I’m 31 now. Actually my birthday was on Saturday, but things have been slightly out of hand lately so I’m only posting about it now. It was a really good birthday, brunch at my favorite brunch place followed by an afternoon in the park and an evening at a Korean restaurant in suburbia, surrounded by friends and the bright lights of a karaoke room. (I sang “(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden” and “Objection (Tango)” and “1 Thing” and “Come Out And Play (Keep ‘Em Separated)” and duetted on “Self Control” and “Black Velvet” and probably sang other songs, too, although right now I’m blanking on what they were.)

Otherwise I’ve been pretty busy trying to get my life in order and also trying to archive my life in a way that might be appealing to prospective employers and/or clients. Trying to find paid employment (ha! ha!) and also running my own side business is pretty exhausting, and on top of that living with my boyfriend/business partner in an apartment that’s smaller than my old place hasn’t left me a ton of physical space for writing here. Which is not the worst thing, although it is clearly a thing.

I’m feeling rather optimistic, though, about the year ahead. I’m doing a big reading on Friday, and have events planned for the rest of the summer. I’m also planning a photo project to occupy my spare time. I don’t want to go into too many details, but I finally found some inspiration the other day, looking at the work of Swedish photographer Aida Chehrehgosha. In 2008 she was photographing her parents in a variety of locations pretending to be dead. What I want to do is nothing like that, really, although I think it did provide me with a spark of an idea…

[image: Aida Chehrehgosha, Dad By Water]

This video of Pulp at the Reading Festival in 1994 has been on Youtube for a year and it only has 1400 views so far, which is a crazy shame that maybe we should all collectively cry about. It’s so good! And the sound is good, too.

Anyway, I’m going to see Pulp IN THE FLESH at Radio City Music Hall tonight and I am so so so so so excited. I haven’t seen them live ever, and also I haven’t been to Radio City since my largely Jewish sixth-grade class took a big trip (with most of our parents) down there to see the Rockettes. (It took us six hours to get there and the one clear memory I have of that trip is this one girl Lori Carocciola’s mom spent some of the gridlock time by dancing in the aisles when “Rumpshaker” came on the radio. Oh, and that we almost didn’t make it back home because that same girl’s dad had disappeared into a bar at one point and the bus driver wouldn’t leave because we were one person short.)

Tomorrow’s the Headmaster party. I’m genuinely excited about this, too. We’re a Critics Pick in Time Out New York and also we’re Gayletter’s pick of the day for tomorrow. You should come! Scroll down to see the flyer, or just go to Kings Cross at 356 Bowery tomorrow (Thursday) from 7-11pm. We’ll have drink specials and awesome music and homework and possibly also a photographer stationed in the men’s room. Here’s the Facebook invite.

Actually, though, the party’s a week from Thursday (the 12th).

We’ll be celebrating the new issue at Kings Cross on the Bowery, just about a block away from site of the seedy nineteenth century male brothel Columbia Hall, which features in the issue. We’ll have cheap drink specials, MR MORRIS (from Rhode Island!) doing the DJ business, and homework.

The party’s on the early side (7-11pm) because the idea of hosting anything until 4am is still so foreign and daunting to me. Which is funny, because it’s not exactly like we’re early-to-bed people. It’s free and open to all and people that live in at least six states will be there.

It is 72 and sunny and I am about to walk over to Federal Hill to stuff my face with zeppoli (or zeppoles, as people in my family would say.) With no disrespect to Purim, St. Joseph’s Day is my favorite dessert-based holiday. I’ve long believed that Italian-Americans should leave Mr. Columbus alone and adopt this day as their ethnic pride celebration, especially because March could use a major ethnic holiday that doesn’t totally suck (ahem) so I will be celebrating by listening to some of my favorite Italian pop songs, like Gigliola Cinquetti’s “Non ho l’eta,” a 1964 Eurovision winner and also the song that I think Angelo Badalamenti based his entire career around.

After the jump, two more favorites that you’ll probably recognize but which you might not know were recorded in Italian first:

No, I don’t know what’s happening here, either.

