"American Princess": My New Favorite TV Show

Entitled, detached-from-reality Jewish American Princess Amanda (Georgia Flood, who looks exactly like Kristen Ritter of Don't Trust the B__ in Apartment 23) is planning a "fairy tale wedding" in the wilds of upstate New York.  Minutes before she is scheduled to walk down the aisle, she stumbles upon her fiancé, Brett (Max Ehrich), having sex with last night's hookup.  Still in her wedding dress, she rushes away.

Isn't that how Friends started?

 Amanda runs into the wilderness and stumbles upon a Renaissance Faire, one of those summertime celebrations of all things Elizabethan -- well, the fun things anyway.  There's boozing, dancing, craft booths, jousts, swordplay.  Workers and many of the guests wear Elizabethan costumes and stay strictly in character.  There are classes in how to speak, wave, bow, and pretend not to be aware of modern technology.

At first Amanda is dismissive of the daffy, reality deprived weirdos, but soon she realizes that her world is equally reality deprived.  Besides, she was an English major, and likes this Renaissance stuff.  When her mother and sister show up to take her home, she refuses.  She gets a job at the Faire, and immerses herselves in the lives and problems of other "rennies" (faire professionals).

I'm surprised that there are so many of them, considering that they work only on weekends during the summer.  It can't be a full time gig.  But:

David (Lucas Neff, left,  unrecognizable from Raising Hope) has an act involving getting splattered with mud and pretending to pee on people.  A German and art history major, he wonders if this is what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

Delilah (Mary Hollis Inboden) has an act involving doing laundry and making sexual innuendos.

Maggie (Seanna Kofoed) has been playing Queen Elizabeth for over 20 years, and is worried about aging and losing her power.

Brian (Rory O'Malley), who plays William Shakespeare, has been her gay bff for many years, but he longs to be accepted by the other performers.  After some false starts, he begins dating Juan Andres (Juan Alfonso), who runs a craft booth.

Leaf (Brock Harris, left) is a jouster, and spends his off time flirting with guests of all genders.

The female sexual empowerment stuff gets a little distasteful at times. I fast-forwarded through some discussions of vaginas.  Did you know that they come in different sizes and shapes?  I do, now.

But the colorful interactions among the characters, both in the Faire and back home on the Upper East Side, are worth sitting through some "boob and bush" discussions.

Besides, just about everyone on the show is gay, bisexual, or pansexual.  There's even a three-way relationship between Natasha (Sophie von Hasselberg), Stephen (Ross Bryant), and Phil (Edgar Blackmon).

And there's a lot of beefcake.  Most of the shirtless actors are playing scruffy, unwashed Elizabethan underlings, but there are also some buffed physiques about.

The first season is up on Vudu and Amazon Prime.  I'm watching slowly, an episode every few days.   I don't want it to end.

"What We Do in Shadows": Everyone is Queer

What We Do in Shadows (2019) sounds like closeted gay men, who used to be called "shadow people."  It's actually about vampires, but aren't they sort of the same thing.  The vampire has always had a tinge of queerness, from the androgynous count Dracula through tortured femme Barnabas Collins to the pansexual gay-dad Lestat.

This iteration is a sort of Real World mockumentary about four vampires sharing a house on Staten Island.

1. Austere Nandor (Keyvan Novak, left), the oldest of the group, has been around since the days of Vlad the Impaler. 

2. and 3. Chubby aesthete Lazlo (Matt Berry, left) is devotee of the pleasures  of the flesh.  He has starred in thousands of porn movies, and enjoys pruning bushes into lady parts.  He is married to Nadja (Natasha Demetriou), but they both seek out other lovers. 

Nadja, for instance, turns Jenna (Beanie Feldstein) during a lesbian encounter, and is having an affair with Jeff (Jake McDorman), a reincarnation of a former lover.

4. Colin (Mark Proksch), an "energy vampire," feeds on the annoyance of humans.  So he has a cubicle-job, where he can annoy his coworkers with inane conversations.

