On weekends like this, a picture sometimes has to make-do as a post. And this is certainly a weekend like this.
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2012
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September
2012
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September
2012
Ben Cohen: Unabashedly Hairy
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.
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September
2012
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September
2012
The 1st Day of Fall
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.
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September
2012
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September
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September
2012
Sneaking Back in the Back Door
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.
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September
2012
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September
2012
Summer Highlights (Summer of the Speedo)
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.
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2012
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September
2012
An Apology to Anderson Cooper
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.
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September
2012
Quote of the Day
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’
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September
2012
The Fall I Fell for Shirley
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.
The opening strings, and the gentle way she had with the vocals, instantly set my mind at ease when I settled into my tiny dorm bed later that night. A few cold-braving crickets chirped outside the window, which was open just a crack for the insufferable radiator that had only one temperature setting: “Hell.” My roommate was gone (as he was most of that year – for this reason alone I loved him), and I laid awake listening to the sounds of other students coming in from their revelries, and the string-laden jazzy nuances of Ms. Horn. A long-distance girlfriend, and much confusion, crossed my thoughts as ‘Where Do You Start?’ began – and the thought of having to start all over again first reared its nausea-inducing head. The music somehow made the pain exquisite – could this be what a work of art does, could this be why it might be so revered?
One day there’ll be a song or something in the air again
To catch me by surprise and you’ll be there again
A moment in what might have been…
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.
And though I don’t know where
And don’t know when
I’ll find myself in love again
I promise there will always be
A little place no one will see
A tiny part deep in my heart
That stays in love with you.
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2012
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September
2012
Brothers in Boston
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.
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2012
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September
2012
The Quote of the Day
It was unbelievable the way, just like that, love stopped. He had seen it happen before, seen the shine go out of a lover’s eyes within the space of a few minutes. More often the love leached away slowly, painfully, over a period of weeks or months. No, he advised himself. Don’t start. Get out while you can. It was best to be leery of love, best to distrust the erratic heart. ~ Jane Hamilton, The Short History of a Prince
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2012
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September
2012
The Kennedy Charisma
You don’t mess around with the Kennedys in Massachusetts (well, a number of ladies might beg to differ, but that’s another story). The powerful and rich history of this political family is part of the fabric of this country, and though I don’t follow politics as closely as other people in this household, I was impressed by this tall ginger who was marching in this year’s Pride Parade in Boston.
Joe Kennedy III is currently running for Congress, to fill the seat vacated by Barney Frank. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Kennedy is a strong proponent of marriage equality and gay rights. For that reason alone, I’m on board. In his pleated pants (he is tall enough to almost pull them off) and copper-colored hair, he is not one of the most striking men of the Kennedy family, but having seen him in person, there is certainly a combustible measure of charm and charisma.
Some have likened him to Conan O’Brien – I see more of a Ron Howard resemblance, minus the absence of hair. (The New York Times Magazine recently described him as “a mash-up of Prince Harry, the “Hunger Games” actor Josh Hutcherson and a bird.”) I noticed him in the Pride Parade before I noticed the name or put together who he was – such is the strength of a ginger’s hair in the sunlight (and the cat-calls of “Ginger!” emanating around me). At 31 years of age (I cringed too) he seems to be on the fast-track to political glory, even if he’s been largely unproven as far as performance goes. We’ll see how far the Kennedy name gets you. Once upon a time it was enough.
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September
2012
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September
2012
Mike Rickard Makes Us Sweat Again
My pal Mike Rickard just released his remix EP entitled ‘Dance Til You Sweat’ – a take-off on his original ‘Sweat’ album, from which these songs were culled. Continuing on that hot and sweaty theme, this is a collection designed to make you dance, with a pumping thread of dance beats that sonically unifies everything at work.
Too many remix projects sacrifice the melody for a throbbing beat, losing the integrity of the song in service of a seamless, soulless pounding. Rickard does the impossible by retaining the meat of his songs while giving them a driving renovation. The original ‘Sweat’ album was made to be remixed, and he’s finally done it, serving up a perfectly paced EP of some of the strongest cuts. The best part is that the songs remain largely intact, keeping their deeper messages (how to keep a long-term relationship hot and new, and the things that make up for that, as evidenced in ‘When the Hot Cools Down’) as well as their melodic magic (the gorgeous bridge and breakdown of ‘Only Love’) but also expanding their purpose. You can usually tell when a musician is involved in their remixes – it’s more organic, and it sounds much better. Mr. Rickard has seen to that on ‘Dance Til You Sweat’ – an EP that sets up the follow-up question perfectly: what will come next?
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September
2012
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September
2012
Zac Efron, Caught with his Hand Down His Pants
Remember when Zac Efron stuck his hand down his pants and the invasive paparazzi were there to catch it all on digital? That’s the beauty, and the supreme danger, of the Internet – if you ever forget, it’s out there somewhere… forever. I’m not proud of absolutely everything I’ve put up here, but I can stand behind it, even if I’ve come to change my mind about some things. You have to own up to your past before you can sail into your future. Sorry Zac, but with that body you have nothing to be ashamed about. (And if there are any gay rumors still floating around regarding Mr. Efron, that pose should put an end to them.)
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September
2012
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September
2012
Madonna’s Hottest Dancer?
This is Adrien Galo, a back-up dancer on Madonna’s current MDNA Tour. While I’ve always found Madonna’s taste in men – including back-up dancers and video love-interests – somewhat questionable (about one in five is what I’d consider hot), there’s usually one or two per tour that merit special mention, and a shirtless post like this. Mr. Galo is certainly one of them. (And don’t let it sway your opinion that he was once a back-up dancer for Britney Spears. We all had to start somewhere.)
There was a time when I could tell you the names and stats of every back-up dancer on a Madonna tour, but while I still love her, I have other things to do. (Much to the current chagrin of Suzie, who needs confirmation that her daughter’s teacher played a part in Madonna’s MDNA Tour… does anyone know?) However, I do remember the ones who have meant the most to me over the years – see if you remember these guys.
On the left is ‘Slam’ from the epic Blonde Ambition tour in 1990. I liked him so much I grew my hair out (and it looked nothing like that.) To the right is the Girlie Show’s Luca Tommassini from 1993 – he’s the one she shouts ‘Luca!’ at in the ‘Everybody’ finale – something I only just put together last week.
It wasn’t until 2001 that I actually got to attend one of her tours myself, and that amazing christening came in the form of the Drowned World Tour. One of the bright spots of that gorgeously dark show was Jull Weber, seen below, who managed to make even a mohawk look hot. He also featured in her ‘Don’t Tell Me’ video as a sexy cowboy. Yee-haw indeed.
The first, and thus far only, dancer I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person (on Boylston Street in the summer of the Confessions Tour) was Daniel ‘Cloud’ Campos. He was gracious and kind, offering to pose for a photo (which I’ll dig up another day) – as I imagine, and have heard, most are. It’s always nice to be noticed for the work you’re doing.
Cloud is on the left, and he was in her ‘Hung Up’ and ‘Sorry’ videos, as well as her Reinvention Tour in 2004. On the right is Paul Kirkland, who was also part of the Reinvention Tour, coming back a few years later for her 2008/2009 Sticky & Sweet Tour. I think all the dancers on the MDNA Tour are new – befitting a new Madonna era. I’ve always admired her self-proclaimed determination to hire the most spirited and charismatic characters for her show, even if they’re not the most technically proficient. These guys are proof of that.
