Dad.

I didn’t know my father.  I do now — not really — he revealed himself slowly, sometimes excruciatingly so, and we only had so much time and how well does anyone know anyone? — but I know that he was a soulful man. He didn’t express emotion, except anger, but he felt deeply. And that’s something that, despite mountains of evidence, which was never hidden from me, I did not know when I was young. Maybe I can forgive my young self for not seeing it. I experienced my father’s silence as hostility. I felt pushed away, though it was I who was pushing him away, and I cultivated a hot, painful anger that by the time I was a teenager turned to cool indifference. 

My father worked his love in the background. I describe it that way because it flatters me. When I’m thorough and demanding of my memory, when I’m scrupulously honest, I see him right there in the foreground, often. Helping me and my brother turn our ideas into Pine Box Derby cars for Boy Scouts (our cars won because Dad knew how to make cars that would win, even if the drawing I gave him was a neon green dragon), or teaching me Morse Code, or how to use a soldering iron. The books I remember him giving me were The Little Prince, a story about aviation and loneliness, disillusionment and the power of an open heart, when I was about 12 and Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy (when I came out). He built a mountain dulcimer for me. He would sit all afternoon and listen to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 or Van Cliburn’s recording of Beethoven’s Sonata in C Minor (a piece I can’t hear today without crying and I don’t know if it’s because of Beethoven or Van Cliburn or Dad) and Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely album. He taught me how to take pictures and let me use his favorite camera. When I’d finished my first roll of film, he taught me how to develop it in his darkroom. In my twenties, he introduced me to Frank Herbert’s Dune books, still favorites. And a very long, overwrought, and moving imagined biography of Sacajawea, which was one of his favorite books. (He loved American Indian history and culture and lore. He told us years ago that when he died he wanted his body to be burned on a pyre on the beach. A more conventional cremation was the best we could do; I hope he would forgive us for that.)

I thought nothing I did pleased him, and then learned decades later that nearly everything I did pleased him. Once again, it’s not for lack of evidence, in my face at every turn. I probably expect my urge toward self-mortification in the form of a litany of confessions in the guise of “my work,” to disperse the shame I feel for not noticing, or at least to reduce its weight, but it doesn’t.

When I came out to my parents, Dad told me that his father had been gay, and he shared stories that continue to fascinate me and reveal and shape who I am. One of the first songs I wrote is called My Father’s Father. When I was performing and touring in the 90s, we booked a gig in a gay bar in Columbus, Ohio, where my brother lives. Mom and Dad drove over from Muncie for the show. It was in an old dive that smelled like an ashtray, only 10 or 15 people showed up, with my family in the front row. My Father’s Father was a staple of our set, but Dad had never heard it. He’d never seen our act. Afterwards, I was standing at the back of the room selling t-shirts and CDs, or more likely not selling them. Dad came and stood next to me. After a very long few minutes of silence, he leaned toward me, and said, “That was good.” It’s not like everything was suddenly different, we were still awkward together for many years after that, but my feelings for him did change after that moment. I didn’t feel hostile anymore. The silence was more for lack of a habit of communicating than any antagonism. I had thought the better part of his opinion of me was disappointment, and how I dealt with that was to not care, or maybe more accurately to profess to not care, to make not caring a a strength, in the way that I’ve always wanted to buck convention just as a matter of course, a positive value.

I think as a kid I probably just wanted a hug, a smile, tenderness. My mother’s feelings and opinions, her inner life, always seemed to be right there, always available. Dad was never going to be Mom. His love for me was never going to be as apparent and kinetic as Mom’s, but after that night I knew that it was always there deep in the silence.

An essay, adapted from a chapter of my book-in-progress, published a few years ago.

In (Qualified) Praise of Social Media.

I complain a lot about the internet and social media, how they’ve corrupted so many aspects of our culture, etc., but I find it hard to give up exactly because of moments like this:

Queer people have their coming out stories; gay men in particular have their “first gay bar” stories. We tell them like campfire stories, we share them because they are all the same and join us in a community that persists across time and place, and because they are particular and reveal things about the person telling them, about who they are, or were at a certain moment in their lives and in history more broadly, about gay life at the time in the place we came of age.

My first gay bar was not really a bar but a disco. I remember going there my freshman year of college at Miami University, but I may have been a sophomore — I remember dancing to Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” and “Celebration” by Kool & the Gang, both of which were released in late summer/fall of 1980, my sophomore year. I have misremembered either the date or the soundtrack.

The place was called Infinity, and it was in Miamisburg Ohio, near Dayton, about an hour’s drive from the Oxford campus. Who had a car? I don’t remember anyone having a car but someone must have. The images in my head are few and circumscribed, I remember standing in line at the door and presenting an ID to a guy at a podium. I want to say we had fake IDs but I’m not sure of that — at the time if you were 18 in Ohio you could get into most bars but you could only drink “3.2 beer.” (My new best friend Scott grew up in Dayton and knew about this club. Scott was the first “out” gay man I knew, to my 18-year-old eyes he was very sophisticated about gay things. He had an older boyfriend back home. (“Older” could have meant 25, we were so young.) But I don’t remember what the door looked like, or the guy checking IDs.

