Winona.

Most of the drive up to Winona, MN, my father’s and grandparents’ hometown, from northern Illinois is through Wisconsin, but then you cross the Mississippi near the end and drive the last 20 minutes along the river with those famous bluffs on your left and the river, which is very wide there, on the right. It’s beautiful, and I always wonder why my parents—who both loved that area and talked about it a lot, especially comparing it to Indiana which they hated but spent most of their adults lives in—never moved back there. I know people don’t always think of their lives as so easily mobile, but why would people spend their whole lives in a place they disliked so strongly?

Winona is a small but not tiny town on an isthmus between the river and a long skinny lake. Both shores are public park. I’ve had these wedding photos of my grandparents since Lenore died and I took her scrapbooks. They were taken in the park on the lake, along which is a road lined with mansions. My dad says it was a popular place to take photos, with the fancy houses as backdrop. I thought there was a good chance the house in the photos was still there, and my cousin Debra and I found it easily. I tried lamely to replicate grandfather Ed’s pose. I don’t have anything close to his charisma and style.

These Days!

Planning this trip, I thought I would journal and blog at the end of every day, I thought I would read the day’s research and write a bit before I went to bed. I have not done that. I have mostly gone back to my hotel room, had a drink, and gone to bed early.

Today was not atypical. I went to bed last night at 9:30 and woke up at 6. I met my cousin Cathy for breakfast at 8:30 and we talked about the last 50 years of our lives, our families, our loves and losses. The last time I saw Cathy (she remembered, I had forgotten) was on a trip to Six Flags Great America with her, her cousin Meg—I guess that would make Meg my cousin, too—and my brother and me when I was 15. Mom was much closer to her Aunt Alice (Cathy’s mother) than to her own mother and when we visited we always stayed with them and not at the DeMeyer farm. After breakfast, I drove out on Washington Street, which used to be Grange Hall Road, to Gurnee to see where the DeMeyer farm was. I knew the farm was no longer there, or any farms, it’s all just dusty random businesses along a wide highway. I couldn’t tell where the farm had been. I haven’t been there since I was ten. I think Great America came first and then lots of development followed. It’s all unrecognizable.

Next was the Waukegan Historical Society. I was very frustrated yesterday not having found Grandma Lenore’s address here and wandering around, nothing ringing a bell. I thought someone there might be able to help me. Their library is closed for a renovation, but the woman running the museum remembered the popcorn store that I remember in the storefront of Grandma’s building. I went to the public library to see if they had old city directories. They did, and there it was: “Cheslik, Lenore 207 N Genesee Apt 305”!

So I walked over to Genesee Street and, plot twist, Grandma Lenore lived over a theater! The Waukegan Theater, now called the Genesee Theater, was a vaudeville house, then a movie theater, and I think about 25 years ago they completely renovated it and now use it for live music. That strip of Genesee was a small theater district in the early 20th century, with three theaters in a handful of blocks. I have no memory from childhood visits of a theater next to the entrance to Grandma’s. She lived there from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, so it’s possible it was closed. Those were rough years for a lot of those old downtown theaters.

Then I drove the few blocks to the house where my family lived when I was born. The house is still there and looks better than it does in photos from the early 1960s. When I got out of the car, I remembered that down the block and across the street my mother had a friend, Henrietta, who told a story about her daughter getting ringworm on her scalp and having to have her head shaved. (That story transmuted into Y’all lore as the story of Cousin Mandy.) At the end of the block, there’s a deep ravine with a creek at the bottom. My brother and I remember the ravine and how Grandma told scary stories about a troll who lived down there (and I also somehow connect the ravine with Helen Keller but I have no idea why now). But I didn’t remember that it was half a block from our house. No wonder Grandma was trying to scare us away from it.

Henrietta lived in one of these houses, I’m not sure which.

Don’t go down there!

It was only about 2 so I decided to drive down to Des Plaines about a half hour south to visit the grave of Danny Bridges, Larry Eyler’s last victim. I’d been feeling a little uncomfortable about the murder tourism aspect of a visit and almost talked myself out of going, but I was compelled. Of Eyler’s victims, Danny Bridges is the one I, and I think a lot of people, are most drawn to. He was the last one, the murder Eyler was convicted for, and he’s unusually young. Young among Eyler’s victims, and young to have been on his own. Everything you read about him makes you think there’s no way he would’ve let that happen to him, he was too smart, so it’s especially puzzling and sad. I cried when I found the grave. I felt silly, I don’t know him. The inscription from his sister was moving. He didn’t have much love in his life.

I was going to have dinner at Louie’s tonight, but I hadn’t had lunch and I was hungry so I stopped on the way back to the hotel, at 4. Louie’s Pizza is mythical, it is the pizza that my parents compared every pizza they ever ate their whole lives to. The best pizza review you would ever hear from my dad was, “It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.” The reason my mother taught herself to make pizza was to see if she could duplicate it, because they couldn’t get pizza as good as Louie’s in Indiana. I would bet that my dad took Mom to Louie’s on their first date. It was their place. I had never had it, so I can’t comment on whether it’s the same now as it was 65 years ago, but it’s pretty damn good. Tavern-style pizza—very thin cracker crust, cut in squares—is the other Chicago pizza. If you want to try it, there’s a new place in the West Village called Emmett’s on Grove that doesn’t have the regional atmosphere, but they’ve got the pizza down. It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.

