Just thought I’d name this post for my favorite new musical. If you haven’t seen it, do. And Jonathan Groff, the lead, is a sweet kid. He even let me bring my nephew backstage to meet him after we saw it in December. I’ll be rooting for Jonathan come Tony time. I had an unrequited crush on him for a few weeks. Jonathan would be a great replacement for Daniel Radcliffe after he completes his Broadway run as Alan Strang in Equus next spring, costarring with Richard Griffiths as Dr. Dysart. (Spring Awakening’s producer, Tom Hulce, played Alan as Peter Firth’s replacement back on Broadyway in the 1970s.) Alan is a part I also played back when I was Jonathan’s age. Anthony Perkins played Dr. Dysart opposite me. I had a shag back then. And I had to wax my chest and stomach to appear closer to 17 the age of the character in the play. I think I was around 21 or 22 at the time. That was thirty years ago now. Roberta Maxwell played the stable girl with whom Alan has a nude scene. The last time I saw her she was playing Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother at the end of Brokeback Mountain. I am often reminded that I have reached the “mother role” phase in my own life. When I used to watch Six Feet Under I always indentified with the sons until it always dawned on me that i went to the Juilliard School of Drama with Frannie Conroy, who played their mother. “I’m the mama,” I’d always whisper to myself and wait for Claire to fuck up.

Spring is, indeed, awakening and God am I grateful. Since I last posted I went to dinner with Christopher Lee Nutter on Thursday night and took him to a party that my pal, Carole Radziwill, gave at her place on King Street for Norwood, a new arts club to be headquartered in a townhouse on 14th Street which is to open sometime this spring. Carole has just installed a turntable in her apartment so records were spun also. It was all kind of au courant and old-fashioned and elegant and lively at the same time - much like Carole herself Friday I caught the train to Boston for a reading at Calamus Bookstore. It’s owner, John Mitzel, could not have been more gracious in his sonorous, flush-faced, royal blue-wearing way. A nice guy. It was standing room only in his lovely store. I read sitting at a table with shelves behind me around my head filled with first editions by gay writers. James Purdy and Patrick Dennis tomes were floating there next to my right ear. I could almost hear their very different prose styles whispering to me from between their covers before I started reading my own stylistic prose. Sold a few books. Had an interesting discussion afterwards with those who came to hear me read. People again complimented me on my “performance” from the book. I do enjoy these readings. Maybe I’ll do a one-man show of sections from the book at some point. Who knows. I’d forgotten what that sweet-spot of performing felt like. I used to feel it when I wore a shag and straddled Nugget, Alan’s horse-of-choice at the end of the first act, and went on one of his - my - midnight rides. I got back around 1 a.m. - a midnight ride of a very different sort - from Boston (don’t get me started on Jetblue again) and fell fast asleep looking forward to the weather we had all been promised on Saturday.

The promise was fullfilled. After I worked out at the gym, I got on my new Electra Amsterdam bike and rode and rode and rode the blues away under the blue blue blue sky. Made it down to the parks and piers in the Village - it’s a bit like a midwestern river city that has spent some senior senator’s federal largesse on a waterfront, not Manhattan - but it was quite clean there and I did appreciate all those half naked bodies and beautiful faces, their winter glowers finally fading as they all, legs splayed, shoulders flexed, their calves cooled against the first brush of sod and grass and a spring breeze, allowed themselves to be moored in place, their hips beginning to list a bit in the sun, beneath the gleaming Meier apartment buildings.

