200 Steps

The underground transfer between the L Train and the 123 Trains is approximately 200 steps. I made the mistake of counting one day as a means to pass the time during my every morning commute. Now those steps are all I can think about.  Every morning I'm plagued with the thought of how I am going to spend those 200 steps.

"How today will I spend these steps?  What will occupy my time? What will I think about? What will I ignore? Will I pay attention to my walking, every step and beat of the way, or will I reach the end without even realizing what all I have traversed?"

There is no skipping them.  No fast forwarding.  They are an every morning constant and those steps never become more or less than what they are: 200 in total.

To take my mind off the 1 to 200 count I've created games that I play with an unknowing public. I'll jump off the train in haste and clamor up the steps before anyone else.  My game is to remain the first person up the stairs and to remain the leader of the pack from all who have just gotten off the L Train and are making the same underground transfer to the 123.  Other times I'll give someone I've spotted a lengthy head start and try to catch up with them, if not beat them all together, before the 200 steps are out.  

Then there are those days when I put my body on auto-pilot and let my mind dream wildly.  I'll find myself in the heart of a zombie Apocalypse, dodging those who have been recently infected and walk briskly to my desperate point of escape.  Other times I walk past the advertisements, roll my eyes and cringe at the world around me.  Often, I'll take in the graffiti, wonder about who left it there and why it tickles me so to see a moustache painted over a sickeningly thin female model or the words "I smile because I'm complacent" written over Scarlett Johansson's face on the He's Just Not that Into You movie poster.   I'll dream about the movies I want to make (but never will,) the books I want to write (but won't get to,) the blogs I want to post (but I have work!) the world I want to save (but why?)  When the 200 steps expire, these thoughts will become ghosts.  There one moment - gone the next.

There are the mornings when I study people.  The way they walk, the swagger in their step, the shoes they decide to wear.  How women can spend lifetimes walking in high heels and how people regard or disregard the man selling poetry and the youth strumming his guitar.  I'll half cruise the men walking against me.  Men wearing suits or dirty jeans and work boots.  There are those who still carry lunch boxes, possibly still sitting on steel beams, overlooking an ever expanding city and there are those still carrying briefcases - what these days cannot fit on an iphone, I don't know - yet the briefcase remains in hand, a trench coat flowing behind them.

I have teased myself with the thought of counting the number of fluorescent lights or the number of lightly tainted, now off-white tiles but it all seems too much.  200 steps in addition to an umpteen number of fluorescent lights and the ungodly amount of tiles stretching across the transfer is overwhelming enough, let alone knowing the count.

In 200 days I will have left a younger version of myself behind for every step of the way. So strong these evaporating thoughts, my younger self. Five steps now. 

Ten and I'm ancient. 

High Holidays

Not your Rabbi's Purim Party

Although Purim isn't considered one of the "High" Jewish holidays, DJ Josh Sparber and I have a history of throwing gay jew parties just for the chutzpah of it.  This time around we've wrangled in our other brother from another mother, Benji Solomon, to help us host the Jewcy event:

Wednesday March 11th

Eastern Bloc

10PM

Groggers, Kippahs, Free Manischewitz shots and your favorite chosen people

*No, you don't have to be Jewish to go.

Lest We Forget...

...This man is an overweight ex-Oxycontin addict.

Really, that's the best you got?

Some more on this here.

Today's Yesterday, Today

Left out of textbooks and any sense of educational history, I often feel as though Bookstore literature is the only window gay people have into our actual, cultural, factual history. It's also remarkably uncanny how certain threads of yesteryear's struggles are still so boldly woven within today's fabric.

The passage below is from Alan Helm's Young Man from the Provinces:

"...The summer after my junior year in 1958, I remained in New York doing test shots and putting together a modeling portfolio; otherwise, I spent my time exploring the gay world. It was such a different world, and now such a vanished one, that it's not easy to explain. Intensely secretive and hidden, it went on mostly at night behind the unmarked doors of the bars and in apartments where the shades were always drawn. The 415 Bar on Amsterdam Avenue was typical: you walked in, saw a few locals talking with the bartender, and figured you'd made a mistake. But through an unmarked door and in the back and down a flight of stairs, you entered a cavernous basement teeming with hundreds of gay men who were dancing and laughing and cruising and kissing and drinking and passing out in the johns. No wonder that during my two years with Dick I'd not had the slightest suspicion such a world existed. It was determined to remain as hidden as possible.