Mecca.

Some research is reading interesting books. Some is archaeology.

The last person Larry Eyler killed was a 15-year-old boy named Danny Bridges. Most of Eyler’s victims were men in their 20s and 30s, but a few were younger. Bridges was quasi-homeless, street smart, charming by all accounts. At that time there was a bustling market in teen boy prostitutes in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and that’s how he survived. The story is that Eyler picked him up there, but it doesn’t add up because Bridges knew Eyler and knew that he was dangerous, so why would he have gone with him?

(Which gives more weight to Eyler’s already credible assertion that he did not commit all 25 murders alone, but that’s another rabbit hole. If you’re curious about Eyler, the Wikipedia entry is pretty comprehensive as far as what’s known. To my mind, a great deal of really important stuff is not known and a lot of what is surmised is fishy. The source most heavily relied on by other writers is a book called Freed to Kill, by Gera-lind Kolarik, a Chicago journalist who followed the case closely. The book is downright weird, she’s sort of the hero of her story and refers to herself in the third person. She speculates a lot and with confidence. No index, no citations. It baffles me that hers is the only serious book about Eyler. There must be hundreds of books about John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.)

Anyway, Danny Bridges evidently gave good interview because he’s featured in a multi-part feature on child abuse in the Chicago Tribune and he’s interviewed in an NBC news special on child abuse (which is where he mentions Eyler, just a few weeks before Eyler kills him). Media was obsessed with child abuse in the early 1980s; remember the hysterical panic about daycare centers? I have been able to find neither the Tribune series or the TV documentary, so far.

I thought I’d located the TV piece. Several sources said it was a made-for-TV documentary called “Silent Shame,” produced by NBC in 1984. A friend helping me with research tracked down what is apparently the only available recording, a VHS tape at the Indiana State University library in Terre Haute, Indiana. (The ISU library also has a fascinating connection to the Eyler murders, also having to do with the possibility of an accomplice, but I keep getting sidetracked!) So I added Terre Haute to this trip because it’s kind of on the way, and Eyler’s murders were mostly committed, or at any rate he dumped most of the bodies, along the stretch of IN-41 which runs from Terre Haute to Chicago, and I thought it would be cool to drive that route.

When I walked in the library, there was a long circulation desk with a huge neon sign over it: “ASK.” So I asked the kid sitting there where I might find the video. He sighed and looked up from his book, gave me a “no clue” look. I handed him a piece of paper with the call number, he looked at it for a few seconds, then said, “Second floor?” I asked him where, once I found it, I could view it. He said, “I don’t think you can watch a VHS tape here.” I said, “You don’t think? The tape is ‘library use only’ so if I can’t watch it here and I can’t check it out, why do you have it?” He gave me the no clue look again. I asked him if there was someone who might have a clearer idea of the situation, and he said “no.” HE SAID NO.

So I wandered around a bit. The place was absolutely deserted. A college library at 9:30 a.m. No reference desk that I could locate. Finally I snagged a woman who looked like maybe she worked there, showed her the piece of paper and asked where it would be, and she took me to the regular stacks, found the tape, and handed it to me. I asked where I could watch it. She said, “Hm. I don’t think any of the listening stations have VHS.” But she said, “Let’s ask,” and she headed for the desk with the no clue guy. I said, “He doesn’t know.” Just then another woman walked by and the first women snagged her and asked. There was one VHS player, downstairs all the way in the back corner.

Well, this was a 1984 VHS tape so if you know you know that VHS doesn’t really last that long. The tape was so badly degraded that it ran at about 1/2 speed with the audio completely garbled and mostly indecipherable. It was an hour long and I was just looking for a few minutes’ interview with Danny Bridges. It was a seriously creepy documentary, ostensibly news, but very salacious with lots of images of actual child pornography with no attempt to obscure the identity of the kids. Because it ran so slow I was there for 2 hours waiting for this interview, and then the show was over and no Danny Bridges. He wasn’t in it.

All the true crime nerds and serial killer freaks on Reddit are trying to find this Danny Bridges interview. I scoured a long thread and picked up that nobody has found it yet, but also that there’s some confusion between this NBC documentary “Silent Shame” and a news special called “NBC Reports: Child Abuse.” So the interview must be on the other one. I’ll keep looking. Hopefully it’s not VHS, and hopefully it’s not in Terre Haute.

Well, I sat down to write a short blog entry (I have two hours between things and I’m at a Starbucks) about my afternoon at the Chicago Historical Society library leafing through 5 years of GayLife, a Chicago free gay tabloid with ads and listings and classified and hard news and politics, looking for coverage of Eyler because I wanted to get the community’s take at the time. It’s a weekly, so hundreds of issues, most of them with nothing about Eyler, but I had to look at every page to find out. My fingers were black when I was done. It took forever and even longer because I was so captivated by this media world that was so familiar and that has mostly disappeared, these bar rags full of stories of gay-bashers attacking gay men, police attacking gay men, politicians attacking gay men, then AIDS attacking gay men, and page after page of explicit ads for bathhouses and “best ass” contests and drag queens, all the sex and joy and fun of our community right there alongside the constant danger of violence and hate. And 1980-84 is a pretty packed few years news-wise, otherwise, too.

