August 2008

The New York International Fringe Festival features a lot of edgy, often witty (sometimes bad) theater in often small (sometimes tiny, sometimes badly ventilated) venues across the city during the dog days of August. And this year’s show listings are no disappointment when it comes to the more tawdry and clothing optional varieties of theater that are one of the special pleasures of the fest.

We’re we were starting to fear that we we were the only (semi) literate people that were obsessed with gay porn, so we compiled a list of five questions, the type of thing you might use to determine if you’re psychotic, and sent them to people who, you know, we otherwise respect (mostly). People who don’t (currently) live in their parents basement or say things like “There’s a sale at Ambercrombie and Finch!” or appear on Cheaters. People who, unlike us, seem to have done something with their lives.

We’ve admitted our weakness for the sick and sordid tales we tend to catch on late-night TV sandwiched between infomercials for ab warmers and toxin-sucking foot pads. Our favorites are the ones involving gay serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, Herb Baumeister and Jeffrey Dahmer. As a service to you, dear reader, lest you get swept up into the web of one of these predators some drunk night, we bring you another profile of a scary gay nobody should have ever gone home with.

[So we’ve been listening to some of the current homosexual oevre lately, we’re a little dismayed. There’s some good stuff out there, aside from Crystal Waters and Soft Cell and that Perry girl, but we don’t here it in the Castro. So we’re bringing you the songs we think should be dancing to. What can it hurt to listen? Madge will always be there…]

Feast your queer ears on the new Lindsay Lohan track, “Bossy”! After LiLo and her GF, Samantha Ronson were spotted partying at The Cock last Monday, we’ve re-evaluated what our darling ex-Disney diva means to us, and we’re willing to give her upcoming album a chance. Working with producers like Ne-Yo and Timbaland, there just might finally be a pop star to give us nightmares who’s actually under the age of 40. She’s Madonna: Millennial Edition! Not only that, but after two plays you won’t be able to get Lindsay’s sultry, pitch-perfected vocals out of your head, and the S&M connotations behind her lyrics are endless. Don’t disobey! Check out the single of the summer below.

Fag isn’t the new black, according to Kanye West, who interrupted his concert at Madison Square Garden a few nights ago to admonish his fans that it’s neither cool to use the word, nor cool to “stay ten feet away” from an approaching homosexual.

This week marked the second-to-last Tuesday Trannyshack ever to grace the tiny stage of the Stud Bar in San Francisco. Long before all the theme nights and Bjork tribute shows, the drag institution that is Trannyshack was birthed back in 1996 by Heklina, who has since become an organization unto herself in the nightlife scene.  Hundreds upon hundreds of trannies, virginal and elderly alike, have flailed across the Stud stage, competed in the annual Miss Trannyshack pageant (otherwise known as Heckles’ rent for the year), and made Trannyshack something wholly unique

MyComrade.com is an off-shoot of the East-Village-based fag mag founded by drag legend Linda Simpson (and her male alter-ego, Les Simpson) back in 1987 when we were just wee babes with no pubic hair and Ronald Reagan was still President. Since 2006 there’s been no issues of the mag, but luckily the web venture is a stylish, straight-up blog with plenty of witty headlines which continues in the mag’s model as “a kind of Vanity Fair/Art Forum/Mad Magazine for the gay smart set.”  We especially appreciate the drag coverage, with an exclusive on Joey Arias avoiding hormones in Vegas and random photo dumps from 1998 including Mistress Formika and Michael Soldier, and photos from the last Tingel Tangel Club. And we also like eclectic finds like this flashback to the heyday of Greg Louganis.