Confessions of a Frustrated Liberal

 I can’t pinpoint exactly when democracy ceased to exist in America, but I think I can safely say that it no longer exists and hasn’t existed for some time. I suppose as good an example as any would be the recent failure of new gun control legislation after the Newtown elementary school massacre. For the first time that I can remember, a powerful interest group (in this case, the gun lobby) proved that they were actually stronger than popular opinion. (If you recall, a majority of Americans at that time said that they supported stronger gun control laws, and yet they failed the pass.)

The other day I found myself walking down West 12^th Street in the West Village, looking at the sprawling new development taking shape where St. Vincent’s Hospital used to stand and thinking, “Gee, that really would be a nice place to live!” I had momentarily forgotten that a hospital used to stand in that location, a hospital that had cared for many AIDS patients during the worst days of the AIDS crisis and had stood at the ready to care for any survivors on 9/11.

How about the most recent stories about global warming? How scientists are now 95% certain that it’s because of human activity that the Earth’s temperature is getting warmer? Do you think that’s going to stop people from burning fossil fuels? If someone can light the water coming out of his garden hose on fire, do you think that’s going to stop fracking?

There have always been rich people, of course, but the rich today are so much richer than they ever have been before that it seems naïve to think they won’t always get their way. If Mayor Bloomberg wants to overturn term limits and serve a third term, he can just buy the election. If developers want to overturn zoning regulations and build high-rises around the entire length of the High Line, they can just do it. If chain stores want to take over every mom and pop store in the city, who’s to stop them?

The insidious thing about these kinds of changes is that once they happen, they never go back. You can’t undo them. You can’t tear down a high-rise once it’s built. You can’t reverse global warming. You can’t bring someone back to life once they’ve been killed with an assault weapon.

So, as the oceans continue to rise, extreme weather continues to increase, gun violence continues to escalate and the New Plutocracy continues to build their skyscraper canyons, all I can do is say, “It’s been real, planet Earth. Let the next generation worry about it. Thank God I won’t we around to see it. Not my problem.”

The Last Shower at Splash

I remember when I first heard that Splash was opening up in 1991. I had been going to Uncle Charlie’s in the West Village and the word on the street was that the gay scene was moving to Chelsea. In the last 20 years, I’ve seen the gay scene move from the West Village to Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen as each succeeding generation of gay men prettied up the neighborhood, increased real estate values and watched straight people take over our turf. Of course, it didn’t help that a lot of us were also dying of AIDS.

One of the features that defined Splash (apart from the go-go dancers dancing under shower heads) was their videos. I think their most famous video was a scene from Mommie Dearest where Faye Dunaway, as Joan Crawford, slaps her daughter. They had spliced together a series of these slaps so that it became a veritable windmill of slapping. The boys ate it up. There’s nothing quite like being in a room full of grown men and watching them all scream in unison: “Don’t fuck with me, fellas!”

I can’t say that I was ever really a Splash boy. (In keeping with the gay community’s emphasis on youth, all men are “boys.”) It was a bit too preppy for me, a bit too upscale at first and, later, too bridge-and-tunnel.

But I feel sorry for the generation of gay men that’s coming of age now. (Hell, I feel sorry for the generation of people that’s coming up age now.) It seems like, as a society, we’re becoming more and more isolated the more social media claim they’re bringing us together. It’s one thing to post your “likes” on Facebook and it’s quite another to be in a room full of flesh and blood human beings expressing them. I feel like our lives as gay men are being reduced to a sexual act and there’s no more room for witty conversation, something for which we used to be famous.

I go back, once again, to one of my favorite experiences at Uncle Charlie’s, watching the season finale of Dynasty where the entire cast was gunned down. If that were on TV now, we’d all rush to our computers or cell phones to tweet about it, each of us isolated in our solitary apartments, alone in a city of eight million people. Our shared experiences are now virtual.

I prefer to live in the land of flesh and blood.

America Is a Third World Country

The only growth industry in our economy.

 America is a Third World country and it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves that it’s not. If the definition of a Third World country is a country where the top 1% controls everything (including the government), we have long since reached that point.

The top 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of the nation’s wealth[i]. Most CEOs took home an average 379 staffers’ worth in base pay[ii]. Just six Walmart heirs have as much wealth as 30% of Americans[iii].

There’s always been rich people. But the rich today are so much richer than before and power has become so consolidated in so few hands, it’s become impossible for anyone who is not born rich to get ahead.

Even Obama, who was elected on a platform of “change,” has stacked his cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives. So even our government, which used to be the only means available of leveling the playing field somewhat, has become useless.

