I Just Want To Sleep.

Monday night I went to bed at about 10, as usual. By midnight, I hadn’t fallen asleep, so I got up and read for an hour and a half. I went back to bed, lay there till about 3, fell asleep, woke up at 3:30. I wasn’t completely awake the whole period from 3:30 until my alarm went off at 6, but I wouldn’t say that I really slept. I dozed off a few times for a few minutes.

That was a particularly bad night. Here’s a good night:

I go to bed at 10 and fall asleep within 20 or 30 minutes. I wake up around 2 or 3 for maybe 20 minutes, and then again every hour until 5 when I wake up completely and wait impatiently for my alarm to go off at 6 so I can get out of bed. That’s a good night. Most nights are somewhere in between, maybe I wake up 2 or 3 times an hour, and I almost always wake up around 5 and don’t fall asleep again no matter how much or little sleep I got before that.

When I was young, I had night terrors, lots of recurring dreams and intense nightmares, sleepwalking, waking dreams, through my 20s, but never difficulty sleeping. Used to be, if I didn’t set an alarm I was in danger of sleeping all day. It used to be, in fact, difficult to wake up. Now even when I take a nap I wake up every few minutes.

I’m fairly certain I started having trouble sleeping a few years before my mother died, but that’s when I remember it getting bad enough that I felt like it was an “issue.” That was also when I started having difficulty reading, or concentrating on anything for more than a few minutes. Those problems have abated somewhat, though not disappeared. I can read for long periods again, but I still have a hard time with the sort of dense non-fiction that used to make up most of my reading. 

I also connect this change to the 2016 election — I am without doubt more constantly anxious than I ever remember being since adolescence — but, again, the trouble sleeping started before that.

Somehow related, though I’m not sure how much or in what way, is my sleep apnea. For as long as I can remember I have from time to time woken up abruptly, feeling like I was being choked. It’s terrifying. At some point I read about sleep apnea and thought “yeah that’s exactly what I have.” I figured out that it always happened when I fell asleep on my back, so I started sleeping on my stomach. Some time later I realized that the chronic neck and shoulder pain I’d been feeling, which I’d assumed was due to playing guitar, was actually a result of sleeping on my stomach, so I started sleeping on my side. It’s not the most comfortable way to sleep, but it’s better than worrying about whether I’ll die in my sleep.

For years I felt like I was managing. Until this insomnia thing.

A year or two ago, I mentioned this problem, the insomnia and the self-diagnosed apnea, to my former G.P., and he referred me to an ear, nose, and throat doctor who sent me to the Cornell sleep center for a sleep test, which did in fact show mild obstructive sleep apnea, for which they prescribed a CPAP machine. I guess most people are familiar with those now, they’re pretty common. You sleep with a hose connected to your face through which a machine pushes air into your mouth to keep your passages open.

I had resisted the CPAP for a hundred reasons (I happen to like falling asleep with my arms around my husband, for one) but the sleeplessness was obviously untenable, so eventually I gave in. I thought, finally, I will sleep! I really thought it was going to change my life.

It was a nightmare. Not only did it not help me sleep, I couldn’t take a deep breath on my own so it made me feel like I was suffocating, and after about 3 hours of meditating, telling myself “it’s okay, you can breathe, you’re okay, just relax,” I would start to panic and rip it off. But I persisted, assuming it could take a while to get accustomed to. After two weeks it was still the same scenario every night, no sleep, no increase in the time I could tolerate the machine. I got a phone call from the vendor who leases the machine telling me I was noncompliant and my insurance company would cease paying for the machine rental if I didn’t wear it at least 4 hours a night. I sent it back. (That’s something you might not know about CPAP machines. The vendor is monitoring in real time when you go to bed, your breathing patterns, when you put on and take off the mask, when you wake up. Not your doctor, but the pharmaceutical vendor.)

My old G.P. moved away and now we have a new primary whatever they call it. (He’s a N.P., so I never know what to call him.) At my first visit, he asked if there was anything else I wanted to address so I reluctantly brought up this sleep issue. I say reluctantly because I feel a little shame about not being able to use the CPAP. I got the feeling he thought I was trying to score some oxycontin or something. I didn’t ask for sleeping pills. If I thought it would help and not just cause more problems, I’d take them in a heartbeat, but I’m a Judy Garland fan. I know where that road goes. (I think it’s a bugaboo of this nurse: a few months later he was strangely adamant about not prescribing pain meds for my broken toe, meds which I hadn’t asked for and didn’t want anyway because it didn’t hurt that bad.)