Dusty’s English version is better, of course, but Pino Donaggio’s “Io che non vivo” was the first to use the dramatic melody that would later become “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me.”

This New York Times article from the other day about important gay movies–and specifically the gay movies deemed important by celebrated gay New Yorkers–got me wondering which gay movie has been the most important to me, and I’m slightly at a loss. As a teenager I watched basically every movie released on VHS, and some of them were pretty gay. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a lot of fun, and Priest was pretty sad, and the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped was my favorite movie of 1996, according to a hand-written list that I found a few months ago. I’ve mentioned here before my love for Robert Altman’s Prêt-a-Porter, and Bound is just generally a really awesome movie, complete with Jennifer Tilly’s voice and lesbian sex scenes choreographed by Susie Bright.

But how important are these films, in the grand scheme of what it means to be gay and what it means for me personally to be a gay movie-lover?

Whenever any kind of [adjective]-est [form of media] ever list comes along I tend to jump back a half-century, to see what was going on then and see if there have been any particular leaps and bounds since then. Fifty-one years ago there was Victim, a melodramatic but ultimately rather lovable British film about the suicide of a young gay man and its implications on an upstanding lawyer. It’s rather preachy but actually very good, as are a bunch of other British movies from over the years, like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and The Killing of Sister George and My Beautiful Laundrette and Beautiful Thing, to name a few of the more obvious examples .

Other important old gay movies that stand out to me are Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train and Purple Noon, the original (French) adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Both of these were based on novels by Patricia Highsmith, but both, because of cinematic conventions of the time, avoid going into any kind of depth with their gay characters. So maybe we need to jump ahead a little bit, to when gay directors started making their own gay features.

Maybe Swoon?

Swoon is a 1992 retelling of the story of Leopold and Loeb, two teenaged homosexual geniuses in the 1920s who decided to kidnap and murder a younger neighbor as a means of getting away with the perfect crime. They failed.

Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story of fussy gay criminal masterminds committing murder for murder’s sake in Rope, which I think is one of his more tedious movies. But in 1992 director Tom Kalin reinvented the story, focusing more on the gay relationship and less on the drama surrounding the crime itself. I first learned about Swoon on PBS, when it got a mention in the ten-part American Cinema series from 1995. A while later, I watched it on late-night TV, possibly also on PBS. It was, I think, the first movie about gay characters that I had seen where the story wasn’t preachy, where the homoerotic was actually normalized, and where I felt like I had seen a queer movie that wasn’t intended for a general audience. It was intended for me.

I’ve actually only seen three of the sixteen films mentioned on the Times list*, since for all these years I’ve somehow avoided seeing Parting Glances and The Boys In The Band and Cruising and My Own Private Idaho. This is always on my imaginary to-do list of things to rectify; knowing the accepted canon of queer cinema–or at least mainstream movies with not-straight characters–seems like it might be important one day.

[*Taxi zum klo is fascinating and wonderful; Tongues Untied is flawed but important; Beautiful Thing is ridiculous but lovely.]

You probably know that I try my best not to talk about international politics ever, on this blog but also pretty much in the real world. But the #Kony2012 hysteria–and a backlash so immediate that I actually knew about the backlash before the hysteria–has been really fascinating me for the past week or so.

The story, about Invisible Children, a group of Americans who produced a video calling for military action against a kidnapper in a country that most Americans would never be able to find on a map, gained a lot of traction almost immediately, thanks in large part to the Twitter-going ways of Jesus-loving teenagers in Alabama and also Invisible Children’s tactic of using Twitter to bomb the accounts of certain celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and Ellen DeGeneres,* whose opinions on African militarization are suddenly things we are meant to consider seriously.

But this story–to put it unsympathetically, a bunch of privileged white people go to somewhere far away and use exploited children as a means to feel better about themselves and their white privilege and their frankly rather dodgy organization–sounded eerily familiar. And then I remembered the article I read last month about The Grey Man.

