Sanktastic

The iPhone Chronicles

2011-11-20T12:12:00.000-08:00

There's a kind of a sort of cost
There's a couple of things get lost
There are bridges you cross
You didn't know you crossed until you've crossed...

--"Wicked"

We start with the good news: The first installment of "Dirty Laundry," my all-naked comedy show (produced by my dear friend and sleaze-meister extraordinaire Daniel Nardicio) was an unqualified success. We packed the space at 30 Lexington, and the evening was truly one-of-a-kind, high-quality entertainment. I think everyone there would agree. Here's an interview Next Magazine did with me previewing the event.

I'm not sure why nudity and comedy would go well together. But if you really think about it, stand-up is all about stripping away artifice and getting to the real and the true underneath. The best comics -- particularly the comics I most enjoy, like Louis CK -- will get on-stage and expose their true selves to the audience. Appearing on-stage naked is perhaps the logical extension of that. I know for me, being naked while telling stories doesn't make me feel embarrassed or sexual or any of the other things we associate with nudity. But it does make me feel exposed and vulnerable, and that actually enhances my ability to connect to the audience in an authentic way.

In any case, and it'll be hard to understand this if you weren't there, the vibe of the show felt like nothing so much as a bonfire at sleepaway camp, at which people are lounging contentedly around a warm center, exchanging funny stories and laughing. It felt cozy.

Just like this. Only nakeder.

30 Lex is not a bar or a club. It's essentially an empty duplex apartment that's used for various parties and functions. I was hopping around the space busily throughout the show, as I always am when I'm hosting. And at some point, I took some of my stuff -- a pair of socks, a Chapstick, my MAC Medium Dark Blot Pressed Powder (which keeps me from looking shiny on stage) and my iPhone -- and set them on the kitchen stove, which was next to the stage platform.

This is where the bad news happens.

Immediately after the show, I wrapped a towel around my waist and was engulfed in a flurry of activity. People came up to hug me, thank me, shake my hand, etc. The photographer from Next Magazine took pictures of me and the other comics. And then I sat down for a very long, very thoughtful interview with a reporter from Edge on the Net. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

When the interview ended, I went to put my clothes back on and gather my belongings. Everything was exactly where I had left it: Socks, Chapstick, MAC powder and even my backpack (inside of which were my wallet and keys).

But no iPhone.

Adios.

I knew instantly it had been taken, even as Daniel and everyone else tried to convince me it would turn up. It shocked me -- and still shocks me -- that anyone who had been part of such a warm, intimate experience would then turn around and steal something so valuable, but to paraphrase Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest, this ain't my first time at the stolen iPhone rodeo.

My first iPhone was was stolen just one month after I bought it. The circumstances were almost identical, except I was clothed at the time. I was hosting "That Sank Show" at Bar-Tini and set the phone down on the edge of DJ booth for a few minutes, and poof! It was gone. The replacement cost me $700. And now, less than six months later, I've got to replace it again.

If I'm being honest, I really do have a troubled past with Apple products. Regular readers of this blog will recall my missing iPod saga from when I lived in San Diego. That story actually had a happy ending, as I got my iPod back, and the fat bitch who stole it lost her job. And this past year has been an especially trying one for me in terms of lost and stolen items of all kinds. In June, I had my wallet stolen out of my pocket at the Eagle (don't even ask the circumstances of that transaction), and then three months later my new wallet fell out of my gym shorts while getting off a cross-town bus, only to be returned the next day (sans cash) by a bicyclist. So this latest theft is just one more giant headache and financial lost to add to my long, sad list.

What can I tell you? As anal retentive and organized and Type-A as I pride myself in being, mine is a scattered artist's brain. And also, I was naked Friday night, so there weren't a lot of obvious places to stow the phone, other than up my ass.

I've been chronicling the loss of my phone on Facebook all weekend, and a number of well-meaning people have reached out to me to try and offer advice on getting the phone back or replacing it without having to pay an arm and a leg. While I truly appreciate everyone's suggestions, none have been useful to me. So in a preemptive strike against one more person's telling me my insurance will pay for it (and as a sort of primer to anyone out there who may be going through this), allow me to summarize:

1) I didn't have insurance. After I lost the first phone, I inquired about insurance and was informed that Verizon's insurance plan only covers damage, not loss or theft. So I didn't get it, and it wouldn't have made a difference if I did.

2) I did have a passcode on the phone, so theoretically, it should be useless to whoever nabbed it -- at least until they wipe the phone and restore it to its factory settings. More on that later.

3) I did download and launch the "Find-My-iPhone" application before the phone was stolen. Apple trumpets this app as a sort of LoJack for phones -- a way to track your phone's location, send messages to it, or lock/wipe it completely from a remote location. I'm here to tell you that Find-My-iPhone is fucking useless. Unless the phone is kept charged and turned on, the app won't work. And whoever has my phone turned it off within an hour of acquiring it and has kept it off ever since. I know this from my Verizon usage reports, and from the fact that I've tried using Find-My-iPhone about two-dozen times, day and night, over the last 48 hours. All it tells me is that my phone is "offline." At this point, I've done everything the app allows -- including sending a sound and a "Return to me!" message to the phone, locking it and wiping it. All the site tells me is that my commands will be granted if and when someone turns the phone on.

4) Apple will not replace my phone. In fact, they don't even have any more iPhone 4 32G's left. I could purchase an iPhone 4 8G -- essentially a downgrade -- for about $500. Or I could reserve the new iPhone 4S and pay $700 whenever it arrives. Nor does Apple keep track of lost or stolen phones by serial number. In other words, if the thief takes my phone(s), plugs it into his Mac or takes it to the Apple store, he can simply wipe out my settings and data and start over again with his "new"phone. This is another reason why Find-My-iPhone and passcodes are bullshit security.

5) Verizon, however, does keep a list of lost/stolen phones by serial number. I spoke with Monica, a truly exceptional customer service agent at Verizon, today, and she actually looked up both the serial numbers of my first and second iPhone and confirmed that nobody has tried to activate them using a different phone number. And now they can't, because I've reported them stolen. This won't necessarily help me get my phones back, but at least I know the evil cunts who took them won't get to use them either. (The poor saps they sell them to are another story.) In addition, I registered with a site called iTrack, which is essentially a national lost-and-found directory for Apple products. Supposedly, iTrack works with pawn shops and law enforcement to prevent the resale of stolen devices. And I've offered a reward of $100 via the site to anyone who turns in the newer of the two phones. We shall see.

6) I don't have renter's insurance. I don't rent.

7) My homeowner's insurance doesn't cover items that weren't stolen from my home.

8) I am not eligible for a free upgrade (to the 4S) until October of 2012. Monica told me she could bend that by a month or two, but not an entire year.

9) For the time being, I'm back to using my ancient, teeny-tiny Verizon LG VX920V03 phone. It's like using an Etch a Sketch to talk, text and email.

I Love the 90s.

And that's basically where it's at now. I'm thinking what I'll do is try and find an iPhone 3 or 4 that someone's not using anymore -- my beloved cousin Stacy said I might be able to have her old 3 -- or purchase a used one online. Then, when next October rolls around, I'll upgrade to the 4S for free. If anyone reading this happens to have an iPhone they're no longer using and wants to donate it to me, please email me. I'll be eternally grateful. I am also accepting monetary donations to the Adam Sank Sad Foundation for iPhone Loss (ASSFIL). You can donate by clicking here:

Actually, if every reader of this blog gave just $5.00, I could probably buy myself a brand new 4S. (I'm assuming I have at least 140 unique readers.) Any leftover funds will be donated to AmFAR. How 'bout it?

Oh, and one last thing. When I got back from the Apple store and the gym today, I walked into my apartment and smelled a strange and sickly mildew odor. I followed the smell into the bathroom, which I found covered in dirty water. Apparently the old French man who lives upstairs had left his bathtub running indefinitely, and the water seeped through my ceiling and light fixtures.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Homo phone home. ♥

Come see me tomorrow night at Rock Bar! Details here.

Fun With Scanner

2011-11-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

Look at this photograph

Every time I do it makes me laugh

How did our eyes get so red?

And what the hell is on Joey's head?

--Nickelback

I know my recent extended trips down Memory Lane have bordered on the pathologically narcissistic, even for a blog titled "Sanktastic." But since so many people from my past have reached out to me in the last few weeks -- and since I recently rediscovered a trove of old photos and figured out how to use my sexy Canon MP495 Pixma to scan them online (no easy feat, by the way) -- I decided to do one last nostalgic photo-blog. If you didn't find my Frat Life series entertaining, you might as well skip the rest of this post. But if you're at all curious about seeing some of the people I described (along with myself as a fresh young thing) read on.

The photos are from a big grey album I made and kept all through college. It's really one of the gayest things you've ever seen. Each page is organized chronologically and by theme, and I had cut out funny little pictures and phrases from magazines and glued them into the album to accompany the pictures. If you've ever seen one of those collages 13-year-olds make to commemorate a bar or bat mitzvah, it's that sort of thing. (At least that's what we did back when I was on the bar mitzvah circuit. Kids these days are probably far more high-tech.)

The album also serves to demonstrate just how abruptly and completely I came out. Sophomore year ends with a number of romantic, kissy-face photos of Jane and me. Turn the page, and there's me and Will shirtless at the Ann Arbor public pool, looking like we just came from a Pride parade. A few more pages, and there's me with my first boyfriend, Tony. From Jane to Tony in one year. I wish I could rebound from relationships now as quickly I did then.

I found the album at my sister Laura's house in Summit. Laura and her family own a large barn in their back yard. At one time long before they owned it, it was an actual barn, with horse stables and a chicken coop and so forth. Now it's just a dark, drafty place where they store stuff. When I moved to San Diego in '08, I stashed about six boxes of my belongings, mostly old files, in the chicken coop. In the ensuing years, a number of creatures -- perhaps raccoons -- have made a comfortable home for themselves in my boxes, and a lot of the stuff I left behind is shredded beyond recognition.

Fortunately, the album survived. And now, on with the slide show. (You can enlarge each picture by clicking on it.)

Painfully hung over in my freshman room in East Quad.

I was REALLY skinny -- 5'10'' and about 140 lbs.

And I could eat whatever I wanted.

Little bitch.

This is not Jane.
Her name is Heather, and she was my first college girlfriend.

Despite that terrible late-80s Michigan hair, she was actually rather beautiful.

The cast of "Best LIttle Whorehouse in Texas."

Future Tony nominee Hunter Foster is in the front row with his hands in the air.

Jules is diagonally up and to his right, wearing glasses and a pink top.

I am dead center at the top of the picture.

No idea why I'm wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

My first picture as a frat guy. My big brother, Steve, is far left.

Jules is to his right.

On the other side is Becky, who was one of closest friends and roommates through most of college.

Surrounded by chicks at one of my first Chi Psi parties.

Lodge president Bill Lewis has his arm around me.

(At least, I think that's him.)

Jane and me soon after we started dating.

Faces have been blurred to protect the innocent.

Yes, that is a dangly earring hanging from my left lobe.

And check out my hairy chest.

I hadn't yet discovered man-scaping.

With Colin at a lodge halloween party.

I went as Pat from "Saturday Night Live."

I had removed the wig and pillow by that point in the night.

Colin is -- I think -- Billy Idol.

With Steve and an unidentified Alpha Chi at the lodge's "Great Gatsby" party.

This is why I loved Chi Psi.

What other fraternity would have had a "Great Gatsby" party?!

At the Chi Psi formal in Windsor, Ontario, with Jane.

I refer to this picture as the last straight one ever taken.

Told ya -- it gets gay really fast.

With Will at the pool.

There was another Chi Psi with us that day whom we were both convinced was gay .

But he's now married with kids.

I cut him out of the picture so as not to incriminate.

All gussied up with Elizabeth,

Sh was an older woman who played a big role in my coming-out summer.

And a mighty mysterious character, indeed.

Someday I'll write a whole blog about her.

With Colin at the lodge formal in Chicago in '92.

I had come out to him and my other close friends -- including my date -- by then.

I don't know why it looks like our shirts are glowing.

Dipping Colin on the dance floor.

With Tony in Saugatuck, about three weeks after we started dating.

I had never been so in love and rarely have been since.

The final evolution in my becoming a homo.

It's not what you think.

I had the lead in a campus production of "Torch Song Trilogy."

So actually, it kind of is what you think.

And that's it, kids! Hope you enjoyed these.

Homo in pictures. ♥

Going Once, Going Twice...

2011-11-10T11:40:00.000-08:00

I've got the brain, you've got the looks
Let's make lots of money
You've got the brawn, I've got the brains
Let's make lots of money
--Pet Shop Boys

I'm baaaa-aaaack. And trying to get back on the healthy living track, although the official Life Cleanse has ended. Since many of you have asked, here was my final cleansing tally, as it were:

30 days without alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes.

That's it. That's what I accomplished. Which is nice, but on the flip side, I failed to meet my goals in terms of eating, working out, television, writing and casual sex. I was unable to stick to a program for even 30 days in those areas. Which, if nothing else, clarifies for me where my challenges lie going forward.

A number of friends in various recovery programs tell me it was a mistake for me to try giving up everything at once. Recovering alcoholics, for instance, are instructed not to try and quit smoking during their first phase of sobriety. But honestly, for me all of these vices are equivalent, in terms of the purpose they serve. I use each of them (to varying degrees) to numb, soothe and distract myself from the business of living life. And each of them keeps me from having to do any mental and emotional heavy lifting. They keep me stuck. So avoiding one while continuing to partake in another feels like switching from Big Macs to Whoppers. Either way, you wind up feeling like shit. (For the record, I prefer the Whopper.)

Hold the onions.

Anyway.

Here's the best thing to come out of the Life Cleanse: I'm still not smoking. And I'm not going to start again. There's just no reason for me to pick this habit back up and a million reasons not to. I've always been a freakishly light smoker -- a pack would typically last me two weeks -- but I've been smoking more or less continuously since I was 14, when one of the older kids at Newark Academy let me take a puff of her cig in the smoking section of the school cafeteria. (Yes, we actually had one, available in the mornings to students 16 and older. Ah, the 80s.) I switched from Marlboro Lights to American Spirits about 10 years ago, and though I remain convinced that the latter brand is far less harmful, the whole enterprise is horrible and deadly and stupid. Twenty-six years of smoking is more than enough for me, and since I clearly didn't miss it during this 30-day period, I might as well make a clean break.

Farewell, old friends.

Beyond that, my goal moving forward is to live as cleansily, if not perfectly, as possible. Only good can come from less TV, less casual sex, less partying, etc. With one exception:

I am a better comic after a few drinks.

I know, I know, that sounds like classic addict rationalization, and I can hear the collective heads of my AA friends exploding in unison. But it's simply the truth.

Look, I've never been a big drinker. Two drinks, and I've got a nice buzz going. Three drinks, I'm sleepy and slurry. Four drinks, I'm dizzy and unable to speak. Five drinks, I'm throwing up. End of story. I've never been able to understand people who just keep drinking and drinking -- people who start with a bloody Mary at breakfast and are still pounding shots late into the night. I would die. Literally.

But just as alcohol works as a lubricant in social situations (pervy readers, please refrain from the obvious jokes here), having a cocktail or two loosens me up just enough before I get on stage. The jokes flow more easily. My timing improves. I am more spontaneous and more able to engage in crowd work. It feels more like I'm at a party talking to friends, which is how I always want to feel on stage.

This became clear to me this past Saturday night. It was my first night off the Cleanse, and it was also the night I was acting as MC and auctioneer for 125th Anniversary gala of the YMCA in my hometown of Summit, NJ. The auction was co-organized by my eldest sister, Laura, and she had roped me into hosting it several months ago.

"We can't pay you anything," she said, "but it's for charity"

Although I am always hungry for cash, I was genuinely happy to do the gig in this case. The Y raises a ton of money for disadvantaged children and families. And the truth is, my life is sorely lacking in community service. I could stand to do a whole helluva lot more for the less fortunate, and it's one of the areas in which I hope to improve.

Still: This was A LOT of work. First there was the monologue. It had to be both clean and YMCA-related and had to appeal to the wealthy, largely conservative crowd that would be in attendance. I had performed thrice before in Summit at the Elks lodge, each time to great acclaim. (Seriously.) But the Elks are a very laid-back bunch, and I could be as nasty as I wanted to be with them.

Part 1 of my first Elks show opening set on May 1, 2010...

And Part 2.

The Y crowd, as I said, was going to be a whole different animal.

Then there was the auction. After my monologue, I was to auction off about a dozen items that had been donated by various individuals in the community, plus some community sponsorships. The hard items weren't the usual material things you see in auctions, like high-end appliances or works of art. One, for example, was a pool-and-pizza party at the Y. Another was a catered brunch for 12 at the town's Reeves-Reed arboretum. They were all really creative and interesting, but that made the details of each item incredibly difficult to remember, especially since I had written specific jokes about each one. And I don't like to ever read off notes. To me, there's just an instant turn-off factor when a performer reads from a sheet of paper. In the end, I did wind up using note-cards with bullet-points on them for the auction section, but most of it I did from memory.

My first panic attack came when I saw the room. My sister and her co-organizer, Carolyn, had done an incredible job transforming the Y's gym into a ballroom, along with the caterer and florist. But it was still a gym -- with the incredibly high ceiling and echoic acoustics that go along with it. And standing atop the stage, I could see I'd be performing in front of a long, narrow room of round tables. This is perhaps the worst set-up possible for stand-up. A comic wants to play to as wide and as shallow a room as possible, and he certainly doesn't want any backs to him.

The second panic attack came with the cooler-scooter.

A cooler-scooter, for those who don't know, is a little motorized beer cooler. It was one of the items being auctioned off -- part of the "Tailgater's Dream Package" -- and the plan was for me to make my big entrance riding the cooler-scooter up through the crowd to the strains of the Village People's "YMCA." I have no dignity.

Well, for one thing, there was no "up through the crowd." The tables were spread out all over the place, and there was no discernible center aisle. Moreover, I soon found during tech rehearsal that I was not very good at piloting the cooler-scooter. I could drive in a straight line without difficulty, but whenever I tried to turn, even at a slow speed, I tipped over.

Carolyn tried to convince me I could still enter from the back of the room, but I put my foot down and said "No." I'm game for a lot of things, but crashing head-on into a table full of wealthy conservatives is not one of them. Unless Roger Ailes is at the table.

It was therefore decided that I would make my entrance from the side of the stage, where the caterer had set up a staging area, drive around (slowly) in circles, park the scooter and begin my monologue.

Then it was time to go home, shower, change into my tux and stress.

The event began at 7:30. I huddled with my family, devouring the amazing hors d'oeuvres being passed by the even more amazing waiters and tried not to talk to anyone. It's hard to explain this without sounding like a complete asshole, but I really don't like talking to anyone before a show -- especially a show for which I have a lot of new stuff to remember. There's a great documentary about Phyllis Diller's final performance in which she talks about this. People would always come up to her before a show wanting to chat, and they didn't understand how much concentration it took for her to do what she did on stage. Any energy she gave someone during a chat was energy that would be lost during her show. Without ever wanting to compare myself to the legendary Phyllis, this is exactly how I feel. If you see me before a show, please leave me the fuck alone. We'll talk afterwards, I promise.

Plus, there were practical considerations. I had done one auction before -- a bachelor's auction at Splash several years ago -- and had gone home at the end of it unable to emit a sound. An auction is the vocal equivalent of a marathon.

So, as I said, I stayed close to the family, stuffed my face with food, ogled hot waiters (one of whom I recognized from the steam room of my gym) and drank Pinot Grigio. Two glasses, to be exact.

The Sanks, all decked out.

Phy, Laura, Me, Anna and Lew.

The evening continued. Dinner was served. Speeches were made. I felt a growing sense of dread. "This is not going to go well," began to repeat in my head. I took my position on the cooler-scooter and waited. Hot cater-waiters bumped into me every few seconds, confused as to what the hell I was doing, sitting on some strange little vehicle directly in their path. "YMCA" began to play. Laura made my introduction. And out I scooted.

I went for it. Completely blinded by a giant spotlight which followed me everywhere I rode, I scooted around the gym as fast as I could, weaving my way around tables and praying I wouldn't crash. I waved my arms and pulled faces and lifted both my legs straight out in front of me and generally behaved like a lunatic.

The crowd went wild.

Ditching the scooter by the stage, I grabbed the wireless mic and dove into my monologue:

"Hello, Summit! How are you guys tonight? I hear you've had a tough week after that freak snowstorm. No power. No heat. No hot water. Now you know how the other 99 percent feel. I heard even Governor Chris Christie lost power. Which is awful! How is he going to microwave his Lean Cuisine?"

Applause. I had 'em.

As I continued, I began to walk around the room, circling tables like an old-style lounge comic. Anytime I passed one of the giant centerpieces, the spotlight momentarily lost me, which became a running joke as I dodged to and fro to stay lit.

"We're here tonight to celebrate the Y's 125th Anniversary. And who better to host a gala for the Young Men's Christian Association than a gay Jew who hates sports? This would be like having Herman Cain host a party for Ms. Magazine."

Thunderous laughter, extended applause break.

The auction began. First up was the Tailgater's Dream Package.

"Now, I must tell you," I said, "when I first saw the name of this in the program, I though it said the 'Taliban's Dream Package.' And I was surprised that the Taliban would be donating so generously to the Young Men's Christian Association. And also, I was thinking I'd be a little nervous to open that package."

They ate it up. It was truly exhilarating. And we ended up raising $90,000 during the auction -- far surpassing expectations.

I was overwhelmed by the reaction I got after the show. A seemingly endless procession of people came up to me to tell me how much they had enjoyed what I did -- that it was so much more entertaining than any auction they had been to in the past. (And these are people who go to a lot of auctions.) A number of people asked for my card, and there was talk of my doing other upcoming events. Stay tuned.

A few minutes ago, Laura texted me. The board of directors of the Y wants to thank me. They're sending me a check.

Guess I'll have to come up with some other form of community service.

Homo going, going gone. ♥

To see me perform in a VERY different kind of show next week, click here.

Falling Off the Wagon

2011-10-31T19:49:00.000-07:00

And now someone's on the telephone, desperate in his pain

And someone's on the bathroom floor doing her cocaine

Someone's got his finger on the button in some room

And no one can convince me we aren't gluttons for our doom

But I tried to make this place my place

I asked for Providence to smile upon me with his sweet face

--Indigo Girls

Happy Halloween.