So he said, well, if the CPAP didn’t do it, then “we need to talk about sleep hygiene,” and he gave me that litany — the weight of your blanket, temperature of the room, no alcohol, turn off the TV and computer for a while before you go to bed, yada yada. I know it all, have tried it all, it has no effect.

(My apprehension about drugs notwithstanding, I was for the last few years occasionally taking Benadryl on particularly difficult nights. It seemed to help a bit. I could go from waking up a dozen times a night to waking up 4 or 5 times. But in the last few months — I think only on those nights I’ve taken Benadryl — I’ve woken up a few times feeling the beginning of a panic attack, so I stopped taking Benadryl.)

So that’s where I am. I read and work in the morning until I can’t keep my eyes open, then I take a 1/2 hour nap, which often will at least keep me awake for the rest of the day. But if I start dozing again later, I take another 1/2 hour nap. It’ s not ideal, obviously. Those half hours are disruptive and they add up. I get less done. And even with the naps, I am always tired, always sleepy, always a bit dull-headed.

As long as I can remember, my father has talked about waking up for an hour or two in the middle of the night. He says that he used to use that time productively, that he felt extra lucid and would lie in bed and solve problems that vexed him in daylight hours. (He worked as an engineer for an electronics company, so solving problems was, I think, his job.) Now, 85 and retired, he says his mind is not as clear and he doesn’t have pressing problems to solve, so those middle of the night vigils are just frustrating.

Super Worm Equinox Moon.

I think of the sun as a necessary evil, but the moon I am in love with. I love that we name them now, like Hindus name manifestations of a God. I love all the moons, but I think my favorite is the Super Worm Equinox Moon.

I have a thing for the Spring Equinox because I love the balance of it, of two equal parts, and because it falls on the most auspicious cusp, between Pisces and Aries, the end and the beginning of the astrological calendar, the cusp on which I was born.

The Trocadero Is Closing.

I just heard the very sad news that the Trocadero in Philadelphia is closing soon. I haven’t been there since some time in the 90s, but it’s vivid in my memory and has a special place in my heart. One (actually 2, we did it twice) of my very favorite Y’all gigs was taking part in the Big Mess Cabaret, a sort of neo-vaudeville burlesque evening of music, variety acts/performance art, and strippers. We had never felt so understood by an audience.

The Troc is the archetypal decaying turn of the 20th century burlesque/minstrel/vaudeville theater turned movie house turned rock club. The Troc has always been my model for the ideal venue for LIZZIE.

Sometimes I Change My Mind.

I found myself at times having an immediately skeptical reaction to this new thing of coming out as “nonbinary.” But I’m coming to see it differently.

The idioms that queer people use to try to pin down, to name the things that are different about us, that feel different, these idioms evolve, shift, change, but they still describe phenomena that are essentially mysterious. The evolution of the language doesn’t move in a linear progression toward clarity; I think it changes for more ordinary reasons: words get tired, we get tired of using them, labels that were once neutral accumulate negative connotations, words that were negative get reclaimed as expressions of pride, new generations need to set themselves apart, create their own way of speaking, create their own lens to see the world and themselves through, assert their newness.

The current lexicon (transgender/non-binary/genderqueer/pansexual, etc.) is no more accurate or “correct” than the gay/bi/lesbian/butch/femme/transsexual lexicon that I grew up with, or homophile/pederast/invert/trade/fairy/Mary Ann/sodomite/urning/Uranian/Sapphist/third sex/intermediate sex, or all the way back to Plato, a bunch of Greek words that are hard to translate, which is not even to get into the various ways indigenous peoples all over the world have understood and described unconventional sexual and gender expression.

We still have no earthly idea why there are variations in sexual expression and desire. And is “why?” even an interesting question? We know these things are “natural,” or we safely assume they are because we see them echoed in myriad species and persisting in our own over the course of history.  

When a younger generation coins new terms, invents new language and metaphors, paradigms, rubrics (is there a word that includes all these things?), they might think they are offering new information, or believe that they are getting closer to objectively describing queer lives or queerness, and sometimes to their elders it feels like — and this is what I realize I’ve been so defensive about — they are, in imposing this new language (and the set of beliefs it implies), rejecting OUR beliefs about ourselves, our ways of describing ourselves and our experience, telling us we were wrong, that we misunderstand ourselves.

But I think I’ll try to stop being defensive. It is the prerogative of the young, not to mention a longstanding European tradition, for people to give things new names and tell us they’ve just discovered them. I’m okay with that.

How Many Degrees of Separation Between YOU And A Serial Killer?

