"bon vivant" really means "gay"

A while back, a friend of mine said he was waiting for the day when I showed up on Gawker.
Well, that day has come. Sort of. My piece on Michael Musto was mentioned on Friday.
(Gawker gave the Blade another nod today, oddly enough, making fun of one of our ads.)
Though I was overall pleased with how my brief Musto profile came out, there was a lot of stuff I had to cut for space. Pasted below is the rest of the interview, in case you're curious.

Me: How old were you when you started the column?
Musto: Three.

You’ve been in New York your whole life?
Yes. I couldn’t exist anywhere else. I couldn’t even go for a week or so. It’s really sad.

I read that you said that you were socially retarded. Does that work to your advantage?
It helps to be socially retarded. I’m so passive, and so unable to communiciate, that I sort of act as a sponge. People come up and start unloading themselves.

Do you hate being interviewed?
Again, I crave it and yet I’m uncomfortable with it.

Were there periods where the column was more gay and less gay?
Whether it’s blatantly gay or not, the gayness underlines every syllable, because that’s part of who I am. I hate it when people say, “I hate being identified as gay.” But why? Would you hate being identified as Italian? They never would say that.

But I don’t think you have that label.
I’m more often “outrageous gadfly” or “man about town,” “bon vivant.” But those are all euphemisms for “gay.”

The interviews I’ve read with you never talk about your personal life. Why is that?
I don’t have that much of a personal life. My career and my column are intertwined with my personal life.

How do you know a good party?
You know it the second you walk in the door. You know if you want to go back home immediately or stick it out for at least 10 minutes. It doesn’t have to have celebrities. It’s a fun mix of people, good energy, cool people. By now I’m pretty intuitive just by looking at the invitation if it’s something worth going to or if it’s something beyond the D List.

Sounds like reading tea leaves.
Yeah, it is. I can tell by who’s throwing it, the location, the day, the time, open bar.

Do you drink?
No. I usually drink Diet Coke.

Are you dating anyone?
I don’t date. I’m married to Jesus.

Further reading: Musto's personal narrative on the changing face of NYC's underground.

damn trick-or-treaters

So I spoke too soon. Halloween turned out just fine in the end. The BF and I had a lazy Saturday, then saw "Manic Flight Reaction" at Playwrights Horizon. After the show, we stopped by the costume shop on 23rd and put together last-minute outfits for the evening.

Actually, the BF went the easy route and recycled his getup from last year. Yes, it was the return of the Lion Cub who was such a hit in '04. No body paint this time, though he did paint his fingernails. (Um, yeah.)

After much hemming and hawing, I went with my original idea. A quick iron-on action, a couple of tape measures and some gold-crown shades later, and the Size Queen made a royal entrance.

We met up with Jeff, who now has a new nickname. He's just been named captain of the swim team, so we'll now refer to him only as Cap'n Jeff.

Our night led us back to Roxy, two weekends in a row, which is unheard of. Good times were had by all, though Junior Vasquez spun a set that was creepy — even by Halloween standards. Worst of all, the club suddenly closed at 4 a.m., just as the party was at its peak. Not sure what happened.

Today the BF and I just lounged around the apartment, watched "Me and You and Everyone We Know" (which I found dull and needlessly quirky) and some scary stuff. Not a bad Halloween at all.
Now we've just got to find some fingernail polish remover. The Lion Cub's got to work tomorrow.

i am not allowed the sugar

Wow. That last post was pretty bleak.
To prove that I'm not standing out on the ledge just yet, here's a little Bjork humor (which I lifted from her.)
You have to watch the whole thing. High-larious.

surprises in the moonlit night

This is Halloween?
I guess it's official: I'm depressed. All Hallow's Eve has snuck up on me and whispered "boo" in my good left ear. But I gave back hardly a shiver. More like a shrug.
It's not like me.
Those in the know will tell you: I usually go slightly nuts when October hits. We're talking bats, skeletons and spider webs — even more than normal — haunting every corner of the house.
But not this year. I've let my favorite holiday almost pass with hardly a fuss. The festivities commence tonight, but neither the BF nor I have costumes. Nor do we even have any good costume ideas, which is just embarrassing.
Blame it on my S.A.D. Or maybe on my J-O-B. Either way, this is shaping up to be the most lackluster Halloweekend I've had in years.
Cue the turkey. I'm tempted to leave the pumpkins be.

