Partying Ways

All this talk about the 1% and the 99% percent has finally piqued my curiosity. It is time to see how the other half lives. Unfortunately, I haven’t been invited into the home of a billionaire since that pride weekend party where Lance Bass’ boyfriend mistook me for a bartender and the highlight of my adventure was buttoning the front of Michael Holtz’s denim shorts. Those were the days. But in that spirit I journeyed a few blocks away from my radio studio to the penthouse birthday party of Penthouse pet Krista Ayne.

Krista has been a frequent guest on our show over the years. Romaine might be so captivated that a photo of her hangs in Romaine’s dressing area so she can gaze upon her naked form while naked herself. That’s devotion. I like Krista, but as a friend, who wears clothes. And has birthday parties in fancy bars in midtown.

The New Tron Dance

I’ve never walked into a bar that smelled new before. Not just clean, but actually brand, spanking new. The whole experience reminded me of the old lady from Titanic describing the famous ship, “I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the ship of dreams, and it was. It really was.” Well, tonight I went to the all new XL bar in Manhattan to smell the fresh paint. The plastic cups had never been used. The stalls hadn’t had any drugs done in them yet. I suppose it could be the club of dreams if your dream is to see other gay men prancing around like always. And if that is your dream, then it was. It really was! I'm oversimplifying of course but what are gay men in a club if not overly simple?

I was excited to see XL since everyone has been talking about it for months now. And like the Titanic, the maiden voyage of this truly new bar for a new generation would either sail into glory or go down sensationally. I asked my friend and trusty nightlife pal Matt Kugelman to join me and he was more than game for the adventure.

Tune Town

Caught a Bass tonight. Well, technically, I didn’t catch one, I saw one. And it wasn’t a fish, it was a celebrity. So maybe I should start over. Saw Lance Bass tonight at Therapy. We all did. As expected, when he hovered around the lip of the miniature stage there, just at the edge of the lights, not at all to his surprise, two by two we turned and drank in his blond visage. There are no accidents.

It seemed appropriate to see a real live celebrity at the bar mere moments after Brian introduced me as one to his collection of bright young things. To be fair, he said there were two celebrities at the table: me and Michael Ausiello. I didn’t place Michael right away because I couldn’t hear his name over the loud music and after going around the table I wouldn't have remembered it anyway after all the other names were tossed out rapid fire like a pop quiz. I think one of the girls was named Colleen, but names and faces whirled by so fast, I can’t be sure of anything.

Bitter Gay Men

My birthday is on Sunday and it is hard to hide my irritation. I tried to talk about it on the air the other day and I just don’t have any words for how I feel about my impending birthday. Why is 38 such a flashpoint for me? Perhaps it is the dangerous proximity to forty. I have been joking that 38 is the new 55, and I really am starting to mean it. Because, in the gay community, you can get old, you just can’t get older.

If you go out to an event or a gay bar and you see an eighty year old guy, it’s sweet. The gays will buy him a drink and hear about the time he saw Judy Garland perform live at the Palladium. But if a 42 year old guy walks into that same gay bar, it’s sad. Doesn’t he know when to quit? It’s not a gay sin to be old, but it is downright criminal to grow older. And where are the gay men in their 40s and 50s supposed to go? They can’t all hide out in Palm Springs until the Social Security checks start to arrive. But when I look around, increasingly I am the oldest person in the room and I start to wonder what will happen when the dot on my palm turns red and I need to run.

Hanging out with Terry Goldman and his new squeeze, ten years his junior, we got to talking about gay men who get older and turn bitter. Earlier I had spoken to Lucas Entertainment exclusive Ben Andrews, with his 22 year old skin and 11 inch cock. He had just returned from the Lance Bass book party and saw Debbie (excuse me, Deborah) Gibson there. “I didn’t even know who she was.” he admitted, “Except, you know, what I saw on VH-1.”

