AatomBomb

HistoryInTheUnmaking

It's difficult to live in this city and not learn a little about the financial sector. After all, it is one of the engines, only slightly more glamorous than tourism, that keeps this city moving forward. 

As with most things that happen in this gigantic small town, moments with global implications often take on a local feel. With this in mind, I took a stroll up Seventh Avenue this morning past the global headquarters of Lehman Brothers on my way to work. 

The building I work in also houses a large Lehman presence, but I knew the real action today would be on Seventh, between 49th and 50th. 

I wasn't sure what to expect; there was obviously something seismic happening on Wall Street. After a year or more of shifting quicksand revealing the fatal structural flaws in the backbone of our financial system, the Fed had finally grown a pair and told the douchebag contingent to suck it up and deal with their own mess. There was a last-minute hail mary for Merrill Lynch, but no such luck for Lehman Brothers or AIG (Correction! We found an extra $85B lying around!). The essential interconnectedness that these companies have to the larger global economy seems to have given these "too big to fail" entities a certain amount of hubris that has led inexorably to a tragedy of Greek proportions. 

Lehman Brothers, a company founded in 1850, and which once accepted raw cotton as payments for merchandise, lost one employee and a large chunk of property on September 11th. They quickly moved into a midtown glass and steel fortress wrapped in the kind of new media gimmickry one might expect from a bunch of tools trying to look hip in an arena clearly out of their range. Pleated pants soon infested the area. Armed with little more than Blackberries and a sense of entitlement, the financial world found its way solidly above Canal Street.

It is with no small sense of irony that I felt as if this locale had become a type of ground zero in its own right this morning. As I walked past the giant glass doors of 745 Seventh Avenue, hundreds of New Yorkers (with the obligatory European presence we now have to endure) stood in muted expectation, waiting for, as usual, very little to happen. But we all sensed that we were witnessing the historic unraveling of something very large, both to New Yorkers and the world at large. 

As I pushed past the crowd, I found myself suddenly caught between the front entrance of the building and the small guerilla army of photographers there to catch every last gasp of this dying giant. Lenses the size of stop signs faced me, hundreds of them, and I felt a twang of pity for those who choose to endure this form of scrutiny for a living. There is a cold sort of entropy to a wall of hungry cameras. A black hole of voyeurism and postmodern consumption. 

I pranced by them, giddy and unnerved. When I got to 1301 6th Avenue there was a noticeable nervousness in the demeanor of those huddled outside - smoking, talking, fidgeting on their Blackberries. Outside of the cameras glare, I couldn't help but feel sorry for those real people, taking the elevator with me, watching the small interactive screen on the way up telling us how bad it was getting for them. 

On my way home, I grabbed the image above of 745 Seventh with my iPhone. The cameras will get no sleep tonight, it seems.

The news, such as it is so far, remains muddled and uncertain. Are we doomed to endure a decade of recession and financial ruin, as the Japanese did? Will the Feds save the day, literally and figuratively, by bailing out just enough of the sector to keep us solvent, while still reminding the Street that there is "moral hazard" to what they do? Is this yet another harbinger, among many others, of a larger decline in American power and influence? The question marks, especially in an election year as pivotal as this one, are not in short supply. 

It is surely my continuing pride in being an American that makes it all so fascinating and difficult to witness up close.

This city speaks to you in mysterious ways. Waiting to cross Madison Avenue at 34th St. today, I stood next to an elderly gentleman with a crate on wheels. As we waited, he looked into the sky and started shouting very slowly and very loudly, "New York City! I love you!" He repeated this joyous mantra at least 10 times before I got out of earshot.

There's a whole lot of crazy in this town, but sometimes it's the crazy that makes the most sense. I love you too, New York City.

BuckingConvention

I had the pleasure of attending the premiere of the Black Party docudrama Schwarzwald - Rites XXVII last night at The Box.  I have to say it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had in a long while, for several reasons aside from the free vodka. 

As my boyfriend and I arrived at The Box, I recognized the face of Joe from Joe.My.God waiting outside for the Manhattan Offender.  I'd never had the pleasure of meeting Joe in person, but I recently used his formidable writing skills for the launch of noiZe, so I introduced myself and we ended up chatting for much of the evening.  We all swapped wacky backroom stories, and momo from Manhattan Offender turned out to be as witty and amusing as I expected.  Joe had the best stories of course, the man is a wealth of anecdotal information. 

