The following words are about my time in New York at the start of the pandemic, an update on my life and a personal essay. If you want more foolishness about pop culture, scroll a little further down! Also this email is simply too damn long and will almost certainly cut off in your inbox, so for the full experience, read on site. I promise they’ll be shorter in the future!
I moved from a small-ish city to a big city, Austin, TX to New York City, NY. I wanted to start something great in my life, make something great out of my life. I turned 30 a few months prior, I felt the great hand of regret reaching up towards my neck, wanting some flesh. So I threw away everything I owned, sold it, gave it to the Goodwill, left a mattress on the curb covered in plastic. I even left the car at the bank, let them deal with the rest of it. I didn’t need a car, I could coast across the land in a metal box, get a car, fly down the street on a moped. I could walk sixteen blocks to see your little face, cup it with my cold hands before we slip into the small, overheated bar. New York City was where I believe I belonged, or where my heart was rapidly wanting me to be, so I threw away the fear I had settling in my stomach and I went.
The next was, for all of us, an unpredicted card in the hands of fate, laying down our simple morality in such a striking display— us: the unknowing card player, the coronavirus: a sentient doomsday device with a packed hand. Early on in March, when all of us were waiting for what was in our minds a small six-week vacation to be over, I dreamt of all the things I would make of New York City. But as the days collected in Biblical proportions, I thought, “Oh god, what am I here for?” Destiny had tricked me, I thought. Even with this wicked thought in my mind, I laughed. I left everything that was stable in my life to move to one of the biggest and most expensive city in the country. Right before a major global pandemic. That closed down my sought after industry, in a blink of an eye. To a city that became the epicenter of intense grief. I was a fool’s errand personified.
Andy arrives a few days before the lockdown, a good friend from Austin. We would be embarking on this journey together, queer pals in solitude. I had already dreamt up the nights we’d spend at some dingy, overcrowded bar in Bushwick. How, maybe even, we’d ride the train home from Manhattan and I’d wave to him as he waited for the sliding doors to open at the Dekalb Avenue stop. But that never happened.
I had spent the previous six months telling anyone who would listen that I was, in fact, moving to New York. With no job. No place to stay. I was practicing announcing my bravery. A war-song for what was surely to be a battle. The days slinked along and then suddenly moved so quickly. It was December, the preamble to my 30th birthday. I always celebrate a bit earlier in the month because, on my actual birthday, everyone is visiting their families for the holidays. I did coke in the bathroom of one of my favorite chill tiki bars in Austin. And though the night didn’t end in dancing, sweat on my neck, of some gay bar dancefloor, I felt euphoric (maybe it was the coke). I was celebrated, hugged deeply, wished good tidings on my endeavor ahead to the great artistic pinnacle: New York City.
The week prior to lockdown (the first one), my friend Diego takes me around New York. He says, “This is the East Village. This is where they shot the new West Side Story. You should get on the bus to Downtown Brooklyn. It’s faster.” We’d stake our claim of a table at a cool coffee shop, or spend the afternoon looking through thrift store coats for anything good for the winter that was settling around us. We’d bounce around bars on Jefferson. And I’d make a show of covering my neck with an expensive scarf given to me by a dear friend, smoking as we walked, letting my Doc Martens hit the pavement rhythmically like a model on a runway.
Thom meets me at a different coffee shop, where in the act of fumbling in the direction of his body in our reunion, I knock out both of my airpods. He says, “I’ve never seen AirPods fall out of someone’s ear before.” Our “banter,” he would call it, hasn’t changed in the almost year of distance. He’s married now. To a beautiful poet, Chessy. And they live in a one bedroom in Ridgewood. Thom and I write, with intermittent breaks for queries on our lives apart, Americanos and waiting in line for the one bathroom. In our traditional fashion, we’re soon off to a pub, where we drink beers, Chessy arrives, and the cold is left outside, where it should be, and the three of us are billowing in warmth.