But speaking of Halloween, check out this story. How creepy.

gimme gimme gimme

Time goes by ... so slowly

The words to Madonna's new song certainly fit my mood Saturday night at Roxy, when it felt like a lifetime passed between the time we talked our way through the VIP line (thanks, Darren — you're the best) and jammed our (mostly sober) selves onto what has to be the most crowded dance floor I've ever seen at the club.

In case you haven't been reading every fag blog in this city, Madge herself was supposed to make a "surprise" guest appearance. The BF and I fell for the hype, which is weird considering that neither of us are rabid Madonna fans. Nevertheless, we somehow found ourselves singing along, on cue, with the new single as Peter teased the audience with it just after midnight. And hating ourselves for being so damn predictable.

Waiting for your call, baby, night and day, I'm fed up ... I'm tired of waiting on you

I'm not sure there's enough vodka in the world to make me enjoy a mob scene like this. After standing in line for half an hour for the ATM (door karma in action, I guess) we kicked back a couple of Red Bulls and waded into the insanity.
Things were fine and good until about 1:45 a.m., when folks stopped dancing and started just standing and staring at the empty stage.
Darren disappeared, and Jeff turned his back to the circle. Even the BF abandoned me, clawing his way a few people ahead of us to get a better look at the spot where the Material Mom may or may not appear. I suddenly sobered up and started thinking that if Madonna didn't show, there was certainly going to be a riot at the Roxy. What a mess that was going to be. Stonewall be damned: This had all the makings of a gay Rodney King incident. Where again was the nearest exit?

Tick tick tock it's a quarter to two ... And I'm done ... I'm hanging up on you

Though Jeff had heard from a reliable source that Madonna was supposed to make her grand entrance at 2:30, a roar rose up in the V.I.P. area beside the DJ booth a few minutes after 2. And sure enough, out she sprang like Venus from the mists, sporting a blue dress and a retro hair wings lifted straight from "Thank God It's Friday."
The crowd shrieked like school girls. I'm not sure Christ on his second coming will earn a more spirited reaction. At least not from the gays. All around us, gym-perfect arms shot into the air, many of them clutching camera phones to capture the action.

Ring ring ring goes the telephone ... The lights are on but there's no one home

The BF realized that I could barely see above the crowd, so he was sweet enough to lift me up — like a handicapped child — just long enough to see the diva on stage. She didn't really sing, but danced around and kept prompting her Secret Service-looking security guys to pull screaming fags up from the crowd to do a little shag on stage. Poor queens. They can die happy now that they've touched Madonna.

In truth, I don't mind the new song, "Hung Up," even though it's a ripoff sample of Abba's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)." The other two songs she danced to were less memorable, not so radio-friendly.

After the impromptu performance, the BF and I said goodbye to Jeffy and hit it for the coat check line. When I got home, I was dismayed to find that the photos/videos I took with my phone (yes, guilty) didn't turn out so great. Here's what I got:


So yeah. That white/blue blob to the right? That's her. Aren't I glad I sprang for the Razr?
Jesus.

Anyway, as I said before, every other homo in this city has been blogging about Madonna nonstop this past week. So there are plenty of other photos to be seen, if you're longing for more Madge. Yes, you could say they're "Hung Up" on her lately. Heh heh.
But I'm sure someone else has said that already.

things that are finite

I read once, probably in what Jerry would call one of my "hokey New Age" books, that the human mind has a hard time reconciling the difference between finite and infinite quantities.
We do great with small numbers and objects (five cars, 16 candles, 22 ex-boyfriends). With nonspecific concepts and experiences, the brain has to shift into second gear: the number of stars in the sky, the total number of hours you've wasted standing in line, the number of days you have left to live.

The mind gets past this division by classifying many finite numbers as infinite, and vice versa. We know, of course, that there's a specific number of times left in our lives when we'll go to the grocery store, just as there's only x number of days until another terrorist attack happens on U.S. soil. We don't like to think about either scenario, so we take those unpleasantries and place them in the "Unknowable" box, which is another way of pretending they don't exist. Only when a number like that becomes known or knowable do we face up to it. Time does a weird lurching thing at that moment: It speeds up, and it slows down. The present instance can suddenly scare the shit out of you.