The star of the evening, though, was Buck Angel, the female-to-male transsexual porn star who has been making a big splash recently.  It's hard to ignore "The Man With A Pussy", as his business card delicately puts it.  He turned out to be one of the sweetest and most interesting people I've met, and we ended up talking with him until one in the morning.  My boyfriend is absolutely fascinated, and is already planning a trip to Mexico for us to visit Buck, who actually put his money where his mouth was when Bush was elected and moved out of the country.  Take that, you Hollywood pussies!  The courage of his convictions is something that Mr. Angel is certainly not lacking. 

The movie was decent for an indie film about a circuit party.  The best parts were the footage of the party itself, interspersed with a nonsensical pagan storyline that occurs in the woods, amusingly accompanied by peppy disco tracks most of the time.  Buck was strangely adorable throughout, looking surprisingly innocent for a muscular bald man with tattoos and a vagina.  He told us after how fascinated gay men were with him, to the point of almost being gang-raped on the floor of the Black Party one year.  Men, as it turns out, are indeed pigs.  Joe summed it up nicely.  He said imagine a room full of the most hardcore sex freaks in the city, men who make a regular habit out of practices such as fisting and bloodletting (the bloodletting scene of the movie was by far the most disturbing - and kind of hot in a wrong wrong wrong way) and then put Buck onstage wearing nothing more than thigh-high leather boots.  It's the one perversion none of them have ever experienced before, and it drives them crazy.  That might help explain why Buck no longer goes on the main dance floor alone anymore. 

All in all, a fabulous evening.  I'm still working off a bit of a hangover (no more gin on long nights. Just no.) but it made me blog again so it must have been pretty fucking special.

Here's a pic of Buck and my angel of a boyfriend:

Aww.

StrangeAnniversary

This year marks the 25th year that the world has been dealing with HIV.  To mark the occassion, the CDC is revising its recommendations to encourage every person between the ages of 13 and 64 to get tested by their doctor, so as to prevent a still staggering 25% of new infections being caused by people who did not know they were positive.  I imagine we will hear the usual doomsday shrieking from the AIDS service providers, who seem to think the government is constantly busy cataloguing and tagging people for extermination somewhere.  But this sounds like a reasonable request to me.  If you've got it, you are far better off knowing you have it, and if you don't then there's nothing to worry about.

Joe My God has a typically touching piece to mark the occassion, and directs us to a HuffPo post about the recognized date of the anniversary, and why it seems wrong.  PBS did a stunning and exhaustive Frontline documentary on the virus; it is a must-see.   It has been seven years since my own body was invaded by this historic little virus.  Seven long, strange, but ultimately wonderful years, spent blissfully meds-free up to this point.  I've learned a lot, laughed a lot, cried a little, blah, blah, blah.  The interesting thing, to me, is how deeply this amazing city has been impacted by the virus and emerged stronger for it.  I've been getting to know segments of the positive population here ever since I seroconverted, and have encountered so many positive New Yorkers, each responding to the virus in unique and often inspiring ways.  The fight is not over, etc, etc.  But I've always found comfort in the fact that I could not have chosen a better city to support me when I need it, catch me when I'm falling, yet continue to constantly treat me just like every other asshole.  Nothing could comfort me more.

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ADDENDUM: The mark of a great writer, for me at least, is that they seem to tease out the very things that run through my own head in less poetic terms.  Andrew Sullivan, despite the almost universal distaste that many of my blog brethren have for him, will always remain a favorite of mine for continually being able to do just that.  In fact, I believe I have said the last line of the following almost verbatim on many occassions:

"I knew I would one day want to block it out, that one day, I would forget most of it, especially the terror of it, and so I made myself write it out at the time. Now I find myself with little new to say, or, rather, nothing to say, except the obvious. I survived. Others I loved didn't. There was no fairness in this. None. Countless more are dying - and surviving - with the same senseless randomness. In this sense, AIDS and HIV are just more intense experiences of life itself. Except death, once encountered, becomes always more real; and life never again resumes the ease and oblivion it once contained. HIV is a crash-course in being human."

TheBlizzardOf'06

Cars were buried so deep on my road that people had to scrape off parts of random cars to find their own.  The neighborhood boys enjoyed a snowball fight, and I was stuck at home with cabin fever.

But the city was beautiful after the storm cleared.

LetterToAndrewSullivan

Andrew,

Reading your 'Gay in the Heartland' post this morning was interesting.  I have had much the same experience in my own heartland of VA, where most of my extended family safely falls into the 'southern redneck' category.  They're not about to lobby for gay marriage, but they have always shown me love and respect, and I've never tried to hide who I am from them.

