R.P. Andrews's Blog, page 44

More About My Latest Book, “Buy Guys:” My One Month Career As A “Rentboy”

More About My Latest Book, “Buy Guys:” My One Month Career As A “Rentboy”

They say write about what you know, but if I was going to write erotic gay fiction about hustlers, as I did in “Not In It For the Love” and more recently, “Buy Guys,” well, logic would dictate I have to experience being one myself, right? So, at an age when most gay men are content to have the remote to their TV or DVD player in their lap, I plunked down my fifty bucks of Visa dollars and posted a profile on the now defunct rentboy.com.

But honestly, would someone actually pay for me, even if time had been kind, to have sex with them?

A buddy once said to me that he found it pretty pathetic that somebody had to pay for sex. But I heartedly disagree. Sure, sex can be a wonderful exchange between two people, but why can’t it also be a commodity for those willing to buy what they want, just like the newest tech toy or an Abercrombie and Fitch polo? Contrary to the notion that only losers pay for sex, there are plenty of good looking guys out there, busy with high power 24/7 careers or entwined in complicated personal lives, who just choose to take the expedient route. I’ve always been an advocate for making prostitution in this country legal and get over our collective Puritanical hang-ups. Make sure the boys and girls are disease free, and tax ‘em, baby.

“Who’s your daddy?” was my on-screen persona, trying to create a market niche distinct from all the pretty boys, and I openly admitted I was over 40 in my ad (how much over 40 I conveniently left out), but rationalized that tidbit with the tagline, “but you did say you wanted a daddy, didn’t you?”

I low bowed my hourly rate to $150 so I’d have a better chance at scoring, given the stiff competition, and made myself “out only” – their place, not mine. Would-be clients could contact me either via email on the site or my cell phone #, and I used a Tracfone just for that so if or when I had any issue associated with my new career – as in being stalked, like I should have such problems – I could chuck the phone just like a drug dealer.

So what does it take to be a Rentboy, besides, of course, some alluring physical attributes (mine I hoped would be my still boyish looks and a tight compact furry body I worked hard at to maintain) and a lot of moxie?

(a) The ability to do it with just about anyone, and if you’re playing the top like me, you know dicks don’t lie, which I figured wouldn’t be a problem given some of the loser tricks I’ve had over the years. You just put yourself in a fantasy mode, right? I soon learned what kept your libido steaming was the fact the guy wanted you bad enough, he’d pay for you. I later read professional escorts need money in their eyesight even when they’re having recreational sex, like Pavlov’s dog.

(b) A feeling of super-superiority and super self-confidence, even if it’s all pretend.

(c) The absolute resistance to ask the guy what he looks like. Yes, you need to know what he’s looking for, but, again, those big bills on the night stand are what are supposed to arouse you,

not whether he looks like Woody Allen’s older brother.

When a week went by after posting my ad and I got no takers, I was convinced I had pushed the envelope too far, that I was a jerk for even thinking I could pull this off at my age, with all the twenty something, thirty something porn star quality meat that was vying for that same universe of hungry, lonely men. What was I trying to do? Make the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest male hooker?

Ah, but my feelings of dejection were premature. At the beginning of my second week I got a hit, and by the end of the month I had had four guys pay me for sex: a social anthropologist and university professor in town to judge a doctoral dissertation; a vacationing retired dentist from Palm Springs; a farm boy cute, multimillionaire software developer from D.C. in town to close a deal and who wanted me to play “coach.” We spent the last twenty minutes of his hour talking about his mousey wife and two kids.

My last “client” was my greatest challenge, a big guy, as far away from my sexual preference as, well, a woman, but do him I did, thanks to a 100 mg, of Viagra and my determination to pass my male escort final exam.

So what did I learn from my month as a rentboy? That physicality and physical attraction defy and transcend social class, professional standing, race, and most of all, personal pride; and that while money can’t buy you love, it sure as hell can buy you one of the best fucks of your life.

BTW, my brief career as a rentboy led to a gig on a male porn site, hotoldermale.com, but that’s a story for another day.

“Buy Guys” is published by Wilde City Press.

Friday: How I Came Up With the Characters for “Buy Guys.”