Coincidence.

When I was a little kid, I’m not sure how old, there was an eclipse and all the dire warnings not to look at it or you'll go blind, and I tried so hard but could not resist looking at it for about 2 seconds. I don't think I really saw anything. I don't know what kind of eclipse it was, I don't remember it getting dark. I was terrified the rest of the day, and I was crying in bed that night and there was some kind of big confession, but I didn't go blind.

Greencastle, Indiana is about 40 miles Southwest of Indianapolis.

On Monday I’ll be in Greencastle, Indiana, where I lived as a teenager, which is smack in the middle of the path of totality or whatever they’re calling it. It’s one stop on a too tightly scheduled road trip with several stops for research in courthouses and libraries and such. I found out yesterday that the county courthouse and public library in Greencastle, the two places where I had planned to spend Monday, are both closed for the eclipse.

I did not know about this eclipse when I planned the trip. I’m not superstitious, but I won’t say that eclipses are not here to fuck with you.

Another coincidence I realized yesterday is that I’ll be visiting my Grandma Lenore’s grave on her birthday. I had it in my head that she was buried in St. Paul, I guess because that’s where she lived the last 20 or so years of her life, but I was reminded that her grave is down the river in Winona, where she was born and raised. So the day of the cemetery visit changed and ended up on her birthday.

I’m up very early today, ready to fly to Columbus to visit my brother and his wife and pick up a rental car. My siblings and I will spend Sunday with my dad and try to help him figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Then Greencastle, Terre Haute, Chicago, Waukegan, Winona, and Minneapolis.

The Past.

In a couple weeks—at the end of a 10-day trek across the Midwest with stops in Columbus to visit my brother, then with him to Muncie and Indianapolis to join my sister and father to begin Dad’s transition from the house he shared with my mom for 40 years to an “independent living” community, and on to Greencastle, where I lived as a teenager, then Terre Haute where Larry Eyler lived for many years, up to Chicago where Eyler was convicted of murder, and Waukegan just north of there where he was arrested for an earlier murder but not tried because the evidence was tainted, and where my mother grew up and my dad lived as a teenager and where I was born, on to Winona, Minnesota where my grandparents were born and raised and my father was born—I’ll be meeting Jay Byrd in Minneapolis to deliver the Y’all archive to the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Preparing for this marathon of research, while simultaneously preparing the Y’all materials for posterity, has been, well, a process. I use the word intense too often, but that’s what it is. The urgency of my father’s move right now in the midst of all this is … what? the icing on the cake? Murphy’s Law? Just fucked up?

My goal for July at Yaddo is to finish a strong first draft of my book. At that point I will have all the research I plan to do and a month of nothing but work. I am very much looking forward to finishing this book. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I’m looking forward to the period after it when I can move on. I think somewhere in my head I’d come to regard this book as my final opus, my big statement. (I even thought for a while that I would title it The Key to All Mythologies.) But I’m only 63 and it’s totally possible I’ll be around for a while, so I’m looking forward to starting something new, maybe something that has never even crossed by mind.

Besides the paper, and the various analog and digital formats of audio and video recordings, the Y’all archive contains a pretty extensive digital component: photos, documents, the archived web site which includes years of blogging, years of email too if anyone has the inclination to dig it out of old contact management software and email programs, as well as more audio and video. This song is on the last Y’all album, Between the World and Me, but it was recorded months earlier than the other songs on the album, which we recorded in January of 2001. The visit you see in the video was the spring or summer before. We were staying with Mike West and his partner at the time, Myshkin, at their house in the 9th Ward. Also there for a few days were several friends on their way to the Kerrville Folk Festival or maybe they had just been there and were on their way home? I can’t remember (one of them was Libby Kirkpatrick, who sings on the track). It was not long after we’d met and fallen in love with Roger. The house is gone now, lost in the flood.

What It All Boils Down To.

This is most of it. It’s virtually all the paper — letters, postcards, legal documents, sales records, scripts, artwork, fan art, flyers, posters, scripts, programs, miscellaneous drafts of things and other ephemera, and photos — and most of the audio (I’ve kept one of all our released albums and singles and the masters, for now). This doesn’t include any of the Life in a Box archives: hard drives with all the media and various rough cuts, the paper logs and storyboards and all that, as well as the 150 hours of raw footage. I want to keep it for a while longer. There’s also quite a bit of digital material, which will be much easier and less anxiety-provoking to transport than these boxes and folders and envelopes.

Other than that, I have the Oshkosh overalls and Red Wing boots I wore in every performance for 10 years. All the handmade shirts and aprons, my grey suit jacket, Jay’s black dress, cameo, and (big sigh) the lucky green dress, were stolen in 2003 from the basement of the friend’s house where Jay was living in Nashville after we separated. We used to say that we were saving the LGD for the Smithsonian, but that’s not to be. I fantasize that 100 years from now it’ll turn up in someone’s attic or in a junk store or estate sale and somebody will recognize it because their grandmother used to go on and on about this bizarre duo called Y’all whose CDs her mother played incessantly in the car when she was a little kid.

Yoga and My Decrepitude.