I continue be surprised and delighted by the various and sundry people from my past who have reached out to me since I began posting the Frat Life series, including Paula -- one of Jane's sorority sisters who was on that same Cancun trip with us -- and Bill, the president of Chi Psi during the brief time I was an active member. The writing I do in this blog is so personal to me, I often forget there are actually people out there who read it. It's awesome, but it's also somewhat frightening, because I start to go back and look at what I wrote, worrying that maybe I've hurt someone's feelings along the way. For whatever it's worth, that is never my intent, and I am truly sorry if it's ever the result.

I'm not sure why my focus lately has been so much on the distant past. I guess since I started the Life Cleanse, I've felt a need to clear out all the cobwebs and create a clean space. Which is great, but I don't want to get stuck there. I was in therapy from 1999 to around 2005. And while Joseph, my therapist, was great for me in many ways, he was also a die-hard Freudian. In hindsight, I think we spent entirely too much time focusing on my early childhood. I remember one session where he actually tried to get me to remember having a dirty diaper.

Talk about full of shit!

It's important to understand the early causes of one's behavior, but that in and of itself doesn't change the behavior. I wish Joseph had been more practical. I wish every once in a while, he would have just said, "Just stop doing this. Just quit it. It's hurting you." But he never did.

Speaking of the LC... I fell off the wagon big-time this weekend. Not with everything -- I still haven't touched booze, drugs or cigarettes since Oct. 6 -- but with TV, food and sex. Which is half the battle. So I'm kind of bummed. I'm not getting into details of the sex right now. I'll only say that I may or may not have hooked up with a guy dressed as Hermes, the Messenger God, after passing him on my block Saturday night. And he may or may not have left his costume on the whole time.

His costume wasn't this cool. It looked more like pajamas.

I was on my way home from a photo shoot at the time. The photo shoot was for an upcoming naked comedy show I'm doing for one of Daniel Nardicio's naughty parties, along with Brad Loekle, Chad Stringfellow and Jason Barker.

Jason, me and Brad in a promotional photo by Jeff Eason.

Fun fact: Jason was actually nude under the blanket.

If you want to know more, you'll have to come to the show.

This all happened during that biblical freak Nor'easter snowstorm we were hit with, and something about the weather just made me want to pig out. So Brad and I stopped at Schnipper's after the shoot, and I ate a cheeseburger with sweet potato fries, while Brad nibbled daintily at a chicken Caesar salad. Then came the thing that may or may not have happened with Hermes. Then I left my apartment again and bought a pint of Ben 'n Jerry Chubby Hubby, of which I ate about a third.

Sidebar: Did you guys know that Ben 'n Jerry temporarily changed the name of that flavor to "Hubby Hubby" in 2009 in support of marriage equality?! How fucking cool! This makes me feel a little better about eating it. Not much, but a little.

So yeah. Fell of the wagon. I'm trying not to beat myself up about it. My many friends in AA tell me the goal is progress, not perfection. Still, I feel rather weak that I couldn't stick to my program -- rigorous though it was -- for even 30 days. It's not even the sex I feel particularly bad about. That only lasted a few moments, anyway. (Hermes is, after all, winged.) No, where I really fell into the trap this weekend was with the television. I watched hours of it, retreating into my old sofa-coma. And yes, the weather was shit. And yes, I had no bookings this past weekend. And yes, nobody called me to make plans, and everyone I called was busy.

But that's the ultimate goal: To find something constructive, creative and healthy to do with myself even when I'm completely alone.

Progress, not perfection.

Ironically, one of the shows I stumbled across Sunday was Oprah's Lifeclass. (Get it? Lifeclass? LifeCleanse?) So many people in my life have been telling me I should be watching this show, so it's probably no accident. Especially since in the first five minutes I watched, Oprah put up a quotation by Iyanla Vanzant.

Iyanla is a relationship expert and one of Oprah's disciples. She is certifiably batshit crazy, and incredibly entertaining to watch. She was on the Oprah show dozens of times during the late 90s, and often Oprah would cede the entire hour to Iyanla. Then the two of them had a bitter falling out, and they never spoke again... until this year.

If you didn't get to see their reunion, I beg you to watch this clip, with Iyanla screaming "I didn't even know what it was!," and Oprah just being as cold and cunty as she's ever been. It's genius.

Anyway, Iyanla is apparently back in O's good graces, because girlfriend is all OVER Oprah's Lifeclass. And as I tuned in to the program, for the very first time, in the first 30 seconds I'm watching, Oprah puts the following Iyanla quote on the screen:

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed.

You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life.

You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them."

Did you just get goosebumps? Because I sure did. It's like she wrote that shit for me.

So without even being aware of what I was doing, that's what all these blogged flashbacks have been: An attempt to open the pain that's been holding me in my past and make peace with it.

I love you, you crazy bitch!

One last thing: In doing a bit of research about Hermes -- the mythological Hermes, not my trick from Saturday night -- I learned that he "protects and takes care of all the travelers, miscreants, harlots, old crones and thieves that pray to him or cross his path. He is athletic and is always looking out for runners, or any athletes with injuries who need his help."

So here's hoping Hermes is watching over me and helping me heal my injuries.

Homo cleansing again. ♥

P.S. Thanks, Paul, for always pushing me to blog. You're a creepy perv, but I like you.

Frat Life (Part 5 - Finale)

2011-10-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

You talk too much
Homeboy, you never shut up.
--Run DMC

Every so often, I begin telling a story that I believe will be interesting and entertaining to my readers -- a twisted, turbulent tale that will conclude with some meaningful, satisfying take-away. But once the story gets underway, it becomes rambling and veers off track, and I find myself at a loss as to how to end it.

This is one of those times.

I'm sorry. I honestly don't know what the point of all this was, and I fear there will be no "ta-da!" moment when you reach the end. Also, my memory of these events is proving to be unusually spotty. For instance, I know Jane was a big pain in the ass, but I can't remember many specific examples to illustrate this. I think perhaps my coming out -- to myself and others -- was so monumental that it overshadows all the events that immediately preceded it.

In any case, if you've traveled this far with me, I feel I owe it to you to at least try and tie it all up in a neat little bow. If nothing else, I do have a cute little anecdote -- courtesy of my big brother, Steve -- to serve as a kind of punchline to this whole mess.

But first, a correction. Moments ago, Colin Scantlebury messaged me the following with regard to my last chapter:

Again, I loved it. I howled at it. I have a few facts for you though:
I am not a Republican Protestant, nor have I ever been! I am a practicing Catholic and a registered Independent (who has yet to vote for a Republican president, btw).

So there you go, and I apologize to Colin for the misrepresentation. This makes me love you even more.

OK, on we go. Apologies again for the lack of clear narrative.

Eventually, Mike P.'s behavior became so obnoxious -- the shit on the cook's car being the proverbial icing on the cake -- that an official campaign was launched to de-activate him from the fraternity. This was highly unusual and a very big deal. The lodge elders called a meeting at which Mike P. was present where we all discussed in depth his misdeeds, arguing for and against his expulsion. At the end of the meeting, a vote was taken.

As luck would have it, I was the only neophyte eligible to vote. Actually, it wasn't luck; it was the fact that I was an anal-retentive little goody-goody who studied diligently for my Chi Psi history exam and was the first and only neophyte to have passed it in time. (As part of the exam, we had to memorize the Greek alphabet. I'm sad to say that all I remember now is Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon... and that's it.)

The meeting was emotionally wrenching. Men wept. Not Mike P.; I don't think he was capable of human emotion. But some of his supporters cried openly. Tempers flared. Personal attacks were lobbed.

As for me, I stood up and gave a little speech that I had prepared, explaining my vote to expel. My recollection is that the writing was first-rate, but the delivery was crap. I was nervous as fuck and stared at the ground while mumbling my words. It turns out it's not easy to tell someone to his face that you want him to disappear, especially with an audience of peers watching.

I remember the last two lines verbatim:

Throughout my time pledging Chi Psi, I never knew where I stood with Mike Putridio. At the very least, now he knows where he stands with me.

Ooooh! Burn!

Whatever. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping him in the fraternity. So the only real result of my speech was that Mike P. hated me even more than he had before, making things between Jane and me all the more fraught. Actually, the vote to boot him did seem to have something of a neutering effect. There were no further major incidents involving him that I recall.

Another emotional meeting that sticks with me now happened during my last semester as a Chi Psi. It was during the rush process. One of the rushees that semester was the younger brother of Chi Psi's president at the time, a hard-headed guy named Bill. The younger brother was a little blond twink named Michael. To avoid confusion with Michael P., I'll call the little brother Mikey.

For some reason, Mikey rubbed just about all the brothers the wrong way. It was an unwritten law that if you were a legacy, you were a shoe-in, especially if your brother was the current president. Not so with Mikey. People just couldn't stand him. "This kid's a major tool," was the oft-repeated refrain. I didn't feel that strongly about him one way or the other, but he seemed nice enough, in addition to being a kindred spirit (i.e. flaming).

Bill held his tongue while the other brothers expressed their unwillingness to consider Mikey. I was one of the few, it should be mentioned, who spoke in his favor. It should also be mentioned that during the course of the rush meeting, I consumed an entire bottle of white wine. I mean one of those big-ass 1.5 liter bottles. My tolerance to alcohol was probably somewhat higher in those days than it is now, but that's a helluva lot of booze in any case.

Finally, Bill got up to speak on his brother's behalf. He gave an impassioned and deeply personal speech about he and Mikey's relationship with one another, and how much it meant to Mikey to become a Chi Psi. And at some point in the speech, much to the surprise of my fraternity brothers and myself, I began to sob. Not cry -- sob. A loud, ugly, painful, primal sob that went on and on. Everyone, including Bill, glanced nervously at me, wondering when this mentally unstable woman was going to quit her caterwauling.

Actual photo of me from that night.

To this day, I have no idea what moved me so, other than the wine. I'm sure I was crying for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with Mikey. But whatever the case, my tears in combination with Bill's speech did the trick, and Mikey was voted in by a tiny margin. When we delivered the news to him, he immediately informed me he wanted me as his big brother as soon as he became a neophyte.

That never happened. A couple of months into his pledge period, Mikey announced that he was dropping out of Michigan to become a fashion designer and was thus de-pledging from Chi Psi. I have no idea what became of him.

OK, let's try to wrap up the Jane thing.

Jane and I basically played our respective roles as the perfect fraternity-sorority couple. We never went as far as getting pinned or lavaliered (yes, people actually still do this), but we did accompany each other to all major events. I also accompanied her -- along with most of her Alpha Chi Omega sisters -- on a week-long spring break in Cancun.

Here's what I remember from that trip:

1) We had no refrigerator in the room, so we kept our drinks on ice in the bidet.

2) Jane's best friend and her boyfriend shared the room with us. Her boyfriend looked like a young Matthew Morrison. I lusted after him non-stop.

3) It was virtually impossible to get Jane out of bed each morning, what with the combination of hypoglycemia, irregular eating and heavy drinking. So I spent nearly every breakfast as the other couple's third wheel. Which was fine with me.

4) I smuggled a cheap bottle of vodka out of Mexico, and it broke in my suitcase, soaking everything.

5) Cancun was where Jane and I had intercourse for the first time, in between her comas. It was nothing to write home about for either one of us, I'm quite certain.

So not my type now, but at the time... woof!

We broke up shortly afterwards. I don't recall the details, but I know it was I who broke up with her. And that I never told her I was gay. Which I sort of regret.

Once single, and having finally admitted to myself that I was a big ol' fruit (and after having bumped into Will at the gay bar in Saugatuck,) I realized it didn't make much sense for me to stay in Chi Psi. My social life had changed dramatically. I was now spending every Friday night at Ann Arbor's one and only gay dance club, the Nectarine Ballroom, where "DJ Roger" spun the latest hits from five years prior, and one could buy a well drink for a quarter until 10PM. And since I didn't actually live in the lodge and was no longer attending most of the parties, I couldn't justify paying the monthly dues.

So I simply de-activated, giving a little farewell speech at one of our monthly meetings. There was only one thing left to do: Come out to the two people responsible for my joining Chi Psi in the first place, Jules and Steve.

Here's how Steve remembers it:

You and Will knocked on the suite door essentially right after your Sawgituck (sp?) visit, and we told you it was alright to come in (despite being undressed under the covers). You both came in, sat down in separate chairs, closed the door, and told us you had something serious to discuss.

"That's fine, go ahead."

"No, it's REALLY serious." (I can't remember if it was you or Will who said this line.)

Jules: "That's fine. It's not like you are going to tell us you're gay or something."

Loooooooong pause. Excruciating uncomfortableness. In those ten seconds, it was clear to EVERYONE that it was EXACTLY what you were going to tell us, and then all four of us started laughing. You both eventually told us the story of running into each other on the west side of the state and, yes, you had come out. It was one of those few moments that I've gotten to enjoy someone else inserting his/her foot in his/her mouth.

Incredibly, I don't remember this episode at all. But it seems crazy to me now that Will and I would have decided to come out to them simultaneously. A double-outing! And by two guys to whom they were both very close! It must have been incredibly surreal for Steve and Jules, but they handled it with uncommon grace and kindness. When I told Colin, a short time later, he also took the news with total acceptance and great humor.

I cannot overstate the magnitude of magnanimity and open-mindedness exhibited by these folks -- and the select few others to whom I came out at that time. You have to remember that this was 1992, an entirely different era in LGBT history. There were no gay television characters, and the only gay celebrities we knew about were the ones who had died of AIDS (and Elton John). And while the University of Michigan may have had a progressive tradition, it was still in the Midwest. I can promise you not too many Michigan frat guys would have dealt with my news the way Steve, Jules and Colin did.

I made a lot of mistakes during my time in Chi Psi, but choosing these people as my closest friends wasn't one of them.

I guess that's my "ta-da!" moment.

Homo de-activated. ♥

Frat Life (Part 4)

2011-10-26T19:48:00.000-07:00

People talk and people stare, tell them I don't really care

This is the place I should be

And if they think it's really strange for a girl like you

To be in love with someone like me

I wanna tell them all to go to hell, that we're doing very well

Without them, you see

That's just the way it is and they will see

I am yours and you are mine

The way it should be

--"A Girl Like You"
The Smithereens

It's not like me to post twice on the same day, but I was sitting in my apartment watching "The Sing Off," and I found myself writing the next chapter in my head. Whenever that happens, it's like spitting into the wind if I don't sit down and try to get it all out. So here goes.

The odds were stacked against Jane and I from the beginning, what with my being gay and her being hypoglycemic. But there were other, more sinister forces at work against us. I mentioned previously that Chi Psis at Michigan were uncommonly nice, well-mannered guys. But there was one group of boys in the Lodge who did not fit the bill. This was Mike's group.

I wish I could tell you Mike's real last name, because it's one of those perfectly onomatopoetic character names, like Nurse Ratched or Pussy Galore. But I have a policy of not using full names when trashing people -- even villains -- in this blog. For now, let's call him Mike Putridio.

Mike P. was a singularly polarizing character in my fraternity. People either loved him or hated him. I belonged to the latter group. I regarded him as a piece of shit. In fact, he once left a piece of shit -- his own -- on the windshield of our beloved cook, Jerry. As a joke. Because, you know, shit's funny.

Mike P. ran with two sidekicks who encouraged and emulated his barbaric behavior. One of them was nicknamed D-Gon, which was, I think, some sort of nerdy engineering play on his last name. (If any nerdy engineers know what a d-gon is, please leave a comment.) D-Gon had a recurring bit in which he would run up to you and ask, "You wanna see puss?" And then before you could answer, he would drop his pants to reveal his genitals. Only his penis would be tucked back between his thighs, so that all you could see was public hair. It was exactly like that scene from "Silence of the Lambs" where the killer is admiring himself in the mirror going, "Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me."

This was not regarded as acceptable behavior in Chi Psi.

The movie came out right around the time I joined Chi Psi, so it was probably D-Gon's inspiration.

The other sidekick was a raging alcoholic named Donohue. I don't remember his first name.

D-Gon and Donohue were not shitty to me from the get-go. In fact, I remember in the beginning thinking D-Gon and I might become good friends, puss exhibitions notwithstanding. But Mike P. was another story. Aside from being an overall hooligan, he seemed to loathe me from the moment he first laid eyes on me. Certainly, I don't recall ever having a single conversation with him during rush. He possessed one of those cocky, too-cool-for-the-room attitudes that had always pissed me off in high school. He refused to ever acknowledge my presence.

I don't know what it was about me he so disliked. Officially, the reason that got back to me was that as a pledge, I had pilfered an older brother's girl -- i.e. Jane, who had gone to the hayride as someone else's date. (Jesus, this all sounds so Rodgers and Hammerstein.) But that didn't make sense; before asking Jane out the first time, I had gone to the brother in question and made sure I had his blessing. And Mike P. was not the kind of person who cared much about the rules of conduct.

Looking back, I suspect three possible motivations for his enmity:

1) He was a homophobe who (correctly) suspected that I was A) a homo and B) a fraud.

2) He wanted Jane for himself.

3) He wanted me for himself.

As titillating and psychologically satisfying as 3) might be, in my heart of hearts, I believe it was some combination of 1) and 2).

Oh, and one more thing: He was one of Jane's best friends.

This made for some tense interactions among the three of us. For one thing, I could never understand why Jane would want to be friends with such an asshole in the first place. But more importantly, I couldn't understand why, if she and Mike P. were such good friends, she wouldn't just say to him, "Stop being an asshole to my boyfriend." Loyalty has been a recurring theme throughout my life. It seems to me that if you care about someone, you don't stand by while they're being abused, and you certainly don't befriend their abuser. I would have made a good mafioso.

[UPDATE: Following is the paragraphh that mysteriously disappeared before publishing. Blogger keps doing this to my posts, and it's infuriating. If, in reading Sanktastic, you ever notice something apparently missing or otherwise odd, please contact me at once.]

Things came to a head late one night about a month after Jane I began dating. We were in bed together in my East Quad dorm. I lived that sophomore year in a four-person suite, which was designed such that there would be two bedrooms on either side, each containing a top and bottom bunk, with a kitchen and bathroom in the center of the apartment. Well, what my roommates and I did was to move both bunkbeds into one of the bedrooms, creating a dark, crowded man-cave that we used for sleeping only. This left the other bedroom available for use as a TV room, party room, or makeout room. Jane and I were using it for the latter. It was well past midnight, when suddenly there was a loud banging on the door.

I sprang from the double-futon clad only in my underwear to answer the door. And there, much to my surprise, were Mike P., D-Gon and Donohue.

It was one of life's truly awkward moments. Because they had no explanation for why they were there. If Colin or Steve or just about anyone else from Chi Psi had been standing outside my door unexpectedly one night, I would have been happy to see them. But these people had already made it clear they were not my friends. So we all just kind of stared at one another for what seemed like an eternity. They looked as weirded out to see me as I was to see them

Finally I remember Donohue mumbling, "Oh, you have a nice body," which made it even more awkward. Then Mike P. strode right past me into the hook-up room, where Jane was still under the covers.

"Oh, look who's here!," he said, his tone making it obvious that he wasn't at all surprised to see her there. Jane looked embarrassed, but she still lay there chatting with him amiably for about ten minutes while my blood boiled. Finally they left.

It was then that I decided I would have my revenge on Mike P.

Meanwhile, I bonded with my other fraternity brothers. One of my happiest memories from those days was fronting the in-house rock band, which consisted of me on lead vocals, Alex Guiso on guitar, Darren Lane on bass, Shawn Johnston on drums and some Asian guy from another fraternity named, I think, Derek on keyboards. Collectively, we were Fat Natalie and the Tooties, a name of which I remain proud to this day.

Love her.

Fat Nat, as we would come to be known, only played one real concert, but it was a doozy. At one of Chi Psi's biggest parties, we performed a five-song set in front of a truly adoring throng. If memory serves, our set list was as follows:

1) A Girl Like You - The Smithereens
2) Dancing With Myself - David Bowie
3) I'll Stop the World and Melt With You - Modern English
4) Need You Tonight - INXS
5) Mediate - INXS

RIP, Michael Hutchence.

For the last one, we even made up dozens of big white cards like they do in the video. I still remember those cards flying all over the place while we played. I also remember looking into Jane's eyes when I sang the lyrics, "Your moves are so raw. I've got to let you know... you're one of my kind."

In truth, her moves weren't all that raw. And she wasn't one of my kind.

To be continued. (I know-- this was a short one. But I gave you two in one day!)

Homo in his underwear. ♥

Frat Life (Part 3)

2011-10-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Lots of things in life are beautiful, but -- brother
There is one particular thing that is nothing whatsoever
In any way, shape or form like any other
There is nothing like a dame, nothin' in the world
There is nothing you can name that is anything like a dame

-- South Pacific

OK, I'm back. Apologies for my absence. As I mentioned in the last post, I had to go to San Francisco -- or more accurately to Stinson Beach -- for a wedding. It's absolutely beautiful there, especially this time of year. The temperatures were in the upper 70s during the day, with brilliant blue skies, and in the lower 50s at night. Just perfect.

Getting married were Ellen Dunne and Blair Bradshaw. The Dunne family and mine have been friends for 50 years, ever since our mothers met in graduate school. She and Blair have two adorable children together, and both the bride and groom are incredibly creative, artistic, all-around awesome people. They got married on the beach -- with the mountains in front of them and the ocean behind. It was pretty friggin' amazing.

Ellen and Blair, exchanging vows.

I had a great time at the reception afterwards, though I must say, not drinking at a wedding is extremely challenging. It's not so much that I was tempted, although there was booze everywhere, from start to finish, or that I actually had to go out of my way to get a club soda and cranberry. It's that people at a wedding make a really big deal out of the fact that someone else isn't drinking.

"Oh, come on!," they kept exhorting. "You can have one glass of wine!"

When I explained I was on a Life Cleanse, they teased me. "Should you really be drinking that coffee? Is that allowed in your Life Cleanse? Is wedding cake part of your Life Cleanse?," etc.

I should have just said, "I'm an alcoholic," which would have probably shut everyone up. Though perhaps not. I spoke to a good friend of mine who's in AA, and he said weddings are the single toughest events for people struggling to stay sober. Now I understand why.

Despite the peer pressure, I stuck to the LC all weekend, as least as far as booze goes. I wish I could say the same thing of diet and exercise. Despite my best efforts, I ended up pigging out and gained three (!) lbs. in four days. Also, I watched about 20 hours of television (including the plane ride both ways) and didn't write at all. So basically, I totally fell off the wagon, except for alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and sex. But in my defense, I was with my parents every single second of my trip.

You try spending four days with them and staying sober.

I also got some serious quality beach time, even taking a dip in the Pacific, which felt like ice water.

Bliss.

OK, so back to the fraternity story. First I must tell you I've been thrilled to hear back from several of my former fraternity brothers about this story, including Colin Scantlebury. (Awesome frat name, isn't it?)

