Fag Hags and Disco Bunnies: A Meditation

I just came from seeing David’s Friend, Nora Burns’s autobiographical tribute to her best friend at La Mama, and I’m absolutely devastated.

Why did this show have such an effect on me?

First of all, it’s about death (David’s, from AIDS). It’s also about the larger death of New York City, a place where people came to find themselves in a world of sex, drugs and disco.

Watching the show was a very emotional experience for me because, in a way, this was my story.

Like Burns, I was a bit of a club kid in the early ’80s.

I, too, moved to New York City to attend college. In fact, the main reason I chose to attend NYU was because it was in New York City and it provided me with a means for moving there. And, like Burns, I eventually found that going to college was interfering with my nightlife (or, perhaps I should say, going to college was what allowed me to have a nightlife, since I didn’t have to get up early for work and my expenses were covered by student loans).

In fact, I suspect that pretty much anyone who lived in New York during this heady period will find much to appreciate in this show.

Burns has had a long career as a member of various comedy groups such as Unitard and the Nellie Olesons, and her writing and performing chops show. But this show takes her talent to a new level.

Because of this show, we get to know David, a stunningly beautiful man who died in the prime of his life.

So, while the show is very funny and entertaining, there’s also an undeniable poignancy to it.

Burns does a great job of recreating the era with the help of music, photographs, and her own journal entries.

The result is an important historical record of this unique time and place. (I’m reminded of the documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s or Brad Gooch’s book Smash Cut, about his lover, the film director Howard Brookner, who also died of AIDS.)

I was lucky that there was a cancellation for the last performance of this sold-out show, whose run was extended. But this is a show that deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

It deserves to be seen by anyone who’s just moving to New York now and doesn’t know the exciting city it used to be before it became a boring city of rich people and chain stores.

And it deserves to be seen by a new generation of gay men who don’t know what it was like to lose an entire generation to AIDS.