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So, Jonno and I were walking down West 23rd Street in New York, very near the corner of 9th Avenue. It was a pretty day–not particularly sunny, but not cloudy either, nice temp–and I’m not sure what possessed me (the weather? too much coffee?), but I suddenly took Jonno in my arms and started waltzing across the sidewalk. It was a cute, loving gesture, but Jonno would have nothing of it and pushed me away. I don’t think his rejection had anything to do with a fear of dancing like a maniac in public–those of you who remember Jonno’s Girlina-inspired flashdanceathon at Voodoo on Decadence Sunday know he ain’t afraid of cuttin’ up. He probably just didn’t like the song I was singing in his ear as we danced: it was the Musak version of “Physical,” taken straight from a current Ameritrade commercial.

As punishment for my bad choice of music, the next thing I knew Jonno and I found ourselves in a small backyard in New Orleans doing aerobics in our street clothes with a large group of strangers. The group was being led by an ex of mine who never really struck me as the aerobics instructor type, but I guess you never can tell these days. The tunes were much better than in the previous segment: we were sweating to Bio’s high-tech theme song from Bust-a-Groove. The scene was still a little strange, though, ’cause the song was being played live by the Treme Brass Band. Nevertheless, I was doin’ pretty good keeping up with everybody, but I was dancing very close to a window-unit air conditioner and was in continual danger of jumping up too high and giving myself a concussion.

I guess consuming large quantities of nearly raw meat before bedtime isn’t a very good idea.

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I went searching for couple of things in my “important box”–the one I use to keep old photos, subway maps from long-ago vacations, decade-old tax returns–and happened across my college journals. I’d almost forgotten they were there.

It’s a little painful, looking back; lots of silly observations and stuff. But surprisingly, some of it’s pretty good, too–even a couple of the poems.

Of course, today these notebooks are most interesting as a sort of time capsule. It’s funny how the images I used then (I was a big fan of the Imagist movement, especially the work of cigar-smoking, combat-boot-wearing Amy Lowell) can remind me of exactly what I was thinking when I wrote some of these pieces.

I won’t bore you with any of it now, but maybe later.

And oh, yes, Chad, I’m flattered, although I don’t really see the resemblance.

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It’s Gay Pride weekend in New Orleans. Nearly every other queer community on the planet holds Pride in June to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, but after years of following that plan, New Orleans’ Pride organizers had become discouraged by the light crowds. They assumed the problem was the weather–June’s not usually scorching, but it’s not usually pleasant to be outside for long periods of time then either. So a couple of years ago, the Pride Committee moved the event to September/October (theoretically, to coincide with National Coming Out Day), assuming they’d have a larger turnout.

I think I can say they were mistaken.

Pride is held in Armstrong Park now, closer to the Fruit Loop–Ground Zero for gay bars and clubs. Spatially, it’s bigger than it used to be when Pride was held at Washington Square in the Marigny, but the crowd’s essentially the same size. And, of course, the gay parade still sucks–but to be fair, I guess it takes a lot to impress the New Orleanaise when it comes to parades.

So, anyway….

My first thought for the day is this: despite the fact that New Orleans has a long and colorful history as a homosexual haven, homosexuality doesn’t mean much here, politically or socially. In New Orleans, the most significant factor in determining your social worth is how many generations your family’s been here–and of course, bound up in that, how you rank economically. If you’re of a certain class and you’ve got three or more generations worth of New Orleanians in your photo album, you hang with certain people; they may be gay, they may be straight, but what binds you together–the identity that galvanizes you–is class. It works the same for most other minorities–in the African American community, for example: the Honores, the Glapions, the Hazeurs, they know they sit high in the pecking order and they aren’t afraid to let you know it, no matter who you are.

Second thought: homosexuality, when normative (e.g. on Eighth Avenue in New York, on Commercial Street in Provincetown, at the corner of Castro and 18th in San Francisco), is boring. It is herd-mentality incarnate, from the hackneyed political rhetoric to the rainbow shoelaces. Or maybe that’s just me and my homosexual “got-to-be-different” gene, afraid of the fact that I’ve been totally assimilated… Yeah, that’s probably it.

Final thought: tonight’s episode of The Simpsons revolved around Mr. Burns long-lost son (played by Rodney Dangerfield). But that’s not important. What’s important is that it ended with a massive street party scene, with every citizen of Springfield dancing to Journey’s “Anyway You Want It.” It’s a song I haven’t heard much since it came out in 1980, and it brought back a creepy wave of nostalgia: bad-ass, long-haired, beer-swilling girls driving Buick Regals up and down the main drag of town with their excitingly redneck boyfriends; the first time I kissed another boy and the conflicting emotions I felt as my lips rubbed across the stubble of his adolescent beard; my constant search for homosex in my hometown and the simultaneous fear that I’d one day be outed–not to my parents or even the general public, but to my friends (I guess like most teens, my parents were at the bottom of my list of concerns). It made my stomach churn. In a bad way and a good way.

Pretty scattered today, huh?

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Grrr.

Why “Grrr,” you ask?

“Grrr” because it’s 5:30am and I woke up about half an hour ago with my heart racing like I’d just run the 100-yard dash in world-record time and of course I can’t go back to sleep, so I’m up and I’m not going to get to sleep again ’till at least midnight, the thought of which exhausts me.

