This song is the carpeted waiting room of God’s lobby. Decorated like an upscale motor lodge, but still a lobby for God, and so of heaven. Trimmings of commerce linger on its edges—the smell of mall pretzels, makeup counter ladies spritzing perfume on passersby.  Volatile compounds of minted, cinnamon’d gum displays; the sterilized crinkle of prescription bags.  A black town car you’re traveling to the airport in—cold and dawn, but the heat’s on in its back seat, you watch the sun rise, you start counting the steps to the door of your heart. You are going up and down an escalator in many locations at once. So many of its phrases overhanging their lines’ meter, dragged over and under the bruleed guitar sounds like tide pulls. Hear it at night and it’s a prom dance, balloons slowly volleying off of dancers’ feet. Hear it in the day and it’s like cold medicine—a cottoned veil over your thoughts, now both wistful and automated. So diffuse; broadcast from underwater transmitters. Argonauts set sail to it. The refrain seems to be written on the walls, on the t-shirts of ghosts you walk among. Don’t let them win.

In the waiting room there are velvet plush pews that smell of Catholic incense and Little Pine car freshener, and you kneel on them for the organ segment, look up through a stained glass cupola in expectation of the crescendo. As you kneel, you commune with every loneliness you’ve ever known, each of them folded together and suddenly sweet, berries studding the strange candied cream of the song.

We’re going to chat about the show 1 Girl 5 Gays.  I know…it’s been on for over a year.  But I guess it’s taken me that long to decide quite how I felt about it.  And the thing is…I’m still not completely sure.  The best I can do is “love/hate”, and that’s not very good, is it?

What contributes to the “hate” part of the equation is pretty obvious, but worth stating nonetheless.  I hate that on a show that aims to present a spectrum of the gay community, the panelists all seem like they were scouted at the exact same circuit party.  Virtually everyone in the rotating cast of “Gays” is perfectly toned and coiffed within an inch of their life; they’re all copies of the same Ken doll, just clad in different outfits, depending on “type.”   To be fair to the cast, a lot of them actually did know each other socially before the show.  And, as with many groups of friends, their fashions and opinions tend to run closely with each other’s.  Furthermore, as any circuit queen will tell you, fatties tend to not be allowed.  Unless, of course, they’re willing to be the token “bear”, which is exactly what young Phillip is on the show.

Having to bear the brunt of representing guys with a BMI over 0 is a daunting job, certainly.  There’s no right way to do this; you discuss your weight a couple of times, and suddenly, people think that’s all you talk about.  You ignore the issue, and your weight becomes (ahem…) the elephant in the room.  But I digress…

The show shouldn’t be called 1 Girl 5 Gays; it should be called 1 Girl 5 Friends or 1 Girl and This Particular Groupa Queens.  The fun of 20 questions is that you’re getting a range of answers, from a bunch of different people.  (Every college freshman knows that it’s just plain boring going up against a bunch of sluts in a game of “Never Have I Ever.” Why?  Because there’s no mystery, no surprise.  Anything you can think of, they already have.  So it’s best to just chug your entire beer and call it a night, y’know?)

This is not to say that the cast doesn’t disagree; most of the time they do.  I just find myself watching and consciously being distracted by how similar most of the panelists are to each other.  There are only 3 or 4 Gays of Color (in a rotating cast of 20 or so), only 1 overweight Gay, 0 trans men, 0 fathers, and 0 Gays over the age of 35.  Put bluntly, we’re watching a group of like minded friends bicker, and that gets tiresome after a while. 

Others have critiqued the somewhat glib tone of the show, claiming that it treats gay men as accessories.  Seemingly there is some truth to this as the host, Aliya-Jasmine, is the only cast member present in all episodes.  For this reason, it is tempting to view the show as one big exercise in selfish fag haggery, with the “Girl” interchanging her “Gays” at will, configuring them to suit her mercurial whims.  I can’t really get behind this argument, though – a cursory viewing of any episode will illustrate that if anyone is there for “window dressing” or to be played with, it’s the female host.  The guys prod her, play with her hair, and speak suggestively to her at will.  If anything, the Girl v. Gays power struggle is a draw.  Still, it is a little troubling that she maintains a steady presence (and therefore establishes the most fully formed “character”) while the men just rotate in and out. 

