AatomBomb

SwanSongOfTheFuehrer

(via Sullivan)

This city speaks to you in mysterious ways. Waiting to cross Madison Avenue at 34th St. today, I stood next to an elderly gentleman with a crate on wheels. As we waited, he looked into the sky and started shouting very slowly and very loudly, "New York City! I love you!" He repeated this joyous mantra at least 10 times before I got out of earshot.

There's a whole lot of crazy in this town, but sometimes it's the crazy that makes the most sense. I love you too, New York City.

MonkeyBusiness

I have to admit, the kerfuffle over the new cover of Vogue had me yawning. Yes, it was probably a very poor choice of poses, and obviously slightly offensive. But you know what, I doubt if LeBron hesitated when taking the big check they offered. I try to err on the side of not yelling racism in a crowded room if it's not absolutely necessary.

However, Gawker now gives us a revealing side-by-side look at why it's actually pretty damn offensive (or at best, derivative) after all. Even though Denton referred to him as James LeBron (hire a fact-checker dude!)

I mean, really? A giant black monkey with a German helmet and the words "mad brute"? Paging Al Sharpton...

I'm sure Wintour is so upset about all of the attention this is getting though.

ChristIsRisen...AndHungry

Best name for Easter ever, courtesy of my friend Rami: Night of the Living Dead. I think it captures the slightly ghoulish nature of celebrating the story of a misunderstood deity climbing out of a tomb to find his Father.

Meanwhile, a supernatural woman that I spent an inordinate amount of time reading and obsessing over as a child has proven to be rather blandly human after all. Anne Rice, who came closer than anyone else to making me believe in something beyond this world, has suffered from a terribly predictable mid-life spiritual reversion, literally and figuratively departing her holy stomping ground of New Orleans to spread the word of said dead prodigal son. It kind of sucks, if you will forgive the vampiric phrasing.

I spent yesterday with the boyfriend's extended family out in the woods of New Jersey. Rocco was a dream, and made the three of us seem like the most stable family unit there, oddly enough. Everyone was very sweet to me, though, which was greatly appreciated, and there was just enough redneck culture present to make me feel like I was actually home.

So Hoppy Easter, everyone! And if you see any undead hippies wandering around, be nice to them, just in case.

Joe.My.God. posts a new Chris Crocker video, consisting entirely of him blinking a few times. Over a million people have watched already. Internet performance art. Love it.

GratuitousPuppyShot

Back in the proverbial day, a friend and I would often see a particularly tragic club queen at Twilo named Asia. She must have had rather unique personality quirks that would have lent themselves to our mordant humor, but given the context of the situation we resorted to the only tool at our immediate disposal. Fat jokes. She would glide by in some form of gaudy drag, and we would gravely intone in the manner of a BBC documentary: "Asia...a large land mass." We would then crumple to the floor in fits of juvenile hysterics, and retire to the dancefloor.

Likewise, I have no doubt that the rich tapestry woven by the experiences of 1.3 billion Chinese people lends itself to insights, wit, and analysis of their complex society. But when you read these types of things it's hard to resist saying: "China...full of fucking fascists." Or something equally nuanced.

What on earth would we do without research studies? Without them, we may never have known that people who suffer from Alzheimer's have trouble with money. Coming soon: the results of a 10 year, $5 million study linking Alzheimer's to poor driving.

Holy shit. I did not see this coming. Somehow, it seems like an Obama cautionary tale. Beware the rosy glow of the anointed ones, or something. But I still hope Barack wins. Better the devil you don't know, in this case, I'm afraid.

"Yet in the teeming religious marketplace of Britain’s cities, [Adam] Smith also saw pressures that would limit the political impact of religious beliefs and prevent theocracy. With so many competing denominations, he noted, religious leaders could acquire political influence only by finding allies outside their own version of the faith—and the process of forming those alliances would drive them toward agendas that could appeal to a wider, multi-faith audience. To be politically significant, he wrote, religious extremists had to move toward broader and necessarily more-moderate coalitions. Their entry into politics would, itself, moderate them." - Walter Russell Mead, on TheAtlantic.com

ButWhoWasMoreDapper?

