It’s funny: even the Chelsea fags I know sneer at Chelsea fags. Like, no one actually believes they themselves fit the stereotype. Same way with Circuit queens. “Oh, yeah, I’m going to Pensacola for Memorial Day weekend,” says a buff, waxed, tanned, tribally tattooed friend, the earphones dangling around his neck pumping a tinny Danny Tenaglia megamix. “I mean, I’m not into that whole Circuit scene, but it’s a good party.”
Fact of the matter is, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who identifies with those stereotypes. Everyone’s always criticizing them, and now the New York Times–in concert with queer crooner/slender-bender Rufus Wainwright–has contributed its two cents.
My point is, by the time the Times starts spouting opinions on something like this, isn’t it ipso facto old news? It reeks of staleness, like a Monica Lewinsky joke. Which, of course, just confirms what I already knew:
1. The Chelsea fags have become the 21st century equivalent of the West Village piano bar queens, content with their tats and their gym memberships and their marketing jobs and their home lives and their cats and their homes on Fire Island.
2. The new homo hipsters–the anti-clone rebels like Mr. Wainwright–are reputedly the East Villagers, sporting slightly different tattoos and membership cards for more “authentic” gyms, toting iMacs for their web design work, and dancing to rock-and-roll instead of 4/4 techno
3. Because points 1 & 2 are confirmed by no less than the Gray Lady herself, it follows that the East crowd itself is growing/has grown tiresome, too, which means it must be time for a reductive musical about their tastefully squalid lives–oh, wait, it’s happened already: Rent…. Perhaps a new one’s in order, though–one with a West Side Story, Sharks vs. Jets showdown climax on the sidewalk in front of Big Cup, with a slightly buffer, inked-up Rufus caught on a payphone in the middle. I got the book–who wants to take a stab at the lyrics?
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