The rich really are different.

I’ve always been frankly mystified by people with money, more so the old money trust-fund-casualty variety that the nouveau riche. They just have a whole different set of trivial concerns that someone who has to scrap and struggle to get by can’t grasp. It wasn’t until I moved to New York for college that I saw just how chasmic and Metropolis-inspired the gap between Have and Have Not truly is.

Up in penthouse apartments and gated communities with rooftop gardens and swimming pools, wealthy people willingly starve themselves down to nothing, pay high-priced scalpel men to transform them into weird parodies of the earthbound gods they fancy themselves to be, and exhaust themselves attaining spectacular levels of comfort in order to keep up with the friends at the country club, this while the people they transport in to raise their kids and clean their houses fret over bus fare versus lunch and how the hell they’ll ever pull off college tuition.

It seems profoundly stupid that what I call “First World Problems” (aka “Foibles of The Rich and Idle”) can prove lethal, but in the case of one Andrew Embiricos, 25, a life of too much privilege, too much opportunity, too much wretched excess came to a fateful fade-out this week with a last breath inside a plastic bag.

Maybe too much love really is worse than none at all... (read the full article)

Today, Elizabeth Taylor went out of this world, leaving souvenirs of herself behind.

A beautiful woman.

A great life.

A poetic death: in the end, her heart gave out.

Fly north, little bird.

Growing up I was all boy. A soccer-playing, Batman-loving, and G.I. Joe-centric child, it must have been a comfort to my unsuspecting mother. Thinking that I was just a curious little boy who enjoyed reading Encyclopedia Britannica, what she didn’t know was that I was reading them not because her son was an incredibly bright little boy, but rather because he was gawking at pictures of Michelangelo’s David. Also, my beloved G.I. Joes were all taking on the Vietcong in the buff. Sorry mom (and Vietnam).

We all had our gay idiosyncrasies — queer-diosynrasies if you will — as children. Occasionally, they slipped out through the conservative cracks in our bones, only to be revealed in the sleight-est of hands in the occasional family photo. A blog called Born This Way is paying homage to those little queer moments gay children have. Yes, I said “gay children.”

The blog features pictures of people, of all genders, as children with an accompanying essay from that child’s grown-up counterpart. The essays are a poignant reminder of what it is like to be a child who knows that they are just a little different.

Start your reflective journey here.

hattip to Don Shewey

See also: Blood & Guts in High School: The Will & Grace Years.

With Valentine’s Day just weeks away, this is the time to start planning for that LTR, or not so LTR to get you through it. For inspiration, the incredibly talented (and hot as hell) fashion designer/director Tom Ford recently shared, to Out Magazine, the story of how he met his partner of 25 years, fashion journalist Richard Buckley.

“We first encountered each other at a fashion show in New York in 1986. He was 38 at the time and the fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily. He was confident and handsome in a way that made him almost unapproachable. His stare was so intense that it completely unnerved me, and when the show was over I literally bolted out the door and down the street to avoid him.”

After they started dating, “It was probably a few days before we were saying things like, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’ Now, we say it to each other every night before we go to sleep, and we say it at the end of every telephone conversation, and we write it at the end of every e-mail. Every time you think, I love you, I really believe you have to say it. If you think about holding their hand or kissing them, you do it. I do it all the time.” said Ford.

A 25-year-relationship is nothing to turn your nose up at, it is an impressive feat; kudos to you Tom and Richard.

Want to help stop NOM’s anti-gay hate machine?

Contact Matt at contact@stop8.org and visit his website for new updates.

“I’m sorry, but your child suffers from chronic nepotism. It’s a potentially crippling condition, as of yet, there is no known cure.”

I know, nepotism isn’t a disease per se, but when you really think about it, it is pervasive, often debilitating, and it does make me sick.

It’s the product of dynasties after all, wherein you don’t necessarily need talent or drive, just the right last name and enough backing from Mom’s and Dad’s end. We’ve all come up against the boss’s kid who really believes that he or she got where they are because of merit, and my primal Id’s response is to slap the bitch up — palm first, then back with the knuckles for making me go to the trouble.

Every culture has it, but America has a special sort: a flash-the-cash, suffer-the-brat, pull-the-strings kind of fail-forwardism that’s permeated every sector where prestige abounds, from business and the military, to Hollywood and the Presidency itself. For those who have skill and may’ve coasted on the family rep just a little, I’ll forgive your trespasses. For the rest — the hapless, the helpless, the hopeless — it’s a testament to humans’ too-secure position on the food chain that you haven’t been picked off from the herd by now. (read the full article)

Can I get a witness?
This ad won an award at Cannes in the 90′s but the questions persist.
Was it a “scam ad?” Legend says it was.
Read about the controversy.

I Just Want to Fucking Dance, Part III
Part II
Part I