I got a request recently from a website asking me to add them to my blogroll. After perusing some of the lengthy archival information, I gladly did so. History of Gay Bars in New York is a treasure trove of gritty history, with a particular fondness for exposing the longtime links between New York City gay nightlife and the mafia. Makes me wonder who wore the more dapper suits, the mob or the men who frequented their bars.

Check it out, it's riveting.

EveryoneIsFamous,WhereAreTheStars?

I just wanted to share a recent piece that I did for movmnt. Enjoy:

The disease of instant celebrity in the post-pop era.

The scene: A starlet, recently freed from a grueling 72-hour ordeal, careens out of a correctional facility parking lot and dials the first coke dealer she can find in her iPhone. Nothing can slow her down now. She is pissed but giddy over the press she has received. Stupid paparazzi. And the studio keeps calling leaving threatening messages with her manager. Can’t they see she’s having a crisis? No one understands how hard it is to be in the spotlight constantly, she thinks. Of course she parties a little, everyone does. She chucks a fast food shake out the window, hitting an oncoming car. Fucking idiots. No one understands what she is going through.

The unmistakable stench of rot and decay lingers over popular culture right now. Celebrity, once the domain of an elite (and elitist) class of hand-picked talent and well crafted studio production, is now mass-produced. How did we get here? When did fame become an end unto itself? The promise of unlimited access to the means of media distribution was supposed to even the playing field, allowing the cream to rise to the top. Everyone can play; everyone can hit the jackpot; everyone can be famous. Yet the very nature of fame is corrupted by its ubiquity. It is meaningless unless there are those less famous looking up to you. You can have 6,234 friends on MySpace and never meet more than ten of them. Fame is now the crack cocaine of success – cheaper, readily available, self-destructive, and quicker to fade.

Read the whole thing here.

Rocco!

Our little bundle of joy arrived yesterday, and after much discussion we decided that Prosciutto just didn't suit him well enough. We agreed that Rocco felt much better, and had the requisite two syllables that a dog name seems to require. It also suits the boyfriend's Madonna obsession.

He took to his crate right away, and is possibly the most gentle, snuggly little beast I have ever met. He doesn't chew, or bark, or jump, or beg. He's easy on the leash and loves to walk around making immediate friends with everyone who stops to admire him. He slept in our bed last night and never made a peep. In other words, we just won the puppy lottery. More schmaltzy dog-blogging TK!

ALittleSideOfHam

After months of talking about it, my boyfriend and I found a new addition to our little family. Meet Prosciutto Rocco, a too-cute-to-be-true Lab/Shepherd/Chow mutt saved by the supernaturally dedicated people at Stray From The Heart. Our little ham arrives tomorrow, and we have spent the last 72 hours puppy-proofing the apartment, setting up a giant crate, finding a local daycare, sweet-talking cabbies into carting us around with him, and laying out his new Winnie the Pooh sweater. Our transformation into lesbians is now complete.

We discovered Stray From The Heart in the West Village one evening, when we saw a beautiful golden mix outside a small store, and the owner told us she got him there. "There" turns out to be a small operation run out of the apartments of several friends on the Upper West Side, who have turned their love of dogs into a non-profit that saves puppies from all over the country and South America, finding stable, loving homes for them in the area.

We went to see a different puppy, Prosciutto's sister to be exact. Bernadette Peters was named after her celebrity human counterpart, a good friend of the organization, who happened to be there when she arrived to donate more money to the cause. But when we arrived, her adorably shy little brother stole our heart instead. Beth, who had been taking care of both of them, agreed that Bernadette was a bit of a wild child and probably needed a yard to play in. Prosciutto was clearly her favorite as well, and she seemed overjoyed that a nice gay couple fell in love with him.

Until we actually told her yes on the phone, it all seemed a bit unreal, like pining for a pony at Christmas. Once it sunk in that this was actually happening, the full weight of adopting a young child into our home hit us hard. Pet ownership is an awesome responsibility, and we will always be acutely aware of the precious life that relies on us to survive. But the short, interminable wait to get him leads me to believe that we made the right decision. We pick him up tomorrow, and we're both jumping out of our skin with impatience.

Stay tuned for better pictures and updates.

