Matt Baume is the writer and storyteller behind the book Defining Marriage and the audio podcast Sewers of Paris, in which he interviews members of the gay community about their experiences and relationships with marriage and entertainment media. His latest ambition is Playing With Pride, a video project in which he and partner James Morris share the stories of attendees of GaymerX, an annual video game convention for the LGBT+ community. Featuring interviews with Sabriel Mastin, Susan Arendt, Jonathan Holmes, Benjamin Williams, Cetine, and more, these vignettes demonstrate the diversity of gaming culture, the courage of gamers, and the power of storytelling.
In this interview, Matt and I chat about his cross-country road trip to find and interview GaymerX supporters; how being a gay gamer is like being closeted twice; the potential that video games offer for both connection and disconnect; what Matt’s learned, both about gamers and about himself, from these interviews; whether Playing With Pride is reaching its target audience or is preaching to the choir; what format the final project will take upon its 2017 release; and San Francisco aquatic sanitation.
Stream the audio edition of this interview below or from Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, Pandora, Pocket Casts, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, RadioPublic, or the Internet Archive. Click past the jump for links to resources mentioned in this episode.
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Matt Baume
- "How Trans Players Find Support from the Gaming Community" for Waypoint
- THINKWALKS — Joel Pomerantz’s walking tours of San Francisco
- GaymerX founder Matt Conn on Polygamer #1
- Gaming In Color feature documentary
- Take This — a non-profit that aims to inform the video game community about mental health issues and to reduce the stigma of mental illness
- Cremisius Aclassi (Krem) in Dragon Age: Inquisition
- James Morris as Pretty Pretty Pixel on Twitch
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:45 — 29.1MB) | Embed
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