I remember a large wood dance floor and the feeling of sailing around it, the exhilaration of dancing in a crowd of gay men for the first time in my life. I loved dancing. That wood floor is pretty much the only memory I have of the interior except that it was a large room with a high ceiling and (possibly?) a mezzanine level that overlooked the dance floor. I remember the songs, the feeling, one or two guys I went home with, or to hotels, and particular things about the sex we had, mostly what I was discovering, what they were teaching me. But that’s it, and I’ve longed for more concrete memories, and, failing that, at least some documentary evidence of the place. Googling “Infinity gay disco Miamisburg” never turned anything up. I tried for years.

A while back I joined a Facebook group called GayBarchives, where gay people, mostly men, mostly of a certain age, post memories, paeans to their younger days, the bars they loved, the places where they found husbands, lost friends, inquiries to see if anyone else remembers the bar they remember, their hometown bar, the old days. For some reason it didn’t occur to me until last week to query this group about Infinity. Lots of people remembered it and filled a few gaps in my patchy recollection:

“My husband's brother-in-law used to do drag there. It operated in what is now called the Baum Opera House. The building is still there and is a community meeting space now. It's almost always been a rental space — weddings, parties, school plays, meetings, rec basketball, etc. I don't think the club was a permanent tenant. I think they just rented the space when they wanted to have a club night.”

“The owner was a crusty old broad named Mary. I feel that it was a very short lived but magical time. I went home with two really cute guys that said they were brothers. They weren’t and I had my first threesome at 19.”

“That was the coolest bar in the most unlikely place ever.”

“Mary, the owner had a pistol at her table and 1 rose. If there was trouble she would fire the gun into the air.”

“What was the rose for.”

“Decorating.”

The Baum Opera House in Miamisburg, Ohio is a beautiful old building, and until last week I had no idea. I think a lot of people would say that the mysterious, hard to grasp quality of old memories like these, is what makes them special and potent, and that once they’re filled in, put in context, connected to recorded history, they lose their power. For me, when it comes to queer history, so much of which is lost, often as a result of a concerted effort on the part of a homophobic world to suppress it, the magic resides in knowing and connecting our stories to the big story, not in the mystery but in the very concrete reassurance that we were always here.

Our Idyll.

Yesterday, at 5-something in the morning, we lost power. The previous evening, there’d been a huge, quick thunderstorm with a sudden blast of rain that blew in, horizontally, with no warning, and pelted me in the face where I was sitting on the front porch well under the eaves — we were only one house of thousands up here without electricity in the morning. Our house has solar panels on the roof that supply most of our electricity, and batteries that store about two days worth of power to get us through outages, which we are told are not infrequent here.

We also lost phone and internet service. This house is in a dead zone as far as cell service, but the previous owners, who ran a media business from home and so depended on staying connected, rigged the place somehow to get reception. As Chan just said when I asked him, “there’s a machine up there that they left and the ADT guy connected it when he was here. I don’t know what it is or how it works.” The improved phone signal is somehow connected to the improved internet signal. Or maybe vice versa. It’s somewhat of a chicken and egg mystery, but it works so we don’t ask.

The point is that we were off the grid. Off all the grids at once. Oh, and also I couldn’t do laundry. Apparently the batteries don’t store enough electricity to run the dryer? Or maybe the dryer is connected to the internet. I literally would not be at all surprised.

So, and just then … our hot water heater began emptying its contents onto the basement floor — for how long before we realized it we have no idea. I went looking for a nail because I wanted to pound a small pilot hole at the bottom of a bathroom door so I could screw in a doorstop, and then I was going to use the nail to hang a picture. Nails are in the basement. Normally our basement is cool and dry, even when it’s roasting outside, and it was pretty mild yesterday, so I knew something was terribly wrong when I opened the door to the stairs and felt a gust of warm, wet air. I went down and followed a trail of increasingly larger puddles, steam, and condensation dripping from everything, to the back of the basement where there were about two inches of water on the floor, and saw hot water gushing out of the bottom of the hot water heater from a copper pipe. The pipe originated from the top of the heater, went up, then over and down the side, straight down almost to the floor, and thats where the water was coming out.

The next two hours: Chan driving until he had a strong enough signal to call somebody. Me catching the water in a bucket and running out to the backyard to dump it. I’d guess about 50 trips before Chan got home. He wasn’t able to reach a plumber. In the name of just trying things hoping something will work, Chan turned the temp on the water heater down all the way; I suggested turning the hot water on full blast on all the taps, just to empty the water heater. Those actions in tandem slowed the discharge of water and little by little stopped it completely.

The power came back on last night, so at least we don’t have to drive 20 miles to make phone calls. Now we’re without hot water until we can find a plumber to come tell us what’s wrong and hand us an invoice with a very large number on it.

This place has a powerful magic. Later, realizing there was nothing more we could do till morning, we had a cocktail on the front porch, with the rain coming down more appropriately vertically by that time, and the musty-sweet smell, and we felt insanely content and lucky for it.

Peach Cobbler, the Beach, Lizzie Borden, etc.

We’re in North Carolina at the beach with Chan’s family for the week.

Last week I was by myself at the Catskills cabin, unpacking, setting up the kitchen, wandering around outside (we have nearly 6 acres of mostly rocky woods) and setting up my basement office. (I don’t love calling it an office, the word evokes drudgery to me, so I’ve been sometimes saying “studio,” but that word sounds a little pretentious, but not as pretentious as “atelier.” Maybe just “study”?)