Colin and I were the same age, but he rushed one semester after I did. I have no idea why we clicked so completely -- he being a straight, basketball-loving, Midwestern, Republican WASP, and I... well, by now you know all the things I was. But we just got each other from the start. In fact, I remember vividly the moment we gave Colin his Chi Psi bid.

We had a little tradition -- and we weren't the only ones, I'm sure -- of pulling a switcheroo. We would bullshit the rushee into thinking he hadn't gotten a bid and then, after he was all upset, surprising him with the good news. This involved an elaborate skit, and in Colin's case, it happened thusly:

I knocked on Colin's dorm-room door very late one night. When he opened it, he found me alone, with tears in my eyes, explaining that he hadn't gotten a bid, and that I was furious at some of my fellow Chi Psis for not voting for him. He threw his arms around me, and as we stood there, hugging in the doorway, a group of other Chi Psis suddenly appeared from down the hall.

"Sank, this is bullshit!," the chastised. "You know you're not supposed talk about the process to rushees."

"Fuck that!," I screamed at them. "Colin is fucking awesome, and you guys are fucking dicks not to vote him in!"

We went on like this for a while. Finally, Colin got so upset that he simply went back into his room and closed the door. We had to knock again and let him know that, surprise! He was in.

Anyway, here's an email I got from Colin last Thursday:

Fair Chi Psi, Can We 'Ere Leave thee?

Dude, I just loved your blog. I didn't even know you did that but I found it brilliant. I love the story about coming full circle with Will (and I mean that in the PG, Disney version of full circle, not whatever you crazy kids call it these days).

I wanted to email you regardless as you have been on my mind for the last few days. I was doing some housecleaning this past weekend and I found some files of papers that had been around since..well, awhile. I file this under the heading of, "How on earth did either one of us not know you were gay?"

This is what was in my file:

Ode to Colin

By A. Jacob Sank, with apologies to Emily Dickinson

I think that I shall never see

A stud so hung as Colin Scantlebury

Whose pelvic thrusts can rock the sea

Who's earned that proud nickname 'JB'*

Who's trunk is long, like an oak tree

Who's free to be, like you and me

If ever such a stud you see,

It is most certainly Colin Scantlebury.

*For the record, I have no idea what JB meant but I'm glad I don't remember. There is enough of my time in Ann Arbor that is filled only with shame.

But thank you for making me laugh in 1991 and in 2011. There are many memories I have from that time, and many people that I cherish. You, my friend, have a pretty singular place. Certainly your memories are about the most vivid.

Be well.

Funny shit, right? Apparently I didn't know at the time that it was Joyce Kilmer -- and not Dickinson --who wrote "Trees." All I can say is, these were the days long before google. I don't even know how I managed to graduate without it. Also, I don't remember what "JB" referred to, either. Jumbo Balls, perhaps?

Good ol' Colin. He's now a commercial airline pilot, married, with kids.

When I last left off in my little tale, I had met my final girlfriend (whom I'll call Jane) at an Alphi Chi Omega serenade. But that's not actually true, as my big brother, Steve, reminded me. (I'll post his email later, as I'm trying to tell the story chronologically.)

In truth, I met Jane at my first Chi Psi social event: An autumn hayride. Jane was the date of another fraternity brother. My date was a Vietnamese student named Chau (pronounced "Chow," which lent itself to all sorts of crude puns).

I have absolutely no memory of where and how I met Chau. All I remember is that she was very pretty, very quiet and that we had unsafe sex together. I know this, because a couple months after we had stopped seeing each other, she called me out of the blue and said she had to see me urgently. I was freaking out -- sure that I was going to become a father at age 19. Instead, when I met her at a coffee shop, all she said was:

"I miss you. I miss your touch."

This became a catchphrase among my roommates at the time. I'd often come back to the dorm to find, "Adam, where are you? I miss you. I miss your touch," scrawled on my door's blackboard.

Speaking of my touch, many people have expressed shock and amazement over the years that I, a gay guy, could have had sex with a number of women before I came out. (Probably about ten, all told.) I never understand why. It's not like women repulse me. Women are beautiful. Moreover, when your options are limited (and you're trying to convince yourself you're straight), you make the best of it. And I had some pleasant experiences with women. I liken it to a back massage. A back massage feels nice, but it doesn't get you all hot and bothered. Unless, of course, you're paying extra.

Another brief side-note: I don't think it was incidental that Chau was Asian. As any gay man will tell you, the last stop before Homoville is Chinatown. I cannot tell you why; nobody seems to know. It's just the way it is. I explained this once to my Asian coworker, and she was not amused.

In my case, though, I had one more detour between Chinatown and Homoville.

Jane was the all-American girl. Blonde, blue-eyed and big-titted. (I always liked my women that way. Tits are fun.) She also seemed way out of my league -- like one of those popular cheerleaders from high school who would sometimes chat me up in the halls but would never consider going out with me.

Jane was also hypoglycemic. This last detail is important because she was supposed to eat small meals throughout the day to keep her blood sugar regulated. Instead, she'd starve herself all day and then, when she began feeling weak and seeing black spots, she'd chug down a couple packets of sugar, all of which resulted in wild and unpredictable moodswings.

Needless to day, dating her was a lot of fun.

To be continued.

Homo dating chicks. ♥

Frat Life (Part 2)

2011-10-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Our house
Is a very, very, very, fine house...

--Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

Chi Psi was a fine house at Michigan. (Actually, in Chi Psi tradition, we called it "the lodge" -- not the house.) It was populated, for the most part, by friendly, well-mannered, Midwestern engineering majors. There wasn't a whole lot of diversity; a couple Indian guys, one Latino, a smattering of Jews. But other than that, it was very white-bread. White-bread, but nice.

The guys were not, it should be pointed out, particularly hot. They were not ugly, but nor were they "face-men," as extremely attractive guys were known in fraternity parlance, nor were they very athletic.

It was no accident that I wound up there, my friendship with Steve notwithstanding. When I decided to rush, I checked out a few other houses as well. The men of Sigma Alpha Epsilon -- known as the Sig Eps -- all looked like they had just sprung from an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue, and this scared the living shit out of me. I knew there was simply no way I was going to be able to keep my gay thoughts at bay amid such masculine perfection.

[This just in: Sig Eps were kicked off of Michigan's campus this year after hazing incidents!]
A good friend from the dorm, Rick, had joined Chi Phi (not to be confused with Chi Psi) the previous semester, so I stopped by there as a courtesy to him. His brothers struck me as loud, dirty animals -- the kind of guys I had always least enjoyed hanging around. When I gave Rick my feedback on them the next day, he got very defensive. ("Good, because they all thought you were a major tool.")

There was one other house I rushed, mostly because it was next door to Chi Psi, so it was easy to hit up both fraternities on a single night. This was Beta Theta Pi. The Betas were very pretty boys, though not as stunning as the Sig Eps. And they liked me a lot, even going so far as to invite me to dinner during one night of rush. They seemed nice enough, and it was somewhat intoxicating being wanted by the same kind of boys who would have shunned me back in high school. But for some reason, they struck me as a little too Hitler Youth-y for my taste. Remember the whole "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" scene from Animal House? I could easily imagine it taking place among the Betas.

Everyone knows that was Kevin Bacon getting paddled, right?

So that left Chi Psi, where Steve was a brother and everyone else seemed to like me well enough. That is, all except one incredibly scorching guy named Will.

I've told this part of the story so many goddamn times -- including on the blog -- that I refuse to get into the details again. If you're not familiar with it, watch these two videos, in which I recount the entire thing:

But aside from Will (to whom I only got "close" after I was no longer in the fraternity), the lodge was Straightsville, USA for me.

I never lived there, choosing instead to remain in the dorm sophomore year and to move off-campus altogether junior year. And in truth, I never ended up spending a whole lot of time in the lodge. I did eat lunch there most days and dinner at least once a week. I also went to all of the Chi Psi parties, which were genuinely fun. (I have a ton of party pictures from those days, but none of them are online. Maybe someday soon I'll scan and post them so you can see see my horrifying early 90s hair.)

So what else went on there? Well, there's a lot of secret stuff I can't talk about. Not because it's in any way scandalous or interesting -- just because I swore my secrecy, and I have no desire to be disloyal to my former brothers. I can tell we had a secret handshake. And secret meeting rituals. And that we drank goat's blood.

Hello.

No, I'm kidding. Our rituals were all totally innocuous, albeit rather silly. To the fraternity's credit, there was a strictly enforced no-hazing policy, and in fact we had brothers who didn't drink at all. Our initiation process was extremely annoying, but it wasn't dangerous or humiliating in any way. Also, unlike any other fraternity I've ever heard of, Chi Psi made its neophytes (newly affiliated brothers) do all the shitty house chores, rather than the pledges.

I had a big brother (Steve, of course), and in time, I had two little brothers. I am ashamed to admit I no longer recall either of their names. Some big brother I was.

Oh, and I was elected to fraternity office! Was I the president? The rush chairman? The social chair? None of the above.

No, I was elected choregus.

What the fuck is a choregus, you ask? Why, only the person in charge of the fraternity's most important activity: Serenades! Yes, Virginia, college fraternities really do serenade sororities, or at least my fraternity did. About once a month, a large group of us would mosey on over to whichever sorority we were trying to woo and sing our hearts out. We even had our own special house blend, as it were, which went back decades. It was called "Maid of Chi Psi," and I still remember the words by heart:

I dream of your eyes, of your golden hair
Like foam on a wave blown high
I dream of you when I'm all alone
And when there are others nigh
I cannot forget you, my girl of dreams
No matter how I try
I want you! I need you! My wonderful one
You're my dreamgirl, maid of Chi Psi.

Believe it or not, I just found a recording of some little twink performing this on YouTube. Make sure you stick around until he starts singing, at around 1:00.

Not for nothing, but I think I sang it better.

It was at one of these sorority serenades that I met the young lady would become my last girlfriend of all time.

To be continued.

Blogger's note: I picked a really stupid time to get into this saga, because I'm leaving early tomorrow morning for a wedding in San Francisco and probably won't be able to blog again for several days. My apologies, and I wish you all a foamy weekend, my wonderful ones.

Homo serenading. ♥

Frat Life

2011-10-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

Your lifelong membership
Is free
Keep a-giving each brother all
You can
Oh, aren't you proud to be
In that fraternity
That great big brotherhood of man

--How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Before I get into today's topic -- my brief life as frat guy -- I'd like to appeal to those of you blog geeks out there, especially anyone who uses Blogger to publish. As you have no doubt noticed, I have been trying to spruce up Sanktastic a bit of late, especially since I've been posting a whole helluva lot more. In doing so, I would also like to monetize the site to its fullest. At the moment, I use only two ad services: Google Adsense, which earns literally only pennies per month for me, and Text Link Ads.

I actually like TLA, but unfortunately, most of its advertisers seem to have no interest in me and my li'l ol' blog. At the moment, I have only one sponsor through that site, which is Pride Dating. And although I am extremely grateful to Pride Dating (and encourage you to click on their link on the right-hand side of this page), I'd like more sponsors. Like a lot more. I registered today with Blogads, and I hope that that will lead to additional revenue streams. But if anyone out there has any suggestions or recommendations for me, please don't be shy. Mama needs a new pair of shoes. And a new kitchen and a bunch of other stuff.

OK, moving on.

So yes, I was in a fraternity, a fact which for some reason seems to shock a lot of people. I don't understand why. To me, there's nothing as homoerotic as the idea of a bunch of young, preppy guys living in an all-male environment, sleeping in close quarters, showering together and paddling one another while drunk and naked. If you don't believe me, check out this NSFW Adults-Only site .

Which is not to say I personally experienced any of those things. I'm just pointing out that they do tend to happen in a fraternity environment.

In fact, my own fraternity experience was the opposite of homoerotic -- which is how I intended it be -- although its origins were indeed a little faggy. Freshman year at Michigan, I took an upper-level theater history course, which was really quite wonderful. Part of the class was about the physical history of theater -- the architecture, the lighting and sound techniques and so forth. I was less interested in this section than I was in the history of theater as an art form. To study this, we read classic plays, including works by Molière, John Gay, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Also taking the course with me was a hilariously funny and boisterous upperclasswoman named Jules. Jules sat next to me, and, when our professor got particularly dull describing some 19th century light filament, we would play x-rated Hangman, passing sheets of notebook paper back and forth.

A game in progress might have looked something like this:

You will never know how long it took me to create this image.

Jules and I eventually became friends outside of class, especially after we were both cast in the Michigan Union's production of "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." I got the tiny part of Edsel, the town newspaper reporter. Jules was a whore. I don't remember which whore, but I do remember she had one solo line in the song "Li'l Ole Bitty Pissant Country Place." The way that song works is, during the "Miss Mona's rules" section, one whore sings or speaks a line and then calls on the next whore to sing or speak the next line.

Jules's line was: "And it don't make money. Beatrice?" And then Beatrice starts singing, and so forth.

Well, what Jules would do is go: "And it don't make money. Beatriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice?," effectively cutting off the poor girl playing Beatrice's line completely. I cannot explain how hard this made me laugh every single time.

Here's the movie version, with the "rules" section coming in at 2:06.

Dolly says Jule's line.

Fun fact about our little production: Jennifer Perry played Miss Mona, Hunter Foster played a football player and Miriam Schor played a whore. All three have gone on to distinguished acting careers on Broadway and beyond. In related news, I'll be hosting the YMCA's Good News Gala in Summit, NJ, next month.

Boy, this story has really run off the track, hasn't it? Nobody ever accused me of being succinct.

Anyway, at that time Jules had a boyfriend who ended up becoming her husband (and later ex-husband): Steve. I had met Steve a few times after theater history class, and more often after rehearsals for "Whorehouse." Steve was -- and is -- one of the warmest, sweetest guys I have ever known. He shared Jules's goofy sense of humor, and the three of us used to hang out for hours, laughing ourselves silly.

The second semester of my freshman year, Steve convinced me to rush his fraternity: Chi Psi.

People called us "Chipsies."

I had never planned to rush. Fraternities to me represented everything that ran contrary to my nature: Conformity, narrow-mindedness, misogyny, and an emphasis on athletics and beer. (I cannot now nor have I ever been able to drink beer. It tastes awful and makes me feel like I'm going to explode.)

In fact, I had chosen to reside my Freshman year in East Quad, undoubtedly the artsiest, crunchiest, most anti-fraternity dorm on Michigan's campus. And I loved it there. But lingering underneath my happy Freshman veneer was the fear/knowledge that I was gay. And did not want to be.

Looking back now, my beliefs about homosexuality at the time mirrored those of today's right-wing homophobes and "ex-gay" proponents. I honestly believed that spending lots of time around straight guys and engaging in "straight" activities would keep my gayness in check, if not vanquish it outright. I even remember thinking I should start working out at the campus athletic center regularly, because doing so would keep me from thinking gay thoughts.

Oh, the irony.

And yes, one could argue that performing in musicals -- I did two my freshman year -- wasn't exactly playing poker and going to strip clubs. But my goal wasn't to change myself completely. I actually wanted to stay exactly who I was... minus the hankering for cock. And I thought maybe, just maybe, Chi Psi could be the answer.

To be continued.

Homo rushing. ♥

Turning Down the Noise

2011-10-17T19:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, makin' my mind slow
That's why I don't fuck with the big four, oh

Bro, I got ta' maintain

'Cause a nigga like me is goin' insane

Insane in da membrane

(Insane in da brain)

--Cypress Hill

Day 11 of the L.C. It continues to go well, although I fell off the wagon a bit this weekend, primarily because I watched more than one hour of TV both days, and I didn't write at all on Saturday. Speaking of which, I have the television tuned in to hour two of NBC's "The Sing Off" as I blog. I am justifying this firstly because it's two-hour show, secondly because the show consists mainly of a cappella singing -- which I think counts as "background music" -- and thirdly because host Nick Lachey is my future husband. I'm totally rooting for Pentatonix, by the way. They're amazing.

And I actually hate the original version and everything else
Katy Perry does. She's all tits and no talent.

I want to thank everyone who gave me such nice feedback on my Coming Out blogs. Most thrilling was an email I received from Robb Forman Dew, author of "The Family Heart," the reading of which I had described as being the first step in my mother's gradual acceptance of me as her gay son. Ms. Forman Dew extended an open invitation for me to join her and her husband at their home in the Berkshires, where they will serve me a gourmet salad. I fully plan to take her up on this.

It touches me tremendously when people reach out to me because something I've written has affected them. Yes, I love the attention and the (tiny bit of) notoriety that comes from having an audience read my words, but it's more than that. I have always had a tremendous need to express myself and to be fully understood. Just ask my poor friends and family.

So, yeah. The L.C. Still happening. I've noticed some curious side effects to it. First of all, I keep waking up earlier than I ever have, and always before my alarm. Even this past Saturday and Sunday, when I could have slept until 10AM (and usually do), my eyes opened at around 7:30, and that was it -- I was up. I am definitely sleeping less, and yet I don't feel particularly tired during the day. On the contrary, my overall energy level is higher. Still, it frustrates me to wake up before the alarm. It somehow feels like I'm being cheated.

My brain is WAY more active than it had been pre-L.C. I once had a therapist tell me that if you stop doing all the things that numb you -- whatever they may be -- you'll quickly find out what you were trying to numb in the first place. And boy, is that ever true. In my case, all my little crutches -- the TV, the booze, the cigarettes, the heavy food, as well as the unmentionables -- are obviously designed to turn down all the noise in my head.

No, I don't hear actual voices. I mean, other than the voices of Broadway divas, and that's because I listen to far too much of Sirius-XM On Broadway. But my brain does run on overdrive just about constantly, which is one of the reasons I've struggled with insomnia since early childhood. (One thing I have NOT surrendered as part of the L.C. is my nightly two milligrams of Lunesta. Maybe someday.)

For as long as I can remember, I've had trouble sleeping. I hated being put down for a nap more than anything, because I knew that just meant an hour of staring at the ceiling. Even before I could read, I had a stack of Archie and Richie Rich comics by my bed, along with a giant volume of Tintin that someone had given me. Late into the night, I'd flip through the pages staring at the pictures until my bleary eyes finally got heavy and closed. I am realizing now that those three boys were probably my first crushes, especially Richie, who had such luxurious blond hair and who lived in a mansion with a robot maid.

And let's be honest; he was a little swish.

It's not that I'm always thinking about big, important things. A lot of the time, I'm just re-playing scenes that happened during the day -- trivial conversations I had or songs I heard on the radio -- or thinking about things I have to do in the coming days. Sometimes I'll re-play events from years ago, as if I'm watching old videotapes. It can be really exhausting, and not just when I'm trying to sleep.

So all of these crutches -- the hours of TV-watching and so forth -- have been an attempt to block all that out. And it works, to a large extent. The problem is, in blocking out all the noise, I also block out a few things that are essential and nourishing, namely my creativity, my energy and my emotions. And without those, I might as well be a robot maid.

It's a Sophie's Choice. I can be a calm, even-tempered, unproductive zombie, or I can be an anxious, neurotic, out-of-the-box artist.

Which would you choose? Honestly?

A decade ago, when I was beginning a four-year relationship with my ex-boyfriend, Phillip, I came home from work at Fox News one Saturday in tears. (I came home from Fox News in tears quite often, but this particular day stands out in my mind.) I was still in training to be a line producer at the time, and my senior producer was a really passive-aggressive and dimwitted bitch named, I think, Michelle.

I don't remember the particulars, but Michelle had re-written part of my script copy -- badly and incorrectly -- causing the live show to get all fucked up and the anchorwoman to yell at me over the commercial break. Rather than take responsibility for her own mistake, Michelle had let the blame stay on me.

As I sat on my bed next to Phillip sobbing, I remember saying, "Why do I care so much? I wish I just didn't care!"

And he said to me: "But if you didn't care so much, you wouldn't be you."

That's the truth, really.

So now what?

Homo off to sleep. (I hope.) ♥

Coming Out (Part 3)

2011-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes(Turn and face the strain)Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

--David Bowie

Whenever I've seen coming out stories depicted in popular culture, there is usually one big climactic scene in which the parents finally let go of their homophobia and accept their gay children for who and what they are. Cue tears and tender embraces.

One notable exception to this was a truly excellent and nuanced TV movie that popped up in 1992, just as I was going through my own family drama. It was called "Doing Time on Maple Drive." Every gay man around my age seems to remember this movie, which featured a then-unknown Jim Carrey as the brother of Matt, the gay main character, played by some cutie named William McNamara.

What made "Maple Drive" better than the run-of-the-mill "message" telefilm was that Matt's sexual orientation and his (awful) mother's inability to accept it were among several other major issues with which the family was struggling, including alcoholism, marital strife and possible abortion. This was refreshing and quite novel at the time: The gay kid's not the only one who's fucked up.

And look! Lori Laughlin from "Edge of Night" and "Full House!"

(On a silly side note, there as a very cute, very straight boy in my fraternity named Darren Lane. Every time I'd be hanging out with my one gay fraternity brother, Will, and we would spot Darren, Will would lean over to me and whisper, "Doing time on Darren Lane." And we'd giggle like schoolgirls.)

At the end of "Maple Drive," Matt's father finally begins to accept and embrace his son, though the Mom continues acting like a big ol' bitch.

My own parents' reaction was even more nuanced; for the next few years, things were touch and go. During a particularly gruesome visit to the family therapist, they used phrases like "heartbroken" and "shattered dreams." I was forbidden from telling my secret to any of our relatives or anyone living in our hometown. Then, for spring break the following semester, I decided to fly to Atlanta to visit my gay friend, Joe, who had recently moved there from Michigan. But when I announced my plans to my mother, she made it known that she would not be paying for the plane ticket if I made the trip.

"I'm not going to pay for you to go hang out in gay bars in Atlanta!," she spat at me over the telephone.

"Really?," I replied. "Because I can just as easily hang out in gay bars in Ann Arbor."

Some of you are probably thinking, why the hell should your parents have paid for your plane ticket in any case, especially when they were already paying your full tuition, you spoiled little shit? A fair point, to be sure. But bear in mind that for my spring break the prior year, they had paid for me to accompany my girlfriend and most of her sorority sisters on a week-long trip to Cancun, the memory of which makes me shudder to this day. The Atlanta trip was going to cost a whopping $200. (Yes, that's how much a coach seat during spring break from Detroit to Atlanta cost in 1992. Go ahead and weep now.)

Undaunted, I took a part-time job working the Wendy's counter at the Michigan student union for one month, slipping all over the greasy floors and bringing home bags of leftover cheeseburgers to my roommates each night until I had earned exactly $200. With that, I was off to the gay bars of Atlanta.

My ticket to ride.

