September 2012
Fresh off from my serious moment with Anderson Cooper, I thought it would be a good time to get a little silly with the Silver Fox, and bring back these photos of a shirtless Mr. Cooper getting a (badly-needed) spray tan. It’s always good to see that those tight t-shirts he sometimes favors for location shots aren’t lying about what’s beneath them. Dude is built.
Looking as if it were lit from within, this dahlia’s coloring, and the late afternoon sunlight slanting through it on a Fall day in Ogunquit, combine to create a spellbinding effect. I grew dahlias for only one year as a child – the endless waiting for them to come into bloom was too much for my impatient heart to take, along with the fact that at the very height of their bloom the frosts came to take them out. While they have some of the most beautiful flower forms and colors, they are just too high-maintenance for me. I would never have the discipline to bring in the roots to over-winter, nor do I want to be bothered with the staking that the tallest and most striking ones require. But sometimes, at this time of the year especially, I’ll eye the neighboring yards with envy as I see the spectacular show that these plants save for the tail-end of the season.
These were taken in the varsity locker room during my younger years as a starter clean-up pitcher for the Boston Bruins. I kid – I was way better than varsity. In honor of Sunday/Monday football (and I’m told Thursday too in the early days of the season), I offer you a few ridiculous football-themed shots. The paraphernalia involved in this sport is insane, and what I have on across my chest is probably the thong of some 300-pound he-man. Oh well, sometimes you just have to pour yourself into tights, lace it all up, and hope for the best. Wait, are the Bruins even in the American League West?
From fried calamari to this insanely good pasta dish, a good Italian dinner never fails to put a smile on my face. With a couple of glasses of wine, this is my idea of heaven on a Saturday evening.
While I’m away in Boston, here are a couple of Ben Cohen photos for your enjoyment – some of which are from the shoot for his 2013 Calendar. In an age of ubiquitous manscaping and razor massacres, it’s good to have someone like Ben representing the natural state.
Previous Ben Cohen posts can be found throughout the site, so do check out our Archives.
When the goldenrod starts blooming, and the milkweed spreads its silky seed pods, the start of Fall is at hand. According to the calendar, today is the official first day of the season, and though Fall has never been my favorite time of the year, it holds its own charms. There was a time when I only fell in love in the Fall – and it always ended badly, or at least less than desired. There are other things that occupy my mind now, but that phantom heartache still haunts sometimes, when the wind is right and the scent of dying leaves carries on it.
Traditionally Fall has been a period of rejuvenation and renewed vigor in whatever project I’m working on, and I felt the first stirring of that as I loosely plotted out plans for future creative endeavors. This past year has largely been spent in flux, as we figured out website issues, and I put a big project off until 2013 (which is getting entirely too close for comfort). But things are back on track, and I feel the invigoration that only a seasonal change can provide. Let’s drive this bad boy right into the holidays… (By the way, the photos here can be found in The Gallery, in case you haven’t perused all of them yet…)
Now go ahead and make a wish.
Just when it seemed I’d taken my last dip in the pool, an extra day of sun and heat provided a final night of swimming, so I snuck in one more time. It seems fitting to have the real final swim of the summer take place in the middle of the night, to let it slip out quietly in the dark, to leave the morning fog wondering in its wake. As the night was cooler, the water felt warmer – the sneaky switch that happens around August, around the last turn of summer.
And so summer goes silently to slumber, settling in for that long winter’s nap, as we wrap ourselves in the last strength of the Autumn rays. There will be warm and sunny days yet, but the nights will be different. It’s always the nights that change first in the Fall. Come Spring, it’s the opposite – the big change begins with the day – but right now that shift is most pronounced when the sun goes down. Still, the water is warm, and I dive down deep, burrowing into the buried recesses of lingering heat.
Plunging into the last remnants of a dying season, I take one desperate gasp before letting go. The time has come to find other pools – the vastness of the ocean perhaps, some tropical paradise with turquoise water and bone white sand. The pool in our backyard has gone dark – all shadows and shades of gray until the return of Spring – only the candles still flicker.
The water has gone still.
It was a summer of the hawks.
It was a summer that started with something that shook me to the core – something from which I never did fully bounce back – and so it was shaded a little more dimly than usual, even if the sun was at its hottest and most consistently spectacular. That something was my service as a juror – and the life-altering tale of my jury duty.
It was the summer that was almost saved by a Madonna song.
It was the summer of the Speedo – as the Olympics reigned and took my mind off other things. Thank you Tom Daley, Michael Phelps, Matthew Mitcham, Ryan Lochte, Sam Mikulak, Danell Leyva, and the wonderfully naked Epke Zonderland. (And let’s not forget that Olympic boner.)
It was the summer I left the Romaine Brooks Gallery after four years as Gallery manager.
It was the summer Prince Harry got shirtless – and then went completely starkers in Las Vegas.
It was the summer of a birthday weekend that began in Boston and ended in Provincetown, a summer that was somehow rescued by my very first whale watch.
It was the summer that found the first – and most major – phase of our website update.
It was the summer that Madonna gang-banged her way around the world with her MDNA Tour – bringing to mind my first piece of Madonna from 1990.