Now, on to the “love” part.  I do, believe it or not, love watching this show.  Aliya-Jasmine’s questions range from the outrageous and tawdry (ie. Grindr profile pics, preferred penis size) to the sweet and banal (first gay role model, thoughts on having children.)  Something straight audiences take for granted is that their (even fairly outré) desires are widely broadcast; from adolescence, movies like Porky’s or American Pie allow them to see themselves on screen and know that they are not alone in their even most pedestrian desires. 

Aside from the occasional art house or niche flick, the less than glamorous, messy sides of gay life are still not really explored in pop culture.  Our sex is supposed to be either porn star hot, or take place in some Tom Ford Gucci ad.  Realistic depictions or discussions of gay sex are really are not as widespread as one would hope.  Essentially, I think of 1G5G as filling the gay Porky’s void; it’s a smorgasbord of the naughty and the gross and the erotic, which allows us to say “Oh my God, really?  Me too!”  I hate to be so easily pleased, but I’m just glad there’s something like this on TV.  I’m solidly a member of the any representation beats no representation camp on this one. 

• King Helene once told me that Kristin Davis is the best actress on Sex and the City, because it’s harder to act comedy well, but especially hard to play a character like Charlotte—a ditz—where we’re supposed to scoff at her, yet respect the stakes of her existence enough to be moved by her.  This has stuck with me for a number of reasons, one of them being that I find Davis’s character to be one of the more three dimensional on the show, in spite of her ditzery.  She’s not a drag queen marionette like Samantha, or a bed of lettuce on which to serve harlequin clichés like Carrie, but a vulnerable creature both crippled and created by her geisha routine.  She’s a rare locus on the show where femininity-as-performance is queried, and it’s revealing/amusing that it comes in the form of a stock character.   
• What are the terms of a ditz?  She’s attractive (necessarily?), frequently blonde, always well intentioned, usually in a situation of wanting or having to escape the confines of her existence—Lucy trying to leave the house and act in Ricky’s world, Marilyn trying to snag a rich husband, Parker trying to be taken seriously as a librarian.  
• There’s not quite an equivalent to the ditz in the male world (though something could probably be said of stoner comedies).  Men can be absentminded; sweet and dopey strivers—their pratfalls endearing, but there’s a layer of pity or dismissal attached to even leading idiots that seems not to apply to the lady ditz.  The ditz, though a cousin to, is something other than the fool.  It has to do with a handicap granted indiscriminately to her gender, that makes her bumbling a given and casts any success as a triumph, as this poor, writhing creature tries to squirm out from behind her breasts.    
• I think of all the ditzes in the world—the real life ones I’ve known, and the fictional ones, and there seems a real possibility that the whole of ditzery is only a trope.  The ditz trajectory on film is often that a layer of superficiality is removed, or that a form of greedy, shallow ambition is replaced with a yearning for real meaning.  The costumes are toned down, the caper music quiets, and the person behind the ditz is exposed…maybe just momentarily, but exposed.  
• Ditzes are charming.  It could be that the charm is the blundering or it could be that, unlike more composed women who have been trained in the Jackie Kennedy mode to keep their personalities milk-still in a porcelain vessel, the ditz rushes about the world a chipped vase, and the accident of leaving any droplets behind is so unusual as to constitute charm.  Either way, the charm permits a veiled feminism—surging ahead doggedly, not in firm (Katherine) Hepburnian strides, but in little hogtied pencil skirt wiggles.  It wavers in a half-active/half-passive mode—the ask for forgiveness instead of permission approach.

As long as someone’s willing to publish something about Lindsay “It’s Just Water” Lohan, I will read it.  I used to deny it, and say that “it’s just sad, now” and then go buy an US Weekly with her on the cover to see which exclusive club/VFW Hall/LA County Jail she was stumbling out of that week.  But I’m done with the frontin’ and the lies; you know why?  Because you all do the same thing.  We love, love, love us some drunk, messy Lindsay.  It’s not even a “decline” anymore, it’s simply her natural state.  And it’s hilarious. 

Failing a drug test the very month that your Vanity Fair cover story (complete with vigorous denials of substance abuse) hits newsstands?  Claiming someone poured vodka down your leg, and that’s why your booze-monitoring anklet went off at a VMA afterparty?  Posing for a picture (in France) of you next to a plate of coke the very same day you told the judge you couldn’t make it to court due to ”passport issues”? 

