Out on the Town

There are a couple events in the SE Michigan LGBT community that really should be on your "don't miss" list.  Motor City Pride is a big one, of course, and fortunately you get the rest of the summer off because if you are involved with it in any way you will be exhausted.  Another big one is coming up though, Michigan Equality's State Equality Dinner.

This annual dinner has been going on for some time, and it's a standout.  It brings together so many different people in our LGBT community into one room, it's like a one-stop gay networking shop!  Long-time activists, prominent community members, straight allies and the next generation of leaders all mixing and mingling at a "family" reunion. The evening also recognizes outstanding leaders who have worked hard to advance Michigan's LGBT movement.

This year the State Equality Dinner is a standout because the keynote speaker is Cleve Jones.  If you are an astute film viewer you will recognize the name from the movie Milk, where a young Cleve Jones is shown working with Harvey Milk in the pioneering days of the gay rights movement.  If you are an astute student of LGBT history you will recognize Cleve Jones as the founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

When I was a youngster living in the gay ghetto of Washington, DC, I went to see the Quilt during its display on the National Mall in 1992.  I had maybe a mild interest in gay rights issues at the time, but more concern about HIV/AIDS (this was the pre-drug cocktail days, remember).  But mostly I was a gay kid more preoccupied with decorating my apartment than engaging with the gay community for more than a night at the bar.

My visit to the AIDS Memorial Quilt was an insane eye-opener about the extent to which AIDS was ravaging the gay world, and a huge early lesson about how many straight friends and family also really deeply cared about what was happening. People were mostly silent as they walked through the acres and acres of quilt panels, looking at highly personal memorial after memorial.  Volunteers stood by with boxes of tissue for those who were overcome, which were many - it was impossible not to be moved. 

I wish I could say that viewing the Quilt was an immediate call-to-arms for me, but it took a while for me to really start to realize there were things I could personally do to help.  It is something I can still remember vividly, though, and when I think about my current interest in working within the LGBT community, that experience is one of the early seeds.

A few years back I was at Common Language bookstore and picked up Cleve Jones' autobiography, Stitching a Revolution.  It's a great read full of info about the early gay rights movement, and it shows how the call to action isn't necessarily a deliberate choice, it can simply be a reaction to what we see happening in the world. For the gay historian, the casual activist and even just the curious, it's a recommended read.

You may not be the next Cleve Jones, but you can hear him speak (and maybe meet him) this Saturday night!

State Equality Dinner and Catalyst Awards

Saturday, October 22^nd

The Henry, Dearborn (formerly the Ritz-Carlton)

Featuring a VIP reception, silent auction, formal dinner, and an afterglow celebration.

Standard ticket: $150

VIP ticket: $250

Afterglow only: $50 (featuring DJ Jace)

All proceeds benefit the programs of Equality Michigan.

Tickets are available at www.equalitymi.org/dinner, or by calling 313-537-7000, x108

We need a little Christmas, right this very minute

And we got it!  Did you read about the Smithsonian pulling the video installation "Fire In My Belly" from the LGBT exhibit "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the Smithsonian?

And then did you read how two activists got banned because they showed up and showed the video on their iPads at the entrance to the exhibit?

Man this makes me feel good.  It reminds me of the old Queer Nation days. I remember being in college walking past the Boston MCA while the Mappelthorpe exhibit was there (back when it was small and on Boylston Street downtown) and a bunch of QN protesters were outside chanting "We're here, we're queer, we're FABulous get used to it!"

If there is a return to the old style of community activism in the works, then I am all for it.  Detroit could use a lot of that.

Music Makes the Gay People Come Together

I was pretty happy to see that the True Colors tour, the multi-act tour and benefit for the Human Rights Campaign that was apparently so much fun last year, was touring again this year, and the Detroit area rated a stop this year! Woo hoo! I think it's like the Cher "Never Can Say Good-Bye" tour - each year the venues lose a little cachet until you're playing dinner theater in Branson. So I guess ... good for us that we made the second year, right?

Well Detroit's no gay mecca, that's established, but tomorrow night DTE Music Theater (or Pine Knob, if you are olde school like myself) is the mecca for gays, and you - like me - can go see this year's True Colors tour!

The show is headlined by Cyndi Lauper (joy) and the B-52's (bliss), and some great new bands including Tegan & Sara, The Cliks and The White Tie Affair. It's not the giant super-slate of performers you see on the website because apparently it is a rotating cast, but if you have never seen Cyndi Lauper perform then you are in for a real treat. And hey, Rosie and Carson will be there!

Cyndi fights for your right and looks fabulous.

The weather is going to be beautiful tomorrow evening, and who doesn't love a lovely outdoor show at Pine Knob? Oh Pine Knob, the memories ... did I ever tell you about the first boy who ever hit on me? I was 17, the Eurythmics were performing "There Must Be an Angel Playing with My Heart," a boy asked me if I wanted to go to Backstage after the concert. "You have backstage passes??" ... "No, it's a gay bar in Detroit" ... I hem and haw and run away. An awkward beginning to an auspicious life as an award-winning professional homosexual!

The show starts tomorrow at 6pm and tickets are still available - $17 for a big gay lawn party, can you beat that?! Grab a gay and go!

"Spice" Girl

Doggy Style this past week was fun, but I'm glad to be going into summer reruns. I love making the compilations but man, that's a lot of time doing that shit.

In compiling this final Doggy Style DVD I put in a clip from a movie from my distant past, and it reminded me of a funny story.

The movie is Spice World, starring, of course, the Spice Girls. I guess this was what, like ten years ago? I actually went and saw it in the theater something like five times with the guy I was seeing then. Now before you judge, it is a very funny movie. When you are totally high.

Five girls. Five days. One bathroom.

The guy I was dating, Brian, was kind of a high-on. Not in a hippy way, but in a recreational way. I was never big on the pot thing before, but I gave it a go because it was fun with him, and I was so crazy in love. So every other Friday or so we'd go to a movie and get high beforehand and then go in and be stupid. It was fun, back at a time when I wasn't working on something seven days a week and had the weekend to shed the pot haze.

Spice World was surprisingly hilarious, and we laughed our asses off the first time we saw it. The second time was even better because we'd forgotten all the funny parts until just before they happened and then we'd remember and laugh again at both the gag and the memory. The third time I think we fell asleep. The fourth time we brought his old housemate and she was not quite as amused, which was a little bit of a buzzkill.

The last time we saw it at the dollar show, and we were surprised to hear a group of people sitting a few rows back laughing at all the same things we laughed at. We were like "all right!" When the movie ended we looked back to see who these obvious geniuses were.

It turns out - how do I put this delicately? - it was a short bus-full of "challenged" kids on a special group outing. Needless to say, that was our last trip to see that work of cinematic genius.

Well, at least until our birthdays (they were the same week). Then there were gifts of Spice Girl dolls and Spice World VHS tapes. I still have complete sets of both the Spice Girl dolls and the Spice Girl On Tour dolls (mint in box!) from this period of cultural excellence! (make me an offer ...)

I had to lay off the ganja later that year because my professional life ramped up and I couldn't handle the brain haze I always had for a day or two after getting high. And then the relationship kind of imploded in a really horrible way, so the Spice Girls ended up in a box in the basement, along with the other detritus (emotional and otherwise) from that period.

Dusting off that movie this week was fun, though. Those were really good times for a while there. Brian died three years ago, but today was his birthday so I thought it would be kind of nice to post a fun memory of him. Those great loves always kind of live on, don't they?

What also lives on is the Spice Girls, although sadly I was not motivated enough to go to their reunion tour. Why bother, when you can just log on and watch this?

No really, the Opera Cape??

Spring cleaning has its pratfalls. Even though the first day of spring doesn't hit for a few days I took to cleaning out my closet earlier this week and oh! the things you come across. Most memorable from this particular revisitation was a particular sweater I've owned for, jeez, 16 years now that I got from the J. Peterman catalog. The Nantucket Sweater.

For those not familiar with the phenomenon that was the J. Peterman catalog let me acquaint you with a bit of retail history. In the late 80's a little ad appeared in The New Yorker advertising a single, simple coat. It wasn't a photo, it was just a drawing and a phone number for a catalog. And somehow it managed to completely captivate the imagination of the Upper East Side and other people who buy clothes as much for the fantasy of the item as for the item itself.

My introduction to J. Peterman is almost as involved as the story of the Hemingway Cap. As a newly-out college student in Boston in the late 80's I became intimately acquainted with a Harvard faculty member quite a few years my senior. It wasn't quite dating, but I thought it was very evolved, very adult. He was handsome, but maybe just a touch past his prime, which of course is hot in its own way.

He was the real deal, in that trying to be the real deal way. He drove a Saab 900, which wasn't considered classic at the time. He lived in a lovely but small house walking distance to Harvard Square. He was a good cook. He had the perfect little beagle named Toby - I would dogsit/housesit sometimes as a break from campus life. He used Dr. Bronner's liquid peppermint soap before it was a "thing" and turned me on to the Hermes scent that is still my baseline fragrance. He had a sleigh bed. And when the hot Harvard law grad from Puerto Rico showed up randomly one night while we were having dinner at his house ... well, college is for experimentation, right? His walls were lined with photos of him from his world travels and he told me, "You don't have to be rich, just have rich friends."

When we were set to walk up to Harvard Square to see some performance art one night in the late fall of 1989 he pulled out his J. Peterman purchase, the "Opera Cape." It's not offered anymore, but it was really a quite a thing to behold: a very dramatic, heavy jet black wool cape lined with crimson satin. I was fascinated - I mean who wears shit like that? He was the first person I'd met who not only had the J. Peterman catalog, but actually bought from it. Believe me, after that I became a regular reader!

It wasn't until I'd moved to Washington, DC, and was making a sensational $18,000 a year on Capitol Hill that I finally spent money on something from J. Peterman. My boyfriend at the time routinely reminded me that I was a "situational" shopper. I would buy something because "it would be the perfect sweater for an early September weekend on Cape Cod." Or "wouldn't this be great for skiing in Vermont?" Which you know, I did maybe once.

And indeed I was the perfect victim, because not only was I still hung up on living in New England after my preppy-ass upbringing in Grosse Pointe, but I was the total romantic when it came to shopping. So this Bay Rum sounds fascinating, I'll buy it! (Unfortunately it does not smell fascinating, but I kept it.) The Counterfeit Mailbag seemed like an amazing purchase from the drawing, but brand new it kind of looked like rawhide (I returned it, after I made the fingernail scratches they recommended ...).

Returned / Not Returned

Ultimately almost everything I bought failed to meet my expectations, and I returned it. I guess that's why J. Peterman imploded when they went to the retail store fomat - nothing lived up to the glorious expectations of the ad copy and the slighty vague watercolors. But the Nantucket Sweater lives on in my wardrobe. It turns out that even though it's actually NOT all cotton, and NOT as romantic-cool-summer-night as you'd want it to be, it's a decent sweater to pair with sweatpants and at this point it's actually vintage American commerce. And now I've had it for almost the full 18 years mentioned in the catalog copy!

J. Peterman still sells some of the same things they've been selling since 1987, and I am sure somewhere right now someone is buying a band-collar shirt. Rest assured at this point that they're straight, and totally Upper East Side-ish, in the academic Woody Allen's Annie Hall sense of the word.

But once upon a time J. Peterman pandered to every prep's fantasy, gay or straight. And the gays, with their aspirations (of romance? of drama? of a normal life?), provided the perfect customer. Or at least, I did.

The Soundtrack of Your Coming Out

Today is National Coming Out Day! Celebrate!

No, I am not going to divulge my identity, a subject recently referred to by someone as "the worst-kept secret in Detroit."

But I am going reminisce a bit about my coming out, an occasion that took place twenty years ago this week. Oh, the adolescent melodrama! The tortured anxiety of it all! Man, those were good times, staying in on a Friday night freshman year in college, thinking about how I would instantly land a boyfriend and find a community of friends as soon as I was able to publicly admit I was a homo! As it turns out, not so much. Hell, it took me a year to even hook up with someone (see previous post).

It all may have sucked at the time, but in retrospect there is a rosy glow over that period. And there is no way to recapture the thoughts and feelings of an era than to reflect on the music you were listening to.

Soft Cell's "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" was stumbled upon by accident. If you're only familiar with "Tainted Love" then you need to explore the total weird excellence of this album. It's one of those albums that's a bit of a narrative, something you don't run across quite as much anymore. This one's about an exploration of an alternative sexual world, back when doing so involved more than logging online. "Seedy Films," "Sex Dwarf," and "Say Hello, Say Good-bye" are highlights but the entire album (which I am listening to right now, on the same damn vinyl I listened to twenty years ago) is amazing. At the time, it was a soundtrack of being a sexual deviant. Today, it's a fond remembrance of being a sexual deviant.

Bronski Beat, on the other hand, sang openly of the very real fear and hatred of gay people that existed in the 80's. Singing "You and me together / fighting for our love" seems just a touch melodramatic now, but man oh man, it didn't (and wasn't) at the time. New songs and brilliant reinterpretations of old songs ("It Ain't Necessarily So") cried out with the voice of the oppressed gay person.

Bronski Beat is also the soundtrack to my visits back to Detroit during college, after hanging out with high school friends and the ex-girlfriend I hadn't come out to yet, driving on the freeway and thinking about going to Backstreet. Melancholy, but uplifting. There is a scene in the gay independent film "Parting Glances" (starring Steve Buscemi, and HIGHLY recommended for an amazing glimpse at gay life in the AIDS era circa mid 1980's) where they are going to a gay bar and Bronski Beat is playing, and it just totally captures a gay moment of the time.

The Pet Shop Boys also factored in, although they had yet to voice their gay identity openly. But come on, who didn't at least speculate? Nothing overtly gay or sexual, just REINVENTING FUCKING DUSTY SPRINGFIELD. Genius.

And then ... and then there are the songs from the gay bar. I finally started venturing out to them starting spring break. My first one? Backstreet, with aforementioned ex-girlfriend and straight high school best friend. Cuz you know, the music was great and their friends were going.

Well once back at school it all kicked in with the new gay best friend (who persists to this day, although not locally. Hi Lance!). The most embarrassing of 12" singles made it into my collection, a remembrance of nights at the gay dance club. Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up," Natalie Cole "Pink Cadillac," Taylor Dayne (!) "Prove Your Love," Depeche Mode "Behind the Wheel/Route 66." Oh the good times and bad fashions of early 1988! And all captured on vinyl ...

And this wouldn't be complete without a mention of the soundtrack to "Maurice," the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of the E. M. Forster novel (which was published after his death in 1971). The weekend I worked up the nerve to tell my first friend that I was gay (she yawned), I spent the next few days reading that novel and then going to see the movie. It was probably my first super gay weekend.

What a time that was. ACT UP was in their ascendancy, Queer Nation was about to make their debut. There was no "Will & Grace" popular acceptance of gays and lesbians. It was a time of gay activism, and a whole generation of gay men was desperately fighting for their lives. There were no antiretroviral drugs, there were no drug cocktails to keep HIV at bay. So much was awful and frankly, when I stop and think about it all, it breaks my heart.

I do know this is when the activist part of me was formed. I didn't see the worst of it, and yet I did see the handsome owner of the designer consignment store end up in a wheelchair, a shadow of his former self. I did see angry young men on the streets with picket signs demanding more AIDS funding. I did see a kiss-in. I did see people sitting, panicking, waiting for their HIV test results.