Everywhere I look I see evidence that proves our Third World status. Whether it’s the book The Unwinding[iv], the documentary Two American Families[v], the daily articles I read in the New York Times or the evidence right in front of my eyes, there’s no denying that we’ve reached a point where the American Dream is dead and there’s no turning back.

This is especially evident if you’re not working 9-5. If you’re working 9-5, you’re shielded from a lot of the worst evidence of America’s decline. But if you’re not working 9-5, it’s amazing the people you see on the streets and on the subway. Hispanic women selling fruit on street corners, Asian women collecting bottles, young African-American teenagers selling candy on the subway. These are the job choices we’re offering people.

Even if you’re a college-educated white male like me, your options are dwindling.

When I first started working, it was still possible to get a so-called “permanent” job. Now companies can’t commit to more than three months at a time, if that. The fastest growing segment of the economy is temp workers[vi]. So-called “permanent” jobs are disappearing and they’re not coming back.

Today, I saw a post on Facebook saying that Manatus, one of the last existing diners in lower Manhattan, is being turned into a Calvin Klein store. Rents on Bleecker Street, formerly a quaint, residential street in New York City’s West Village, now surpass rents on Bond Street in London and Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, according to the Web site Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York[vii].

A few days ago, there was an article in the New York Times about a bidding war for a $595,000 studio in the West Village[viii]. According to the article “it was the only condominium for sale in the West Village for under $600,000.”

And nowadays, even if you’re rich enough to be able to afford a $595,000 studio, the competition to buy that studio is so intense that you can’t really afford it unless you can afford to pay all cash. Because you’re not just competing with rich New Yorkers, you’re competing with rich people from all over the world, who will probably only be using the apartment as an investment or, at most, a pied-à-terre. There are now entire buildings, if not entire neighborhoods, in cities like New York[ix] and London[x] that consist of these uninhabited investment apartments.

My best friend (another college-educated white male like me) recently had to move back with his sister in Virginia because his landlord stopped accepting the rent he was paying on his sublet. He and my other best friend (also college-educated) have both been unemployed for over a year. The only reason I’m still living in New York City is because I’m rent-stabilized.

So let’s stop kidding ourselves that America is the “land of opportunity” and New York is the “city that never sleeps.” Because neither of those statements has been true for at least 20 years.

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[i] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/10/03/334156/top-five-wealthiest-one-percent/?mobile=nc

[ii] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/ceo-pay-ratios/

[iii] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/08/1043438/-Just-6-Walmart-heirs-have-as-much-wealth-as-30-of-Americans#

[iv] http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0374102414

[v] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/two-american-families/

[vi] http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe

[vii] http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/

[viii] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/nyregion/amid-housing-scarcity-many-buyers-are-going-home-empty-handed.html?ref=realestate&_r=0

[ix] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/nyregion/paying-top-dollar-for-condos-and-leaving-them-empty.html

[x] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/europe/a-slice-of-london-so-exclusive-even-the-owners-are-visitors.html?pagewanted=all

The Warriors: Bloomberg’s Worst Nightmare Meets a Multiethnic Paradise

 Last night I watched The Warriors, a movie that I had fond memories of watching on cable TV as a teenager after it came out in 1979. Boy, have times changed!

I’m pretty sure I didn’t think the movie was camp when I first saw it, even assuming I knew what camp was at that tender age. Watching it almost 35 years later, it’s an unintentional laugh fest on a par with Mommie Dearest. Is this the same movie that struck fear into the heart of suburbanites all over the country?

The first sign that you’re not in 2013 is the subway system: trains covered in graffiti, people using tokens, wooden turnstiles and an illegible subway map. Apparently, there was even an amusement park in Union Square station. Who knew?

But what really makes this a candidate for the Most Quotable Lines Since Scarface Screenwriting Award is the ridiculously clunky dialogue. My personal favorite is when the movie opens. All the gangs of New York are gathered at a park in the Bronx and the Grand Poobah of All Things Gang-Related exhorts the crowd with the following line: “Can you dig it? Can you dig it? CAN YOU DIG IT?!!!” I immediately wanted to break into that line from the old soul classic “Can You Dig It”: “I can digga digga digga, she can digga digga digga, we can digga digga digga digga, Can you dig it, Can you dig it, baby?”

While the gang members in this film exist in some kind of multi-ethnic paradise where all races apparently get along, the characters aren’t always so PC. The word “faggot” was used at least three times by my count, most often as a verb, as in “go faggot” or “gone faggot.” They make it sound like sexual orientation is a choice similar to deciding which restaurant to go to.

There’s another homophobic moment when the gang encounters a group of young women who are apparently lesbian. The call themselves the “Lizzies” and one of them has crimped hair! But they still make out with men (before they try to kill them)! I’m confused.

