Christmas Is Still Gay.

There's an interesting essay on my new favorite blog, The Awl, about the gutting of Leonard Cohen's transcendent "Hallelujah," in order to make it vague and Christiany enough for Christmas.



Which follows in the long, noble tradition -- well, there's only one other that I can think of off the top of my head, but there must be others, right? -- of eviscerating songs to make them palatable for bland holiday records by the likes of Kermit the Frog (for real).



My favorite Christmas song, in fact my favorite Christmas thing period, is this song, which isn't really about Christmas as much as it is about despair. But replace, "until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow," with, "hang a shining star upon the highest bow," and it's still a bit sad, but not sad enough to do anything drastic like put you off shopping.



I guess, like most, I get sentimental this time of year. I am not Christian, but I love the story of a gift of hope and redemption in dark times. I like to mark this time of year by acknowledging in my heart the miracle of another year, another orbit, another chance.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Life Is Not A True/False Exam.

This blog post (which Andrew Sullivan linked to this morning) says succinctly what I've been thinking, what I've been trying to put in words, regarding the billboard that some atheist group put up near the Lincoln Tunnel (“You Know It’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.") and the counter-billboard put up by some Catholics: "You Know it's Real. This Season Celebrate Jesus."

“Myth” is not the same as “falsehood.” Myth is a narrative structure used to convey some of the deepest truths we humans can glean. Myths are not believed in but unpacked and lived.

I am irritated to no end by the asinine "Jesus is the reason for the season" garbage we have to listen to this time of year. But I am just as irritated by a lot of the public atheists' responses, which are every bit as asinine. Though this organized atheist effort to rid the public sphere of Christian propaganda is inspired by writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't like how Dawkins' and Hitchens' more distilled, acerbic statements along the lines of "Christians are stupid" get pulled out to support the exasperated atheists -- because both writers obviously are much subtler thinkers and have a lot more than that to say.

Which is to say that I find it unfortunate that the atheist statements in response to the literalist Christmas stupidity are often just as thick-headed. It's ridiculous to justify your Christian faith by insisting that all those stories relate events that really happened. It's just as thick-headed, in this context, to use the word "myth" to mean "lie."

The heart of my objection to this argument is that it cheapens, it disregards, it erases the value of what, as an artist, I do. Artists are myth-makers. Artists are storytellers. The work of an artist lives in that realm where a standard of literal truth or falsehood makes no sense, does not apply. Where the whole point is to be truthful, to say what is real, yet where stories are constantly told which are not objectively verifiably true. The story of Jesus's birth is no more actual than the story of Dorothea and Casaubon's marriage or the story of Mary Richards' job interview, but they all have the power to transform at the molecular level one's very being in this world.

(Also posted on The Bilerico Project.)

Give It To Me, I'll Keep It With Mine.

It just occurred to me that I am living in an apartment that is very similar to M’s apartment in Austin: open living and dining room/kitchen and half bath downstairs, two bedrooms and full bath upstairs. My house is much older (his is new, very East Austin contemporary green building, mine I’m guessing was probably built in the 20s) but they both have simple clean design, lots of light, white walls and black granite kitchen islands.

Today on facebook, M posted a photo of himself with a man. The man is leaning to rest his forehead against M's, and they're both smiling sweetly. No caption. Several of M's friends have "liked" the photo. I'm not a rocket scientist, just an ex-boyfriend, but it's pretty clear. The guy is handsome. They look happy.

My house sits at the top of a long stairway up to my neighborhood from Broadway. There are two wide sets of concrete steps with a little green space in between, 10 flights. Anytime I want to go anywhere I go down these stairs and up again on the way home. (I could take a longer way around, through the neighborhood, but the stairs are more direct and I like that my legs get a little workout since I don’t have time or money for a gym right now.)

My bedroom window looks out over the top of these stairs, so, if I want to (and I do) I can watch people go up and down all day.

East Village R.I.P.

More fodder for the relentless conversation about how New York has changed. I liked this article because it assured me that my moaning about the transformation of the East Village from a neighborhood of immigrants, artists, poor people, old leftists, Polish coffee shops (and, yes, bars) into a frat party is not just the nostalgia of an old man. Cities change, New York especially, but what has happened to the East Village and Lower East Side (and, then, Williamsburg, for that matter) is unique and very ugly.