So for a few years now I’ve had a little to a lot of back pain on evenings after I do laundry or vacuum the apartment and sometimes just randomly when I haven’t done anything strenuous at all. Usually it’s not that bad, but sometimes I’m flat on my back for the rest of the day.

I got out of my gym habit during the pandemic, so I get very little exercise these days except hard New York walking, which is not nothing—I try to walk most places if I can get there in less than about 40 minutes, and even if I take the train I have a 15-20 minute walk to the closest station—but stomping on the pavement is probably not good for my back. Besides the back issue, in general, I can feel my body stiffening. I’ll be 63 in a couple weeks.

Seemed like yoga might be what I need, I kept saying, what I need is core strength and more flexibility, but I put it off and put it off for months, mostly out of social anxiety: going to a new place with new people, starting a new thing with new stuff to learn, feeling dumb, out of my element... The community center in my neighborhood where I go, or used to go, to the gym has a yoga class twice a week. I love this community center, so I finally dragged my ass there (at 7:30 a.m., thank you).

And I started to really enjoy it. I like the teacher, the other people seem nice, the vibe is quiet and mellow, there’s not a lot of socializing. And then the dance studio across the street started offering a class twice a week (at the more reasonable time of 9 a.m), so I tried that one this week and liked it even more.

Since twice a week didn’t feel like quite enough if I want to develop some discipline, I thought I might do both. The community center class is on Mondays and Thursdays at 7:30 and the dance studio class is on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9, so on Thursdays I’d take 2 classes in a row, but they’re both close to home and it it felt totally doable. Today was the first day I was going to try it out and see if it was too much.

After the 7:30 class, though, as soon as I started walking, my back started to hurt. When I got home I was in pain, I lay down for a while and felt better, but as soon as I tried to get up it was worse. As long as I’m completely immobile (except for my fingers) it’s tolerable, but any movement is pretty painful.

I’m reminded of my favorite Lily Tomlin joke: “The other day I bought a wastebasket, and I brought it home in a paper bag. And when I got home, I put the paper bag in the wastebasket.”

January 1993.

I’m donating the Y’all archive to a university library LGBT collection (I’ll make a real announcement once we’ve signed stuff) and my plan is to deliver a portion of it in person when I’m traversing the Midwest next month doing research. To prepare, I’m trying to sort out and organize what I have, decide what to take. A lot of the material is straightforward: correspondence, press, flyers, photos, legal papers, audio, video. But there’s also quite a bit of random ephemera.

Here’s a page from my 1993 date book. January was kind of slow. We’d been performing for about six months by then. We were mostly doing shows in downtown theater venues like Dixon Place and appearing in the various variety nights of that era (“No Shame” hosted by Home for Contemporary Theater comes to mind), and also doing East Village bar/club-type gigs. I don’t think we’d been swept into the alt-country Rodeo Bar scene yet. The blessing and curse of Y’all was that we fit in everywhere and nowhere.

According to this calendar, we played in the monthly Outmusic night at the Center (we loved those gigs and those fans), and it looks like we were starting to check out the West Village cabaret scene. Later that year we’d do long weekly runs at the Duplex and 55 Grove St. It was an exhausting, insanely fun, creative time. My work has never been quite so singularly focused or quite so open and free.

My previous band, TV Goodbyes, was still playing out, I’m not sure how much longer that lasted. Y’all was kind of a bulldozer. The little notations of money in/money out kind of break my heart. Oh the decades of grinding anxiety about paying the bills. I was 31 (and had very recently declared bankruptcy) when I met Jay and we started Y’all. I still had a few decades to go before I ever made more money at art than I spent making it. I’m proud of my persistence.

Speaking of which—of all my jobs and money-making schemes over all those years, I think the one I find most remarkable was being, for a brief period of time, the proprietor of a twice-monthly sex club called The Come Spot.

Love & Marriage.

Just got butter out to soften so I can make the pink heart-shaped cookies I make every year for Valentine’s Day, because apparently now I am a person who does that sort of thing. And while I wait, I’m contemplating how it all started.

This, from December 2010, is from a few weeks after we met, and this, from March 2011, I wrote a couple months later.

(I’m struck by how frank I was back then when I blogged about men and sex. I guess it’s mostly because in 2010 I’d been single for years and there was a lot more sex drama in my life and it was interesting stuff to write about, and now, well, I’ve been married for 12 years. That part of my life is less newsy. Which is not to say less interesting, but that the kind of news generated by a long marriage is I guess more personal, or I have chosen to keep it personal, to protect it. I have a feeling this is a subject for its own essay!)

1983 - 2023

First time I saw Madonna—I always say it was the Roxy but it might have been Danceteria— in 1983, she performed this song on a platform on the dance floor, backed by two male dancers just like in this video. I know how fortunate I am that my adult life and my life as an artist align with the course of Madonna’s career.

Last night at Madison Square Garden we had a communal ecstatic experience. I’m feeling it this morning, in my bones and joints and in my heart and soul. Being at a Madonna show is always deep, but last night it was especially moving. A video can only convey a small, oblique slice of what was happening in the room, but here’s kinda what it looked like.

Thank you, once in a millennium world-changing genius artist and undisputed Queen. 

Life, Work, the Toilet.

