I spent Sunday with the kid I’ve mentored for the last four years. His name is Brandon and he’s now almost - geez - 13 years old. He’s a tough little Puerto Rican guy with a tender heart. When we first started hanging out he lived in Crown Heights but his family - he lives with his Aunt Diana and her boyfriend Felix and his cousin Stephanie - moved out to East New York in Brooklyn a few months ago; it’s almost at the last stop on the L train. So it’s an even longer trip for him back and forth into Manhattan. (Now that he’s older his aunt trusts him to make the journey himself instead of my having to spend all day on the trains myself picking him up and taking him home.) Sometimes we go to a movie or bowl or catch a ballgame at the Garden. I’ve finally broken him of his McDonald’s habit and he’s now an afficionado of Eggs Benedict, his new favorite dish. He also enjoys saying his favorite new word: brunch. And his favorite brunch spot is Blue Water Grill on Union Square because of its jazz combo downstairs. He insists we sit at the table closet to the drummer and I catch myself rhythmically spooning my omelette into my mouth to some extended Ellington and Strayhorn. This Sunday he was late getting into the city - the MTA was doing track work and the L train wasn’t running way out where he lives so he had to take a shuttle bus to get to his connection at Broadway Junction and it took him almost two hours to get here, that’s four hours round trip - so we had to skip brunch to make it to the theatre on time. I had tickets to take him to see “In the Heights” a new musical that opened this week off Broadway about the loveable denizens of a Latino neighborhood. Brandon’s been acting out in school a bit recently so during the intermission we discussed the reasons for that. I also showed him a copy of Mississippi Sissy - I got a real book finally last week hot of the presses from St. Martins - and I think he was proud of me. I hope so. Brandon has become a big part of my life in the last four years. The love I’ve grown to feel for the kid could be described with the same two words I just used to describe him: tough and tender.

Saturday night was one of those great evenings when I remember why I still live in this crazy, overly expensive city. I bought a ticket spur-of-the-moment to go see the concert version of “Follies” at City Center after reading Ben Brantley’s rave review of the Encores! presentation of the show that morning in the New York Times. (After you read Mississippi Sissy, you’ll understand just how special it was to see a great production of “Follies” since the music from the show plays a big part in the last chapter of the book.) Boy, am I glad I bought the ticket. For an old theatre queen like me, it was a magical night. Victoria Clark and Donna Murphy gave brilliant performances - brilliant! - as the two leads Sally and Phyllis. Mimi Hines - yes, that Mimi Hines who was Barbra Steisand’s replacement in “Funny Girl” - stopped the show with her rendition of “Broadway Baby.” Christine Baranski gave an acting lesson when she sang “I’m Still Here.” The show still doesn’t quite work over all and remains a bit of a soap opera - but what an amazing job the cast did. Bravo to the Encores! series for assembling it and to director and choreoprapher, Casey Nicholaw, of “The Drowsey Chaperone” fame. After the show I ran into my old friend, Larry Mark, who produced the film Dreamgirls. I’ve known Larry for 25 years since our Paramount days when I was a highfalutin amanuensis/factotum and he was the head of West Coast Marketing before becoming one of LA’s top movie producers. He was there with Bill Condon, who directed the film of Dreamgirls. I hadn’t seen them since the film’s premiere and hugged their necks, as we say in the south, so glad I was to see them on such a special night. Then I turned and said hello to a couple of other old acquaintances of mine, Frank Rich - who is also a hero for the columns he’s been writing the last couple of years for the Sunday New York Times - and his lovely wife, Alex Witchel, another great Times writer. To this day, I think Alex wrote one of the best profiles of a creative person I’ve ever read, her Sunday magazine article a few years ago on director George Wolfe. I usually figurativelly spend my Saturday nights anyway in bed with Frank - reading his upcoming Sunday Times column is the last thing I do before falling asleep - so it was nice seeing him in the flesh on a Saturday night also. His column yesterday was about Barack Obama, who is my candidate for president. Edwards is my second choice. Richardson is my third. And then I get to Hillary. But, more of that anon.

Friday night I had dinner with one of my dearest friends - dear being the operative word - Tim Tompkins, who runs the Times Squre business district. I call him the Mayor of Times Square, which, for all intents and purposes, he is. He’d just had his yoga class - as if he didn’t have enough to do running Times Square, he’s also getting certified to teach yoga, talk about yin and yang - and he was trying to convince me to take class with him. I’m a yoga-holdout. I always love seeing Tim and catching up. He’s a sailor also. Instead of buying a condo a while back, he decided to buy a sailboat. It’s docked down in Miami right now but he’s sailing it back up in the spring - he lived on the boat last summer where it was docked in the Hudson - and I might meet up with him in Charleston after a book signing in Atlanta on April 2nd to sail the rest of the way up the coast. We talked about what I might write about for my next book and I told him I keep thinking about this: taking a year to travel in Africa and to write about whatever transpires. I went to Africa a couple of years ago for a month - I made the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro on that trip - and have been thinking about my return ever since.

