by Bob Mould
A couple of things came to a head at once. One was that I didn’t want to continue being the pessimistic, self-hating homosexual. I started allowing myself a little bit of enjoyment in life, a little latitude. I’d been out for five years but I still wasn’t in “the life.” I’d had a career that, to my mind, had little to do with being gay. I wasn’t homophobic, but I was definitely self-hating, and not exclusively or necessarily due to my sexual orientation. I thought I was ugly, unappealing, unattractive. I had a beautiful man on my arm, but that didn’t make me feel any better about myself. I’d been beating myself up, even comparing myself to Kevin, who everybody, straight or gay, threw themselves at. I decided not to do it anymore. (A small observation from personal experience: if you marry the gorgeous one, it might be hard on you.)
The second was that I’d never felt people were attracted to me—instead they were attracted to the person onstage. Now that I had walked away from my career, this was the moment to make it all about me. Sure enough, people started coming up and talking to me. I know that might sound shallow: They only talk to me if I look good? What about my esteemed career? What about my personality? They didn’t know about any of that, which was perfect. I wasn’t the rock guy. I was just a guy. Now they were going to be my friends because they wanted to be—because I looked like them or because we worked out together. It’s like responding to a “band member wanted” ad in a college newspaper because it mentions your favorite bands. Every group, every situation that we enter into, has a code, rules of conduct, and markers and signifiers that attract or repel us.
Kevin and I would walk from the loft to the gym, work out, then have lunch at a little vegetarian place nearby or at Manatus, a longtime gay diner on Bleecker Street. After lunch we’d go to the Factory Café, which became the center of my social life. From the beginning of 1999 until I left New York I don’t think I ever missed a day going there. It was the center of the universe for me. That’s where I made my first real group of gay friends—the experience was priceless.
I started meeting all these characters like Mark, this five three, 230-pound African-American flight attendant. He was completely worked out, busting out of his uniform. He would come from his Upper East Side apartment with his roll-aboard bag, sit in his seat by the corner window (we all had preferred seats at Factory Café), and tell stories of his exploits in foreign ports. Mark would make mix CDs of classic disco and new music for the shop to play. I learned a lot about dance music from Mark, and heard things like the Avalanches’ album Since I Left You, which would later be an influence on my LoudBomb recordings.
There was also this fellow named Jack, a handsome, masculine, yet mysterious fellow. He usually dressed like a construction worker, with a Carhartt jacket, jeans, and work boots. He had short black hair, a goatee, and dark brown eyes—very strong Italian features. No one was quite sure what he did for a living, but like clockwork, he would show up each day for a cup of coffee to go and sit out front on one of the two wooden park benches. One day I showed up alone and, instead of sitting inside, decided to take my coffee to go and sit next to him on the bench. We sat quietly, not talking, for several minutes. Suddenly he looked up at me and said, “Do you like chocolate?”
It was the first time I had heard him speak, let alone speak to me. I said, “Oh, yeah.”
“Come with me,” he said. As we walked down the street to the old Li-Lac Chocolates shop, Jack asked me if I smoked pot. I said sure, and we proceeded, with coffee and chocolate in hand, to smoke weed and listen to music in his studio apartment a few blocks away. Nothing intimate happened—it was simply a moment that brought me a new friend and some new knowledge about how to be gay in the West Village.
One of my gym buddies was Michael Lucas, who is one of the biggest gay-porn stars/producers in the world. He lived in Chelsea with his Austrian-born partner, Richard Winger, who owns the two West Village brownstones that house the LGBT Community Center. If you walk up and down Eighth Avenue in the Twenties and see this Russian guy with big pouty lips and black hair, that’s Michael Lucas. He would show up at the gym, lift his shirt, and reveal his tightly defined abdominal muscles. Then he’d run his hands up and down his torso, as if he were a model on The Price Is Right gesturing to a fabulous new vacuum cleaner, and proclaim, “Perfect.” We would all nod and say, “Of course, Andrei, perfect.” His real name is Andrei—Michael is his stage name. He invited me to his home office, where he had manila envelopes stacked in a corner. He explained that they were filled with résumés and photos of aspiring porn stars. Some afternoons he would hand me a magnifying loupe and let me go through a stack of envelopes in hopes of finding a suitable candidate for an upcoming film.