Here’s a list of things:

1. C and I have started going to this great new barbecue place down the street every Saturday. I think I’ve mentioned it before. It’s the kind of place where you sit at the bar and have a couple beers and then do a shot with the bartender. Also great barbecue, sort of modeled on Texas-style, meat by the pound served on butcher paper. It turns out the bartender graduated from the same high school as me (30 years later, but it’s Greencastle, Indiana so not a lot has changed in 30 years).

2. It also turns out that Megan, the bartender, is the grandniece of the notorious Indiana gay serial killer Larry Eyler, the “interstate murderer,” and, as she showed us a photo on her phone last night to illustrate, quite resembles him around the eyes.

3. From 1982 to 1984, Larry Eyler picked up I think 21 young men, some of them teenagers, raped and tortured, murdered and sometimes dismembered them, and then tossed their bodies in fields along the sides of highways. He grew up in Crawfordsville, which is just a few miles down the road from Greencastle.

4. 1983 just happens to be the year when I spent a few months back in Indiana, trying unsuccessfully to finish a college degree, and, just a few months ago, researching another crime from that same period of time for the show I’m writing, I repeatedly came across coverage of the “gay serial killer” in the local newspaper on microfiche in the library. They knew at that point that he was targeting young gay men, but they didn’t catch him until late 1984, so gay people were a little spooked.

5. Many of his victims were never identified, likely because they were kids who’d run away from or been kicked out of their homes because they were gay, so it wasn’t like anyone was looking for them.

6. I now know there is such a thing as Murderpedia.

Also This To-Do List From 1982.

This makes my heart hurt. In a good way. As I get older and my mind goes to all those I’m getting older places, what have I done?, etc., and because I work with a lot of young people, I think often about the idea of youthful optimism and I don’t remember really ever having anything you’d call that. The constant grinding mental state I remember (which hasn’t changed in any quantitative way but maybe I’ve made friends with it or learned to recognize it as inherent in the process of art-making) is one of uncertainty or more like fear that I wouldn’t be capable of making art that was authentic. It was always hard for me to imagine achieving that, let alone sustaining it for a lifetime. I was not optimistic, I was terrified.

To say something authentic, something TRUE, always seemed to me to be the whole thing, and a terrible burden. I was so afraid of making work that was false, of being a hack, a conman. That to me wasn’t just failure as an artist, it was criminal. I might not be so strident now, but I still believe that more or less. It’s the reason I would never stay in school, not until I was almost 50. I felt the encroaching sense that in school I was learning mostly how to talk about the work, not how to make it. (The fear I think came from a confidence that I WAS capable of faking it. I was always smart enough to do that, or I thought so anyway.)

I always felt like I had to start from the beginning every time to make sure every element was genuine, honest, accurate. My journals are filled with entries like, “A stage, 2 characters, one onstage, one off. They are having a conversation. (Figure out what the conversation is about.)”

To discover this tiny fragment of hope (and let’s be honest, it’s tiny) in my 1982 mind makes me want to hold my 21 year old artist self in my arms and cry.

1990.

I read yesterday that the White Horse Tavern is closing or has closed or may close, and though I’ve only been there twice that I know of, I feel a certain feeling, sadness or something like it, every time I walk by it, and I felt moved to write a little something, and I may still later or tomorrow but I always get waylaid when i pull out old diaries.

Not to get too far into the weeds of what I’m NOT writing about, but the thing about the White Horse is that the first time I went there was in the early 80s with a man I dated for a short time. I met him at a bar on the Upper West Side (I would go up to the Works when I wanted to cruise and didn’t want to run into anyone I knew) the year after I dropped out of Parsons and was living on East 10th St. and working at Pearl Paint, he lived in New Jersey or White Plains or something, I don’t remember back then ever being at all concerned with any distinction between the places people lived that weren’t Manhattan. He lived with a woman who didn’t know he was “bisexual,” he smoked Nat Shermans, and I was obsessed with him. Also he was handsome and, I don’t quite know how to say this but he treated me like a girl and that turned me on hard.

He (I don’t remember his name!) specifically wanted to take me to the White Horse and tell me about how Dylan Thomas drank himself to death there. I know I wrote about this man in my diary at the time because I ran across mentions of him last year as I researched the essay I wrote for a book my friend Joan is making. He is somehow connected to my decision in 1983 to spend a year in Indiana finishing school which I only half did because … well, that’s another story and probably one I’ve told a million times. He, I guess it’s fair to say, ghosted me, which was a much easier thing to do back then.