Another Installment of My Gay Advice Column, “Go Ask Daddy”

Another Installment of My Gay Advice Column, “Go Ask Daddy”

Buddy: I’m on a few of the gay hook-up sites but I say right up front I’m not looking for one night stands but a long term relationship. I’m an attractive intelligent young guy, but get few hits and those that do respond tell me I’m nuts to try to find romance on places like Manhunt. Am I wrong?

Daddy: It’s not that your intentions are wrong, but the way you’re going about it might be. Saying in your profile on a site where most men are looking for recreational sex that you’re searching for a lover is intimidating to even would-be suitors, not just guys who only want a little bedroom action, and puts your expectations in the stratosphere. You sound like some over-active broad who on the first date is talking where to hold the wedding reception.

Get real. Even when such encounters lead to LTR’s, the sex has to be there in the first place. How many connecting on these sites don’t have sex the same day or very soon thereafter? If they don’t, it ain’t gonna happen. Instead, loosen up and say that while your future goal is to find a soulmate, meeting guys for fun isn’t off the books either, a movie or dinner then the main event. Plus, it’s important especially in gay life to meet all sorts of men so you learn how to “read” people, and get to know – in your gut – who’s real and who’s bullshit and not be done in by your own naiveté. (Like a friend of mine who after forty years of str8 marriage, suddenly entered gay life and believed his meth head bf when he said he was off the junk.) Yes, you might get lucky and meet your dream man. But life is short – why not have some meaningful encounters with guys in the meantime?

As for gay “dating” sites, I only explored a couple, but sadly, as my str8 neighbor told me with her experiences with the hetero varieties, they often are cover stories for guys really only looking for a quick roll in the hay.

Good luck.

Cleaning House

Cleaning House

Well, as one commentator said yesterday, Iowa picks corn, New Hampshire picks Presidents.

We’ll see.

It’s interesting how this time around gays are not a solid Democratic block nor all Hillary lovers. But however the cookie ultimately crumbles, at least the New Hampshire results were based on votes, not coin-tosses, and helped temper Cruz who I find an arrogant, officious, holier-than-thou, conniving fag hater; and, to a lesser degree, Rubio who, while smart and articulate, doesn’t like us either.

Say what you will about Trump, at least he’s beholden to nobody, and for that alone I respect him. And I’m especially happy to see him scaring the shit out of the old guard GOP since he doesn’t need to suck anybody’s ass for their money, and could very well pull off the nomination in the biggest populous anti-politician upheaval since Andrew Jackson. Remember, Reagan was just an actor (noticed how he was lost when his teleprompter screwed up?) but was smart enough to surround himself with people, at least some of them, who knew their shit. Trump could do the same.

As for Hillary losing to Sanders, I think she knew it was a giveaway since New England is his home turf. In my mind she’s the most experienced person for the job, but she’s got to work harder convincing younger voters and, yes, some women, if she’s going to pull it off. If the Dems throw the nod to Sanders, the GOP could nominate Mickey Mouse and win. Sanders has a lot of great ideas but let me ask you, who’s going to pay for them?

I think the first real tests will come when Texas, the second largest state, population wise, and my adopted home, Florida, the third largest state in the country, hold their primaries, Texas on March 1, and Florida on March 12.

Now and Then: The Response to Zika Vs. AIDS

Now and Then: The Response to Zika Vs. AIDS

The Zika virus, which causes draconian birth defects in pregnant women and can be transmitted not just by mosquitoes but even sex (sound familiar?), hits the shores of the U.S from Latin America and health officials are all over it. Travel restrictions, health warnings, the works, in a campaign just weeks old. It has affected us down here in Broward County where Fort Lauderdale is located, and Miami, and my prediction is it may negatively impact on this year’s tourist season.

Okay you say, that’s what our health guardians are supposed to be doing, right? Absolutely, but contrast this to how the prevalence of HIV was treated over thirty years ago. If you know your gay history, and I didn’t have to bone up on it, I lived it, the response was, to be polite, underwhelming. The first cases in urban centers like San Francisco and New York of almost exclusively gay men coming down with rare infectious diseases like Kaposi’s sarcoma, which up to then had only been seen in Africa, were viewed as medical curiosities. The problem was quickly labeled the “gay plague,” as if to imply that it only happened to “those people,” so who gave a shit.

