The New Yorker Radio Hour - “The Book of Queer,” and “Bob’s Burgers” Hits the Big Screen

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

While working on his Ph.D., the historian Eric Cervini (whose book “The Deviant’s War” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) noticed the lack of popular histories on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Researchers were publishing plenty of papers, but they were mostly in peer-reviewed journals and other academic outlets. His attempts to change that—first with his Instagram videos, and now with a series on Discovery+—bring to life key moments and figures in queer history, including the pharaoh Akhenaten and President Abraham Lincoln. “I would describe [the show] as a queer-history variety show,” Cervini told Michael Schulman. “The Book of Queer” is streaming on Discovery+, with new episodes each week in June. Plus,Loren Bouchard, the creator of “Bob’s Burgers,” resisted making a movie from his TV show—until now. He talked with The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson about the show’s surprising strain of optimism. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When Eric Servini was working on his doctorate in LGBTQ history, he was surprised by how much had already been published in the field. But really, apart from professional historians, most people, it seemed, didn't really know this stuff. The research was largely in peer-reviewed journals and academic press books. So the obvious solution, he thought, was Instagram. There was about a nine-month period between when I defended my dissertation and my book was published. And during that time, I said, you know what, let me, let's try this out.

Let me put up some videos. I got a green screen. I put it up, ironically, in my closet and said, let me film myself, just telling some of these stories and having fun with it, you know, posting goofy pictures. I'm going to pretend like I'm in ancient Greece or in Mesopotamia or, you know, ancient Egypt. And people liked it. Servini's book, The Deviance War, went on to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But it was his homemade videos that inspired a real full-fledged history series on Discovery Plus. And that's just been launched, and it's called The Book of Queer.

Eric Serveni spoke with the New Yorker's Michael Schulman. So let's hear the elevator pitch for The Book of Queer. What is this show? How do you describe it? It's definitely not something you, you know, your average documentary on the history channel. Mm-hmm. I would describe it as a queer history variety show. And so what that means is, you know, we're telling approximately 15 stories from the past,

ranging all the way back to ancient Egypt up until basically present day. And rather than taking the conventional docu-series approach, We do it through reenactments, comedians. They were all written by 12 queer comedians. And camp, humor, drag, and song. Every episode ends with a musical and original choreographed musical number. Open our book and dabble your mind. History's about to be redefined.

Think you know the truth about the past. Honey, better think again. We're shining a light on queer lives at last. Dishing drama from now till then. Yeah, these pages are full of many courageous. Stories of glory that are all right outrageous. Baby, we've always been here. Welcome to the...

Yeah, you have some great, like, queer celebrities on the show. Could you tell me about some of them and what they do on it? Sure. I mean, there's so many. So every episode is narrated by a different high-profile member of the queer trans communities. And they're helped by 18. teen historians help actually narrate these stories along with Miss Vanjee and Gottmick and some of these incredible drag queens and comedians who also narrate it. Anyway, communities crave identifiers, and the queer community is no different.

Darling, I'm the rainbow flag. Look at me. I'm the reason you can spot a gay bar from a mile away. Today, the rainbow flag is the most recognizable queer symbol. But it was hardly the first. Back in the day. Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha, excuse me, can I speak for myself without you nears explaining everything? Well, excuse me, Miss Rainbow Flagg, but I am narrating.

Anyways, to understand how truly powerful I am at uniting different queer communities, we need to first visit a few of those earlier symbols and groups, or as I like to call them, my guest to queer. Rewind that shit. And do better. Okay. So I want to dig into some of the history and some of the people that you cover on the show. First of all, can you explain how the high five got invented?