5. Guillermo (Harvey Guillén, right, with boyfriend), Nandor's human "familiar" (slave, servant, apprentice).  He usually gets ignored or rejected, and then goes to his room to pout (think Willie Loomis to Barnabas). 

The humor comes from vampires engaging in modern urban activities like planning parties and going to nightclubs,with some plotlines about negotiating with enemies, forming alliances, and dealing with the Vampire Council.

The delivery is very understated, deadpan, with a lot of improv, which I find a bit dull.  Maybe, like, hire some writers to actually write some dialogue?

But on the bright side, everyone on the show is unreflectively pansexual; they don't seem to even be aware of the existence of sexual orientations.  For instance, Nandor orders Guillermo to invite his virgin friend Jeremy (James Dwyer) to the upcoming orgy to be eaten (virgin (infinitely attractive to vampires).  Guillermo tries to make Nandor think that Jeremy is not a virgin by discussing his "girlfriend," marking him as heterosexual.  But when Jeremy comes to the party anyway, he has energetic anal sex with a man. "This is a great party!" he exclaims. 

Well, not a great party, but a pretty good one.

My grade: B. 

The Dark Side of Poly Pride

When I saw this "Poly Pride" sweatshirt, my first thought was "polyamorous."  But surely this high school student wasn't aware enough to identify  as polyamorous (attracted to people across the spectrum of gender): that's a long coming out process.

And even if he had figured "it" out, the administration would never let him wear a Polyamorous Pride shirt to school.

Or maybe they would.  Turns out that he attends Poly Prep, aka the Polytechnical Preparatory Country Day School in Brooklyn, founded as the oldest boys' school in New York (co-ed since 1977).  There are two divisions,  lower in the ritzy Park Slope, and middle/upper in the even ritzier Dyker Park neighborhood (where 2-bedroom apartments start at $3000 per month).

It's not a boarding school, so students all come from Brooklyn or nearby.  This athlete transferred from the quaintly-named New Dorp HIgh School on Staten Island.

Tuition is $49,000 per year, more expensive than Harvard ($47,000), where many of the graduates will be going.

Behold the faces and physiques of the 1%

Interested in knowing what the 1% gets for lunch? Sample menu for a day in April: Mint Pea Soup, Spanakopita or Roasted Lemon Chicken accompanied by cauliflower au gratin with roasted tomatoes and gruyere cheese.

Upper School has a 56-page curriculum guide detailing courses like "Gender Studies through Literature" (beginning with Judith Butler, a theorist who I didn't get until grad school).

Student groups include the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, of course, plus Girls Who Code, Ink Drinkers (for writers), The Sustainability Club, and War Child (awareness of child soldiers).

Athletics include football, soccer, tennis, fencing, lacrosse, squash, fencing, and wrestling.

But all is not gender studies and cauliflower with gruyere cheese at Poly Prep.  In 2018, a video surfaced of two female students wearing blackface while making monkey sounds. The administration did not discipline the students (although they both dropped out), or even acknowledge that the video was racist, leading to a rally and protest by a group of students of color.  The students also alleged that they face regular racism on campus, including harassment from their peers and teachers who single them out for abuse.

Well...Poly Prep has a Diversity, Equality, and Social Justice division with a full-time director....





A 2016 exposee in Esquire alleges that a former Poly Prep football coach sexually abused hundreds of 5th and 6th grade boys from the 1960s through the 1990s.  He also bullied them and created a hostile homophobic environment with terms like "fag" and "homo."  A student who complained to the administration had his scholarship revoked.

Um...ok,just to be clear, this photo is of the high school swim team 20 years later.  The the age of consent in New York is 17, so many high school students are legal for dates and hookups.  But only if they consent, and never if you are their teacher, coach, or anyone else in a position of authority.

Geez, peering into the lives of the rich and famous is supposed to be fun.

A 2015 lawsuit alleges that a Poly Prep administrator used school funds to take some students to Cuba, where he bought them booze, cigars, and hookers.  Additional allegations had Headmaster David Harman hiring "goons" to intimidate anyone from speaking out.  The Headmaster soon resigned.

Um...skip it.