Ronald Reagan has been all but defied by the GOP as the Great White Father of the modern Republican Party but as President, following those first cases in 1981, he did virtually nothing. His response according to his biographer Lou Cannon was “halting and ineffective.” Gay men were treated like pariah and even funeral directors refused to accept their bodies. One of Reagan’s best buds was Reverend Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority (again, folks, listening to the rhetoric of today’s GOP contenders, have things really changed?) that viewed HIV as “the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Those in health care pleaded for money to be immediately thrown at the problem, but Reagan’s response was indifference, even after his friend from his Hollywood days, Rock Hudson, whose career as a matinee idol in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s would have been ruined had he come out of the closet, was diagnosed and eventually died of AIDS. It was not until 1987, close to the end of his second term, that Reagan even mentioned the word AIDS publicly. Eventually, massive funding became a reality but it was too late for the thousands of gay men whose time had run out.

In a strange way, your predecessors and my contemporaries who suffered through this terrible period made it easy on American society because they represented a somewhat isolated sub-culture, not mainstream America. Had AIDS hit like Zika has, I’m sure the response would have been 365 degrees different.

So is what is happening now a reflection of the hard lessons learned when another epidemic hit our shores a generation ago? Or is it because it affects heterosexuals, in fact, young mothers-to-be, heterosexuals carrying our next generation, and not “those people?”

The Way We Were: The Gay Plague

The Way We Were: The Gay Plague

I wasn’t one of those urban gay men that knew legions of buddies who died of a disease that ironically disfigured men so obsessed with their looks and physical being. But I do remember Bobbie Rosenberg who lived on the Upper East Side in an old walk-up, a relic of the turn-of the-last-century days when immigrants crowded what were then considered tenements. It was the tail end of the seventies, and we had met at Uncle Charlie’s, a local bar, played around one night, then morphed into Saturday night bar hopping buddies. While I watched the clock, and wondered what the traffic would be like in the Lincoln Tunnel since I was still living at home at the time in Jersey, Bobbie, moonfaced, stoop-shouldered Bobbie, knew exactly what to do to get a man to come back with him.

I was fucken jealous and rationalized that the guys were so horny they’d fuck their cat by that point.

Bobbie also had the not-so-coveted knack of contracting the Disease of the Month which didn’t bother him at all; in fact, he’d often brag to me about what exotica he had caught getting fucked. Amoebas were my favorite.

December 31, 1979, Bobbie hosted a New Year’s Eve Party in his tiny apartment and invited George, my partner and I. I remember watching Dave Clark who had that gay icon group, “The Village People” on. They sang some song extolling the upcoming new decade and the buzz among us gay guys was that the ‘80’s were to be OUR time. Had we known what was ahead, we would have dumped our poppers down the toilet and joined a seminary. Looking back, though I know it wasn’t true, AIDS seemed like some Biblical retribution for the Sodom and Gomorrah ‘70’s.

I lost touch with Bobbie soon after that (George was never a fan of his – “he’s a pig”), and I often wondered if Bobbie had been swept away in the First Wave of the AIDS genocide that hit soon after.

A few years later on vacation in Houston’s Montrose gay ghetto, I picked up a tall, balding, non-descript looking guy with a hairy swimmers build bod and clipped mustache who was OK with oral sex. Maybe because he knew it would be easier to get. It was the mid 80’s, even ATZ wasn’t on the horizon yet, and after we played, Herb took a dozen eggs out of his frig, and separated the whites from the yolks which he then chucked down with some OJ. He was insistent that this newest craze in self-medication for AIDS was helping him. I never met him again so I’ll never know.

When I went for my first HIV test and had to wait a week for the results, I was convinced, even though I never bottomed, I would be positive and was ready to accept that reality since I was an adult male who knew exactly what he was dealing with, not some poor weepy victim, a role so many guys I’d meet took on who played with fire after 1985 when it was clear you didn’t get it from a toilet seat or a bad bottle of poppers. But each time I’ve been tested, I come up negative, and even my gay doc subscribes to the theory that some guys – maybe a very small number of us – are just immune.