I, you know, I'll be honest. I learned so many new stories as part of this story. You know, the first thing we did was collected hundreds of these queer stories with a team of researchers. And I didn't know this one. And it's the story of Glenn Burke, an incredible baseball player who, played for the Dodgers. And what people don't realize is that in the 1970s, the high five was not really a common form of communication. It just wasn't something that was really done yet. And at the World Series, Glenn Burke brought it to America. And it was the first time. No one really

knows why he raised his hand in the air to congratulate Dusty Baker. But he did it. And this is a gay, black man who did this. And, you know, we tell that story is kind of, all right, this is the inventor of the high five. But I think even more important is his entire life story of what happened to him next. Right. So what did happen to him next? If you're a relatively open gay black man playing in the MLB in 7778 and, you know, the management of the team learns this, you can guess what happened. and it's not a pretty story. He was traded to the Oakland A's, you know. He was the soul of the Dodgers, and they kicked him out.

During a 1982 interview on The Today Show, Glenn spoke publicly about his queerness. The people that you like and live with and work with might not understand, you know, the problem of being gay and a professional baseball player. It came to the point to where I was uncomfortable. I thought that the world should know how I felt. So when I got fed up with the situation, I thought I'd tell people about it. It's a hard story, especially, you know, I'm sure you notice that the MLB didn't participate in the telling the story. They would not allow us to use their footage. We couldn't even license it.

So that made it even more difficult to tell this story. But, you know, it was an honor not just to learn his story. Of course, he died. I don't know. It's, it's, it's, I don't want to call it a story. spoiler, but I mean, he dies, of course, of AIDS, you know, and so it would have been amazing to interview him about it, but fortunately, we had an incredible actor, we had the help of Glenn's family and pull it off, I think.

One thing that's very interesting to me in thinking about these historical figures is the issue of using very modern terms like non-binary or gender non-conforming or gay or or bisexual or queer, any of those, to describe people who lived long, long, sometimes centuries, but even, you know, in some cases just decades before they were in popular use. How did people in your field think about that? I mean, it's been a subject of debate for decades. Can you call someone gay when that word didn't exist? And so one of the very first things we do, and we do it when the very first story,

which is Abraham Lincoln, is to find the word queer, which just means deviating from that subjects, that subject society's norms surrounding gender and sexuality. Howdy. I'm Eric Servini, the Book of Queers resident Homo historian. Welcome to the footnotes. You may have noticed that we haven't labeled Abe gay because that wouldn't make too much sense. Why?

Because sexuality, just like race and gender, is what we call a social construct, or a concept that we as a society just came up with. And during Lincoln's time, the idea of a homosexual hadn't yet been conceived or constructed in the English language. That's why we love the word queer. All it means in the words of queer theorist David Helperin is whatever's at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.

So what do we know about Lincoln's sexuality? Well, we know he had four children, so we have to start there. but we also know the proof is in the pudding exactly we also know that he loved four men and the proof is in

the letters the proof is in the memoirs written by his contemporaries and by these men themselves and you know the historian who tells this story

Thomas Belserski's wonderful scholar he says it always goes back to the bed when you look at whom was Lincoln sleeping with it's men he did not sleep with his wife they preferred not to but when his wife was out of town who did he sleep with

men time and time and time again and we're very careful about saying you know we're not calling him gay we're not saying even that he was bisexual what we're saying is that he had four intimate relationships with other men that may have been sexual and we let people decide for themselves. We call him queer because we do believe that this was beyond even the differences in masculinity back then.

This was going beyond even that in terms of his intimacy with these men. So the people on the show, the historical figures, are both people that everybody knows, like, you know, Lincoln and Alexander the Great and Eleanor Roosevelt, but also people who may not. be familiar to wide audiences. And I'm wondering, can you tell us about Harry Allen? So, Harry is one of my favorite characters. So Harry was essentially an outlaw, a trans outlaw. His story we identified from a wonderful book by Peter Bowag. And he tells these stories of all these gender nonconforming. And what we would now use the term trans, folks in in the west on the frontier this is in the late 19th early 20th century and harry is one of those figures who who goes out west of course there are fewer laws fewer regulations it's easier to

live on the margins because there's just fewer structures in place to to regulate you and that's true for not just sexually deviant folks but also folks who who transgress gender norms and the record is incredible because what happens is he kind of becomes a celebrity in Washington and Seattle, Portland, kind of traveling all around and just making trouble. He's very much a quintessential trans outlaw and the newspapers report on it. And there's just this wealth of sources from the press, whether it's Seattle newspapers, local newspapers, that are just talking about, you know, they would use quote unquote this, this quote, woman who was presenting as a man and created this scandal that people just couldn't get enough of, just getting arrested, biting cop's hands,

