Was I being ridiculous in the way I was reacting to a glowing profile piece by my favorite local writer? Absolutely, yet my reaction wasn’t a reaction to the story itself, but the earlier parts of my life that were represented here, and on this blog. It was a mirror held not by my own hands, but by someone else; I couldn’t move to re-position the light or shift the angle to my best side. Steve held it, and I was frozen in the reflection. If I saw narcissism and ego there, it wasn’t in the telling of the tale, but in the substance of the story. And to be critical or bothered by that was unfair to Steve, and unfair to myself.
Yes, vanity plays a certain part here, particularly in the early years when vanity was all I had to keep me from completely hating myself. It was my weapon and my wound. It propped me up when there was nothing inside me. It proved a way of pretend that allowed me to work on the serious stuff behind the scenes. Slowly, the inside caught up to the outside, and in a strange way I was going through that same journey in how I was reading and taking in this story.
On the third day after it came out I spoke with the main players who so graciously offered their views for the story. Andy told me I was overreacting; Sherri thought I was overthinking it; Suzie thought it was a fine piece; Skip thought my insecurities were getting the better of me – and they were all correct. I’d written a few messages of thanks to Steve for taking the time and making the effort to write the story, but I wondered whether they were coming across as hollow. That third day, he reached out to ask if I was doing a blog post on it, and if so whether I wanted to flip our roles and interview him about what it was like to write it. I was honored to be asked that by someone I’d always admired, and in order to do that, I would have to read it.
To the backing soundtrack of my favorite Madonna song ever, I sat down alone in the attic and opened the newspaper again, slowly reading and savoring every carefully-chosen word, marveling at the artistry, getting lost in this story of someone I thought I knew so well, seen through the eyes of a relative stranger, seen honestly and critically and somehow affectionately in the way that the best artists and writers are able to view and appreciate the most flawed and awful among us.
He allowed me to get out of my own way and see myself for all the contradictory, ridiculous, worth-while, talented, courageous, scared, and silly things that I was – vanity was just a naughtier word for pride. He showed me what the world had seen then, and what it sees now. He gave me the opportunity to embrace being fabulous and flamboyant in the most authentic and genuine manner possible.
That shouldn’t have to come from someone else for me to believe it, and the fact that it still does is further evidence there is more work for me to do. Much more work – and I’m grateful for that.
The work I put out twenty years ago is infinitely different than the work I put out today. The person I was then was entirely bereft of many of the most salient traits I exhibit now. But that’s what happens in twenty years. I can acknowledge and embrace and decry and condemn all that came before, and at the same time move beyond them for the person I’ve become now. Twenty years of blogging don’t define me anymore than a single profile defines me – and I can celebrate both. Steve gave me that gift, even if it took a while to fully figure it out.
And so it was that learned to accept this celebration no matter what the naysayers and haters might say. After reading the story late that night, I stayed up even later to explain my response to Steve, and include a few interview questions to wrap it all up. What follows are excerpts from that exchange:
ALAN: When I first contacted you to discuss the possibility of a story on the 20th anniversary of my blog, I was genuinely seeking your honest and real thoughts of whether it was a story worth writing. At that time, I wanted you to tell me your honest opinion on whether there was something there, and as we talked it through, it almost felt like you, through your experience at sussing out a compelling angle that most of us couldn’t detect, were carving out a narrative that juxtaposed the creatively flamboyant self-expression of the blog with my equally-long career in the state of New York. By the end of our conversation, it almost felt like you had talked me into doing a profile instead of me having proposed it. How far off is that description and what do you recall of that first phone call?
STEVE: A story needs an angle, a pitch. I don’t go in having decided definitively what the story is, of course: You have to be willing to throw out all of your preconceptions if an interview turns a corner you weren’t expecting. That’s why I prefer to interview in person or on the phone vs. emailing questions: There’s spontaneity in the give-and-take of a conversation, and people are also more likely to roam across subjects when talking than if they’re focused on getting the words and sentences right as they type. For example: If I’d emailed questions to Andy, I highly doubt I’d have gotten the great quote about him not being willing to pay $1,000 even to see the pope in a hula skirt, singing while playing ukulele.
That’s all a preamble for saying that when you pitched the story, I needed some idea why it was worth doing. What’s the peg, the hook? It could be timeliness: This is happening now. So the pitch in January would have been the 20th anniversary of the blog. Knowing it was unlikely to get done by the end of January, I needed another timeliness angle to sell to my editors, and pitching it for the centerpiece of the Unwind lifestyle section on the day of the Albany Pride parade became a natural. (You are gay, right?)