One night Kevin and I went with Michael to Bar d’O for a performance by legendary female impersonator Joey Arias. During Joey’s monologue, he noted that Michael was in attendance. He asked the lighting director to turn the spotlight toward Michael, but the light landed on Kevin and me. Joey quipped that we were Michael’s two newest Russian porn star finds. I heard a cackle of laughter from the other end of the bar. Turned out the guy laughing was Rufus Wainwright.
Back at the Factory Café, I only knew the guys by Bill or Tom or whatever their first names were, but we all hung out together and shared the stories of our lives. I would sit and listen as the older men told of what the West Village used to be like in the ’70s and ’80s. They would tell me about Stonewall, the disco era, the fetish clubs, and the advent of AIDS. I was all ears—this was not my personal history, but the history of the culture I had never known.
I learned how to harmlessly flirt with other guys, how to be bitchy without being hurtful, and how to look at other men without letting eyes connect for more than a half-second (lest you end up married—gay joke). I didn’t know the details of tricking or open relationships, but I learned about those things and more, and rather quickly. I was getting a crash course in how the gay world turns.
These were the behaviors, routines, and rituals I had never experienced, the ones that most gay men learn at seventeen when they run away from Nebraska and move to Chicago. And here I am in the West Village, at the age of thirty-eight, finally experiencing and learning this stuff. I felt like Rip Van Winkle—I’d been asleep for years.
* * *
I had fallen in love with Christopher Street, the West Village, and my new romantic notion of gay culture. Although it had been nearly twenty years since the heyday of gay life in the West Village, it was thrilling for me. One thing I’ve found over the years is that no matter how hard new commerce and new community has tried to gentrify a “gay ghetto,” you can still feel the old sexual energy there. Walk down into the Sheridan Square subway stop at Christopher Street, and you can imagine men of all ages and body types, cruising each other on the platforms. Look for the smallest of details in the buildings, and you will see traces of the struggles, the dramas, and the plague. All these things will eventually fade and disappear, but in 1999 it was still a very good version of the classic gay Christopher Street, right down to the smells: afternoon burgers with the old-timers at Julius, freshly mopped floors at the seedy adult book stores, the occasional whiff of poppers wafting out of a ground floor apartment window.
Within months I started hanging out in Chelsea, which at the time was the younger, hipper, more happening gay neighborhood in Manhattan. My main haunt was Barracuda, a bar on Twenty-Second Street at Eighth Avenue. There’s no sign out front—it’s next to the gay-oriented Unicorn bookstore. Barracuda was a fabulously gay place, playing Cher and Madonna and hosting drag shows. I had never been part of any of this before; in fact, these were the very people whom I felt alienated from for many years. Before I knew better, these were “the freaks” that rattled me. But now I saw how they embraced their “freak” and used it as self-identification and for self-empowerment. Another piece of the big gay puzzle fell into place.
Kevin and I had a nightly ritual: hike the mile and a half from the loft to the West Village, where we’d p
ick up an energy drink at the same corner deli, then continue up to Barracuda in Chelsea, arriving around 10:30 at night, ready to party. Everyone around me was drinking and carrying on while I remained a teetotaler, completely sober. I didn’t care though—I was just happy to be there. I befriended Stephen Heighton, a handsome British chap who was one of the owners of Barracuda. I had crushes on the two main bartenders, Cole James and Darren Dryden. They were so sexy and hot, and I would sit at their bar and drool. Kevin would just be chuckling through all of this. We’d go in the back lounge and watch female impersonator Candis Cayne do her Pat Benatar tributes to raise money for her Mexican boob job. The best I could muster was a one-off solo acoustic-electric show in that same lounge on July 11, 1999, as a fundraiser for the Anti-Violence Project—one of my earliest and most direct involvements in the New York City LGBT community.