Chan and I had been there together the previous weekend. There’s still much to do, settling in-wise: deciding where to put stuff, figuring out what we need, we’ve never had so many rooms, cleaning, yard work. I’ve planted a few things, it’s too late in the year to start much, but I put in some zinnia seeds which are sprouting, lots of herbs, which are going gangbusters as my mom used to say, and one Fresno chile plant and one tomato. We also made time to just slow down in the country; the nights are still cool enough to sit around the fire pit. On Monday, we got up at dawn, I drove Chan to Rosendale about half an hour away to catch the bus to work in the city, and then I stayed upstate for the rest of the week.

Friday, at the end of my week alone, I drove down to the city, picked up Chan, he took over the driving, and we headed south. We spent the night just south of D.C., left in the morning, and we arrived here around 4 on Saturday.

On the way down, once we were off the Interstate and onto the state highways that approach the shore, we kept a lookout for a farm stand. Last year we stopped at a place selling the most beautiful peaches—we bought a huge box of them—but we didn’t see it this time. As with anything to do with peaches, I don’t bother unless I can get really excellent peaches. They’re easier to find in the South, but last year, or maybe it was the year before?, we got some amazing New Jersey peaches. Luckily, and surprising to me, the Food Lion here, where we shopped for the week’s provisions Sunday morning, had great local, ripe peaches. I made a cobbler.

The last few years I’ve been making a sort of shortbread cookie cobbler topping that I like much better than the usual soft biscuit thing that I’m not a fan of (it gets doughy and gummy, and there’s always too much of it). Since I’d come more or less straight from Upstate, I didn’t have my recipe with me. The cookie thing is so simple I thought I could improvise, but instead of a crumbly shortbread texture I got more of a soft sugar cookie, which I liked even better.

On these family beach vacations, I stay in the house all day avoiding the midday sun while the rest of them sit on the beach and fry. I like the time alone in a place that’s not home, reading, napping, cooking. I join them later in the afternoon for happy hour.

Tuesday, I had a long, rangey, and really enjoyable conversation with Lizzie Borden expert and scholar, Stefani Koorey, for The Lizzie Borden Podcast. Stefani knows more about Lizzie and the Borden murders than anyone (her website, the Lizzie Andrew Borden Virtual Museum and Library, is truly peerless), and she’s a big fan of our musical, so the conversation was lively and very fun. It will be available to stream later this month. I’ll give you a heads up when it appears. I guarantee you will learn stuff. I sure did.

Here’s that recipe:

Peach Cobbler

peaches, about 12-15 depending on their size. You want enough
peeled and sliced for about 1-1/2” in a 9 x 13” baking dish
sugar
2 rounded tablespoons of cornstarch

Peel and slice the peaches (drop them in boiling water for about 20 seconds, then into cold water, and you can slide the skin off with your fingers) and mix with about 1/4 cup sugar, more if the peaches are tart. Stir in cornstarch and spread in a 9 x 13” baking dish.

Topping:
2 sticks of butter, very soft
3/4 cup sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
pinch of salt

Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the flour and salt and mix until there’s no dry flour. I just used a big spoon.

Form the dough into balls and flatten them with your palms to about 3/8 - 1/2” discs. The dough is very loose, so the discs are kind of floppy to handle. They don’t need to be neat. Place them on top of the fruit to cover the top with space between them. Sprinkle sugar over the top.

Bake at 350 for half an hour, then at 400 till the fruit is bubbly all over and the topping is golden and set, probably another 10 - 15 min but watch it. Let it cool for at least 20 - 30 minutes before you serve it. I made it early in the day, and it was great later at room temp.

We had it with cream whipped with a little powdered sugar and vanilla.

History.

Jesse Green wrote a surprisingly uninformed essay in the New York Times T Magazine a few days ago. This technique or device or style, dramatizing existing text to re-create or evoke real events, has been employed frequently, in myriad ways, going back at least a century. Green cites a few examples, but mainly to say that they are few and far between.

Immediately two shows came to my mind because they were the work of friends: Kristin Marting's piece, Obscene, based on a conversation between Larry Flynt and Andrea Dworkin published in Playboy magazine; and a piece by Clay Shirky that consisted of a reading of a Supreme Court case, my memory is telling me it was Bowers v Hardwick, but I’m not at all confident it wasn’t something else, at that tiny storefront theater on Ludlow that I always forget the name of. It doesn’t so much bother me that this work was not mentioned. The work is obscure and a long time ago. Audiences were small in that scene; reviews, if you were lucky enough to get one in the Village Voice or the Times, were small and often dismissive. Probably only a few hundred people saw those shows, even if they loom large in my own career and memory. But it just wasn’t unusual in that world to make theater from found, borrowed, stolen, or appropriated text, often to depict or satirize or comment on current issues, problems, politics. And so much of what we see on Broadway and off these days has its roots in that earlier era of experimental theater. Green’s piece is incomplete without without mentioning the progenitors of the current plays he’s discussing.

There was a political theater movement in the mid-60s called “documentary theater” or “theater of fact,” whose participants made plays using primary sources like court transcripts and news articles, and there’s The Laramie Project, in which a theater company used the text of real interviews with witnesses to dramatize an event, and A Chorus Line for god’s sake, which was adapted from interviews with Broadway dancers about their lives, and the technique goes at least as far back as the Great Depression with the WPA’s Living Newspaper Project, which dramatized current events.

Anyway, thinking about this nudged me to consider a lot of work again that I hadn’t thought about in years, and I remembered a play I wrote in 1984. It never went beyond the page. I wasn’t part of a theater community yet and I still considered myself at that time a visual artist. Though I remember thinking the writing was very good, I lacked the social confidence I would have needed to find or whip up the circumstances, the resources, a venue, people, interest, etc., the conditions of making a production happen.

