Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture Read online

  After that, I barely allowed myself to think of “it” during the day. Late at night, though, I would lie awake thinking about my future, the inevitability of my sexuality, and the improbability that anyone would accept me once they knew. I really believed my life would be over once I came out and that this happy kingdom in which I lived would fall to pieces. Or that I would.

  CHAINS OF LOVE

  By the time I was a senior in high school, I’d established myself to Jeanne, Jackie, and everybody else as—for lack of a better phrase—one of the girls. Boy-girl non-romantic best-friendships were unusual for that time, at least in my circles; nonetheless I was always surrounded by women, a circumstance that prepared me well for my life today. I had guy friends, too, and was popular—president of the student body and voted (big shocker) Most Talkative and (irritatingly, but not exactly shockingly) Biggest Gossip in my senior class. (I was pissed I didn’t get Best Dressed, but that’s another story.) Looking at me, you’d have thought I had it all together. But, without getting too Afterschool Special about it, underneath the gregarious exterior was a whole other story.

  Late in high school, Jackie’s parents went on vacation and asked me to stay with her, to look after her and their house. My mom was mystified. A boy staying alone with a girl? What kind of parents would allow such a thing? “Why would you trust your DAUGHTER with my SON?” she asked Jackie’s mother, Jan. After a pause that was way more pregnant than I would ever get Jackie, even alone together for a week, Jan said to my mom, “Andy’s … safe.”

  She was right: I was “safe,” in that way. Of course, I didn’t feel very safe. I felt like if anyone found out my secret, I was done for. But for now, no one knew I was gay, and I played right along with the normal high school shenanigans, such as deciding to take magic mushrooms with some friends and go see Eddie Murphy live in concert.

  Like everybody, I had loved Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, his live routine differed from his television shtick; namely in that it mostly consisted of ridiculing gay people. Every other word out of his mouth was “faggot.” And with each and every gay joke, the crowd went wild. They loved it. My friends loved it. I was surrounded by thousands of people in hysterics, and they were all laughing at “faggots.” And ipso facto, laughing at me. Unfortunately, the drugs I was on didn’t act as any sort of emotional buffer, but instead like a magnifying glass intensifying the huge beam of hate and mocking cackles trained on me. I ran out of the arena and into the bathroom, where I spent most of the concert in a stall, rocking back and forth wishing and praying that I could somehow unzip my skin and throw it away. I wanted to walk out of that bathroom a completely different person, and yet I knew I couldn’t.

  When my legs finally stopped shaking enough for me to stand and leave the stall, an alarmed stranger looked at me: “Are you okay? You look like you don’t feel right.” I saw my reflection in the mirror. My pink Polo button-down shirt was drenched with sweat. I splashed cold water on my face and rejoined my friends while Eddie Murphy continued to merrily spew his best faggot material. (Though I would never be able to laugh at Eddie Murphy’s comedy after that night, rest assured I was highly entertained years later in 1997 when police pulled him over with a transvestite prostitute in West Hollywood.) Watching my friends cheer Murphy on that night reinforced my secret fear that homophobic bigotry was perfectly acceptable. It also reinforced that I should never do mushrooms again, and I haven’t. I do love me a mushroom pizza, though.

  * * *

  When it came time to go to college, I chose Boston University because of everything it wasn’t. Its social fabric wasn’t dependent on a fraternity system. It wasn’t built around a campus. It wasn’t the only thing going in a small town. It wasn’t anything like St. Louis. It was urban, with a good communications school and, I’d found out on the sly, a semblance of a gay community. Not that I was rushing out of the closet yet, but I needed to know that if I came out (or was pushed out), there’d be a safety net there to catch me. My two girlfriends Jackie and Kari decided to go, too, and so off we went from St. Louis to Boston in the fall of 1986.

  Over orientation weekend I was randomly assigned a dorm room with a guy who would become, thank God, my best friend, like a brother, and—some would say—the straight version of me: Dave Ansel. Dave had arrived in the room first and dropped off his duffel bag. When I got there and saw his bag, I did what any self-respecting freshman would do: I opened it up and snooped around. I found the same pair of Vuarnet sunglasses as I had and the same kind of paisley boxers I wore. When I returned to the room later, Dave was there.

