My guest on The Sewers of Paris podcast this week is Oliver Darkshire. As a young adult, he found himself drifting away from his friends, due in part to what turned out to be an undiagnosed illness that made it hard for him to participate in day-to-day activities....
2022-04-28 21:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a great big Will & Grace video headed your way in a few weeks, all about that show's monumental impact not just on TV but on American politics -- including a very unexpected moment where my work intersected with Joe Biden. In this week's bonus video, I'm bringing you some fun behind-the-scenes interviews with the creators &a...
2022-04-24 17:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest on The Sewers of Paris this week is Harold Slazer, an actor-writer-director whose life was changed in an instant after a car crash and ensuing memory problems that left him unable to remember people, places, and his own work. He rebuilt his life and created a popular live show in New York called The Honeysuckles — a comedic h...
2022-04-21 18:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Dynasty's known for cliffhangers, and the bizarre UFO scene in the finale of the Colbys spinoff is -- I think -- their greatest work. Alas, America didn't quite see it that way, because the show was cancelled before it had a chance to explain itself. But we can still speculate about what the hell they were thinking! Also in this week's ...
2022-04-17 17:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis week sees the release of Love and War, a new comic book set in the competitive world of varsity tug-of-war and featuring a lovely upbeat queer romance. (It's free to read for Prime members, and otherwise just $3.) The author, Andrew Wheeler, was my guest on The Sew...
2022-04-15 16:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is the performer, author, and academic known as Lil Miss Hot Mess, who was fortunate enough to grow up with a proto-queer friend group that paved the way for a professional drag career. Over the years, what began as a hobby for Lil Miss Hot Mess gradually morphed into a method for grabbing atten...
2022-04-07 16:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
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 Totally Trans)...
2022-04-03 17:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostThis month marks the 30 year anniversary of the American debut of Sailor Moon, and to celebrate on this week's Sewers of Paris we’re diving back into the archives to hear my 2018 chat with author Ryan La Salla. When we last spoke, Ryan was about to publish his first novel — Reverie, a queer adult fantasy. Since then, he’s written ...
2022-03-31 19:46:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Well hello!
The upcoming video about Dynasty is still chugging along, but in the mean time I've got some fun treats to share -- a Dynasty live show (!!!) featuring one actor who played the gay son on the show and another actor who recently came out of the closet, so good for them! Also a story about how Charlie's Ange...
2022-03-28 16:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest on this week's Sewers of Paris podcast is producer Xavier D’Leau, who always knew that he needed, somehow, to make television shows that tell the stories of black queer lives. That wasn’t going to be easy, considering he went to school for socia...
2022-03-24 16:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
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: Sometime in 1982, the singer Carly Simon interviewed her then-boyfriend, actor Al Corley (who played the gay son on Dynasty) and the results were VERY bizarre. I've also o...
2022-03-20 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest on this week's Sewers of Paris podcast left his old life behind to chase dreams of freedom with the love of his life. Buck Jones was working a corporate job with a homophobic boss when he and his then-boyfriend, now-husband sold their home and moved overseas to open a little café in Paris. It was the culmination of a lot of ch...
2022-03-17 16:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi hello!
I am SO DELIGHTED to share these clips of weird queer TV history with you! Recently, a Madam puppet appeared on an episode of Antiques Roadshow, and if you're not familiar with Madam ... you'll just have to trust me that she was a whole THING in the 1970s, a saucy diva puppet performed with blinding gayness by a man named Waylon ...
2022-03-13 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostMy 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 literar...
2022-03-10 17:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
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 video, and now I'...
2022-03-06 23:11:51 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest on The Sewers of Paris this week is Michael Bach, whose life was changed in a movie theater — or more precisely, just outside of one, when a conversation about the film he’d just seen led to a terrible discovery about the person he was currently dating. Now, three decades later, Michael’s entire career has come to encompa...
2022-03-03 17:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello there!
I was drifting off to sleep last night, thinking about how March is said to "come in like a lion and out like a lamb," and as a result I slept deeply and dreamed of lions removing what turned out to be lion-themed onesie pajamas, revealing that they'd been sheep all along. I hope your sleep as of late has been just as pe...