A lot of the text is taken from, or adapted from, random sources: an episode of Love Boat, gay erotic pulp novels from the 1960s, encyclopedia entries, Shelley’s Frankenstein, overheard conversations. About half of it is original writing, though honestly there are a couple passages I’m not sure whether I wrote or appropriated.

I think this is the only draft I have. The markup is from when I was going to make it a film script. A friend and I were going to make a movie, but never did.



Bodyodyody.

This is a fascinating conversation about GLP-1 drugs. It seems obvious to me that, no matter how you feel about these drugs, they are changing the human species in huge ways.

Before my episode or bout, or whatever you call it, with coronary disease started last fall, I asked my PCP if I could get a prescription for a GLP-1. I had gained and lost 20 to 40 pounds every few years since my mid-thirties. Losing it, which I accomplished by starving myself for a few months, got harder every time until eventually it felt impossible. Starvation didn’t work anymore. I couldn’t eat as little as I needed to eat to lose weight. Not only did it feel like physical torture, I’m just fundamentally opposed to that kind of deprivation—temperamentally, philosophically, esthetically. I believe pleasure is necessary. Not that I think I should pig out every day and indulge every craving, but it goes against my most deeply-held ideas of what a good life is made of to be shouting “NO!” in my head to myself all day long, slapping my hand just because I want to use those overripe pears to bake a pie.

My PCP said I wasn’t technically obese, so my insurance might not cover it, but he’d put in a prescription for Zepbound and see what happened. But that was the same visit when I told him I was having chest pain on my walk to the subway. He referred me to a cardiologist. By the time I got an appointment, I was having chest pain when I walked up stairs, and then when I walked across the apartment. Over the next couple weeks and with a series of tests, the clogged artery was discovered, and then I had the stent put in, which stole focus, so I didn’t go on the drug—it seemed like it was the only drug I didn’t go on—but then, as the urgency started to wane and I was recovering well, my cardiologist suggested starting Zepbound would be a good idea, not primarily for weight loss, but to help lower my cholesterol. And it did, dramatically, in concert with the other drugs. And I’ve lost 35 pounds since January. My weight now is what I weighed in college.

The transformation has been a little slippery to try to describe or make sense of. It’s a tangle of physical and mental and emotional changes. The improvement of my heart and arteries has been considerable, but not really felt so much as seen in the lab results. (My LDL cholesterol went from 120 to 48.) But the most dramatic change came with the weight loss, which caused a huge opening up of my emotional and mental life, a sense of having more free time, energy, space that had been full of thoughts about food, constantly mentally scolding myself, eating and being angry with myself, hating the way I looked, always measuring my body against an idea of what I thought my body should be like—or I think more precisely, what I felt my body did look like, that my body when it was heavier was wrong, inaccurate, and I was opposed to it—and hating my clothes, all the pants and shirts and coats that used to look good on me but that no longer fit, and also the ones that did fit, hating how big they were. All of that mental garbage is gone. Poof. I look in the mirror and see me. That open space is filled now with gratitude to be alive, which is a much lighter load than the other stuff. I came very close to a different outcome.

I think if you dig down deep enough this desire to look good, to believe my body looks good, is connected to wanting to be or feel sexually attractive, or not just wanting to be attractive but wanting to attract someone, and now. But I don’t experience that desire so acutely or urgently, or vividly, now as I did most of my life. I don’t need to take the “why not?” of that all apart here, except to say that I feel loved and safe, and I am old. I’m 65. My new skinny body that I feel so comfortable in is the body of a 65-year-old man: wrinkly, crepey, ropey, sagging, ass-less (the ass-loss happened before the drug, I just woke up one day and it was gone—nobody tells you that your ass and your lips disappear when you get old), but I’m not much worried about what I look like naked. (I was, non-stop, when I was younger.) What a relief.

I’m eating a lot less. That’s a big adjustment. We find ourselves with leftovers from most meals. I’m good at repurposing leftovers, but I can only find uses for so much. I’ve always prided myself on running a kitchen with very little food wasted and that’s harder to manage now but I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Restaurants are harder. Most of the time when an entree arrives I can see immediately that it’s enough food for three people. Even in the past it would have been much more than I needed, but I would have finished it anyway. I never used to be able to leave food on my plate. Now I physically can’t eat more when I’m full.

Speaking of my heart, Friday morning will be my last session of “cardio rehab.” The program was 36 sessions all told, 3 per week. Next week I’ll be back at my old gym doing essentially the same things but without the monitors, and the crazy assortment of New Yorkers, mostly men, some women, all my age or older, several of whom have much scarier crises to recover from, and without the phalanx of fit young women in athletic wear with serious smiles and good posture taking my blood pressure, giving me encouragement that may be slightly rote but not infrequently made me tear up, and showing me what to do with all those machines that somehow evoke for me the inside of a space ship. I have, oddly, enjoyed the whole thing, and I’ll miss it, and them, and the bad 80s rock.

"Queer" IS a sexual identity.

This rankles. As far as I can follow it, the reasoning is, “1) Israel cynically employs gay rights to sanitize their imperial project (they do), so 2) to mark myself in opposition to those imperial politics, I identify as queer, not gay, so 3) queer is not a sexual identity.”