Or maybe just lucky.

And you know what they say about luck.

The Way We Were – NYC’s Leather Scene: Gone But Not Forgotten

The Way We Were – NYC’s Leather Scene: Gone But Not Forgotten

Once upon a time, there was a sign stenciled in white on the black wall of the tight, SRO-style john at one of NYC’s sleaziest West Village bars, the Spike. “Don’t Flush for Piss.” That sign said it all.

True, you can still find vestiges of the Sleaze Factor and echoes of the glory days of the seventies, eighties and nineties in Manhattan’s new Eagle, which opened shortly before I moved to Florida in 2002, or Fort Lauderdale’s Ramrod leather bar. But for real authentic sleaze you’d have to take a time machine back to New York City’s West Village Sleaze Alley threesome, the Spike, the Eagle and the Lure.

For anybody in the leather/levi scene of decades past and living in New York, visiting these bars on a Friday and Saturday night was a given. You wouldn’t just visit one of them even if essentially the same guys frequented all three. You’d have your early evening beer at the Rawhide in Chelsea (for those of us who came in from the ‘burbs parking in the West 20’s was saner). But by 11ish you were trotting your levied ass (or bare one if you were wearing chaps under your trench) down to West Street. The streets were dimly lit and kinda scary to be honest, but you didn’t care. You were butch (with no shirt under your leather jacket on a 10 degree NYC January night so your tits were all perky for your grand unveiling in the bar) and about to enter Manhattan’s Butch Zone. The “S” bars were all within reasonable walking distance of one another, so making the circuit was easy even with the wind blowing in your face.

And when you’re Saturday night horny, four or five blocks in sub-zero weather means nothing. Remember these were the days long before you were able to connect naked in your bedroom on the web.

While the other bars of the triumvirate were a bit kinder when it came to dress code, at the Lure it didn’t matter what you looked like; if you were wearing sneakers or, Jesus, after-shave or cologne, Mr. Bouncer would turn you away.

And once you entered these temples to sleaze, there was no place, I mean NO PLACE, to move except against another sweaty body in bars the size of the men’s section at any Macy’s. The smell of man-drenched arm pits and chests, beer-laden piss, even carcasses (The Lure, in the heart of the now chic Meat Market, was once a meat packing warehouse) was everywhere. While it was nice to socialize with some buddies, cruising was the main reason you were there in this world before 24/7 cybersex. And even if it was more illusion than reality, these holes had the dingy, dreggy look as if they had been there from the early days of NYC’s pre-gay liberation when being queer meant belonging to some truly secret society of men, not a sub-cultural demographic dissected by Congress and wooed by Corporate America.

On Summer Sunday late afternoons from 4 until about 8, the Sleaze torch was handed over to the Dugout at West and Christopher. There, sweaty men, half naked men flooded the corner, searching for the one last fling or two of the weekend before Monday morning reality came crashing down on all our respective little shitty worlds.

If they hadn’t become victims of the real estate boom that transformed this abandoned sector of New York into a new Soho, (though I understand it’s still called the Meat Packing District), NYC’s gay sleaze alley might still be with us. But alas, that was not to be. While City dwellers and tourists can still point to places like the Eagle or the Ramrod, it just ain’t the same without the West Village threesome, smelly corners of the world that every leather/levi bar today, whether it realizes it or not, is seeking to emulate, replicate, recreate.

Last fall, I visited New York City for the first time in thirteen years, and one afternoon took the subway from my two hundred dollars a night hotel in the garment district down to Sheridan Square and the West Village, my old stomping grounds. Christopher Street, the catwalk of my youth, was now more trendy than sexy, and where my seedy hangouts, the original Eagle, the Spike and the Lure, once catered to the whims of the leather/levi crowd, high rise condos sliced into the sky. The crumpling West Street piers, the site of decadent night time liaisons, were now a sleek urban park, complete with a jogging trail and tourist ferries. Ah, if only the sidewalks could talk.

As for St. Vincent’s Hospital, once a City landmark on 12th Street which ran the health care system I worked for till I left for Florida in 2002 (the system went bankrupt a few years later), it was being converted into luxury apartments.