It’s fun to play “where are they now” with a movie like this. Mercedes Ruehl, who would go on to star on Broadway in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” trilogy, plays a tough chick (an undercover cop?) who nabs one of the gang members by coming on to him in a park and then handcuffing him to the park bench.

And, of course, Michael Beck, the handsome lead, would go on to star in “Xanadu” the next year with Olivia Newton-John. Just out of curiosity, I decided to look him up on imdb.com. Let’s just say cute doesn’t age well.

There’s more fun to be had with the gang costumes. It’s hard to imagine anyone being scared of a gang of mimes, much less a gang of baseball players with face paint, a gang of pimps, and what looks like a gang of Asian monks. I hope the costume designer was at least nominated for an Oscar.

Another curious feature of the film is that, in a city of eight million people, almost no one seems to be on the street or the subway at the same time as any of the main characters. Normally, this is a sure giveaway that a movie was filmed on a sound stage. But I’m pretty sure this movie was filmed on location in New York City. I even saw my block show up in one scene. (Look for a sign that says “All State Glass.”)

All in all, good times for everyone. Unless you’re a woman. Deborah Van Valkenburgh plays the kind of female lead that actresses are still trying to overcome. The nicest thing that can be said about her character is that she’s “not a slut.”

But at least she’s not a “faggot.”

The Sadness of the Pet Shop Boys

 For me there has always been a sadness underlying a lot of the music of the Pet Shop Boys. For that reason, they were also the perfect gay band.

I was reminded of this when I was in a gay bar the other night and I suddenly heard what I think is the perfect Pet Shop Boys song: “Love Comes Quickly.”

While it can be read on the surface as an obvious play on words (see also Richard Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts”), “Love Comes Quickly” perfectly encapsulates not only the sadness and loneliness of a life of one-night stands, but also the sadness and loneliness of the life of a pop star: traveling all over the world but never staying in one place long enough to develop a real connection.

The Pet Shop Boys are, arguably, the quintessential gay band because, while they never talked about anything explicitly gay, they perfectly encapsulated a “gay sensibility,” whether it was the emptiness of consumer culture (“Shopping”) or the power/economic dynamic of a lot of gay (and heterosexual) relationships (“I Love You, You Pay My Rent”). Even their name, the Pet Shop Boys, is a seeming allusion to the Richard Gere/gerbil myth that refuses to die.

What was it about the ’80s that gave birth to so many gay bands, and why have they suddenly disappeared at a time when gays are more visible than ever? Certainly, there was a lot of “gender-bending” going on, whether it was Eurythmics or Culture Club or Boy George’s pop star friend, Marilyn.

But you also had The Smiths, who were so melodramatic it was funny (“I was looking for a job and then I found a job. And heaven knows I’m miserable now.”).

But gays could also be outrageous/campy drag queens like Boy George and Pete Burns from Dead or Alive, although Boy George could also be melodramatic. Who could forget the Barbra Streisand-like production on “Mistake Number Three” and its correspondingly melodramatic video?

They could also be defiantly political and heart-rending, like Bronski Beat with their coming out anthem “Small Town Boy,” depicting the loneliness and isolation of gay life in a small town.

But there was something else about the Pet Shop Boys, whether it was Neil Tennant’s plaintive voice or Chris Lowe, the “cute” one whom you saw but who never said anything and always hid behind his keyboard and/or some outrageous costume.

Chris Lowe could be read as a symbol of the objectification of gay life.

But Neil Tennant was and is something more. Neil Tennant was/is that most feared thing in the gay community and, indeed, society in general: an intellectual. 

Gap is Crap

 I’m old enough to remember when the Gap was a store that sold only Levi’s. That was in 1969, when the store was founded and their slogan was “fall into the Gap.” That means I’ve been a Gap customer for almost 50 years. But lately I’ve been finding that, while their prices, have been going up, the quality has been going down, to the point where they may lose a life-long customer.

Now, this would be no great tragedy were it not for the fact that this phenomenon mirrors what’s happening in the economy in general, namely the disappearance of the middle class. While the middle class is disappearing from cities like New York and people are increasingly either very wealthy or very poor, in the retail landscape this is mirrored by the fact that people are increasingly shopping at either Kmart or Bergdorf Goodman.

I have always relied on the Gap for “dress casual” clothes at “dress casual” prices. After all, I work in publishing, not finance. But lately it seems like they’ve abandoned that market altogether.