  “Hello, Louis,” he said. Not only had he read my luggage tags (with my dad’s name on them), but he soon confessed that he, too, had snooped in my bag. We bonded over our lack of boundaries immediately, and as suburban Jewish boys whose families were both in the food business, we had even more in common. From that day on, we were together 24/7. It was a new kind of friendship for me. He was the first guy to tell me he loved me; it was a platonic, brotherly love and we were deep in it. He told me everything and I listened. The one hitch was that during our hours-long late night talks, Dave offhandedly peppered the conversation with a catalog of gay slurs. Which meant that while I was getting to know every detail about him, he didn’t really know who I was at all. It was a kind of torture, feeling that close to someone but not being ready to tell him the truth. And as the months passed, I often wondered: Would he ever be ready to hear it? And would I ever be ready to tell?

  For most college kids, the point of going to Europe for a semester is either to experience a foreign culture or maybe to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. I saw it as an opportunity to convince my nearest and dearest that I was a raging heterosexual. But fate was against me.

  Before I began BU’s London Programme (that’s how they spelled it, and it bugs me to this very day), I traveled through Europe for a month with Jackie. Apparently, her mother’s conviction that I was “safe” still applied, because Jackie and I had already had one amazing trip together, escaping Boston freshman year to jet off to Manhattan. It was my first trip to New York, and every direction I turned, I ran into a place I’d seen in a movie or on TV, bigger and better than I ever imagined. The first time we left Jackie’s parents’ pied-à-terre, we had only walked just a couple blocks, and who came toward us but Andy Warhol. We screamed when he walked by. To this day I can’t believe that I saw Andy Warhol on my first ever day in New York City; it seemed to portend something about my future and what New York had in store for me. (If he were alive today, I’d like to think Warhol would be painting the Housewives.)

  The summer before my London semester, Jackie and I Eurailed our way through France, Spain, and Italy. Then she had to go back to St. Louis. For the first time in my life, I was completely alone somewhere far away, which made me feel scared and liberated all at once. I spent a couple of weeks doing whatever I wanted. Everyone back home surely assumed that I was hiking and seeing the sights, but what I was really doing was visiting a bunch of gay bars in Florence and Rome. It wasn’t my first time in a gay bar—I’d been to a few in Boston and once or twice in St. Louis—but in Europe I wasn’t terrified that someone was going to see me and turn me in to the authorities, or (worse) tell my parents. The freedom felt great. In retrospect, when I think of myself in those bars, I realize that I was a twenty-year-old freshly plucked chicken just out of the cage, and it’s a miracle I got out of there alive. But that’s giving me all sorts of credit, when I deserve none. The truth is, I had absolutely no game. First of all, and no small matter: my hair. I’d spent the earlier part of that summer following the Grateful Dead around and was now growing my hair out so I could put it in a ponytail. Have you ever seen a pony with kinky hair? No. My attempt was just a curly, fro-y mess. Making matters worse, I was draped in tie-dye, and my personal hygiene was questionable, even by European standards.

  My fortunes changed in Paris. (Isn’t that always the way?) I had a two-day
romance with a dude named Jean-Marie; he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak French, so we conversed in bad, broken Spanish. We had not a thing in common, but it was the most romantic two days of my life. He would point to things and say, in Spanish, “This is a very typical French building.” Or “Summers in France are very warm.” Scintillating! I bet I wouldn’t last an hour with him today without having a narcoleptic seizure, but at the time I thought he was a poet. His apartment was the size of a Tic Tac, and despite its being a complete hotbox, I don’t recall hot water actually being readily available; in fact I have a faint recollection of something (nonsexual) having to do with a teakettle. I thought it was totalmente quaint. He was handsome and sweet and had a big Parisian nose. But more importantly, he liked me. We held hands under the dinner table. The whole thing felt like a fantasy. In my heart, there was no turning back.