So I was reading old diaries this morning. Somehow I haven’t found what I set out to look for. I guess it would help if I looked at 1982 and not 1990. I’ll get there, but in the meantime, here’s a fun excerpt. In 1990, I had just left my first long-term serious boyfriend Brian, and I was living alone for the first time in my life. I was temping as a legal proofreader to pay (well, sort of) my bills, and I’d just started writing pornographic stories and scheming to get them published. I wrote several but I never finished them. This was before computers or even word processors. I had a manual typewriter, and the process of revising was too tedious to live. I still have drafts of them somewhere in the drawer with the old journals.

My favorite thing here is that I considered using the name of Judy Garland’s fourth husband as my porn nom de plume.

Mourning The Old Neighborhood, Not So Old.

It’s not a big surprise that Moishe’s has finally closed. The building was sold a while ago and I’m sure that storefront is more valuable sitting empty.

In the very early 80s, when I waited tables at Banditos (the Tex-Mex restaurant that used to be on Second Ave, I think between 10th and 11th but I’m never quite sure anymore), and lived on Pitt between Rivington and Delancey, I stopped at Moishe’s every morning on my way to work and bought two (TWO!) raspberry hamentaschen and ate them for breakfast. I always thought of Moishe’s as a vestige of the neighborhood’s early 20th century Jewish immigrant past, the days of the Yiddish theaters on Second Ave and pushcarts on the Lower East Side. There must have been a few kosher bakeries in the neighborhood back then, but Moishe’s opened in 1977, long after that era had passed. There were still Jewish businesses around — 2nd Avenue Deli probably the most famous — but beatniks and Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans and artists and drag queens had all staked big claims too by 1977.

I’m glad — though I’ll admit kind of holding my breath — that Moishe’s smaller satellite store down the block from me on Grand St. is reportedly staying open. I walk by it almost every day and like to swoon at those big-as-a-brick hamentaschen and black and white cookies all lined up on trays in the window AND I RESIST. Well, not every time, but I sure can’t eat 2 of them a day anymore.

The Four Fivers Will Make Up For That.

I knew there was something missing in contemporary porn. Where are the book deal negotiations? Everything was better in the 1880s.

From The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.

Do You Read Kevin Drum?

Is anyone else following Kevin Drum’s blog posts about climate change?

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, which is disorienting, unsettling for a person who grew up internalizing the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle). I think these ideas, in my family, were more about thrift than about the environment, at least to begin with, because my parents believed this, lived like this, and demanded it of their kids, before the environmental (or ecology, as they used to call it) movement was a thing.

And as an adult I never really questioned the wisdom of this ethos. I was always scraping by on not much money, so planning meals so that nothing was thrown away or, say, cutting up my worn-out t-shirts to use for rags so I didn’t have to buy paper towels was just necessary. Not that I didn’t see the big picture and believe that reducing consumption and waste was good for the earth. And of course being a lifelong liberal Democrat — well, pro-environment policy was just one of the things I believed in and supported.

But more and more I wonder (for instance, when I take my recycling, which I’ve rinsed and obsessively separated) downstairs and throw it in the bin that my neighbors have filled with dirty takeout containers, plastic bags, and pretty much whatever the fuck else they feel like throwing in there, knowing that even if there were a market for all that “recyclable” plastic — there isn’t: most of it ends up in a landfill — recycling plants will reject it because it’s “contaminated” with non-recyclables) I wonder, “why do I take this so seriously when most people can’t be bothered?” I mean, I’ve always assumed I’m helping, but am I helping?” And this is New York, a supposedly enlightened, liberal place. Good luck even trying to make an effort in Mississippi.

And then there’s the bigger idea that Kevin Drum writes about, which is that even if we pass all these GND laws here, get everyone’s behavior here, get everyone on board here (which, let’s be honest, will never happen), most of the world is not trying, not interested, in making the same changes. So if we really believe that this is an emergency, why are we so focused on these things that so clearly are not going to help at the massive scale required to save the world? Is it just because those are the things we’ve been relentlessly pounding away at for decades. Is it because we’re locked in a battle with a bunch of fucking idiots (that is, 1/2 the population) who still deny basic proven facts like evolution and global warming and the age of the planet and getting them to listen to reason has become the goal?

I don’t know. Like I said, pondering this stuff lately is disorienting. But I can’t find anything to disagree with in Drum’s assertion that if we actually truly believe we only have a few decades to reverse emissions drastically if we want to save the earth and its human population, shouldn’t we be laser-focused on finding something that stands a chance of doing that, instead of expending all our energy trying to implement green building and municipal composting programs?

Obsessed.

