Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (44 page)

Somehow, I got 218 the next day, but wouldn’t break 100 again until February of the following year, when I spied on this newfangled thang called YouTube a long-rumored Super 8 film of a young Madonna allowing an egg to be fried (via movie magic) on her taut tummy back in high school. For some reason I still can’t determine, technology blog Boing Boing linked that post, and I suddenly had 6,472 views. I was also getting linked occasionally on the gay blogs of record.

I didn’t reliably have 100+ page views daily until 2007, didn’t have 1,000+ a day until 2008, couldn’t bank on 5,000+ until 2009, 10,000+ until 2010 and now, in 2015, I’m at a point where my page views are reliably 15,000-20,000 a day. By comparison, Perez Hilton started with zero views and was a millionaire driving the culture against its will within a year. I was doing something right, but I was doing it at the absolute wrong pace.

Along the way, though I was posting elaborate recaps of
Boy Culture
’s various premieres (in L.A., scandal-magnet director Bryan Singer told me the scene between adolescent boys in the movie was “beautiful”), and although I have always been partial to long-winded, intensely analytical essays on politics, art, gay issues, popular culture, and sex, I quickly found that it was the latter two items that got me the most clicks. Getting more clicks leads to having more influence (if an opinion falls in the forest, does anyone hear it?) and generates ad dollars, of which I’ve never made much, but even a pittance can help make me feel a tiny bit better about spending hours and hours a day at my computer.

I mean, I probably lost my relationship due in large part to the all-consuming nature of blogging day and night, so I might as well make a few hundred dollars on ads about which child stars have grown up ugly, why Ellen DeGeneres lied, “Woman is 53 But Looks 27,” and/or “Popular White Actors With Their Black Spouses.”

My biggest day on the blog was when I published a sexy gallery of Greg Plitt images the day the fitness model died in a freak accident. The second biggest was when I logged over 75,000 views on its eighth anniversary, the day after I posted a Vine of North Carolina State Wolfpack football player John Mangum twerking in his long johns. As mesmerizingly articulate as his body language admittedly was and is, it really keeps a guy humble to realize the most-watched items on his blog in the space of nine long years were found images of a dead dude and a video of a dude shaking his ass for a few seconds. As a bonus, the latter turned out not to appreciate his gay fans.

It’s like how in book sales, cute cat books trump literary classics, except in my case the cat is a devastating rump.

As previously mentioned, Zac Efron gay gossip was my third biggest day. My fourth biggest day had to do with the Madonna vs. Gaga feud, with other huge days springing from my early release of Madonna’s
L’Uomo Vogue
cover shoot, pictures of Jesse Metcalfe praying in his underwear and a subjective list of the hottest gay porn stars ever.

The funny thing to wrap your mind around about blogging is that it does not have to be wholly original in order to be wholly you. While I have a chunky catalogue of original content, the bread and butter of my blog is aggregation—and there is definitely a personality to be gleaned from how someone curates. I think a scan of BoyCulture.com should communicate to anyone paying attention that I’m gay, a liberal firebrand, obsessed with popular culture (especially of the nostalgic variety), and never met a man I didn’t lick.

Blogging only works if your posts get read and disseminated, so I threw myself into social media as well, launching accounts on any platform I thought my help spread my brand—Twitter lets me be witty and succinct, Facebook reminds my 5,000 friends when there are new posts, YouTube is stuffed with videos I shoot at events like the GLAAD Awards, Instagram is dedicated to pictures of sexy guys I see on the street, which is an offshoot of my blog’s daily “Guydar” and “Ends of the World” features.

But the reality of being hyperactive on social media is that people send you messages all day long encouraging you to keep up the good work when you aren’t really doing any.

Publishing a personal blog is akin to a never-ending game of hot-or-not; the goal is to make readers hang on every latest reaction…but it can be so draining day-to-day to write content that lures.

There are many pitfalls of being a blogger, not the least of which is continual harassment from people who might hate you for something as simple as an unkind word you once had for Bette Midler (a Beyoncé queen once called me a hack), something as complex as their view of your racism in light of the dearth of faces of color in your sexy-time posts, or something completely unquantifiable: They just fucking hate your face. (I had a comment on a post once that a reader was sick of being confronted by my rictus of self-promotion in party pictures, which reminded me of the time a potential hook-up had examined my online selfie and told me, in passing on me, that I looked too
happy
.)

In 2014, I received an anonymous e-mail that read:

“You will never know who this is, and if you did, you would be shocked.

“To be honest, I hate the fucking shit you write about, and you really make the gay community look so bad, superficial, and gross. And quite frankly, I don’t like U

“You’re in your mid-life crisis because the things you put out there, YOU WILL NEVER BE!!!!”

Was I really worthy of four exclamation marks on hate e-mail? I don’t post cute twenty-year-old physique models because I want to be them, but simply because they’re cute twenty-year-old physique models. And his rant didn’t hurt my feelings so terribly because the e-mail came from a Spice Girls-themed account that I narrowed down to an old YouTube which pointed directly at the person who sent it—an aspiring artist of no consequence with whom I’d only ever had positive interactions, including a glowing review of his work. It’s hard to take someone seriously when they’re viciously saying they hate you for being superficial while simultaneously adoring the Spice Girls. He was later called out by a New York nightlife impresario, who posted an embarrassing melt-down voicemail he left. It’s all very, “Don’t you know who I am?” and the answer is, “No, but then nobody really does.” He thought I wanted to be something I never could be, but he himself will never be the person he’s certain he already is.