For some reason, every year I believe the story I tell myself in December, the month when everything conspires to keep one from getting anything done, that if I just get through it, January is next, and it’ll be quiet and wide open and productive. But of course January is never wide open; it’s full of all the things one couldn’t get to in December. By which I mean all the things that are not making art and that keep artists from making art.

Last week, I kind of felt like I was getting through the list—re-orienting myself in my book (the scale of it is constantly daunting to me, and after a few days, let alone a month, away from it, it can take days for me to figure out what’s going on), applying for two residencies later in the year, getting the Y’all Xmas record online for streaming (every December I’m reminded that people want it and it’s out of print and unavailable, so this year I vowed to take care of it in January), planning a 10-day Midwest research trip for the spring—and then on Thursday our shower faucet broke, and what was a drip became a steady stream. Whatever sense of equilibrium I thought I had came crashing down, taking my disposition with it.

The maintenance department in our co-op is sometimes helpful, sometimes a clown show, sometimes a Kafkaesque nightmare; this time they wouldn’t touch it, so I watched a bunch of Youtube videos and decided I could fix the faucet myself. But then, with visions seeping into my head of being sued by every resident on the floors below us for flooding their apartments, I chickened out at the last minute. I called a plumber, and five days and a few hundred dollars later our shower works.

I keep saying that being able to write is as much or more an issue of focus and sustained concentration than a simple question of how one fills the 24 hours available in a day. But is it? I know some artists who can use the 20 minutes between a phone call and an errand productively. For me, it’s challenging to get anything done on a day when I have a dentist appointment in the morning and the rest of the day free. There are artists who are crazy driven, have boundless energy and never lose focus, work constantly and fast, and there are artists who are sluggish, tentative, roundabout, fearful. I have my moments in the former category (mostly in collaborative situations), but temperamentally I’m somewhere closer to the latter.

I tend to put everything in two columns: making art and not making art, and often resenting the whole latter category. But the not making art column doesn’t only include plumbing and such; it’s also full of things I want and need in my life: seeing friends, watching a movie with my husband, having my nephew for dinner, getting some exercise, sleeping, that sub-category of things one does to stay healthy physically, emotionally, spiritually.

It’s insanely difficult to discern the line between taking care of yourself and letting yourself off the hook (believe me, I know this). It’s taken years, but I have a glint of self-awareness about it now, and I find myself constantly interrogating my work ethic. Is this moment of just sitting here like a bump on a log a moment of fruitful daydreaming, a moment of opening up my mind to see the problem from a new angle or in a different light? Is this productive? Or am I just fucking lazy and afraid right now? Or do I need to get more exercise so I sleep better and have more energy in the morning?

This morning at 6, Chan flushed the toilet and it didn’t stop flushing. We have tankless toilets in our building. They flush hard and fast so they don’t seem to ever clog, and there’s no tank which is nice when you have a 20 sq. foot bathroom. And I hate toilet tanks. They’re gross. But when our toilet won’t stop flushing, it’s sending gallons of water per second down the sewer. The maintenance office doesn’t open until 8, so our toilet flushed continuously for almost two hours. Needless to say I haven’t done much this morning.

Is This Where We Are?

This piece caught my eye this morning, mostly because I couldn’t have had a more exactly opposite response to the film. But this take is still interesting to me because so many gay men seem to have felt the same way.

The setup—two beautiful, damaged urban gay men struggling to connect—and the tender, moving performances of Andrew Scott (who is always great) and Paul Mescal—made me inclined to forgive an often obvious, and sometimes outright maudlin story. But gradually my mind drifted far away from the characters to mostly trying to solve the puzzle of the plot. By about halfway through, I was just frustrated and irritable. Instead of contemplating the real problems I thought the story was about—how gay people are always on the outside of their families, the essential loneliness of being gay—I left the theater trying to figure out whether it was a dream, or the guy was schizophrenic, or was it a fable or a horror story, and what the hell was that blurry mass of flesh on the bed at the end? I enjoy the former; the latter makes me angry. It’s not that being tricked by a movie is necessarily a bad thing (“I see dead people” was fun), but not this time. If you stripped away all the gimmickry, there is a beautifully written and acted and powerfully moving story of two men yearning to be together despite everything in modern life that wants to prevent that from happening. It posited interesting questions about gay life, implicitly, and directly in the conversations between the two main characters. (I learned later that the film was made by guy who also did the HBO series Looking, which I loved partly because it dealt with similar questions.)

And then there’s Maestro—in the end I just really loved it, it was so beautiful so watch. Big and gorgeous, unabashedly stylized, cinematic. The way it was edited gave me exactly what I miss in so many contemporary films that look like they were edited by 3-year-olds with ADHD. I’m a sucker for a lingering camera, a whole scene in one long uncut static shot you can relax and let your eyes and mind really take in, slowly, every inch of it. And the tracking shots, especially the one near the end, of Bernstein conducting and the camera moves around him. The virtuosity of his performance and of really everything—just rapturous. It seemed to me that everyone involved in this film was working at the highest level of excellence, and that in and of itself is moving.