Another way of getting into the gay mix was at our loft, where we hosted fabulous dinner parties on our roof deck. We’d run an electrical cord out a window, up two stories to the roof, and into a lamp and a ghetto blaster, and we’d cook up delicious meals for Andrei and Richard and others while we all shared our life stories. Most of the guys at the dinner table had led much more typical gay lives; my stories, though, were mostly about my old punk rock life, and were as foreign to them as theirs were to me. Those conversations were illuminating, and we all learned from each other. The dinners were modest and intimate, yet just as meaningful as the wild smorgasbord I was about to encounter.
Andrei and Richard would have us out to Fire Island, a sandy spit of land running parallel to the east coast of Long Island, and I quickly realized there was another level to all of this. That level was the Pines, the vacation town for rich and famous East Coast A-gays, like David Geffen, who has a palatial estate there.
The trek from Manhattan to the Pines, and the gossip that goes along with the trek, is all part of the ritual: What is (s)he wearing that outfit for? What is that little tiny dog they’re carrying? Didn’t they break up last weekend? On and on. Most guys ride the Long Island Railroad to Sayville, then take the ferry to Fire Island. The Pines is essentially a series of dunes crisscrossed by plank walkways; there are no cars. You bring what you can carry in your arms or on little red wagons. The beaches are white sand and the water is the purest blue. It is simply stunning.
Andrei and Richard owned a large house on the bay side, not far from the center of town. I would usually be in the swimming pool that faced the bay. Over to one side, there’s a big privacy fence. From time to time, I would see heads popping up over the fence. This would go on for hours. After a day of this, I said to Richard, “Your neighbors keep looking over the fence.” Richard said, “Oh, that is my house too. That’s for my exes.”
If I thought I was A-list in the rock world and B-list West Village gay, I quickly found out I was a nobody at the Pines. I went to my first circuit party out there. A circuit party is a seasonal dance, usually a fundraiser for various gay organizations, and the DJs typically play diva remixes. This guy Beau threw a party one August where they built a dance floor that went out onto the water, and that was my first real exposure to “the clones”: seven hundred shirtless muscle boys with buzzed heads, all wearing Levi’s 501 jeans. None of them are shorter than five six, none taller than five nine, and they’re bumping around against each other. Kevin and I are up on the catwalk, watching this spectacle, this party thrown by a multimillionaire for these boys. The next morning we go to brunch with the organizers, and they’re dropping famous names and exotic places like nobody’s business. I ask myself, What am I doing in this movie?
Circuit parties are usually themed parties: the White Party, Black Party, Cherry Party, Black and Blue Party, and so on. The White Party, for instance, is an all-night dance party where everyone wears white. If it’s an outdoor White Party, people dance as the sun comes up, and continue until noon. The promoters typically hire a DJ like Junior Vasquez to do those parties. Tribal music, sounding like pots and pans banging in a busy restaurant kitchen, would be the evening music. Uplifting, more ethereal and melodic house music would be the morning music. So there was night music and morning music, and I’m trying to figure out all this stuff on the fly.
Then there’s the Black Party. To begin with, the dance floor is not that different from that of a leather bar on a Saturday night, except it’s filled with a thousand men and over-the-top sound and lighting. The music is more primal, more intense—harder sounds, hypnotic layers, what I refer to as “hunting music.” I would never advise anyone to go to the Black Party unless that person has a strong stomach and a wide-open mind. It’s a very dark S&M-oriented party. Imagine a thousand men or more, many dressed in leather, rubber, or other fetish wear, and some of them with absolutely no boundaries. If something can go into something else, it’s probably happening in some dark corner. There’s a lot of hardcore sexual experimentation, and not many people want to remember what they did the next day. My first Black Party was the first time I witnessed things I had only heard whispered about. Two fists aren’t supposed to go into that hole at once. OK, turn away. What do you look at when you’ve seen everything?
Remember, I’d grown up in a farm town, then gone to college, spent ten years on the road, then holed up at the farm, then spent several cloistered years nesting with Kevin in Austin and New York. These new experiences were a little surreal, but I was rolling with it, figuring out which parts I wanted to bring into my life and which didn’t work for me.