  When summer ended, though, and I reported to London for a semester of serious study, I was back to reality, which meant pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Some friends from BU were in my “programme.” (I’ll drop the quotation marks from now on, but is there anything that bugs you about this word, or is it just me?) Everyone was anxious to share tales of their amazing summers, while I couldn’t conceive of telling anyone about what I’d just experienced. Which, I realized, was going to be an ongoing challenge. Because from the moment I got there, everywhere I looked and listened was gay, gay, gay.

  You couldn’t walk one foot in London that year without hearing Erasure’s super-gay pop song “Chains of Love.” Oh, and my flat was in the gayest part of town, Earl’s Court. How the hell was I supposed to stay in the closet when living in a neighborhood where everybody looked like a Village Person? I certainly wasn’t complaining, but it just seemed ironic.

  I was committed to my secret, though, because I truly did not believe I had an alternative. I was terrified of being ostracized by my friends and family. I’ve always said that gay people and fat people are two of the last minority groups that it’s acceptable to make fun of across America. That’s finally starting to change now, but gay-bashing was still de rigueur in the eighties—and Eddie Murphy was hardly the lone offender.

  On the trip from Paris I’d concocted a fairly elaborate story about my summer, and the minute I got to London, I began relaying it to friends back at BU and in St. Louis. I told them—through letters and phone calls and eventually just word of mouth—that I had taken a train from Switzerland to Paris (true), where I’d met a German girl (true) with hair under her arms (true) who asked me to get drunk with her (true) and that I did (false) and she attacked me (false) with her hot body (eew, false) and hairy underarms (again, true, but I didn’t touch them). We spent a mad, passionate night together fucking and fucking and fucking some more on the rails and had a very dramatic good-bye in Paris (false, gross, false, gross, and no).

  The Tale of the Fräulein Who Took Me on the Night Rails made an immediate impact on my friends, to whom I must’ve always seemed like a Ken doll (sans the stunning Aryan looks) with no genitalia and just smooth flatness “down there.” They swallowed the Tale of the Fräulein like a fresh Slurpee, simultaneously happy for me and relieved that whatever questions they’d had about my—at best—asexuality were unfounded. And if it made any of their brains painfully freeze up for a moment, well, that was just from drinking it all in so fast.

  Within one day of being in London I met two women who would become my best friends for the rest of my life. Amanda Baten was a petite, blond, earthy stunner with an infectious laugh and appetite for fun and drama; she was on the road to her eventual career as a psychologist and was already figuring out all our problems. Graciela Braslavsky was Brigitte Bardot on steroids, a New York City girl with an anything-goes vibe and a razor-sharp wit who was also enrolled at BU. That I’d never been somehow magnetically drawn to her on campus back in Boston seemed unfathomable. I connected with both women deeply and immediately. The image I portrayed to them was of a hetero hippie, and when I shared the Tale of the Fräulein Who Took Me on the Night Rails, they had no reason to question it.

  The programme itself consisted of a couple of (fairly bogus) courses and an internship at United Press International Radio, which sucked. My hoped-for internship at the ABC News London Bureau never materialized, so I was stuck in this dead-end job in the Docklands, which was essentially the middle of nowhere. At this point I’d had several amazing internships already. I started young, as the “littlest volunteer” for Senator Tom Eagleton’s re-election campaign (I was twelve and felt strangely at home among adults wearing corduroy sport coats). At sixteen, I was the youngest intern at the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. Then came the internships at the CBS radio station in St. Louis and a classic rock radio station in Boston (where I worked the switchboard and felt like Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP in Cincinnati, except that I was nowhere near as hot as Loni Anderson and way more efficient), so maybe I was spoiled with regard to internships. And maybe spoiled in general. I had decided already that there was absolutely no way I’d ever work in radio. My plan was to graduate, move to a small market, and become a reporter and local anchor. So it all seemed pointless and for naught.

  Graciela, Amanda, and me. No, that is not a pot pipe in my hand.