I spent the next six months in a mice-ridden apartment in Bushwick, a noted kind of staple for a fresh New Yorker. I ate groceries from the more expensive but less crowded bodegas and markets near my apartment. I watched my roommate’s cat die. Then I watched him try to rent the empty room in the apartment to a young businessman who wanted to use the room to cut drugs. On the fourth of July, I sat on the roof alone, drank whiskey and wrote poems, watching the sky light up all over Brooklyn, hearing the car stereos pumping with the latest jams.
I feel a shifting beneath myself that evening. If I could make it in New York City during a pandemic, I could be free to be whoever I wanted to be, that the city would open itself up to me, reveal its tender secrets, provide something to me that I had lost and was constant search for. The month dragged on inside my old apartment, the mice collected, I bought a TV. My world was a small room I painted from light pink to beige, hung pictures of my friends, ordered margaritas in to watch Drag Race, bought some clothes, I never got to wear, to hang from cheap plastic hangers. My room became my sanctuary, a lighted world of wonder, where I discovered something small and simple about myself. Then the light started to crack.
My last night in Brooklyn, I rented a moped and drove to Thom and Chessy’s apartment. The air was cool, as rain was promised in the sky’s slight tint. While we drank whiskey sours, it rains. I tell them of my plans, to evade, to escape, to protect. Being unemployed in a great city, that promises both ecstatic moments and ones filled with heartbreak, I started to grind my teeth. Literally. I stayed up all night until I saw the light pierce my bedroom window. I would venture out into the world in the cover of night, walking fast down Bushwick Ave. My life had grown and then was paralyzed. It was a giant weight on my mental health. I looked for anything that would sing to me. But everything was a rung bell, muted.
The body changes, not only with time but with space. I dared to move the body in space, in an attempt to create rapid motion towards change, then was served dense friction in the wake of my dreams. I can’t express to you what it felt like, marching towards your dreams, and quickly after, watching them in the distance, being broken apart slowly. To dream of, to dream towards, my dream goals, my dream life, my dream man, my only dream, to die, to sleep— perchance to dream. Dreams sometimes aren’t meant to be reality.
Whenever I tell anyone this story, it’s met with gasps of horror and pitiful eyes. Are my dreams, my hopeful future, gone? Have I failed? Was I one of the washed up hopefuls, looking for change in the big city? Now, and often, I feel like a failure. I feel that I was not strong enough, not brave enough, not wild enough to handle the ride of New York City. I left my dreams there. I abandoned them. In hindsight, now over a year ago, I see that those dreams, they’re merely evolving. Like I am. The space inbetween what your reality is and what your dreams are is infinte.
Camp of The Week
A year ago, a meme rocked the internet. Yes, okay, this one is “old” but the phrase “go piss girl” has resurfaced on Gay Twitter™ recently. The Gossip Girl meme was created in spring 2020 by the internet. It’s one of my favorite memes ever. See the resurfacing below:
The Gossip Girl meme, featuring Serena and Blair, found itself co-opted in every way, into every valance of meaning. If you could reconfigure the words “Gossip Girl” into a clever response to the question asked by Serena in the top image, you won instant Twitter points. But you’ve also applied your wit to the Camp canon.
In Meme-ology, there are rules.
One must be timely.
One must be funny.
One must apply worldly observations to meme following rules 1 & 2.
Once one has seen that the lifespan of the meme has reached its full potential, one must then abstract said meme until finally:
One must stop in the use of said meme until it resurfaces a few months later.
Memes are camp! Memes have an insistent on the continual replication of a pop culture moment until its run into the ground until it becomes something else. And the way it “dethrones seriousness,” meme-ology is an attack on the intellectualism as it goes beyond the measures of complexity, straight to the frivolous. Sontag states that Camp goes beyond irony to artifice. What is the greatest artifice of them all but the internet?
“So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste.”
