Tony and the Paraplegic Dwarf

Several things are jumbled up in my head right now and causing me what is probably a very normal anxiety. I'm starting a rapid career transition provoked by a lay-off, I'm moving across the country, I'm missing my New York friends already, and I just met a great guy here in New York and I don't know how to balance normal dating behavior with wanting to say overly affectionate things that are surely motivated by the ticking clock I hear in my head every time I talk to him. So I'm going to write about something funny and try to take a load off.

In 2003 I was standing in line for the bathroom at the Starbucks on 18th near Castro in San Francisco. I was at the end of the line, and the only person in front of me was a paraplegic dwarf in a wheelchair.

When the man in the bathroom came out, I reached forward to hold the door open for Dwarfy. As Dwarfy entered, he said, "I'm going to need some help in there. Would you mind coming in with me?"

You can imagine that this caught me off guard. My first instinct was that I sure as hell didn't want to do it alone. I said, "Ok, just let me get my friend outside to help me."

He quickly replied, with an annoyed tone, "I didn't ask your friend to help me. I asked you."

Ok, think quick. Karma is a bitch. One can't just walk away from a paraplegic dwarf in need. "Um, ok," I said, and after we were both inside, I locked the door.

He rolled over next to the toilet and said, "Ok, I'm going to pull my pants down. Then I need you to put your hands under my armpits and lift me to the toilet." He proceeded to pull his pants down while I uncomfortably stared at the floor. "I'm ready," he said.

I leaned down and HOLY CRAP, his penis was huge! Seriously, like 4 inches long and really fat and totally soft. Ok focus. Hands under the armpits. So I lifted him up and as gracefully as possible, and I set him down on the toilet. Once he seemed stable, I started to back up.

"Woah, where are you going!" he yelled. "You have to hold me in place!"

Oh... uh... ok. I bent back down. So imagine now that I'm standing in front of the toilet, bent down with my hands under his pits, with my face hanging very uncomfortably over his crazy third leg. I can't remember what I was thinking about. It was like a dream though. Lots of madness with no real clarity. Until I hear the first explosive fart. That really brought me back into the moment.

So Dwarfy took a shit. I was doing my best to angle my face left or right as far as possible, but movement is really limited when you're holding a dwarf on a toilet. Afterwards I got to hold him with just one hand while he wiped, and then helped him pull his toddler pants back up. I moved his tiny little ass into that wheelchair as fast as possible and got the little man out of there. I remember washing my hands. Oddly, I don't remember having to pee anymore after that.

And that's the story of Tony and the Paraplegic Dwarf.

I am my own best PR

I feel like I might be experiencing my 15 minutes of gay D-List fame. I did some nude modeling lately (nothing raunchy, nice artsy stuff) and the amazing photographer Walter Kurtz has given me a whole page on his gallery online. If you don't mind seeing my soft penis (no boners, I promise), check out http://www.walterkurtz.com/. Go to the galleries, and click on Tony. Sweet!

Giving too much away

This blog, among other things, is a frequent reminder that my understanding of boundaries is different than most people. And because I am well aware that I differ from the norm, I get quite insecure about giving so much of myself away. But the truth is that this really is what comes naturally for me.

My mom is very open and surely the foundation for my behavior came from her. But I think that Umecke and Rowena were responsible for bringing me to my current extreme. They became my best friends when I was 18 and just out of the closet. Just months before we became close, I had been so depressed about being gay that I tried to kill myself, and then these two amazing women came into my life, and they taught me to hide nothing. Better yet, they taught me to be proud of everything. It was the most liberating time in my entire life. With the strength and courage of those women, I took everything out of the shameful place inside myself and put it out for everyone to see.

The first time I became aware that I lived life more openly than most people was in 1998 when Rowena suddenly died. She turned 23 on the day that she disappeared from a gas station at Hollywood and Gower in Los Angeles, and 10 days later her body was found in some bushes around the block. I will explain the full story someday, later. But right now I will say that she was the closest person to me at the time, and after she died, I suprisingly learned a lot about her. With every new piece of information I felt a little heartbroken, because she had known every single thing about me. I couldn't fathom how the person I was closest to had hid severe depression, or a 6-month affair with another friend of ours. I remember the night that I called both my mother and Umecke, and I asked if I knew everything about them. In turn, they assured me that I did not, and that this was no reflection of their love or trust in me. Some people just needed to keep some things private.