To my mind, in the end, this is incoherent. FWIW, when I call myself queer, it IS a sexual identity. At its root, the word simply means I don't conform to society's expectations of my gender (in my case by being sexually attracted to men). All the other stuff, the culture, the politics, the choices about what to wear, where to live, the forming of communities, are born of the fact of our gender nonconformity, which brings us together, usually in opposition. Our existence is political, whether we espouse or act on those politics or not. Our gender nonconformity makes our existence political, but it is not one and the same as our politics.

I go back and forth between calling myself gay and queer. Why in the world would I feel like I had to give up "gay" with its long, rich, beautiful history, just because someone is using it for a bad purpose?

Fucking Plato.

Fascinating to see that we’re back to Plato. 

In some ways the big bang of the modern gay rights movement centers around a smattering of 19th century academics who started noticing and reading and putting together the queer and gender stuff in Plato. Back then, a formal education included study of the ancient Greeks, so scholars and scientists (which were pretty much the same thing back then) would all be well-versed in Plato. The sex and gender stuff was always in there, but 19th century scholars just overlooked it or “interpreted” the sex out of it. Like many things in Victorian times, it “wasn’t discussed.”

But then came a few scholars, grappling with homosexual feelings of their own, who started to see glimmers of themselves in Plato’s writing. Plato is full of actual gay sex. Once you acknowledge it, you can’t unsee it. (Not that Plato was a gay rights hero; his thoughts about same-sex relationships were conflicted and contradictory.) But in 19th century England and Germany, if you were found out writing, or worse publishing, about homosexuality, you could lose not just your livelihood but pretty much everything, including your freedom. Still, some of the braver ones wrote treatises and books and shared them with small groups of friends, these men eventually began finding each other and talking, and things grew from there.

So this business at Texas A&M with administrators demanding professors remove all discussion of sex and gender when they teach Plato is familiar. It’s just another of many liberating moments in history from the last couple hundred years — the Black Civil rights era and the Women’s Movement, the New Deal, the progressive reform era of the late 19th/early 20th century, among others, all of which have made society more fair, humane, and enlightened — that conservatives are determined to undo.

Today, etc.

I got a rejection email from a literary journal yesterday but the good kind, the “we liked your essay, we just couldn’t make it work this time but please submit again” kind. It’s a small sign of life, a glimmer. I’ll send them something else soon.

The thought came into my head last week in the thick of a nasty respiratory infection that, without Christmas and heart disease, I might by now have completed a first draft of my book. More like “without Christmas and heart disease and a million other things every day that pull my attention away from writing, I might blah blah blah.” I don’t know. What I do know is that I was on a serious streak of progress in mid-October when I started feeling chest pain and saw a cardiologist on October 20th, and now I haven’t written a word in two and a half months.

Watching Devil in Disguise, a new series about the John Wayne Gacy murders, has lit a small fire. The series is, among many things, a corrective to the usual true crime forensic approach to telling these stories. It takes a longer view that includes the communities and families affected by the murders and makes the case that Gacy is not alone responsible for these deaths, that the police and community’s hatred of gay men are also to blame. That the murders are a product of not just a maniac, but of a time and place that was viciously and reflexively homophobic. Because of the cops’ revulsion toward anything having to do with gay men and boys and gay sex, they didn’t care about the crimes or the boys enough to do their jobs. Those boys didn’t stand a chance. Which is what I was trying to get at in writing about Larry Eyler, whose spree took place in the same area 6-8 years later.

Being away from the work isn’t just a loss of 2 1/2 months’ writing time, it’s more like a 6-month setback. I look at the piles of notes and papers on my desk and remember how, in October, I knew what every pile was, what it contained, how much and what was still to be done, how it would fit together, the flow of it, and now I don’t know any of those things. It’s just piles of random stuff.

These things on my schedule, making a return to regular, disciplined writing days feel impossible — among them this cold, which thankfully after nearly two weeks is on the wane (last night I blew my nose and a clot of blood as big and shiny red as a newborn gerbil flew out onto my hand, which was simultaneously horrifying and also maybe a good sign, like an exorcism almost), and also the heart rehab program I start soon which will require 3 months of thrice weekly trips to a hospital in the East 30s — I’m beginning to realize will not abate. Aging has me buffeted by a litany of things I now need to be worried about: look after your brain health, and your heart health, your skin care, bone mass, muscle mass, all requiring attention to your diet and activity, and each carrying high stakes. It’s not: you’re 25 and somebody says start moisturizing now so you have great skin when you’re 70. It’s: eat more fish and legumes so you don’t have a heart attack and die next week. Swallow handfuls of pills twice a day to keep yourself alive and don’t forget to take your pill containers when you travel, along with backup bottles of everything in case your flight gets canceled. And remember that shot has to be on ice and in your checked bag not your carryon. In my twenties I was sure, as sure as people in their twenties are sure of things, that I would die young. Maybe at 30. As 30 came and went, I kept revising the number up until at some point I realized I didn’t mind getting older. There was a window, my forties and much of my fifties, roughly, when being “older” was cute. I felt smarter, more confident, handsome. Now I’m almost 65 and taking Zepbound because I’m fat and I have high cholesterol and heart disease.

I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I am grateful there are drugs and other ways and technologies available to keep me ticking. I truly am. But you know what else is ticking? The clock, and I just want to finish this damn book.

My 2025 Theater Year.