I had a nice surprise last night when I took a new friend of mine, Columbia med student Jamie Houston, to an art exhibit at the townhouse of the Consulate General of Argentinia. The exhibit consisted of the work of the father of an old friend, architect Gustavo Bonevardi. The show in the ornately paneled room was severely beautiful in its shadowy, sure-handed way. That wasn’t the surprise. I’d always known that Gustavo’s father, Marcelo, was talented. The surprise was running into the gaggle of guys with whom I used to hang out when we were all young kids in New York City - mostly at The Ninth Circle, one of the great gay bars in the Village back in the 1970s and early ’80s where roughtrade hustlers played pool downstairs and we - preppy boys who were just beginning to let the city rough us up a bit ourselves - all smoked joints and drank beer upstairs out in the garden with other ambitiously artistic types. We even got together for a “class picture” as designer Tom Ford called it last night when we all posed for the camera. (When I figure out how to post a photo on here, I’ll post this one.) There was, of course, Gustavo, who, along with his architectural partner, John Bennett, were the two people who came up with the idea a couple of years ago for the beautifully moving two shafts of light that illuminated the Manhattan sky and seemed to climb all the way to heaven, wherever that might be, from the site of the World Trade Center. There was art dealer Wilson Kidde. Also Patrick McMullan, the social photographer nonpareil. Writer Jim Holt and his longtime boyfriend John McMillan, one of the smartest and sexiest couples still in NYC. Set and costume designer, Ian Falconer, who is also the creator of the series of children’s books based on the sublime Olivia, a piggy little girl who could never be considered a bore. There was Ford. And there was I. We are all middle-aged men now who have made our differing marks but when we congregated together in that room in the consulate it felt as if we were all 20 years old again. I left with a smile on my face, much like I’d leave them all after hanging out 30 years ago now back in that wonderfully seedy bar on Tenth Street between Seventh and Greenwich instead of where we all had ended up in an ornate room on 56th Street off Fifth.

Move over Teresa Heinz Kerry. The media has a new political helpmeet to ridicule - former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s third wife, Judi. The New York Post this morning ran a front page photo from their shoot in Harper’s Bazaar in which Judi sits atop her husband’s lap and plants a wet kiss on him. It does look a little like a Viagra ad. She also sings his virile praises in the upcoming Bazaar article. Judi was his mistress back during his second term as mayor, stealing him away from his second wife, Donna Hanover. They were supposedly seeing each other while Rudy was bunking down with two of his closest friends who happened to be a homosexual couple living in what amounted to a kind of wedded bliss that until that point had escaped the mayor. All that - plus Rudy’s previous pro-choice stand - are causes of the pundits all over the television today decrying his chances down south if he really does decide to run for president. As usual, the pundits are missing the most salient part of his past - his first marriage was to his cousin. That’s right: HIS COUSIN. Trust me, that will outweigh everything else down south and give him the margin of victory he needs. That’s right: MARGIN OF VICTORY. There’s a long tradition of marrying your cousin down south. As a Mississippian I know what I’m talking about. Indeed, my paternal grandfather’s second wife was also his second cousin. So repeat after me Chris Matthews, “Cousin couples are Rudy’s secret weapon down in the land of cotton.”

Volker Schlondorff. Werner Herzog. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Wim Wenders. Those are, debatably, the four great post-war German film directors. Now, as the 21st Century begins, it’s finally time - I think it’s safe to say this after only one film, “The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen),” - to begin a list of the great post-unification German directors with this name: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He’s only thirty-three years old and also wrote the movie. It is a stunning achievement. Set in East Berlin in 1984 it involves the Stasi surveillance of a playwright and his actress mistress, but the story and its visual telling encompass more than politics and delve - unsentimentally, unsparingly - into the depths of the human heart; the fine line between performance and reality; the symbiosis of goodness and evil, of bravery and treachery, of morality and survival. The acting is extraordinary. If Brecht had been at the screening I attended last night I think he might have uttered a gutteral “Bravo!”

In fact, Bertolt might have fit right in with the incongruous group that high-powered publicist Peggy Siegal put together at the Sony headquarters on Madison Avenue for one of her screenings and dinners. I went with my old friend from my Vanity Fair days, the magazine’s PR honcho, Beth Kseniak. Beth is not only one of my favorite people in the world, but also one of the sexiest women in the New York media one. You’d never know how high-powered she is herself she’s so down-to-earth. Much of Vanity Fair’s success in the last 15 years - not taking anything away from its Editor-in-Chief, Graydon Carter, who is brilliant and already legendary - is because of Kseniak’s savvy mediacentric acumen. We had a good time before the movie started marveling at how Peggy can put together such a diverse group. Where else but in New York City on a frigid February night could we be sitting in a small screening room with ex-governor of Massachusetts William Weld, musician Lou Reed, and writer Elie Wiesel?

After dinner, Peggy showed us beautiful photographs from her recent safari in Africa. “You must have a great camera,” I told her. She shot me one of her Peggy looks. “I’ve got a great eye,” she said, reminding me why I was there in the first place: to celebrate one of the great new “eyes” in the film business: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Remember the name. Go see the movie.