Is anyone else watching this series, A Discovery of Witches? It’s SO good. I keep comparing it to Dark Shadows, the horror soap from the 70s that haunted by tween dreams. It’s hard to say that, esthetically speaking, it’s anything like Dark Shadows except that it tickles the same itch. It’s super creepy, sexy, soapy, very fun and full of creatures of all stripes living in our world. We’re watching it on Sundance but I think it’s available on Amazon too.

BUT, over the ending sequence of one episode, this cover of Go Your Own Way crept in. Not only was it a case of brilliant dramaturgy it’s just a gorgeous cover of one of the best pop songs ever written. Who is this Lissie whose voice kind of evokes Stevie Nicks and whose video is a more than a bit L.A. witchy? I will find out!

Jack!

Okay, so the thing I’ve been working on for at least a couple years now (how long? I’ve lost track), the musical based on my high school diary — incidentally, how happy am I to have that tight little description at hand when people ask me what I’m working on: it’s evocative, terse, and it resonates with shows (Dear Evan Hanson, Be More Chill, which are not substantively much if anything like my show, except in the broadest general way but “I’m writing a musical based on my high school diary” gives people’s brains a place to land) that are getting a lot of attention right now in the musical theater world? — which started as a bio-musical of Horatio Alger, became a mashup of Horatio Alger and my high school diary, and then shed the Alger story — is now 13 songs and 95 pages long.

I sent the songs and draft to a trusted friend and colleague for feedback. He’s the first and only one to read it. They (they?) always say that when you finish your first draft you should put it aside and let your brain settle a bit before going back to re-write. So that’s where I am.

The obvious next choice would have been to take up the Horatio Alger musical, which spun off on its own, and I envision it as a more conventional book musical, because I’ve already written 3 songs for it. But I think I’d like to wait on that one. I think I might want to just write the songs and find someone else to write the book, someone with experience writing a conventional book.

I’d like to start something further afield. For a long time I’ve wanted to make a musical set in the Gold Rush. There’s tons of great queer stuff in there. But something in me is resistant to another piece requiring a lot of historical research. That muscle is still sore from the Hester Prynne musical. And I feel drawn to create a story out of thin air.

Not Really The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year.

Loss. All the other things that make the holiday season miserable — crowded stores and mobbed airports and bus stations, horrible shrill music everywhere, a dozen competing agendas and expectations and travel schedules that you have to somehow make work together, etc. — all those things are just amplifying factors; the heart of the sadness, the depression people feel, is abandonment. This time of year doesn’t make people feel awful until at some point it has changed. Your grandmother moved too far away and can’t come anymore, your uncle and aunt got divorced, someone had a falling out, you moved, someone died, Santa Claus turned out to be a lie.

The first really sad Christmas I remember was when I was I guess 21, my first year not in school, I made very little money and couldn’t afford the airfare. I don’t remember what I did that year, but it was not sitting around the tree for hours with my family listening to the Nutcracker, drinking egg nog and eating shrimp cocktail, and opening presents. My memory is fading, but I think there were two Christmases around that time in my life when I didn’t go home to Indiana.

“Home for Christmas” is not an expression I use anymore. The house where my parents lived since the mid-80s is not any of the houses I grew up in, but I thought of it in some sense as home, or it was one of the places I thought of as home — there have been many and sometimes none — but now that my mother is gone, every year it’s less home and more the house where my father lives alone. We’ll spend most of our visit at my sister’s family’s home, where I feel very much “at home,” but not “home.”

Not that any of these feelings are inappropriate to the season. The weeks leading up to the end of December are marked in different ways in different traditions, but the common thread is as ancient as humanity: we watch with dread and mourning the days grow shorter, the nights get longer. We are alone, abandoned by the sun, and we hope against hope that it will come back. When it does, we celebrate. Everything turns around. No more sadness. A new beginning. Of course we always knew it would come back, but the world still feels so empty, so bleak, until it does.

The trouble with all the other losses — your childhood house, Santa Claus, my mother — is that they are not so temporary. So the Christmas season has become less a vigil for the return of the sun than a reminder of everything that's gone long gone.

Thoughts On Kevin Spacey.

I want to say first that I have very mixed and hard to pin down feelings about men joining the #metoo movement. Sexual harassment and assault obviously don’t happen exclusively to women. But there’s something in this moment that I think is about women’s experience, about revealing to us all a particular experience that women have in common, as a gender. So something rubs me the wrong way about so many men sharing their #metoo stories. Still, it’s complicated, and, like I said, I’m not at all confident about my feelings here.

But I want to write about homophobia and how I think there’s room for a great deal more subtlety and depth in examining how it is at work in the reactions to Anthony Rapp’s story and Kevin Spacey’s reaction to it. I am heartbroken for them both.