It was a summer that set us up perfectly for Fall – as they all seem to do – a summer that ended with the reflection on nine years of summers on this website. The end of summer is not the end of the world. There are good things to come.
Dear Anderson Cooper –
A year ago tomorrow, I posted this rather mean letter to you, imploring you to come out as a gay man, and condemning you for not having done so earlier. My reasons for doing so, and the points I made then, are still relevant and valid, but calling you out by name was not the best way to do it. For that I must apologize, and it’s going to be a little awkward and uncomfortable, but you deserve  it. (When you’re right for insufferably 99% of the time, an apology is not something that comes easily.)
Looking back at that letter, I see now that I was wrong in singling you out. When so much is made of bullying, how could I act as such a bully myself?  Forcing you to come out was its own act of bullying. I realize now that it’s never right to force someone to come to terms with something as serious and important as their sexuality before they’re ready. Everyone – gay or straight – has the right to live their life as openly or as privately as they wish to do so, and the choice to be open or closeted is entirely up to them. The rite of passage that comprises coming out is different for each of us, and especially different for those in the public eye. Every person does it in their own way, and everyone should have the option of doing it in the safest and most comfortable manner for them.
In the year since I wrote that letter, you came out rather gracefully and powerfully – not in a hyped-up manner, but as a matter-of-fact, a simple statement of truth. In doing so, you helped remove the inferred aspect that something was wrong with being gay. There is no way of knowing how much that may have helped someone, but I am sure it has.
And so Anderson, I am sorry. You had to do it in your own time, in the same way that each of us has to do it. It wasn’t fair of me to call you out, it wasn’t right for anyone to do that. The shame is that there are people who still think there is something wrong with being gay. I have to believe in the idea that if we were all to be out and openly gay, some of that stigma would go away.
As I watched the opening of the second season of your talk show, you already seemed happier, more at-ease, more free. Maybe that’s just projection, maybe that’s just what I want to believe, and though I don’t know you personally, I do feel that it has made a difference – if not in your own life, then in some of ours. Thank you for being so brave. Thank you for showing us who you really are. And thank you for doing it in your own way, on your own terms, and reminding me that some things are still sacred, and some people still noble.
Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we’ve learned how about bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to the sadness and, yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants.
~ Michael Cunningham, ‘By Nightfall’
If there’s one album that signifies the start of fall to me, it’s ‘Here’s to Life’ by Shirley Horn. It’s not that there are any specifically fall-themed songs, no ‘Flaming September’, ‘When October Goes’, or ‘November Rain’ but on a personal level it brings back the fall I first went to Brandeis, and Boston. I still remember the evening I purchased that CD. I’d walked around the city before winding up at the end of Newbury Street. I passed through the revolving door of Tower Records (in the space that is now a thoroughly-depressing Best Buy) and rode the escalator up to the second floor. Back then there was no iTunes or online music purchasing, so the music store was still vital. I’d peruse the CD singles section for hours, finding old forgotten Madonna singles, or discovering new ones. (That sense of surprise and discovery is one of the things I regret most about the arrival of the Internet.)
On this particular night, I passed a stand of new music, and one of the titles being displayed – Shirley Horn’s ‘Here’s to Life’ – was getting all the accolades. A woman with some fierce, black, opera-length gloves sat gazing out from the cover, and the praise being promoted on the sticker was grand. Today we don’t have to buy music without listening to it first – at that time a new CD was a crap shoot, but something impelled me to take a chance and buy it, sound unheard.
In the solitude of that time, I learned how to be alone with myself, and all right with that. As much as I would fall for passing men, as infatuated and obsessed as I would sometimes become, I would always remember how to be alone if I had to be. And I would have to be, many times, and many nights. I remember the leaves of Harvard Square, swirling around my feet as I stood at the newsstand, browsing the magazines, hoping not to be called out for reading instead of buying them. The cafe across the street, where couples bundled up tightly in coats and hats, sat studying and reading, content simply to be in each other’s company, was as enticing as it was forbidden. I longed for the simplicity of that, the easy way people had with one another. I wondered if I would ever find it.
Over the wisdom of Ms. Horn’s occasionally raspy voice, the years of love and pain unfolded behind us. It would always be like this. I was old enough to understand, but too young to believe. I still thought there was a master key to all of it, a font of knowledge from which I had only to sip to find out the truth, the answer, the point. No one wants to realize that all the chasing and figuring out was for something that was in you all along – if I had been Dorothy I would have clocked Glinda for that almost-deadly exercise in futility.
This Saturday I’m making a quick trip to Boston with my brother. (Let it sink in.) I honestly can’t recall the last time we traveled anywhere together, so I’m very much looking forward to that, because traveling with my brother reminds me of cherished childhood moments – weddings and such – when we stuck together in the face of family strife and drama, even when we were the cause of said strife and drama. Things are decidedly changed now, and we can co-exist as adults who don’t always agree, but can manage a happy tolerance of each other, amid the knowledge that we’ll always be brothers, and no one else on this earth knows exactly what the other went through as a kid. Not even Suzie or Andy will ever know what my brother and I shared – and I imagine it’s the same for many siblings – especially those who only have one other. That’s what strikes me most when I watch my niece and nephew together – and one day I’ll have a heart-to-heart on what it all means. Perhaps they’ll have some word of wisdom for us.