But there were brighter moments, too. Over that summer of '92, my mother read a book called "The Family Heart: A Memoir of When Our Son Came Out," by Robb Forman Dew. (I've blogged about this previously here.) In the book, Forman Dew tells the story of her family's reaction to the coming out of her son, Stephen, who was exactly the same age as me and came out at more or less the same time. The book touched my mother deeply; I think it was the first time she felt like someone out there was going through the same sense of confusion, pain and loss that she was. And in what I took be an enormously positive sign, my mom bought each member of my family a copy, inscribing in mine:

Dearest Adam,
From our family heart with love respect.
Mom & Dad.

Incidentally, I've recently become friendly via Facebook with Stephen Dew. And I've told him what a huge impact his mother's book had on our family. Not surprisingly, he seems like a really cool dude.

But after steps forward like these, there would be setbacks. By the time the next winter break rolled around again, I found myself deeply in love with my first real boyfriend, Tony. Because a close friend, Michelle, was getting married in New Jersey on New Year's night and had invited Tony as my date, he accompanied me back East for the entire break. My mother had initially said Tony could stay with us; then she backtracked. It was just too much for her to handle.

Everything turned out fine, though. Tony and I stayed at my sister Anna's apartment in Hoboken. She left us chocolates and condoms on the bed.

The following summer, after Tony and I had broken up, I went to stay with my parents in their Hamptons beach house for a week. One night, out of sheer boredom and curiosity, I decided to check out the Swamp, the area's one and only gay nightspot. (It has since ceased to exist.) A more innocent gay venue than the Swamp has never existed. It was a prissy little restaurant and piano bar where rich queens like Calvin Klein and Barry Diller used to hobnob in the 70s. I would have been more likely to find sex in the synagogue than at the Swamp.

And yet, my mother was horrified, no doubt imagining leather-bound figures grinding and moaning their way through some dank, dark basement. (I wish!)

The next day, my sister Laura chastised me for having gone. "Mom was really upset. You shouldn't go to places like that when Mom and Dad are around," she said.

To which I could only reply: "I didn't come out so I could keep lying to them."

And so it went for a long, long while. For far longer than I ever expected it to. Then, in 1995, after I had moved to Atlanta and then to New York, a shift occurred in my mother's entire paradigm. It was inspired by the most unlikely of sources.

Anna had decided to do the very first Boston-to-New York AIDS LifeCycle, then called the AIDSRide. In preparation, she sent fundraising letters out to all of my parents' friends. (This was still a time when people sent actual letters, as opposed to emails.) Virtually all of them wrote back to her with generous pledges.

All except for one. I'll call him Dr. X.

Dr. X was an Austrian Jew who had fled the Nazis during World War II and settled in the U.S., where he eventually became a successful surgeon. He and his wife had been out-of-town friends with my parents for 20 years, and our two families sometimes vacationed together.

Dr. X chose not to pledge any money to the AIDSRide. That was certainly his right. But the good doctor also took the time to write out a letter to my sister detailing exactly why he would not be donating to this cause. AIDS is a disease that mostly affects homosexuals, he explained, and he did not support the homosexual community. Moreover, Dr. X wrote, AIDS is preventable and only contracted by those who engage in illicit, immoral behavior. Were my sister raising money for other diseases, he concluded, such as cancer or diabetes, Dr. X would be happy to donate.

In a manner most uncharacteristic of her, Anna wrote back a rather gentle response. In it, she said she was sorry that the doctor felt the way that he did, given that there were gay people in her life that she loved and cared about. She also promised to hit him up again the next time she was raising money for cancer or diabetes.

But my mother was crushed by Dr. X's letter. For the first time, I think, she felt her own core values deeply tested. More importantly, she felt that her son was under attack. And so, after consulting with one of her oldest and dearest friends, Lee Dunne, who reminded her that "words have consequences, and words can kill," my mother penned her own letter to Dr. X. It read, in part:

I deeply regret that after 20 years of what has been a warm and rewarding friendship, we must now part ways. And it's not only because my son is a homosexual, but because I find your values personally repugnant.

My parents never heard from Dr. X or his family again.

In the ensuing 15+ years, there has been a sea change in my parents attitudes' toward LGBT people. They are, I believe, as proud of me as they ever would have been had I turned out straight. Any boyfriend of mine would be (and has been) warmly welcomed into our family. And more importantly, my mother and father have realized that you can't be a decent, fair-minded person without also being pro-gay rights. (The vicious assholes on the other side have made this very easy to understand.)

I consider myself supremely fortunate to have them on my side. And my coming out experience, long and painful though it was, taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of my life: That given enough time and enough love, people really can change their hearts and minds.

See, my story ends just like one of those cheesy movies!

Homo Done (with this story). ♥

Coming Out (Part 2)

2011-10-12T19:27:00.000-07:00

There's one life, and there's no return and no deposit
One life, so it's time to open up your closet
Life's not worth a damn 'til you can say,
"Hey world, I am what I am."

--La Cage Aux Folles

Before I continue with the story, some thank-yous are due to some truly lovely fans. First and foremost, to Scott Fortner, who took it upon himself to redesign the header for this blog, and to coax me into cleaning up the margin issues. I think you'll agree he greatly improved the look of this site.

I also want to give a shout-out to Paul E., better known to regular listeners of the Frank DeCaro Show as "Paul in Mass." In addition to giving Sanktastic multiple shout-outs (and making the smart suggestion that I fix it so all the links open in separate windows), Paul operates an absolutely filthy, perverted, NSFW, adults-only gay porn blog, also called PaulinMass. I beg you not to click on it. (Consider yourselves warned.)

Ok, back to the story. The night of my big unveiling, my parents were on their way to a dinner party. "When you get home," I said to my mother as they were walking out, "I need to talk to you and Dad."

To say that her face fell would not be accurate. It collapsed.

"What is it that you need to talk to us about?," she asked me in a cold, dead voice.

"It's nothing bad, don't worry," I said, perhaps disingenuously. "I'll tell you when you get home."

She sighed heavily and said, "Now I'll be thinking about this all night."

I had already asked that my sisters both be there for my bombshell, so they were present when my parents returned several hours later.

"OK," my mother said before she had even crossed the threshold. "What do you need to tell us?"

"Let's all go into the den," I said.

My family's old den, which probably would have been described as the "TV room" or "family room" in other households, was exactly that -- the room where my family and our guests spent the most time together. This was a happy, cozy space -- a space where I had grown up. My parents sat down on the sofa next to each other. Laura and Anna took the two upholstered chairs on either side of me. I sat on the stone platform in front of the fireplace. It wouldn't occur to me until years later that I had literally ended up on the hot seat.

As I began to speak, both sisters spontaneously reached out and took hold of my hands.

Weirdly, the only thing I cannot remember clearly about this event are the words I used to tell them. I must have disassociated, because it's very unlike me to not recall exact words. I don't think I would have just blurted out "I'm gay!" But whatever I said didn't take too long, and the overall message was clear.

They didn't scream. They didn't cry. They just got very, very quiet. When they did finally speak, it was almost exactly as I described in my early stand-up: My dad suggesting that I was actually bisexual and should "stick to women," and my mother insisting that this was a phase, much like my joining a fraternity.

"Remember when you first joined Chi Psi?," she said. "You were so excited about it at first, but after a while, you weren't interested in it anymore."

This is where Anna spoke up. "Mom, he's had these feelings since he was a little boy."

My mother would have none of that. "You've always been such a wonderful boyfriend to the girls you've dated!"

"Yes," I explained, "but I was never really attracted to them."

We went back and forth like this for a while, and then my mom said: "I think what you need is to enter into a long, meaningful relationship with a therapist and sort these feelings out."

I told her I'd be happy to speak to a therapist, but that no amount of therapy was going to change the fact that I was gay and happy to be so. That was sort of where the conversation ended for the night. Everyone hugged and said "I love you," and then my parents, still in a daze, wandered upstairs to bed. My sisters left as well, and I grabbed a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge and called my closest gay friend, Joe, in Michigan, to report on how it had all gone down. I remember feeling intense relief that the worst was over.

It wasn't.

The next day, Mom called the family therapist. (Every Jewish family has one on retainer, like an attorney.) I agreed to do a phone session with the therapist, during which he asked me some very basic and innocuous questions about my sexual orientation and how I felt about it. He asked me if he could relay the content of our discussion with my mother, and I told him he could. When he spoke to her again, the substance of what he said was:

"Adam is gay. He's not confused, he's not depressed, he's not ill in any way. He's just gay."

Thank God for the good and decent therapists in the world, right? I shudder to think of all the gay kids out there who aren't nearly as fortunate in this regard as I was.

After her phone call with the therapist, my mother became somewhat resigned to accepting the immutability of the situation. And in her own loving, maternal way, she decided the best way for the family to deal with this crisis was for the five of us to go into the City and see a gay-themed play, so as to better understand our strange, new reality.

It really was a sweet gesture on her part. Unfortunately, the play she chose was Larry Kramer's "The Destiny of Me."

"The Destiny of Me" is the sequel to Kramer's better known, landmark play about the beginning of the AIDS crisis, "The Normal Heart."

"The Normal Heart" is one of the most painful, wrenching, psychologically battering works ever written for the theater. One walks out of any production of it gasping for breath.

But "The Destiny of Me" makes "The Normal Heart" feel like "The Lion King." Most of it takes place in the hospital room of the main character, Ned Weeks, who is suffering from full-blown AIDS and undergoing an endless barrage of painful, experimental treatments. In one particularly awful scene, the actor playing Ned rips his transfusion bag off the metal hospital pole and throws it into the audience, spraying the first few rows with fake blood.

In short, "The Destiny of Me" is not a play you want to see after your son has just announced to you that he is gay. In 1991.

I'd still rather sit through it than "Lion King" again.

We were probably the only traditional nuclear family in the entire theater. And I remember standing in the lobby with Anna during intermission, surrounded by gay men on all sides, while everyone else used the restrooms. Several months before, we had gone as a family to see the Broadway production of "Dancing at Lughnasa," an Irish chamber play that had so thoroughly bored the crap out of us that we had nicknamed it, "Six Sisters Bitchin' in the Kitchen."

"Well," said Anna, as we looked at each other, wide-eyed. "At least this is better than 'Six Sisters Bitchin' in the Kitchen.'"

Without missing a beat, an old queen turned to us and said, "Ohmigawwwwwd! You saw that?"

If my mother had appeared dazed several nights before, when I had told her I was gay, she looked positively catatonic by the time Act Two of "The Destiny of Me" ended and we made our way out of the theater. But again I thought, "The worst is over."

It wasn't.

To be continued.

Homo off-Broadway. ♥

Coming Out

2011-10-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

This is where the fun ends
I am on a life cleanse
This is where the fun ends
I am on a life cleanse

--Adam Sank

What do you guys think of the new blog design? It's cleaner and easier to read, yes? Frankly, I wish there weren't so much goddamn space between "Sanktastic" and "The Life and Times of Adam Sank," but Blogger doesn't give you any leeway with its templates. Oh well.

So here it is 9PM on Tuesday, and I've completed all my Life Cleanse (henceforth referred to as "LC") essentials except for this one -- the writing for an hour. Ugh. This was the first night since I started LC that I REALLY didn't want to turn the TV off. I watched the latest episode of "Boardwalk Empire," which I like but don't love. (Everyone compares it to "The Sopranos," but let's face it: "Boardwalk" isn't nearly as gripping.) And when "Boardwalk" ended, I just didn't want to get up from the sofa.

But I did. Hooray for me.

Anyway...

I'm sick to death of talking and blogging about LC, and I sense that you, Dear Reader, are getting bored with it, too. I'm also tired of talking about comedy. That's even though I had a fun set at Harriet Halloway's show at Gotham Comedy Club last night -- especially after a woman in the crowd started arguing with me about my sexual orientation. I don't mean she had a problem with my being gay; she just refused to believe that I was. That led to some fun-filled exchanges, including my turning around and bending over in the lewdest way possible in order to prove my gayness to her.

I bet she would have believed it had she seen this picture.

By the way, Harriet had the funniest line I've heard in a long while: "Adele has had her heart broken a lot for a fatty."

Speaking of proclaiming one's gayness, did you know that today was National Coming Out Day? It's true! Coincidentally, it's also "Parents' Worst Nightmare Day!"

In all seriousness, and not to get all heavy-handed on your asses, coming out is a singular and life-changing event in the life of any LGBT person. And politically, it's the greatest weapon we have against those who hate us. (I'm talking about you, Rick Santorum.) If every gay person in the world -- or even just in the United States -- came out publicly today, the Christian Right would lose their single greatest fundraising tool. Violence and bullying against gay children and adults -- and those merely perceived to be gay -- would plummet. Gay marriage would become legal in all 50 states. And Michele Bachmann would become single. If you're still in the closet, think very carefully about all this. You hold the power to do tremendous good in the world, if you can only (wo)man up.

Here's a shortlist of the prominent folks I wish would just fucking come out already -- loudly and proudly. (And yes, Mom, they're all really gay.)

Tom Cruise

John Travolta

Ryan Seacrest

Jodi Foster

Queen Latifah

Kevin Spacey

Anderson Cooper

Shepard Smith

Armstrong Williams

Elena Kagan

David Souter

Lindsey Graham

Marcus Bachmann

Ed Koch

As I said, this is only a shortlist. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the Comments section.

All of this has made me think about my own coming out at the age of 20... which was almost exactly 20 years ago. (I waited until winter break, so I'm just shy of that anniversary.) I've spoken about this at length on-stage. In fact, the first jokes I ever wrote were about coming out to my parents.

Here's some early video. The coming out stuff starts at around 0:41.

The truth was a lot more painful.

I had begun the process of coming out to myself during the summer after my sophomore year at the University of Michigan. By the time I was actually able to say the words "I'm gay" out loud, I was half-way through junior year. I had told my roommates, closest friends and few trusted fraternity brothers, and everyone's reaction had been overwhelmingly supportive. And while I had all the normal anxiety and fear any queer person has about coming out to his parents, I honestly didn't think it would that big a deal.

First, of all, I was certain they already knew. Yes, I had dated girls throughout my adolescence, a few quite seriously. But come on! I was obsessed with musical theater from the time I was born. I used to traipse around the house singing all the songs from "Annie" "A Chorus Line" and "Evita." In fact, at age eight, I was known to stand at the top of the stairs with a towel-turban on my head belting out "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina."

God, I wanted to be her.

If that weren't enough to tip them off, I hated all sports and outdoor activities, I loved to bake, I watched soap operas religiously, and my absolute favorite activity was French braiding girls' hair.

NOT VERY STRAIGHT BEHAVIOR FROM A PREPUBESCENT BOY, IF YOU ASK ME!

Beyond that, my parents have always espoused and practiced the most politically liberal values. It's one of the things I most admire about them. These are bleeding-heart, pro-choice, pro-labor, anti-war, environmentally aware, equality-minded Jewish Democrats with a capital D. Some of my earliest memories are of passing out green Carter/Mondale bumper stickers in 1976, when I was five.

Anyone besides me old enough to remember these?

Granted, my parents were less enlightened when it came to issues of sexuality. I remember their using the words "fairy" and "fegala" (a Yiddish pejorative which loosely translates as "faggot") more than once to describe a gay guy. But even these words were spoken without malice, and I always believed my parents intended them more to describe stereotypically flamboyant behavior more than actual sexual orientation. (Not that it's OK to call a flamboyant person those names, either. It's not. But that's how I justified it to myself at the time. The ultimate irony being, of course, that I was not only their gay son but a rather flamboyant one at that.)

So as I said, I didn't expect it to be that big a deal. But just in case, to soften the blow, I decided to first tell my sister, Anna, the person in my family to whom I have always been closest in personality and temperament. Anna is crazy -- and I say that in the most loving, admiring way possible. She is one of the most fearless, hilarious people I have ever known and in many ways my role model. She's also a natural comedian since she has no filter whatsoever between her brain and her mouth. In any case, I just had a sense she would be OK with my news when I sat down to talk to her over Thanksgiving break.

And she was. Completely. But one of the first things she said was, "You know Mom is going to freak out about this."

Before flying back to Michigan for mid-terms, I asked Anna to share my news with my other sister, Laura, and her husband, Bill. Laura and Bill are a bit more conservative, but they, too, were supportive, especially over time.

And then came winter break; it was time to drop the bomb on Mom and Dad.

To be continued.

Homo out. ♥

Sober Sally

2011-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

No sugar tonight in my coffee,

No sugar tonight in my tea

No sugar to stand beside me

No sugar to run with me

--The Guess Who

Last night was the first real test of my Life Cleanse. Not only did I perform comedy, but I performed at Therapy, where my drinks are always free and plentiful. Most of the bartenders know my drink by heart: Vodka and soda with a splash of cranberry, served in a ginormous glass. (This is technically called a "Rose Kennedy," since that's all she reportedly ever drank, but nobody calls it that. Once in Tucson, I quizzed a bartender to see if he knew what the drink was called. "Yeah," he said, "a 'Rosa Parks.'")

Damn, she had a big head.

But it was just soda and cranberry for me all night long, along with a side salad that had way too much frisée. (My hatred of frisée is well documented.)

Not drinking wasn't terrible, but I do have a new-found appreciation for sober people -- especially sober people who hang out in places where everyone else is drinking. I did feel a bit like the odd man out, particularly as the night wore on and people got progressively drunker. You don't really notice this when you're also imbibing, but people really do get stupid when they drink. Nobody puked or got in a fight or anything -- although one unfortunate soul did lay his head down on a table at one point until his friends roused him. But there were noticeable changes in people's demeanor and social interactions -- changes that wouldn't have been as obvious to me had I also been drinking.

For one thing, drunk people repeat themselves. "You're so cute," a guy said to me after my set. It was nice to hear the first time.

"I mean, you're really, really cute."

Thanks.

"I probably wouldn't be telling you this if I weren't so drunk. But you're really cute."

OK, then.

"Seriously, you're cute."

It becomes sort of exhausting.

As for the show itself, it was totally bizarro. First, the speakers blew as Brad Loekle was finishing his opening set. Actually, only the speakers in the performing area were affected. Those patrons situated near the bar -- the people who least wanted to watch the show -- could hear everything loud and clear. This created a strange effect whereby the people on-stage appeared to be lip-syncing their own words, because we who were seated near the stage could see their lips moving, while we could only faintly hear the sound from 100 yards behind us.

Hoping the system would come back online, Brad brought Amy Beckerman up to the stage. Poor Amy was a trooper. She gamely went through her entire set, even though the audience directly in front of her couldn't make out what she was saying. But despite her best efforts, the crowd inevitably got antsy and started talking among themselves, making the sound situation even worse. Finally, Brad got up and announced he was ending the show early due to the technical difficulties. The crowd was genuinely upset, begging him to continue regardless. Then someone yelled out, "Take off your top!"

That's when things got even weirder.

Do I make you horny, baby?

Brad bade farewell to the crowd. But nobody left. It was as if they refused to accept that the show would not go on. Then, after about 15 minutes, the speakers magically turned themselves on again. And to the audience's absolute delight, Brad re-started the show, bringing up Naomi Ekperigin, who killed.

Then I went up.

Meh.

Look, I didn't bomb. I did OK. But it should have gone better. I couldn't have asked for a better crowd; this was a crowd, after all, that wouldn't leave -- even after the sound system crashed. They were committed. I should have been able to just press "play" and let the laugh track fly. Instead it was more like this:

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

[Silence]

HA!

[Silence]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!/APPLAUSE

[Silence]

HAHAHA.. Wha?

I finished strong, but I hate sets like this, because it's impossible to get a rhythm going. It's the comedy equivalent of a car that keeps speeding up and then stopping short; a bit nauseating.

Oh, and I wound up taking my clothes off, too.

Working the pole for the straight-guy-on-subway bit.

I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that I had no alcohol in me. Maybe the new material wasn't strong enough. Or maybe the audience was just tired by the time I got up there, what with the extended length of the show and all the strange events that had transpired. In any case, I left Therapy feeling sort of wah-wah about the whole evening. Not bad -- just wah-wah.

I got home around midnight and went straight to bed, stone cold sober... and woke up at 2:26 AM for no reason whatsoever. It took about an hour and two "New Yorker" articles for me to get back down, and then I slept fitfully until my alarm went off at 8:30AM.

When I logged onto my laptop this morning, I had received a Facebook message from Jason, the sweet Therapy waiter:

I forgot to pay for my salad.

Homo wah-wah. ♥

I get another shot tonight at this show:

Writer's Block

2011-10-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find
Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin

--Natasha Bedingfield

Yes, it's the theme song to "The Hills," but before that, it was a perfectly decent song -- and one that brings back happy memories of an Atlantis cruise I once took with my friend Seth. More importantly, it sums up my state at the moment.

I'm headlining at Therapy tonight. This always fills me with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Therapy's Sunday night audience is perhaps the most challenging in all of New York. On the one hand, the place is always packed. (And regardless of what Brad Loekle told "Next" magazine last month, it was packed when I hosted it, too.) These are people who show up because they want to see good comedy, which is something you can't really say about too many bar shows. They are present and attentive and alert (or as alert as one can be after five cosmos).

A true friend to the end.

On the other hand, Therapy's audience members are arguably the most discerning comedy audience on earth. And by discerning I mean cunty. No, actually, they're just honest. If they find you entertaining, they will shower you with laughter and applause. If they don't, they will stay silent. Totally, completely, dead silent. They won't heckle you. They won't get up and leave. They won't start talking amongst themselves. They'll just stare silently at you waiting for your set to get better... or for you to leave the stage. Whichever comes first.

Can you imagine how unnerving this is? I would literally rather people fling shit at my head than give me the silent treatment. (Which should tell you something about the psyche of a stand-up comic.) Shit I can play with and fling back at them. Silence... well, silence equals death. The only thing worse than a quiet comedy audience is no audience at all. (See "That Sank Show" at Bar-Tini.)

Having hosted the Therapy show for three years, I've learned more than a bit about the room and the crowd it draws. First of all, they prefer women over men, which is the reason both Brad and I have almost always booked female headliners. This is the opposite of how it is in mainstream comedy, where the target audience (i.e. straight men and their female dates) often (mistakenly) assume that women aren't as funny as men. But the gays? We like the ladies. Go ahead -- ask any gay man on the street who his favorite comedian is.

I'll wait.

Ready? I bet they said one of the following:

1) Kathy Griffin
2) Margaret Cho
3) Joan Rivers
4) Ellen DeGeneres
5) Any drag queen

Therapy's crowd also prefers dirty over clean and loud over quiet. But the trick is, you have be dirty and loud AND smart. You can't just get up on-stage and yell "sloppy pussy!" (Although that is pretty funny, come to think of it.) You have to prepare clever, original material and perform it with energy and confidence, all the while being dirty and loud.