A big part of my feeling good about being back in New York has been an almost-conscious decision to let go of my love for the East Village, which was my home for many years and which has been nearly completely obliterated by the sale of large sections of it to NYU for dorms and by its status, starting in the 80s, as one of the hippest neighborhoods in the world. The global East Village.

I knew -- we all knew and had a pretty clear idea of the importance of that declaration ("I live in the East Village") in marking who we were -- that I lived at the epicenter of cool. But it's sort of like, now, no neighborhood can ever have that status again because as soon as you say a place is the hippest it no longer is. I don't think this is true just because I'm older now -- I think it's because news travels too fast and faster and faster all the time. You used to have to wait for the New York Times article saying something was hip before you knew it wasn't any more. Now twitter can have the same de-hipping effect in a day or two. It's not hip if everybody knows about it, and everybody knows about everything immediately now.

I don't have anything against nightlife. Nightlife is one of the things that makes New York great. But the East Village is completely insane. If you know what 6th Street in Austin is like at night -- it's like that. Except that it's a neighborhood where people live. People live there. Y'know?

Home, Again.

It's a gorgeous cold and clear day, and I spent the afternoon exploring my new neighborhood. Within a few blocks, I found a nice small grocery store (good produce, coffee, organic stuff, soy milk), a deli with decent beer, cigar store, divorce lawyer, a handful of pizza places, a pastry shop, little Dominican restaurants, a barber shop (I got a great haircut), florist, drug store, and a liquor store with a huge wine selection.

And a 24-hour donut shop. I’m in big trouble. (There's 10 flights of stairs up from Broadway to my house, so I might get fat but my legs will be in great shape.)

Not a Starbucks in sight, thank you Jesus. Inwood is an old New York neighborhood, that -- probably, hopefully -- won’t be gentrified, at least not in the horrifying way that the East Village and Williamsburg were gentrified, because it’s already sort of nice, middle-class. Ethnically, it’s mostly Dominican now. I’m not sure what it was before that. There seems to be a slow trickle of white folks moving in. Up the street is some kind of small stadium or baseball field or something where the Columbia teams play. And of course, there are huge wooded parks and the Hudson River within a few blocks.

Here I go, falling in love with New York again.

Fainting.

(An edited version of this was posted on Bilerico.com.)

I was on the train coming home from work one day last week and noticed two boys standing across from me, typical kids with their iPods and goofy smiles. They could have been anywhere from 14 to 20, it's hard to tell, teenagers develop at such different rates. (When I say typical, I mean that their pants were more than halfway down their asses, and while I'm on the subject I've been wondering: does the average kid on the street or the train or wherever, a suburban grocery store, does he know that homosexual men are flipping out inside at the sight of a young guy in, essentially, his skivvies in public? Does he know? It's a real puzzle to me. I don't know how to interpret the trend except as some kind of sexual display, but it's their asses they're displaying. What? It's rebellious, so I like it. It makes regular folks blow a gasket, so I'm all for it. But aside from the discussion of what it means for young men to be offering up their backsides to public view, what I find even more interesting is the sheer quantity of attention men are giving to their pants, constantly adjusting, tugging, touching them. Have pants ever before in their history been so interactive?)

Anyway.

I was reading, so not really paying attention to these kids until one of them hit the floor like a sack of rocks in front of me. He had fainted, but he smacked his head on the floor hard enough to wake himself up. Several people jumped to help him up, tried to get him to sit down but he didn't want to. (This was a well-dressed, cute white kid. I couldn't help but think that if he had been, say, a homeless man, everyone would have scattered instead of rushing in to help.) He finally sat down, kept insisting he was fine. He was hating all the attention. I looked more closely at his friend and it dawned on me that they might have been a little high. I hate to assume, but his eyes were awfully red and he couldn't stop smiling.