The men were too. Everyone I knew was more or less closeted and spent a lot of time in the workaday world passing for straight. Save for a few artists and hairdressers and decorators and dancers, we were all terrified of being found out. Gay men regularly married for the sake of appearances or inheritances and just as regularly committed suicide. If you heard that a gay man was seeing a shrink , it only meant one thing: he was trying desperately to "go straight," which sounded more like a road sign than a way of life. Parents routinely disowned and disinherited their gay sons or had them committed to mental hospitals where they were subjected to shock treatments and lobotomies and a popular therapy of the day called "aversion therapy": "by means of hypnotic suggestion and conditioning, the author has been able... to create deep aversions in the male homosexual to the male body." How do you do that? "Suggestions of filth associated with the male genitalia of their partners were implanted in their subconscious and reinforced periodically during the hypnotic trance." Psychiatrists published abominations like that with pride and impunity. In their view, which was mainstream America's view made professional and scientifically unassailable, homosexuality was an abnormality to be corrected at all costs; the most barbarous treatments were justified in the name of destroying such pernicious tendencies. There were gay men walking the streets of Manhattan in those days who had been rendered incapable of sex or had their memories obliterated by electricity. For some, it would take years to put their minds back together again; for others, the effort was hopeless. Of all the enemies we had, psychiatrists were among the most dangerous. And our parents, of course. I never met anyone who was out to his parents; you had to be crazy to do such a thing.

There was no place in public where it felt safe to be gay. Even inside the gay world you weren't secure, since bars and parties were raided all the time. You'd be having a beer and a chat with someone in a bar when suddenly the police would appear at the door screaming "Stay where you are, this is a raid!" Fear would sweep over the place, followed by a stampede for the back door, people falling over each other and jamming the exit in their panic to get out. During one of my own terrified escapes, I was fleeing out the back when I saw a fat man I knew wedged in the bathroom window leading to the alley. The next day, his name appeared in the papers along with the names of the other men arrested in the raid- a couple of dozen all told, an average take. He was fired of course and evicted from his apartment, and there was nothing he could do about it. There were no legal aid societies or political action groups for gays in those days, no gay weeklies or bimonthlies to publish his plight and raise money for his defense. What defense? Firings, evictions, arrests, entrapments, blackmail, muggings, murders- they happened all the time, they came with the territory.

At parties, you knew the instant the police had arrived. The room would fall silent and without even turning to look, you knew a couple of New York's finest were at the front door, "Fuckin' Faggots" scrawled all over their faces. Sometimes they told us to keep it down and they went away; other times they told us to break it up and then stood at the door as we filed out between them like guilty things caught in a shameful act. I never once heard anyone protest or ask why we had to break it up. We just did as we were told.

Except for the drag queens, bless their sassy, revolutionary hearts. But they always got beaten up and arrested and thrown in jail, over and over again. "Such masochists," we said. "They're really sick."

Whenever our world came into conflict with the straight world, group loyalties crumbled. Threatened with arrest or blackmail, thrown out of a party, chased down a midnight street by a gang of fagbashers, it was each gay man for himself, running for fear, lost in panic to save his own skin. We didn't have much political awareness, partly no doubt because our enemies were so often invisible: cultural opinion, legal precedent, psychiatric theory, social convention, religious stricture- nothing you could insult or demean or punch in the face in return. The most pernicious enemy of all, and the most invisible, was our own self-hatred.

Almost all of us bought into the straight notion that there was really something wrong with us, something abnormal and perverted and ultimately pathetic. It still astounds me to think how many derogatory names the straight world has invented to designate gay men: fags, faggots, pansies, perverts, inverts, aunties, flits, queers queens, cocksuckers, nellies, sickos, homos, sodomites, pederasts, sissies, swishes, fairies, fruits, and the list goes on. The reverberations of that lexicon sounded even in our dreams, inducing a kind of concentration camp mentality. We were disposable, the scum of the earth, living crimes against nature (thank you, Thomas Aquinas), and we knew that socially, religiously, legally, psychoanalytically, and in every other way that mattered, we were beyond the pale of what was considered acceptably human. I don't remember that we talked about the sense of shame the straight world bred in us, but it was pervasive in our lives, and I don't know anyone of my gay generation who's ever been able to shake it. I certainly haven't. You can still see it in the timid gestures toward self-exposure of a John Ashberry or Jasper Johns, and in the furtive, guilty cruising of gay men in their fifties and sixties.

With so much fear and danger hedging our lives it's no wonder we were a wildly romantic bunch. Mainstream America was too, of course. My parents had grown up in a world fed by Hollywood fantasies of romantic love, and the lyrics of popular songs urged a desperate, eternal monogamy: "Once you have found him/Never let him go," and then the repeat in case you weren't paying attention the first time. In 1957, 96 percent of adult Americans were married, if you can imagine such a statistic. Heterosexual marriage was the only model of adult life that existed at the time, so gay America was busy coupling in the imitation of its masters.

Since romance thrives on obstacles (Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Cupid and Psyche, Antony and Cleopatra), there was no more fertile ground for romance in those days than the gay world. I don't think I ever made love with a man without first convincing myself he was a potential long term lover, and if the first date went well, which invariably meant the first night of sex, I was ready next morning to shop for monogrammed towels. All the frenetic cruising and partying and sexing had as its goal the paragon lover, a gay knight on a charger who would sweep us off our feet and make everything all right, compensate us for the oppression we had to put up with and for the pervasive sense there was something lacking in us that only the right man could supply. We fell in love a lot and conducted our mostly brief affairs with operatic drama-passionate avowals of eternal devotion, fits of jealous rage, wrenching breakups replete with nervous breakdowns and threats of suicide. The few of us of sustained affection managed successful relationships, but most of us got "married" and settled down for a brief while, then broke up and broke down, then grieved and cruised until we met the next candidate for our troubled affections, and thus the same round all over again."