I was thinking about knowable quantities today during my morning walk to work, because for the first time I realized I'll only be making that specific walk a few more times. When I say "few," really it's more like "several," a number larger than 15 but smaller than 50. The word came down yesterday that my company is moving its offices, part of a tremendous crush of other changes not worth going into here, but transitions that are going to have a huge impact on what I do with my 40-plus hours of daylight each week. Because of this news, today has taken on a very different meaning: It's now a countdown until the new office. Really, this was the reality all along. There was always a finite number of days that I'd spend here in this specific office overlooking 7th Avenue, but my brain didn't like to look at it that way. It's better to pretend that everything will last forever.

Or is it?

Last weekend the BF and I traveled to Atlanta. It was our pre-emptive "We're Not Coming Home for Thanksgiving So We're Here Now" trip, which both families took better than we'd hoped.
I also had the chance to catch up with a few close ATL friends, and on Friday heard a bit of news that's been on my mind ever since. Crystal Covergirl, a fixture in the city's gay nightlife during the past several years, died suddenly in the early part of October.

Now, I couldn't call Crystal my "friend" — we said hello when we saw each other out, but I'm fairly certain she never knew my name. (Hell, most times when I saw her, I hardly knew it myself.) Still, she was one of those characters that Brad, Taures and I came to rely on in our clubworld travels. Her exploits became the stuff of legend: The night she half-accosted Brad on the back patio at Blu, that crazy thing she told Taures at Backstreet that time, the way she almost always had a cocktail in hand — usually in a plastic sippy cup. Good times. Silly, but good.
Looking back, and with the new knowledge that those experiences were finite, it pains me to know that Crystal passed away without me ever taking the time to really know her beyond a few pleasantries. If I knew then what I know now, well, I'm not sure if anything would have been different. But at least I would have known what was coming.

So what does the death of a drag queen I never really knew have to do with upcoming changes in my career? Probably not much. I guess both these bits of news just jar me a little, and make me stop for a second and count the number of buildings I can see out my office window right now, here on an otherwise chilly day in late October.

don't sleep in the subway

What a dreary, rainy, really blah day in the city.

Perhaps the only bright spot (for me, at least) was this.
I guess I'm now officially a gay New Yorker, in case there were any doubts. Many thanks to the Portwood, who took the photo.

Speaking of blogs, Harry Potter fans might find this post interesting. (Not sure why they still have me listed as working for David. Silly Muggles.)

say good night, john boy

I'll be honest: The main reason I hoped to see "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way" had nothing to do with gay playwright Richard Greenberg or his previous success with "Take Me Out."
Really, I just wanted to see John Boy Walton on stage.
When I was a kid, my family just loved "The Waltons." Who wouldn't adore the show, which was homespun 1970s treacle at its mopey best? Hum the first few bars of the theme song even today and I'll get chills.

Sadly, John Boy, I mean Richard Thomas, has ventured pretty far from Walton's Mountain with "Appian Way," a show so pretentious and self-serving that I'm shocked it's made it to this stage of production.
I won't give anything away, but let's just say that the plot is preposterous. Greenberg's trying to spin some sort of indictment of the convictionless liberal elite. But in doing so, he's lost sight of some basic truths of the ways in which real people interact. Yes, a few zingers along the way might score some laughs. But the sit-com pacing gets old quick.

I will say this about the show. After seeing Jill Clayburgh on stage tonight, I'm now even more curious about the film version of "Running With Scissors." She plays Agnes, Augusten's adopted mother, which just sounds like an odd fit.
Too bad she has to include this stinker of a show on her resume.

i close my eyes and count to ten

Can you sum up 10 years of your life in one CD?
The topic came up tonight at dinner with La Lasher. Seems she's recently reconnected with a friend she hasn't seen since high school, which led to the promise to make a mixed CD to capture the last, oh, decade they've missed.
I decided I'd break my CD down by year: 10 songs for 10 years. On the subway home, a few possiblities fell into place:

1995 "In Between Days," The Cure, in honor of my old roommate, Mark, who introduced me to the group

1997 "They Can't Take That Away From Me," Ella Fitzgerald, which is a song about being further down the "bumpy road of love" but knowing you've traveled through something meaningful

1999 "Believe," Cher, which I realize makes me a Big Fag ©, but the song perfectly sums up the summer I spent just about every Saturday night at the Armory, dancing like one

2002 "My Imagination," Ceevox, perhaps my favorite club song ever

2003 "Babylon," David Gray, a song that makes me think of late nights in my bedroom on 7th Street

Revisiting those years turns out to be deceptively difficult, to trigger the Wayback Machine of your mind and try to tune into the one track that somehow captures the weight of a full year.
Of course, this isn't the final list, but it's small start.