The thrust of the reaction in the LGBT media and community has been immediate condemnation along the lines of “We’ve been struggling forever to convince straight people that gay men are not child molesters, and you come along and tell them that in fact we are.”

But from where I sit, it looks like it is the LGBT community and media who are telling people that, not Spacey.

pic.twitter.com/pg2PLnHpXt

— Zachary Quinto (@ZacharyQuinto) October 30, 2017

Nope to Kevin Spacey's statement. Nope. There's no amount of drunk or closeted that excuses or explains away assaulting a 14-year-old child.

— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) October 30, 2017

As recounted by Rapp, Spacey’s behavior that night was harassment, exploitation, and — depending on how you interpret the whole lying on top of him part of the story — possibly even assault. But Rapp was 14. He was not a child. Though this view is hardly universal, I personally think that an adult having sex with a 14-year-old, even with consent, is wrong for all kinds of reasons, but it is not pedophilia. If we don’t want straight people to think gay men are pedophiles, don’t say we are when we’re not.

On one level, this is an object lesson in the danger of respectability politics. It’s understandable how gun shy we are around the issue of children. When you’re called a child molester your whole life, you become incredibly self-conscious about it and you want to dig as wide a moat around it as you can to be sure you don’t get near it, you want to define it as broadly as possible to make sure you're the first and loudest to condemn it.

Of course, much of the LGBT community have resented Kevin Spacey for decades because he refused to publicly reveal his queerness, and, as so often happens when a closeted famous person is outed, the community is howling with gleeful derision. One thing, maybe the only thing, LGBT people share is the psychologically, emotionally, spiritually damaging experience of the closet. Yet there is so little empathy shown in these cases. I’ve always wondered about the causes of this ugly gay mob behavior: is it just that human trait of loving to see a successful person knocked off their pedestal?

I wish stories like these could be moments to teach straight people about how the closet distorts everything, for life. How shame corrodes our spirits. How scarred we are. Kevin Spacey is a man dealing badly, and very publicly, with the explosion of an aspect of his life that was out of control and which now seems to threaten every other part of his life. The closet is cancer. I feel deeply for him.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Spacey, but your application to join the gay community at this time has been denied."

— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) October 30, 2017

If this is a community that doesn’t have room for the most damaged among us, then I’m ashamed of my community.

Hugh Hefner.

I love watching the arc of the response when a big culture maker like Hugh Hefner dies. First the lionization (he was a god!), then the backlash (he was a monster!), then there’s room for something more balanced while the two sides continue to fight it out.

Whatever you think of him, it’s hard to imagine someone more culturally influential than Hugh Hefner. Or more peculiarly American. You see his influence everywhere, for good and bad. What creates such a phenomenon, what is it about a person at a particular moment in history that makes that happen? These are the questions I become obsessed with.

I start with the idea that people (men mostly?) have a bottomless appetite for erotic images, erotic talk, erotic thoughts, but historically various social controls (church/traditional morality and taboos, marriage) pushed back against indulging that appetite. This is just true, right?

Then comes the so-called sexual revolution of the second half of the 20th century, which is inextricably linked to the kind of mass commercialization of sexuality Hefner pioneered. Is it even possible to think of the successes of the women’s movement (relaxing of sex roles, women as the agents of their own sex lives, normalization of birth control…) without the new frankness about sex that Playboy sold? Or gay rights, same question?

Hefner took something it was obvious men wanted and sold it, and changed the world. The world-changing aspect of it was not accidental. He didn't just sell pictures of naked ladies. Along with the sexual images, he sold the new world in which it was possible to consume those images without shame.

Is it an American phenomenon, that it takes commercializing something to ease old taboos? Does it really come down to, “If I can make money off it, it must be okay.”? Are Americans willing to leave anything unexamined if it comes with a Horatio Alger story?

Put bluntly: On one hand Hefner ushered in the ubiquity in media of images of women as ideal and willing sex objects (and all the attendant distortions for men and boys regarding expectations and consent). On the other hand, he played a big part in relaxing the shame associated with female and homosexual desire (which contributed to a massive social and legal shift for the better for women and gay people). Is it possible to extricate one from the other? 

Just some thoughts.

Looking Back.

My friend J, J who was the first, true lasting friend I made in New York, who was in my class at Parsons and at the end of the first semester asked me to share her apartment on East 10th St. and we lived there together for 2 years until I fell in an ill-fated love and she went to Berlin (but kept the apartment even as the neighborhood around it more or less left; she still has that apartment) but who I fell out of touch with when I left New York in 1998 — we’d seen less and less of each other for several years before that because, well, I could list all the practical excuses I’ve cataloged in my head to make sense of the painful process of shifting alliances that happens over and over in a life, but why?