Since that time there has been a battle inside me. On one hand it feels so good and honest for me to give it all away. I have done nude modeling. I will talk about my sex life, or my fears, my depression, or my anxiety, with most people. I trust people inherently. When I date, I can't play the game. I tell you when I want to see you. I tell you when I want to kiss you. I tell you that I find you gorgeous. At parties, I say too much. I tell the story of the naked dance party at Burning Man, or the leather/sex party in London, or eating a girlfriend out in front of a room full of people at an after hours party when I was younger.

And then I feel guilty. I see around me that my friends don't have the same elasticity in their boundaries, and it makes me wonder if mine are too far out. What do I do if they are? Can I change? Do I want to?

Let me ask you: why do you hide the things you hide? What would happen if you didn't hide them anymore? Would you feel more free if you were able to give it away? I promise that I'm not asking on the offensive. Your answers might be deservedly different from mine. But I feel like a lot of people never bothered to ask themselves these questions.

I often end my internal argument with a staunch decision to hold my ground. Be true to myself, because anything else will drive me crazy. And from that decision came this blog.

There are times like tonight, when I was out with Connie, Andi and Brad, that my stories push the boundaries. I see an uncomfortable look, and I realize I have gone too far. And again I feel guilty. I wish I had normal boundaries.

And then I come home and write it all down here for everyone to see. So for me, I guess the good just outweighs the guilt.

You don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

My wise friend Marshall once said (last Sunday), "You don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle." He was actually talking about my BigMuscle profile at the time, and at first I didn't get it. If I put naked pictures of myself on the site, are they steak, or are they sizzle?

I looked up the saying online, and it appears that it really is a well-known marketing term. I guess the steak is the product, the sizzle is the differentiator, which means the sizzle is all things that make the product different from all the other products in the same category. So to connect the dots, I guess a headless picture of a guy would be steak, but if you see something unique in the picture, you've got sizzle. If you can learn something unique in their written profile, again more sizzle.

This got me thinking about what really sells a person. When I first saw Marshall at the gym about a year ago, my impression of him was that he was gorgeous. But I guess he was gorgeous in the same way that half the other men in the gym were gorgeous. So steak.

But I guess that there really have to be certain characteristics in the steak to even make you notice the sizzle, right? If Sizzler had an advertisement with a rotting steak, covered in flies, sitting in the middle of the most beautifully decorated plate I had ever seen, I still wouldn't buy the steak. There has to be a minimum acceptable threshold of steak quality. Not only that, you actually have to make the steak look gorgeous. You have to work that steak out in the gym and give it good haircuts and proper hygiene and basically look incredibly edible in a pair of gym shorts. Only then will people (and by people I mean other Chelsea boys) introduce themselves to the steak and even have the chance of learning about the sizzle.

Well then the pressure is really on, because the Chelsea boy that just met the steak has undoubtedly met a thousand steaks before, and all of those steaks tried to sell the sizzle. Some of the steaks were funny, some were smart, some had good jobs, some just made him feel good. Som steaks came with a big ol' bone. The Chelsea boy had learned to expect some sizzle with his steak. In fact, he expected a lot. He thought he had a lot of sizzle, gosh darnit, and he deserved some sizzle from others!

I'm not sure if I'm the Chelsea boy or the steak in this analogy anymore, but one thing is clear: you have to sell the steak AND the sizzle. (But don't worry Marshall, you've got them both covered :-)

A little explanation about my decision to go to San Francisco

I think I said in my post about getting fired that I knew I wanted to move to San Francisco within minutes of getting the news. Several people have asked me how I could make such a quick decision. The answer is that I already thought about this a lot.

This was my third winter in New York, and the third time that I felt like jumping off a building when the temperature dropped below freezing. By the middle of December I was talking to my therapist about this city every week, and I was exhausting myself by constantly thinking about what city I should be living in. After one therapy session, I realized that I could make a decision model out of this problem and finally have an answer and be done with it. So I sat at home one night and got intimate with Excel. Here is what I found:

On the left I listed the characteristics of a city that affect my happiness. I rated each of those characteristics on a scale of 1-10, and then rated my favorite cities on those characteristics. Then each city was assigned a weighted score, and the pink box at the top finds the city with the highest score and displays the city name. I kept playing with the numbers, and no matter what I did (while being true to myself), San Francisco was my #1.