doing lines in chelsea

The rain cleared up (briefly) today, so the BF and I were able to get out of our apartment for a bit this a.m. and catch at least part of the openhousenewyork tour.
And when I saw "part," I really mean we hit one site: The High Line.
If you haven't heard of it, the High Line used to be an elevated railroad track that stretched along West Chelsea's warehouse district. It was built in the early '30s but fell into disrepair in the '70s and '80s, then was nearly demolished. In the late '90s, a group of neighborhood activist types got together and lobbied to save the old train track — which even now is essentially a second-story weed garden above some of Chelsea's hottest real estate.
From the Phillips, de Pury & Company gallery space, we could peer out onto the desolate structure, made even less inviting by today's gray drizzle. But I can see how the current plan to convert the High Line to a public park and exhibition space could work.
It's a fascinating project no matter how you slice it, and the BF pointed out as we were leaving that it reminds him of the Beltline plan in Atlanta to install a light rail train along the unused tracks that circle the inside of the city. I'm amazed at how these relics of a bygone industrial era are being reimagined for the new century.

Further reading: Friends of the High Line
High Line Preliminary Design

And speaking of revitalization projects, I've spent a couple hours this weekend giving the blog a bit of facelift. After 10 months with the same drab header, it was definitely time the old girl got a new dress. It's a work in progress and likely to change again soon.
Thoughts? Let me know.

little britain

New York really doesn't lend itself to much fun when it's raining this hard.

The BF and I had kicked around some ideas for today, including hitting a few sites on openhousenewyork or maybe seeing a play. Instead I spent my Saturday holed up in the apartment, cleaning out my iPod (don't laugh — it was terrible) and writing.
Lucky for me, the BF insisted we get out tonight, weather be damned, so we headed down to the Village for a thoroughly unexpected comedy outing. Seems he's never seen a stand-up comedian before (I know, poor kid was deprived until he met me), and he'd scored us tickets to see Graham Norton — not realizing that a) I'm a fan already and b) the show would be queerer than crumbcake.
On stage, Graham was shorter than I expected (guess I should have known that, having seem him stand next to Dolly that one time on the show — and she's like 4-foot-8) and even more animated. Lots of belly laughs followed, my favorite bit being his riff on Dubya: His staff explained he was "entertaining the president of Columbia" when Katrina hit. Really, do I need to explain why that's fucking funny?
If you live in New York, go see this show. But hurry — it ends Oct. 22.
As Graham said, "I'd love to stick around longer, but, you know, the cocks won't suck themselves."

exhausted from walkin the floor

So the new job is gobbling up a much greater portion of my life than the 40 hours I originally surrendered to the Gods of Gainful Employment, thus my lull in posting.
But it’s not just wage slavery keeping me from writing.
I’ve also started an illustration class at SVA, which apparently uses the term “illustration” loosely.
More on this later, but I'll say for now that the class is a little dull, but also surprisingly difficult. How's that possible?

Other news from the past two weeks:

• My interview with Carol Channing.
Much as I’d like to go all snarky, I just can’t. Carol won me over instantly with her self-deprecating wit and astounding humility. Such a lady!

• Speaking of snark, I also had the chance to share a coffee (actually, a Diet Coke) with Village Voice columnist Michael Musto. You’ll have to read the Blade next week to hear how the conversation went, but I’ll go ahead and say here, La Dolce’s diva may come out in print, but in person he’s less dazzle and more distant.

• The Blade’s Best Of Gay New York hit stands on Thursday, though getting it there required an overflow of blood, sweat and queers. I’m pleased overall. If nothing else, the (so-called) Staff Picks were fun to write.
A day before our issue closed, I received in the mail a copy of CL’s annual Best Of, which made me nostalgic — for like six seconds. I haven’t had a chance to climb the mountain of text, but I’ll let you guess which items I contributed.

• A thing that scares me: In my iTunes list of Top 25 Most Played Songs, nine of the tracks are from Neko Case. The situation is made no better by my recent purchase of her 1997 debut, “The Virginian,” which includes the gem, “High on Cruel”:
You're crawling on the floor like a fool
And I'm so high on cruel
Because really, there's nothing like a little cruelty to get your day going.

• It also scares me that Zach is now blogging. OOOOKKKK.
Meanwhile, the Portwood has a new blog. It's dirty and delicious.
And finally, in an effort to atone for my slackness, I’m going to post a new blog entry every day from now through Thursday. (No promises on Friday, a travel day.) Let’s see what happens.