Obama: Consciousness

Hope made real

Who would have ever thought that a liberal lefty cynic like me would ever stand in solidarity and applause of our nation's leader?  I certainly didn't think so but here I am today, elated after President Obama's State of the Nation Address, rooting for the country and truly feeling that over-used cliched word: hope.  Hope is out there.  Change exists!  This is exactly what lead Obama to win the presidency and exactly that which will lead our nation out of crisis.

There is no plan for hope and change, despite the naysayers and critics request for one, and I feel Obama made that very clear last night.  The only plan for hope and change is that we as Americans begin taking responsibility for ourselves.  

Nothing made me more proud of our President last night when he declared that dropping out of High School is "no longer an option" for American people.  My applause became louder when he declared that this issue is neither democratic nor republican but an American issue! Education is the root of life opportunity and progressive change and our country should not carry a nonchalant attitude regarding it.  We must become better parents, better educators, better eaters, better citizens and we should carry a consideration for our common man.  The responsibility to shape this nation is ours and Obama spread that consciousness last night.  He can only take us so far.  After that the repair of this nation is only up to us.  I applaud President Obama and congratulate him for talking to his citizens like actual people and not running us through bullet points, numbers and dry statistics.  Morale and personal motivation are the key ingredients for any sense of healthy esteem and those are the same ingredients which will be applied in rebuilding this nation.  I salute President Obama for spreading this message and I will work with him and my fellow citizens to ensure this nation reaches the high-set goals so absolutely attainable. 

• "But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken, though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."
  
• "Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more."
• "I've appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud.And we have created a new Web site called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent."
• "But credit has stopped flowing the way it should. Too many bad loans from the housing crisis have made their way onto the books of too many banks. And with so much debt and so little confidence, these banks are now fearful of lending out any more money to households, to businesses, or even to each other."
• "Well, I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders, and I know you don't, either. It is time for America to lead again."
• "So let there be no doubt: Health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year."
• "It is...It is our responsibility as lawmakers and as educators to make this system work, but it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it.  So tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be a community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself; it's quitting on your country. And this country needs and values the talents of every American."

Wingsuits!

Via TodaysBigThing.com

Stop the Arrests Footage

Footage from Saturday's Coalition to Stop the Arrests protest at Mayor Bloomberg's crib:

Farewell Oscar Wilde, What Becomes of Stonewall?

Farewell indeed. Another piece of gay history bites the dust.
From NY Magazine

One of the subtler pleasures of the movie Milk is its vivid portrayal of those small rooms where the conspirators of the gay liberation movement first came together. Sadly, one of those sanctums, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, announced it was closing last week, after 42 years.

As it happens, the place has a direct link to the film: Its founder, Craig Rodwell, was an early boyfriend of Harvey Milk, at the time a closeted actuary in Brooks Brothers drag. They met cruising on Central Park West and parted after Rodwell, uninterested in monogamy, passed along a case of the clap. By far the more militant of the two, Rodwell had arrived as a teenager, from Chicago, to study ballet, but was distracted by sex and the dawn of “the homophile movement” in the early sixties. In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots, when most gay activists still used fake names to avoid arrest, he took his savings from cleaning Fire Island hotel rooms and opened the nation’s first gay bookstore.

Not that there were many gay books then. The real action was in the cramped back room, where Craig and his staff—he hired men and women in equal numbers—plotted a better future. The city’s first gay-pride march was planned there. Strategies for getting the Mafia out of gay bars or confronting police brutality were discussed. When I found my way out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1979, as a teenager, I longed to be in that conversation and one day found the courage to ask Craig for a job. He let me run the register one Saturday a month. My sense of arrival was complete.

But my awe for the place never dimmed. I remember how it felt a few years later when copies of my first book lay in a pile on the floor there and Craig handed me a pen to sign them. Craig died in 1993 (cancer, of all things), a few months after selling the shop. It has gone through four owners since. Kim Brinster, the manager since 1996, bought it three years ago. Shoppers, who for years have consisted more of tourists than locals, disappeared in August. Last week, she told her staff, “I’ve never been the owner, I’m the caretaker. And unfortunately there’s nothing we can do now.” Oscar Wilde himself might have been more sanguine. As Lord Henry told Dorian Gray (in a slightly different context), “They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever

I suppose this is a good opportunity to bring up a certain idea: Every year, whether rumor or fact, I hear that the famous and historic Stonewall Inn on Christopher St. faces an imminent closure at some point in the near future. My friend suggested that we should start rallying around wealthy gay people and gay organizations to raise money so when that time comes, we can buy out the building which the Stonewall Inn is located, clear it out and turn the space into the Official Gay and Lesbian Liberation Museum. This way, the West Village and more specifically, Christopher St., can go through as many changes and gentrifications as it will yet the gay community will always have that space on that street to call our own.