causing fights. And he would, he would essentially, anytime he would get arrested, he would say, look, I'm a guy. Like, you, that's what I am. And they would try to find ways of punishing him, but they never could quite figure it out. Right. So when the show was announced, Breitbart wrote an article saying that the trailer makes, quote, wild claims about President Lincoln being queer and calls Joan of Arc non-binary. I'm wondering what was your reaction to that? I assume and I hope that that is the first of many such articles that we get. Because, I mean, look, given what's happening in Florida, what has happened there, what is happening in my home state of Texas, to trans kids there in Alabama, Arizona, everywhere.

This show is a response to a very intentional nationwide attempt to erase not just our history, but our own existence. If that's not queer, I don't know what is. The tone of the show is so original. I mean, there's people might recognize elements of like drunk history. history in the sort of sketch comedy format, but it's also, it also includes a lot of academics, PhDs, it's a footnoted TV show, which I've never seen before. You know, it's a show that's not told straight in more ways than one, and I was curious if

you felt that there was a kind of style of queer storytelling that was important. Like, is there a reason that queer history shouldn't be told straight? I think when you look at how the folks that were describing their stories, whether it's Jose Saria, or, you know, even Harvey Milk or Gil Baker, they use humor themselves to tell the stories. You know, humor is a survival tactic. And so I think humor and queerness are inextricable. Eric, thank you so much for talking with us. It's a real pleasure, and I look forward to people seeing the Book of Queer. Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

That's Eric Serveni talking with the New Yorkers, Michael Shulman. The Book of Queer is streaming now on Discovery Plus, with new episodes each week in June. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. In the 1990s, inspired by The Simpsons, an entire wave of animators started making cartoons for adults, and one of those animators was Lauren Bouchard. Bouchard worked on niche late-night shows like Science Court and Dr. Katz professional therapist. And eventually Bouchard took to prime time

as the creator of Bob's Burgers about a family-run burger joint in some seaside town. All right, listen, you're my children, and I love you, but you're all terrible at what you do here. And I feel like I should tell you, I'd fire all of you if I could. Bob. All right, hands in.

All right, sell some burgers. Salisle some burgers. Here's Sarah Larson, a longtime staff writer. I've been a fan and admirer of Lauren's work since I first encountered it and him in the mid to late 90s. We were both living in Boston and working in the world of writing and comedy. We were used to The Simpsons being brilliant and kind of crazy, but this was funny in a different way. It's a mainstream-looking family comedy. They're a regular family. They run a burger restaurant.

They have neuroses and vulnerabilities, but they're also very plucky and very creative, and they really love each other. They're weird, but they accept each other as they are, and they're always trying to make the best of everything. After a decade on television, a Bob's Burger's movie just came out, and it's called, you guessed it, the Bob's Burger's movie. and it's written and directed by Lauren Bouchard. Sarah Larson talked with him last week.

I was so excited when I found out that you were making a movie because I just had a feeling that what I love about Bob's Burgers on a small screen would just explode into glorious, wondrous, exciting stuff on a huge screen. Can you tell me about what intrigued and excited you? about the possibility of making a movie as opposed to a show? Yeah. There's, it's sort of two parts. I think that one part is the easy part that probably all of us share, which is I love movies.

I love going to movies. I love watching movies. I have always loved movies. And so that part was just built in, right? And then separately there's the, like, the who do you think you are, you know, just pure gall to think that we could make one. And that happened in a very specific way, too. I remember clearly when we were quite sure that we shouldn't make one. Why?

What was that all about? Well, that was just simply doing the show. We spent so many, you know, seasons on the bubble, as they say. We were never a sure thing, you know, to get renewed. We always fought for our dinner. And kind of, in a way, got used to that. You know, it was like working in an emergency room. You know, we were just under pressure all the time.