So now you can understand why I knew immediately that I wanted to move to SF. My analytical extremism had already been applied to the situation. My model really confirmed what my heart knew. San Francisco is home, and while I might be a bit disappointed that Sydney didn't win, it is going to be great to be home again.

Chapter 2: Stepdad #1, Chuck Prue

(In case you are new to my blog, I'm writing my history in a series of chapters. I wrote Chapter 1 in January 2008. This entry is kind of depressing, but its a true reflection of my younger life. I promise the chapters will get cheerier when I'm an adult.)

Mom met Chuck Prue in June 1984 at a bar in Alameda, just outside San Francisco. He was a sailor working at the Navy base in Alameda for the summer, while permanently stationed in San Diego. By that point Mom had been a single mother for five years, and was beginning to worry about the effects of raising my sister and I without a father figure.

We didn't have a lot of money. My mom slept in the living room back then so that my sister and could share the bedroom in our apartment. My first memory of Chuck is when I got up in the middle of the night because I thought I heard my mom crying. I went out to her bed in the living room and he was on top of her. I thought he was hurting her, and I started screaming. Mom jumped up and said everything was ok. She told me to go to my room. Within seconds she was dressed and at my side, and explained to me that everything was ok. It was my last month as an 8 year old. My sister Jennifer was 5.

Mom allowed herself to fall in love quickly with Chuck, and made an impulsive decision that she hoped would make life better for us all. She married him on August 4, 1984, and on August 8 we packed our remaining things into his truck and drove down to our new home in San Diego.

In order to afford a three-bedroom apartment we moved to a cheaper eastern suburb called El Cajon. It was a pretty decent low-income suburb, with most families living in stucco apartment buildings with pools at the center, and strip malls providing all services from grocery stores to doctors. We lived in the first apartment for a year. The things I remember about that year include:

• The beautiful bushes that lined the walkways of our building, and the hummingbirds that drank from their flowers
• Playing tag with my sister around the building
• My sister’s cat Sissy jumping out of her second story bedroom window and living in the bushes for two days until we found her
• Chuck kicking a paper bag that he thought was empty, but was actually full of my painted rock collection, and when I laughed, him pushing me across the room so that my head slammed into the wall and I fell to the ground
• Mom yelling at him for pushing me
• The first feeling I had had of being unsafe in my own home
• Eating liver for the first and only time
• A beehive in the tree outside our living room window
• Cleaning the apartment naked so that I didn’t get my clothes dirty, while mom played an 8-track of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits
• Chuck yelling at me about not cleaning the cat-box in my room, grabbing me from the back of my t-shirt, dragging me face-down through the hallway and into my room, and shoving my face in the cat shit
• Feeling so confused, and humiliated, and scared
• Mom taking Chuck into their bedroom and screaming loud enough for me and Jennifer to hear that she would leave if he ever touched either of us again
• A truer understanding of how deeply my mother loved me

Despite my growing fear of Chuck in that first year, when I think of the apartment I remember that it was bright, and the excitement of a new beginning. After one year though, we moved to a new apartment in a different part of El Cajon. When I think of that apartment I think of darkness, and the beginning of the anxiety that I have carried with me since. We lived in that apartment for one year as well, and here are the things I remember about that year:

• Our first VCR, and the fun I had recording and watching movies
• A rabbit we had that would chase our cats around and try to have sex with them
• Losing my cat Missy one day, and searching the apartment complex until I was crying so hard I could barely say her name anymore, and going back to the apartment feeling drained and horrible to find her there waiting for me
• Chuck asking me to help him build a wooden storage system for the bed of his truck, and constantly yelling at me for doing everything wrong, but making me stay to help him
• Teaching myself to do front handsprings in the lawn
• Black widow spiders on the back porch
• Seeing Chuck naked when he came to my door one night just after I had gone to bed; not hearing anything he said, but staring at his penis, which looked long and thick, though it was the first grown man’s penis I had seen
• Feeling aroused by Chuck, even while hating and fearing him
• Asking my mom what a blowjob was, and her telling me
• Telling mom that I thought I was gay (at 11), and her telling me that it was probably just a phase

By that point I was in sixth grade and was in a school for smart kids. I say this here because I think it made the dynamic between Chuck and I worse. I have talked about this with Mom before and I think that Chuck was very self-conscious about his own intelligence. During that second year of their marriage he took a test to advance to the next level in the Navy and failed three times. So the way that manifested with me was for him to constantly show me his superiority, demand things from me, and make me feel stupid, or subservient, or just scared.