But there’s something strange at the heart of it. It’s billed as a biopic, but it’s not. It’s a story of a very unconventional marriage, Bernstein’s wife Felicia is the protagonist, and Bernstein’s inner life is kept hidden, except in some scenes where Felicia shares her take on it. I don’t think this is necessarily unintentional. “Leonard Bernstein” is a performance, his life had the quality of myth, unsurprisingly, because it was constructed, by him, by the media, by his admirers and fans. 

Which gets me to what’s on my mind. That idea of such a constructed performance is often a story about celebrity, but it’s also, and more salient here, a story about queer people, a story about the closet. Every “self” is an act of performing and concealing, but the stakes are usually higher and more explicit for queer people. Bernstein was famously “out,” in that he didn’t hide his attraction to men and his affairs. But the public at that time, and in many ways still, didn’t know what to do with a gay man so unless you were in that circle you wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t like “out gay conductor, Leonard Bernstein” in the New York Times.

Bradley Cooper’s performance, intentionally or not, had the feel of something meta, a performance of a performance—interestingly, not unlike Cate Blanchett’s in Tár—which was exactly right for Bernstein, but without seeing its cracks, and we never do, the film fell short of revealing anything very deep or complex about the man. (Felicia was the only truly complex character.) That in itself is moving, the portrayal of a personality so diminished by the closet; but just sad, not tragedy. Tragedy would be seeing what was lost.

So … there’s another film to be made there, and I look forward to it, when (if?) straight people ever come to terms with how they treat queer people, the lives they force us to live so that we don’t make them uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing I don’t have time to really puzzle out this morning: I feel like both these movies are movies about gay men but made for straight people. (All Of Us Strangers was made, I think, by a gay man. The actors, as far as I know, are straight and it’s loosely based on a story about a straight couple. I could be wrong about any of that, if those things even matter.) I think maybe that’s just where we are, in terms of how popular culture deals with queerness now, and that’s not at all a bad thing. Maybe?

Mom Liked Tommy Best.

My memory (which is probably about 60% reliable at this point) tells me that the cable network, TV Land, when it launched in the early 90s, ran the whole season of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and that’s where Jay and I studied their act and began to emulate it. Jay was Tommy, and I was Dick.

I don’t know if that was before or after we started getting compared to them in the press, but it shaped what we did in a huge way. They were the unrivaled masters of a particular mid-century genre of duo comedy, often but not always with singing: George and Gracie Allen, Sonny and Cher, etc., and Jay and I wanted to be everything they were: hilarious, musically legit, old-fashioned enough for your Southern grandmother, subversive enough for the East Village, sweet, political but unthreatening, always the most entertaining act on the bill. We studied how they made each other funny and we wanted to do that.

The Smothers Brothers were one of those culture-changing acts who most people don’t remember now or know who they were, which is sad, but you can see their influence in so much of what came after. Kind of like Y’all (or I like to think so anyway).

New York theatergoing 2023.

I know we see a lot of theater, but I’ve never actually counted before. We saw 20 plays this year! I don’t think that’s more than usual, in fact maybe less since it was a very busy year otherwise, too. There were lots of truly great nights at the theater, a lot of fine but unmemorable ones, and a handful of best forgotten. Pretty good record. If you want to catch the great stuff, you have to risk seeing some not so great. And a few this year were not just highlights of this year but plays and performances and productions for the ages.

My favorites were Eddie Izzard’s Great Expectations (she’s absolutely sui generis, riveting), the Lincoln Center revival of Camelot (everything I want in a musical, and the score sounded glorious), Fat Ham, Wicked (took our niece, she was thrilled, I’d never seen it before and I loved it), the revival of Sweeney Todd (wow), I Can Get It For You Wholesale at CSC, Stereophonic (one of the best plays I’ve ever seen, for real), Appropriate (so exciting to see an honest-to-god great new American play in its Broadway premiere—if there’s any way, don’t miss this one).

Here’s the whole list:

Great Expectations (Eddie Izzard)
Between Riverside and Crazy
Pictures from Home
The Wanderers
Cornelia Street (new musical)
Camelot
Fat Ham
Wicked
Sweeney Todd
Primary Trust
A Simulacrum
Some Like It Hot
Harry Potter and the rest of it whatever it’s called
I Can Get It For You Wholesale
The Refuge Plays
Stereophonic
Witness for the Prosecution (in London)
Spain
Appropriate
I Need That

Fellow Travelers.

So back to Fellow Travelers, now that it’s done — I thought it was kind of amazing.

At first I was really struck by the idea, and successful execution, of a suspenseful and sexy melodrama set in that repressive and often terrifying time and milieu, to use the repression itself to drive the plot and make it sexy. I didn’t expect it to become such a history lesson, which seemed to start around the third episode. I resisted it at first — the exposition of the politics and homophobia of the era felt clumsy and dry at times — but I got used to it, and soon it didn’t bother me at all. I think that to tell a story so dependent on the culture and politics of a specific moment in history, you either have to not explain it and accept a very small audience of those who have that knowledge, or, if you want a mass audience, you need to catch them up quickly.