I moved to New York and assumed that life here as a gay man would be more comfortable, and for the most part that is true.  But riding the subway last night from downtown to Times Square, I sat across from a nondescript, average looking black woman.  30 seconds into our trip she started gesticulating wildly towards me, flipping her hand in an exagerrated limp wrist, snapping her fingers at me and yelling, whooping, and generally making a very loud ass of herself.  I had my iPod on, and initially thought the best thing to do would be to completely ignore her, but after several minutes of the constant commotion and obvious gaybaiting I stood up and moved to the other end of the car, where she proceeded to yell and flail her hands for another minute or so in my direction.

The woman was obviously a misguided Jesus freak (she loudly referred to the Bible as a justification for her absurd behavior), with a strong possibility of mental illness.  But the rest of the blue-state crowd in the car just looked uncomfortably away from us and part of me suspected that several of them tacitly agreed with the poor wretch.  New Yorkers are notoriously reticent to break out of their personal space for much of anything, so it didn't surprise me, but reading that letter from the heartland on your site made me think.  If some crazy person was verbally assaulting me back home, and my family or anyone in my community saw it happening, you can bet there would be hell to pay, and she would have been whisked away from me, or worse.  Much like the straight people who wished to defend your reader at the club. 

I don't know if there's a lesson in this or not, but it just goes to show that you can't make rock-solid assumptions about who will be there for you, politically or otherwise, merely based on party affiliation or geography.

Addendum

Some rather provocative and not unexpected comments call for a bit of further explanation.  Why did I not confront this woman who was harrassing me?  And why the need to mention her race?

I find it best to engage the mentally ill as little as possible.  She was so lost in her own strange delusional world that to confront her would be to deal with her on her terms, and I refused to do that.  Also, it was painfully apparent that she was itching for me to respond to her and pay her some mind.  I merely smiled at her and refused to engage her, which of course made her even more incensed and ridiculous.  Often, in the name of 'defending themselves' people are merely exercising their vanity and satiating their enemies' desire for attention. 

For better or worse, I am an extremely non-confrontational sort, and that policy has worked very well for me for the past several decades.  I make friends far more often than enemies, and have managed to avoid physical altercations altogether.  This must seem awfully lame to a brave former Marine like Scott, but each man must find his own path in this world. 

I am an extremely quick and efficient judge of character, and have engaged quite a few anti-gay minds in the past if I felt that there were some chance of connecting with them (successfully, more often than not.)  But she was beyond hope, and quite obviously so.  I found myself pitying her, and pity is the foulest thing you can feel toward a person. 

The fact that she was black was a descriptive qualifier, and nothing more.  I think white people can be just as irrational and hateful as anyone else.  I commonly refer to "this white guy did such and such" or "a hispanic girl told me" and so on.  I have no malice in my heart toward people based on their physical appearance.  But often, I find people's behavior slightly ironic considering their skin color and enjoy highlighting the irony.  In this case, an average-looking black woman in her 40's completely surprised me by suddenly turning into a raving homophobe based on religious quackery.  That is stereotypically the province of religious white men or aggressive young straight boys.  I felt that the racial detail was therefore intriguing.

As I sat there ignoring the creature, these thoughts swirled through my mind, trust me, and the temptation to yell at her or somehow make her stop was very strong.  But I held my ground because I honestly felt that no productive good could come of such an emotional response.  Maybe I was wrong, but it felt right at the time.  After the fact, of course, as is common, I thought of the perfect way to respond to her if I had wanted to, by playing on her simple religious fears and proclaiming myself the harbinger of gayness and evil, out to destroy her and her kind.  This may have backfired in a big way, but ideally it would have frightened the crap out of her, because in a real way she is a dying breed and she knows it.  But I still think the wise course was to not engage her at all.

Would love to hear further thoughts from others about this.  Am I just a big pussy, rationalizing away my fear? 

GottaGoToMo's

A friend just shot this cell phone pic of the Jewess at the Letterman show.  I pick on her mercilessly (mostly to annoy my friends who drank a little too much Madge Kool-Aid), but she does exude a fierce star quality, no?

Will'sHypocrisy

I work on a committee that throws social events for HIV positive men in the city.  We work on a budget that makes the term 'shoestring' look extravagant, and there are three of us running these (somewhat) monthly parties.  This all sprang out of some of the support groups that are held at the Center, and a growing feeling that the time was once again ripe for providing a safe space for positive men to commune in a relaxed setting without any of the added pressure of disclosure.  Most of our crowd runs a bit older, the type that puts "not into bar/club scene" in their profiles.  We have been fairly successful considering our limited resources, pulling in 100-200 men at each event for the past several years held at various generous gay bars throughout the city.