I’ve had other run-ins with lunatics, including someone who hurled racial slurs at me in my comments section because my sister married a black man, and ongoing harassment from Lady Gaga fans angry that I prefer Madonna. One told me she hoped I would choke on my AIDS medicine. I guess she was born that way and hoped that I would die
that
way.

One guy, reading about my latest celebrity-hunting adventure asked if this was really how I’d hoped my life would be now that I’m forty-five. This is the kind of question that usually comes from someone whose life is exactly what they hoped it to be, but who now realize they wanted the wrong thing all along.

There really is a downside to putting yourself out there on the Internet—and in books like this. Just having an active Facebook and blog makes it a foregone conclusion that you’ll state your opinion on just about every controversial issue at one point or another, which means people you went to high school with have to swallow the fact that you’re not only gay but are also for marriage equality, don’t think Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown should have been shot dead, don’t believe 9/11 was an inside job and that you preferred to vote for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton—or that you would ever vote for either one in the first place. Just garden-variety opinions can turn people you thought were casual friends into persistent enemies, or at the very least turn them off.

I once joked that anyone who liked Jay Leno couldn’t be a friend of mine, which an online pen pal took personally. He also demanded I visit him in another state when he was sick, and when I wouldn’t, he told me I was a fake friend and told me this was why my relationship ended. Actually, two crazies have done that, and both have continued to try to make contact after being told never to be in touch again.

Perhaps the absolute worst thing about blogging, especially when a lot of it is aggregated content, is that it can really help you dodge getting other things done. My last published novel was
Blind Items: A (Love) Story
in 1998…and it’s not like I don’t have countless ideas and the opposite of writer’s block. (I’m addressing this issue, putting out two books and a Web series in 2015.)

But there is something kind of amazing about blogging, which is that it affords you an instant bond with an unknowable number of like-minded people. Blogging actually becomes a way to not only be heard, but be heard by people you’d actually like to know. It’s embarrassing but delightful when I’m at an event and someone comes up to me to excitedly announce they (okay,
he
) reads my blog and to ask for a picture with me. That’s even happened a couple of times at one of the autograph shows I attend—I’ve been in the middle of getting a picture with a ‘70s TV star and had to juggle a fan of my blog asking for a picture with me. (I don’t charge, by the way.)

And the perks include lots of free plays, movies, and swag you can keep, give away, or sell.

Oh, and every once in a while, having a legit outlet can lead to meeting your idol, so I take back all the trash I just talked about blogging.

Marie Curie said we should be less curious about people and more curious about ideas, but maybe we can be more curious about the idea of people than about the people themselves. It’s the difference between gasping, “Queen!” at Lady Gaga’s every fart and being fascinated by the fact that other people gasp for exactly that reason.

That’s how I justified writing a Madonna encyclopedia twice, twenty years apart. I may not be able to credibly deny interest in how many abortions she’s had, but I can robustly declare I am more interested that her fetusography is known in the first place.

Madonna’s always been for me a pop cultural lose-my-load stone that both perfectly proves the intellectual side of my interest in fame as well as proving the dippy shallows to which I can float when caught up in the moment; I care as much about why other people hate or love her as much as I care about, “OMG, she looks a-MAH-zing.” (No, I haven’t let go of
Happy Endings
and never will. I can’t wait for the cast to be down on its luck so I can gobble them up at autograph shows and declare my love for them in ten seconds or less.)

They say never to meet your idols because they may let you down. I say you are a fucking coward if you pass up the chance because whether living up to or dashing your hopes, either result is a part of it. Woody Allen said even the worst orgasm was right on the money, and while I disagree (am I the only one who has had orgasms I could have written a letter to my grandma through?), I think every part of starfucking is fucking interesting.

I spotted Lauren Bacall in the audience of
Gore Vidal’s The Best Man
on Broadway once. Knowing her reputation for being wretched in fan situations, I still dashed out, missing the curtain calls, so I could be there at the exit and politely, timidly ask her for a pic-with.

“No!” she barked, as if I were Michael Biehn. I thanked her, wished her a lovely evening, and got the hell out of her way—I wasn’t about to bogart Bacall. That was just two years before she died. One of the last dozen stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age had put her lips together and blown me off, and it was
glorious
.

Sean Young, who’d been seated next to Bacall, came out next—I guess this was a stalker-themed evening, with the lines between reality and fantasy blurred. She not only posed, so resplendent in white fur you almost thought the animals would’ve been okay with it, she took our photo herself when the nearby fan I’d drafted to take it was too shaky. He was so nervous to meet Sean Young, his hands were trembling.

I was equally pleased with each encounter.

But Madonna was different because she’s the star to whom I’d hitched my wagon back in 1983, whose memorabilia I collected and sold and bought back, whose life I’d chronicled in books.

My first memory of really being into Madonna would be from around September 1983. I was driving home from playing Dungeons & Dragons at my cousin’s in Swartz Creek, listening to Top 40 radio at full blast, and rocking (more like popping) out to Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” when “Holiday” came on. My reaction to it was immediate—this was like aural sex. I assumed the singer was black (this happened to lots of people listening to early Madonna, and seems to be a bit of trivia that pleases late Madonna) and made a mental note to track down the song. When I did find the 45, it had no picture sleeve (her first was for “Borderline”), seemingly a part of the conspiracy to muddy the waters about her race. But I found out soon enough that Madonna was white, found out she was being marketed as a sex kitten, albeit one with claws, and found out she was from Michigan…like me. It wouldn’t have been enough for Madonna to be from Michigan, but it was a good start, some evidence that Midwest girls (and boys?) could get out of their small towns and mold their own destinies. It helped that every song she put out was irresistibly catchy.