Somewhat of a sentimental fool, I’ve used the leather motif a few times in my books like “Not In It For the Love” and “The Czar of Wilton Drive,” but the philosopher was right.

You can’t go home again.

I’m just hoping some gay historian had the smarts to save the “Don’t Flush for Piss” sign in the Spike’s john before everything came tumbling down.

Friday: The Way We Were: The Gay Plague

What The Results of the Iowa Caucus Mean To Us

What The Results of the Iowa Caucus Mean To Us

Probably nothing. After all, only twice since 1980 has it picked a Republican candidate that went on to win the nomination. And who gives a fuck what a state that is 92% white with a mere three million people think? (Sorry, my Iowa followers.) I wanna hear from racially, ethnically, socially and, yea, sexually diverse California and New York and Texas and Florida which together represent a quarter of the country’s adult population. Hell, there are more people living in South Florida than the whole state of Iowa.

Yet Cruz’s win is troubling since he represents the most conservative (and Bible Beltin’) wing of the GOP, and even the smidgen of a chance self-avowed Socialist Sanders gets the nomination over moderate Clinton (who barely beat him in the Iowa caucus) practically guarantees a Republican in the White House. Wed that with the current movement by the Tightasses across the country to give businesses and other organizations the right to discriminate against us because of ”religious beliefs,” and in a few short years we may lose what it took decades for us to win.

The Way We Were: How the L.A. of the Sixties Shaped My Writing

The Way We Were: How the L.A. of the Sixties Shaped My Writing

Whenever I see a gray-haired, pony-tailed biker or eighteen year old John Denver-look-alike hippy, complete with backpack and guitar strung over his shoulder, I think back to the heyday both are attempting to relive, the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. Those were the years when we who were just coming out benefited as the first generation of homosexuals from the new won openness of the gay liberation movement. For me, that very formative, impressible time was spent not in NYC that I could practically see out my Jersey window, but a continent away in L.A. where I went to complete my master’s degree at the University of Southern California, a socially acceptable reason for an X-rated movie. You see, living at home (I went to a commuter college for my B.A.) had become impossible, with two well-meaning but overbearing parents who called out the cops if their boy wasn’t home by midnight. L.A. offered me not only freedom, but an unbridled opportunity to play the scene for the first time in my fresh gay life.

When we talk about the L.A. scene today, we think of Silver Lake, by extension Palm Springs, and, of course, West Hollywood. Ah, but before there was glitzy, pretty boy, overpriced West Hollywood, there was Hollywood, not the mythical Hollywood perpetuated even today by entertainment pundits, but a seedier version of the town that by the late ‘60’s was still pretty with its blocks of pastel colored garden apartments, but pretty like a sixty year old whore with a good Max Factor make-up job. I found it ironic that Hollywood as a municipality technically didn’t even exist, and was just a section of the City of Los Angeles. But my studio apartment off Melrose was cheap and, at most, a brisk twenty minute walk from the best of the scene of that day, an important consideration for someone who couldn’t afford a car and relied on L.A.’s joke of a bus service. (These were the pre-subway days.)

Now, in those days, before cell phones and iphones and Manhunt.net’s, you met guys the old fashioned way, mainly in the bars and the baths (the latter of which I didn’t discover until I was back in NYC). One other approach, a path less taken, was the “male-seeking male” personals that only appeared in liberal, quasi-commie, anti-establishment, anti-LBJ pubs like the Los Angeles Free Press. You were assigned an anonymous “mailbox” by the newspaper that forwarded any responses (of course, unopened) to your real address. Heavens, there were no dick or bare ass shots up there for the world to gawk at (you hoped the guy would send you a pic of what he looked like, at least), just four lines and out, thank you ma’am. All by snail mail, which meant it often took weeks to cement a contact, versus the technological miracle of virtually instantaneous e-mail (so why do we go back and forth today with endless e-mails and still end up nowhere? Have things really changed?).