People barely remember McCarthy and the HUAAC hearings now (shameful, for such a broadly consequential moment in recent history) let alone the “lavender scare,” and I realize more and more that even the most liberal accepting straight people I know usually have little knowledge of gay history and how very recently attitudes, and more importantly laws, persecuting queer people have relaxed, to the extent that they (and not just straight people but often younger queer people) will look at and judge gay life and same-sex relationships from 20, 30, 70 years ago through a lens of how things are now. True also, and maybe even more so, of the early 1980s AIDS years. Even a lot of gay men who were around then don’t remember the timeline very well. So, I was on board for the Wikipedia-ish nature of some of the dialogue.

What I think was new, at least in a TV series made for a general audience, is how this series set out to and mostly succeeded in dramatizing what “the closet” means, how holding such a deep secret, with the stakes of disclosure so severe, the terror of that, how the necessity of that secrecy corrodes everything around it, over generations, relationships, careers, families, including the integrity of our own souls. And how holding that secret together shaped our communities, shaped how we interacted, not only, but crucially, sexually.

Overall, I thought the series was ambitious (and unique in what it set out to do) and mostly lived up to its ambition, beautifully made, and very compelling start to finish. And, I don’t even know, there’s something about Matt Bomer, I’ve always found him almost uncomfortably sexy, like I feel like even if I just look at him too long I’ll do something wrong.

I asked for the book for Christmas. I wonder how it will compare.

Yes, but.

I wrote an application this week for a musical theater development grant. My musical “Jack” has been on the back burner for a few months while I’ve worked on my book, so I was happy to have this grant application draw me back into it. I need money and institutional support to keep it going, so I’m applying for grants. After the reading of the first draft last year, when I found it was way too long and wooly, I pulled it apart, left 2/3 of it on the table, and put the rest back together, streamlined to tell the story more directly.

I’ve fussed with this piece for so long that I’ve ended up with several orphan songs, songs I cut for one reason or another, usually because the character who sang it was cut. There are several. Some of them are very good. What should I do with them? If I were 25, I’d record them myself and release an album on cassette, get a few nice reviews, no sales, and move on. Or maybe try to get a few gigs where singer-songwriters sing,

I get asked fairly often, well, not often like every day, but with enough regularity that it’s a question I should be prepared for and I’m not. The answer is yes, I miss it a lot, but I always find myself saying yes and then babbling for a while about why it’s not likely to happen. There are lots of ways to plot one’s aging; one way is to see it as an accretion of things you miss.

I cut this song because, one, there are a lot of slow, melancholy songs. All I seem to want to write these days, or listen to, if I’m honest, are songs drenched in sad cello, and I have to keep reminding myself that I have a much higher than average appetite for wistful regret. But also I’m not sure what it adds. Maybe some later day I’ll figure out how it works and find a way to put it back in—maybe not. I sure love singing it, though.

Art.

Chan and I went to the Modern yesterday. Saturdays I have my morning drawing group, so we met at the museum afterwards to see the Ed Ruscha retrospective. Ruscha has always been a favorite of mine, but I think I’d only seen a dozen or so of his paintings and drawings before yesterday. This exhibit is comprehensive. It’s beautifully done, crowded but not so crazy you can’t linger and really take it in.

Neither of us had been to the Modern in many years, not since they completely re-built it — does everyone call it MoMA now? Didn’t everyone used to call it the Modern? Somehow I still do — so we wanted to spend some time with the permanent collection. There’s so much there.

In the middle of it, I posted a comment on Facebook about the selfie crowds around a small Dali and also around a series of three Frida Kahlo panels, but ignoring Picasso. Reading it later, I thought my comment sounded like I was judging people’s taste, i.e. saying they had none, or something like that. I wasn’t. I was just struck by how when I was very young I made a beeline to certain paintings there, and now that work is apparently out of fashion. Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali and Van Gogh are so thoroughly integrated into not just our current visual culture but our mythos regarding what art is and what an artist is. It used to be Picasso, didn’t it? And then Monet? It’s hard to compare because media is radically different now, and so the way we relate to images, how they sit in our day to day lives, is different than it was a generation ago. Kahlo and Dali and Van Gogh are undeniably great, important artists, but I think it's interesting which art and artists get branded for tourists and how that changes. There’s no getting around the fact that the art that gets the most attention will always be the art that people can make a pile of money exploiting. It might also be the best art, but that’s barely more than coincidental.

I could look at Kahlo's work all day long, I constantly see new things in the paintings, and new ways to see them. The melting clocks? For me, it gets repetitive. Van Gogh, it's hard to separate the work from the hagiography, and, to be honest, though some of the paintings are gorgeous and moving, he's no Cezanne. I feel like when I was younger, Picasso was the "it" artist. Maybe it's just art and art history students who get misty around Les Demoiselles? I can’t say I’m a fan of Picasso in general. The paintings are technically fascinating, sometimes thrilling, but I don’t have an emotional response to them.

Later I found a gallery of Ellsworth Kelly's notebooks. I was alone in there except for one person who came in briefly but didn't look at anything and left. Ellsworth Kelly was like a god to me when I was young, up there with Rauschenberg and Johns. When I encounter his work in a museum or gallery, I feel a magnetic force, like it’s physically hard to walk away. The question of which art and artists are important is not only a matter of fashion and commerce but it's also utterly subjective in the end.

Ellsworth Kelly, Apples, 1949

HOW MUCH TRITENESS?