I then rode down to my old neighborhood in Tribeca where I lived for about 15 years on Desbrosses and Greenwich. I was amazed by the difference in the neighborhood. Buildings even gleamier than the Meier cluster up the river had risen all around the old spice factory building where I had my loft. I loved living down there because it was so secluded and a bit of a frontier - though Bruce Weber and Bette Midler had lofts right around the corner. Bruce is still there I think. Bette’s become a Fifth Avenue lady - some downtown doyennes become that. Bette’s one of them, bless her heart. I worshipped her growing up back in Mississippi. My artistic brother Kim even painted t-shirts, exact copies of the Amsel portrait on her Divine Miss M album, for Karole and him and me when were were kids out in the country. I did a big cover story on her for Vanity Fair back around 1989, 1990. I visited her on the set of For the Boys and hung out at her house in Beverly Hills (”Well, Beverly Hills post office, “she corrected me back then, the first time I knew there was a distinction, a completely LA term to my New Yorkcentric ears.) She and her handsome fashionable lug of a husband, Martin, took me out to lunch. I even helped her - she was getting into gardening big time right about then - with her mulch. One day, over a year later, I was unlocking my bike on our shared corner in Tribeca and she and Martin were emerging from their building. “Hi, Bette,” I said. “Remember me?” She swept by in her haughtiest on-stage diva mode. “Hmmmph … vividly,” she said and strode right by. I had obviously said something in the VF story to offend her. My heart raced at the thought. Weeks later I was in our local breakfast expresso place. I was reading the Times and eating my croissant when she entered. We were the only two people in the place. “Morning, Bette,” I said. “Looks like you’re going to have a hit,” I told her, having seen the previews of First Wives Club a few days before. “Hmmmph,” she said, her favorite non-word it seemed when I was around. I turned back to the Times. My heart began to race again. I heard the click of her heels compete with the rapid beats of my increasingly racing heart. She stood, akimbo, next to me. “Kevin, we have to talk,” she said. “When you wrote that story on me for Vanity Fair, you said my baby was homely and it broke my heart.” I began to interrupt her. “No. Listen to me. What you wrote broke my heart. I have tried to forgive you. I have prayed to forgive you. I was hoping with time I could forgive you. But - look at me …” I looked up from my half-eaten croissant. Crusty remnants of it adhered to the roof of my mouth. “I will never fogive you,” she said. My hand shook own my expresso cup. “But, Bette … ” I stammered. “Kevin,” she said. “You broke my heart and I will never forgive you.” With that, she turned on her clicking heels and ordered her own expresso. Fade out. Fade in. The next year, in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue, I was asked to write an appreciation of Bette for the magazine’s Hall of Fame page. The form was that each sentence had to begin “Because …. ” At one point I said, words to the effect, that because in spite of all her awards and critical praise her greatest creation was her lovely daughter and then wrote Sophie’s lyrical full name. (I had initially written in the cover story on Bette that though Sophie had been a charmingly homely baby it was easy to see why Bette was so proud of her because she had grown into such an adorable child. But, rightly so, Better had focused on the word “homely.” I apologized privately to Martin and her with a note I slipped under their door and the Hall of Fame page was a public one as well.) A couple of weeks passed and I was buzzed at my loft. “Western Union,” came the voice. Who would be sending me a telegram in this day and age? I opened it and it read: “Kevin, That was very decent of you. All is forgiven. Bette. ” What a classy dame, which is more than I can say for myself in that story. Sometimes I think that’s one of the aspects of being gay: falling just short of being a classy dame oneself.

I rode up from Tribeca into Soho and dropped in on my friend Michael Smith at Depression Modern, who had decorated my entire loft back in those days with 1930s furniture from his store. My weekend stops, when I’m in town in nice weather, have always included - for over 20 years now - a visit with Michael and his dear friend, Howard, who worked in the store on weekends. The Sunday before I headed out on book tour on that Monday, I visited Howard at St. Vincents hospital to bring him some tulips and see how he was doing. He was not doing well. He was up in his 80s and a lifetime smoker and when one thing started going wrong, everything started going wrong. He never made it home. I had been thinking about Howard all during my tour. I had written the words “Depression Modern is a less lovingly irascible place without you there. Get well, honey” on the note I left with the tulips. Michael told me Saturday that Howard had passed away. I stood in the store and cried a bit. I had last seen Howard in the lobby of City Center before the concert version of Follies. He was complaining that Michael was late and he was freezing and how he was so looking forward to seeing the production. Howard taught scenic design at Brooklyn College and worked as a scenic designer all his adult life. His professional heyday was back in the ‘50 and ’60s. I’ll miss talking about what theatre we’d seen the week before when I’d go downstairs at Depression Modern and sit at the table with him as well as discuss the stories he was reading in the Times and Post that day. He was one of those sweet curmudgeonly gay gentlemen of a certain age - literally a dying breed now - who are a repository of fabulous memories and nicotine and a hard-earned grace. Rest in peace, Howard. My life was enhanced knowing you.