Like today, for example, I went to buy some polo shirts. No biggie, right? I went to three different branches of the Gap: Astor Place, lower Fifth Avenue and Chelsea. Astor Place had almost no selection whatsoever, lower Fifth Avenue was under construction with, again, almost no selection whatsoever and Chelsea only had a small selection in odd sizes and ugly colors. I bought the only three “smalls” I could find. I asked the cashier why there was such a poor selection and she told me that all the normal sizes and colors had sold out. “When am I supposed to buy polo shirts?” I asked her. “Winter?”

Just out of curiosity, I decided to walk down to the Banana Republic in Chelsea. There I found an almost completely empty store (their customers were undoubtedly in the Hamptons or Fire Island for the weekend) with stacks of merchandise. The only catch is that their polo shirts were twice as expensive as the Gap’s and almost too nice to wear to the office.

Inevitably, in these situations, my ire falls upon the hapless sales clerks, who have one of the worst jobs in our bad economy. I asked one of the sales clerks in the Chelsea store if there was a corporate strategy to phase out the Gap entirely. I pointed out to him that I have been a life-long customer of the Gap and that while their prices have gone up, the quality has gone way down, to the point where I almost can’t find anything I would even consider buying. The only reason I still shop there, I told him, was because I don’t want to deal with the crowds at Macy’s. (And I must really hate crowds when you consider that it now costs $60 for a dress shirt at the Gap compared to $30 for a better quality shirt at Macy’s. And even after I buy that $60 shirt at the Gap, I still have to take it to a tailor because it’s missing a second button on the cuff, making the sleeves too long and too wide unless I wear one of those large chunky watches on each wrist.)

What I did not mention to him was that this is how companies in general do business these days. They take a product that costs pennies to make and then charge a fortune for it, with most of that money going to the corporate executives at the top as opposed to the people who make and sell that product. I didn’t mention how most of that money is spent on advertising to create a well-known international brand as opposed to creating a better product. And I didn’t mention the sweatshops where these products are made so that people like me could still afford to buy them while the corporate bigwigs raked in the insane mark-up.

After I unleashed my tirade on this poor sales clerk, I apologized to him for doing so and went home with my three polo shirts from the Gap, wondering if that would be the last time I ever shopped there. Because, nowadays, when you “fall into the Gap,” you fall into the crap.

Liberace: Behind the Candelabra or Whatever Happened to Fey Gay?

 As a gay man, I had mixed emotions about watching Steven Soderbergh’s recent HBO biopic, Liberace: Behind the Candelabra. On the one hand, as a depiction of the personal life of one of the few gay entertainers of the 20^th century (closeted though he was his entire life), I was looking forward to it. On the other hand, as a depiction of someone who represented some of the worst stereotypes about gay men, I held my breath.

At least there was Matt Damon’s ass to look forward to.

I must admit that, on paper at least, it sounded intriguing. Michael Douglas, master portrayer of macho hubris in such movies as Wall Street and Fatal Attraction (and now recovering from throat cancer) as Liberace, perhaps the most effeminate gay man who ever lived. Could he pull it off?

And Matt Damon, whom I’ve had a crush on at least since The Talented Mr. Ripley, as his lover, Scott Thorson. Who could resist?

Actually watching the movie, on the other hand, was kind of like watching the proverbial train wreck: repulsive at times, yet you can’t look away.

For starters: How do you depict a man who was camp personified without lapsing into camp yourself? I must admit, Michael Douglas toed the line pretty well, nailing Liberace’s voice and mannerisms without overdoing it.

But then there’s the whole creepy May-December nature of their relationship which, while accurate, is still difficult to watch. The first time I saw Michael Douglas without his wig on, I had the same reaction Scott Thorson did when he and Liberace went to the video store.

Then again, as such shows as Dynasty and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous have shown us, there’s a certain voyeuristic pleasure in watching how the other half lives and, to his credit, it appears that Liberace was in on the joke.

The movie had its genius moments, too. Cheyenne Jackson’s slow burn in the beginning as Liberace’s soon-to-be-rejected protégé, called back at the end of my movie by the soon-to-be-rejected Matt Damon. Rob Lowe as the plastic surgeon who, as a friend of mine pointed out, really did look like Michael Jackson. An unrecognizable Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother. If nothing else, Steven Soderbergh always makes interesting casting choices.

And despite what the Times said, I really did believe Michael Douglas and Matt Damon as sexual partners, not just surface portrayals. They really did “go for it.”

So, ultimately Liberace: Behind the Candelabra accurately portrayed the dueling forces at work within one of the most famous, and most closeted, gay entertainers of the 20^th century, in the process revealing the mixed feelings gay men often have about themselves as well as the mixed feelings society often has about wealth and fame.

Plus there was Matt Damon’s ass.