And when a fan, and it was always at first the fans who brought it up, when a fan would say you should make a movie, it was kind of like, no, no, don't say that. You know, we can barely make this show. We don't even know if we're going to get picked up. And so it felt I would squint at that and recoil. It was a little bit of fear. Can we back up and talk a bit about how you got into animation in the first place

and your evolution as a writer and director and composer and so on. I love telling the story because it's, you know, it's a study in luck, in sheer, incredible luck on a, on a, you know, galactic scale. So I was raised by creative, artistic people. I had many creative and artistic urges, but I got a little derailed. My mother died when I was a teenager and I had a few years of drifting a bit

and I did not finish high school and I was working mostly bartending. Despite not finishing high school, I got high quality education up until that point, I should say, because my father was the art teacher at a private school in Cambridge Mass. And so my sister and I got a full ride there. And so I,

So as part of that, I had known this guy, Tom Snyder. He had been the science teacher at the school, at the grade school I went to. You know, he was a really fantastic teacher and just a magnetic personality. And so, and I think I had piano lessons from him for a time. I was connected to the guy. He was a sweet presence in my middle grade, fourth, fifth, sixth grade. Then he left teaching. And I, you know,

To some extent, had stayed in touch, and then I'm 23 years old. I am quite sure that I have wrecked my chances of having the life that I had imagined for myself, which is to say a creative life. I was taking classes at the Cambridge Adult Ed Center. I was thinking maybe I could try to be a writer or a cartoonist or something. I had this sense that there was a job for me that, you know, combined my interests. I even had a sense that animation would be good. I had been watching The Simpsons.

It had come on, I think maybe when I was about 18. And so I understood that there was this world, but I had no idea how to access it. I had no sense that I could figure out a way for me to get into it. I run into Tom Snyder in Harvard Square. And I'm coming out of an art supply store. I believe he was on his way to a funeral. We just cross paths on the street. And he says, hey, do you still draw on stuff?

And I say, yeah, and he says, well, come see me. I might have some work for you. I've been getting into animation. Wow. And I knew it. I knew right then and there. I was getting lucky.

I experienced clarity like you wouldn't believe. I basically said, I'll do anything. He said, okay, it's not going to be much money, and I can't promise anything, and this animation thing may not pan out, but it did. He had the great idea to team up with Jonathan Katz, this local comic.

They had the great idea to make Jonathan into the therapist and then have other comics be fake, do their stand-up routines, but have it be as if they were in therapy. You know, Katz, what is wrong with me? Well, you know, that's not such a simple... Come on, you blood sucker.

How long are you going to suck off my teat before you cure me? Fix this! Fix this! When I first saw Dr. Katz and then home movies. You know, we were used to this wonderful gift of the Simpsons in our cultural landscape, but the aesthetic that you guys had and the way you were doing what you were doing felt so new and so thrilling and different because it felt conversational. It felt more realistic in the way that, you know, it had pauses.

It sounded like the way people really talked. To be fair, we wrote it. scripts for Dr. Katz. But they were treated somewhat as a safety net rather than as the script, the way we normally understand it. So we would have the actors improvised before they'd even read the script. We didn't want them to be colored by it. So the improv was really king. Even now, I tremble to think what one of those scenes would look like. If we'd written, you know, Dr. Katz makes a joke. Ben laughs. Ben makes a joke. Dr. Katz. last year, it's going to be treakily.

But when it was improvised and discovered in the moment, it wasn't. Or I hope it wasn't. And those shows were really beloved by the people who saw them, but a lot of people didn't see them. And I just, you know, it was such a tragedy in our world when Home Movies was on for a few episodes, and it was excitingly, you know, on buses that would go by and what's happening? And then suddenly it was gone and replaced by a show called.

Shasta McNasty. I was like, what is happening? I used to tell people we weren't just canceled, we were extra canceled. He called, the guy called after our first episode aired, and he said, your ratings were so bad, I would be fired if I even suggested you had a chance at renewal.

Yikes. Yeah, got extra canceled. We got canceled, and then he kind of just, like, pushed the coffin lid closed as I was still trying to, you know, wedge my fingers out. Can you just tell me a bit about creating Bob's and what that moment was like and what you were looking for? I had been thinking about a family that runs a restaurant. I'd been thinking about it for years, in fact.