Saturday night I met up for dinner with my friends Jamie - a Columbia med student - and his New Zealand boyfriend Bede, who recently graduated from Columbia law school. Jamie is on his way to Cape Town for the summer to work with AIDS orphans and Bede, who specializes in human rights law, is headed to Johannesburg to do some pro bono work before settling into his new job in D.C. at a law firm. We had a great meal at Mermaid Inn and then walked over to KGB Bar to hear Phil LaMarche read from his novel, American Youth. Remember Phil from my Toronto posting? The place was packed with his groupies - yeah, I guess I’m one of them - and I bought a book for him to sign. (Jerry Stahl in the LA Times gave him a rave last week and called the book “an American masterpiece.”) Before Phil read he said that some of his friends didn’t show up because they thought readings were for sissies. He wrote in my book, “Readings are not for sissies.” I think I would have liked it better if he had stuck with his friends’ attitude and turned it on its head. But maybe you have to be a real sissy to do that.

After the reading I left Bede and Jamie in an East Village boy bar to drink and I rode my bike up to the movie theatre on 11th and Third and bought a ticket to Fracture. Anthony Hopkins, the original Dr. Dysart in Equus on Broadway, and Ryan Gosling, who would have made a great Alan Strang a few years ago, were fun to watch though the movie was a bit too slick for my tastes. I made it home by midnight and read the Times with Archie my dog cuddled next to me. I wondered what stories Howard would have found the most interesting in the Arts and Leisure section. I fell asleep, looking forward to Sunday and more sunshine. I dreamt of Cape Town and Johannesburg and Bette Midler’s face singing Surabaya Johnny on a t-shirt I wish I still had in my drawer. “I’m the mama,” she whispered to me after she sang the song. “I”m the mama,” I whispered back. “I’m the mama,” we both kept saying and we were. We are.

On the plane ride home (see below) I said a prayer for the families of those kids and teachers at Virginia Tech and never mentioned myself or my book once. Exhaustion causes more than headaches; it can cause selfishness as well. It’s 3:14 a.m. right now. I’ll say another prayer of thanks I made it home safely. Safety to you all out there.

I know. I know. I’m sounding like a stuck record. But here I am again at another damn airport - this time Logan in Boston - because of weather. My flight has been delayed for four hours and who knows if I’ll make it back home to NYC tonight. I flew in on the Jetblue shuttle do to a reading in Newtonville at a great independent bookstore. Mary, the owner, could not have been nicer or more gracious but only about a dozen people showed up because of the inclemency. I gave them a show anyway. A buddy from Ptown, Phil, came and kindly gave me a ride back to the airport. I thought it would be easy doing a round trip in one day because it was Boston. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I am exhausted and frustrated and close to tears. I sold three books tonight at the store. I paid for this trip myself. My Amazon number is for shit. I feel like I’ve sort of reached my limit in sales - I pray I’m wrong about that - and I’m just treading marketing water now. I hate to sound so down but that’s the way I’m feeling. I live a pretty solitary life but this life-on-the-road has taken the loneliness I often feel and encased it with a meta-loneliness that is becoming increasingly difficult to cope with on a night like this. There is a baby squalling next to me that seems, touchingly but maddenlngly, to have picked up on my feelings tonight. And it sure isn’t helping my headache. I hope the weather is better by Friday when I head back up here on antoher day trip to do a reading at Calamus bookstore and speak to a class at Harvard. I’m going to sign off now and ask the mother with the crying baby if she has any aspirin in that diaper bag by my feet.