At the time I only knew that Chuck was abusive with me, but I later found out that he was quite abusive with Mom in that year as well. In 1986 Mom left him and we moved in with Mom’s parents, who luckily had moved to San Diego as well. Chuck’s mental health deteriorated, and soon after they separated he was ordered by the Navy to spend six months in an intensive psychiatric facility.

The last time I ever saw Chuck was maybe seven or eight months later when I looked out the window one morning and saw him in my grandparent’s driveway. I was terrified, and ran to my mom, but by the time she got to the window he was gone. I thought that maybe I had been mistaken. So we finished getting ready for school, and when we went to the car, we found a large basket of black flowers on the hood of the car. There was no note. At the time I thought it was a warning, but I guess it was just a goodbye.

Hung Like a Horse

Once a month I try to go on a guided tour of the West Chelsea galleries. Chelsea alone has 300 galleries, which makes it the world's hub for contemporary art. The tours are led by a guy who has a Ph.D. in educational psychology with an emphasis in art or something, and he spends his life seeing the new exhibits. Everything in galleries is for sale, so a show usually only lasts 4-6 weeks, and that means its a full-time job for him. Then once a month he takes a group on a tour of his 8 favorite exhibits. Its a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.


Before today's tour he sent an email out to his whole list letting everyone know that today would have an especially controversial exhibit. It was great marketing, because he got his biggest group ever.

To get right to the point, the second gallery that we walked into had a tv on the floor of an otherwise empty white room. By the time I entered the room there was already a crowd around the television. I pushed my way to the front and sat on the floor. At first the lighting threw me off and I couldn't tell what I was looking at. Here is what I saw:

Look closely, and you'll see a man licking a horse's penis. Well, that caught me off guard a little bit.

Apparently the artist did not film this himself. He found this video in Germany, or Austria, or some other country that is overly repressed and therefore acts out sexually. Then he digitally altered the film with a red tint and a kind of psychadelic red light show playing over the horsey porn. Wa-la. Art.

The tour guide explained that the artist never explains his work. There is no literal message. We are just meant to experience it and be shocked.

The paintings in the next room were somewhat shocking, but really by that point I was completely desensitized. Stick figures recreating a snuff video, a man made of cigarettes, whatever. Here is a picture of my friend James next to Cock Monster:

I really have nothing to say anymore. Everything seems insignificant. Woahhhh, horsey.

California, Here I Come!!!

I was feeling a lot of pressure to write about something amazing now that people are actually subscribing to my blog, and so I bounced all these ideas around about what I could say that would be interesting and I couldn't decide and I started getting stressed and...

...then I got laid off. Yep, this morning at 10:45. So fuck yeah! I've got something to write about now!

Don't be sad though. My first reaction (well, my second reaction) was a smile, because I knew immediately that I was going home to California.

In case you're wondering why I got laid off, here's the scoop:

• First, the firm is about to split the commercial practice and government practice into separate businesses, and that meant a restructuring for both sides
• Everyone was pretty sure that lay-offs would be part of the deal
• I was told this morning that in the assessment sessions last week, every Associate (that was my level, and we were all compared regardless of our time in the firm) was ranked into top, middle, or bottom third; I was ranked bottom third
• The entire bottom third is getting cut
• The reasons for my low ranking centered around my interpersonal style, which was referred to as informal, unprofessional, sometimes aggressive, sometimes defensive, and often awkward
• A secondary reason was that I didn't go above and beyond in my delivered work
• Interestingly, I got good feedback on how I structure and manage work and my thought leadership, which is basically how I anticipate and meet clients' needs, but this must not have been ranked very highly in importance
• You all know me, so you can imagine that if the firm sees my interpersonal style as the main reason for me to go, then this is not the firm for me

I love how life does this. I remember the day that I got back from my second vacation in Sydney, and over lunch I told Umecke that I thought I wanted to move. That was almost exactly 5 years ago. In less than a month I was gone, and in less than a month from now, I will be back.

I can't wait to feel the California sun. I can't wait to eat good Mexican food, or have drinks with my best friends after work, or be part of that dirty sexy hippy lovey vibe that is San Francisco.

If you have an open bedroom, I could probably use it for a week or two in April. I hope to couch surf for a month or so when I arrive, because seriously, papa's broke.