Thoughts?

Checking In / Three Shelves

Hi!

I'm not gone. I just took a new job and I'm busy busy busy. I'll have to figure out some sort of new blog-work balance but until then hang in there and enjoy the story below.

I just caught wind that The Oscar Wilde Bookstore on Christopher St. is closing its doors. The story below was inspired by my visit there last year. This was originally posted on: Feb 7th 2008.

Three Shelves

I got out of work earlier than expected and Wayne wasn't available for another hour and a half. I headed out of my office, got on the subway and eventually jumped off at West 4th St. figuring I'll slum around the West Village for awhile. The weather was unusually warm and a light drizzle came and went as if Mother Nature could not decide upon her mood. The city is out. People are getting home, going to dinner and music plays from the restaurants out onto the streets. I sucked the city in deeply through my nostrils and headed in an aimless direction toward the West Village.

Call it instinct or a natural gravitational pull but I always find myself at some end of Christopher St. The street is narrow and the boutiques are hip and artistic. Rainbow flags fly and neon signs blip and buzz. As Manhattan changes again and again it always seems as though this one part of the city, is and always will be, quaint and unique. The streets are narrow and tree lined with old and gorgeous brownstones and a feeling of vibrant history rattling beneath the pavement.

In the distance I notice The Oscar Wilde Bookshop. Actually, I don't notice the little independent bookstore as much as I notice the giant rainbow flag waving outside. Having been there before I know that's the calling card of the bookstore, letting everyone know that despite it's size, it's there. Colorful, loud and proud. It's the only queer focused bookstore in the city and one of the only few surviving independent bookstores that has yet to be gobbled up by the corporate book and music malls.

The inside is quiet and clean and one can expect to hear some nostalgic acoustic music playing. Dylan, Cat Stevens, Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco... A smooth green carpet matches well to the light brown bookshelves filled with paper back and hard cover books. Posted on many of the shelves are yellow tags alerting customers to "staff picks" and critic's choices. There are never more than 5 customers in the store at any time. Today there is only one. I'm happy I saw the store in the distance, it reminded me to pick up a copy of James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room" for the first meeting of a book club I recently joined.

I wasn't able to grab the book right away because the section of fiction I needed to pull it from was being occupied by a seemingly frantic and excited young lady pulling out books left and right, top shelf, bottom shelf, flipping through the pages, reading backs, studying the price, compiling piles. I didn't mind waiting and looking at the new arrivals but I couldn't help but wonder what this girl needed or why her interest in so many books. I watched her for awhile. She was nearly out of breath. She would take a pick from the pile she created, study the cover, flip to the back and judge whether or not to put it back on the shelf. "What is she doing," I thought to myself. Judging from her level of stress I could only suppose that whatever it was she needed carried a great importance. "A research paper? A thesis?" I shrugged and continued to browse the selections.

Holding a book in the air and showing it to the cashier the young woman asked in a hard accent and broken English, "What about dis vone? Will I like dis vone?" The store clerk advised her there are others she would like better and left the counter to assist her search. As the store clerk approached the young woman said, "There's just so much! Where I am from there are only three shelves...Just three..."

Upon hearing this my breath caught itself in my throat and my arm goosebumped. "Just three shelves," I repeated to myself. I understood immediately the girl's frantic search and how important it was to her. I waited until the store clerk escorted the girl to another section and grabbed my book off the wall of fiction. I looked around the room. This whole book store: for me. Everything from fiction to non-fiction, biography to auto-biography, gay to lesbian, bisexual to trans, fantasy and reality, porn to prude- everything is here and it's an entire store. Maybe it is just one store with this specific focus but any store in this city has more than just three shelves!

I hung around the bookstore checking out other sections keeping an eye and ear on the girl and the store clerk. I wanted to know where she was from, what country or place she was visiting from that only allowed her three shelves. I wasn't granted any of that information but hearing what I already heard was enough for me to wish her the best of possible searches. She stood in front of me paying for her books. Almost 100 dollars in total. A pile that would keep her busy for months, if not a year, and will be with her for a lifetime. Having a few extra dollars left over she asked the store clerk, "What rainbow things you have else?" "Well," the store clerk responded, "we don't have too much this time of year, more in the summer, but here take this bracelet." The young girl took a rainbow colored bracelet and slipped it over her hand, securing it on her wrist. "Oh tank you," she said overjoyed, placing her hand over the bracelet and smiling.