Hello again from book tour hell. Remember my birthday when I was stuck in the airport in Chicago? Well, at least the airport here in Toronto is much nicer than O’Hare. But I’m stuck again in an air travel nightmare. My flight this morning back to New York was cancelled due to weather and I’m now scheduled to depart at 4:15 - if that flight too is not cancelled. I even had to come all the way back through customs to re-book a later flight and have to make my way back through security and customs a third time to get back to a gate if the later flight takes off. I have a sinking feeling that it won’t and I will be spending another night in Toronto. I keep trying to breath and not stress out and remember how lovely the last day was in Miami at the end of my three-week leg of the tour before taking two days back home in Manhattan to re-bond with my dog, Archie. When I last posted I was about to walk along the beach in Miami. It was just what I needed - and I need it again right about now up here in cold, rainy stormy Canada. Later in Miami I went to a concert by the New World Symphony on Lincoln Road, the orchestra made up of recent graduates of musical schools across the country which Michael Tilson Thomas directs. I wrote Mississippi Sissy while listening to many of Bach’s adagios. Every word of the book, in fact, was written with Bach filling my ears from my iPod. I suggest maybe playing a bit of Bach while you’re reading the book if you haven’t already. So as the long three-week leg of the tour for the book came to an end in Miami it seemed only fitting that I found myself sitting at the New World concert hall on Lincoln Road - where I sat so often when I had a condo down there - and listening to classical music. They performed beautiful renditions of Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, an adagio by Brahms, and Richard Strauss’s suite from Der Rosenkavalier. They also played a composition by one of their own violin fellows, Piotr Szewcyk. It was his graduation piece from the University of Cincinnati and won the composition competition there. It was titled - yet another heightened coincidence considering that I was winding down a tour I was on to promote a memoir - Transposed Memories. I keep trying to hear all those melodies I heard on my last night in Miami again in my head - an inchoate ache instead is beginning to make itself known around my sinus region - as I sit here in the Toronto airport and attempt to remain calm at being stuck yet again on the road. (I left my iPod at home.) I also keep thinking about Archie that first night back in New York a couple of days ago now when I slept like a baby as he curled up next to my stomach under the sheet. Just the thought of him curling up next to me can calm me a bit. I know that sounds corny and too asininely caninely of me, but humor me. It’s been a rough day so far. I had to board Archie yet again to come up here and now he might be spending another night at the kennel, his own version of the Westin I fear I’ll l be heading back to in a few hours.

I arrived in Toronto yesterday to do a reading at the International Readings series at Harbourfront Centre. Last week Lionel Shriver read from her new novel, THe Post-Birthday World. Others who have read at the Harbourfront Centre series over the years have included John Banville, Maeve Binchy, J.P. Donleavy, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin, William Trevor, Amoz Oz, Umberto Eco, Oriana Fallaci, Hikaru Okuizuma, J.M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Orphan Pamuk, Martin Amis, Alan Ayckborn, J. G. Ballard, Clive Barker, Howard Barker, Julian Barnes, Alan Bennet, William Boyd, Howard Brenton, Anthony Burgess, A. S. Byatt, Bruce Chatwin, Antonia Fraser, Michael Frayn, Simon Gray, Thom Gunn, David Hare, Ted Hughes, Kazuo Ishiguro, P.D. James, Pico Iyer, John le Carre, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan, Jan Morris, Harold Pinter, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, Edward Albee, John Ashberry, Hilton Als, Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, Saul Bellow, John Berendt, Amy Bloom, Robert Bly, T.C. Boyle, Harold Brodsky, Josef Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Mae Brown, James Lee Burke, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Pat Conroy, Michael Cunningham, Don DeLillo, James Dickey, E.L. Doctorow, John Gregory Dunne, Deborah Eisenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, Lousie Erdich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mary Gaitskill, Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Gilchrist, Allen Ginsberg, Nikki Giovanni, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Spalding Gray, Barry Hannah, Beth Henley, Patricia Highsmith, Christopher Hitchens, Alice Hoffman, Richard Howard, John Irving, Bret Anthony Johnston, Edward P. Jones, Erica Jong, William Kennedy, Ken Kesey, Jamaica Kinkaid, John Lahr, David Leavitt, Fran Lebowitz, Elmore Leonard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Peter Matheissen, Mary McCarthy, Joseph Elroy, Jay McInerny, Larry McMurtry, Terrence McNally, Daphne Merkin, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Arthur Miller, Sue Miler, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Minot, Toni Morrison, Howard Moss, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Tim O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Camille Paglia, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jodi Picoult, Marge Piercy, David Plante, George Plimpton, Richard Price, Annie Prouix, James Purdy, Ishmael Reed, Adrienne Rich, Tom Robbins, Norman Rush, John Sayles, Wallace Shawn, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, Robert Stone, William Styron, Gay Talese, Amy Tan, Peter Taylor, David Foster Wallace, Alice Walker, Edmund White, Colson Whitehead, John Edgar Wideman, Joy Williams,, Meg Wolitzer, Tom Wolfe, and me.