And that last thing I've learned, from performing for this audience about 200 times, is that I have to write new fucking material for them every time I get up. I think this one may be specific to me. I've seen other comics do the same bits a dozen times in that room and consistently kill. But for whatever reason -- maybe it's my own internal generator when I'm doing new stuff -- they want to hear new stuff from me every time. At least for the bulk of my set.

Which is EXCEEDINGLY difficult and risky. I often hear people complain about comedians -- even very famous comedians -- "He always does the same jokes." You know why? Because those are the jokes that WORK. When you go to see the Eagles in concert, you want to hear them do "Hotel California" -- not "Busy Being Fabulous." Personally, I'd rather hear Don Henley sing "Sunset Grill" while the other Eagles stand around and watch, but then I'm a child of the 80s.

Jesus, what a great tune this was.

Any comic will tell you: Don't try out new material in front of a "real" crowd. You try that stuff out at open mics, or sparsely-attended shows or other shows about which you don't particularly care. Or if you do try something new, it's a quick line or two or a short bit you can weave into your regular material. Because at a big show, if the new stuff doesn't work, it doesn't work in front of a whole lot of people. And that's bad.

But again, for me, at Therapy, the rules don't apply.

Here's me performing at Therapy in June, 2009. This was the very first time I had ever done the bit about the kitten.

See? It worked!

All of this is to say, I should be furiously pounding out new material for tonight as we speak. (Mmmm... pounding), instead of writing this silly meta-comedic blog post. But I don't want to. I never want to. Knowing I have to write something is actually one of the most dreadful emotions I have. Literally: Filled with dread. Because writing for me has always felt like sitting down with a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I know there's a way to make all the pieces fit perfectly. And I know I'll feel great once the completed puzzle is all put together and laid out in front of me. But trying to fit all those goddamn pieces together... well, that's just about the most tedious thing there is.

Perhaps I'll go up to the roof for just a little while. Then I'll come back down and write hilarious new jokes for tonight.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Homo procrastinating. ♥

Video: Rollerblading 10/8/11

2011-10-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Who is TJ?

2011-10-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

Friday Night, 9:45 PM.

I am in my apartment, seated at the big wooden desk my parents brought back from India, blogging to you fine people as I listen to classical music on Sirius-XM Pops. Classical is really the only genre I can listen to if I want to get actual work done; and the pieces must be those with which I'm not too familiar. Otherwise I'll start "singing" along and lose all focus.

Right now they're playing the finale of Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C. It's light and cheerful, but I've never heard it before. Perfect.

Speaking of classical music, my dear friend Walt Nickels and I were in Central Park this past Sunday on what was arguably the most beautiful day of the fall when we happened across a woman playing the violin, along with some pre-recorded backup instrumentation. I actually recognized her: Her name is Susan Keser, and in the winter time, she often performs on the ramp to the No. 7 train in Grand Central Station. On this day in Central Park, she was playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," one of my all-time favorites. We sat down to listen.

It was sublime. I snatched some video with my iPhone:

I'll plug Susan's website in case anyone in the New York area is seeking a violinist for your next affair, as one often is. It's www.newyorkviolinist.com. (Don't ask me who she killed in order to snag that domain name.)

As I write this, I've got a crustless quiche baking in the oven. I'm all about crustless quiches lately. They take a little bit of time to assemble, but once baked, they feed me a delicious and filling breakfast for up to a week. I'm convinced that the key to good eating is good planning. Decide what you're going to eat every day that week, and then follow through on your plan. When I'm eating right (as I'm trying to now), my diet goes more or less like this:

1) Eggs and turkey bacon for breakfast.
2) Mixed salad with grilled chicken for lunch.
3) Tuna salad low-carb wrap for dinner.
4) Atkins bars, fruit smoothies and Metamucil crackers as snacks.

A number of people, including my ex-boyfriend, Rob, have wondered how I can eat virtually the same thing every single day without dying of boredom. In truth, I prefer it to varying my alimentary routine. I would have made an excellent prairie settler or prisoner of war.

Some have questioned the very concept of a "crustless" quiche. These doubters say that what I'm actually cooking is a frittata. To those people I say: Go frittata yourself. A true frittata is fried (hence the name, shitheads). My crustless quiche is baked and identical to a traditional quiche with one exception: My "crust" consists of fried, chopped, minced onions, mushrooms and turkey bacon. It's incredibly delicious and almost completely carb-free.

Here's the basic recipe I use, with some modifications. (I prefer cheddar to Swiss cheese, and as I mentioned, I also include mushrooms in the base. Also, I find 45 minutes to an hour is a more realistic baking time).

For tonight's edition, I used smoked Gouda for the top layer. The quiche is just about ready, and the deliciousness is overwhelming my apartment right now.

As you have probably surmised by now, this Life Cleanse is boring as shit. And it's only been 24 hours since I began it. But so far, I've been very good. I watched exactly one hour of TV yesterday ("The Real World," which I discussed in my rather tedious video blog, below). Tonight, I watched "Project Runway." That show runs 90 minutes, but with commercials fast-forwarded, I'm still kosher.

(Speaking of kosher, to all the Jews who are reading this: Yes, I know it's Yom Kippur, and I'm supposed to be fasting. Well guess what: I'm not. Try not to get your panties in a knot over it. If I'm going to wind up in Hell, I assure you it's for far greater transgressions that not fasting on Yom Kippur.)

Of course, I did have the TV going for an additional 45 minutes while I prepared the quiche, but I don't count that as violating my one-hour-a-day rule. For one thing, I fail to see the difference whether I'm baking to TV, music or silence; the result is the same, regardless. Also, the TV was tuned to a fascinating documentary I'd never seen before, all about the life and career of Vidal Sassoon. (It was called simply "Vidal Sassoon: The Movie.")

I confess I really didn't know much about Vidal Sassoon before. I remember watching commercials for his hair-care products growing up in the 70s (as well as the "Oh-La-La, Sasson" jeans, but those had nothing to do with him). But I wasn't aware of the "five-point" haircut he created that revolutionized women's hair in mid-60s Britain and, ultimately, worldwide.

Liza's still wearing it.

I personally find this hairstyle and others like it fucking hideous, but I can appreciate how revolutionary it was, particularly when contrasted with the over-sprayed beehives that came before it. Basically, the movie shows how Sassoon's hair designs combined with Mary Quant's fashion designs (especially the mini-skirt) radically changed global fashion and culture.

Sassoon has also always been a fitness buff -- long before it was fashionable. In one scene, you see him today, in his 80s, doing yoga and pilates stretches that most fat-asses in their 20s couldn't do.

Also, he's a humanitarian and is responsible for the building of more than 20 new homes in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

Basically a pretty inspiring guy. (And a completely heterosexual hairdresser! Who knew?)

This morning on my way to work, as I strode purposefully down 42nd Street, ear-buds firmly planted in my ears, I heart a faint voice saying my name. I turned to see a rather pleasant-looking blond man about my age, smiling at me. I had no idea who it was, and I guess my expression betrayed that fact.

"It's TJ!," he proclaimed happily.

"Oh, TJ,!" I replied, throwing my arms around him. I still had no clue who he was. The only TJ I could ever remember meeting was TJ the DJ from Cherry Grove, and this dude weren't him.

TJ the DJ

So then I asked: "What are you doing in this neighborhood?"

This is my standard operating procedure whenever I'm faced with one of these awkward situations, which is to say, constantly. Like a detective, I start grilling the witness, hoping something he says will spark a tiny flame in my addled brain and remind me of his identity.

"I just started work around the corner," Mystery-TJ replied.

"Oh, really," I said, "what kind of work do you do?"

I could tell by his puzzled face that this must be a stupid question, given the context of how we knew each other, whatever that might be.

"Um, I'm a lawyer," he said.

"Ohhhh..." I said, "right. A lawyer!" Still no clue. Did I know any lawyers, other than my brother-in-law, Bill Gump? I didn't think so. Feeling more flustered by the moment, I began to squirm away.

Then TJ Whozzat said: "Well, I just want to tell you, I really enjoy all your Facebook posts."

A clue! He was someone I knew on Facebook! That narrowed it down to about 4,000 people.

As soon as I got to work, I went on Facebook, searching for TJs. I found two among my friends, neither of whom lived in New York. It occurred to me that TJ might be short for something like Thomas James, so I began searching all my T names. Finally I just gave up and posted this:

All right, I confess: I have no idea who TJ is -- the TJ who stopped me to say hello on my way to work today and told me he enjoyed my Facebook posts. I'm only friends with two TJ's on FB, and neither of them are him. TJ, PLEASE STEP FORWARD AND IDENTIFY YOURSELF! (And I'm sorry. This happens to me all the time. I am brain-damaged.)

Sure enough, just a short time ago, Phantom TJ revealed himself. It's a guy who indeed goes by "Thomas J." on Facebook. And we know each other because about seven years ago, I dated a guy named Jason with whom TJ went to law school. A CLASSMATE OF AN EX-BOYFRIEND!!! SEVEN FRIGGIN' YEARS AGO!!! You'd think TJ could have said, "It's TJ! You know, Jason's friend! From NYU!," or something to that effect. I probably wouldn't have known who the hell Jason was, but at least I would have had a snowball's chance in Hell.

Bottom line: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do not remember people. I don't remember their names, and I especially don't remember their faces. So unless we've slept together repeatedly and recently, or we worked together for years, or we're related, PLEASE EXPLAIN WHO YOU ARE AND HOW WE KNOW EACH OTHER WHEN YOU SEE ME OUT AND ABOUT. (And don't even be so confident if we're related. Last year a woman came up to me at a comedy show in Philly, and I stared at her like a demented housecat for about 30 seconds before she finally said, "It's Lindsey. Your cousin.")

That's just how I roll.

Quiche is ready.

Homo Crustless. ♥

Don't forget: I'm headlining Therapy this Sunday 10/9 at 10PM.

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VideoBlog: The Real World

2011-10-06T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Life Cleanse

2011-10-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

How long till my soul gets it right?

Can any human being ever reach that kind of light?

I call on the resting soul of Galileo

King of night vision, king of insight.

--The Indigo Girls

Kids, it's time for some changes. The definition of crazy is doing the same thing and over and over and expecting a different result, so goes the old adage. (It's often attributed to Einstein, though other sources claim Ben Franklin said it, while still others credit the quotation to Alcoholics Anonymous.) In any case, if the statement is true, I've been crazy for approximately the past two years. Or roughly since moving back from San Diego.

Since then, I've been working at the same dead-end (albeit not unpleasant) full-time day job, making slightly less money than I need to pay my basic expenses. (My extremely generous parents have been making up the difference.) I've been doing a tiny amount of comedy -- an average of about once a week, contrasted pitifully to the three or four times I was getting up weekly before I left New York in 2008. I've been working out, but not enough. I've barely dated, opting instead to have meaningless encounters with people I either don't know or don't care about (or both). And worst of all, I've spent countless -- and I do mean countless - hours, alone in my apartment, staring at the television set.

And where, midway through my 40th year on earth, has all of this gotten me?

1) I am single.

2) I am 10 lbs heavier than I want to be.

3) I am making less money that I need to be. (See above.)

4) I am bored.

5) I am lonely.

6) My comedy career, such that it was, has all but slipped away.

Honestly, it has. I still feel as funny as I ever did. In fact, some of the recent shows I've done -- especially the headlining hour I did at GNI this summer -- have, I think, reflected my best writing and performing to date. But before I moved to San Diego, it felt like things were really starting to happen for me. I had just appeared on "Last Comic Standing." I was hosting a very popular and high-profile weekly show. I was getting regular bookings around New York and elsewhere.

And then it all ended.

And yes, that's what often happens when you move across the country to a small city without much of a comedy scene. But I've been back in New York now since January, 2010. I can only use the San Diego excuse for so long before it becomes just that -- an excuse.

The truth is, this is how show business works. You're hot for a little while, and then you're not. And that's as true for A-List movie stars as it is for no-name people like me who are on the lowest rung of the business. And when you're down, getting back up again can often feel the same as starting from scratch. It's as if the last eight years I've been working in stand-up never happened.

Which is weird and confusing, because you'd think all the contacts I've made and all the work I've done and all the comics I've helped (and booked) when they needed it would reach out and help me now that I need it. But they don't. That's not how this business works. For one thing, nobody in show business is ever thinking about anybody but themselves. And for another, people only want to reach out to you when you're hot and don't actually need their help. This is the same paradoxical principle that assures that the richest celebrities in Hollywood are the ones who never have to pay for anything.

At the end of the day, you have to make it happen yourself. By yourself. Without any help from anyone.

This all came into hideous focus for me a month ago, when I was interviewing for a new day job. (I can blog about this, because my current employer knew I was interviewing elsewhere and in fact sanctioned it. If you knew what kind of company I worked for, this would make sense to you.)

The new job would have been working for a hedge fund. The fund was looking to fill an administrative position similar to the ones I've held since 2003. The position would have paid a lot more than I'm making now, and the company said it was looking for artistic, out-of-the-box types. (They actually gave "comedian" as an example of the kind of person they were seeking.)

I met initially with some of the folks I'd be supervising, and they all said they loved me (and indeed recommended me strongly to upper management). But when I went back for the second interview, the two executives with whom I met grilled me endlessly about the fact that I had this outside comedy career. (I know -- why did they advertise for a comedian if they didn't want someone with an outside comedy career?)

The conversation went something like this:

Executive: I've gone online and looked at your web site and your videos and your blogs. You're very successful.

Me: I'm really not.

Executive: Well, it seems to me like you are. You've done a lot of big things.

Me: Not in the last three years, I haven't.

Executive: How do we know you're not going to be whisked away to L.A. for the next pilot season?

Me: Because it's never happened. Nobody in L.A. knows who I am.

Executive: Well, we need someone who's going to commit to this job.

Me: I spent five years at The New York Times, during which I was doing a lot more comedy than I am now. I never missed a single day of work that wasn't part of my regularly scheduled vacation.

And so on and so on.

In the end, I didn't get the job. The feedback was that everyone liked me and thought I was more than qualified, but that they regarded me as a "flight risk" due to my show-biz career.

This is the terrible irony: I'm too successful for a day job and not successful enough to quit my day job.

People ask: Why don't you just do comedy full-time? Because I can't. Not until and unless I find some kind of regular comedy gig that provides steady and significant income. I have a mortgage. And I need health insurance. (Trust me on this; I do.) And comedians don't make a living wage unless they either get regular TV and film work (which is tantamount to winning the lottery) or go on the road for 300 nights a year. I have never wanted that life. It's lonely and miserable and tolerable only for schizoid personality types or people in their 20s (or both).

So where does that leave me? I don't know. I don't have any answers right now. But I do know that I can no longer keep doing the same thing and over and over and expect a different result. And so, for the next 30 days, I am embarking on what I'm calling the Life Cleanse.

It consists of the following:

1) At least one hour of exercise every day. Either at the gym, in my apartment or outside.

2) No more crap food. This includes but is not limited to all sweets, simple carbs and cold sesame noodles from the Chinese restaurant.

3) No alcohol or other recreational substances. (Not that I would ever use those, Mom.)

4) No smoking cigarettes. (I'm not a heavy smoker and never have been, but I do tend to have a cig or two when I'm out socializing at night and before and after a comedy show.)

5) At least one hour of writing every day. This can be in the form of joke-writing, blogging or working on other creative endeavors -- e.g. writing a play or book -- but can NOT include posting on Twitter or Facebook, to which I am hopelessly addicted.

6) No sex. Unless it's with someone with whom I've gone on actual date.

And finally, the toughest of all for me:

7) No more than one hour of television a day. The only exception will be if I'm watching a movie that runs over one hour, and it must be a movie I've never seen before. No more reruns. Not even (gulp) "Sex and the City."

I don't expect that following this regimen will magically transform me. Like I'll do it and then exactly 30 days from now I'll be cast in my own NBC sitcom. But at least it will force me out of my pointless routine. More importantly, it will force me to examine who I am, what I want, and how I might be able to make it happen.

At the very least... it can't hurt.

To be continued.

Homo cleansing. ♥
_____________________________________________
I'll be headlining Therapy this Sunday, Oct. 9 at 10PM.

And check me out the following night at this fun show at Gotham Comedy Club.

BW... Revealed!

2011-09-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

Seeing as this is a historic day -- the day "Don't Ask Don't Tell" officially gets tossed into the trash-bin of history where it belongs -- I thought I might as well take blog in hand to officially unveil the man to whom, for the past three years, I've referred in this space as BW (for "Boy Wonder").

Even though BW and I are no longer a couple, we remain very close. And I have the utmost respect for the 15+ years of service he has given (and continues to give) to this country, all the while facing the terrifying and very real prospect of termination due to his sexual orientation.

BW isn't planning any sort of big public declaration today. (I was personally hoping he'd show up for work in a rainbow-colored cover, greeting his fellow seamen with a casual "Hey, girl." No such luck.) But he did give me full permission to reveal his face and name to you all, at long last.

And so, without further ado, I give you...

Robert Leon Nelson, Jr!

(With me, at Therapy, in 2008.)

Homo proud. ♥

This is a Test

2011-09-09T06:48:00.001-07:00

Anybody reading this?

Tales of Woe From the West Coast (Part 5 - Finale)

2011-05-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

So many faces in and out of my life
Some will last
Some will just be now and then
Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes
I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby
Say goodbye to Hollywood
Say goodbye, my baby

--Billy Joel

Having departed Burbank just after 5PM on a weekday, the drive back to San Diego was endless. It took over five hours. And yet I remember, as BW's Honda barely crept down Interstate 5 (or "The 5," as it's known on the West Coast), that a giant smile remained plastered across my face. I felt as if I had taken five hits of the best ecstasy ever created. I am embarrassed now to admit some of the insane, grandiose thoughts that flew through my head. I thought about what car I was going to buy with my new-found wealth. (I was still driving Carmen, my constantly-breaking-down '97 Passat, at the time.) I thought about how I'd have to find a nice gym to work out at in Burbank. I thought about how some weekends I would drive to San Diego to stay with BW, and the other weekends he's come up and stay with me. I was literally spending the jackpot of the lottery I had yet to win. And even then, a little voice kept saying, "Calm down. It hasn't happened yet, and it still may not."

And yet: There was a certainty about the whole thing. The way they had mentioned my getting an apartment in Burbank and made the comparison to Joy Behar at the start of "The View." The fact that Annabelle was close friends with Roxanna -- and had told me at the end of the meeting that she was going to check in with Roxanna to get her input on me. It all just felt... meant to be.

That evening, after I had gotten home, I sent Donny and Annabelle a thank-you email. (It actually took me a couple tries; I hadn't gotten Donny's contact info, so I guessed at his email address using Annabelle's as a model. But instead of reaching Donald Page, executive producer at ABC-Disney, I reached Donald Page, ride operator at Disneyland. The latter was kind enough to write back and supply me with my Donny's email.)

I imagine Donny the ride operator looking like this.

Donny responded in an email the next morning: "It was great meeting you, too, and we hope to be working with you in the future." That was a good sign; most of the time, you never hear a word back from industry types unless you've booked the gig.

But after a couple of weeks passed without any further contact from ABC, I started to get nervous. And then it hit me that I had never followed up with Roxanna after my meeting. Maybe Annabelle and she had spoken, and maybe Roxanna could provide a little insight into what the execs had thought of me? So I emailed Roxanna in Europe and asked her.

The tersely worded email she sent back made my blood run cold. I didn't save it, but here's more or less how it read:

"Adam, Annabelle did reach out to me to ask what I thought of you. I told her that you were funny when I knew you 15 years ago, but I hadn't seen you since then and have no idea what you're like now. Best of luck."

People are funny creatures. It's impossible to ever really know what goes on in someone else's head. Roxanna and I had been the closest of friends during a stressful and difficult year in both our lives. She had been a guest at my parents' home for several holidays. In all of my Columbia graduation photos, there's Roxanna and her family posing with me and my family, outside St. John the Divine and at the restaurant where we all got dinner afterwards. So I can't begin to imagine why Roxanna would have been anything other than glowing when speaking about me to Annabelle, someone she knew had the power to profoundly impact my life. It certainly wouldn't have cost her a thing, and I don't have the slightest doubt I would have done it for her had the situation been reversed, whether it was 15 years later or 40 years later. But there it was. As I said, people are funny creatures.

And look, I'm not foolish enough to think that Roxanna's recommendation -- or lack thereof -- had anything to do with how this story ends. It was just one added element of crushing pain, disappointment and humiliation. Because surely by now even the most hopeful of my readers knows how it ends:

I never heard from ABC again.

I sent a follow-up email to Donny and Annabelle a month later and got no response. I sent another one about six weeks later. I also added both of them to my mass email list so they would be included whenever I sent out announcements about upcoming shows.

Zilch.

If you find the ending to this story unsatisfying to read, try living it. I wish I could I give you a better conclusion. I truly do.

I've only told this story to a handful of people, all of them comedians. They have all had the exact same reaction:

"OK. And?"

Because this is, at the end of the day, what happens in showbiz. It happens every single day of every single year to every single person trying to make it as a performer. You try out for things, and most of the time you don't get them. And you never hear back from the people for whom you tried out. And even if you do possess the talent and the fortitude and dumb luck to FINALLY get something... it ends up falling apart. The pilot gets canceled. Or it gets shot but doesn't get picked up. Or it does get picked up but gets canceled after four episodes, and you don't land another job for five years.

That's showbiz.

And I know that. I've learned that lesson a thousand times. Believe me, these Tales of Woe could have easily had 50 chapters instead of five. But each time it happens to me, I die a little bit inside. And after these two particular episodes --having a manager and then not, and being summoned to ABC for a talk show and then not -- I died a lot. I lost faith: In myself and in the world. My relationship with BW suffered to the point of collapse. And I ultimately just gave up.

My dear friend and fellow gay-median Brad Loekle is fond of telling me: "You have the worst possible personality for this business." As cunty as that sounds, he's right. In spite of all my extroverted bravado I am fundamentally a deeply sensitive, insecure person. I am still that 14-year-old gay kid getting pelted by snowballs on the school bus and not knowing why or how to stop it.

The Voice of Reason. Which sounds oddly like the voice of Satan.

Again, I hear every comedian I know answering that with: "OK. And?"

Because that's also showbiz. Nobody becomes a performer -- especially not a comedian -- because they feel wonderful about themselves. We're all trying to fill some deep, aching need, and also because we're adrenaline junkies -- a potentially lethal combination (RIP Lenny Bruce, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Mitch Heburg, Richard Jeni, Greg Giraldo and the list goes on.)

Look, I don't want anyone out there worrying about me. I have neither the genius nor the madness of any of the folks mentioned in that last paragraph. When I say "I gave up," I mean on comedy -- not life. Yes, I've continued to perform steadily these last two years, and I will continue to do so. The truth is, I can't stop now. Comedy is in my blood. I write new jokes whether I want to or not; it's an involuntary reaction. And when I'm away from the mic for more than a week, I begin to crave it, the way a hungry person craves food.

But for much of the past two years, since my West Coast fiascoes, I've given up on the idea of "making it" in this business. And by "making it" I mean achieving a level of financial security from performing such that I'm comfortable giving up my day job and my employer-sponsored health insurance. Life is about choices, and this had been my choice. Some days it's a choice that keeps me awake at night, and some days it's a choice that makes it very hard for me to get out bed in the morning. But it's also a choice that allows me to live in a very nice condominium in one of the best neighborhoods in New York City and know where my next paycheck is coming from enjoy a semblance of a social life.

Something is shifting now, though, and I can feel it. I've felt it ever since I had drinks with Leah Bonnema last month -- which was the whole impetus to begin blogging again. It's not that I'm planning to do anything rash like quit my day job (although I do fantasize about it a lot lately). But I am feeling that little spark of hope and possibility again. I have a number of fun gigs on the horizon for this spring and summer -- far more than I did last year at this time -- along with some potentially exciting side-projects. I feel as though maybe I'm ready to put myself back in the game and see what happens.

That's also what showbiz is, by the way: The ability to dream big.

I'm trying.

Homo out. (Probably for a while, but I'll be back. I promise.) ♥

Don't forget THAT SANK SHOW every Wednesday at 10PM at Bar-Tini Ultralounge.

And you can hear me on the Derek & Romaine Show on Sirius-XM OutQ (Channel 108) next Friday, May 27 at 7PM ET.

Oh, and here's video of an interview with me at the Love Out Loud VI Event on May 11.
(I come in at 6:42.)

Tales of Woe From the West Coast (Part 4)

2011-05-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime...
--Eminem

There are fuzzy aspects to the memories I'm recounting here. Remember, it all happened more than two years ago. Moreover, I often feel that the hot southern California sun literally baked my brain like some kind of giant cookie when I lived in San Diego. My time out there often feels like a fever dream, rather than an actual experience.

For instance, I can't remember whether Roxana, my grad school friend, and I ever actually spoke by telephone after I got the ABC meeting, or whether we simply exchanged emails. I do know that she assured me she'd put in a good word for me if Annabelle contacted her. And I mean, of course she would. Why wouldn't she?

I remember clearly the day I drove to Burbank. My meeting was set for 4PM, so my boss at the time, Lisa, let me leave work at noon. I have been extremely blessed over the last eight years to have a series of incredibly supportive bosses -- bosses who let me leave early or come in late or miss days altogether because I had some kind of performing opportunity or commitment. Lisa was one of them.

I remember I borrowed BW's LaHonda and our roommate, CW's GPS device for the trip. I packed a Subway sandwich -- the sweet onion teriyaki chicken -- and a big bottle of water. I again wore what I thought was casual-yet-cool t-shirt-and-jeans ensemble. And I drove. And I drove. And I drove, and I drove, all the while repeating a mantra to myself: "You can do this. You will do this."

About 20 miles outside of L.A., I witnessed a car accident. I mean, I actually saw the accident happen. A car several hundred yards ahead of mine sideswiped another changing lanes, causing it to spin out. It wasn't a major accident; I watched as both drivers stepped out of their cars unhurt. But I remember thinking as I passed them, "Thank God. In five minutes, once the emergency vehicles arrive, the freeway is going to be a parking lot." (Reflecting on this now, maybe I shouldn't have left the scene of an accident? Or does that only apply when one is actually involved in the accident?)

Burbank is only 12 miles north of downtown L.A., and it's often referred to as the "Media Capital of the World." I therefore expected it to look like L.A. itself -- a sprawling, industrialized hellhole. But it didn't. It was actually rather charming -- a place with tree-lined streets and single-family homes and horse farms. (The air actually smelled like horseshit, but in a pleasant kind of way.) It was like a wealthy Connecticut suburb with palm trees.

This is exactly how I remember it.

I remember I arrived about a half-hour too early for my meeting, so I pulled over at a hamburger place and stepped outside to call my parents. I remember the air outside was extremely hot -- even hotter than midday San Diego -- and I quickly got back into the air-conditioned car so I wouldn't be all sweaty and gross-looking for my meeting. I remember pulling up to the gate at ABC and giving the guard my name, and I remember him smiling at me and waving me in.

I remember walking through the lobby and seeing the walls lined with pictures of classic television shows from my childhood -- shows like "Happy Days" and "Mork & Mindy." I remember the elevator ride up to meet Donny and Annabelle floor, willing myself to stop sweating.

I was greeted by an assistant and offered water in a cup -- bottled water had recently become verboten at the network due to environmental concerns -- and then Donny and Annabelle came out. "I just saw a car accident!" I blurted out after hands were shook. We were all walking back to Donny's office.

"You did?" Donny asked.

"Yes, right in front of me! On the freeway! I actually saw it happen!"

Meanwhile, my inner voice was whispering "Shut the fuck up. You sound like a crazy person. Witnessing a car accident is probably not that exciting to people who live in Los Angeles. Or to anyone else, for that matter. Calm down. You can do this. You will do this."

We went into the office and shut the door. And for the next hour -- and it was a solid hour -- we talked. Or more accurately stated, I talked. And I talked. And I talked, and I talked. Every time I shut my mouth, Donny or Annabelle would ask me another question, and I talked some more.

And what did they ask me about? Everything. And I do mean everything. In the course of that hour they asked me -- and I told them -- about my experience in stand-up. About living in San Diego versus New York. About having a boyfriend in the Military. About pop culture, including what TV shows and performers I liked and didn't like. About my family. About my sex life. About my political views and my philosophy of life and my thoughts about being a gay man in America in 2008.

It was an incredibly intensive hour of therapy. In fact, as the meeting wore on, I found myself leaning back in my chair, almost reclining, as if I were in an actual therapy session. I even said I one point, "I feel like I'm talking to my therapist!" Donny and Annabelle didn't react. They didn't react to anything I said. They were completely inscrutable. It was like having a conversation with two very inquisitive housecats.

"If you could co-host a pop culture talk show with any straight female celebrity, who would it be?"

I told them I liked Kelly Ripa and thought I'd have good chemistry with someone like her. For some reason, I starting talking about how I liked Danielle Fishel, the girl who played Topanga on "Boy Meets World" and now hosts "The Dish" on the Style Network. Only I couldn't remember her name and kept referring to her as "that Topanga girl." I also mentioned a number of non-famous female comedians I've worked with over the years.

You know... Topanga!

Then they asked me: "If you had to get an apartment in Burbank to tape this show on a regular basis, how would that affect your relationship? Would your boyfriend be OK with that?"

I assured them he would.

Right before I left, I asked them if the fact that I wasn't widely known would be a factor in their final decision. (Good ol' Adam, always trying to sabotage himself.)

"No," Annabelle said. "Nobody knew who Joy Behar was before 'The View.' The show will make you known."

Will, she said. Not would. Will.

They shook my hand. They told me they'd be in touch. I left Donny's office and said goodbye to the assistant and took the elevator down to the lobby and walked outside to my car. My hands shaking, I called my parents again.

"Mom," I said when she answered. "I think my life just changed."

To be continued.

Homo on the brink of fame and stardom. ♥

Please follow me on Twitter.

Tales of Woe From the West Coast (Part 3)

2011-05-13T11:45:00.000-07:00

Opportunity knocks once, let's reach out and grab it

Together we'll nab it,

We'll hitchhike, bus or yellow cab it!

(Cab it?)

Movin' right along.

Footloose and fancy-free.

Getting there is half the fun; come share it with me.

--The Muppet Movie

My last installment garnered a whopping zero comments, and I'm about as busy at the moment as I've been anytime in the last two years. But my childhood friend Rebecca Landwehr Olgeirson emailed me Wednesday demanding to know what happens next. So for Rebe's sake (and nobody else's), here goes:

When we last left off, my manager/agent had disappeared, and a woman named Annabelle Chang from ABC had emailed me out of the blue about meeting with me for a talk show.

After several emails back and forth, Annabelle and I had a pre-meeting phone conversation that lasted about 25 minutes. She told me she had come across me by googling "gay comedians." ("And then we contacted the ones who were good-looking," she added.) Strangely enough, when I google the same thing, my name doesn't even appear on the first results page. I should probably do something about that.

I told Annebelle about myself, including the fact that I had gotten my master's in journalism from Columbia in '96. "Oh," she said, "did you know Roxana Scott*? She's one of my best friends. In fact, she was a bridesmaid in my wedding."

I couldn't believe my ears.

"Um, yeah," I said, "she was my best friend in grad school."

And she was. I met Roxana my very first day at Columbia. She was a beautiful, elegant, young black woman from Brooklyn. During our very first conversation, as we sat on the steps outside the J-School, I mentioned to Roxana that I was gay -- which was not something I mentioned to everyone in those days. (I was only 25 and had been officially "out" for just three years.) I wasn't sure how Roxana would take this news. Something about her told me she'd be cool with it. But I was wholly unprepared for her response.

"I think my boyfriend might be gay."

"Oh," I said. "Does he..." and then I stopped. I had planned to ask, "Does he initiate sex with you?" This has always struck me as a pretty good test of someone's sexual orientation. But I didn't want to be presumptuous. Maybe Roxana and her boyfriend weren't yet having sex? Or maybe they were, but Roxana wouldn't be comfortable discussing that fact with someone she had just met?"

So all I said was, "Does he..."

And Roxana interrupted, "Yes, he really likes it in the butt."

Well then!

The Site of Our Butt Talk

There's an episode of "Sex and the City" in which Samantha is trying to get an appointment with a much-in-demand breast cancer specialist. Alongside her in the waiting room, also waiting to get an appointment, is a nun, played by the brilliant Julia Sweeney. The nun is not wearing a habit. Their discourse goes as follows:

Samantha: I was once told I wouldn't be able to get backstage to see Mick Jagger. Well I did get backstage... and I blew him. [Silence] Excuse me... I don't know if this is an appropriate question to ask...

Nun: I think we passed appropriate a few seconds ago.

Samantha: What kind of cancer do you have?

Nun: Breast.

Nun: Breast! Me too. I'm curious... Do you have children?

Nun: I'm a nun.

Samantha: You have none.

Nun: No, no, no... I AM a nun. But that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy your Mick Jagger story.

That was like my first conversation with Roxana. She passed appropriate with me from the get-go, and I adored her for that. The fact that she combined inappropriateness with utter class and poise made her all the more appealing. We were basically inseparable for the remainder of grad school. I recall walking with her through the streets of Harlem and having black guys scream at us: "Oh, no, baby! What are you doing with that ghost?! You don't need to be with him! You need to be with me!," and being utterly flattered that they had assumed we were a couple.

So when Annabelle Chang from ABC dropped Roxana's name -- out of all the names she could have mentioned of people who had gone to Columbia J-School -- it felt more than serendipitous. It felt like fate.

Annabelle scheduled a meeting for one week hence in Burbank. It would include me, her and her boss, Donny Page*, a network vice-president in charge of programming. "And I'll be sure to touch base with Roxana before then," Annabelle added.

The moment our phone call ended, I began composing an email to Roxana. In the years since our Columbia days, she had moved to Europe, married a very wealthy man and given birth to several beautiful children. We had stayed in touch, but only sporadically and always via email.

"You're not going to believe this," I wrote. "But you and I know someone in common. And she could change my entire life..."

To be continued.

Homo who likes it in the butt. ♥

I'm very close to 1,000 fans on Facebook. Please click here and "Like" me if you haven't already done so.

*A pseudonym.

Tales of Woe From The West Coast (Part 2)

2011-05-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

The papers said Ed always played from the heart
He got an agent and a roadie named Bart
They made a record and it went in the charts
The sky was the limit...

--Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

I'm going to cut to the chase here, because the punchline of this story is far less exciting than the set-up:

Bruce disappeared on me.

I mean, not immediately. There were a few phone calls here and there over the next several months; some talk about getting me booked in Vegas. At one point Bruce was going to send me out for a new series that was filming in San Diego; but then the show got canceled. He came to see me at the Laugh Factory one night when I was again booked on that gay show -- and told me afterwards that I was clearly the best comedian on the bill. (And not to sound like an ass, but I was.) But other than that, he never "managed" me in any way.

At the Laugh Factory, Oct. 3, 2008 -- The Night Bruce Came to See Me.

(Photo by Ken Kleiber)

Actually, that's not entirely true: He got me booked on one no-pay show at the Hollywood Improv. And he also tried to negotiate my contract with a little gay resort in Puerto Vallarta that had contacted me directly. (The place was actually located in the appropriately named Playa Los Muertos -- Beach of the Dead. They were offering me like $300 for the whole week, and I would have had to pay my own airfare, so Bruce and I both decided it was a joke. I know other comics who ended up doing the gig. The general word back was that the place was a shithole, and nobody got paid. It has since folded.)

Such Stucco Fabulosity!

Aside from that, I did no business of any kind with Bruce. Every few weeks I would call him and say, "Hey, there. I'm still eager to go out for stuff! What do you have for me?" And each time, he'd say, "I know, I know -- I will, I will." His calls back eventually petered out to the point that they stopped altogether. And then one day, I heard through the grapevine that he had gone to a new agency... and never told me.

Now I'm no showbiz expert, but I'm pretty sure when your manager relocates and neglects to tell you, it's a bad sign!!!

So what happened? Who the hell knows. I sure don't. The whole thing would have made more sense to me if Bruce had sent me out for a bunch of auditions, and I hadn't booked any of them. Or if the night he saw me at the Factory, I had stunk up the joint. But neither of those things happened. He just disappeared... for no apparent reason. Making me wonder if the entire sequence of events hadn't been some sort of grandiose fantasy on my part -- a self-induced Hollywood mirage. Maybe I was Bruce Willis at the end of "The Sixth Sense." Except I knew I wasn't dead; only my career was

Needless to say, I was crushed. I felt as though I had won the lottery... and then lost the ticket.

Months went by. I began working full-time at a tedious, low-paying job in a military housing office. My spirits sank. And then one day, sometime in early spring, out of the blue, I got an email from someone named Annabelle Chang* at ABC-TV:

"Hi, Adam. My team is developing a talk show, and we're looking for a gay comedian to co-host. Would you be available to come up to our studios in Burbank for a meeting next week?"

Suddenly, I was back in the game.

To be continued.

Homo Gone Hollywood. ♥

Don't miss THAT SANK SHOW at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge this Wednesday, 5/4 at 10PM with headliner Helen Hong and featuring Sheba Mason and Neil Thornton! Details at www.adamsank.com.

And follow me on Twitter!

*not her real name

Tales of Woe From the West Coast (Part 1)

2011-04-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

Last thing I remember

I was running for the door

I had to find the passage back

To the place I was before

"Relax," said the nightman,

"We are programmed to receive.

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave."

--The Eagles

"Hotel California"

Shortly before I moved to San Diego, I became friendly with an openly gay television actor. He's not a household name -- it's not Neil Patrick Harris or TR Knight -- but he's a recurring character on a well-known and long-running series. Let's call him Donald.

Donald had stumbled upon my Therapy show one Sunday night and introduced himself afterwards. He was a fan of stand-up comedy and very much wanted to try it himself sometime. I told him I'd be thrilled to have him on the show, and we eventually became casual friends.

I liked Donald and still do. He's kind and warm and easygoing and has none of that phony Hollywood persona I find so repellent. He really plays no part in this story other than the fact that it was he who introduced me to the person who figures prominently in the first of my two West Coast Tales of Woe:

My manager.

Yes, folks, for one brief, shining moment, I had an actual professional business manager. Or least I thought I did.

His name, for the sake of this story, will be Bruce Crenshaw. Bruce was Donald's manager and had been for years. He lived in L.A. but was in New York on business one week and had accompanied Donald to Therapy to see my show. Later that week, the three of us went to dinner.

Bruce was exactly what you'd expect of a Hollywood business manager: Jewish, late 40s, with a hangdog look, a sardonic, slightly sour sensibility and a straightforward way of speaking.

"I think you got something, kid," Bruce told me. (I don't know if he actually said, "kid," but that's how I would write it if this were a movie.) "You're likable. You got charm. I could see you doing TV stuff. Hosting -- that sort of thing. Look me up if you ever come out to L.A."

I was, of course, on Cloud Nine. But I also figured, when the hell am I going to be in L.A.?

Actual picture of me taken that night.

Fast forward six months. I'm living in San Diego with BW and have recently begun reaching out to all my L.A. industry contacts (of whom there are about three). Bruce is, of course, among them, and I shoot him a friendly email. He writes back immediately and says to let him know when I'm next in L.A. Later that week, I get my first L.A. club booking. A gay comic there is hosting a new show called "Thank Gays It's Friday" at the Laugh Factory and offers me a spot. I immediately let Bruce now, and he and I arrange a meeting at his office in West Hollywood the afternoon of my show. I am over the moon. (Which is somewhat higher than Cloud Nine.)

A few words about the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles: It's brutal. It's only about 130 miles, but somehow it never takes less than three hours and can easily take as long as five. The closer you get to L.A., the shittier it gets, with endless road construction, terrifyingly narrow, windy lanes and constant, hideous traffic. Before I moved, I had this crazy notion that I could easily commute between the two cities should my burgeoning show-biz career require it. Now I understand it's the equivalent of living in Philadelphia and commuting to New York. Which, I guess, some people do, but I could never be one of them.

(Actually, I just Mapquested it; Philly to New York is easier -- only about 95 miles. Still shitty, though.)

Ugh. I still get nauseous at the memory. What a shithole.

But none of that mattered to me as BW and I inched up the 405 in his black Honda Civic (whom we named "LaHonda"). I was on my way to my first Hollywood meeting. With someone who might want to represent me professionally. This was a major milestone.

I remember what I was wearing. Having watched countless episodes of "Entourage," I knew that Hollywood was all about dressing down, but in a chic, fashionable way. So rather than wear slacks or a tie or something dorky like that, I was dressed in my most expensive gay jeans and a tight, olive-colored graphic t-shirt. I was tan and in good shape and still in my 30s. I looked good.

This was not taken that day, but it's more or less what I looked like
at the meeting. Except I didn't walk into the meeting holding a microphone.

BW and I pulled up to Bruce's office. BW dropped me off and then drove off to shop or get coffee or have sex with a stranger or something. (Just kidding! I'm sure whatever he did during my meeting was entirely wholesome.) I was met in the lobby by a quintessential Hollywood assistant -- a young, cute, perfectly dressed gay boy who acted like we were old friends but had a simmering undercurrent of hostility. He ushered me in to meet Bruce and his partner.

The meeting lasted about a half hour. I don't remember anything we discussed because I completely left my body during the course of our conversation. This happens sometimes when I'm greatly excited about something. It used to happen to me whenever I got onstage and still does in rare moments -- when everything clicks perfectly and I'm firing on all cylinders. And I was. I was on. Not in a loud, obnoxious, needy way; in a cool, confident, charming "I got this" kind of way.

Given the title of this blog posting, you probably think you know how this story ends. Bruce stands up, shakes my hand, and says, "Not this time, kid. But come back and see us again sometime." I wander out into the oppressive L.A. sun, crushed, dazed, searching in vain for the air-conditioned comfort of LaHonda and the solace of BW's tender, consoling embrace.

That's not what happened. Instead, Bruce said, "Well, I'd love to represent you. Email your head shots and resume to my assistant when you get back to San Diego, and let's start sending you out for stuff."

I was in the stratosphere. This was it: My life-changing moment.

Or so I thought.

(To be continued.)

Homo deluded. ♥

Wake-Up Call

2011-04-26T08:22:00.000-07:00

-- UPDATED BECAUSE THIS STUPID BLOGGER PROGRAM DELETED AN ENTIRE PARAGRAPH FOR NO REASON--

Thought I knew my mind like the back of my hand
The gold and the rainbow, and nothing panned out as I planned
They say only milk and honey's gonna make your soul satisfied
I better learn how to swim cause the crossing is chilly and wide

Twisted guardrails on the highway, broken glass on the cement
The ghost of someone's tragedy -- how recklessly my time has been spent
And they say that it's never too late, but you don't -- you don't get any younger
I better learn how to starve the emptiness and feed the hunger...

--Indigo Girls

You know it's been a long time since I've last blogged when I actually couldn't remember how to log on to this site, or even what the URL was. I confess I've been going through something of a midlife crisis since turning 40 in February. Nothing major -- it's not as if I did something crazy like quit my job, give up my long-running comedy show and move across the country for a guy I barely know. (I already did that when I was 37.)

No, I've just been feeling incredibly... inert. Stuck. Paralyzed. Unable to do anything other than meet the minimum requirements of my life: Sleep. Get up. Go to work. Host weekly Bar-Tini show. Go to the gym. (Not nearly enough.) Eat. (Too much.) And waste hours and hours of my life watching shitty reality television and checking Facebook and Twitter obsessively.

It's not depression, exactly. Depression is more extreme -- more intense. (And I know whereof I speak. In 2002, a year before I started doing comedy, I quit my job as a daytime producer at Fox News to become the 11 o'clock producer of "Eyewitness News" at New York's ABC affiliate, and I immediately slipped into a debilitating psychological state. I have a journal from that six-month period full of rantings like, "Snap out of it! What the hell is wrong with you?!" and descriptions of my inability to make a dentist appointment. That's how depressed I was: I didn't have the energy to call the dentist and make an appointment to get a cleaning. THAT'S depression.)

This is actually what got me through it.

No, this feels more like existential laziness. Like when I was a teenager and would come home from high school and collapse on the sofa staring blankly at "General Hospital" and "Oprah" until my father would mosey on in from his home pediatric office into the den and scream, "No daytime TV!" at me until I'd tell him to go fuck himself.

Dear Ol' Dad.

I just don't know what to do with myself lately. Or more accurately, I do know what to do, but I can't seem to do it. "What to do" -- what I should do -- is to get my ass in gear and start working on my career again. ("My career." I always feel so ridiculously campy saying that -- like Joan Crawford in "Mildred Pierce.") But I don't know what else to call it. My career. This... thing. This drive to become a professional comedian that I started in 2003 -- as a direct result of my Eyewitness News-based depression -- and that has now apparently driven me to my current state of ennui. I need to start working on that again. I need to, but I haven't been able to for a long, long time now.