After she left I said to the store clerk, "Wow. Only three shelves, and here we have this entire bookstore. It just goes to show- despite the amount of work we still have have ahead of us, how much we already take for granted." "Yes," the store clerk responded, frowning, "And I'm not even sure you can find more than three shelves in other places in this very country. I'm not sure if Montana, Idaho, Kansas or North Dakota offers much of a difference..."I shook my head, realizing the impact of what the store clerk was saying. I thanked her for the books and headed out of the store onto Christopher St., the very same street where 39 years ago a group of people demanded they weren't going to take it any more and have allowed the rainbow flags to fly, without apology, ever since.

New York Nightlife: Back with Vengence?

Come on, how could you not be hyped?

Sparber spins hot disc.

Look Familiar?

Past to Present:

Must See: Loaded

Wayne and I went to The Center last night to see a new play entitled Loaded. The show is completely sold out for its short 5 show duration but if you beg The Center or call ahead you might be able to get a seat.

The Synopsis:

LOADED, the provocative new play by Elliot Ramon Potts, directed by Hector Lugo is an exhilarating dark comedy which dares to ask the question, “What happens when f**k buddies start talking?” Running ninety-minutes, LOADED breathtakingly unfolds in real time as the characters -- a jaded, 47-year-old man who is used to having the upper hand in intimate encounters and a hopeful, quick-witted 24-year-old -- reveal themselves in a sexually charged tête-à-tête. They thrash out the perceived consequences of a libertine past, the risk of a conformist present and the dithering future of the Gay Community. The sex may have been hot, but the conversation…incendiary. The talented and sexy cast features Paul Caiola and Ted Morin.

Wayne and I were both incredibly impressed with this play and how the subject matter unravels before the audience with no unnatural flow or superficial push. In approximately 90 minutes the characters hit upon everything ranging from: Gay history, gay sex, Older/Younger homo dynamics, activism, HIV/AIDS, bareback, the difference between generations and where we're headed. The play is intense and carries a great impact.

Loaded is currently being sought out by producers - hopefully the play will get picked up for a longer run and a bigger venue.

Official website here

Chicks in Boots: A series of Haikus

Click clack clomp clump thud

You know these floors are wood, right?

You are killing me.

Listen, I get it,

Okay? Fashion, whatever.

But the boots must go!

There once was a time

When Ugz were in - maybe you

Could be less trendy?

It's not you, really.

It's me. No, no.  Wait a sec.

Yeah, sorry, it's you.

Ahh, peace and quiet

This is nice, isn't it?  Oh shit,

there goes your iphone.

Every So Often

The day is here:

The anxiety crashed a long time ago. The white foam rumbled itself out over the last few remaining months and the pools have drained back into the water.

He's made it. He put his hand on the book, the other up in the air and officially became our 44th President.

I suppose it is among the greatest of stories: The no-name underdog battling his way through the spiked tunnels and pitfalls of politics, dodging spears, swinging on hope, and defeating his two opponents at a pivotal time in our world's history. The stakes have never been higher and the people have turned to the rookie to lead them. We have given him a key to our city and he, with our investment, made that key glow to its brightest potential.

He is the Native American. The Slave. The man in the hose's aim. He is the man on the Moon, the picture in the text book. He is the man that made the Earth stand still. He is the President who got out of his motorcade to stop and wave to the people. He is history. He is: The American dream.

Throughout his campaign Barack Obama used words like Change, Hope and Progress to spark people up from an election and out into a movement. Art became inspired. Musicians began collaborating. Young people threw themselves onto computer screens and chiseled their way through technology. We had something to believe in again. After eight dark, directionless years we now had a light to hold on to.

"We want change. We want change."
"Yes we can! Yes we can!"

But now the day is here. Right here. Right now.

He has taken us this far. But now the responsibility is ours. We were the ones that chanted "yes we can." We were the ones that urged support. We were the ones that pledged "we want change." Now it's time to prove it.

So, in the words of our new President:

"Every so often there are times when America must rise to meet a moment.
And our moment is now.
This is our moment.
This is our time-
to unite in common purpose.
To make this century the next American century.
Let's go change the world!"

Let's go.

January 20th 2009: President Barack Obama

Pier

Stop the Arrests: Town Hall Meeting

Last night Wayne and I attend the Stop the Arrests! town hall meeting at The Center. The meeting was called to educate and organize around the recent NYPD entrapment cases and frivolous arrests targeting the queer community in NYC bookstores and other adult venues.

To read up on the issues please visit my previous post where I feature Gay City News reporter Duncan Osborne's article on the matter. This is definitely a topic worth discussing. Our community is being unfairly targeted and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for it other than the police viewing gays as easy people to arrest.

Below is Duncan Osborne's summation of the evening:

Some 300 people came to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center for a town hall meeting on police arrests of gay men on prostitution charges in New York City porn shops.

Openly gay state Senator Thomas K. Duane, who represents Chelsea, told the crowd “I think it’s very disturbing that there has been this pattern of arrests...No matter how you look at this issue, the enforcement has been completely, utterly inappropriate and out of control.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who represents Chelsea, and Councilmember Rosie Mendez, who represents the Lower East Side and part of Gramercy, sent staffers. Quinn’s staffer said the speaker was “very concerned” about the arrests and had communicated with the police department while the staffer representing Mendez read a letter in which the councilmember called for a “full investigation into the actions of the police department.”