If I wasn’t out before, I was certainly out now. I immersed myself in gay culture and was having a great time. In my previous life, my miserablist state, the world was often cold and small and grey. I had the feeling I wasn’t in Minnesota anymore. Now my life was filled with revelatory experiences, suddenly painted with vivid colors.
This was my new gay life.
CHAPTER 22
In September of 1999, my fabulous gay summer was preempted—I took a day job. I was going to work for World Championship Wrestling.
As a child in rural northern New York State, I had a number of interests and hobbies, but only two passions: music and professional wrestling. I discovered wrestling at an early age, and once I saw it, I was hooked. Some kids had Batman, others had the Lone Ranger, but pro wrestling was my action-adventure series. My first exposure to it was when I was eleven, through Montreal TV stations, and I’ve followed it ever since.
As a youngster, I was drawn to it for the obvious reasons: the drama spoke to the young man growing inside of me, waiting to be released. Not unlike most school sports, pro wrestling spoke to the desire to have contact and intimacy with others, not necessarily in a sexual sense, but in a healthy, competitive manner. Pro wrestling has always been predicated on good versus evil. The wrestlers on TV were larger than life, pitching and catching heated threats of destruction, humiliation, and retribution. Sometimes it was simply about who was the better man, other times it might involve a piece of stolen or destroyed personal property, and, on rare occasions, it was about the betrayal of a best friend.
I used to buy wrestling magazines at the neighborhood pharmacy, and every few months my father would drive me to the matches at the Montreal Forum, an hour and a half away, with our usual stop for hot dogs and poutine. If there was wrestling anywhere within fifty miles of Malone, I would ask to go. I studied wrestling like other kids study baseball cards—immersing myself as deep as I could, gathering as much information as I could find. Some of the wrestling magazines focused heavily on match results, and I would read these results over and over until I memorized them—much as I’d done with the label copy on seven-inch singles.
My friends and I would reenact matches in the backyard, not certain of what we were doing, but it was a way to pass the time. I got my nose busted three times when I was a kid; the last time, at thirteen, I was play-wrestling with my friend Steve, who accidentally connected full force with an elbow-drop on my face. After the elbow connected, I sat up and cursed, more at the pain than at Stev
e. I felt the warm blood pouring down my lips and chin, and in a matter of seconds, my white T-shirt was covered in red. My nose still tips to the left, starting just below the bridge.
My last few years of high school, my interest in wrestling was superseded by sex, drugs, and rock and roll—or at least two of the three. Freshman year at Macalester, there was a television in the common area of the dormitory, and Sunday mornings at eleven, a bunch of us would gather around, hung over, and watch All-Star Wrestling. I instantly jumped back into fan mode, learning the new characters and following their story lines.
I watched Jesse “The Body” Ventura every week on television. Jesse was a charismatic figure who emulated 1970s wrestler Superstar Billy Graham. I got to be friends with him in 1982 when I helped book and run Goofy’s Upper Deck. Jesse used to come to Goofy’s and hang out a little bit. He had that wild look, with asymmetrical sunglasses, feathered boa, and ears pierced with large feathers. He appreciated the punk rock mentality, so there was a natural kinship. We gave Jesse a Metal Circus T-shirt, which he wore on an episode of WWF on the USA Network. It was their highest-rated show to date, and the fact that he wore a Hüsker Dü T-shirt throughout the two-hour episode was hilarious, touching, and a real thrill.
This was also when I got to know Jim Melby. Jim was the guy who later managed Hüsker Dü’s 1986 Wig Out East tour. Jim was one of the nicest guys in the world, and he always had time to help out a friend no matter what else was going on. He also happened to be one of the foremost historians of the wrestling business and wrote articles for the American Wrestling Association’s monthly programs. He was a big music fan, I was a big wrestling fan, and we became good friends. Jim and I would talk about wrestling history, and from those conversations, he could tell I was a serious student of the business—but that I didn’t know how they created the choreographed illusion of the physicality. Jim took me under his wing and taught me all about it.