Next up: P.S. High School 323 in the poor, crime-ridden Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn.  Lowest percentage of graduates going on to college in the state.

Four Questions about Prasad Romijn

Prasad Romijn is a professional model who starred as a boy saddled with a psycho girlfriend in the Ava Max music video.  That was his first acting role, and there is very little else about him on the internet.  I had to do some digging to answer these four important questions.

1. Is he the son of actress and model Rebecca Romijn?

No.  Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell have twin daughters.

Besides, Rebecca grew up in Berkeley, California, and Prasad was born in Boulder, Colorado on September 10, 1998.  Here he's on the football team at Nevin Platt Middle School.

Romijn is a Dutch name, not very common in the U.S., so they may be distantl

Prasad got into modeling through his mother.  He moved to New York in 2017, shortly after he graduated from high school, and started racking up the fashion gigs.

The top photo, for instance, is from Teen Menswear Magazine.  I can't figure out what article of clothing he's supposed to be modeling.

2. Is he Hindu?  (Prasad is a Hindi name).

There's a Ty Romijn, no doubt a father or uncle, on the faculty of  Taoist Institute of Education Acupuncture in Louisville, Colorado, so Prasad has some  Eastern mysticism in his background.  But he seems to be more of a material girl.

He owns his own jewelry and clothing company called Nihmor (which I can't find online), and is "CEO of a PR and marketing company."

Plus he can hook you up with the "coolest homemade jewelry in Malibu."

Here he's got $250k of bling on his body, and is ready to "body y'all."

Urban Dictionary defines the verb "body" as "to murder."  I assume he's being metaphorical, as in "drop-dead gorgeous."

3. Does he have any nude photos?

None on his instagram, facebook, or twitter pages.  But with professional models, the beneath the belt gifts are not particularly relevant anyway.  You're supposed to be looking at the face and the bling.

4. Is he gay?

I couldn't find any references to boyfriends or girlfriends, or any references to gay people at all, but I've never heard a gay person talk like a 1990s rapper:

"Every other restaurant in New York sucks. Dig in at my homies restaurant."  (It's Baby Brasa, organic Peruvian rotisserie, owned by Peruvian celibrity chef Franco Noriega).


 

And here's a flier for his "aggressive" 20th birthday party: free food and wine, RSVP required.  Held at Esther and Carol's Restaurant in the Bowery, actually owned by Kevin King and Cordell Lochin, named after their mothers. Not a gay couple, not in a gay neighborhood.

Finally, dig this flier for the same party.  There's a mostly-naked girl in his lap (I had to crop the naked parts).

Definitely straight.

See also: The Top10 Pop Songs

"Pose": Let Your Body Move to the Music

I was around in 1987, but almost nothing in Pose (2018-) is familiar.  In retrospect, I was enjoying a lot of privilege: white, middle-class, conventionally masculine, HIV negative, able to escape from the homophobia of the mainstream Reagan-Jerry Falwell society. I visited my parents twice a year.

Meanwhile, many LGBT people were racial minorities, drag queens or transwomen, sick, poor, eking out a living through sex work and petty theft, rejected by their birth families, rejected even by other LGBT people. They had nothing but each other.

So they lived together in "houses" under the care of a "mother," and when the lights went down, they vogued.

Look around, everywhere you turn is heartache
It's everywhere that you go 
You try everything you can to escape
The pain of life that you know
I know a place where you can get away
It's called a dance floor, and here's what it's for, so
Come on, vogue

They compete in gigantic drag contests with judges and scores, their acts involving not lip-synching but "posing," often not in dresses but in the Park Avenue drag of the rich and powerful, critiquing the culture of excess and exclusion that would eventually lead to the Orange Goblin being elected president.

Real house members act as series consultants and take small roles, so the series has an air of authenticity. The nostalgic 1980s soundtrack helps: "Heartbeat," "In My House," "On the Radio," "I Wanna Dance with Somebody," "It's Raining Men," all of those old songs that we heard constantly at the bars but have since forgotten.

Feuds between houses occupy a substantial part of the plot, but there are also stories  about conflicts with the outside world.