Police have arrested at least 47 gay or bisexual men in seven porn shops dating back to 2004 with roughly half of those arrests coming in 2008. Citing those arrests, the police department sued six of the seven, with four suits happening in 2008, using the city’s nuisance abatement in an effort to close the shops. Two were shuttered while the others remain open under settlements with the city that restricts their operations.

Andrea J. Ritchie, director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center, said the arrests and lawsuits are used to punish “deviant” sexuality. “The decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 did not end the policing of gay sex,” she said referring to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down state sodomy laws. “The policing of sexuality casts a much wider net. It captures heterosexuals as well as queers.”

Other panelists at the town hall included Sienna Baskin, a legal fellow at the Sex Workers Project, Joey Nelson from the Queer Justice League, Jennifer Ramirez, an organizer at the New York City Gay and esbian Anti-Violence Project, and Robert Pinter, a gay man who was arrested for prostitution in Blue Door Video on First Avenue in the East Village in October. The Coalition to Stop the Arrests, a group founded by Pinter, will meet at the Center on January 29 at 6:00 pm to plan next steps and AVP will host a meeting at its offices on Janury 28. Go to avp.org for details.

New Ad

This project has been on delay for awhile. But without further ado:

Original music by Xylos.

Quiet City

The apartment is solely illuminated by the blue-black flicker of a television set airing football against the white walls. I am just waking up. It's morning, but it might as well be dusk, or even later- maybe somewhere around the edges of this deep winter's midnight. I check back at my clock twice, making sure I hadn't somehow slept through the entire day. I hadn't. It's only 11AM on Sunday and my roommate is plopped on the couch. Our "Emergency Only!" television set has been brought down from the closet shelf and is now propped on our kitchen chair airing ESPN. My roommate stares at the flicker, an entire day of watching football reflecting off his eyes. I need to get out. Our apartment is so dark. So cold. Everything is cold and dark and the walls of our tiny apartment are finite and looming. There must be errands to run, I think to myself, trying to conjure up a day of aimless, just-to-make-you-feel-better productivity. I look up to the ceiling. In the television's dull bleeps I make out a dust web in the corner and think to myself that cleaning my room is at least something. But, that's not going to happen. It can't. I need to get out of here. I shrug off ideas in my head as I slip on my sneakers and pat my coat making sure I have my gloves with me. For a moment I consider my cell phone. Friends to call? Brunch? I buckle. The thought of scrolling through my contacts, picking or choosing, waiting for whomever, whenever, wherever- texting, it all becomes too much and I tease myself with the idea of leaving my cell phone at home for the day. This, of course, is an impossibility. Leaving my cell phone at home is about as far fetched as confidently leaving my house naked. I'd constantly pat at the front of my jeans, my pockets won't feel exactly right and each square of the sidewalk would bring thoughts of "what if" or missed opportunity. Truth is- I wasn't expecting any calls and knew I wouldn't be making them. I drop the gadget into my pocket, feel the correct weight in my jeans and decide to head to The Strand bookstore. If I am feeling this dismal, this early on, then reading the next book on my list about The 80's and the AIDS crisis would only validate my utter nonchalance, if not snap me out of it all together.

The air is cold and the wind twacks my nose like a snap of steel. My shoulders hug my neck and I feel knots starting to spitefully muster up in my traps. There's no sense in taking the L Train, I might as well brave the cold and walk to Union Square. I stop for a coffee, hoping the heat and caffeine might cause me to straighten up or rewire my brain to form some semblance of glee. Something's got to work. This is a rare mental state for me, yet it continues to linger, overcast and heavy. Maybe The Strand will hold an unexpected something? This is New York, right? Adventure waits around every corner. Who knows, maybe I'll even get laid? I drift away with this thought and allow it to consume the distance of blocks I have to walk. Maybe I'll turn the corner of the Gay and Lesbian Fiction section and catch the eyes of some unsuspecting handsome Joe. We'll make eye contact, look away, stare at the floor, and look back, quickly causing the numbers of the combination to lock and he'll start a conversation with me as I pull a book from the shelf:
"Oh! You like David Feinberg," He'll ask and continue on with, "If you like that one I can recommend a bunch of others that you might enjoy. In fact, I have a whole collection of books just like this at my brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side! Why don't you come over, I'll make a fire and get into my underwear and you can cuddle up against my chest and spend the whole day reading whatever you'd like?"

Suddenly I'm excited to get to The Strand. I walk in, unzip my coat and flick on my gay sonar senses hoping the unsuspecting handsome Joe will bleep onto my screen. Nothing yet. I make my way to the back of the bookstore and hold my breath before turning the corner of the Gay and Lesbian Fiction section. I exhale. There's nothing here except packed, unkempt 10 foot tall bookshelves and the smell of paperback ghosts. Just as well, I think, that's what fantasies are: fantasies.

