As we stumble along through spooky season, I want to dive into the Sewers archives to revisit my 2015 episode about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My guest back then was Matthew Hintzen, a programmer who found Rocky Horror in its early days, the late 70s, when he was a closeted kid on the verge of running away from home to live on the streets. H...
2020-10-22 23:37:00 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week is the legendary performer Peppermint, star of stage and screen, from Drag Race to Pose to Broadway. Her new album “A Girl Like Me” comes out this week, featuring autobiographical songs about a turbulent relationship, along with a steamy music video called Good Sex. And she’s got some livestreams and fundraisers and elec...
2020-10-15 20:45:24 +0000 UTC View PostOho, behold, another episode of Cozy Pants, the Patreon-exclusive podcast where me & James talk about the entertainment that makes us loopy. This week we're talking about hunting monsters together (as gay lovers) and also the mystifying discovery of Deflated Garfield. Also on the agenda is my resentment of Superman II, and strange fascinatio...
2020-10-13 16:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week is the drag artist known as Deere. You may know her from her livestreams on Twitch, where she plays primarily horror games. She’s also the founder of Stream Queens, a collective of drag artists, makeup monsters, and creatures who adopt amazing costumes and personas to livestream games. Off-camera, Deere’s a quiet introvert...
2020-10-09 20:43:22 +0000 UTC View PostHello friends!
There's a brisk snap in the air, a cool autumn breeze and the howl of a wolf signaling the start of what will surely be an extremely bizarre Halloween season. How are you planning to enjoy this strange spooky season? I've been taking a fresh look at one of my favorite films, The Addams Family,...
2020-10-04 06:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
My guest this week is Chris Pepin-Neff, the world’s foremost expert on human-shark interaction. His life was shaped, you will be shocked to hear, by the movie Jaws — but also by his time in a socialist commune, as well as working alongside Frank Kameny, one of the leading gay rights activists of the 20th century, not to mention ...
2020-10-02 16:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostYou may have seen the very exciting news this week that BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon will release a holiday special this year — an adaptation of their wonderful live holiday show. I helped out with the shooting of the special and without giving away too much, I can tell you...
2020-09-25 23:39:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello Patreon backers!
I'm bringing you a new thing this month -- Patron-exclusive video messages to update you on some of the fun weird wild stuff I'm working on. (If you can't see the video embedded above, you can also view it here: (https://youtu.be/sOF0esDj...
2020-09-24 20:47:13 +0000 UTC View PostLove is in the air this week with my guest Philip William Stover, writer of numerous romance novels both gay and straight. Growing up, he hid his love of romance, tearing the covers off of books so nobody would notice what he was reading. But as he grew up, he started to realize the extent to which queer people are often denied an opportunity to...
2020-09-18 13:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week likes a good scare. As a kid, Sam Irvin loved Bride of Frankenstein, and he brought that influence with him as an adult when he 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 McKellan, Sam is an endless source of...
2020-09-10 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostHello friends!
Well here we are, wrapping up (what will hopefully be) the weirdest summer of our lives -- I hope you're safe, secure, and comfortable, wherever you are.
A quick reminder that this month the rewards for new Patrons have changed. If you joined before September 1, your level will remai...
2020-09-10 00:25:10 +0000 UTC View PostWe're back with a new Cozy Pants podcast to share our recent entertainment joys: A strange astronomical man, supercuts of Celine Dion and Alex Trebek, and a fantasy novel that I actually enjoyed, for once. We also have a few fond reminiscences of weird hyper-local TV stations on the Northeast, and suggest that you familiarize yourself with the m...
2020-09-08 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the three hundredth episode of the show, and I just want to take a moment to say how incredibly grateful I am to the hundreds of amazing guests who’ve made time to talk to me, listeners like you who download the show and recommend it to friends, and of course everyone on Patreon whose support allows me to create the show week after wee...
2020-09-03 22:51:35 +0000 UTC View PostOn this episode we’re remembering Chi Chi DeVayne, performer and Drag Race star who passed away last week at the age of 34. I spoke to Chi Chi back in 2018, when she was appearing on All Stars, about her roots, her religion, and how she drew on military training as she discovered her love of drag.
This week I’ll also be posting some cl...
2020-08-27 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostThe topic this week: Tori Amos, Steel Magnolias, and Alice in Wonderland.
What piece of media gets you through your rough patches? For my guest this week, it’s Steel Magnolias, a movie that helped him understand his place as a little gay kid among powerful southern women. It’s also the film that got him through election night 201...
2020-08-20 16:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostOn this week's Cozy Pants podcast, we're fussing over some lovely YouTube serieses that we love: Tasting History, which is kind of a one-man Great British Bakeoff; and Scaredy Cats, which has revealed to me that maybe I actually like horror movies, actually??? We have two short What's Her Names, muse about Avatar: The Last Airbender, and confess...