With that settled, it needed to be honed. There are lots of gay people, and lots of gay writers, so why you, and why now? Because it’s Pride month and you’re gay and you have a blog that is 20 years old that you write posts for every day and you have million-a-month traffic and you refuse to make any money from it even though with some effort you could likely double your annual income and your blog is racy and you have a state job in human resources… And I knew I could get a compelling story out of it.
Did I talk you into being profiled? No. I refined the reasons for doing it, so I could make the case to my editors about why [we] should commit resources to a story that, even today, we knew would upset some readers because we’re splashing a flaming homo all over their Sunday newspaper.
ALAN: What were your doubts or stumbling points as you began to solidify ideas for the profile?
STEVE: None, except I knew I’d have to write the hell out of it. Writing about a writer, after all, has its perils. You don’t get paid for writing, but you absolutely are a real writer, and a good one.
ALAN: How did you research and decide where to dig for the previous posts you referenced?
STEVE: You dig until you find something useful to the story you’re trying to tell. Since the blog is at the 20-year mark, it was natural to go back 10 years and see what’s there.
ALAN: Confession: it took me three days to read the story in its entirety. I was just too freaked out by the barrage of what I saw as self-obsession, narcissism and ego – I thought that the Capital Region would hate me – and then my insecurity reached a point where I started to question whether you had intentionally just let me go on with just enough vanity to destroy myself with my own words and images.
STEVE: Oh, good lord…
ALAN: Only after realizing what I had done did I go back and give it a close reading, at the exact time you contacted me about doing a blog on the process of writing the piece, which I took as something significant. Since you reached out about that, what did you most want to convey in this follow-up of sorts? It felt like you might have more to say.
STEVE: You’re still overthinking it. I truly just thought you could get a fun blog out of it. It’s a regular habit — for journalists, anyway, who are always prospecting for new material — to pass along ideas to colleagues.
ALAN: You spoke with four of my favorite people in the world ~ Andy, Suzie, Sherri and Skip. What was your impression of each of them, and how did their responses change or shift the narrative?
STEVE: Each was an excellent interview suggestion and valuable to the finished story. Andy I didn’t know at all. He was funnier than I expected. He was essential for the domestic/relationship angle. Suzie I needed for history. Sherri for professional. Because you described Skip as your blogmaster, he was, I thought, much more heavily involved in the blog than he turned out to be. But I got something much better: The unexpected, unusual and very touching story of a close friendship between a flamboyant gay man and a straight married dad who’s so utterly comfortable in his own skin that he fully embraces the friendship.
ALAN: It is apparent how much work you put into this piece, and I am touched and grateful that you helped make what could have been silly and frivolous into something that was deeper and yet still fun. What are the rewards for yourself when you complete an article about another person?
STEVE: That I’ve used my interviewing, reporting and writing talents to share with my readers an interesting person, whom they otherwise might not know about, in a way that is fair, accurate, compelling and true to that person. I basically wrote your obituary, but you aren’t dead, so it’s a profile.
After our interview/exchange, I thought back on my relationship with Steve. It was a leap of faith for me to entrust a profile to someone I’d known of for years, but didn’t really know at all. After the emotional reckoning that seeing my best and worst aspects in print brought about, I got to see and accept things from his view, and ultimately that was an incredibly valuable gift. I shared a few more private observations about my takes on our limited in-person interactions over the years, and asked that he send me some of his work that was most personal to him.
The first was this touching story about his mom and changing traditions – a story that starts out as a sweet memory of holidays past and evolves into a poignant reminder of loss and grief. Those same themes are present in this post about the unexpected death of a friend, and how the seemingly mundane turns of life – the making and sharing of a meal, the deceptively-insignificant brushes of existence – take on unbearable emotional meaning when the one who once performed them is suddenly gone. Companion pieces of sorts, they form bookends of the somber beauty that can sometimes frame the only way we can make sense of a brutal, ugly world.
Reading his words left me feeling a little closer to him, and made our recent interactions mean more than just the transactional workings of story, subject, and writer. It feels fitting to leave the last words of this post, and this chapter, in the capable hands of Steve himself, and this was his response to my recollection of our previous meetings: “Though we’ve been aware of one another, and read each others’ work, for more than two decades, we’ve met in person only a handful of times. We don’t know one another. I wanted to figure out what makes you tick. And I like the challenge of telling an interesting story for my readers, telling it well, and telling it in a manner that befits the subject.”