There are only a few titles by David Feinberg. Two paperback editions of Spontaneous Combustion and one hardcover of 86'd. I pull all three books off the shelf and flip through them hoping the mysterious previous owner made notes in the margins or underlined sentences, causing the status of the book to go from novel to treasure, but nothing is found. I feel a sad sense of guilt, clearing these books off the shelf and purchasing them for myself. It makes sense that I would have these books but what if there's some 19 year old NYU student or burgeoning AIDS activist for whom I am robbing this experience? The titles are obsolete enough as they stand and I have several friends who have copies of these books who would gladly loan them to me if I asked, yet still I want them for myself. I want to send one copy of Spontaneous Combustion to a friend and the other I want for my personal stash. I'm going to have to buy all three. I tick-tock my tongue off the top of my mouth and rationalize the purchase by proposing that I'll read the books, keep 'em handy for a few years, make my own notes in the margins and return them sometime during my mid-thirties, if the world still exists then. Fine. I turn on my heel, clutch the books by my side and head for the checkout line.

Back outside I stamp my foot and huff at the cold. The weather is far from announcing any invitations for me to sit on a bench in Union Square and begin my reading. I think of which coffee shops are within my radius but who am I kidding? They're going to be packed to the hilt, coffee cups themselves, overflowing at the brim, all the seats taken, John Mayer on the stereo and some twenty-three year old girl complaining to her friend that her father is finally making her pay her own phone bill. I sigh and head north to Barnes and Noble. Maybe, if I play my cards right, keep my alert on high-gear and hover correctly I'll find a seat in the bustling coffee area.

I make my way through the huge doors and as they close happen to drown out the frail man screaming for people to leave "just one penny for the homeless." I self-consciously walk with my head down past the security guards. My backpack is full of books. Books I didn't purchase here and would hate to be mistaken for a thief. Everything in Barnes and Noble is clean and white and gleaming. Hundreds of sleek new books are neatly organized into little stacks and each table is clearly marked by their topic. So many books. Both old and new, fiction and non-fiction. Everything! I want to belly-flop fling myself upon each table like a brave soldier to a live grenade, letting the books detonate beneath me, sending shrapnel of words and stories and talent and technique and history to shoot throughout my body. I want to absorb everything. The idea is titillating and inspiring for a moment but then turns sour because I can't possibly consume everything in this store and I begin rattling off thoughts like there's never enough time in the day or the year or even a life. The books turn dark and cruel like sadistic children on a playground pointing and laughing at me, causing me to recount all the things I haven't completed in life, all the projects I left unfinished and suddenly everything seems daunting and unfair.

I shake my head from side to side and head toward the escalators. I make my way to the huge coffee area and the place is buzzing like Times Square hopped up on brains and New York based conversation. A homeless man tries to dissolve into a corner, babies wail in their strollers, girls gab to one another, a man listening to his ipod flips through a book and scribbles notes onto loose-leaf paper, a man with white hair and a red Kashmir sweater reads a self-help book and I eye my desperately-looking-for-a-table competition standing alongside me. There's about four of us and not one of us seems willing to give the next available seat away. This battle is going to be fierce. It's not about who was first or who has been waiting the longest. It's all about who spots what or if you're closest to the next table packing up to leave. Fortunately, I get the first ray of sunlight in my rather stagnant and stuck day and one of the mommies seated next to where I'm standing resigns to her crying baby by saying, "you know what? Fine. You've had enough for today," and gets up to leave. The moment the mommy reaches for her coat I take one giant step to the left and the table is mine. Victory! Ha! I try not to make eye contact with my competition and pretend as though they no longer exist. I sit, exhale deeply, put my coffee on the table, shed my coat and flip open the cover of 86'd. I take one last look around the room and look back down at my book. I drown out the rest of the chaotic world around me and begin reading the first few sentences.

100 some odd pages and god knows how many hours later I look up to discover an entirely new cast of characters seated around me. Startled and engulfed by 86'd I contemplate calling some of my friends just to check in on them, to make sure, unlike the plot of the book, that they're all still alive. I blink a few times allowing my eyes to adjust and notice the day is breaking into a dull yellow and pink dwindling twilight. It'll be dusk soon and full fledged night only moments there after. When the sun is out of the sky and the dark winter has consumed everything, I can finally say my day is done and head home, hoping for a clearer less dense head tomorrow. My ears begin filtering conversation around me. I overhear The Eagles won the game and I hesitate the decision to head home, wondering if I'm up for my roommates raging enthusiasm over the victory of his beloved football team. Maybe seeing him will be a good thing? I shrug and head out.

Union Square is almost entirely empty. I pull a cigarette out of my pocket and smoke it out of no other reason than dawdling in the cold, for just a bit longer, before committing to going back to my apartment. The day lessens overhead, a thin sliver of golden dry light is pushed beneath the darkening sky and I listen to the breath of the wind through my pinking ears. The city is nil. Muffled, dim and bleak. Nearly apocalyptic. I finish my cigarette and flick it hard against the ground causing the embers of the tip to explode into an orange dazzle. One last toast to my virtual palindrome of a day.