Thirty shows this year. Eleven Broadway, 18 Off-Broadway and one at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. These 13 were my favorites (* = Broadway):

*Cult of Love (Big conservative Christian family drama. One of the adult children brings her lesbian partner home for Christmas. One of the family’s Christmas traditions is to play and sing traditional music together. Much of the storytelling happens in and around the songs, which are also wonderfully performed. Mare Winningham.)
*English (So many plays about the immigrant experience these days, but none have been so subtle and complex and surprising or quite so affecting—and theatrically inventive—as this one.)
Liberation (I think if pressed I would say this was my favorite play this year. Beautifully and ingeniously written and performed, deeply insightful about the span of time from the late 60s to now, and the effect those years have had on all of us. It packs a wallop. It is a play about our time, but also about mothers and daughters. And memory.)
Ghosts (Ibsen, Lily Rabe, Billy Crudup, Hamish Linklater, new translation directed by Jack O’Brien. This is why I live in New York.)
*Pirates of Penzance (Hilarious, sexy, full-on musical theater joy, totally delivered.)
*Sondheim’s Old Friends (I was kind of reluctant to shell out the bucks for this. Why? It was perfection. 40-some songs. Bernadette Peters still jaw-droppingly great. And don’t tell Patti but Beth Leavel’s Ladies Who Lunch was a revelation. It might be the first time I really got the song.)
Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. (An unexpected treat. Thrilling even from our nosebleed seats. Cynthia Erivo as Jesus, Adam Lambert as Judas. All the power you want from that score. And the venue is magical.)
Oratorio for Living Things (I won’t try to describe Heather Christian’s work because I think the descriptions I heard for years were what made me resistant. In terms of just a pure, transformative theater experience, this was the one. It’s profound, and maybe indescribable. Just trust.)
*Little Bear Ridge Road (Great new Samuel Hunter play, Laurie Metcalf keeps getting better and better, which should be impossible but apparently it’s not.)
*Oedipus (I wish these Greek play got the same perennial treatment that Shakespeare gets. I was truly shaken when the curtain went down.)
The Baker’s Wife (Classic Stage Company. Gorgeous, transporting. The whole ensemble shines, Ariana DeBose is radiant, Scott Bakula will break your heart if Judy Kuhn hasn’t already stolen it. I thought it was just perfect.)
*Chess (Wowsa! The orchestra and those singers just keep knocking your socks off, one song after another. I loved this so much. I’ve been listening to the album for decades but never really knew the book. Everybody always says it was flawed or problematic, some people say this new production fixed the problems, others say it didn’t. But I found the story compelling, the singing and playing forceful and thrilling. I spent so many years waiting for Lea Michelle to come back to Broadway, and her return is everything I’d hoped it would be. This show is somewhere up near the top of my list.)
*Marjorie Prime (Chan and I saw an Off-Broadway production of this play 10 years ago and it left us both cold. I don’t know how or if the play was revised for this new production, but certainly a lot has changed in our lives, and in the culture, in 10 years. For one, ten years ago the idea of people having meaningful “personal” relationships with AI robots was pretty far-fetched; now it’s widespread and we’re all worried about it. And two, Chan and I both lost our mothers in the last ten years. The play landed deeper, hit harder, this time. We both left in tears. Wrenching performances by Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein.)

It was a good theater year in New York. The quantity of great new work is kind of breathtaking. Two things come to mind, though: most of the shows I saw this year were produced by non-profits, both on and off-Broadway, and most of my Broadway favorites were produced by non-profits (Roundabout and 2nd Stage); and, I just read yesterday that, counting the new musicals that opened in the fall and the ones that have announced spring openings, there might be only four new Broadway musicals eligible for Tonys this season. Which is too few. (I guess the rules say there can’t be fewer than four nominees, and that not all four can be nominated). Queen of Versailles is closing early this month, having lost all of it’s $26 million investment. Shows flop all the time, more often than they hit. I’m not a business person, but I worry, along with pretty much everyone but the super-rich, that the economics of New York theater, the sky-high cost of producing shows and the mind-boggling ticket prices, are a cloud growing bigger and bigger over the whole thing. It’s unsustainable.

Santa.

When I was around 8 or 9, my brother and I spent the night at a friend’s house down the street. Our friend’s father was what we used to call “strict” back then. We were all in sleeping bags in the basement, not sleeping, it was very late. Our friend’s father yelled from upstairs to “Go to sleep!” We stopped talking and laughing for a few minutes and then started again. He yelled again. After a few rounds of this, he appeared at the top of the stairs in his pajamas and yelled “Get up here!” Our friend slid out of his sleeping bag and slowly climbed the stairs. When he got to the top, his father grabbed him by the arm, took off his leather house slipper, and beat the crap out of him. For some reason, I associate finding out that Santa Claus is not real with that night. The memory of any specific connection is lost, but any time anyone brings up the subject of whether or not parents should perpetuate the Santa Claus thing, I’m right back in that basement with my brother and our friend and his father and the leather slipper.

Still Here.

I just got home from a followup visit with my cardiologist. I still have some pain, but I'm recovering. He told me how glad he was they were able to open the artery with a stent, that based on my condition before the procedure he’d been worried I would have to have bypass surgery. He shared with me the x-ray images from the procedure I had two weeks ago: images before and after the stent was placed (arrow is pointing to where the artery was clogged).

This Is What I'm Doing Now.