Now we are in touch again, and she’s commissioned me to write some text, an essay?, for a chapbook that she will print and publish to accompany an exhibit of her prints in Chicago where she lives and teaches now this fall. The text is to resonate with, respond to though not necessarily explicitly with the work she is showing. (She still makes visual art. I, you know, do not.) The prints span her career. One set is a series of drawings she made in 1984 in the process of working out a large installation. One set is a series of drawings in response to a large installation she made in the mid-90s.(I call them drawings -- they are monoprints.) A third set is current work.

This thing I’m writing, which I hesitate to call an essay because it is impressionistic, episodic, takes the shape of a review of our friendship (so of course it is meandering and disjointed). I’ve pulled out her letters to me spanning the mid-80s through the early 90s, half a lifelong conversation about what’s important, what we yearn for our lives to be, what we want our work to be about, the shape we want our lives to take, and I compare those hopes with how our lives actually look now. We are both still artists. That in itself is remarkable to me and something to be proud of regardless of whatever other dreams I’ve fallen short of. It was certainly never the most likely outcome, statistically speaking, but I never had any doubt and I doubt J did either.

So.

Between this project and my high school diary musical, which are the two big things on my desk right now, my writing life is thick with memory. Late 70s in Indiana, 80s in New York. It feels like judgement day up in here. When I dive into the past — I shouldn’t say dive because I more or less live there — my favorite game seems to be finding things I feel uneasy or guilty about or ashamed of and to pick them apart, to confess, and try to, if not absolve myself, understand. But, yes, absolve myself of.

It all, all of it, has the slightly queasy-making quality of a retrospective, which I supposed I should embrace. I am not done, but I am on the cusp of a new phase, I really believe. The work I am doing now is stronger, more vivid, more truthful, more true, than ever. I am 56 years old and have, as they say, zero fucks to give. A look back is appropriate. And then forward.

Life Has Purpose.

I'm embarrassed that I've let 4 months go by without blogging. Four months!

My most valid and hopefully persuasive excuse is that I'm deep into writing a new show. Not that I'm furiously writing every second and couldn't have taken a few minutes now and then to blog, but that the energy of a new project, the mental and emotional state it requires, or maybe not so much requires but creates, distorts things around it, one of those being my sense of what else I should be doing. Sitting, staring into space is so much more compelling than really anything else. (I note that lately C, more frequently than usual, says things to me like "What's wrong?" or "Are you upset about something?" to which I say, "No, I'm just in my head.")

This new thing, I've probably mentioned it a few times here, is the musical I'm writing based on my high school diary. It took me a while to get oriented in it, to get some traction, but now it's cooking. I have written six songs, five of which I think are very strong, and the sixth might be great as well but I'm less confident about that one. (It is sung by a character that has been, is, I think always will be, trickier. He's a deeply unsympathetic character who I'm asking the audience to empathize with. And that empathy is kind of key to the whole thing.)

The overall shape of the show (working title is "Jack" -- my middle name and the name I was called until I left home for college) is still a bit wild and woolly but that's not as worrisome as it was a few months ago. As I work and as the story takes shape, I keep a list of "Things I Can Do Now," practical tasks like "write the song that goes there," or "write a monolog about so-and-so" and I feel good if there are 6 or 8 things on that list. When the list gets short, that's when I start to worry that maybe I'm not sure what the piece is about yet.

This show might have a female character, I'm not sure yet, but it's about boys, about men, and I'm enjoying that quite a bit, since the two other projects that have occupied so much of my time and energy for the last few years, LIZZIE and the Hester Prynne musical, are all about women. I'm sure you all know how much I love writing about women, for women, women's stories ... but men are pretty interesting, too.

And, though my own life has always played at least some part in all my writing it has often been buried, especially in the adaptations like LIZZIE and Hester, it's exhilarating --and liberating in a self-mortification way -- to be doing this explicitly autobiographical work. I can just tell the story.

So I feel energized, excited. Life has purpose.

Opposite, Both True.

I have to say I was shocked to read the New York Times's huffy review of the new Sam Gold revival of The Glass Menagerie this morning because my experience of it was so deep and powerful -- and so intimate -- that I couldn't get my head around the notion that anyone in that room could have had such a different experience. It was hard for me to imagine anyone thinking that Gold altered or tinkered with or did violence to Tennessee Williams's play. To me, this production revealed the play.

But that's just how it works, I guess. Other critics described something more in line with what I saw.