No surprises there, except perhaps the idea of someone so young watching Vh-1. He was still in diapers when she danced on the sand with a denim jacket sliding off her shoulders and a scrunchy in her hair. When Reagan died, Sean, who was born at the end of his first term, told me that he didn’t know until that moment watching CNN that Reagan had been an actor. “They never taught us that in history class.” It’s enough to make anyone over the age of 35 contemplate suicide. Or the survivors turn bitter.

Terry started in on the interns at work, who when he told them that there wasn’t internet when he was a kid, looked as surprised as if he had said he didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing. He tried to explain what a BBS was and they looked at him like he worked his way through college delivering ice from a horse-drawn wagon. “Don’t tell them you didn’t have your first cell phone until you were almost thirty.” I urged him, and then prompted him to ask his new guy if he had ever been to a Fotomat.

Remember the Fotomat? That was one shit hole of a teen job. I still shudder when I think of those kids with nothing but a transistor radio and some comic books to pass the time inside the familiar A-frame structure. Even before digital, the Fotomat was an arcane dinosaur, with the Polaroid camera coming out of the sky like an earthbound comet to wipe them off the face of the planet. Now even the Polaroid seems quaint. And this is where the bitterness comes in.

I have said many times that you know you are old when you start talking about places that don’t exist anymore. I never appreciated the song “Come Up To My Place” from On The Town until I got older and realized I could also rattle off an old guidebook full of destinations as distant to twenty-something gays as the Hippodrome is to me. No wonder you feel like the party is over, the place where they used to hold the party closed years ago and now it’s a condo complex. I would say internet café, but even those are fading into the ever rapid distant past.

My mom has a theory about why it seems that time speeds up as you get older. While waiting for your birthday between the ages of four and five, a quarter of your whole life has to pass to make it to that point. But when you are going from 50 to 51, it’s only 2% of your life. It turns out (in a move that defies the laws of physics) that the more you accumulate over time, the faster you travel. This might explain why so many people retire just so they can sit in one place, not moving, for extended periods of time. The world is just travelling so fast at that point, there is nothing you can do but just hang on. Which leads me finally to the wisdom of Tennessee Williams:

“What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?” Brick asks Maggie, their empty life together at a crossroads, on the eve of Big Daddy’s final birthday.

“Just staying on it, I guess. Long as she can.”

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

It feels like all I ever do is go to Bowery Bar and then write about it in my blog. Ugh! I don't even like that bar and yet it feels like I am there all the time!

I’ll admit it. I don’t have much of a social life. My days generally consist of:
- me sleeping until almost noon
- eating a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats while watching The View
- wandering through my new house annoyed by the disrepair but too lazy to address it
- Fucking around on Towleroad.com, Yahoo News and MySpace
- Realizing how late I am from sitting on the internet
- Hopping in the shower
- Driving to the train
- showing up minutes before my show
- Doing four hours of radio which leaves me with no interest in humanity
- Dashing out of the studio to catch the first train home
- Heating up something to eat while watching Robot Chicken
- Fucking around on the internet until I realize it’s 4am and then going to bed
- Lather, rinse, repeat

This has left me with all sorts of problems. I have a house that needs some TLC. I have no desire to go anywhere or do anything. I have a radio show and a video podcast begging for content (not to mention a blog), and no compelling interest in existing outside of a four square foot area radiating out from my own bed. If I could get away with a bed pan that I emptied out my bedroom window and using a mini-fridge as a nightstand, my dream life would be complete. As a kid I couldn’t understand why people like Howard Hughes ended their lives in a single room, but now I wonder at what age I could get away with it without it being totally creepy and crazy. Is forty too young?

One of our few ridiculously hot listeners was in town this week with his boyfriend so I agreed to give them a studio tour and a drink out on the town. He is fresh out of the Air Force and I like to do what I can to support the troops. It’s my own version of the gay USO. So I took Zach to Bowery Bar since he is relocating to New York City. He needs to know where to find and converse with the other ridiculously hot people in the city once he gets here, and that location on Tuesday nights is still, eternally Bowery Bar. It was also a good excuse to finally see DJ Ben Harvey who has been something of a hermit while packing and unpacking from his move to DUMBO (not the Disney movie, although that would be kind of cool). The stars continued to align with roommate working late and Chip Arndt being in town for the AIDS Ride (please donate money to support Chip. He is a good guy and he is trying to raise a lot of money). I even sent a text message to D-A-N who happened also to be going to Bowery Bar tonight (although I suspect he is always out on Tuesday night and it is not casual coincidence that keeps us running into each other).

