Post Natal Trip

Yesterday was my birthday and with my roommate's encouragement, I hastily arranged some happy hour fun at Therapy Bar in midtown. I had a nice turnout, a good cross-section of people I know and mostly never get to see. As any gay party invariably does, it divided quickly into two groups: those asking who my hot friend was and the hot friend in question. Granted, there is always a fair amount of overlap in those situations (hot people asking about other hot people), which is commonly known as a hook-up. Although I don’t think there were any successful hook-ups at my birthday this year. You know me, always keeping the sexual temperature somewhere near a faint simmer.

Me and Adam Sank. Turning up the sexual heat!

Birthday parties are the worst kinds of parties because most of the time you go but the only person you know is the object of the party. And the same is true for everyone else there. So mostly you all spend the evening standing around not talking to the one person you came to talk to and milling around among a cluster of other people with the same mixture of irritation and disappointment on their faces.  Not fun.

“Why don’t you spend some time talking to the people you never see, instead of the people you see all the time?” asked designer CharlieLapson, a longtime friend who happened to be in town the night of the party and who wanted some attention. A great idea except that aside from Katie and Donny who work on my show, I never get to see any of the people at my party very often. I've probably seen Charlie more times in the last decade than I've seen Adam Hignite and I hadn't seen Duke and JP in years until I randomly ran into them last month at LAX, of all places. So the woes of a birthday party dynamic work in both directions.

One hot guy I did want to talk to and that I was repeatedly asked about was Zachary Barnett. Johnny Lazy’s hot friend Joe Campanella thought Zach's charitable efforts to End HIV were noble and wanted to help him set up a fundraiser in Florida, while Donny found his work as a do-gooder too much to handle. "People who help people? Ain't nobody got time for that!" was his quick summation on his way to being single forever. But whatever Zach does for a living, there is no denying he is hot, tall and strapping, with a devilish smile and wild sense of adventure. And I think we all have time for that.

On his way out of my birthday party, Zach asked me if I wanted to join him the following night at some club down near Houston. Go out two days in a row? At my age? Downtown? That seems unlikely. And tonight when Zach texted me a few minutes before my show ended, at first I tried politely to bail, but then this happened:

I refuse to be bound by expectations, even if I will instantly regret it. As it turns out, it was Donny who sold me down the river. Zach shared his plan of inviting me out while they sat together at my birthday party and Donny insisted I would cancel. That Donny! What a troublemaker. #TheWorst

But then suddenly, I was in a taxi racing down Ninth Avenue wondering what the Hell I was thinking. I scooped up Zach in the cab and we continued down the West Side Highway. Zach spent about five minutes describing the club and the various players but mostly it all sounded to me like a Stefon sketch from SNL.

True to form, Stefon would have been proud. One block North of Houston off the West Side Highway one Tuesday each month in a former straight strip joint New York's hottest club is Westgay. It had everything: a bald drag queen doorman with a clipboard, a hairy-chested coat check guy in a French maid uniform and a slightly overweight stripper in a kilt and kicks. Zach called him out on his kicks. "I know as a stripper you want to be comfortable but this isn't your living room."  Westgay also has a black room. A black room? You know, a black room is that thing where there's a whole other room in the club with another DJ and everyone in there is black.

The crowd was mostly young and interesting. Some people were trying too hard, others not hard enough. It all looked like 1981 and sounded like a grimy underground dance mix of 1999. Zach didn't notice but all the guys around us were way into him. One blond thing with a cute friend dressed as a culturally insensitive rendition of a Native American, replete with loin cloth and single feather headband, eyed Zach so hard I thought they might pop out, a ’la a TexAvery cartoon.  Another just blurted out, "That's who I wanna go home with!" as Zach obliviously searched the DJ booth for signs of Jake Shears.

As often happens when I am completely out of my element, I ran into Will Wikle. His hair was longer and gently tussled and he was dressed in a hospital gown, open in the back, with no underwear, a costume he quickly explained. "I wanted people to say, 'Is he in a hospital gown and nothing else? Yes.'" Wish granted. Also his ass looked great. So whatever he is doing, it's working. Meanwhile, I looked like an accountant just dropping in for a quick audit. "Can I just cut the sleeves off your shirt real fast and make it a tank top?" Zach asked, making imaginary snips along the seam. I really don't think that would have helped, but it was sweet of him to offer.

After a few turns on the dance floor, and some time spent watching Zach toss dollar bills into the waistbands of strippers, it was time to leave. Zach couldn't understand my lack of enthusiasm at shoving singles into crotches, although we both agreed that giving a dollar to a stripper on a box or a homeless person on the street is basically the same thing. As much as I wanted to help the hot hipster in nerd glasses and Superman underwear raise money so he and his overweight high school boyfriend can buy that organic kale farm upstate, I had a train to catch. After all, no matter how old I get, or how many times I plunge into the deep end of gay nightlife, eventually I have to go home, where I belong.