But papa's happy. Yay! California, here I come!!!

If a tree falls in the woods (next to an investment banker cheating on his fiancee with a whore), does anyone hear it?

I was having drinks with a straight male friend from business school a couple weeks ago at a no-name bar in Soho. My friend got a call from another guy that we went to school with asking where we were, and that guy decided to come join us. I didn't know this guy well in school, but he always seemed nice enough. He is doing very well for himself now as an investment banker at a big firm, and investment bankers always intrigue me so I thought he'd have a good story or two.

So he shows up and we have a round, and then another round. By this point I am aware that Investment Banker has got engaged (to be married) since we graduated. However, during round 3 he is becoming very interested in most girls walking by. At some point the conversation moves from some girls fine ass to hookers. Now I'm the only gay guy here, so I feel like the outsider in what I assume is the normal ritual of straight male bonding... talking about cheating on your girlfriend/wife. Fortunately though, my friend had the common sense to say, "What about your fiancee?"

Investment Banker shrugged and said, "If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone here it? If I sleep with a whore and no one ever finds out, did I really cheat?"

I have been rolling this around in my head now for two weeks. And I'm not trying to figure out if its cheating because of course it is. What I'm trying to figure out is why this guy thought it was acceptable/cool/funny to talk about disrespecting the person he is about to marry.

Part of the conundrum for me is the gay straight difference. My guess is that the infidelity joke has probably been told a million times between beer-drinking buddies and that straight guys don't actually believe that anyone will do it. Its just a bullshit conversation that guys use to bond. If this is true though, then they must recognize a subtlety that I was not able to pick up, because he sounded serious to me.

I feel like its not cool for the gays to talk about premeditated cheating. Is that right? Do we sit around sipping our carb-free vodka & sodas and talk about how to cheat on our boyfriends without getting caught? (Yes, first you have to go through the trouble of finding friends in monogamous relationships to even fathom that conversation, but had you found those friends, I just don't feel like they would brag about their intent to cheat.)

That said, I think it is important to recognize that I am not placing judgement on those who cheat (unless you do it to me and then fuuuuuuuccccckkkk you). Like it or not, it happens a lot, and if I gave up every friend who ever cheated I would get lonely really quickly. I wouldn't discourage a friend from telling me about cheating, because people make mistakes. But most people make those mistakes spontaneously. Don't they? So to bring it back to Investment Banker, I guess it was his INTENT that really suprised me.

Investment Banker left us after round 3 to go meet other friends. I heard the story of the rest of his night later and it sounded like it ended with some greasy indian food instead of a hooker. So he probably was just talking shit. I guess he should be careful who he talks about these things to though, because blogs make trees falling in the woods much more audible.

Amigos en Puerto Rico

I am visiting my friends Jodi and Steve in San Juan, Puerto Rico right now. They are married and with child, and as you can imagine they are unique in my peer group that is otherwise filled with gay manly whores. I'm not really myself at work, so I would say that they are my only real link to the alternate straight reality, complete with weddings and babies and sex with one person for the rest of their life.

Steve and I went to business school together, and met in June of 2005 during an orientation program. Two months later he met Jodi, and three months after that they moved in together, which made them big 'ol lesbians in my book.

I was really self-conscious about my friendship with Steve in the beginning because it had been so long since I had had a close straight male friend. He didn't have the boundaries that most straight guys have, and it just suprised me that he would want to develop a friendship with a big homo like me. Its one of the few times that I have been aware of my own internalized homophobia. In this case I think I had more of it than Steve did. In the fall of our first year, my mom came to visit, and over brunch he met my family, and I met Jodi.

Jodi is a school teacher, which fits her perfectly because she (like Steve actually) has the gift of being incredibly likeable. She's adorable, and rambunctious, and funny.

Last summer they got married in Minnesota, and I was in the wedding. Aside from being completely covered in swollen bug bites, the most memorable part of the whole trip was when we were out on a lake, and for some reason our posse left us floating in two inner tubes while they took the boat to pick up someone from the dock. We spent about 20 minutes talking and laughing, and it occurred to me that I felt completely comfortable with them. Even though Jodi kept reminding me that there were leeches in the lake, I felt at home because they were there.

After the wedding they moved to Puerto Rico, and I am finally here on my first visit. The lucky bitches live on the ocean on the top floor of a highrise. Here is a picture I just took over the balcony.



Oh, Jodi's home, bye bye now.