Girl, please.  You are cracking. me. up.

But what’s really funny are the details emerging from her last foray into covergirl-dom.  So, Plum Magazine offers this bitch a cover-story and pictorial and exposure on their national media channels.  Lindsay Lohan…who hasn’t done anything (besides blow) in years but get paid to make cameos in straight to DVD/limited release-in the bad way- flicks(yes, I know…”Machete”…but it was a glorified cameo…) and at nightclubs, but still bills herself as an “actress”…someone was going to let her talk and listen and put it in print.  And do you know what she does?  She flakes on the interview.

Whomp.

But at least we have the pictures.  You know them by now…the played out side boob shot…

her looking lost and glamorous in a hotel lobby (Did you know she lived in the Chateau Marmont for over two years?!  Suze Orman would have a fit!)…blah, blah, blah.  Also, this person is only 25 years old.

What’s awesome is that the writer decides that instead of just printing the pics, she’d document the time she spent in the vortex of nuts that is Camp Lohan.  Apparently, she got her underage sister drunk, was in tears over a pair of missing heels (don’t you get the feeling she’s the girl who is always crawling around the floor of the club at closing?), and in the best episode, yells  “Move that cone. I’m Lindsay Lohan” to who she assumed (and we hope actually was) a parking attendant.  Too bad whoever he was did.  ‘Cause she definitely hit him up for a twenty once she did the rest of her stash in the lobby bathroom.  At least he got to feed her some humble pie.  (She then returned to the lobby bathroom and threw it back up, though.)

You can read more in depth about the Lohan crazy here: http://gawker.com/5820809/lindsay-lohan-indignant-that-she-was-not-considered-for-black-swan

Can someone please get this girl a reality show stat?!  I need more than vignettes, and photo outtakes and the occassional TMZ video.  I need full on, first person narration of the nuts.  Because while she’s no longer an actress, she’s one hell of an entertainer.

This one is a direct dedication to King Helene.

In high school, my best friend, who—in the grand tradition of my close male friends since kindergarten—turned out to be gay but-I-was-too-dumb-to-realize-it had this thing where we’d sit in the black leather seats of his deluxe SUV smoking Parliaments and belting pop songs together. By ‘together’ I mean to each other, wailing our hearts out, all the pathos of what we couldn’t have in life melting into the warm platonic nest of each other. Our favorites were ‘N Sync, Lil Kim, Britney, but then there was this song, which stood above all others.

In retrospect, I’m pleased as pudding that this was our song because it holds up nicely as a banner of fag haggery in its puzzling, dulcet complexity. There was the fact that both of us would fight over who would get to be the Christina in the duet (understand though: who can resist delivering the “lah-ooooonging to ho-old you” at 3:26?), there’s the campy drag queen/Orlando, Florida quality, there’s the way it’s a kabuki telenovela (yes there is a Spanish language version of this song), but mostly there’s the dominant flavor of this song and video, which is that of two sexually incompatible magnets passionately rebuffing each other in the dark (or actually in an Aladdin castle).

The non-chemistry of these two is the Vegas go-go dancer version of Don and Betty Draper: you’re hot, I’m hot, but I do not desire to put it in you, and there’s something lonely-making yet poignantly compelling about that.  Something that glamorizes and throws into relief the sex that happens for each of us, elsewhere, while purifying this space.  Something that makes us want to stand around in the vicinity of each other and writhe in a thwarted, masturbatory manner.

There’s the two dynamics: 1. the genial battle for diva-hood 2. the non-threatening mannequin sexuality. It’s a competition of two peers with nearly identical (societally marginalized) standards transposed over an essential apple vs. orange quality that saves each party from ever being subsumed by the other. Competition brings out the best in both without a phallic spear puncturing the bubble.  

Watching Ricky paw at nubile Christina makes me think of Holly Golightly’s “He’s harmless—he thinks girls are dolls literally.” Ricky, at the forefront of his maze (“the mind’s mazes”) is a minotaur of a different color, the bestial half stored offscreen. With these two only hand gestures make the scene; they pass among each other as CGI ether instead of into each other as grinding hip motions, which is I think where it’s at with gay/girl friendships—it’s this chance to duet enthusiastically beside one another, inviting only the better angels of each gender.