1. Damon Richards of the House of Evangelista (Ryan Jamal Swain) is neither drag queen or transwoman, just a rather feminine gay man who aspires to become a dancer.  He begins dating fellow Evangelista Ricky (Dyllón Burnside),

2. Angel Evangelista (Indya Moore) begins dating Stan (Evan Peters): white, married, middle-class, employed by the Trump organization (which was sleazy even back in 1987)

The cast consists mosly of transgender actresses, so one doesn't expect a lot of beefcake. But there are a few conventionally masculine physiques:

1.Dyllón Burnside

2.Evan Peters

3. Angel Bismarck Curiel as drug-dealing house member Lil Papi.

4. Johnny Sibilly, Costas, the lover of ball m.c. Pray Tell (Billy Porter), who is dying of AIDS.

5. James Van Der Beek as Matt Bromley, Stan's completely odious boss.

6. Matthew Carter as "Walkman Wally).

But aren't muscles themselves a type of drag, a costume we wear to hide who we really are?

My grade: A+.

Russian Doll: Skip the Last Episode

The Netflix series Russian Doll stars Natasha (Nadia Vulvokov), a  New Yorker.  Rather, she is New York, the city personified: big, brash, flashy, sarcastic, irreverent, gravel-voiced, with frizzy hair and lots of rings. 

She's Nicky from Orange is the New Black, Elaine Boosler, the scary, scanky woman that George Costanza thought was faking it on Seinfeld,   She has some sort of job with computers and a large pansexual, multicultural group of friends who talk about art, film, and sex while eating avant-garde hors d'oeuvres and taking designer drugs.

She stares at herself in the bathroom mirror at her 36th birthday party, commiserates with her friends on being over the hill, spars with her ugly ex-boyfriend John (Yul Vazquezl left), and flirts with the uglyMike (Jeremy Bobb, below) (apparently she has a thing for ugly guys).  She takes Mike home to screw. Later she goes out again, sees her lost cat, and rushes across the street to fetch him, whereupon she is hit by a car...

And appears at the bathroom mirror again, at the start of her 36th birthday party.  Natasha interrogates her friends on whether they gave her a weird drug, tells John about the weird experience, sees Oatmeal and fetches him, avoiding the car.  Then she trips and falls...

And appears at the bathroom again.

Life is fragile.A trip on a staircase, a chicken bone, a moment of inattention while crossing the street, a gas leak, a friend who mistakes you for a burglar, and it's over in an instant.  And return to the moment of your 36th birthday party.

Natasha interrogates her drug dealer, investigates the house where the party was held, buddy-bonds with the homeless Horse  (they sleep together but don't screw, at least not on camera)...

Then she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), who is also reliving a pivotal day in his life: the day he asked his girlfriend to marry him.  She rejected him because she was screwing her literature professor...Mike, the ugly guy Natasha hooked up with!

He openly admits to screwing other co-eds, but the girlfriend doesn't care. 

Natasha and Alan are connected in other ways:  They ran into each other the night of their first deaths.  And they always die at the same moment in time.

To the director's credit,they don't fall in love (although they do screw).  They buddy-bond as they try to unravel the mystery, and either die permanently or go on.

The premise falls apart at at the end -- the last episode makes no sense.  But it's interesting to see Natasha grow from amorality, and Alan from frozen with indecision (think Eleanor and Chidi from The Good Place)

Gay characters:  Half of Eleanors friends are lesbians, although the morning after the party, they awaken in a multisexual pile.  No gay men exist.  '

Beefcake:  Alan always wakes up in his underwear.  The other male characters don't show their physiques, but most of them are startlingly ugly anyway  Brendan Sextan III, who plays Horse, is rather cute, but unrecognizable under the homeless guy makeup.

In Search of the Gay Bacchanal of "The Phantom Tollbooth"

Sometime around sixth grade, I was recommended The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) a "fantasy" about a boy exploring a mysterious land.

Sounds great, like Middle Earth, or Narnia, or maybe Oz.  A fantasy world with languages and cultures, histories, geographies! Maybe there would be a map!