— Susan Sontag“Due to the fact that her thighs spread just like
Peanut, Peanut, Peanut, Peanut
Pe-pe-peanut, Peanut, Peanut, Peanut
Peanut, Peanut, Peanut Butter”
— Rupaul
A Tweet I Want to Expound On
Okay. Listen. This is my favorite thing in the world. It works for everything: I’m blaaaack! Honey, we’re Black again! We’re Black in business! It’s Black to Black, baby! Black in my day! — Okay, maybe the last one didn’t work so well. But this classic kind of word play that integrates identity and the skewing of the modern English language is def a form of camp—think O. Henry Pun Off.
The preservation of “proper English” by the elite is a way (in which) they can hold power. People who talk in idioms, AAVE or other forms of an American English dialect are often ostracized in “aristocratic” (as Sontag puts it) spaces like academica and such. I believe to this day that “proper speech and grammar” are tools of white supremacy!
Anyway, word play and puns are just fun! Get into it!
Comment with your favorite wordplay and/or puns below!
Give My Regards To Broadway
In regards to the whole SR situation, I applaud the theatre community across social media for making their voices heard. Recently, the star of In The Heights and the 2009 revival of West Side Story, Karen Olivo revealed that they wouldn’t be returning to Moulin Rouge in protest of over silence on the recent news about SR by the Broadway community. I applaud Olivo for their courage to stand up and speak out— but I want to know “why does a person of color have to lose their job for people to start talking?” After all this, stars of the upcoming SR revival of Music Man (snore), Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman finally open their damn mouths. Foster, in an Instagram post, said that she “taking a step away” so that she could handle how she “wanted to address the situation.” Sutton, come on now. This is easy Intersectionality. You let a fellow Broadway star OF COLOR lose their job for you to say you didn’t want to be “trumpeting” your ideas. And then still didn’t take any actionable steps. Well, I guess, Anything Goes. (Sorry.)
Jackman released a unhinged, half-apology IN ALL CAPS that was just sad.
With the SR problem, there’s also the problem of how those in power (artistic directors, producers, boards, etc.) weld their power. I’m not saying anything new. It just seems slow moving in the theatre world. The Me Too reckoning sliced Hollywood apart (a more nuanced discussion of its actual effects have been discussed). And in the theatre world, though with protest, a highly advertised, expensive multimedia production of West Side Story went up before the pandemic with an accused sexual abuser just last year.
I wish that Olivo had some other power names behind them. Where are the other producers? Where is Patti Lupone? Where are the other actors that have been in SR productions? I think more needs to be done and said. Didn’t all the major theatres across the country stand with Black folks in protest of police violence? Where are they now?
A Few More Theatre Things
Firstly, read this tweet thread about the problems with the hit Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen— and I’ll admit to blasting “Waving Through A Window” in my car with Andy all of 2019, the music SLAPS. This thread sums up all my issues with the musical’s safe and washed-out telling of mental illness. Click and read through!
Secondly, a Broadway darling from the show Mean Girls spoke out, mama! Her star turn in Mean Girls is great and she’s set to become a Broadway darling BUT this is funny to me. Read a thread here of her Instagram posts.
Third, Ken-Matt Martin is named the first Black artistic director of Victory Gardens and he deserves because he’s an incredible queer, black artist (and charming to boot!). Get into his New York Times profile here.
4— Lastly, this great article about non binary roles in theatre:
Pop Culture Bites
I wish I was a chef but I can’t cook so here’s some internet yummies for your tummies.
This video of Taylor Swift singing with Mary J. Blige.
Music Twink Alert! Troye Sivan shows off his giant home in Melbourne. Years and Years and Years has a new song, “Starstruck.” It’s a bop! Naur bestie, it’s’ true. We love twinks!
Tyra Banks is… a slam poet. This just another truly unhinged moment from the queen.
Milo Ventimiglia’s tiny shorts and other assets.
Lady Gaga’s 2013 album ARTPOP has topped the charts years after. FREE YOUR MIND and stream ARTPOP.
Rina Sawayama giving us perfection, darling, in this NPR Tiny Desk (at home).
Come back next week where I’ll be talking TV shows about soulmates, TikTok, and The Circle. And lastly, come on this quest with me where I’ll be searching high and low for musicals that aren’t racist! xoxo