Why? I'd had a few iterations. I just was fascinated. I'd worked in restaurants, and I had frequented restaurants where the kids were behind the counter. And, you know, it's just evocative of a certain kind of childhood. And I just was excited by that. So we made, in this first iteration, we made the family also cannibals. So family that runs a burger shop, finding victims, grinding them up, making burgers out of them,

Sweeney Todd style. We did not get very far. Blessedly, the network simply said, we love the idea of a family who runs the restaurant. You don't need the cannibalism. Why do you want the cannibals? And I basically was just felt relief. I said, I think you're right.

I think you're right. I don't know. I put it in out of fear. And if you don't need it, then I certainly don't need it. So we suddenly released from that feeling that we had to be that, you know, edgy and that sort of high concept.

And we could simply be, I don't know what Bob's is, let's call it, low concept, a family that runs a restaurant. That was it. the hook. And they were happy with it, and so was I. There's something I love about the way that the movie opens as it begins, you know, they're all worrying about money. They've got this loan that they have to pay back very fast. We have a meeting this morning and we're going to ask for an

extension on a loan payment. Oh, fun. And we really, really need to get that extension. And they're also thinking about their summers and who they're going to be this summer and what's going to happen this summer. Only one more week of school and then I'm summer Tina. Big things are coming for summer, Tina. Big things like that. Hate rash you get sometimes? Bigger. You know, they all have these sort of beautiful notions of what might happen.

And here you are. You've got this movie that's opening as the summer begins. It's a real summer movie. What are your thoughts about this summer and you and what will come of all this? What would you like for this summer? I mean, I, you can imagine what I'd, like it's not hard to picture but i go into this coming weekend with a lot of uh well fear i guess frankly i i'm being a bit bobbish here uh if i may use the characters to define my moment

but we are still a small movie we aren't a big movie this is and it's a two-d animated movie and but i guess what i want to say is it is a smaller movie it's a big movie in terms of of our ambition of the storytelling and the scope and the spectacle, but I just don't think that I am going to be happy if I think this movie is going to be some kind of mainstream success and then I find out, I'm brought back to Earth, when the box office numbers come in and it doesn't compare, you know, to Sonic 2 or, you know, some Pixar movie or, you know,

some movie, animated movies have, you know, they can be incredibly successful. And I would love for that to be the case, but I also am fine if our movie is just beloved by the people who find it and who wanted that, be they fans or new fans. And I want to stay in that zone. I'm trying really hard to stay there so that I'm not knocked around by lukewarm reviews or lukewarm box office. because, you know, my little soul can't take it. If I let myself dream too big about the summer success of Bubbs, the movie, I think I'll be disappointed. Well, you know, I think the thing I love about the Belcher family

and the show and the movie is that whatever combination of good and bad that's going on all around them, they will just make the best out of whatever happens to be going on. And it makes you feel like, well, we can do that too. you know. Optimism is a very powerful thing. We were making this movie during Trump, during COVID, and all the other things that are, you know, feel really heavy in this moment. And we're raising families in this time.

And optimism, it isn't cheesy and it isn't just wishful thinking. It is, in fact, a stance. It's a choice. And it isn't because you expect a good outcome. It's because to face the future with a pessimistic attitude is worse for you no matter what come. And I know that sounds funny given that I just predicted doom and gloom for the Bob's box office. But in fact, that's, I think, still me exercising maybe a sort of a double-dutch kind of backwards optimism, but it still feels like I'm just trying to imagine the best path for the movie.

that doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a box office smash in order to succeed. Exactly. That is beautiful. That sounds like pretzels. Thank you. I'm glad you think so. Lauren Bouchard, the creator of Bob's Burgers, talking with the New Yorkers, Sarah Larson. The Bob's Burgers movie is out now.

I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a... co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Peter Bresnan, Aveykoreo,

Bresden, Breeda, Kalli, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphan and Putabwele, with help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Monfei Chen. We had additional help this week from Michael May. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund.