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Then suddenly it was December 2013 and American Psycho: The Musical was opening at the Almeida Theatre in London, with Doctor Who’s Matt Smith in the lead for a five-week run. This had happened so quickly that I was amused by how surprised I was, and how strange this notion felt, because it still didn’t seem quite real. I’d heard the first demos that Sheik had made and sung himself, and I’d skimmed Roberto’s book but just barely, since this project seemed light-years away from my practical life and day-to-day preoccupations: this was someone else’s world. The producers offered to fly me to London for a week to do publicity, which I realized would not only make me the de facto face of the show but also might be misconstrued as my approval of a show I hadn’t, in fact, seen. I wasn’t in the mood to play a nice and grateful artist and I warned Jesse Singer that if they brought me over to walk the red carpet and talk to the press, I was going to be honest about whether I liked it or not. In the end they decided against the risk and the expense; besides, they didn’t need any PR help since the entire run was sold out already. The Almeida production opened to good reviews, and there immediately was talk about moving the show to Broadway. Three years passed very quickly, and in the spring of 2016 I was flown to New York so I could see this staging in previews, immerse myself in a press junket, become the de facto godfather, and walk the red carpet and attend both premiere and the after party: my appearance sealing the deal that I approved of it all. And why wouldn’t I? It could be lucrative.
The last time I had been in New York was in 2010, on the first stop of a book tour when I’d felt myself physically recoiling from the changes the city had gone through since I’d left five years before: more crowded, if that was possible, and more rich people; everything seemed cleaned up and slightly anonymous, as if globalization had waved its wand over Manhattan. The city in which I came of age during the late 1980s was so much dirtier, scarier and more thrilling than the corporatized and homogenized place I experienced during those few days on the book tour. Then, after completing a UK book tour and before doing another one in Australia, I was brought back to the city again to appear on the Charlie Rose show, and before that taping I spent an afternoon walking around kind of dazed at how different everything looked: calm and prosperous, safe for families, expensive and neutered, and so much less crazy than it had been in my twenties. And these feelings were amped up even further six years later, when the American Psycho musical opened on Broadway. By now this all seemed like an extremely long dream, and I could imagine what I would sound like if I were to describe it to anyone: a book I’d written had been turned into a musical and I had to fly to New York to watch it with a journalist from The New York Times sitting next to me and noting my reactions, and then I was backstage shaking hands with Bradley Cooper, and next we were both talking to Benjamin Walker, the star of the show, and then I was being interviewed at Sardi’s and, later, at the 21 Club where a reporter from the New York Post ironically noted that I had ordered steak tartare, raw and chopped up and bloody red. But this wasn’t a dream.
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Even though the week was mostly devoted to the musical that we all hoped would be so lucrative, the other part of the trip happened to coincide with the upfronts—the beginnings of an advertising sales period—for Fullscreen, a digital company to which I’d sold a web series called The Deleted that I had written and would be directing later that summer. When I wasn’t doing press for the musical, I was in my Midtown hotel room finishing up the remaining scripts or else taking an inventory at my apartment on Thirteenth Street, which I’d been renting out in a neighborhood I no longer recognized, or else hanging out with a few friends who had moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn and whom I hadn’t seen in years. In the end, I didn’t have to fake any PR niceties about American Psycho: The Musical because I genuinely liked the show, finding it problematic but enjoyable. Bateman’s awareness that the society he’s a part of doesn’t care about his crimes and in turn forces him to imagine that maybe he didn’t actually commit them, was a tricky thing to dramatize onstage; it’s what had also proved difficult for Mary Harron in her adaptation for the screen, a failure to which she freely admits. An unreliable narrator might be best suited to the digressions of a novel, and all three times I watched the musical that week the second act always gave me pause, with a succession of scenes where Bateman is compelled to acknowledge his “truth” about himself and society. Overall, however, the material seemed more prescient than it ever had. In the wake of the distant economic collapse and the growing ascent of Donald Trump, it seemed as if this might just become the musical of the moment. As I watched Bateman rise before me one last time, I couldn’t help but think back to that initial meeting at the Chateau Marmont a decade ago, where the summer light was dying and I was buzzed from a couple of cocktails, when I felt like this scheme might actually work out and be lucrative. In fact it closed two months later after eighty-one performances including a month of previews, at a cost of fourteen million dollars that was never recouped.
t h e s e d a y s
In the summer of 2018, I started watching a TV show that aired on Sunday nights, a sometimes riveting, sometimes moving, often frustrating series set in, of all places, the transgender ball-culture world in late-’80s Manhattan. Often, as I watched, I felt myself experiencing an actual physical reaction, whether it was an abrupt pang in the chest, a slight rush of adrenaline or a faint yet twitchy fearfulness, and I realized this was connected to the yearning for freedom that the main characters in this show all seemed to feel: a desire for acceptance, for their voices to be heard, to be included no matter what they represented or how repugnant they might seem to the status quo. It was a somewhat conventional prime-time soap, which seemed to take the characters’ lives seriously, but their stories of pain and struggle took place in a world that didn’t want to acknowledge them; because they were somehow offensive and so should instead be erased, invisible, banned, and this had, for me, in the summer of 2018, a stress-inducing timeliness that had nothing to do with the show itself.
The three trans women at the center of the show were resilient figures who could have been tragic given the unlucky moment they were born into, in which homophobia, AIDS and racism were rampant. But, at night, they had the ball-culture world, which allowed them to escape from the darkness of their real lives into an aspirational fantasy of freedom, where they competed for prizes, cat-walking and dancing down an imaginary runway of luxury, emulating other social classes and genders. At these balls the women were judged on voguing, costumes, appearance and exaggerated attitude, and their goal was to accentuate a parody of feminine heterosexuality. The characters’ defiance here wasn’t crushed by the real world, as it seemed to be almost daily in a place they wanted to fit into, but instead was judged by a panel that awarded them trophies based on their “realness,” which was their acting-out fantasy version of themselves—avatars disguising themselves for a night of escape. This show was a reminder for me in the summer of 2018 that freedom was ultimately what everyone yearns for, no matter your age, your gender, your race, your identity. In the Manhattan of 1987 that I had resided in, freedom was a promise fulfilled only for certain people, and a particularly uneasy episode of the show reminded me of the now-obvious racism in the young, privileged, white-boy gay scene during that period, yet this strange and uneven series also reminded me of the shifting attitudes of what freedom, with all of its attendant limitations and illusions, meant now.
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During that summer I had dinner with a friend who’d driven up from Manhattan Beach. I met him in Culver City after coming over from West Hollywood, a district that was still Resisting, actually going so far as to present a porn star who’d had a one-night stand with Donald Trump over a decade ago, and who’d been paid not to talk about it but had recently started giving interviews to humiliate him, with the keys to the city—instead of, say, to an advoc
acy group working for the homeless or even a gay male porn star. They were making a point, of course, but about what exactly seemed, like everything else in 2018, clouded by a particular brand of sentimental derangement. My friend and I hadn’t seen each other in about a year, and we exclaimed about this before sitting down in a restaurant in the old Helms Bakery complex. We’d initially met when I moved back to LA in 2006, when he was working in Hollywood for a production company where a project of mine was being developed, growing somewhat miserable about the stark realities of the business. He’s American, about a decade younger than me, and conservative. He’d voted for Trump and thought the president was doing a pretty good job, and sitting there with him I realized yet again that I was living with a Trump-hating millennial socialist and yet somehow that summer was able to go to the movies every weekend with a pro-Trump, pro-Israel, Jewish millennial, just as I could have drinks with a forty-year-old leftist journalist visiting from New York, or have dinner every month with a passionately anti-Trump liberal feminist in her fifties, just as I texted about bad TV shows weekly with a gay Jewish filmmaker in his thirties who supports Trump and on and on. So while sitting in that restaurant in Culver City I registered that my group of friends was politically diverse, and that even though I lived in blue-wave Los Angeles, I wasn’t also living in a political bubble.
And neither was my friend from Manhattan Beach, though he admitted that over the last year easily half of his left-leaning friends had dumped him simply because he’d talked positively about the president on social media. The question for him now had become: Well, were any of them really his friends in the first place? If they could ditch him so completely over Trump, maybe they never had been. He’d often wondered: Was this really all it took? Was defending the president you had supported and voted for that immoral and outrageous? Apparently, for some on the Left this was reason enough to abandon a friend or a relative or even an acquaintance. My friend also noted that it was harder to meet girls online here in blue-state California, where it seemed “Where do you stand politically?” had become the question most frequently asked by females, replacing the previous: “How tall are you?” Like me, my friend accepted all ideologies and opinions, even those diametrically opposed to his own, and we noted how many of our friends were living in a bubble, still reeling over the “unfairness” of the election and the perceived evil of the Trump administration, and couldn’t bear to consider a different view—that is, to stand in someone else’s shoes. This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn’t approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.