Though, as an artist, I know how personally wounding a negative review can be, when it comes to other people's work, a polarized response makes me much more interested to see something than universal praise. (I didn't really have much interest in seeing Hamilton until the backlash started which made me think there was something interesting there after all. Yes, I'm still entering that damn lottery every. single. day.)

I keep reminding myself of this as the reviews of the London production of LIZZIE roll in. Depending on whom you believe, it is either "loud, messy, and incoherent" or it is "the greatest American musical since Sweeney Todd." The critics are just about evenly split between hating it and loving it, with not much in between. It is a roller-coaster. But if this weren't my work and I were just somebody reading reviews, this would be the show I would be dying to see.

All of which is to say that the (to my mind, clueless) Times review of The Glass Menagerie pissed me off, but on the other hand left me reassured that I'm in good company.

I Fell In Love Last Night.

For Christmas I got C tickets to the new revival of Sunday in the Park with George. The not-really-a-gift-because-it's-for-me-too-ness of it was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I've never really liked this show. It is musical theater apostacy, but I was never -- except for the Gypsy and West Side Story lyrics and maybe a dozen songs that I think are absolutely sublime and most of them are from Company -- never really much of a Sondheim lover. All those jagged melodies, and the always sort of cool, highbrow take on the subject at hand, and here's another word that rhymes with that, and here's another, and another. And another. Sunday in the Park with George always felt like the embodiment of everything I didn't respond to in Sondheim's work.

I am happy to report that it was I who was full of shit. In the middle of the first act, just when I'm thinking "what is this show about? is anything going to actually happen?," the lights focus in on George sitting downstage left, the orchestra gets quiet,  it's the end of the song, and he sings

Look I made a hat
Where there never was a hat 

I couldn't breathe for a second. From that moment till the end I was either weeping or on the verge of it. This show that I always said I didn't know what it was about was suddenly about everything I've ever cared about in my life. I knew it was about art, but I never felt how it was about art till last night.

(One big revelation for me was learning that Putting it Together is a song about fundraising. I guess I'd never listened closely to the lyrics, but I always thought it was a song about the artistic process. I know, duh, I'm probably the last person on earth that didn't know that. It didn't resonate when I first encountered the song -- I wasn't so battered and bruised by decades of negotiating the relationship between art and money.)

Maybe it's just because I'd never seen a production of the show, or maybe because this cast make what I think is overcomplicated music emotionally straightforward. Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford both give really clear, simple performances that were at times heartbreaking. The simplicity of the staging also threw the emotional arc into relief.

I love having something new to be a fan of. What's next? God forbid, Into the Woods?

Cowboy Mouth/LIZZIE.

In the last week or so I’ve had 2 separate, different dreams in which I am walking around someplace public wearing no pants, and I haven’t forgotten to wear pants or lost them or had them taken away from me but, in both dreams, I have deliberately put together a pantsless outfit to wear, and the dreams mostly consists of my effort to commit to the decision, to tamp down my discomfort, to pull it off. In the first dream, several days ago, I was walking down the street; in the second dream, last night, I was at work, maybe in a restaurant but the setting is vague.

Tonight I'll be on a redeye to London with my friend Tim for the U.K. premiere of the musical we began devising almost 27 years ago. T and I have made lots of theater together in the years since, but LIZZIE was our first collaboration. It spans the length of our friendship. It nearly spans the length of my career, and, since about 10 years ago when we resurrected the old one-act we'd put aside after a short run in the early 90s, began rethinking the book and adding not only a bunch of new songs but a third writer, our friend Alan, it has come to sort of be my career, at least in the eyes of people who haven't known me long. I am one of the writers of LIZZIE. "Have you met Steven? He's one of the writers of LIZZIE." I guess it's a function of how long musicals take to develop, but people ask me now "How's LIZZIE going?" in the same way they would ask someone, "So how's work?"

We always talk about the various LIZZIE influences, the great rock women, Heart, the Runaways, etc. But I was thinking this morning that even deeper in the DNA is the Sam Shepard/Patti Smith play, Cowboy Mouth. I was obsessed with this play in the early 80s, and I directed a production of it when I was in college, briefly, in Indiana in 1983. Cowboy Mouth is literally about yearning for redemption by rock and roll savior:

"In the old days, they had Jesus and them guys. His words don't shake through us anymore. We created rock 'n' roll in our image -- it's our child -- a new savior, rockin' toward Bethlehem to be born. God was selfish. He kept himself hidden. You gotta be a performer."

Here's a beautiful recent clip of Patti Smith:

And there's this: