Filed under: personal | Tags: ewan mcgregor, gay, national coming out day, personal
[In honor of National Coming Out Day, an event I have extremely mixed feelings about, one of my stories.]
I came out to my best friend when I was seventeen, via AOL Instant Messenger. Just moments previously, in the same instant messenger chat window, my best friend had told me he was gay. He didn’t really believe me and I didn’t really believe him and then one of us called the other one and I think maybe we cried a lot, mostly because we were happy. And gay.
He was a year younger than me and we had met doing some insanely nerdy thing at school—Math Team? (I don’t know, there were so many nerdy activities.) Over the next few months we hung out like we always had, but we talked about sex more and more. We watched Emmannuelle movies on Cinemax and we saw Boogie Nights and talked for hours about how much we wanted to do it with Mark Wahlberg. A couple of months later, on Valentine’s Day, we started doing it with each other instead.
Coming out of my blogging coma to let you know that we’ll be in New York later this month to launch the second issue of Headmaster. The party’s at Julius, a West Village institution that I’ve been fond of for a while now. The first time I went there I had taken maybe two steps in the door before someone offered to buy me a drink. Not even five minutes later, 7/8 of a Guinness still in hand, someone else offered to buy me a drink.
Perhaps you will also be lucky, if you come to the party.
11 posts on the Pet Shop Boys since Monday and the big party tomorrow. (Hopefully you are coming!) The plan for Friday is to crash all day and/or catch up on Torchwood, which I’m already three episodes behind on. (Although honestly I spent most of the first couple of episodes just wishing the Mekhi Phifer would go away, possibly to an acting school somewhere.)
In any event, posting will resume soon.
Filed under: people from rhode island, personal | Tags: dance parties, me me me me me, providence, queer animal futures
This Friday I’m DJ-ing the Queer Animal Futures party in Providence with Meg Powers and Eli Manhunt. It starts at 10 and goes until I have no idea.
Here’s their description from the official Facebook invite description:
Does it make any sense to make a major news announcement on the one afternoon of the whole year when people are least likely to be in front of their computers? Probably not, unless the thing you’re announcing has a big waving American flag on the cover!
The new issue of Headmaster will begin shipping on July 15, but we are taking pre-orders now. We are also offering a one-year subscription for the first time.
Contributors to Headmaster no. 2 are Stéphane Barbier, Jesse Burke, Heyd Fontenot, Steven Frost, Krys Fox, M Kitchell, Steve Locke, Johnny Murdoc, Joseph Segal and Thomas Weidenhaupt. Headmaster no. 2 is once again 7″ X 10″, 88 pages, full color and perfect bound. (No staples here!) It is once again produced in an edition of 1,000.
[cat painting by my friend Stacey]
Last winter there was a house I was visiting regularly that belonged to two women I don’t actually know all that well. Shortly after Christmas, I noticed something: all of the art had moved. Things from the kitchen were now in the TV room, things from the dining room were now in the living room, and some things seemed new altogether (like a letterpress card that said WTFWJD, hanging over their toilet.
What a great idea, I thought! New Year’s is my favorite holiday anyway, and what a great time to rearrange the prints and photos on my walls. I’m by no means a huge collector, but I have enough art amassed that it seemed like a good idea to freshen things up.
Well, now that we are basically as far away from a New Year as one can physically be, I’ve finally decided to get off my behind and start working on this!
Filed under: magazines, personal | Tags: headmaster, headmaster magazine, me me me me me
If you haven’t noticed, posting’s been a little slow lately here and on my Tumblr, but the good news is that I’ve been busy getting other things done… Like prepping the second issue of Headmaster! No, it’s not out yet, but it will be soon… And we’ll be taking pre-orders in the very near future, too, which I will of course announce here.
We’ve got some really great stuff for this issue, too, and (without giving anything away) we are also expanding our scope a little. So, be ready!
We’re in 23 stores now in 14 cities. We’ve sold out in New York and San Francisco at various points, and now we’re out of stock in Montreal, too. Unfortunately, it’s going to stay that way for a little while, since the whole Canadian postal service has been locked out by the Harper government. (But hopefully that will be fixed soon!)
At our online shop things are selling briskly… We’ve only got Small and X-Large t-shirts left, and there’s only a couple of (c)hair prints remaining. Snap them up while you can!
And don’t mind that I might not be posting much for a little while…
Filed under: magazines, personal | Tags: headmaster magazine, housekeeping, me me me me me, new orleans
I’m back home now after a fabulous (and fabulously relaxing) trip to New Orleans (about which more soon!), but of course now I feel as if I’m flailing around like a lunatic trying to get things done, and also to promote ten thousand events that have possibly-but-probably-not overlapping audiences:
This Thursday I’m DJ-ing another Eurocentric dance party in Providence, at which you will surely hear Ukrainian singer Jamala, whose song (and video) “It’s Me, Jamala” have made many a night less tedious in these parts lately.
On June 9 I’m hosting an evening of sexy (or possibly very unsexy) readings, which I will officially announce as soon as one last reader sends me their photo and bio.
I’m also doing two other events that I won’t mention here, as well as speaking on a panel next month that I feel completely unprepared for.
And, of course, I’m also plugging away at Headmaster no. 2. Doing all of our own ad sales, promotion and distribution has proven a little challenging, although we’re really excited about the content that’s coming in for the next issue. We’ve also sold quite a few of the first issue… And if you haven’t gotten yours yet, you know how to. There’s also a new monthly mailing list which you can sign up for at the website, should you care for that sort of thing…
This morning the plan was to go to the breakfast buffet at the strip club, but due to some logistical errors and worky business I had to call that off. Which is too bad, because the breakfast buffet only happens on Fridays and today is the very last Friday of my twenties. Which seems like reason to celebrate, I think, with bad rock music and strippers and eggs.
And while I plan to spend a lot of the next week celebrating my transition into a thirtysomething, I’m saving the real hoo-hah for next weekend, when I’m flying off to New Orleans for my first real vacation in, uh, thirteen years.
I mean, I’ve traveled some during that time, but only for weddings or work trips or art shows or events that friends planned or as a tagalong on somebody else’s work thing. This will be the first vacation since my high school trip to Paris, when I planned to spend all my time seducing British tourists and buying records but instead just mostly fought with my one friend for six days.
Filed under: art, internet, personal | Tags: aids, art, hiv, new york, the internet, visual aids
Since 1999, New York-based art nonprofit Visual AIDS has hosted a monthly web gallery featuring work made by HIV-positive artists. Last November, the lovely folks there were nice enough to invite me to guest curate a gallery for them, and I’m pleased to announce that Personal, Jesus went live today.
Since last November a lot of things have happened. The National Portrait Gallery completely lost its shit about the ants on the crucifix in David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire In My Belly, and this spring saw two different Mark Morrisroe retrospectives open up in New York. (Note: While they’re both great I actually prefer the smaller show at ClampArt, which didn’t stress the artist’s biography quite as much.)
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