Putting “and me” at the end of such a litany …. well… floors me. I have always had a bit of an inferiority complex about my abilities as a writer since I became known for writing celebrity profiles for Vanity Fair. Getting an invitation from Harbourside meant a lot to me. And the writers with whom I shared the stage were exceptional. The lyrical award-winning Irish novelist Colum McCann (nice guy) read from Zoli, his haunting tale of exile and survival based on the Romani poet Papsuza. Brit Howard Jacobson read - brilliantly - from his brilliant Kalooki Nights, which spans the decades between WWII and the present day as told from the perspective of Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist. I’ll go read every book ever written by Jacobson now that I’ve finally discovered him. I whispered that to him when he sat back down next to me after he read. Howard has been called the funniest writer in Britian and The Independent said that Kalooki Nights is “a masterpiece.” Judging from what he read last night, I’d be prone to agree. Howard has called himself “the Jewish Jane Austen.” But I think he’s more like the son she would have had if Philip Roth had fucked her. And first time Amercian novelist Phil LaMarche read from the opening of his acclaimed new book American Boy which tells the story of a southern New England teenager who is confronted by a moral dilemma following a firearms accident. When Phil sat down next to me at the dinner beforehand, I have to admit I had an instant crush on him. Maybe we bonded because we were the “new boys” in the group since we each were promoting our first books. Phil teaches creative writing at Syracuse and just got married to the womens volleyball coach. He was a wrestler in high school but also, he claims, a sensitive type who loved reading and was often ridiculed as “the pansy.” I can’t imagine that, but I trust him. He told me after I read from Mississippi Sissy - I was given the honorary clean-up slot of fourth after the other three had read, which I found flattering considering the esteemed company I was in - that he was very moved by my excerpt. “I was considered the jock when I got to graduate school for creative writing. But in high school I was the one ridiculed. I can’t wait to read your book.” I can’t wait to read his too. Google his name and you’ll see what a lucky woman that volleyball coach is. Then go buy his book. I plan to. Phil seemed as sweet as he obviously is talented - and, yes, he’s really, really sexy. That’s the trifecta.

Last night I had my reading at Books and Books on Lincoln Road. They said they were expecting a big crowd but I knew not to expect one and get my hopes up too high. As you can read below, I lived here for a while but one of the reasons I moved away was because the only thing most people read around here in this land of clubs and cloudless skies are condo prospectuses and fake IDs. But I really appreciated Books and Books inviting me to read - I love the people who work there, especially Viv and Chip and Anne Marie - and signed a few books for the people who showed up after I read. In fact, I even, in my exhausted state, signed my own book in which I have edited in pencil the abridged version of the Halloween scene I’ve read at all my stops and gave it to someone off the table of books in front of me. I’m hoping the person who bought that one realizes it and brings it back to Books and Books. It threw me into a bit of a tizzy for the rest of the night. I really was counting on carrying that book around with me to all my readings. It’s become a kind of security juju for me. Or have a just imbued it with such juju qualities, engendering it with the power that I really must carry around inside me instead. Maybe it’s just another lesson in letting go. Books and Books was a hard room to read in. I had to use a hand-held mike and felt like a bit of a lounge singer in Las Vegas. But my old buddy, Andy Tobias, was there and told me it went well and I’ve always trusted Andy’s critical acumen. If you’ve never read Andy’s book Best Little Boy In the World, I recommend you do so. And any of his financial books and computer programs are helpful. In fact, I should have paid more attention to those now that I’m deep into middle age. Andy is also Treasurer for the Democratic Party and I’m sure he’d want me to tell you to find a way to donate at some point before 2008. (Are there any Republicans reading this blog? If so, out yourselves in the comment section below this post. My own bumpersticker in life is this one: NEVER JUDGEMENTAL, ALWAYS DISCERNING. So don’t worry. I welcome readers of all political persuasions.) Thanks to local writer and bon vivant, David Leddick, for showing up also. He’s a legend around these parts for good reason. And my old pal Alan Roth, who’s becoming a South Beach legend himself, came with his latest beautiful girlfriend. Alan is a local party promoter and restauranteur and now magazine publisher. His grandfather was once mayor of Miami Beach and I - lovingly - refer to him also as “the mayor of South Beach.” We met years ago when he was a waiter at the Delano Hotel when it first opened and I came down to work on an earlier book I was trying to write - a novel that now sits in one of my drawers in New York - and we immediately hit it off. He will always be, in my eyes, that ambitious little kid who kept me smiling so long ago when I’d wonder down from my room at the Delano and dare to flirt with him. I still dare to every now and then. His ambition has certainly paid off. And he can still make me smile. Two other guys who always make me smile are my Ptown buddies, Sean and Mitch, who live down in Ft. Lauderdale during the winter. They came over for the reading also and we went out and had dinner afterwards. There are some people you just feel at home with and Sean and Mitch are like that for me. I always feel like I’m rocking on porch back in Ptown when I’m with them and life is good and simple and … soothing on some basic level. You can’t ask for much more than that. So thanks to Sean and Mitch for showing up. After three weeks on the road, it was relaxing just being in their presence. I can’t wait to get back to Ptown this summer and really rock on a porch with them and create even more summer memories together. And Archie, my dog, loves Atticus, Mitch’s dog. Everbody loves Atticus. Atticus is the mayor of Ptown.

