We all grow up differently. We have different cities, different racial makeups, different genders, different years, different families, different sexualities, and differet attitudes. The one thing that many of us in the modern age can attest to is that we grew up with an infinite sense of pop culture.
Matt Baume’s podcast, The Sewers of Paris, is an hour each week exploring the life of a gay man through his relationship with culture. What makes The Sewers of Paris vital is that we’re currently at a nexus where one generation of gay men had to discover each other for healthy role models, and the other just had to turn on the internet, and the range of people in between.
The Sewers of Paris is currently in its infancy, with half of the conversations sounding like a cross between therapy and American culture dissection. Hidden within these walls, the hidden kaleidoscopic image of the modern homosexual male comes into a broader relief. If what we think of as the gay male cliche is Jack and Will from Will and Grace, then The Sewers of Paris opens up the lens to have a broader and more technicolor focus into view.
Currently in week 20, the one shortcoming of The Sewers of Paris is that Matt Baume is only focusing on cis-gendered gay men. Though there have been a few genderqueer types and drag queens, mainly this is a podcast by, about, and for gay men. Topics have included some of the usual stuff – The Wizard of Oz, Soap, The Birdcage – but, there have also been inclusions of E.M. Forster, Frankenstein, and Little Shop of Horrors.
Each episode is its own messy conversational journey, sometimes spanning years or decades of a man’s life, showing how each individual came into their own. Each episode is an hour or under, and they’re all worth it. Last Thursday’s podcast featured an African-American writer for The Guardian who grew up on Will and Grace and has to come to terms with its regressive tendencies. Check it out.
The Sewers of Paris – Matt Baume
As an editor’s note: the above link is an affiliate link, something I’m testing out for my convenience and yours. The Sewers of Paris is free (yay!), so it’s not like I’m making a buck off it. To be perfectly up front, this post is both to promote a fascinating podcast and to test out the affiliate link situation. If you guys would like to see other forms of links (i.e. What do you Android and Windows Phone people use? How can we make things more convenient for you?), let us know. Now, if the link works, I’ll have to see if I can get the damned button to work…