Zach only stayed for one drink, but it was long enough for him to swap military tales with roommate. He had a very early flight and a hot boyfriend waiting for him at the Hilton, so he was excused. Ben Harvey was as adorable as ever, and we almost got three sentences spoken between us before the usual suspects began parading through the door like it was a red carpet premiere. First, Peter Stickles, late of HereTV’s The Lair showed up, this time minus his good friend Michael Carbonaro. Apparently Michael couldn’t pull his enthusiasm for going out tonight from a hat, so he opted to stay home. Since he is 15 years younger than I am (at least), that wasn’t excuse enough for me. Then D-A-N arrived in a red muscle tee and playfully tussled hair. His pupils were like two giant black holes from which no light or tall, strapping lad could escape. Draw your own conclusions. I last saw him downing an orange juice like his throat was on fire and talking with Lance, the formerly straight waiter who abandoned his pussy hound ways to chase men. His resume seemed to intrigue D-A-N when I told him, so when I saw them exchanging numbers on my way out for the evening, I wasn’t surprised. Oh and Lance Bass was there and I meant to talk to him because we got offered an interview with him at 11am and I like Lance and NSync and all, but there is no reason for me to reorder my world (i.e. sleeping until noon, Mini-Wheats, etc) just to talk to him on the radio. I was about to go over but they were leaving and I just thought, “Eh. The publicists will work this out, or they won’t.”

I was wearing my shiny PlanetOut backpack from 1998 because it is easy for others to find me that way and I am trying to bolster their miserable stock price by reminding the who’s gay of Bowery Bar that they still exist. This caused me to be spotted by a PlanetOut executive who wondered where I got it then realized that he knew me from FantasyMan Island, my long defunct column. While talking to him, Chip Arndt bounded up to me like a hungry lion with his friend Greg. Greg is everything gay men and straight women aspire to be: tall, thin, and put together just right. He is the gay guy straight girls are always trying to set up with any gay stranger they meet at a party because they can’t fuck him themselves. Chip is sexy and wonderful and I wish he was running for something so I could vote for him. I admire him because when he and Reichen broke up, he let Reichen keep all the fame they accumulated in their relationship. Chip kept his dignity and I suppose a set of dishes, possibly some stemware.

Speaking of dishes and stemware, Wade Williams wandered in and I didn’t even know he was in town. I razzed him about not calling me and insisted that we were now even from when I came to LA and didn’t call him, but he insisted it wasn’t the same thing. Whatever. I feel even. Conor was also there, complaining about an upset stomach, which caused Ben Harvey to also feel unsettled. I think the two of them make each other queasy. That was the last exchange I had with either one of them. Ben slipped away into the crowd, as did Conor at some point. Finally, I realized that it was late and I had to catch the train home. So I bundled up roommate, kissed Peter good bye at the door and sailed away in a cab.

Usually I like to have some kind of 360 degree connection to round out the story but I don’t have a lesson tonight. That would make this blog posting about life out at ye old gay bar outside my normal cookie cutter structure. Maybe the lesson is that I am in a rut. It’s not a bad rut. In fact, I like it very much. I’ll have plenty of time to catch up with Ben Harvey at my housewarming party on Saturday and I’ll see more of Chip on Sunday when he returns home from the AIDS Ride. However, it did feel like a wasted night at Bowery Bar, even down to this blog in search of an ending. I saw most of the same faces. Had the same drink I always have. Hated the same pretentious gays I have always hated. And then came home to eat something fried and watch some TV. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I may not be living in one room yet, but in my head I am getting pretty close. And honestly, I don’t mind.