2022-03-02 18:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello hello! This week's bonus video has one more deleted-and-then-reconstructed joke from the pilot of Soap. Plus! A little sneak-peek at the Dynasty video I'm working on next, featuring lots of glamour, beauty, and slapping ... and also a pretty incredible life-story of creator Aaron Spelling, who wound up in Texas because when the family came...
2022-02-27 18:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis week sees the re-release of one of the greatest videogames ever made, Majora’s Mask, which is about a young boy trying to stop the end of the world. In commemoration, we’re diving into the Sewers of Paris archives yet again for a chat about the game with a man who’s given a lot of thought to impending apocalypses, bo...
2022-02-24 21:17:24 +0000 UTC View Post
I generally don't side with the network censors, but it turns out that there were a couple of jokes in the first few episodes of Soap that ... well, taking them out was indeed a good call, as it turns out. But the rest of the censors' notes are pretty bad! In this week's bonus video, I'll share what I've been able to reconstruct of what was remo...
2022-02-21 18:00:07 +0000 UTC View PostFor this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris, we’re jumping back to a 2015 interview about the show Soap, which was something of an obsession for my guest Andrew.
It's a little unfair that so many gay men adore The Golden Girls, but fewer have heard of the show Soap, without which Blanche, Rose, Sophia and Dorothy w...
2022-02-17 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Well hello there!
Time for another bonus video, and this week I've got the hot gossip about the joke that ABC made the show Soap cut from its pilot episode. Also! Confirmation of the story about Susan Harris cursing out a bunch of NBC executives, and details about a couple of gay guys who (kind of) pulled off an elaborate...
2022-02-13 18:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostNext week would have been the 96th birthday of Kenneth Williams, an incredible British performer who hid queer culture in plain sight on the BBC back in the 1960s. For this week’s episode of The Sewers of Paris podcast, we’re diving all the way back into the archives to one of my very first episodes, a conversation with gam...
2022-02-10 17:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week on The Sewers of Paris is Jim Colucci, author of numerous books about the behind-the-scenes stories of the making of classic TV shows. In his work he’s had opportunities to interview greats like Norman Lear, Betty White, and Bea Arthur — but the R...
2022-02-10 17:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello, forest creatures. Welcome to another bonus video!
Backup link if the embed's not working: https://youtu.be/haOL5vbrxho
This week I've got a bunch of fun stories to share: Before he was the first recurring gay character on a successful US sitcom, Billy C...
2022-02-07 06:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello Fleckman Fans,
I'm doing something a little different with this week's bonus video -- I'm going to share with you my full conversation with Stan Zimmerman, who was a writer on many episodes of The Golden Girls and went on to such delightful projects as the Brady Bunch movie and the lesbian kiss episode of Roseanne. Stan was kind enou...
2022-01-30 18:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest on this week's Sewers of Paris podcast is author Jonathan Alexander, whose new book Dear Queer Self comes out in March 2022 and is a sort of conversation with his younger self, and an attempt to recapture some of younger-him’s wisdom. Though Jonathan of today has been through a lot of eye-opening experiences, from a brief marriage to ...
2022-01-27 17:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Well hello there!
In this week's bonus video, I've got a very fun (dirty) joke courtesy of Rue McClanahan, and a real ~ mystery ~ about what she was doing standing next to hunky Dustin Hoffman at a party (???) sometime in the 1970s. Also! Check out this clip of Betty White spitballing about Cary Grant's sex life with Joy Behar. Was Cary Gr...
2022-01-23 18:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week on the Sewers of Paris podcast grew up alongside eight sisters, in a home so crowded his room was a tiny storage closet. Splitting his time between homeschooling and the family flea market, Caudle had a particularly insulated upbringing — until an adventure to a convention for fellow nerds opened his eyes to a big w...
2022-01-20 17:01:03 +0000 UTC View PostFifty-eight years ago this weekend, the musical Hello Dolly opened on Broadway — and this week we’re diving into the Sewers archive for a chat with Guy Branum about why, for him, the show encapsulates all the greatest joyful aspects of being gay.
2022-01-13 17:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post