I just had to leaf through the book to realize that it wasn't a fantasy at all.  There is no alternate world with well-thought out political systems, economies, and social structures.  It's a "world" full of incongruities, artifices, and horrible puns that ruin any sense of reality.

So Milo and his dog companion (who has a clock in his stomach because he's a "Watch Dog", get it?) are on a quest to save the daughters of King Azaz (from a to z, get it?) from the Mathemagician's attempt to eliminate language in favor of numbers.  The daughters, by the way, are named Rhyme and Reason (two characteristics of language)..

Idiotic!  There's no sense of wonder here!  This is not a land of dreams, it's a land of stupidity!

But apparently some other people, those who weren't conned into expecting another Tolkien, like the book.  It inspired a 1970 movie (starring Baby Boomer icon Butch Patrick), a stage play, a musical, an opera, and another upcoming movie directed by Matt Shakman (executive producer of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

 While reading an article on the upcoming movie, I learned that the author of Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, got the idea while on a holiday at Fire Island.

Fire Island?  The gay resort?  So the author of Phantom Tollboth was gay?

Time to do more research: Apparently Norton Juster was an architect  living in New York, who won a grant to write a children's book about cities.  But he was suffering from writer's block, so he went out to Fire Island to clear his head -- or get some head.

The characters of Milo and the Watch Dog came to him suddenly, and he started plotting the book. When he got home and told his housemates, Jules Feiffer (left) asked to illustrate

Housemates, huh?  Three gay men living in New York together in a pre-Stonewall Bohemian bacchanal.  Maybe they cruised at the Everard Baths, or Uncle Charlie's on Christopher Street.

More research: In the late 1950s, Juster was just out of the Navy and living in a small basement apartment in Brooklyn.  Jules Feiffer was his upstairs neighbor.  They met while taking out the garbage, and became boyfriends...um...gay bffs...and eventually got their own place.

I was unable to discover the identity of the third housemate. No doubt some trick who spent the night and never left.


So a gay man's trip to a gay resort resulted in a collaboration with another gay man on the horrible but popular Phantom Tollbooth.

Uh-oh.  More research, and my vision of a pre-Stonewall gay bacchanal began to fall apart.

Jules Feiffer published a lot of heterosexist stories and cartoons about courtship and marriage, like Boy Girl Boy Girl.  He wrote screenplays about heterosexuals, like Bernard and Huey, and he complained about "fags" in Playboy.  And he was married to women three times.

Ok, so a gay man and his straight housemate collaborated on The Phantom Tollbooth.

Nope. Norton Juster started writing while in the Navy, as a "way to pick up girls."  When he and Feiffer became friends, they "competed over girls." He married a woman named Jeanne in 1964, and they were together until her death in 2018.  They lived on a farm in rural Massachusetts, and volunteered for Amherst Family Services. Not the most common life trajectory for a gay man.

Ok, so a heterosexual man and his heterosexual house mate collaborated on one of the worst "fantasy" novels I've ever encountered.

Figures.

Why We Watched "The Nanny" in West Hollywood

We didn't watch a lot of tv in West Hollywood, but we did manage to watch The Nanny (1993-1999), part of the  "servant brings joie de vivre to a dysfunctional family" sitcoms that extends back to Hazel , "Somebody bellow for Beulah?", and probably back to ancient Roman comedy.

Here a  "flashy girl from Flushing",  the loud-mouthed, low-brow working-class Jewish Fran Fine (Fran Drescher) has no education or experience in childcare, but somehow manages to becomes the nanny for the children of the ultra-sophisticated, ultra-elite Broadway producer Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy):

1. Teenage Maggie (Lauren Tom)
2. Tween Brighton (Benjamin Salisbury. left)
3. Preteen Grace (Madeline Zima)

Filling out the main cast are Maxwell's business partner C.C. Babcock (Lauren Lane), who has an unrequited crush on him, and sarcastic butler Niles (Daniel Davis).

Episodes involve Fran's wild I Love Lucy-style schemes, Maxwell's play production problems,  occasionally caring for the kids, and of course the ongoing question of "Will they or won't they?"