That’s gotten very little coverage in the US, that I’ve seen, anyway, so let me give you some background:

The Grey Man is a relatively new Australian charity that claims to work on ending child trafficking and sex work in Southeast Asia. Their vigilante methods of capturing traffickers was profiled in a national news story in 2009 and their profile has been raised steadily since then. Funded entirely by donations, the group’s success stories haven’t been believed quite so easily by sex workers groups, who (correctly) tend to ask questions before believing every story that comes along about the rescue of child sex slaves.

So there was one problm: The Grey Man volunteers, men with military and police training, weren’t really telling the truth about their many rescue missions.

Thai media, actually, accused the charity in December of faking the rescue of 21 rural children, lying to the adults in the community about why they were there and then using photos of the children to ask for money via Facebook**. Andrew Drummond, a British journalist who independently investigated the story, said that the children never left their village, all lived at home and all went to school every day. More than that, he found that the children’s education was government-funded so that their education was paid for. He even took a photo of them to match the one that The Grey Man took; the children were never in any kind of danger at all.

Australian media, with few exceptions, were pretty silent about that news. But the Scarlet Alliance, a major group of Australian sex workers, has called them out on it. According to an editorial by the Alliance’s Ari Reid:

Apart from exploiting Thai children, causing damage to the reputation of an entire village and strengthening harmful and hurtful stereotypes, it is also being alleged that the charity conned the Australian public in order to get donations… it appears the Australian media is too obsessed with Asian sex slaves and white saviour stereotypes to do so…

So where does that leave everyone?

[I]t falls on sex workers, using a voice that is already marginalised, to compete for airtime against charities with whom we already compete with for funding, to ensure the media and public are educated on complex issues such as trafficking. Sex workers were the only people to review and critique the unethical Oscar nominated documentary “Born into Brothels”. Sex workers in the US are driving the response to Ashton Kudger and Demi Moore’s failed foray into “rescuing” a imaginary American child sex slaves, playing watchdog to Google’s funding of inappropriate rescue organisations, and warning Obama of the damage forced rescue reeks in the lives of sex workers in Cambodia.

*I really like Ellen DeGeneres, generally, but this is the third time in just the past month or so that the weight of her celebrity has been turned into a ridiculous public issue which, in every single case, makes her look clueless at best.

**Perhaps it’s not surprising that Invisible Children shows up near the top of their Facebook Likes.

The story of my first-ever attempt at group sex is up now at Salon. I’ve already gotten one (very sympathetic) e-mail from someone else who went to one of the same parties.

On Saturday at the party we debuted a brand-new print (a self-portrait!) by Matias Uris, and it is soooooooooooooo lovely. You can find it on the inside cover of the new issue of Headmaster, but now you can also possess it in a larger, more frame-able 9″ X 12″ form. It’s printed in an edition of 20 and it’s on the web shoppe now for just $25.

Tonight at Brown:

Have you heard of Project Weber yet? They’re an amazing group in Providence, RI doing direct service and outreach to male sexworkers in our state.

Come find out more as Richard Holcomb, co-founder of Project Weber, gives us an in-depth look into the world of male prostitution on the streets of U.S. cities and abroad. Through lecture, documentary clips, and a panel, this presentation will cover data, personal and professional experiences with this population, and the barriers and challenges in providing male sex-workers with appropriate services and support. The panel will include Richard Holcomb, one of Project Weber’s fantastic outreach workers, and documentary filmaker Dio Traverso, with SNEAK PEEK CLIPS from the documentary “Invisible”.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

Smith-Buonnano 106 [95 Cushing Street between Brown and Thayer*]

[Disclaimer: I haven't actually heard of Project Weber before and they don't seem to have a website, just a Facebook page with no real info on it; here's a profile of the founder, though. AIDS Care Ocean State sponsored a screening of this a few weeks ago, though, one I had to miss because I was hosting an event somewhere else. I'm hoping to go tonight and have a report tomorrow since this is, you know, a subject I'm very interested in...]

*It’s easiest to find it if you enter from Brown Street. If you’re coming from Thayer take the alley behind Blue State that doesn’t actually look like a street…]

[photo: Philip Lorca DiCorcia, from the series Hustlers, which has nothing at all to do with Providence or with this movie]