Andrew Sullivan quotes Massimo Pigliucci on the nature v. nurture "debate", and could have taken the words right out of my mouth:

Wake up, ladies and gentlemen on both fronts: the reality is both more complex and more fascinating than either caricature would allow. It is neither nature nor nurture, it is -- as the title of an unusually balanced book by Matt Ridley puts it -- nature via nurture.

Amen, brother. Now, can we all finally grow up and stop treating genetics like a zero-sum operation?

TurnsOutPuertoRicoIsn'tJustForPorn

It's been a long holiday season here at Casa d'Aatom. I left my day job after six years to pursue something that might actually make me happy once in a while. Turns out advertising sales is no fun at all unless you really enjoy the thrill of it. And even then you end up bitter, botoxed, and incapable of leaving a building without an assistant's help. So I am a free agent. I have enough money to last a few more months, and I'm hunting for someone who wants to give this budding genius a chance at writing copy. I just want to love my job, is that so wrong?

I took the boyfriend home for Christmas, where he gained a more complete understanding of what functional alcoholism means. Then it was off to Puerto Rico to celebrate New Year's Eve. After American Airlines fucked us all day getting there (our three hour flight turned into a twelve hour ordeal that involved both Newark and JFK, and then they informed us curtly that they "don't do pillows anymore"), we finally got to San Juan just in time for an over-priced dinner at the New York steak house in our hotel.

Everyone assured us that the place to be for the best New Year's party was the El San Juan hotel. It is a beautiful historic hotel, worth the price of admission for the lobby chandelier alone, but unfortunately the open bar was in the little nightclub at the hotel. Let's just say we could have gone to Hoboken and seen the exact same crowd. So we rang in the Puerto Rican New Year surrounded by low-cut black dresses and bad heels, gulping down free cocktails. Then we adjourned to the glamorous lobby to ring in the New York New Year (which happened one hour later) with the older casino crowd.

The rest of the week was pure bliss. San Juan is gorgeous, and the amount of construction was staggering. $1.5M apartment buildings spring up just as quickly there as they do here, and they are infinitely more interesting architecturally. Ashford Avenue in the Condado neighborhood is a luxury mecca, no need to shop online for Chanel pumps there. Our hotel, a redesigned Wyndham now called the Condado Plaza, had a bar in one of the pools, seen above. That's pretty much all I need to relax. A trip to the nasty local gay bar (where they drink a hideous concoction of rum and fruit juice called Gasolina out of foil pouches), a wonderful tour of El Yunque rain forest, and a strange night getting lost in Old San Juan rounded out the week. The best part was relaxing by the pools with my lovely boyfriend, drinking and soaking up the sun.

So now we're back, and I have been working on closing the next issues of movmnt and noiZe. I'm procrastinating my noiZe work as we speak! We hired a new hot-shot editor-in-chief, Steve Weinstein, an amazing writer and editor from what I can tell so far. I'm taking a course downtown in Ad Copywriting, and hope to land a job in the next several weeks.

As for blogging? Well, I never know when the mood will strike me. But I do have several loyal readers who make me feel guilty for not posting more often, so stay tuned...

Here's a pic I took from the rain forest, on a clear day you can see St. Thomas on the right:

TheAbsurdityOfFear

Everyone's buzzing about today's WaPo article regarding drug-resistant killer staph infections. A report issued yesterday by the CDC estimates that as many as 19,000 people die each year from these brutal infections. I personally know a handful of friends who have been unfortunate enough to deal with a case of staph, and even the ones that can be treated are no laughing matter. Some cases are the result of unclean hospital conditions, but many of them are linked to crystal meth use among gay men, and the extremely unclean conditions that result during the orgy portion of the experience. A good friend of mine ended up with a hole the size of a softball in the middle of his stomach once. Absolutely horrifying.

The most interesting thing to me, however, is this little nugget: staph is "killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus". There is most likely a link between HIV infection, staph, and the lifestyle decisions that often lead to one or the other. In other words, there's more than one reason to reign in your wild PNP ways. But isn't it intriguing that the spectre of AIDS still instills more fear in the human mind than something like staph. Getting staph is just bum luck, maybe some dumb decisions, but can usually be dealt with, you know, unless you die. Same with HIV. But staph doesn't have the cultural inertia of fear and hysteria attached to it like AIDS still very much does.