And just like today, guys, well, they lied. Sent pics taken at their Confirmation or descripts that had to be written while the guy was high on grass or LSD. Now I must confess I met some great sex partners, bless you, Free Press, but I also had my clunkers like the guy who told me he was 25 (when I was 22) and who I took two buses to rendezvous with at some gas station only to spot his toup from my seat on the bus. (Yes, I went through with it anyway. Young or old, when you’re horny, a dick is a dick.)

A neighbor in my very gay complex, Tommy, personified the new old Hollywood. A Cincinnati transplant and beautician by trade, he had been a wigmaker for one of the studios but had recently lost his job and was living on unemployment. His hobby? Collecting match covers from whatever club or cheap motel he had been in and covering his bathroom wall with them. He soon became my tour guide to the Hollyweird club scene.

There were plenty of bars to choose from in the Hollywood of the 70’s: levi, leather (mainly in Silver Lake), and nelly (they weren’t called twinks then), all filled with mostly young guys. Just like me. But the two clubs I remember most fondly were Gino’s (named for its owner), a dance bar on Melrose that I reminisce about every time I hear the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back;” a super hit at the time; and The Farm, a ranch-motif bar with sawdust on its dance floor, where I fell in love with half a dozen handsome, rugged guys, again, young and hot, every time I went.

And after the bars closed, just about everybody ended up at Arthur’s Diner off Hollywood Boulevard which was almost as cruisy as the bars and sported more pretend women than the genuine article most nights.

But for those of you gay men under 30 who romanticize the ‘60’s, not everything was rosy. Remember, it was the height of the Vietnam War, and every one of us dreaded opening our mailboxes to find that love letter from Uncle Sam. I naively thought I would be exempted from the draft because I was continuing my education, but I was dead wrong. The prevailing notion at the time was that admitting you were a fag could mark you for life, career wise. But through a lesbian neighbor I made contact with a physician who got guys off, a libertarian who even resembled Timothy Leary. For a hefty fee, he morphed my nervous stomach syndrome into a full-fledged bleeding duodenal ulcer that earned me a 4-F. It’s still the best $800 I ever spent in my life.

So, why, you ask, did I ever leave this wet dream of a lifestyle, after getting my M.A. degree, for cold, bleak New York and my parents’ outstretched tentacles?

I was broke, living on Campbell Soup towards the end. To this day, I’ll never use Bank of America that, in those poverty-stricken days of my youth, charged me a fee every time I withdrew money from my quickly dwindling account.

I also suffered from the chicken or the egg syndrome. Without money, I couldn’t buy a car, and without a car, it was hard to land a decent paying job. Desperate to keep my long Beatles style hair, I even bought a short hair wig at a Hollywood novelty store for interviews. I finally managed to land a part-time gig in the basement of the now defunct Broadway Department Store on Hollywood Boulevard, not far from the still very much alive Roosevelt Hotel, gift-wrapping other people’s stuff. Not exactly a career goal for someone with two degrees.

I did apply for one job connected to the old Hollywood, the position of “title writer,” whatever the hell that meant, at glorious MGM. Taking the bus out to Culver City, however, by then ghettoized and resembling more a dingy warehouse district than the sacred home of the “dream factory,” my idealizations of a glamorous L.A. were abruptly blown, and not getting the job, I realized my own fantasy of living and working here was not to be.

My only real friend, out-of-work neighbor Tommy, left in desperation for his hometown in Ohio, hoping his old beauty shop would take him back. His sacred matchbook collection ended up on the curb in the garbage

Finally, Mother Nature reared her ugly head. Living in L.A., you get used to tremors anytime of the day or night. But when the earthquake of ‘71 hit, – my apartment was spared any serious damage but businesses like Broadway suffered broken windows and ruptured pipes, and a hospital in “The Valley” collapsed – I took it as a sign that it was time for this gay boy to head home. The rest, as they say, is history.

So, too, for me, was L.A.

Yet, in all my books, I have tried to recapture that easy, breezy lifestyle I once enjoyed for a brief blink of my life when responsibilities were someone else’s game.