I stand at the south end of Union Square. I'm the only one here. Beneath me empty subway tunnels blow New York Post tumbleweed while in front of me cabbies seem desperate for fares. There is no honking, no sirens, no on-the-street chatter. There is no sound except for the monotone dull fuzz circling around my brain.

There is nothing but a quiet city today.

...aaaand back?

I promised myself I wouldn't do a thing, not a thing, until I got my hair cut. No blogging, no friends, no visits to the bank, hell- I wasn't even going to eat before getting my hair cut. I worked my tail off, on the road, for the last half of December all to come back to New York for two days and get hit with a horrific shit storm of a flu. I checked out of the city and basically checked out of life and hunkered down with my parents in New Jersey until this cold front passed over my body and I was back to health. In the meantime my hair, which was shaggy and miserable before leaving town had grown so unkempt and wild that it became the epicenter for everything bad and rotten in my life. I swore when I returned to feeling 100%, getting my hair cut would be the first step in restoring my life back to normalcy. The hair on my neck had grown to full-on werewolf, I had bangs, my beard was Rastafarian and my sideburns were now fit for a standard application to the East Williamsburg Orthodox community.

My flu finally subsided by Wednesday night and by Thursday I felt healthy, brave and eager enough to hop the 197 Willowbrook Mall Express to Port Authority. I missed my life, my apartment, NPR, my friends and I could not stand the thought of another day flipping through channels just to end up on another disdainful episode of The "Real" Housewives of The OC (Vicki is such a bitch.)

Stepping foot on the New York concrete and getting slapped in the face by a frigid gust of wind was like finding a pool of water after wandering the desert for 5 days. I was back and the city was mine again. Being back gave me one of those rare New York feelings where I felt the city was more accessible than ever. Subways were fun and the entirely redundant subway-to-apartment walk was interesting yet again! I had one of those moments where I asked myself, "Yeah, why don't you go to MoMA, like everyday?" and "I'm totally going to the New York Public Library at Bryant Park on Saturday. Just to go! After all, this is New York." My excitement to be back in the city and healthy again caused me to take the very rare trip to West 94th street to see my friend (who always asks me to come over and eat dinner but I always complain that "it's too far!") and catch up.

My excitement to be back in the city and to see my friends dropped quicker than an erection to a Grandmother when my friend greeted me with a hug and said in that hyper-homo snarky tone that I hate and makes me want to rampage facebook pages, "yeaaaah. That hippie-bear look you're going for isn't really werking werrrking (snap!) working for you." I wanted to shove the palm of my hand right up his nose but instead I settled for a "fuck you" and a hug. I dropped my jacket and demanded hot food at once. My resentments didn't last long and I found myself enjoying my friend, his company and sharing where we have been and what we have been up to for the month we hadn't seen each other. At 2AM we called it a night and I headed downtown on the 2 train to 14th street where I discovered the L was no longer running, but still in my excitement to "be back!" I decided to walk from 6th Ave. to the East Village to get home. I arrived back home around 2:45 (I stopped for a hot tea on the way) and crashed into sleep without trying.

I awoke today and rolled around in bed for a few minutes and cracked my laptop open to begin hacking down on the emails I've been ignoring for weeks upon weeks even though I pledged to not do a thing until getting my haircut. I answered about two emails before rolling my eyes and considered renewing my Republican ownedManhunt account but remembered while hairy might be "in," the homeless look certainly isn't and I actually did have better things to do than sit around all day answering going nowhere, back-and-forth emails like "What R U in 2?" and the always clever "sup?" I blew a short breath out of my lungs, swung my feet over the bed, stretched, got up, thew some Santogold into the stereo and steamed up my tiny bathroom with a hot-hot shower. I was ready for my hair cut and start living life again.

I figured I should actually eat before doing anything as it's probably a bad idea to go hungry when your body is recovering from the flu. I had banana pancakes (yum!), two coffees and a water. When I got up from the table I felt exhausted. I prayed that I didn't already over do anything and was going to end up sick again. Regardless, I was going to get my hair cut! I usually get my hair cut at that small place across from Ty's on Christopher St. but I decided to settle for Astor Place Hair instead as I didn't want to brave the walk to the West Village in my weakened condition. I always get my hair cut by the same tattooed Latin guy who considers me "pretty cool for a gay guy" and always invites me to smoke a joint with him on his break. I declined this time wanting to ensure that I recover before harming my lungs again. As he snipped away at my hair I felt self-loathing and ugliness lifting from my body like stench out of a sewer and I was relieved that this one single action was finally taking place. Whew!

After the haircut was done I felt more exhausted than I did after breakfast. Looks like I'm not entirely healthy after all. I was bummed that the haircut didn't cure everything I thought it would. But I suppose it's all about baby steps, right?

Ugh. I need my bed.