Happy Valentine’s Day!
Category: ultrapersonal
You got it raw!
I’ve wanted to write something about John Waters, and why I respect and adore him so much, and how he’s been so influential for so much of my life — I saw him speak last Saturday night, just before I left the UK, and had him autograph my expired visa — but it would be hard to put all that in tow words properly at the best of time, and I’ve been absurdly busy.
Instead, let’s just enjoy a few moments from Cry-Baby, shall we? I still remember seeing this with some girls I knew in college, and when Polly Bergen said with some disgust, “Boys with long hair . . . and tattoos . . . who spit on the ground,” we all experienced a collective throb of “Oh yes.”
Sparky in exile
So, yeah, I’m leaving the UK for a bit. I’ve been here for the last four years on a series of visas, and my current work permit expires in a little under two weeks. We haven’t been able to get the right paperwork for my next visa in time, so I’ve got to be out of the country before the stroke of midnight on the fateful day. Now my only option is to stay away until all the paperwork is sorted, and then reapply from within the United States.
It sucks, hugely. Although I’d already planned to travel for most of December anyway, suddenly I have to buy extra plane tickets, exploit the hospitality of friends for longer than I’d planned or wished to do, and scramble to fill that time with extra work when I’d been planning to take a break after the completion of my job. And instead of settling into the new year with a new job, new opportunities, and the return to solvency, I’ve got to head back to New York and float from couch to guest room to couch while I deal with bureaucracy, burn through what little money I have, and just hope things work out.
The sudden change in plans is one thing, but the uncertainty is the bit that’s doing me head in. It’s likely, yes, but not certain that I’ll be allowed back. The Home Office has been really difficult about my sponsorship so far — the main reason it’s taken so much longer than anticipated — and I have to throw what I can fit into a suitcase and just hope the final details fall into place. If they find fault with any part of my application, than I could really be stuck an ocean away from the life I’ve been slowly building for myself for the last four years. Even if all goes well, I don’t know how long it will take to come back and for things to settle down. This is already screwing upplans to travel and teach in January, and may even screw up another trip to India I was starting to plan. I’m rattled that the stability I’d been holding out for has been snatched away for a while more.
Even if things go well and I can get myself back to England by the end of January, there’s another problem. This will probably throw off my plans to apply for permanent settlement, since the interruption in my visa status may invalidate the time I’ve spent here already, leaving me with another five years to go before I can stay without any trouble.
So that’s that. I’ll be living out of suitcase for at least two months — hoping for the best, trying not to be a burden, working when and where I can, and waiting to see if things fall apart of fall into place come February or so. Wish me luck!
Life on Mars
For the record, in case any of you are or know eccentric billionaires, I would ABSOLUTELY be willing to go to Mars, regardless of whether or not there were a way to get back. In fact, that would be a certain part of the appeal. Surely the need for this fatalistic derring-do of mine is of vital importance toward future colonization, right? Surely a Mars mission needs an introspective (yet appropriately sociable) designer/zinester to document the journey and the inevitable decline of the first colony, right? How else would future generations learn? I already have a thing for space suits! SEND ME TO MARS, DAMNIT!
I knew her when
Long before autotune, that Oscar, little baby Apple, and even her duet with Huey Lewis, young miss Gwyneth Paltrow and a few of her chums at the exclusive Spence School on the upper east side of Manhattan planned a small production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown as a senior class project. I, ladies and gentlemen, was cast as Charlie Brown in that production.
Spence was an all-girls school, so just like the all-boys school I attended nearby, they had to recruit from other schools in the area to round out the cast if they put on a show. (This is a big reason why it wasn’t considered that faggy to get involved with the theater in single-sex schools: it was an effective way to meet suitors. That also made it good camouflage if you were just a typical teenage musical-theater fag.) After seeing a flyer for auditions at Spence appear in the locker room one day, my pal Neil and I went slightly further uptown and were soon cast as the male leads.
Sadly, the show never made it to the stage. After a few rehearsals held at Spence and in the sprawling 5th Avenue apartment where one of the girls lived, we stopped hearing anything from the girls. One of them had a little brother at our school, and he sheepishly asked us to return our scripts because the show was cancelled.
A lot of the details of this are all very fuzzy now: I can’t remember what I sang at the audition, and even though I know Neil was going to be Snoopy, I’m not totally sure what part Gwyneth had. If I’d have known one of us would become famous I might have retained more. But it wasn’t until many years later that I connected that chick who was in that movie with the teenager I knew a little who had an actress mother named Blythe Danner whose name only barely rang a bell. I recall Neil saying he wasn’t that interested in her, since her classmate Gretchen — the one with the brother in our school — had much more impressive tits. I was convinced all along that I would never see these girls again, anyway, since they were obscenely wealthy and moved in different circles altogether. Spence was, after all, one of the inspirations for the school in Gossip Girl, and I was definitely just a working class art nerd.
Random bits of loosely related trivia that have occurred to me while writing this:
- Fellow type designer Jonathan Hoefler — who I only met a couple of years ago — went to another school in the neighborhood at the same time. I don’t think he ever met Gwyneth, but he made much better use of his experiences working on the school newspaper and/or yearbook.