“Grrr” because I’ve been working on a film festival and the projectionist just came by yesterday to test out his equipment and as it turns out the projection area is about 1/2 the size it should be and now I’m left scrambling either to find a new lens for the 16mm projector (about as likely as finding a set of eight matching absinthe spoons in the “ear” pattern in mint condition lying in a Tiffany-blue bag on my doorstep this very morning) or to move some of the screenings to a smaller venue.

“Grrr” because there are two houseflies circling my computer and I keep trying to spray them with the compressed air I use to dust my keyboard, hoping it’ll freeze ’em just like that fly-nap stuff my friends used to use in biology class but of course, like most of my schemes, nothing interesting happens.

On the other hand…I finally located a scan of one of my favorite paintings. The one and only time I went to France, I was roaming the Musee d’Orsay (which hosts one of the world’s largest collections of Victorian art) and I stumbled (almost literally–Victorian art can be painfully boring at times) into a gallery completely dominated by Jean Delville’s The School of Plato, an outrageously lush painting of twelve scantily clad, sylphlike men, languidly lolling at the feet of an equally willowy Plato, who bore a striking resemblance to most modern depictions of Jesus Christ. It was weird because, like, (a) it was totally gay, (b) it was totally blasphemous, and (c) it was hanging in a major museum and was therefore validated as one of the premier pieces of Victorian art, like, ever. Which makes me pause and say, yo, Victoria, wassup wit’ you and your obliquely lovesexy regime? Women were closing their eyes and thinking of England, but men got to pierce their dicks and lollygag half-nekkid with other men? Y’all was some freaks, indeed….

Anyway, I didn’t have the chance to get a postcard of the piece, but I thought, no biggie, it’s a major painting in a major museum–I’ll find one eventually.

Wrong.

Either the painting’s proven really difficult to reproduce, or (my guess) the museum’s not quite ready to vaunt it as a prize collection piece, because it’s an impossible-to-find image. It’s not even featured in most of the Musee d’Orsay books and catalogues I’ve happened to come across. So when I found it the other day almost by accident, I was pleasantly surprised.

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Around four o’clock this morning, Jonno and I parked my father’s butter-yellow 1972 Mustang on the upper floor of a parking garage. I turned around to look for the elevator, and when I turned back, I saw a police officer arresting my boyfriend.

To my surprise (and yours, too, if you know Jonno), he was handling it quite well, chatting and joking with the officer. When I asked Jonno what had happened, he said that the officer had simply asked him how things were going, but when Jonno responded with a quote from Allistair Crowley, the officer knew something was suspicious and searched the car. There he found a couple of stems from a bud my boyfriend had been smoking, and that, ladies and germs, was all she wrote. My boyfriend was in cuffs and I started scrambling for a lawyer.

What struck me as the most odd–aside from Jonno’s complacency–was the fact that a New Orleans Police Officer was abel to correctly identify a quote from Mr. Crowley. But before I had time to give it much thought, I awoke to find my boyfriend curled quietly beside me.

Then, at around 5:30, I found myself at my old elementary school, wandering the grounds and enjoying Mayday celebrations with my close personal friend Megan Mullally. We were discussing the school’s desperate need for a paint job and the capital campaign they must be running to maintain the building.

I’m dreaming of capital campaigns. I think I’ve been a fundraiser too long. Any suggestions for new career choices?

Strange Dreams, indeed, Ms. Anderson.

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The more I think about it, the stranger it seems: why should scent have such an overwhelming influence on memory? Something I see might occasionally remind me of something else, or the sound of an old song might bring to mind the friends I had when it first played, but smells… The memories I associate with the scent of hairspray or musty corridors or night-blooming jasmine can be really overwhelming. Almost knocks me down, at times.

Like the other day: I came home and it was moderately hot outside and the air conditioner in the living room hadn’t been on and our house smelled exactly like my friend Ken’s house did when I was 12 years old. A warm smell, not completely clean, but not filthy either. Fried food permeating every porous surface. It smelled like home–not really my home, but someone’s.

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Scarier than Satan is right. For all three of you out there who’ve never seen Kiki and Herb in concert, this’ll give you a taste of what to expect when you do (and you will, Mary).

The most interesting part for me is the fact that Justin’s apparently been asked to teach a course in my old department at NYU (Performance Studies, not Performance Art, as he’s quoted). I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that one: battle of the egomaniacal freaks is what that’ll be. Having seen both Justin and the profs at NYU first-hand, I’m not placing any bets on who’ll come out alive….

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Wah! Mommy make it stop! Can someone please turn off this internal clock thing before I single-handedly put Westclox out of business?

Maybe I can get a prescription for sleeping pills and get addicted to them like Hollywood bimbos of the 1950s. Or my mom.

The worst part of it all was that I was actually having a fairly entertaining–if exceedingly faggoty–dream: I was working at a summer theatre camp for high school kids, and I was directing the camp’s production of Twelfth Night. All the kids who had auditioned for the play were really very good, but one of my old grad school profs (I guess he was running the camp, but I dunno) kept whining about how important it was for me to play the role of Orsino so I could “anchor” the show. (This prof, FYI, had a habit of casting himself in student productions, which irritated all of us to no end.) I adamantly refused.

So I had all these kids there and it was shaping up to be a great rehearsal and then I realized that two of my kids were kinda weird, but I couldn’t put my finger on the actual problem. Then I saw that they were actually pie plates–walking, talking pie plates, but pie plates nonetheless.

That’s when I woke up.

Sounds like the sort of scenario my boyfriend might whisper into my ear just to watch me squirm as I slept….