Of course they will, but it seems to take forever.  Maxwell is concerned that, coming from different social classes, they are incompatible  (has he never seen, like, every romance movie ever?).

Meanwhile the Sheffields get along swimmingly with Fran's family:  stereotypic Jewish mother Sylvia, generally unseen father Morty, and grandma Yetta.

And Maxwell has an endless stream of relatives who demonstrate that it's ok to romance your servants.  His sister marries her chauffeur. His brother even romances Fran.

Yet Maxwell proposes and takes it back, says the "L" word and takes it back, kisses her and takes it back, yada yada yada.

I would have told him, "show me a ring or I'm outta here," like 35 episodes ago.

Not a lot of beefcake.  This is a distaff show, about women talking, scheming, commiserating, bonding.  The few men around are seen from the perspective of the female gaze, desired for their charm, sophistication, and power, not for their physiques.  They rarely if ever take their clothes off.

Not a lot of gay references.  When a very occasional gay person does appear, everyone is surprised.  Apparently the world of Broadway draws only straight people.

Then why was it such a hit among gay men in West Hollywood?

1.  We were envious of New York.  It was bigger, more sophisticated, more serious, the birthplace of Gay Rights.

2. It was unremittingly cheery, with few of the depressing "problem of the week" episodes that spoiled other 1990s sitcoms.

3. Fran is a flamboyant fashionista, a campy, corny drag queen.

4. Since Maxwell is a Broadway producer, every Broadway star, singer, and actor you ever heard of makes a cameo: Ray Charles, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme,  Eartha Kitt, Carol Channing, Patti LaBelle, Rita Moreno, Billy Ray Cyrus, Ben Vereen, Celine Dion, Lynne Redgrave, Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John,

And many you never heard of, famous at the time but now long forgotten: Joe Lando (left), Leslie Moonves, Donald Trump.

Finding Foran: The Beefcake of Connecticut's Gold Coast

An article from 2018: "Foran's Ryan L. after winning the state open title at 152 pounds last week. The Foran senior won his second-consecutive New England title Saturday, March 4 in Providence."

I could use another glimpse of that Foran senior, so I searched google images, and found another article from 2017:

"Ryan L.  and Michael R. from Foran High captured titles at the 53rd annual New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championships."

This must be Michael R.

I'm hooked.  Where is this beefcake-heavy Foran?

It's in Milford, Connecticut , on the Gold Coast about 1 1/2 hours from Penn Station.  Though the mill by the ford in the river dates from 1640, its big population growth came after World War II, when men in gray flannel suits built their Tudor-style houses there and commuted to skyscrapers in Manhattan  on the Long Island Railroad.  It's 93% white, 81% affluent, with nothing much to do except go boating, yachting, and shopping, and work on your yoga and pilates.

The main tourist attraction is PEZ.Visitor Center, a museum devoted to the famous candy dispensers Although the candy has been around since 1927, they didn't start making characters until the the 1950s: The Halloween Witch in 1957, and Popeye in 1958.  There have been uncountable thousands of dispensers, some rare ones selling for thousands of dollars (the 1982 World's Fair Astronaut got $32,000 on ebay).  The current crop includes characters from Jurassic World, Despicable Me, Peppa Pig, Trolls, and Frozen.

If you don't collect PEZ or go boating, your best bet is the beefcake potential.  Foran (named after Joseph A. Foran, longtime school superintendent), ofters a variety of student clubs, including a Gay/Straight Alliance, an Investing Club (naturally), and a Social Awareness Club, along with swimming, wrestling, track, and lacrosse.

Wrestling seems particularly popular.

But Foran is only one of the five high schools in Milford.  Law, named after Connecticut Governor Jonathan Law, allows thousands of alumni to truthfully say "I went to Law School."















Platt Tech is a technical high school that offers classes in auto repair, hairdressing, electronics, and other subjects that you would ordinarily take in a community college.

Milford Christian Academy, a ministry of the First Baptist Church, offers softball, golf, volleyball, and cheerleading.


And Yale University is only 10 miles away.