It's why I won't accept that things are great for gay people now, just because you can live in NYC or SF without hassle. It's why I believe that gay marriage - as much as I could personally give a shit - is a matter of fundamental fairness and should be fought for much more aggressively than it is. It's why I am tired of gay people not fighting back harder against the anti-gay (not simply "pro family") agenda of the right wing.

I don't mean to detract from the cotton candy fluffiness that is usually Supergay Detroit, but anniversaries demand reflection. I am pretty sure I don't live in a different world from the rest of the Michigan gay community, but sometimes it feels that way. That is why I so strongly require my life to be in Detroit, not Oakland County. I need to connect with gay spheres that are not my own. And I need to feel like people still seek something better, not the status quo.

The soundtrack of today is the blog post of the future, so let's hope it is as inspiring as it is entertaining. Acceptance for gay lifestyles is important, but it saddens me to think that a collective gay identity may be lost. I worry that right now "fitting in" matters more in our gay community than "being yourself."

I just wonder when we can simply be ourselves? Embrace our gay heritage, our gay culture, our gay identity. And still be accepted. Shouldn't that be the goal?

Anyway, the activist gets away from me again ... what from your coming out inspires you? What is your coming out soundtrack? I'm genuinely interested to hear.

Lady Di Died

Hard to believe it was ten whole years ago when Princess Diana died, eh? I was in Saugatuck for Labor Day weekend, staying at a friend's condo when we got the news.

I remember feeling sad and a bit weird - I was wholly obsessed with the Royal Wedding back as a little pre-teen faglet ... waiting every day for Nickie McWhirter's report from London in the Detroit News (or was it Free Press?) ... clipping every article and picture that was printed and saving them in a Hudson's gift box (for ten years!) ... waking up at 5am to watch the wedding live on TV ... ah, remembering that uninhibited youthful gay exuberance exhilirates me even now.

The gay community certainly was shocked by her death as much as anyone, and perhaps mourned it a little more (or more dramatically), what with their love of a strong tragic female icon. I do have to say though, that I did not react like the guy in this video. A bunch of gays sitting around playing canasta, watching the news about the accident, and then at 30 seconds in, the news comes ...

The only better gay story I've heard goes like this: A guy was at the gay bar hanging out on a weekend night when suddenly the bartender turns down the music and shouted "OH MY GOD, DIANA'S DEAD!"

Without hesitation, some queen shrieked back, "Diana Ross is DEAD???"

Mary!

House of Aviance, or Bedtime Stories

What is it about summer here? I just can't believe how this city comes alive with people walking, jogging and biking everywhere, festival on top of festival, ballgames, barbeques, parties, patios, porches, parks and promenades. It's not the same city it was just three months ago.

The same appears to be true for things to do in the gay community. After a winter of hitting the same old spots with only an intermittent party or special event to spice things up, there is a sudden deluge of options.

This Saturday is a good example. Not only is the ABBA show at Pine Knob/DTE, but Kevin Aviance is performing at Menjo's. It's like a gay Sophie's Choice. Except of course you win either way. Which I guess would be the gay part of that.

Kevin Aviance is an amazing performer, kind of drag, kind of not. He describes himself as an "entity" on his website. He's been a fixture performing in NYC for years, in particularly known for his time at Twilo and The Roxy. He and I actually go way back. Not as friends really, but friends of friends. Oh, the stories I could tell. And will.

I met my first serious boyfriend (we'll call him Tad Hamilton) back in the little club world of 1991 Washington, DC. He was in school at the time, but had been a fixture on the club scene for a while and his little group was the House of Aviance, of which Kevin was a member. I remember so well the romantic night when we met dancing to Jean-Philippe Aviance's mix of "Work this Pussy." I met Kevin through Tad.

At the time my roommate and I lived right in the heart of the Dupont Circle gayborhood at 17th & P, and it turned out Kevin moved into a flat in the townhouse next door. He lived with Tatia, a chubby Asian club girl from a good family in McLean, VA, who was plying her trade as a call girl, "the pearl of the orient," known for her large-ish breasts. My roommate, a Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate student seeking popularity, fell in with that whole clubby group when he started dating one of those boys. It was a watershed moment the day I got home from work and walked into the apartment to see a drag queen (Kevin), a call girl (Tatia), a pimp, a drug dealer and a credit card scam artist all hanging out with my roommate in the living room. The drag part I liked, obviously, but the rest was the beginning of the end of that particular living situation, as you might imagine.

My normally subdued roommate hit a rough patch later when he found out his boyfriend had been cheating on him the whole time they were going out (hasn't that happened to us all at some point?) and a series of extraordinarily dramatic suicide attempts ensued. One time, the roommate drank a bunch of booze and took a bunch of pills, and then decided to seal the deal by using Saran Wrap to seal off our galley kitchen and turning on the oven with the door open. Only one problem: it was an electric oven.

Kevin Aviance was there to save the day anyway! He knew the roommate was home and distraught and couldn't reach him on the phone, so he hopped the fence from his backyard into ours, climbed up the fire escape in his platform boots and kicked in the bedroom window a/c unit! He tore down the hermetic seal on the kitchen and got our boy up and moving around, saving him from potential death (but not future embarrassment about the oven thing).

Coming to a fire escape near you.

Later, when Tad had replaced the roommate in the apartment, I had a visit from an ex-girlfriend (look, I was young). She drove down to visit me while her parents toured the city. We had the full coming-out talk (which she had already guessed, having seen the way Tad and I bickered. We were young.) and it was a great visit. On the morning she left she was walking down the steps of my building with her parents, middle-aged working class folks from Macomb County, just as Kevin Aviance was returning home from a night out. He sauntered down the street in full make-up with a bandeau top, cha-cha heels and huge hoop earrings, looking like a gold lamé Carmen Miranda (with a bald pate instead of a fruit hat). I cringed as I thought about what horrible timing this was, until I found out later my friend's dad just turned to her after Kevin walked by and said "I love this city."

Kevin left DC a little after that, and later started making a name for himself. There's Kevin in the Madonna "Secret" video ... there's his first big club hit "Cunty (The Feeling)." I ran into him once at The Roxy (the same night Madonna walked right past me there - chyeah!) and another time for a big performance at the (then new, now closed) Chelsea bar xl. He's scored a bunch of other dance hits on the Billboard charts, been on television, and survived a nasty gay-bashing in NYC's East Village a year ago.

Back in the saddle after the gay bashing. NYC Pride 2006.

Really, he's become a bit of a legend, and this Saturday is a great opportunity to see him get his freak on. Go now, so in fifteen years you can be like me, telling stories of the old days like you are your own grandpa.

The Blair Bitch Project

Back when they first discovered the inter-nets and the world wide webs, there weren't a lot of young folks making their own web pages, blogs and manhunt profiles. But Richard and Bryan, two gay, Asian, skater (pre?) med students at Columbia University in NYC, started Blair, their online magazine inspired by the domineering bitchiness of Blair on The Facts of Life. Every gayboy needs a role model! I discovered it around 1995 back in DC when I was surfing the text-only web at work on my monochromatic monitor on a 386 computer at blazing speeds of up to 28.8kbps. Ah, the magic, and free time, of youth.


They ended up doing seven issues, and all of them have hilarious casually-written features thrown online in what now seems like remedial HTML, but at the time was standard and actually really pulled together! Features on the corporate takeover of Sassy magazine, Gay or Eurotrash? (we used to call this Flamer or Foreigner when I was in college), Lamar Latrelle from Revenge of the Nerds, and a hilarious writeup about the International Male catalog are just some of the highlights.

These boys were way ahead of the pop culture curve too, writing about robot dancing, the Beadazzler, Lacoste shirts and Wallabees way before any of them hit hipster mainstream!

Blair #6 is the highlight for me though, with great features on Wayland Flowers & Madame, electric wheelchairs AND Carol Channing! It's almost too much comedy to take!



It seems the boys have retired from the Blair biz, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for my first favorite web zine, Blair.