When people ask, “If you could be 18 (or 25, or 12, or whatever) again, would you?” — for me a panic-inducing question because it contains hundreds of questions within it — I always say, “God no!” But, buried for the last three years in the journals and letters and ephemera of my youth, I’ve kind of fallen in love with my 18-year-old self. The world was cracked wide open and I was ready for it, all of it. I was preoccupied, obsessed every moment, with clearing all the accumulated Midwest bullshit and getting on with my life as an artist. I had no patience.

One regret, I guess, that I have, though, related to the question of returning, is that back then, through college, my twenties, especially my late twenties when I started working with theater artists downtown, I had opportunities all around me — in that DIY scene, people were making theater everywhere, putting on their plays, devising performances, adapting, appropriating, experimenting, in their apartments, on the street, in tiny storefronts, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, everybody was up for something weird and new — but I didn’t initiate much of anything. I’m not saying any of it was easy to put together, but you could do it. If you had an idea there were venues, collaborators, an audience. You could try stuff. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas of my own, but they weren’t concrete theatrical ideas. They weren’t “I want to try this on a stage.” I depended on other artists to come in with the framework and then I could contribute. I had tons of ideas, but they were more theoretical than theatrical.

I’ve had, continue to have, a rich and varied career, a huge success by the standards I set for myself as a kid (luckily those standards did not include financial rewards), but something nags at me. I missed a world of opportunities. I could have pushed myself, demanded more of myself as an artist and thinker and writer to find ways to theatricalize the stuff in my head. Now that world of freedom and experimentation is gone. We all turned 30, the rent went up, we had to make more money or leave New York, every marginal, liminal, derelict space was bought up and developed decades ago. Downtown disappeared. If anything like it exists now, which I doubt, it’s not accessible to me.

So maybe I lied, maybe I do wish I could return, but not to my younger self, just to the circumstances of my young life.

Old Songs.

Nice list of great songs made over for a new time.

I was thinking along these lines when If I Loved You, from Carousel, came on during that awful gay rom-com, Red White & Royal Blue, in a cover by a singer called Vagabon (I’d never heard of her, is that because she’s obscure or because I’m old?). It was gorgeous and immediately moving. I downloaded the recording and enjoyed it, I love the airy arrangement, but I probably won’t play it much. Toward the end of the song, she alters the melody in a couple of places in ways that diminish it.

Strangely, I don’t have any trouble with Dolly Parton’s loose approach to the melody in her recording of Let It Be. I think I’d put McCartney is the same category as Richard Rodgers when it comes to just sing the tune as written, but something about the churchiness of Let It Be makes it feel okay.

Non-binary thinking.

I had a sudden insight regarding the label, “non-binary.” I’ve been irritated by it for years, didn’t really get how people were using it, I thought it was an unnecessary, and ugly, word. Some people identifying themselves as non-binary are outwardly, visibly, gender nonconforming in dress and speech, body, affect, what we used to call butch lesbians or nellie queens, bulldykes, sissies. Since to me “gay” and “lesbian” have always included a vast range of gender presentation, most of it nonconforming, I felt like “non-binary” was sort of implied. But others using the label appear conventionally male or female, sometimes even heterosexual. The latter phenomenon is still baffling to me.

I also resisted the word because it has an off-putting scientific, computery smell about it. Some people have the same issue with “homosexual” — they find it antique, clinical — but I like it. Meaning accumulates on words over time, and I think homosexual after a couple centuries has acquired a more complex resonance, warmer than it was when it first appeared in scientific literature. 

First I was gay, then for many years I preferred “queer.” I liked the broader brush of “queer,” the way it included trans and bisexual, men and women. I liked how blunt and confrontational it was. I liked the way it felt to steal the power of a slur. But recently queer has come to be used in a way I don’t, to be honest, really grasp, and yet feel specifically excluded, as a homosexual man, from whatever its umbrella is meant to cover, so I mostly avoid it. I strongly dislike being called “cis.” I think originally cis had a simple technical meaning — a person whose sense of their own gender matched their biological gender — which I guess more or less describes me now, but lately I see the word used to mean something more like a person whose sense of their gender and their presentation of it in the world conform to a stereotypical, essentialist view of gender. Which doesn’t describe me. (And “cis white male” now seems to mean no more than “culprit.” It’s lazy politics and lazy thinking. It’s also snobbery, looking down on people with conventional taste and aspirations, judging certain people to be not queer enough.  My first thought when I hear or see “cis white male” is “yeah fuck you.”)

So, as a person whose life and personality gender- and sexuality-wise are a very mixed bag and more often than not misaligned with society’s expectations of how male-bodied people act, look, and behave, I am non-binary. I don’t mean that in a “this is me!” way. I’m not coming out. Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I don’t see any of these words in terms of some deep characteristic of identity. They’re descriptive words. What’s immutable is my sexual attraction to men. My identity as a gay man is cultural, it’s political. We come together and assert a common identity because it gives us political power. I see non-binary as a broader category, comprising anything that rejects or confounds or debunks or flies in the face of the idea that male and female are separate and opposite, literally “not binary,” and that describes me, so I’ll embrace it. I am gay, I am biologically male, and I am non-binary.

I know that most young people, with their endless appetite for taxonomy and moral certainty, will probably disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay. I won’t say they’re wrong. But I’m not a young person.