This reminds me of the way that many of my friends are still ridiculously scared of flying on airplanes, but will pile into a small metal deathtrap and cruise down a highway drinking and smoking weed. They are far more likely to end up in a morgue riding in a car, but never give that a second thought. Then in the relative safety of an airplane they hyperventilate and pop enough Xanax to kill a small dog. I find human mind tricks like this fascinating. Here I sit, HIV-positive now for almost a decade, and I still get the dramatic sympathy and look of pity when I confide in people. Well-meaning people, mind you, but people still mired in the earliest conceptions of what having HIV means. Yet if I confided in the same people that I had recently suffered through a staph infection, which is more likely to actually kill me, I would get thoughtful questions and sympathy, but probably not the same look of melodramatic concern.

What does all this mean? Not much, really. Both staph and HIV are still real concerns for those out there living life to the fullest. But it does draw the curtain back a bit on the mythology of fear, and how it affects us in the most absurd ways sometimes.

Porn Godfather Michael Lucas, at the Ascension beach party, Fire Island Pines

I also wanted to thank Joe.My.God for giving me props for a long-winded comment I left on The Malcontent. As we become more and more mainstream, which I fully support, the gender issues that lie just beneath the surface of so much of our slang and behavior toward one another will become more and more divisive and important to understanding who we are. Things like "pink face" in the media, and the growing intellectual divide between effeminate gays and the "average Joe" set will play an important role in how we perceive ourselves, as well as how we are perceived. As usual, there's really no "there" there, as there's plenty of room in this world for all types of queers. Nevertheless, I see this evolving into a type of lesbian/gay divide, where we are lumped together by society-at-large, but don't really see eye-to-eye with one another on most things.

A study in contrasts: Time, Inc recently unveiled its response to the Conde corporate advertising blitz. Conde's campaign is called "The Point of Passion" and leverages their celebrity access to emphasize the luxe yet familiar feel of its titles and how they form an intimate bond with their readerships. Time, Inc.'s response? "Trusted Connections", an orange nightmare of creative leveraging what Time, Inc. does best - write boring memos and pander to a faceless mass audience. "We don't sell pages," they brag, "we sell influence." They certainly got that first part right. With the luxury market moving further and further into Conde's nest, and the mass tabs/gossip blogs outflanking the People mothership by being even more bawdy, cutthroat, and let's face it - British, there's less and less solid ground for Time, Inc. to stand on. For a company that survives by growing its audience, not merely struggling to keep the one they already have, these are tough times indeed. One would think a bolder, sexier campaign that focused on our much-touted digital revolution and found a way to connect with ad people (ad people!) with more acumen than this would be in order. It's pathetic.

TheViewFromMyWindow

I don't know what posessed me to send this pic taken from my bedroom window to Andrew Sulllivan, but he posted it. Although clearly I don't live in New York, as he titled it, since it is a picture of the city from NJ. I love this time of the day, when the sun hits that midtown building just right for about 10 minutes. It's actually much more dramatic in real life.

Post-TraumaticOptimism

I've been fumbling around for a reasonable explanation for how I, and so many others, could have been so historically wrong about Iraq. Coming from a military family myself, I'm acutely aware of how disruptive this war has been for so many American families and Iraqi civilians. With no good news on the horizon, a sense of terrible failure has set in, as we grope for the least catastrophic end to this debacle. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers recently nailed it, at least from my perspective:

With at least ten golden years of history behind us, we told ourselves how good we were and convinced ourselves that the blighted Arabs needed our way of life, needed our product. We convinced ourselves that the Middle East was no different than Bosnia. There would be some resistance, but after a show of American power the population would fall into a sluggish acquiescence. Everyone would live happily under the flag of Nike.