Wednesday: The Way We Were –  NYC’s Leather Scene, Gone But Not Forgotten

Just Because the Human Rights Campaign Named Wilton Manors, Florida “Perfect” Doesn’t Mean It Is

Just Because the Human Rights Campaign Named Wilton Manors, Florida “Perfect” Doesn’t Mean It Is

The Human Rights Campaign recently released its annual Municipality Equality Index and Wilton Manors (and two other Florida cities, Orlando and St. Petersburg) scored 100 percent on a whole host of categories: “non-discrimination laws, municipal employment policies, inclusiveness of city services, law enforcement including hate crime reporting, and municipal leadership on matters of equality.”

Okay we get it and why Wilton Manors, a shit hole twenty odd years ago (I know – I partied there as a snowbird and where the iconic Alibi stands today was a shooting den for druggies) is probably the fastest growing gay mecca in the United States right now, and why every self-respecting gay man or couple, especially the ready-to-retire and just retired Baby Boomers, are determined to have their own slice of paradise.

But I’ve lived here in the Fort Lauderdale area for thirteen years now, in neighboring Oakland Park (which ranked 86 in the HRC score card), and regularly play in WM, and I’ve got to tell you it ain’t all perfect.

What they don’t tell you is:

WM, again because of gayboy demand, has some of the most overpriced real estate and rentals in Broward County (I bought in Oakland Park because it was saner price-wise, and just 15 minutes away from Party Town.)

The closer your home is to the strip the more likely you’ll hear the noise of the bars and the more likely your quiet street will be invaded by cars on a weekend night. (Never enough parking in Party Town.) And the drunks who will attempt to drive them. Ditto with the piss on your shrubs.

Pedestrians on Wilton Drive, the strip where most of Lauderdale’s night life is located, are an endangered species on a weekend night – yes, guys have been run over – and so far there’s been a lot of talk of what to do about but not much action.

If you do drive, get ready for the bike boys – like in Schwinn – from all directions. These are the gay guys who have too many DUI’s or no money to afford wheels – the four version kind. Go ‘head, label me a spoiled suburban brat but it’s kind of sad to see a fifty something year old man on the bike at two o’clock in the afternoon pedaling home with groceries. (These are the same guys who can’t host because they have four roommates and want you to pick them up, take them to your place, fuck ‘em, and take them back. Sure. You live in suburban sprawl South Florida and you don’t have a car??!)

If you don’t mind being cruised at ten in the morning in the twenty items or less aisle of the local supermarket, you’ll love WM. But if enough is enough, don’t move there.

But hey, don’t let me bust your bubble if you’re contemplating moving to Gay Paradise. I’m sure you have the capability of doing that all by yourself.

Who’s On First?

Who’s On First?

When I was still back in New York, working in PR, Mae West, the buxom, nineteen thirties Hollywood queen of double entendres (“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?”) who didn’t make her first film till her forties, came up in casual office chatter.

“Who’s Mae West?” asked my twenty two year old secretary Jennifer.

“Talk about making me feel real old,” I replied.

Well, for those of you are don’t recognize the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, super big in the forties and fifties in both the movies and on radio and later TV, this dynamic duo was perhaps most famous for their skit, “Who’s On First.” (I’ll get to how this connects to the transgender couple pictured here in a minute.) Here’s the skit:

Abbott: Strange as it may seem, they give ball players nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello: Funny names?

Abbott: Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–

Costello: That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

Abbott: I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third–

Costello: You know the fellows’ names?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: Well, then who’s playing first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow’s name on first base.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The fellow playin’ first base.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy on first base.

Abbott: Who is on first.

Costello: Well, what are you askin’ me for?

Abbott: I’m not asking you–I’m telling you. Who is on first.

Costello: I’m asking you–who’s on first?

Abbott: That’s the man’s name.

Costello: That’s who’s name?

Abbott: Yes.

Abbott: What was that?

Costello: I said, I DON’T CARE!

Abbott: Oh, that’s our shortstop!

Okay, by now you’re saying, Ray, get to the point.

See, we got this transgender couple in Ecuador. He was a she and she was a he. Cute couple, huh? But since they both still have their original junk, she who used be he impregnated he who used to be a she who is now carrying their baby. Hey, they’re even waiting for the Catholic Church there to bless them.

As Diane, formerly Luis, correctly pointed out, “It would be a contradiction to criticize us for giving birth naturally.”

Understand now why I called this blog, “Who’s on First?”