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.