Free-market economics, rather than Hobbes, is the driving philosophy of Donald Rumsfeld. He invaded Iraq with 100,000 troops because he believed the "spontaneous forces" latent in Iraq merely had to be tapped into to turn it into New Zealand. Some were a little concerned when we heard this phrase of his, recognizing its Hayekian overtones. We began to suspect that he was a fanatic Friedmanite, treating Iraq like some Libertarian laboratory, applying a philosophy that worked under certain precise circumstances to an irrational place. The light footprint of our military was to a significant extent borne of our better instincts, of a free-market ideology, worse: a do-gooder freemarket ideology. The rough and tough Rumsfeld thought that the U.S. merely had to subtract itself for the most part from a country whose order it had just annihilated, rather than act as a leviathan, providing the necessary security and force.

Having watched free markets sweep across Eastern Europe and Russia, we naturally thought the same would occur in Iraq. And flush with the profound success of our economic philosophy in our own country, we hurriedly grafted it onto a country so benighted, whose culture was so alien to liberal capitalism, that we instead cast it into further moral darkness and depravity. It was a kind of economic five-year plan. Many of us honestly believed that in five or ten year's time, in 2007 or 2012, Iraq would be awash in foreign capital. The historical naivete of the Republicans was breathtaking. Their shrunken time-frame was not conservative, was that of their enemy, a naïve, atheist liberal, of a teenager even.

After 9/11, many of us suffered a type of post-traumatic optimism, so profoundly disgusted and horrified by an attack on our soil that we desperately clung to the belief that we could re-fashion, in our own image, those parts of the world that bred the kind of hateful ideologies out to destroy us. If only these people had the option to live as we did, freely and openly with a respect for market economies devoid of tyrranical dictators or frothing religious bigotry. If only.

Bush & Co. offered a promise that this was possible. A promise so blindingly naive and unlikely that it would take a born-again Christian, or a nation deeply wounded by tragedy, to fall for it. Some of the more stridently anti-war folks out there now demand that each and every one of us who supported the war initially feel eternally guilty for it, personally responsible for every American death, and barring that we should sign up for military service ourselves. I'm not going to flagellate myself for their edification, but I will grant that my conscience is weighted with the knowledge that our mistakes have cost so many innocent lives. I will admit to a temporary form of delusional optimism, a willful suspension of disbelief for the sake of making the world a better place. As the cruel hangover sets in, all we can brace for now is a long, painful journey home.

Kevin, the Queer Conservative, has tagged me to tell you 7 things you may not know about me. Let's get all MySpace for a moment, shall we?

1) I'm fairly certain that I will be run over by a car or bicycle in the streets of New York. This gives me a strange confidence in the face of more realistic dangers.

2) I, too, played clarinet as a young student. I wanted to play flute initially, but my mother and the music salesman convinced me that it was a girl's instrument, and forced me to buy a clarinet instead. I enjoyed it much more than I would have enjoyed the flute, as it gave me a chance to sit with the larger girls and gossip about the cute drummers.

3) I have very few meaningful or detailed memories of growing up, yet I have no personal traumas in my past that would explain this. My memories begin to fade almost immediately after forming them, and I end up telling people the same stories constantly. Yet I can still remember the ISBN code of a bookmark from when I worked at WaldenBooks in high school: 68180322.

4) When I was a toddler (according to my mother) I wandered back into the barnyard behind our house in Washington state just as the abattoir was chopping the head off of a steer that we were having butchered. As she swooped me up to take me back to the house, I peeked over her shoulder and told my mother, "That cow lost it's head!"

5) I'm very good at many things, but master of none. If I were younger I would probably have been put on ADD medication at an early age. Which probably helps explain my taste for stimulants.

6) I am neurotic about staying on straight lines, patterns and lighter colors when I walk through Manhattan.

7) I do not believe in the supernatural, but am absolutely convinced that this city has a personality greater than the sum of its parts. I feel lonely anywhere else.

Have a great holiday, everyone.

Aww. My first Gawker redundancy. Took them long enough. I stand by my comment though. "Inster Fashion"? Slow news day doesn't really do that justice.

HappyGayShame

UPDATE: I've carefully re-read this post and come to the conclusion that it is a complete load of pretentious horsecrap, and I don't think I even agree with myself. Oh, the crippling shame.