At the next stop, the conductor came over and asked the kid if he needed a medic; the kid was mortified and said, over and over, "No! I'm fine. Really." A woman sitting near him insisted that he get off the train and get to a hospital. One of the men who had helped him up hovered over him and his friend, expressing concern, trying to convince his friend to get him to a doctor. Both kids -- the kid who had fainted really did look okay, the blood was returning to his face -- refused to leave the train. They just wanted to be left alone and go home.

The man kept getting closer and closer, more and more insistent, and the situation began to seem less like a person in distress being helped by a stranger and more like someone being harassed by a crazy person in the subway. Most everyone, now that the crisis was past, had returned to their anonymous shielded subway world, except the man and the boy, who was extremely uncomfortable with getting so much attention. He gave the man a look like "Oh my god will you please just get the fuck out of my face, old man?" Then the man raised his voice and said, "I care about you!" He said, "I have a son, and a daughter. I care about you."

Just a few days before this I was at the Eagle. I had a beer and had smoked a little pot before I left the house but it had been a couple hours. I was talking to a man sitting next to me. It was crowded and warm and suddenly I felt my blood pressure drop like I was going to pass out. I put my head between my knees for what seemed like a very long time. (Anyone who sang in choirs in grade school knows what it feels like when you're going to pass out, and what to do to prevent it.) The man I'd been talking to looked after me, sat with me until I felt better, and then -- we found we both lived in Inwood -- rode with me back uptown.

He turned out to be a fairly well-known actor and theater director and we had lots to talk about during our 2-hour A train odyssey to the North Pole, er, Inwood. (Will they ever finish that track work? It's been going on for at least 10 years now.)

(Incidentally, that has happened to me in bars a handful of times over the years -- one or two beers, a little pot, and suddenly I'm listing. Maybe I should find out what that's all about.)

So here's to the kindness of strangers. And not just strangers. I'm moving in a little over a week. I've been staying with my friend T since I came back to New York in September. Back in June when I was falling apart in Austin, crying on the phone with T, he said, "Come back to New York. We'll do theater together. We'll form a new company and make new work. Just come. We'll figure it out." And I did, and T has shown me unbelievable kindness and generosity, as he always has in the 20 plus years of our friendship and artistic collaboration.

Not only has it been a long time since I had a regular job, it has been a long time since I paid rent and a long time since I moved somewhere where I wasn't living with friends. I don't have sheets, blankets, towels. I'm going to be 50 in March, and I'm still starting over, and over and over.

Rent.

It comes up from time to time, it came up just last weekend when we were at Baldwin-Wallace College where the musical theater students were singing several songs from Lizzie Borden in a concert of songs from new shows and they had us on stage for a Q&A after the concert, this question about Rent and why I don’t like it -- the students are rehearsing now for productions of Rent and La Boheme (the opera on which Rent is loosely based) to be performed in repertory -- and my pat answer is that it claims to depict a time and place and milieu, one which I have a strong attachment to, it having been my time and place and milieu, yet the characters, the songs, the story, don’t look or sound or feel anything like the time and place and milieu that I remember. In fact, it seems to me that it trivializes and sentimentalizes, reduces to clichés, the things that made the East Village in the 80s so wild and urgent, so heady, so riveting: performance art, drag, AIDS.

But I accept the possibility that I’m guilty of extrapolating my own experience too widely, assuming that my own experience of that time was the experience. I’m sure there are many people for whom Rent feels authentic. I may be too harshly critical. Lots of people love Rent. They can have it. In the end, I guess I just don’t care much for the songs.

T suggested wisely that Rent may be a younger generation's Fame, a movie which -- though I have known many people in the meantime who attended the High School of Music and Art, on which Fame was based, who say that it is a terribly unrealistic depiction of their experience -- inspired both T and I and many of our friends, showed us a New York where we might go to find aspiring artists like ourselves, a place where the streets were crawling with music and love and sadness and inspiration. I'll buy that. (The comparison breaks down when you compare the movies, though. Fame is a good movie. It holds up. The movie version of Rent is a piece of crap.)

I always think, afterwards when it’s too late, that I wish I would have added to my answer about how I feel about Rent that, though it doesn’t feel at all to me like the New York in the 80s that I remember, Angels in America does, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for an artist and a work of art.