2020-08-17 16:02:00 +0000 UTC View PostImagine if there was someone out there who could, in a matter of minutes, help you make sense of the unanswered questions you’ve asked about yourself for as long as your can remember. My guest this week is JP Karliak, a voice actor and writer who you might recognize as the voice of the characters Boss Baby, Wile E Coyote on those occasions whe...
2020-08-13 19:27:32 +0000 UTC View PostHi friends!
I’m going to be making some adjustments to the reward tiers next month, and I wanted to let you know what’s going to change and what isn't.
Here’s the TL;DR version: Your pledge amount and rewards will remain the same, unless you decide to change them.
And here’s more details about exactly ...
2020-08-12 18:39:32 +0000 UTC View PostYou might’ve seen the news this week that after three decades, NBC cancelled the entertainment show E! News. For this week’s episode, we’re revisiting my 2015 conversation with one of the hosts of E! News, Steve Kmetko. Steve was the face of the E! cable network from 1994 to 2002, and in addition to hosting the news show he also anchored c...
2020-08-07 00:27:52 +0000 UTC View PostWelcome to another episode of Cozy Pants! This week James and I are talking about Legendary, the ballroom competition-reality show on HBO Max that is very very good. It compares interestingly to early seasons of The Great British Bake-Off, if you can believe that, and is also like a more modern (and I think enjoyable) version of Drag Race. We al...
2020-08-03 16:01:05 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week is Tom Zohar, whose love for stories about powerful women led him to movies like Death Becomes Her and The Joy Luck Club, and whose hippie parents brought him to musicals like Hair. A common thread through a lot of Tom’s favorite media is characters who are completely and totally un-repressed, but self-repression was an issu...
2020-07-30 16:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week is Hamish Steele, whose graphic novel Deadendia is being adapted into an animated series at Netflix. The show will feature a gay trans man as the lead character, and it’s inspired both by Hamish’s friends and his love of shows like Dr Who and movies like The Addams Family Values, which feature queer-ish if not explicitly q...
2020-07-23 16:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostTime for yet another round of nonsense with the Cozy Pants podcast. James is wide awake this week and yet somehow he's stranger than ever, with some creative ideas about starfish and potatoes. We've got some Totoro to discuss, as well as a very butt-centric early Bugs Bunny cartoon. And we're SO CLOSE to the end of Modelland this week we can alm...
2020-07-20 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostYou might have seen that Disney is about to release a new documentary called Howard, all about the legacy of the great Howard Ashman whose music gave live to stories like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and many more. For this week’s episode, we’re diving into the Sewers of Paris archive to revisit my 2015 conversation about anothe...
2020-07-16 20:36:33 +0000 UTC View PostWe're back with another baffling Cozy Pants podcast, with James as sleepy as he's ever been and me almost as forgetful. We just watched Spirited Away and have some thoughts about what makes it so good (and what it's lacking, namely, cats). We also touch upon salad anxieties, an exciting new character named Mist Piggy, and the documentary Kiki wh...
2020-07-14 04:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello and welcome to the Sewers of Paris. This week’s guest, Terry LaBolt, was suggested to me by a Sewers of Paris listener, and I’m so glad that they did. Terry has an absolutely amazing collection of stories from across his career, starting as a young kid transfixed by musical theater, then later as Carol Channing’s music d...
2020-07-09 16:05:01 +0000 UTC View PostHello friends!
Thank you so much for all your support on Patreon. Before we talk about what's going on this month, I wanted to give you a heads-up about a small change to Patreon.
Starting this month, Patreon is required to collect sales tax on some items. Most backers won't be affected by this, depending on wh...
2020-07-07 23:45:01 +0000 UTC View PostMy guest this week is illustrator and film obsessive Dashiell Silva, who you might know from his excellent Oscar guides and also as an artist on the just announced Netflix series Deadendia, which looks, by the way, amazing. Dashiell grew up in the West of Ireland where nob...
2020-07-02 20:28:47 +0000 UTC View PostAs we reach the conclusion of a particularly busy Pride month, I wanted to dive back into the Sewers of Paris archives for a conversation with someone who knew Greenwich Village in the years before Stonewall.
The Village is the gay enclave that was the model for many of the enclaves we know today, a place where people went to reject the ma...
2020-06-25 20:14:16 +0000 UTC View PostThis week’s guest is Michael Hobbes, writer for the Huffington Post and co-host of the fantastic podcast You’re Wrong About. Michael’s influences are like the jump cut in the movie 2001: one of the pieces of media that shaped him as a person takes place in prehistoric Eurasia; and another is set in early 2000s gay bars of Pittsburgh. The t...
2020-06-18 16:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post