One thing that’s not ideal about where I live is that the closest subway is a 15 minute walk. We’re right at the terminus of several bus lines, so sometimes we take the bus to the train, but, if the weather is friendly, I’ll walk. I’m a fast walker, New Yorkers are fast walkers, I don’t get much exercise otherwise, and I just kind of enjoy the quick stroll through my neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, I started to notice after a couple blocks a tight feeling in my chest, not exactly pain, but distinct pressure. Which was strange because, only a few days prior, Chan had complained of a similar feeling. I’d been very worried about him—chest pain is alarming—and I wondered if mine was some kind of sympathetic reaction. I didn’t say anything the first few times it happened; it felt ungenerous to steal his chest pain moment. At the very least, he was first in the queue.

But it seemed to get worse, and to happen sooner in the walk, bad enough that I’d have to slow way down for the last couple blocks, or stop altogether and rest.

Whatever was happening with Chan cleared up. His pain was triggered by deep breaths, and he figured it was probably a vestige of a bad chest cold he’d had recently. Mine got worse, so I made an appointment with my primary care nurse. My blood pressure was fine; it always has been. He did an EKG, which was normal. He referred me to a cardiologist, and I saw him on Monday of last week. The cardiologist scheduled me for two tests the following week (this past week), and he told me that if I had pain while I was resting, especially combined with numbness or pain in my left arm or jaw, light-headedness, etc. I should go to the emergency room.

On Thursday morning our housecleaner was here, and I walked to the neighborhood coffeeshop where I often work while she’s cleaning. It’s a 20-minute walk, but I took it very slowly. And then I walked home. I felt some pressure in my chest, but it subsided quickly once I stopped. That afternoon, I did some cooking, nothing crazy but I was on my feet for an hour or so, and the pain came back. I lay down on the couch, it didn’t go away, then my arm started to feel tingly, but both symptoms seemed mild, and I hemmed and hawed for a good half hour. I wasn’t in real pain and my pulse felt normal. But when I stood up, I felt faint, I got scared, and I decided I didn’t want to die of indecisiveness, so I called an Uber and went to the emergency room. Chest pain gets you past triage fast. Chan left work early and rushed over. They didn’t find anything wrong with me, and the pain was gone after a half hour or so. The doctor, nurses, a student doctor, lab technicians, everyone was lovely, kind, communicated clearly, but I was there for five hours, mostly sitting waiting for test results and discharge papers. I guess that’s just the nature of hospitals.

Back to the cardiologist on Monday. The first test was like a sonogram, or maybe it was a sonogram, with the wand and the jelly, but instead of a fetus it makes pictures of your heart. I asked the technician if she saw anything bad. She said, “The doctor will look at the images and discuss them with you,” which I’m sure is just the protocol, but I felt like there was something in her voice. Then, on Thursday, a “stress test,” which comprises a shorter version of the sonogram, then walking on a treadmill while you’re hooked up to the EKG electrodes so the doctor can monitor your heart activity while you’re walking, then another sonogram afterwards, to look at how your heart has reacted to exertion.

I was apprehensive about the treadmill. For a couple weeks, I’d been taking everything very slowly pretty much all the time because exertion triggers the pain. I’m not sure how long I was on the treadmill, it felt like only a couple minutes, when I had two jabs of sudden, intense pain in my chest and broke out in a cold sweat. The doctor pulled me off the treadmill and onto the examination table. I was terrified, he told me to take deep breaths, that I was okay, he was there monitoring everything, and he held my hand till the pain subsided.

The cardiologist and the technician (maybe she was a physician’s assistant, I’m not sure) sat down in front of her computer monitor and looked at the blurry, grey moving images from the sonogram. Two of the images in particular they watched several times over, and I swear I saw their faces darken. They looked at each other, concerned. The doctor came over and stood facing me and said, “Based on your symptoms, the changes in your heart activity concurrent with the pain, and the sonogram images, I believe you have “significant coronary disease.” I have “blockages” in my coronary arteries.

High cholesterol runs in my family. We all have it, my siblings, my mother. I’ve battled it all my life—that’s not true, I should say I’ve battled it during the intermittent periods of my life when I’ve had health insurance. I take a statin drug for it now, a high dose, and the number is still higher than it should be. But I’m the first that I know of to have heart disease. Somebody has to be first.

Monday morning at 6:30, I will have a procedure called a “heart catheterization” at Mt. Sinai Hospital on the Upper West Side. It’s another diagnostic test. They’ll insert a tube into a vein in my wrist and feed it up into my heart to deliver a contrast dye, and then they’ll take x-rays. It’s to locate and assess the extent of the blockages. Depending on what they find, I’ll have one of four possible courses of treatment: One, they find no blockage (extremely unlikely based on the previous tests and my symptoms); two, the blockage is minor enough to be treated with drugs (the cardiologist says this is also very unlikely, based on the above); three, they find blockages in one, or two, arteries (in this case, they’ll place a stent or stents to open up the artery, as part of the procedure, since they’ve got the tube up in there already); and four, they find extensive blockages and/or blockages in the main coronary artery (the treatment in this case is bypass surgery—they’ll wait till I’m awake from the anesthesia to discuss this with me). I think with the stent I would go home that day. With the open heart surgery, I would be in the hospital for a week.

This is all moving kind of fast, and I wanted to get all the details down before I start to forget or make things up.  I’m used to telling everybody everything, but for weeks all I had was chest pain and uncertainty to share. I waited even to tell my friends and family until there was something concrete to say. And then suddenly I had bad news, or at least dire news. I’m looking forward to Monday and getting on with it. I won’t say I’m not very frightened (and these few days of waiting are excruciating). 

Fruition, etc.