There has been a bit of a media tempest in an urban gay teapot about this year's Pride festivities. Who are we? What do we need this parade for anyway? Is there a division between the affluent white gays and the adorable (but do not fuck with them) street urchins that inhabit (inhibit?) the piers every year for the strangely controversial Heritage of Pride street festival at the end of the parade in the Village? This year's clusterfuck of an attempt to move the street fair to Chelsea blew up in our collective faces, highlighting the awkwardness between the demographic divide forming in the New York gay community. The relationship between the mostly white male activists of the AIDS generation and the new-gen genderqueer types from the black/latino/trans/lesbian ranks that are currently screaming for attention has always been a strained one, but until now we have all put on a somewhat happy face together, fighting much larger powers-that-be for several decades.

Now, a sense of achievement has set in among the well-heeled 8th Ave. set, who no longer feel that the fuss is worth it every year. In other words, if we can't bring the festivities to us, we just won't go at all. Collectively, we've made incredible progress in such a short amount of time - it's almost a given that in the next 10 years New York will have full gay marriage rights, NJ is already experimenting with civil unions, popular culture has come a long way in portraying us in a somewhat positive light. AIDS is still a haunting but less immediate spectre in our lives. Perhaps the time is ripe to recognize that indeed, we are all just people, living the lives that people live. Complicated, messy but sometimes rewarding lives. Some conservative gays (of which I tend to find much agreement with) closed their eyes this year and wished upon that star.

What did I do this weekend? I played host to an ex and his friend from Texas, partied like an ageing rockstar, and missed the parade. I am, after all, a somewhat privileged white man with a fabulous view of the city, and my sense of urgency for gay issues is also somewhat muted. Saturday night found us at the old Roxy space, which had been rented out one last time for an Arena reunion blowout with Junior Vasquez. For the low low price of $55 you too could have been witness to the tortured death throes of an entire generation of NYC nightlife. The aging queen of mega-club theatrics was in familiar form by now, re-hashing old standards and mashing sounds together inchoherently with the petulance of a fading monarch. The 'spectacle' consisted of a stage prop wall of hideous neon lights meant to suggest (one would surmise) the media-centric light show of the original Arena at Palladium (now poetically a student dorm). Some reported seeing a show or two (if one considers a Madonna impersonator doing 'Don't Cry For Me, Argentina' a show) but we saw none, instead forced to suffer through a peak-hour 'Peace Train' by Dolly Parton (not live, as he once would have been able to pull off), watching a confused and scattered crowd wander aimlessly in the middle of the dance floor hugging one another - out of misery or faux-ecstasy one was not sure. Sunday was spent blissfully enjoying the soft touch and gentle kisses of my boyfriend, using up the remainder of our own ill-gotten mood enhancers. There was indeed a sense of personal pride felt by us that day, as we watched the fireworks burst over the pier dance from my declasse Jersey apartment with unmitigated glee. 

Today, I saw two adorable boys walking across 42nd street, one white and the other hispanic, and I knew instinctively that they were gay. Not because of affectation, but you do learn to recognize certain demographic realities in this city. Call me racist if you will (everyone is a little bit, after all), but one of the interesting hallmarks of gay life is that it forces you to fraternize with other gay people that aren't necessarily part of your demographic set. It would be a shame to lose that unique edge in life, which seems to be what is happening recently.  I'm all for assimilation, but I wouldn't mind holding onto the things that make us unique in positive ways, including our ability to love one another regardless of race or gender, forced as it may have been on us.

Although I like where this guy is going with his thinking, I also hope that Pride doesn't become a completely anachronistic exercise for us. In our continuing effort to mainstream our lives, we should hold tight to the idea that the rising tide should benefit all ships, and not cut the ropes on those who lack more immediate mainstream appeal. We all experience our sexuality in unique, sometimes wonderful ways. But we all have secret shames to deal with - sometimes personal, sometimes public (note to Jr.: let go of the past, girl.) Let's not make our greatest shame an inability to empathize with those of us who haven't seen all of the advantages that some of us have been so lucky to see in our lifetimes. Wouldn't that just be so depressingly human and predictable? So I choose to not celebrate Pride this year, but Shame, because it is only in recognizing our own complicity in man's inhumanity to man that we will ever reach a place that recognizes all of us as the beautiful, fabulous creatures that we are.