It's not that I've given up comedy per se. I still do it, after all. I still book and host and promote a weekly show for which I am constantly writing new material. And I still get booked to perform at other places -- some terrific places, actually, as seen by the list of my upcoming gigs. And I still love doing it. Truly, I do. After eight years, I still love walking onto a stage, telling original stories and having people laugh at those stories. It makes me feel like I'm using the best part of myself. (As opposed to the aforementioned reality TV watching, which makes me feel like I'm using drugs. And not in a fun way.)

What I don't do -- and haven't done for over a year -- is to work on the business side of comedy. Which is the side I hate and the side at which I am truly terrible. I am the opposite of a Hollywood type. I don't know how to schmooze. I don't know how to network. I don't know how to "brand" myself. All I know how to do is work hard and be funny, and, as I have learned over nearly a decade of this business, neither of those qualities has much to do with success.

This became most apparent to me during my brief and ill-fated attempt at living on the West Coast. Two really traumatic things happened to me, career-wise. I've never blogged about them because A) It's considered really bad form when an aspiring performer tells everyone how badly his career is going -- "Hey everyone, look at what a fucking loser I am!" -- and B) When I say "traumatic" I'm not exaggerating. These were things that kept me awake many a night and contributed in no small way to the disintegration of my relationship with Boy Wonder. They changed me. They hardened me. They turned me from a starry-eyed, plucky optimist into a bitter, jaded old Joan Crawford-like shrew.

Last night I had Leah Bonnema over for drinks. Leah is a new friend of mine -- someone I've gotten to know in the last year. She's not only a terrific comedian -- recently named to "favorite female comic" lists on both the Huffington Post and College Candy -- but also a genuinely lovely person.

Anyway, I rambled on for several hours about my existential bullshit and terrible tales of West Coast woe, and after listening to it, Leah gave me her version of tough love. (Which is actually rather gentle.) She pointed out that the people who make it in this business are the ones who get the door slammed in their faces 1,000 times... and keep knocking until they find the one door that opens.

Which of course I know is the absolute truth. But maybe I need to be reminded again and again.

Leah also told me that she thinks I shine as a performer when I do the news headlines every week at That Sank Show, as well as when I host my little "Are You Smarter Than a Homo?" game show there. Before she stumbled off drunkenly into the night (after a total of one vodka-soda), Leah made me promise that I'll start videotaping these segments every week and putting them on YouTube.

So I will. I promise. And thank you, Leah.

I also realized, after she left, that I need to let go of what happened to me on the West Coast. And the only way I've ever known how to do that is to blog about it. And so I will... next time. I promise.

And thank you, Leah.

Homo Emerging From Cocoon. ♥

Don't miss THAT SANK SHOW tomorrow and every Wednesday night at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge! This week's lineup is headlined by Christian Finnegan (Comedy Central Presents) and features Shawn Hollenbach and Joanna Ross! Details here.

Ricky Gervais's Mean Streak

2011-01-17T11:27:00.000-08:00

Much of the post Golden-Globe talk today seems to be about host Ricky Gervais's edgy opening monologue, and whether it crossed the lines of civility or was simply not funny.

If you missed it, GawkerTV has the entire four-minute clip here.

For what it's worth, here's my take:

As a comedian, and as someone who has been accused on more than one occasion, by various friends, family members and ex-lovers, of having a touch of Tourette Syndrome (or at the very least an insufficient filter), I don't think there's such a thing as going too far in comedy. "Nothing is inappropriate in this house," Lily Tomlin says in "Flirting With Disaster," and that's a motto by which I've lived. I watch those Comedy Central roasts (and the infamous Friar's Club roasts of yore) with a mixture of wonder and glee, anxious to see just how far people will push the envelope in the service of a laugh. It thrills me, and in a very deep way, it's what comedy is supposed to do.

I also think awards shows, especially one as meaningless as the Golden Globes (which are chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a corrupt shadow organization made up of 90 journalists no one's ever heard of) are ripe for the ripping. (Remember: This is the group that awarded Pia Zadora a Globe for 1982's "Butterfly.")

So the question, given all of the above, is this: Did Gervais go too far, and was he funny?

He ain't pretty -- that's for sho'.

I'll deal with the second part of the question first:

When I watched Gervais's monologue the first time, I found myself gasping with pleasure, shocked and delighted that he was hitting it so hard from the get-go. Watching it again this morning, I'm not so sure. The punchline to the opening joke, about Charlie Sheen's antics in the New York hotel room, was rather flimsy: "That was a Monday; what did [Sheen] do New Year's Eve?" That's a punchline just about any new bringer comic could come up with in about 30 seconds. Moreover, the hotel incident happened in October -- three months ago. That's an eternity, in terms of topical comedy. Why open a live show that's being watched by millions with a stale, hackneyed bit? Why not at least update it with Sheen's more recent shenanigans at the AVN Awards in Vegas?

Then Gervais segued into "The Tourist," joking that the acting was two-dimensional, the HFPA was bribed into nominating it and no one had even seen the film -- all of which are accurate. This was probably his ballsiest joke, and it was, indeed, funny. (Although I didn't care for the swipe at Cher. Gervais is showing his age and irrelevance if he thinks only people living in the 70s would want to see her in concert.)

The airbrushed "Sex and The City 2" poster joke was decent. "I saw one of you in an episode of Bonanza!" was a great tag.

Still haven't seen it!

Then came the bomb(shell): Gervais's joke about the famous closeted gay Scientologists. This line was met with a chorus of groans and boos and is the one everyone's talking about today. From a political standpoint -- that is, as an openly gay man/performer who believes that the closet damages our community more than any "God Hates Fags" protester could ever hope to -- I loved that Gervais said this. I would have loved it even more had he come right out and said, "John Travolta and Tom Cruise." (He did at least add the tag: "Don't worry, they're not here.") But funny? Eh. Like the Sheen joke, it seems rather obvious. In fact, it seems like something Kathy Griffin would have said -- and has said -- five years ago. And she would have said it funnier.

Next Gervais trained his sights on Hugh Hefner and his marriage to a women six decades younger. Good stuff, especially the "Just don't look at it when you touch it," line. And unlike the Sheen joke, the Hef material is utterly current. But I can imagine Leno, Letterman, Conan et al having already made the same joke in the past couple weeks (albeit, not as edgily as Gervais's). The joke was good; but the premise is already a bit hack.

So while I believe Gervais is a stellar comic, I'm giving the monologue a B-. When one considers that he probably had a team of professional writers backing him up, the grade slips to a C+.

Now the other part of the question: Was it too mean?

To give you my take on this, I offer a parable:

During my ill-fated attempt at living on the West Coast, my Aunt Marcia came to see me perform at a new comedy club called the Mad House. The Mad House was in suburban San Diego. It opened as a sort of challenge to San Diego's one and only true comedy club, the Comedy Store in La Jolla. In fact, most of the Mad House's staff -- including its co-owner -- were defectors from the Store. For those of us who found the Store to be a grim, way-past-its-peak shithole, the Mad House was a Godsend -- a place that treated comedians like human beings and booked them because they were funny. Of course, the Mad House, like my entire existence in San Diego, ended in dismal failure. The club got shut down for having an improper liquor license... two days before I was booked to headline there.

RIP, Mad House.

But back to Aunt Marcia. She had recently moved to San Diego and came to see me in a Mad House showcase where I did about 15 minutes. It was a great night. The place was packed, the lineup of comics was on their game, and I had a killer set. Then, for the check spot, one of the club favorites got up. I won't say his name because I genuinely like him and don't want this to come off like a burn on him; it's not. (San Diego comics reading this will know who it is.) Let's call him Matt Christianson.

Matt had had a few too many. Even sober, he was known for going off the rails on-stage -- chucking his material and just sort of riffing for the entire set. I'd seen him do this before and admired his courage and quick mind. But this particular night, he was just drunk. Drunk and progressively belligerent. The crowd grew increasingly weary of him, and everyone started furiously motioning to the waiters for their checks. Towards the end of Matt's set, he started doing some "crowd work." (Note the quotation marks.) "Are you a Jew?" he demanded of one of the patrons in the front row as she signed her credit card slip. "You're a Jew, aren't you! Jew! Let's see what kind of cheap tip you left, Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew! Jew!"

I found this rather hilarious. Aunt Marcia did not.

Don't mess with Marcia.

A few words about Aunt Marcia: She is in her mid-70s. She is a highly educated, extremely articulate person with an enormous heart. She's also something of a character, and it's been suggested by some that I inherited my lack of filter from her. But to Aunt Marcia, who was a young teenager when the horrors of the Holocaust were unfolding, there is absolutely nothing funny about a non-Jewish person standing on-stage angrily yelling "Jew!" In fact, it's rather frightening. "Listen to me," she told me the next day on the phone, as I tried explaining that Matt truly wasn't an anti-Semitic person. "You stay away from that guy. He is dangerous."

What bummed me out most about the experience was that Aunt Marcia had had a wonderful time up until that point. And instead of leaving the show feeling a sense of joy and catharsis -- which is what the best comedy can evoke -- she felt uncomfortable and troubled. Which is what the worst comedy can evoke.

Do I think Ricky Gervais's monologue was the equivalent of someone screaming "Jew?" I do not. But I do think he failed as a comedian in much the same way my friend Matt failed at the Mad House that night. Because at the end of the day, he made the room uncomfortable. I actually think Robert Downey Jr. had the smartest line of the night when he said: "Aside from the fact that it's been hugely mean-spirited with mildly sinister undertones, I'd say the vibe of the show has been pretty good so far, wouldn't you?"

The art of comedy is to both provoke and entertain. Not just to shock people -- but to shock them into laughter. So that they find themselves thinking, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm laughing at this, but I can't help it!" More importantly, the host of an event sets the tone. And the tone of a nationally televised awards show should not be the same as that of a Comedy Central roast. It should be irreverent and poking fun at all the pretentious bullshit while at the same time respectful to the people sitting in the room and watching at home. This an incredibly difficult task, whether one is hosting a back-room comedy show for five people or hosting the Globes. But it can be done, and for someone with Ricky Gervais's immense talents (and the aforementioned team of writers behind him), it should be done.

So in the final analysis: Was it unfunny because it was too mean? No -- it was too mean because it was unfunny.

Homo out. ♥

Save the dates:

THAT SANK SHOW Every Wednesday at 9PM at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge in Hell's Kitchen. No cover charge, no drink minimum and you can compete to win two free drinks in "Are You Smarter Than a Homo?" For more information visit www.bar-tiniultralounge.com or www.adamsank.com.

Adam Sank Hosts "Inside the Comic's Studio" Saturday, Jan. 29 at Dixon Place, featuring live sets and interviews with Christian Finnegan, Giulia Rozzi and Josh Homer. Buy your tickets here: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/8616635.

For all upcoming dates, go to www.adamsank.com.

The End of the World As We Know It (Dreariest Blog Post Ever)

2011-01-05T12:17:00.000-08:00

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

--T.S. Eliot
"The Hollow Men"

So here it is, 2011. Jesus. I mean, seriously, right? This is the year I turn 40. Forty!!! As Roxie Hart says in "Chicago," I am older than I ever wanted to be. By the time my father was my age, he had a wife, three kids, a home and a thriving medical practice. And I have... an administrative day job and a comedy "career" that is questionable at best. I don't even have a dog. Or a houseplant.

I don't mean for my first post of the new year -- and the first time I've blogged in over a month -- to sound so dumpy. I'm OK -- really. Just feeling sort of blah today. New Year's hangover, and all that. I just need one exciting thing to happen to pull me out of this funk and send me back on my thrill-seeking, adrenaline-addicted journey. A really hot club date or an unexpected TV booking, or maybe a hugely-endowed new boyfriend. Or I maybe I could win the $380 Megamillions jackpot. Oh wait -- too late.

Anyshits, here's something new and (un)exciting: I have a brand new web site! It's not as pretty as my old one, but it's far more functional and has all sorts of new features, including embedded video clips and a photo gallery. So if you haven't already done so, please log on to http://www.adamsank.com/ and tell me what 'cha think. And sign the guest book while you're there.

I'll wait.

Back already? OK. I designed the site all by myself, in a three-day burst of manic energy, using a host site called http://hostbaby.com/. It was actually pretty easy, once I got the hang of it. Best part is, I can change and update the site anytime I want in a matter of minutes. The only drawback is, I used my old site to store a lot of pictures, which I then copied to my blog. This means a lot of photos from my older blog postings are now going to appear as empty boxes with red X's over them. Oh, well.

Speaking of photos, something's wrong with blogger.com today, and I'm not able to post any pictures.This really is going to be the shittiest blog post ever.

What else? Oh, the world is ending. Don't believe me? How else can you explain all the birds and fish that keep dying for no explainable reason? People are seriously freaking out over this shit. There's lots of end-of-days talk and whatnot. Personally, I'm not frightened by the prospect of the world's ending, as long as it's ending for EVERYONE. What's frightening is the idea of the world's ending for you while it goes on for everyone else. Kind of the way I feel every time I see a comedian I know on TV.

[INSERT PHOTO OF DEAD FISH HERE WITH CLEVER YET WISTFUL CAPTION]

Spent New Year's in Miami Beach with three of my favorite people -- Patrick Healy, Seth Gilmore and Jeff Hardy. We were there not just to ring in 2011 but also to celebrate Jeff's birthday. I won't tell you which birthday it was; I'll just tell you it starts with an F and ends with a Y and it's IFT in the middle. (He still looks fabulous, so he has nothing to be embarrassed about.) We had a really nice time, complete with mid-70s temperatures, but I wish I could have stayed longer than four days. A number of other NYC friends were there as well, and I also got to see Will Hershman, my former fraternity brother who lives in Ft. Lauderdale and whom I see far too rarely.

[INSERT PHOTO OF SMILING, TANNED SELF AND FRIENDS HERE WITH SENTIMENTAL YET VAGUELY BITCHY CAPTION]

"That Sank Show" continues. We've had some really good shows, but I'm still struggling to build a regular audience. Trying to be patient and Zen-like and remind myself that comedy shows are like penises: Every one is different, and some of them take a really long time to grow. If you're in the NYC area and haven't checked it out yet, I beg you: It's every Wednesday night at 9PM sharp at Bar-Tini Ultra Lounge.

[INSERT PHOTO OF SWEATY, GRIMACING SELF HOLDING MICROPHONE IN FRONT OF EIGHT PEOPLE AT BAR-TINI]

One more plug while we're at it: Saturday, Jan. 29, I'll be hosting "Inside the Comic's Studio" at Dixon Place, in which I'll be interviewing some amazing comedians following their comedy sets. Scheduled to appear are Christian Finnegan, Ali Wong and Josh Homer. Buy your tickets now by clicking here!

That's about it for now, kids. With all this exciting news, you can see why I've been blogging so regularly. Happy birthday to my darling and demented sister, Anna Sank Haselmann, and get-well-soon wishes for Granny Lipton, who's been through some serious stuff lately but is on the mend. Oh, and a shout-out to Peter Reinhardt, who seems to be the only one who misses the blog.

Peace out, bitches.

Homo drab. ♥

I'm Back

2010-11-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

My heart's like an open book

For the whole world to read

Sometime, nothing keeps me together

At the seams

I'm on my way, I'm on my way

Home sweet home...

--Mötley Crüe

Yes, I'm back to the blog, at least for the moment. But I'm also BACK -- as in back in NYC, back in Hell's Kitchen, back to my own apartment, back to hosting a weekly show. None of this (except perhaps the last part) should come as news to anyone remotely acquainted with me, yet lately, I keep running into people who seem genuinely shocked to see me.

"Ohmigod, you're back?"

"Uh, yeah."

"For how long?"

"For about a year now."

"Wow! So how long are you here for?"

"For good. I live here."

"Cool! So where are you living?"

"Here. In Hell's Kitchen. In my apartment."

"Awesome! Where in Hell's Kitchen?"

"In my apartment. The same apartment. The one I bought 10 years ago."

"Oh, really? So when do you go back to L.A.?"

"I wasn't in L.A. I was in San Diego. And I'm not going back."

Etc. etc.

It's exhausting. In spite of what my family believes about my oversized ego, I am aware that my whereabouts and activities aren't of primary concern to most people. Nor should they be. But if you know me well enough to know I was ever gone, you should know by now that I'm back. I haven't exactly kept it a secret. I guess it shouldn't surprise me as most times it's other comedians with whom I have the above conversation. (See oversized ego.)

Anyway, here I am, as 2010 draws to a close, right back where I started. In so many ways. It's surreal. And terrifying. And strangely comforting. On the one hand, I feel like I should be at a whole new place in my life. Like I've regressed instead of progressed. But on the other hand, it's taken me so long to get back to where I was before I decided to blow up my entire life -- back to a place where I feel safe and in control and like I actually know how to get stuff done -- that to finally be able to push the reset button feels like an incredible relief.

OK, enough naval-gazing; I can sense your nausea. On to some news:

As mentioned above, I am back to hosting a weekly show. It's called "That Sank Show," and it's happening every Wednesday night a few hundred yards from my apartment at Bar-Tini at 8PM. It sort of fell into my lap rather unexpectedly (and due in large part to the help of a certain individual who shall remain nameless but who knows who he is and to whom I will be eternally grateful). The first show was this past Wednesday, Thanksgiving eve, and it went well. Not perfectly, but well enough for a first show. (Anyone remember my first Therapy show in 2005? Egads.)

Back in the saddle, sweating bullets. Nov. 24, 2010.

I forgot how much work and stress go into hosting and producing a show. The booking, the press releases, the constant writing of new material, selecting music, all of it. But I have to admit I've missed it a lot. It feels great to be holding my own mic again.

Lexi Cullen-Baker opened the premiere show. She was adorable as always.

Paul Case went up next. I would tell you he was very funny -- and he was -- but it will mean a lot more to him if I tell you he looked thin.

The amazing Vanessa Hollingshead headlined.

Then it was time for the debut of my new game show, "Are You Smarter Than a Homo?" Competing were drunk straight guy Donny (who won) and despicable vulgarian Brad Loekle (who lost.) Here were the 9 questions I asked. See how many you can get right. (Answers at the bottom.)

1) Which U.S. President served only 31 days in office?

2) On the Periodic Table, which element is represented by the letter "H?"

3) In the movie "Tootsie," what's the name of Dustin Hoffman's female alter ego?

4) Spell [the German word meaning delight in the misery of others].

5) What is the largest country in South America?

6) Who's the starting quarterback of the NY Jets?

7) Name the first Broadway show for which Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics. (Loekle got this one wrong!)

8) Who wrote "The Sound and the Fury?"

9) Listen to this line from HBO's "Sex and the City" and fill in the blank. This is Carrie talking to Samantha: "You broke up with James because he was too small. This guy's too big. Who are you, ____________________?"

Did you get most of those questions right? If so, come to the next show this Wednesday, Dec. 1 and compete for fabulous prizes! Speaking of the next show, I was thrilled that Time Out NY's Gay section ran this listing for it, complete with a big photo of moi! Sadly, the photo is only in the print edition, but here it is:

Toothy, ain't I?
(Photo by the thin Paul Case)

Gay City News also ran a listing, God bless 'em, but they went with an ancient head shot of me -- the notorious Pit Shot -- rather than the new pic I sent them. They also decided that Rachel Butera's name should be spelled Racgek Bytera. Which is how I'm going to introduce her from the stage.

While I'm self-promoting -- and when am I not, really? -- here are two newish comedy clips of me you may not have seen yet. They are parts one and two of a set I did at "Stripped Stories" back in July. The show was professionally recorded, so the sound and video quality are pretty amazing. And it was a strong set, if I may say so. But WARNING: I TALK ABOUT ALL KINDS OF DIRTY GAY SEX STUFF! So this video is NSFW, and also NSF parents, friends of parents, minors, miners, former kindergarten teachers and anyone else who reads this blog and doesn't want to picture me with a dick in my mouth. Consider yourselves warned.

Part 1

Part 2

If you enjoyed this video, please repost it and forward it to your friends and loved ones. It makes a great Christmas gift. Also, if you're not already, please follow me on Twitter, and friend me on Facebook. Or become my fan on Facebook. Or just ignore me altogether.

What else is going on? Oh, yeah -- I'm doing another installment of my show, "Inside the Comic's Studio" at the gorgeous Dixon Place theater space in January. This is the show in which I do on-stage interviews with the comics after their set. It's really fun, and I have some AMAZING people lined up. Just trying to firm up the date right now -- it's either going to be Jan. 27 or Jan. 29. More details to come.

Had a very nice Thanksgiving with the family back in Jersey (plus my dear friend, the camera-shy Jeff Hardy). Took lots of cute pictures, but here's the best one:

All my nieces and nephews. Ain't they cute?

Still working at the day job. Nothing new there.

Still single. Nothing new there.

And I think we're basically caught up!

A deep and profound gratitude to all the wonderful people in my life. More to come.

Homo back. ♥

P.S. Don't forget to attend the second installment of That Sank Show this coming Wednesday, Dec. 1 at 8PM sharp at Bar-Tini! No cover charge, no drink minimum, loads of fun!

Answers to "Are You Smarter Than a Homo" Questions:
1) William Henry Harrison
2) Hydrogen
3) Dorothy Michaels (I would have also accepted "Emily Kimberly.")
4) Schadenfreude
5) Brazil
6) Mark Sanchez
7) West Side Story
8) William Faulkner
9) Goldi-Cocks!

On the Radio

2010-10-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

They said it on the air
On the radio whoa oh oh
On the radio whoa oh oh
On the radio whoa oh oh
On the radio whoa oh oh now, now...
--Donna Summer

First off, make sure you tune in tonight to hear me guest co-host "The Derek and Romaine Show" on OutQ Radio -- Sirius channel 109, XM channel 98. I will be filling in for the vacationing Romaine Patterson. Very excited and also somewhat nervous, as the show runs FOUR HOURS -- from 6PM to 10PM ET. The most I've ever been on the radio is 20 minutes at a time, so it just seems like a lot. (I've been told to bring a sandwich.) If you'd like to chat live, call in to the show at 866-305-6887.

Actual photo of my family listening to me on OutQ.

Derek Hartley and I have a strange relationship. The first few times I was on the show as a guest, I thought he sort of hated me. (Once, when I was on the phone calling in from San Diego, a caller was like, "Derek, why don't you just admit that you don't like this guy? And I agree! He sucks!") Then the tide turned somewhat, and the last few times I've seen Derek, both on and off the air, I got the sense he was secretly in love with me. Now he's asked me to host with him. It should be an interesting four hours, regardless.

THIS JUST IN: It turns out my ex-boyfriend's ex-boyfriend is going to be a guest on the show tonight as well. Why don't we have my mom call in, too, and complete the circle of awkwardness?