  My life in London became a balancing act. I spent most of my time hanging out with Amanda and Graciela, doing stupid things around London like smoking buckets of hash and going to all-you-can-eat pasta nights at Fatsos in Soho. One night Graciela dared me to slide down the median of what was probably a four-story escalator in the middle of a packed tube station; I did it and cut my hands to bits. I was in massive pain, but to us it was hilarious and proof that I was completely under Graciela’s spell. I was—and am still—powerless to resist her dares. Decades later, when she was sitting in the audience of Watch What Happens Live, Jimmy Fallon was the guest, and during the commercial break she dared me to do a large shot of Maker’s Mark. Jimmy looked at me like I was a madman to be considering this dare, but with the clock ticking down the seconds until we were back live on the air, I had to comply. She’s like a Siren!

  When I wasn’t acting like a fool with my girlfriends, I was checking out gay spots around town on the DL. I had an affair with an aspiring pop star. In my rearview mirror he appears absolutely ridiculous, but at the time, he was spectacular—Mr. Barrel Chested Gay UK 1988. He’d recorded a truly pathetic techno cover of the Petula Clark classic “Downtown,” but his total lack of talent did not dissuade me from loving his angular A-Ha look and enormous chest. Concurrently, I feigned interest in Rebecca, a red-haired beauty (I liked Gingeys even then) in our program, who had a crush on my roommate. Thus, she was safe. (And there’s that word again.)

  I was also quietly empowered by some of my openly gay classmates. I remember running into one of them one morning on the street. He told me he was just coming home from his night and that it was “wild.” He winked and walked away. I couldn’t imagine being open and cavalier like he was. Later he invited me to his flat with a bunch of his friends, and we all watched Sudden Fear together. At the time, sitting with a group of gays watching a Joan Crawford movie seemed downright revolutionary. Now it sounds like a Sunday afternoon.

  The dark side of my initial forays into the gay world was that I was absolutely terrified that I was going to get—or had already gotten—AIDS. I questioned every scab, cough, bruise, cut, and cold sore as though it were the beginning of the end for me. It was 1988, and the AIDS crisis was generating massive paranoia and uncertainty. Being gay seemed to go hand in hand with AIDS, like an inevitable one-two punch.

  * * *

  As I went on with my double life, letters kept arriving from home:

  September 1988

  Dear Andy,

  Well, by now you are quite the experienced traveler. I saw Jackie and she sounded as up about the trip as you. Can you take a Shakespeare course rather than a politics or some kind of English art course at least?? Are there any Jewish kids there? I can’t believe that your damn co
ats and your polo towels and that damn white sweater are lost. Furthermore, it was not insured—can you believe it? Hopefully the tracer will find it. You better find a flea market and buy yourself a coat or you’ll freeze. We have tickets to “Les Miserables” on the 15th, which is the evening we get to London. If you could get tickets to Phantom on Nov 16th, that would be fabulous. I do not wish to pay scalpers prices. The play we must see is Lettice and Lovage. Will you see about tickets to that and MasterCard them too? It’s a comedy with Maggie Smith. I am so damn mad. I forgot to set the recorder in my room and didn’t change the clock on the recorder in the basement back from daylight savings. So today I have 2 recorders and no soap! Palmer really set up Natalie and Jeremy to make them look guilty as hell. Nina had a baby boy. Erica’s on a long trip. Nothing else major is happening.… Well, I hear the garage door opening and it is your dad. We love and miss you and look forward to hearing about all of your experiences. Don’t forget to keep the journal. Have the time of your life.

  LOVE MOM

  A letter like this, brimming with the wonderfully mundane details of my former existence as a closeted mama’s boy, now filled me with dread. The longer I was in London the more I knew that I was living a lie and that there could be no going back to my old life.

  My anxiety intensified with each day. I honestly believed that if I chose to be open about my sexuality, I would be shunned by everyone I loved. It sounds so melodramatic now, but at the time, the decision of who to tell and when loomed like a life-or-death question.

  To make matters more complicated, there was an added and potentially uncomfortable energy around my relationship with Graciela. We were in the midst of a love affair that happened to be absolutely devoid of any physicality. I hungered to be around her. She made me laugh, surprised me, stimulated me, and I wanted to tell her everything. She had a boyfriend back home, so I figured she thought that was why I wasn’t making a move. Still, I did some deflecting. And I now know that she did a lot of wondering.