Richard Grieco put his disease in me.
It’s his fault that I have a thing for Guidos. It was fate that I just happened to be entering the initial materialization of sexual identity at the very time he was sauntering into his 21 Jump Street/Booker brief glimmer of stardom.

During that era, the teen crush objects of Saved By The Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 were Clearasil-skinned Mickey Mousers; Le Grieco was the antithesis of pre-fab Wonder Bread idols — a trashy, spike-haired, downtown slut with the class of an alley cat and a porn star smirk. My Yasmine Bleeth Reflex — the design flaw that leads the well-adjusted inexplicably drawn to ruinous headboard pounders — triggered and my formative Grieco obsession has left me forever susceptible to the wiles of the Guido.
The sexual fantasies that we always turn to are the ones that make us feel the most ashamed, the ones that make us question who we really are and what we really want. It’s when we feel the most dirty that we’re the most gratified. Our polar opposites – those we would never conceivably cross paths with and who personify everything we’re not – can sometimes attract as much as they should repel.
Guidohood is at once highly-cosmetic and curiously virile. At once thought to be a look sported by working class Italians in NewYork’s outer burroughs, New Jersey, and Long Island, the trend has turned up big time in virtually every northeastern city – and as far west as Chicago – likely to have an Italian-American population.
The youthquaking Guido cult has now grown to include Irish-Italians and Greeks, with some Jewish, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern beauhunks going so far as to fake Mediterranean heritage all together in order to pull it off. Even the look has now broadened to include the sons of the taste-challenged nouveau riche (I’m talkin’ to youz, Gotti Boys) with loads of dispensable income to fuel their endless partying and whoring.
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