the making of the Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme holiday special. Check that out at youtube.com/mattbaume.

And please join me for weekly...

I can think of few better ways to spend the holidays than seeing some live queer theater, whether it’s Golden Girls Live, a sing-along to Mame, or shows with some of my local Seattle drag legends like Dina Martina and Scott Shoemaker. And one of the most iconic holiday duos to emerge from the Emerald City is Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme. Every year they create a new holiday show and tour it around the world, and you might recall that when theaters were closed in 2020 they taped a holiday special and streamed it online. 

My latest You...

My guest this week is Steven Milliken, author of a book of autobiographical essays entitled Late Bloomer Baby Boomer. Steven was a class clown who grew up to become a teacher in some fairly rough schools, and had to move in and out of the closet over the years as he navigated sensitive careers alongside alcoholism and sobriety

We’ll have that interview in a moment. First, a quick heads up that I have a new video coming this weekend about the making of the Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme holiday special, including an exclusive interview with BenDeLaCreme an...

My guest this week had his big screen debut alongside Adam Baldwin and Matt Dillon in 1980; made a career getting gays online with PlanetOut in the 90s; and today work for TED Talks, bringing together who are doing, as he describes it, some of the weirdest work in he world. Tom Rielly’s had a lot of jobs, and one of the constants has been figuring out new ways to bring audiences along for an unpredictable ride.

We’ll have that conversation in a moment. First, a quick heads up that I have a new YouTube video out...

For this week’s Sewers of Paris, 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 culture that just went live on YouTube — check that out at YouTube.com/mattbaume . In this episode, you’ll hear from writer and artist Terry Blas about his childhood traveling between Idaho and Mexico, which felt very similar to Dorothy’s journey; you’ll hear from writer Josh Trujillo about his youthful obsession to...