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However, my friend and I were both well aware that we resided quite comfortably in what was now referred to as the bubble of white male privilege. Perhaps from certain angles this was true, but I didn’t consider any of whiteness or maleness defining aspects of my identity—or at least hadn’t been overly conscious of this (a fact, by the way, I can’t do anything about). Still, along with millions of other white men, I was increasingly reminded by a certain faction, that we should be defining ourselves by our white identity because that was itself a real problem. Actually, this faction demanded it, without bothering to recognize that identity politics of any kind might be the worst idea in our culture right now, and certainly one that encourages the spread of separatist alt-right and all-white organizations. Across the board, identity politics endorse the concept that people are essentially tribal, and our differences are irreconcilable, which of course makes diversity and inclusion impossible. This is the toxic dead-end of identity politics; it’s a trap. But even so I didn’t reject people because they believed in this, or wanted to align themselves with a particular candidate. They were free to do as they wanted, and as a friend I supported them. I might not have agreed with them but I wasn’t about to unfriend anyone because of what his politics happened to be. I’d never stopped hanging out with someone based on who he or she voted for, and maybe this was easier for me than for others because I just wasn’t that interested in politics. Or else, as many would say, it was easier because I was a white privileged male. Or possibly because I’m simply a grown man, no longer a child, and understood that the world didn’t always behave precisely as we wanted it to and also that people weren’t all the same. I was far more interested in what people were really like, not who they voted for.
But in the summer of 2018 who you supported politically would determine if you were invited (or not) to a party or a dinner table or, as the White House press secretary learned one week that June, allowed to eat in a public restaurant. This had, for some of us, become an increasingly unacceptable form of “resistance”—something that after almost three years of Trump’s ascendancy now felt stale, absurd, in bad faith. The shunning of others who don’t think like you had moved past protest and resistance into childlike fascism, and it was becoming harder and harder to accept these exclusionary tactics. The differing political viewpoints were judged as immoral, racist and misogynist. This constant shrieking by the unconsoled was, for me, beyond tiresome, a high-pitched drone that never moved the needle. I figured that you might not like someone’s politics or even his or her worldview but could still learn something useful and then move on. But if you look at everything only through the lens of your party or affiliation, and are capable of being in the same room only with people who think and vote like you, doesn’t that make you somewhat uncurious and oversimplifying, passive-aggressive, locked into assuming you are riding the high moral tide, without ever wondering if you might not, in the eyes of others, be on the very bottom?
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The summer hysteria of 2018 was never louder than when the future of the Supreme Court opened up, silencing my loudly unhinged boyfriend into a forty-eight-hour depression after Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, and friends started texting me in jacked-up despair, wondering what country they should move to. Add to this the supposedly cosmic immorality of the immigration policies now being enforced at the borders (Obama’s were not that noticeably different), and the Resistance had officially become something different from what it started out as. It finally seemed time to close the door on this hysteria, a kind of fake game that didn’t even come close to connecting with the real and the pragmatic, that by now felt manufactured and enacted and was almost never compelling or convincing—simply a desperate grab at, well, what exactly? Certainly not any notion of civility, or of accepting that the president was governing in a way that ninety percent of the people who’d voted for him approved of. Increasingly it looked as if there was an apparatus in play to delegitimize the election itself because some people simply hadn’t gotten what they wanted. And Trump had forewarned them of this at all of his rallies, where “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” consistently closed the show.
The country often felt like a demented high school where the losers in the student body were throwing everything they could at whoever had been elected class president just to see what might stick, at every turn undermining him as well as the students who’d voted for him. This was the dynamic, as I noted before, that kept turning Trump into the biggest underdog we’ve ever seen. The ongoing comparisons of him to Hitler, and of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Gestapo, was for me the last straw—after almost two years of the let’s-wait-and-see-if-everyone-can-calm-the-fuck-down hiatus I’d maintained until the late summer of 2018, when I couldn’t calm the fuck down anymore. And a new irony had entered the picture: I was now hearing about how irritating the Left had become from people on the Left. One evening over drinks someone sighed to me, “I don’t know how we got so a
nnoying.” And at a dinner a middle-aged liberal scoffed, “Oh, I can’t deal with the Resistance anymore”—and this from a gay man who’d been a proud member of it.
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