- Aside from one show my freshman year of college, I never really bothered with performing after that. Neil, however, did go on to try his hand at acting, and it was always funny to see him turn up unexpectedly as a bit character in the occasional film.
- I once met Anthony Rapp, who played Charlie Brown on Broadway. It was a totally random handshake sort of meeting, during which I never got the chance to mention that I had been in his apartment earlier that year, helping a mutual friend feed his pets while he was out of town. Anthony was introduced to me by his boyfriend, with whom I had shamelessly flirted some months earlier.
- I am not the gayest gay the Jesuits at my high school ever sent forth into the world. That honor belongs to another Oscar winner — Bill Condon, writer/director of Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls, et al.
- Do you know who else was a total east-side private-school theater fag who was in a bunch of musicals at my high school (long after my time)? The girl who would one day become Lady Gaga.
It Gets Better
Overall, I’m a big fan of the It Gets Better project. I think it’s an incredibly important message to send out into the world, if only because there are so many kids who really, really need to hear it, and get a little strength and encouragement from it. The world isn’t an easy place, and I know the truth really is that — as a wise friend of mine expains — it gets complicated. Overall, though, I’m for the effort, and regularly touched by the variety of ways I see the idea repeated, and the variety of people who have taken the time to repeat it. Tonight I found this one by Murray Hill and friends, and it was immediately my favorite:
What I love about this is that it’s joyous. Not glib, not maudlin, not too specific — just filled with spirit and energy and good will. This is what would have really reached me when I was young: the site of that huge, happy, heterogenous, homosexual crowd all having fun in one place without it seeming weird or scary or dull or over-the-top. In fact, it captures the spirit of many, many nights I’ve spent out at shows or little clubs over the years, and it makes me happy to see it.
On the whole, I’m not a happy person. Believe it or not, I keep a tight lid on most of my moping and griping. The honest truth is that my baseline emotion is one of frustration and futility, peppered with a generous dose of poor self-confidence. You know what, though? The gay thing has never been the cause of that. Sure there were scattered moments of anxiety during the coming-out years, but never despair about that part of the equation. As the realization that I was gay crept up on me, I never thought I was wrong or bad because of it. It was just stressful to figure out how to change course.
I cling to the few and fleeting things in life that make me feel really happy, and the truth is that a lot of them connect to being gay, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. Whether it’s been the love of interesting men, the comaraderie of friends, the link to a variety of subcultures that resonate with me, or even the increasingly outdated thrill of being a little outré, there’s a lot about being gay that makes parts of my life good. There’s been plenty of pain in life over the years, but the gayness — the sexual identity, the cultural identity, and the permission to figure out my own way in the absence of an established model to follow — has generally been the salve, not the sore.
I’ve been lucky in that I was able to stay below the radar (mostly) before coming out on my own terms, and then I found that no one loved me any less, or thought any worse of me. Because of that fortune, it’s a little hard to really and truly understand what it’s like for kid trying to figure all this out in worse circumstances. But you know what? That just makes me even more sure that every kid deserves the love and support that I realized was there all along. And they deserve to find themselves — if that’s what they want — in a roomful of energetic, interesting people not just telling them — but showing them — that it gets better.
The slippery soapbox
I foolishly got involved in a heated online discussion about HIV and dating and disclosure this weekend. Foolish, that is, because in the midst of a lot of passionate — and often mean-spirited — opinions firing back and forth, I chimed in without really anticipating that in the true spirit of the internet someone would anonymously choose to be a real asshole, and it would really rattle me. Aside from that unpleasantness, though, I made a few points that are probably worth sharing.
Home Again
It feels a bit wrong to say New York is home at this point. It’s been four years now since I moved to the UK, and while London doesn’t quite feel like home yet, New York just feels like the place I came from, a place I happen to know.
I’ve only been back a handful of times, but this last trip really felt more like being just a visitor than before. Since I was in town for work, I stayed at a swank hotel in Chelsea — the Maritime. I’ve never stayed in a hotel in New York before, just my own place when I lived here, or crashing with friends since I left.
Coming right into Manhattan from the airport, rather than easing into a visit by seeing friends first, is also a bit of a shock. I got in around 11 the first night, but it was such a perfect clear night that I went for a short stroll through the West Village to unwind before the travel fatigue caught up with me. I’m so used to living in Europe now that it felt so unexpected, so preposterous to hear myself surrounded by shouting, laughing, gabbing Americans. Part if it was that these were regular New Yorkers out on a Saturday night, instead of the blandly accented Americans I regularly hear on TV. I was sure I’d stop giggling and eavesdropping once I readjusted. But it was a delicious shock to the system in my weary state that night.
Blighty
Judging from the many, many house renovation projects going on in my area (Leyton — vicariously experience the charms by buying the typeface), people around here are making an investment in their homes. While that’s a good sign overall for the prospects of a pleasant neighborhood where I have a great deal on a room in a super flat with a super flatmate, it leads to some…irritation. Like this GIANT SKIP RIGHT OUTSIDE THAT WILL NEVER EVER GO AWAY as near as I can tell. Sure, it makes it easy to direct people to where I live, but it’s kinda ugly, right?
The builders next door are gutting the former home of a sweet old lady who passed away a while ago, but apparently they do about an hour of work a day, and this damn skip will be eligible for protection as a historical feature soon.
Wonders never cease