(Actually, my mom is in Eastern Europe with my father right now on a whirlwind Holocaust tour. She emails us regular dispatches such as: "Today your father and I visited the oldest Jewish cemetery in Poland." It's the old Jews' version of Spring Break in Daytona.)

Don't ask -- I have no idea.

So yeah, my whole "I'm going to start blogging regularly again!" thing has fallen apart. But you know what it is? The last blog I posted three weeks ago, focusing primarily on the movie "My Bodyguard," took me HOURS to write. I was really kind of proud of it. And you know how many comments I got? One. One measly comment! And yes, more of you commented on the Facebook link, and that's all very well and good. But Facebook comments disappear into the Cosmos in a matter of days, never to be seen again. Whereas a genuine blog comment is forever... or at least until 2012, when the world ends. Needy much? Yes, I am. But I also feel like if I'm going to spend hours posting my hilarious and insightful thoughts and observations, I must know that more than one person is reading them! What I'm saying is, it wouldn't kill you to leave a comment here now and then, would it? And call your mother. (She's in Poland.)

The truth is, I don't have a whole lot to tell you people anyway. Life is rather slow at the moment. I've only been doing about one gig per week. The pointless day job continues. The weather is getting colder by the minutes, and I have been spending way too much time on the sofa, watching television, wishing I had someone there to snuggle with. Been going through one of my perennial existential "What the hell am I doing with my life?!" crises with which I'm afflicted every few months. Trying to just keep my head down and wait for it to pass.

(Literally as I typed the words above, I received an email from Nickel Spa with the following subject heading: "Live Penis Enhancement Seminar with Dr. Mark Solomon." Maybe it's a sign from the Universe.)

Seen two rather excellent movies lately -- Ben Affleck's "The Town" and the documentary "Catfish." Was particularly inspired by the latter. Putatively the story of a New York photographer who embarks on a Facebook romance with what he believes to be a beautiful and talented young Michigan woman, "Catfish" actually delves into deeper questions of identity, especially identity in our age of social networking, reality TV and general over-sharing.

I recently witnessed (from afar) the breakup of two social acquaintances who had been together for years. The relationship ended bitterly after it turned out one of them had lied to the other about some of the most essential personal information, including his age. The whole thing has been deeply unsettling for me, even though I am only casual friends with both of them. It brought me back to my senior year in college.

That was the year I fell in love for the first time. His name was Tony, and he was and is a terrific guy. (We remain friends to this day.) One of Tony's best friends at the time was a guy named Paul. They were both in their mid-20s and had been friends since they were undergrads. Tony, I and all our friends referred to Paul as "Dr. Paul," because he was an internist at the University of Michigan Medical Center.

Or so we thought.

We also thought Dr. Paul had been a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, and that he was single.

Through a chain of events too exhaustive to recount now, we ultimately found out that Paul was not a doctor. He was a phlebotomist -- a blood-drawing technician. He had never attended Sigma Chi (or any fraternity, for that matter). And he had a boyfriend with whom he shared an apartment. There were more lies, but those were the biggies I can recall.

I cannot explain how this incident rattled my innocent, 21-year-old brain at the time. I was so totally thrown by such pathological lying that I wound up writing a play based on the experience for my playwriting class. (It was called "Our Son, The Doctor," and I'm pretty sure it was horrible.) I just couldn't fathom inventing a whole biography of one's self and then maintaining it for years, even among one's closest friends. I still can't. It's hard enough maintaining my real life; who has time for an imaginary one?

Anyway, see "Catfish." It's good.

Gotta run. See you on the radio.

Homo on the air. ♥

P.S. Connecticut folks, come see me with along with a hoard of hilarious homos in a few weeks!

Video Vanguard

2010-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone to far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VTR
--The Buggles

First off, some new videos of little ol' me. I FINALLY got the DVD of my set from Comix when I opened for Jennifer Coolidge on July 25, 2010. Even more exciting: I figured out how to rip and upload the video from it all by myself!

Why, in this day and age, it is still so difficult to do this boggles (and buggles) the mind. If I can plug my Flip Camera into my computer and have the video instantly upload with the click of a mouse, why the hell can't I do the same thing with a DVD? In the interest of public service, I hereby direct you to this link if, like I was, you are struggling to rip video from a DVD onto a Mac. (If you've got a PC, you're on your own.) I went straight to "Part II: How to import NON-Commercial DVD into iMovie," but there are also instructions on how to copy/bootleg a commercial release, if such a thing interests you.

Anyway, it worked. A warning, though: Don't try this unless you have a few hours of free time to work on it, especially if you also plan to upload the video to YouTube.

Here, without further Mountain Dew, is the set. It's in two parts. (And if you've seen me perform anytime in the last few years, you've probably seen most of this material before. What can I say: I'm not gonna do new material in front of a sold-out club crowd opening for a movie star.)

Part Un

Part Deux

Coming soon: A video of my set at "Stripped Stories" from July 14, 2010 -- all of which contains BRAND NEW, NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN MATERIAL. (Unless you were at that show, of course. Or at the "Stripped Stories" I did back in 2008.)

After a busy and unspeakably hot summer, I find myself with a lot of down time lately which, combined with the cooler weather, is making me nostalgic, romantic, hopeful and a little sad all at the same time. I think I'm ready for a boyfriend again, but I'm not meeting anyone with whom I feel remotely compatible. In truth, I'm not meeting much of anyone. Where do people meet nowadays anyway? When I was younger, I thought nothing of going out to a bar by myself and just walking up to someone. I could NEVER do that now. I can't even imagine going to a bar by myself. What happens these days is, I go out and meet friends, and we stand around in a huddle all night, talking to one another and ignoring (and being ignored by) everyone else.

I don't care what Oprah says; getting older sucks. Last night I plucked three white hairs from my head. Not grey -- white. I don't mind the color -- I find some silver-haired guys really sexy. But the texture of these white hairs is beyond nasty. They stick straight out from my head like jagged bits of fishing line, and no amount of gel will tame them. I'm told the only real remedy for this is to dye one's hair. If I do, any color suggestions from the Peanut Gallery? I think I'm too old to pull off the platinum blond anymore...

What Ever Happened to Baby Bam-Bam?

With my new-found down time, I've been re-watching a lot of old movies and YouTube clips. Came across a 1988 video of Freddie Mercury performing "Barcelona" live at an outdoor concert in that city with opera singer Montserrat Cabballé. It gave me chills. Although I must say, I'm sure Montserrat is a great opera singer, but she's no match for Freddie.

Genius.

Unable to get to sleep Saturday night, I watched "My Bodyguard" (1980) on Netflix. Not to be confused with "The Bodyguard" (1992), which is a steaming pile of filmic plop, "My Bodyguard" stars Chris Makepeace as a sweet-but-nerdy high school freshman who is mercilessly bullied at the hands of Matt Dillon (already delicious at 16). Fed up, Makepeace hires the scary, troubled outcast that everyone, including Matt Dillon's character, is frightened of, to be his bodyguard.

Is it wrong for me to lust after a 16-year-old, even if he was older than me at the time and still is?

"My Bodyguard" was one of those movies I watched as a child dozens of times on HBO but hadn't seen in decades. I always loved it, in part because Makepeace looked a lot like my friend Mike Bultman, at least to me. (Mike, email me a photo of you as a young teenager so I can do a side-by-side comparison here.) And it goes without saying that I identified with that character, especially during my traumatic Newark Academy years. Basically, "My Bodyguard" is the ultimate revenge fantasy for any kid who ever felt victimized in school. Which is to say, most of us.

I'm happy to report that "My Bodyguard" has stood the test of time. It's as sweet and quirky as I remembered. The teenage actors are great -- look for two supporting roles I had completely forgotten about played by a very young-looking Joan Cusack (!) and a hilariously adenoidal kid named Paul Quandt, who never made another film. Makepeace is completely authentic, just as he had been in "Meatballs" the year before. (Why his career dissolved is a mystery to me.) Matt Dillon plays a terrific and non-stereotypical bully; even when he's terrorizing a weaker kid, you can see he's masking his own scrawny insecurity. And Adam Baldwin, as the titular bodyguard, exudes a deeply sexy, dangerous aura throughout. When he finally smiles, it's like the sun coming out of the mist.

After some research, I was shocked to learn that aside from Dillon, Baldwin -- no relation to the famous brothers -- has had the most successful career in Hollywood of any of "Bodyguard's" teens. He's made dozens of movies and TV shows including NBC's "Chuck," in which he plays John Casey. I would never have recognized him as the same person.

Adam Baldwin then...

And now!

My only real complaints about "My Bodyguard," actually, pertain to its adult characters and the actors who play them. Martin Mull is useless, doing his usual wacky, befuddled Martin Mull thing as Makepeace's single hotel-manager father. Ruth Gordon practically inhales scenery as the boozy, sexually inappropriate grandmother (essentially a cheap retread of her "Harold and Maude" character). And someone named Kathryn Grody plays a hippie teacher whose sole raison d'être seems to be revealing highly personal information about Baldwin's character to Makepeace that should have gotten her fired. None of these people adds a thing to the movie. (The venerable John Houseman also makes a cameo, but I confess I must have dozed through his scenes. I have no idea what he's doing in the film.)

All right, I've rambled on far too long and must get some work done. Don't forget to get your tickets now to see me in my off-Broadway debut next week, hosting a fabulous new scene competition called "Scene It!"

Thursday, September 23rd at 7:30pm
Scene It!

Jerry Orbach Theater
Snapple Theater Center
210 West 50th Street
New York, NY 10018
Click here for Tickets.

Homo on film. ♥

P.S. Just realized my main topic of this post was to have been the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, and I didn't mention a thing about them. Oh well. They pretty much sucked anyway.

Croatianism

2010-09-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

I'm Slim Shady, yes I'm the real Shady
All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating
So won't the real Slim Shady please stand up,
please stand up, please stand up?
--Eminem

This week I discovered to my horror that someone in Croatia -- at least he said he was in Croatia -- had assumed my identity on Facebook. Not only was he using my name; he was also using my photos. And, most creepily, his personal information was vaguely reminiscent of my own. (For example, Croatian Adam Sank named Sea World as his employer. While I never worked at Sea World, I did audition to be the host of their Christmas spectacular when I was living in San Diego, something I blogged about here. Croatian Adam Sank listed Ohio State as his alma mater; I went to fellow Big 10 school University of Michigan, and so forth.)

Croatian Adam Sank used an old headshot of mine as his profile picture:

I Call This One "Pit of Despair."

That didn't freak me out as much as the fact that on his wall, he posted an additional headshot with the words, "Here's another picture of me." In other words, he went out of his way to find pictures of me to go along with his fake identity. He also posted clever, insightful status updates, such as, "..fuck,I'm a horny gay bitch,waiting for a nice sexyy hot horny gay *MY BITCH* ;)) :**"

Which is something I say all the time.

I discovered Croatian Adam Sank by accident when I was typing my own name into Facebook's search bar. Why was I searching for myself, you ask? Because I have two pages on the site: The first is my primary profile page, which is simply called "Adam Sank." The second is my fan page, which is called, "Adam Sank, Comedian." The fan page is actually a public page, like one owned by an organization or social group, so there's no way for me to "log in" to it other than to search for it and click on it, the way one would go to a friend's page or that of a group he wanted to join. This is one of the many annoying things about Facebook. (Why I even have a fan page when I'm only half way to the 5,000-friend maximum on my profile page is a conversation for another time.)

Needless to say, I was shocked and amazed when I saw my own name and armpit staring back at me, and living in Croatia no less! I should point out that while Croatian Adam Sank listed Croatia as his current location, he also listed British Columbia as his home province. So who the hell knows? I immediately sent Croatian Adam Sank a message demanding to know what gives. I also reported the profile to Facebook as a fake and alerted all my friends and fans to do the same.

Meanwhile, my mind bubbled at a possible Croatian connection. You see, more than two years ago I received some Internet fan mail from someone supposedly in Croatia and calling himself Zlatko Patacko, along with his request for my "autogram." I blogged about it at the time because I thought it was sort of funny... and then never gave it a second thought.

But in discussing my Facebook impersonator with comedian Shawn Hollenbach the other day, I discovered that he had received the exact same email... as had Dave Rubin, Adam Lehman and Danny Leary, all of them gay New York-based comedians. (Paul Case revealed to me that he was devastated to have been left off Zlatko's list.)

Maybe it's just a coincidence. But the fact that Croatia has now come up twice in connection with me (and other gay comedians) makes me think that Zlatko -- or whoever it is calling himself that -- could also be Croatian Adam Sank.

The Official Flag of Croatia.

I particularly like the goat on the ring finger.

Having an impostor feels very strange. On the one hand, it's flattering to think that some stranger out there thinks enough of me -- or at least about me -- to want to "be" me, at least in a virtual way. On the other hand, it emphasizes how vulnerable each of us is to manipulation (or worse) if we put our names and faces out to the world. After all, Zlatko, or whoever he is, could have pretended to be just about anyone on Facebook. The fact that I'm a public figure -- albeit a very minor one -- increases my chances somewhat, but who's to stop the Zlatkos out there from assuming any identity they want? Even yours?

Certainly not Facebook. I was discussing this Saturday morning with "comic" vulgarian Brad Loekle as we sunned ourselves on my roof. (Brad was clad only in boxer briefs. I shan't give further description lest any of you be eating while reading this.)

Me and the Bald One.

Sept. 4, 2010.

Brad was telling me that Whoopi Goldberg and her lawyers have apparently been waging a campaign to get all her fake Facebook profiles removed. According to what she said on "The View" -- which Brad watches religiously -- Whoopi herself isn't on Facebook. And yet there are a dozen people on the site calling themselves Whoopi Goldberg, using her photos, and essentially commenting on her behalf. (This one has over 20,000 fans!)

But I'm not sure why Whoopi's having such difficulties, because after a single weekend of having my peeps report Croatian Adam Sank to Facebook, I am happy to say that his profile has been deleted. Leaving me, the one and only Adam Sank, to continue toiling in obscurity.

And working on my Croatian comedy tour.

Homo one and only. ♥

Feast of Flesh (Part 3 - The Full Monty)

2010-09-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Before I conclude the story of my naked weekend (which I sense has been of interest to absolutely nobody), a quick literary detour which has nothing to do with anything:

I just finished re-reading Andrew Holleran's "Dancer From the Dance." The tragic tale of circuit queens living 1970's-era NYC, "Dancer" is one of those novels I read again every few years (along with Larry Kramer's "Faggots," which came out at the same time and is in many ways a companion piece). As always, I was struck by the lyrical, poetic beauty of Holleran's writing. He's the only author I know who can set a scene in a bathhouse and make it come out like something out of Dickens:

Malone stood at the window, looking out at the falling snow through the web of ice crystals that had formed on the windowpane, watching the snow fall on 28th Street, on the tops of garbage cans, the silver throats of the streetlights; while against him brushed the bodies of muscular men who wished to catch his eye, thinking that once Malone saw him, they would have him. But Malone continued standing there, within the house of flesh, the Temple of Priapus, staring out at the sparkling snowfall. That was it. That was Malone -- standing in the crush of voluptuous limbs, enthralled by the cold, lonely, deserted street.

What struck me hard this time was a paragraph from one of the two unnamed characters whose correspondence to each other frames the story. (I don't think I'm spoiling the book here for anyone who hasn't read it, the narrative being almost beside the point.):

You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks -- no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.

Oh, God, it's just so good and so real. If you have never read it, you simply must -- especially if you're a gay man, and most especially if you're a gay man, as I am, who has ever partaken, in any small or large way, of the circuit lifestyle -- that crazy existence that brings constant expectation, extreme physical sensation and little else beyond heartbreak, addiction and loneliness. That's really what "Dancer From the Dance" is about for me: The futility of the circuit, and the basic need for human intimacy.

Good Stuff.

So back to the GNI retreat:

When the group had originally asked me to do the show, I was told by the booker: "You're not required to be nude on-stage, but I can tell you our membership would greatly appreciate at least partial nudity, if only as a curtain call." This presented me with a quandary. On the one hand, I really didn't want to perform nude. My experience performing for gay men has taught me that the more clothes I have on, the better. This goes along with my theory (recounted in a recent Next Magazine article) that gay guys like to keep their comedy separate from their sex lives, as evidenced by the popularity among gay men of drag queens, John Waters characters and other grotesqueries. In short, we don't want to fuck that which makes us laugh, and vice versa.

On the other hand, I have always believed strongly in respecting my audience. When I do a synagogue show, for instance, I clean up my material and heavily emphasize my own Jewish upbringing. (Although as Robin Fox can attest, I recently hosted a temple show in Jersey in which the crowd wasn't responding much to my clean, Jewy stuff. When I finally pulled out the dirty card, doing my Vagisil bit, the punchline of which includes the phrase "stank pussy," I received an applause break from the entire audience, the rabbi included.)

The Vagisil bit, performed at the Dirtbag in San Diego on June 6, 2009.

So as I said, I believe n respect. I also believe in acknowledging the room. A gay show is not the same as a straight show, a resort is not the same as a comedy club, and a group of naked people is not the same as a group of clothed people. It's incompetent and lazy not to adjust one's act accordingly.

Also: I'm an almost-40-year-old gay man living in New York City. There aren't a lot of things about which I can say, "I've never done that before." This would be one of them.

And so:

I got naked.

After a fashion.

What I did was to begin sort of semi-nude, clothed in only a vest, a bow-tie, boxer-briefs, shoes and socks:

Note Jared, horrified, watching from the wings.

I explained to the crowd that I was afraid to perform completely nude, both in terms of how my comedy would be received and because of my less-than-impressive endowment. But, I told them, the harder they laughed, the more clothes I'd take off. This was met with thunderous applause. Cheesy ploy or genius? I'll let you decide. All I know is, it was one of the best, most successful times I've ever had on-stage, and I did wind up completely starkers -- at least for an instant.

Off came the tie and vest...

...and later, the undies, leaving only a jockstrap.

I can't tell you how unsettling it is to perform comedy in a jockstrap. Never before had I realized how physical a lot of my stuff is. (I don't regard myself as a physical comic.) When I'm imitating Heidi Klum Fortunately, the GNI membership felt no such weirdness. Nudity, after all, is their preferred state. So all they did was enjoy it.

I left the stage after about 25 minutes, bringing Jared up for his contortion act. He destroyed.

The highlight came when Jared asked a volunteer from the crowd to put him in a straitjacket.

This is truly a man comfortable with his sexuality.

After Jared's act, I came out to to the stage again to say good night and thank you. At this point, I was wearing only a towel. After some hemming and hawing, I turned my back to the crowd and dropped the towel, revealing a completely naked backside. The crowd went wild. I slowly turned around to reveal... a sock hanging from my johnson! I paused for a moment, whipped the sock off, and got the hell off stage as fast as I could.

This photo is dedicated to my dear friend Tommy Raniszewski, who begged me not to post it because he felt showing my blurry tush would somehow damage my non-existent career.

Tommy, this butt's for you!

In the end, I have no regrets. I faced my fears, had a terrific set and made lots of new, naked friends. So thanks, GNI!

Homo exposed. ♥

Feast of Flesh (Part 2)

2010-09-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hello,

You uploaded a photo that violates our Terms of Use, and this photo has been removed. Facebook does not allow photos that attack an individual or group, or that contain nudity, drug use, violence, or other violations of the Terms of Use. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users, including the many children who use the site.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page at http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wphotos.

--The Facebook Team

The forbidden photo cited in the above message, which I received this morning upon waking up, was the one showing a large group of naked men having cocktails... as seen from about 1,000 yards away. Seriously, how prudy can Facebook be? I've seen more titillating nudity in National Geographic. Facebook needs to grow up -- and maybe take a cold shower.

OMG, Titties! Scandalous!

So back to my GNI story: Once Jared and I had shown ourselves around and done a quick tech run-through, we still had hours to kill. It was a gorgeous day, so I decided to take a dip in one of the two camp pools. I moseyed on down to the one where the cocktail party was NOT happening, as it was barely occupied. And, in front of the four or five guys who happened to be lounging around down there, I stripped down to my birthday suit and dove in.

It was nice -- I'm not going to lie to you. The water felt wonderful. Though I must say, as I did my laps, I kept wondering how my ass looked bobbing up and down along the surface of the pool. It had nothing to do with the other guys; they were minding their own business. It was just my own self-consciousness. And when I got out, I immediately wrapped myself in a towel and stayed that way. (I also didn't want to burn my balls.)

After that it was off to the gym -- one of the most primeval in which I've ever worked out. They had one of those ancient exercise bicycles with actual wheels on them, and the dumbbells were so damp and moldy that the metal flaked off in my hands.

But you know what? Working out shirtless -- I put my shorts back on for this activity -- is the greatest thing ever. Lifting in front of the mirror, I was so much more conscious of my form than I normally am and was able to use my muscles in the optimal way. Now I sort of understand those people who work out in spandex and other skin-tight get-ups, even though I still think they look ridiculous. In any case, I had the best workout in recent memory, and had the sore parts to prove it for the next five days.

I'm going to wear this next time I'm at the gym.

As I did cardio on the creaky elliptical machine, I was visited by a number of GNI staffers and volunteers, all of whom were, of course, naked. And it struck me that the challenge of hanging around with naked people is trying not to look at their dicks while having a conversation with them. Not because I didn't want to look -- as a gay man, I can never see too many dicks -- but because it just seems rude. I kept waiting for someone to say, "Hey, my eyes are up here -- not down there." But no one did.

But I'll tell you this about dicks: Spending 18 hours with the GNI members and their members really drives home just how much variety there is in the dick kingdom. I haven't seen too many vaginas in my life, but I can't imagine they come in so many different shapes and sizes. There seem to be as many different varieties of penis as there are penises. They're like snowflakes!

Oh, the things you can find on Google Images!

After the gym, I showered and headed, still shirtless and shortfull, down to the cocktail party. The theme was Eye Candy, and I spotted a number of highly creative costumes.

Incredibly, Facebook has no issue with this photo. At least not yet.

The GNI guys were, to a man, warm and friendly toward me. But a number of them wondered why I wasn't nude. I pointed out that, in fact, wearing only shorts and sandals, I was as nude or nuder than many of them! But to this argument, the GNI-ers simply smiled shook their heads. Apparently, naturists have a penis-only policy, and I wasn't making the cut. So to speak.

By the way, in case you're wondering what Jared was up to all this time, the answer is, he was keeping a low profile up in the cabin. I did run into him on my way back from the cocktail party, stretching out in the gym. It takes Jared hours to stretch our prior to a performance, which is just one more reason why contortionists have it tougher than comedians. While he was lifting his legs over his head, I was on my second Pinot Grigio!

Now it was time for dinner, which would be followed by showtime.

To be continued.

Homo shirtless. ♥