At one of our recent events, held at The Eagle, we managed to convince Will Clark, a New York-based porn star and host of various local bar events himself, to come to our event and make an announcement or two.  We thought it would spice up the flyer a bit to have him on it and pull in some extra guys. 

Then the shit hit the fan.  The supervirus scare had just broken on the front page of the NYTimes (way to go, MSM!) and Will Clark is very vocal (in word, at least) about safer sex issues.  He found out that The Eagle had hosted a party in the recent past for a porn company that specializes in barebacking videos (they make the "one that everybody has in their collection" according to vast anecdotal evidence), and he fired off a pissy email to everybody and their mother slamming The Eagle:

Dear Friends,

I just found out that the barebacking company Treasure Island is doing a 'video giveaway' and promotional party at the Eagle on Friday night March 4th. Apparently they are also casting a movie to be filmed over Black Party weekend where a model will take 20 loads.

Isn't it a little bizarre to have this kind of thing a week or two after there is talk of a new strain of HIV going around - our premiere leather bar is promoting videos that glorify unsafe sex? And one night after a community meeting organized by the HIV Forum about this problem in our community... kinda tragic. Isn't glorifying and eroticizing this part of the larger problem - that our community has decided that HIV and AIDS is not a big deal???

This, understandably, didn't sit very well with The Eagle management so they promptly banned him from attending our party.  There went the flyer.  After a quick tete-a-tete with the committee, we decided that our interests and more importantly the interests of the poz community would not be served by canceling our event or hastily moving it to another venue at the last minute.  We were scheduled for Black Party weekend at The Eagle for god's sake, and that's where the action was going to be.  We come with a caseload of condoms and safer sex literature, and what The Eagle decides to do with their space when we're not hosting a party for them is their business.  If we vetted every bar that was generous enough to allow us to host a party for suspect safer sex messages we would be totally screwed.

Anyway, the party continued without Will, and the pussy never showed up to 'protest' The Eagle with press in tow like he said he was committed to doing.  According to the committee member who had been the liason with Clark, he was "PISSED PISSED PISSED with the Eagle, and cannot believe how few people are standing up for his cause and this will not evoke change and where are the larry kramers of the world in present day and all of that..." 

Flash forward to more recently.  We spotted announcements for Clark hosting, guess what? A porn party at The Eagle.  Guess they fucked and made up.  And just now we got word that he will be appearing at an actual S&M sex party at The Studio, and at least one of our committee members assures us that safer sex is not the dominant theme there.

So where are all the Larry Kramers of the world?  Well, Larry's still around, certainly, busy calling all of us murderers.  But Will Clark's porn-star appearances seem to conflict a bit with his safer sex rabble-rousing.  He's free to appear at any event he wants to, of course, and I understand that it's hard to do anything in the NYC gay community without coming into a conflict of interest safe sex-wise.  But don't burn bridges by tapping out incensed emails to community leaders, then accuse a small volunteer community organization of fraternizing with the barebacking enemy, all in the heat of a moment that has obviously passed. 

The group I work with will continue to provide safe comfortable spaces for poz men to get to know one another in a fun atmosphere, all while pushing a strong safer sex message.  And Will Clark, apparently, will continue to rent himself out to the flesh industry. 

MovingStill

If you are in New York on May 26, you should definitely check this out.  Several dear friends are involved and it promises to be a truly beautiful production. 

Steamed

This was inevitable.  The party is over in the steam room boys:

"A high-end Chelsea gym has been slapped with a $25,000 lawsuit claiming that gay sex is rampant in the locker room and that the club's staff has been unable to stop the steamy high jinks.

Carlos Sosa, 34, of Manhattan says he expected the posh David Barton Gym on West 23rd Street to be the normal exercise center its management says it is.

But he says he was shocked to see men performing sex acts on each other in the shower, ogling him in the locker room and leering at him as he changed clothes.

"The gym misrepresented what they are all about," said Sosa's lawyer, Brian Kennedy. "They represented themselves as a serious place where you actually work out — but it became a saucy steam room that reminds me of the ancient Roman baths."

For those trying to escape the harsh glare of media attention, might I recommend the NY Sports Club in Times Square?  There are plenty of married men, with wedding bands on, who would be happy to help you jerk off.  Perhaps I should sue them for making me feel uncomfortable?