I didn’t think I could write a gayer post than the two below, but how’s this: Instead of watching the Super Bowl today I went to a fashion show. A dear friend had her show today at the main Tent at Byrant Park and she was kind enough to invite me. Her show was gorgeous and artistic - just like she is. Fashion shows, however, are always a bit deadly to me. Literally. I’m always reminded when I’m sitting there amidst all the beauty strutting by in front of us - the glare of it all, the glorious brevity of it, all the work, the talent, the hyped up nuttiness of it - of the short lives of James Dean and Jeff Buckley and Marilyn Monroe, though Marilyn’s 1950s hips wouldn’t be so welcome on the runway. There is something ineffably sad about a fashion show, something too lovely for life to embrace so that life finally rejects it just as it rejected James and Jeff and Marilyn.

Afterwards a few of us, along with my friend’s husband and children, headed back to her hotel suite where she’s camped out for a while while awaiting her new home to be completed. Then we all went downtown for a dinner and party. I ended up sitting in a booth with, among others, Mike Nichols, who was stag tonight because his wife, Diane Sawyer, was off in Syria interviewing its president. Nichols - erudite, charming and funny - regaled us with his take on many of his favorite actors he’s worked with over the years as well as stories about Susan Sontag and Franz Kafka and Mozart, whose real middle name, according to Nichols, was Gottlieb. He changed it to the Italian translation - Amadeus - because it sounded more musical and fitting for the genius he knew himself to be. Peyton Manning - whose middle name is Williams and is a kind of genius himself - just won his first Super Bowl. I made it back in time to watch the last seven minutes. Another super Sunday in New York.

After I finished my first post last night (see below) I had an email from Larry Kramer telling me that my upcoming book party on March 12th will be on the same night as the 25th anniversary dinner for GMHC (Gay Mens Health Crisis). I emailed him back and said I would look into it and also told him I had just written my first post on this new blog. If he signed on, he could be my first reader. Larry Kramer as the first reader to sign on to my blog should give this site some sort of gay-cred imprimatur.

Larry wrote me back immediately and claimed credit for having introduced Peter and me and wondered rather pointedly how I could have left that out of the post. When Larry claims credit for something he’s usually right - whether it’s founding GMHC and ACT-UP or being the gay movement’s angry yet loveable prophet or being considered the agitprop genius that he is. Though I have to say that I consider his autobiographical play “The Destiny of Me” - which he originally called “The Furniture of Home,” a title I tried to convince him to keep - one of the great plays of the modern era. It’s more than agitprop. I think it is just as good as anything ever written by Miller or Odets or Williams or O’Neill and better than anything written by Hellman or Inge. Without Larry Kramer we not only wouldn’t have many of the meds that keep us alive today, we wouldn’t have Tony Kushner and Craig Lucas and, yes, John Cameron Mitchell. Mitchell, indeed, played the young Kramer in “The Destiny of Me” and gave a performance as stunning as he did later in his own “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Anyway, back to Peter and me. Yes, Larry is right. I had seen Peter at a party at Area pretending to ride a huge ceramic pig and thought he was amazingly silly and sexy and interesting. Someone told me he was one of the founders of ACT-UP and there was an article about him in the current issue of Rolling Stone. I called up Larry and told him I wanted - no, demanded - an introduction. Sweet Larry - who is always trying to matchmake the boys in his orbit, let’s call him a Dolly in Levis - called up Peter and made it happen. It was an introduction that changed my life in many, many ways. So, Larry: thank you.

This is my first entry - duh - on my blog named for my new memoir, Mississippi Sissy. I feel kind of like the first time I had sex with a guy. There aren’t many ways left to make me feel like a virgin but this is certainly one of them. Even my saliva is getting thick. Too much information? Get used to it.

I am able to do this because an ex-boyfriend, Peter Staley, built the site for me. I am grateful to him - not only for building the site but also for being such a dear friend for almost 20 years now. Thank you, Peter.

I first met Peter when he was a hero of mine back when so many of us had our saliva thickened by political action, those horrible early days of the AIDS epidemic that almost seem halcyon now because, though many of us were dying, we were probably never so alive as a community. Peter was one of the founders of ACT-UP. Political action back then was … well … sexy. Now political/action seems to be nothing more than a movie category in which George Clooney specializes.

In fact, I just walked in from a movie that an old ACT-UP rabble-rousing colleague of Peter’s, Maria Maggenti, made. It’s called “Puccini for Beginners” and it is delightful. Smart. Funny. Touching. It’s got lesbians in it and that cute Justin Kirk from “Weeds.” It’s the movie Woody Allen has been unable to make in the last few years. The audience broke into spontaneous sustained applause when it ended. It’s a movie about New York circa 2007 - one that Maggenti probably longed for back when she was protesting with ACT-UP and was fighting to put hope back into all our lives. It’s a hopeful movie.

Here’s to hope.

And welcome to my blog.