About five years ago in a cabin in Maine, the thought popped into my head, “I’m gonna write a book,” and I sat down and started writing one. Now I see the end of it in my sights. Maybe it’s distant, I don’t know how distant, but I see it. All my scribbling and staring into space and digging through old stuff for five years is coming to fruition. I have in my hands a literary journal with a chapter from my book in it. The way it makes me feel, to have editors find my writing compelling and, through the process of editing excerpts for publication, to see that they get what I’m doing, that they feel some sympathy with it—it is, to say the least gratifying. It feels like a big step, a turning point.

Why have I so many times in my life just decided to do something I didn’t know how to do but had some notion that by doing it I would learn how? First there’s a story I want to tell and I guess it suggests or draws me to the medium that I think will work best to tell it. The feeling that I am not only telling a story but inventing the wheel is what really feels like making art to me, making something true and honest. And I’ve always just kind of wanted to do everything.

The other side of throwing myself into a new medium is of course at some point having to learn how an unfamiliar field, an industry, works. I’ve put aside thoughts of agents and publishers and readers and the business while I’m writing. I knew eventually I’d have to deal with all that, but I know from experience that those thoughts are needy, they have sharp elbows and an inflated sense of their own importance, attention makes them grow. They take over. They eat the work and grow bigger to fill the space the work left. But they know you’ll need them eventually.

Which is to say: If you know a literary agent or a publisher or editor you think might be intrigued by a book about three homosexual men, whose lives span the 20th century in America, looking for love, give me a shout.

People Like Violence?

Not that this is scientific but I was just sitting here thinking about how I’ve written three musicals in my life, all three stories are cautionary tales or warnings of some kind, each with an outcome distinct from the others, and all very different in terms of their success:

One, Frankenstein, warns that human arrogance will destroy us, and it does; the story ends catastrophically for everyone involved. Our musical was basically stillborn and abandoned. It didn’t work, and we walked away.

Two, The Life & Hard Times of Hester Prynne, says that things are bad but that we can make a better world if we commit ourselves to work for it. This piece was more successful, we did a couple of readings, recorded some of the music. It was in a good place, needed more time and work and support, but the collaboration fell apart and now it languishes.

And three, LIZZIE, a story of violent rebellion, a woman bashes her parents heads in with an axe and transmogrifies into a deity. It’s the most successful of the three by a mile—artistically, professionally, and financially. A hundred-some productions all over the world.

People like quick, unequivocal solutions and happy endings.

Granted, these three works span nearly the whole of my career—from Frankenstein in 1991, Hester Prynne in 2017, and LIZZIE, well, LIZZIE is hard to pin down because it was done and revised and done and revised a few times over 25ish years, but let’s just say the version people know now debuted, sort of, in 2009—which introduces all kinds of variables like differences in my level of experience and skill, changes in the industry, luck, the Zeitgeist (when we first started writing LIZZIE, a big concern was getting the audience to sympathize with an axe murderer—not a problem now). And maybe LIZZIE is just better. I mean it is, but that’s true in part because it (and we) persisted through years of readings and changes and workshops and festival productions and on and on, in other words development. Frankenstein we wrote, rehearsed, and put on stage in the course of a couple months, and none of us had ever done anything like it before. We spent about two years writing Hester Prynne. And LIZZIE was decades in the making.

Just thoughts, for whatever they’re worth.

Dad.

We had a sweet weekend in Columbus, where my dad has just moved into an assisted living facility close to where my brother and his wife live. We sat around and talked, sat around and didn’t talk. We took him and his dog out for very slow walks. He said yes when we asked him if he wanted to join us for pizza and beer, which surprised us all, and, also surprisingly, had no complaints about the pizza and said the beer (a local IPA) was “acceptable.”

I spent a good chunk of the time hanging pictures in his new apartment. It went smoothly, and he was pleased with the results. If you know anything about my dad and our relationship, you know I should be getting some kind of medal or something. The things about him that I hated most when I was young are now the things I find myself holding onto most tightly, because they are "him," and they're slipping away.

Uncle Jim.

It’s World Down Syndrome Day.

My mother’s little brother Jim has been on my mind a lot lately. He was born in 1947, at a time when doctors commonly advised new parents of babies with intellectual disabilities to leave their child at the hospital, that it would be better for everyone to put the baby in an institution before they got attached—which seems monstrous now. We have (had?) advanced so much in the last few decades—in the way we understand disabilities like Down Syndrome, but also in how we regard and treat people with disabilities and what’s possible for them.

Uncle Jim, mid-1950s.

It’s sad and depressing to watch the slurs, “retard” and “retarded,” getting more common again, especially, or maybe only, among the reactionary crowd who are, for the time being, running things. When I was a kid, those words were already strongly frowned on. (I think I got the lecture from my parents about the r-word at the same time as the n-word.) As kids, we heard them, maybe used them, but we knew it was a transgression, and we knew why: because those words hurt people like my Uncle Jim, and they hurt people who loved him.

It’s not unrelated that the Trump/Musk administration is defunding and eliminating federal programs that help people with disabilities—people like my Uncle Jim—live better lives. It’s only three steps from using “retarded” as a casual insult meaning stupid and worthless, which implies that intellectually disabled people are stupid and worthless, to asserting that resources spent to improve their lives are a waste of money.

We don’t just stigmatize certain slurs because they make individual people feel bad (though I think that’s not a terrible reason to avoid a word that has at least 100 benign synonyms), we discourage slurs because the way we talk to each other shapes our thoughts about each other, and shapes our communities’ attitudes, and behavior, and policies.