When I was a sophomore in college, I got an instant message in response to an informal blog I kept on LiveJournal. The message was from a 17-year-old blue-eyed boy in Tennessee who had longish blond hair and a penchant for eyeliner and taking pictures of himself, as I gathered from his public profile and his own blog.

He was clearly intelligent, but cared little for grammar and peppered his language with gay slang and a sassy Southern drawl. He said he wanted my opinion on some poems he had written, noting that I occasionally posted poetry on my journal.

He told me his name was Chris. Most unsolicited messages I got back then were guys asking for my “stats” or wanting to jerk off on webcam, so I considered Chris unique and kept him as a contact. He was deeply sexual and angered about the fact that the LiveJournal group would not let him post naked pictures of himself anymore because he was underage, but Chris seemed to use sexuality not so much for pleasure but as a way to negotiate his identity and politics. He never tried to bring me in to it. He was online often and sent me poems every day, and I got the sense that he spent many hours behind a computer screen.

I was a recent ex-Catholic, and had replaced its gap in my spiritual life with an interest in astrology, which I saw as a gay-friendly belief system that filled religion’s promise that everything in life had a direction and a purpose. Chris talked me into giving him my phone number so I could discuss his natal chart (his sun was in Sagittarius and his moon in Cancer, if I remember correctly, which was about as in-depth as my astrological knowledge was) and about his life. (read the full article)

The Face of an Era!
The Cock of an Era!
And The Cutest Top Boy that Ever Lived!

George Orwell once said that a man has the face that he deserves at age 50. And while I’d agree with that sentiment as it relates to just about every single post 50-year-old walking the planet today — think Dick Cheney — I’d have to take exception with how that curse applied to Michael Jackson.

Dead at 50 and possessing a face with which no one should ever have to contend. Mike’s adult face was actually a mask. A direct creation of self-hatred, plain and simple. That and the way our own ghoulish fascination with his self-loathing spurred him on. An obsession that was prodded, secretly I think, by that part within each of us that dislikes parts of ourselves: wrinkles, sags, spots, dots; imperfection. Given unlimited wealth and time, Michael could nip, tuck, tweak and freak to his heart’s content. Only he could never get away from the self-loathing.

But enough bummer talk. Michael was a true blue puer aeternus … and no self-respecting puer, worth their essence in gold records, should ever live into his fifties. Michael was just taking leave on cue, true to his mythology. It makes perfect sense to me. (read the full article)

On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (read the full article)

“The important thing to remember about A-Rod is that he has ginormous purple genitals.”

So speaketh Wisdom in the form of an email from a reckless horndog I know whose life I frequently fear for, as he flirts with danger from the driver’s seat of a nasty black SUV and has lived to tell the tale, probably because he can read trade the way a crack sniper reads the landscape for the false flutter of leaves that aren’t leaves at all but camouflage on the move.

Ginormous purple genitals — can so poetic a phrase be repeated too often? — was his dead-on call when the rumor was floated recently in a slew of overblown tabloids that Madonna had left her dicky hubby for everyone’s favorite mixed-race, 6-foot-3 baseball player wet-dream Alex Rodriquez, he of the mocha-latte skin and slate-green eyes, the tight white pinstripes and prominent athletic cup.

Prominent athletic cups have always been the signature style of the Kabbalah Girl, so late of the Material World. Yet though she was named in this week’s divorce filing from A-Rod’s wife, Madonna shot the allegation down over the weekend. “I have nothing to do with the state of his marriage or what spiritual path he may choose to study,” she told People in a formal statement released through her press agent.

At the center of this otherwise conventional sex drama was, of all things, religion. (read the full article)

The Fat Lady has sung. The last dog has died.

And still she hangs on, clutching her barely-there 2-percentage-point victory in Indiana. From her cold, dead hands, children. From her cold, dead hands.

What I will miss most about my Hillary — for yes I am a supporter and yes I would vote for her again and yes, yes, I know, she is sooo cooked — is the way she would look at Barack Obama during the debates. That frozen glare behind the frosted smile. The slight up tilt of the forehead. God, that was priceless!

There would be ol’ Barry sawing away and saying nothing, all misty uplift about change and hope and the American people, slipping ever so carefully into just the palest of black preacher cadences, something for the home team, no Reverend Wright, of course; more Miss Diahann Carroll in an Oleg Cassini gown glossing her way through Aretha: R. E. S. P. E. C. T., ladies and gentlemen. That’s what y’all mean to me.

And there would be my Hillary in all her late-blooming, newly blondized, Georgette Klinger radiance, the robot who suddenly grew a heart and look ma, she’s even warm to the touch! All red-carpet razzle dazzle beside the dour law professor, with his down-turned lips and his solemn — here I risk a racist word — dignity. (read the full article)

Forget Clint-Obama-Rama. And our economy sliding over a cliff.

At Sunday’s Grammy Awards a cataclysm of titanic proportion occurred when Beyonce Knowles introduced a waiting-in-the-wings Tina Turner to a drop-jaw audience as … “The Queen.”

Come Monday an irritated
Aretha Franklin, always and forever to be known as The Queen of Soul, declared the following about the supposed contretemps:

“I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy.”

Franklin then made like Storm from the X-Men superheros team and with a severe sweep of her arm annihilated dozens of neighborhoods in Beyonce’s hometown of Houston Texas.

What Aretha may have lost in of-the-moment pop music relevance during recent years — where her musical output has been scattershot and weakly received — she seems to be making up for in sheer mass and madcap, could-give-a-fuck fashion chutzpah. (read the full article)

Who didn’t love Tammy Faye, who died this past week (but not before doing the full hour with Larry King)? She was crazy in that crazy American way. Singing and crying and loving on Jesus, then in the next breath telling you all major credit cards were accepted.

Her trademark was the triple-ply false eyelashes, mascara-streaked tears bubbling out through the blissed-out smiles, and an ability to sing, laugh and cry all in the same hallucinatory moment.

It was a talent later imitated but never quite equaled by another screaming-Mimi of the Christian Ministries, Jan Crouch, the Jayne Mansfield to Tammy’s purer, more sincere Marilyn.

Sincerity, that is, as far as it went for a wiggy televangelist like Tammy who would sprint off to dismal foreign slums for a day and wrap her on-camera arms around a starving child — some adorable wretch with big suffering eyes and flies alighting on his lips — and then all at once something kooky would happen.

The script would fly out of her head; Tammy could never linger too long on the negative. A sunburst would break through the tears, one of her notorious outbreaks of inappropriate giggling. She’d start praising the lord and thanking Jesus for all her own gifts, which could be yours too if you sent in the prayer money. Then, mission accomplished, sticky child removed from arm, she would store the big hair back on the private jet and fly home to one of several plantation-style mansions in the subdivisions of South Carolina. (read the full article)