Another person who showed up last night at the reading was writer Christopher Lee Nutter. Go get his book as well - The Way Out. I usually avert my gaze from books that are labeled self-help or New Age, but Christopher’s transcends either category because of his talent as a writer. Also, he’s an original thinker. And he’s sexy too. That always helps. We had never met until the night before my reading at Books and Books when he had his own reading there. When I went up to get his book signed, we discovered that he is from Birmingham. I had arrived from Birmingham that morning. He also went to Millsaps College in Mississippi where I went to school. He was also a Pike at Millsaps. So was I. And he lives one block away from me in New York. As you can tell from reading my blog and having read my book, that my life is full of heightened coincidences. Heightened Coincidences is, indeed, how I often describe the narrative flow of my life to people. Meeting Christopher was one of the loveliest in a long time. I look forward to eating at one of our local restaurants when we both get back to New York and finding others in our lives.

And now I’m going to go put on a pair of shorts, take off my shoes, exhale the three-weeks of airline air I’ve been breathing in on this trip, and take a long walk on the beach. I’m going to go over what all has transpired and connect all the Heightened Coincidences I’ve experienced on this tour. Once I’ve done that I am going to empty my mind as I let my feet feel the ebb and flow of the tides and - toes tingling, allowing time itself to ebb and flow - BE THANKFUL.

More anon …

I’m sitting here in the lobby of my hotel in South Beach and trying to process these last few days. As busy as this trip has been, the last few days, coming as they have at the end perhaps, have been physically - and emotionally - exhausting.

An explanation.

Atlanta was in a hectic mode when I was there because of the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. It is a city of traffic anyway. But when I was there it was even more hectically crowded - as my hotel was - with hopped-up, hoop-loving packs of heterosexual men hoping that their favored proxies of masculinity would prevail on the hardwood. Even I - non-heterosexual, non-hopped up, but loving those proxies of masculinity with equal fervor - have always wanted to be at an NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament. I just didn’t realize that when I finally made it to the same city at the same time as one, it would be for a reading of a book I had written. It was an odd feeling knowing that almost everyone in the city was focused on the final game the Monday night I read at the Borders Buckhead store. There in a corner of that store was a small oasis of gay men and a couple of middle-aged women who had come to hear me read. It dawned on me: I was their proxy, yet we were all on the same team. We all wanted to prevail. That’s what the book has proven to me. My pain, my surviving of it, my ability to observe and laugh at the absurdity in the midst of it all, is specific to the story I have to tell, but there is a commonality I have been witness to from my side of the podium as I read from my book and talk afterwards with those of you who are showing up. These readings - this blog - is a gathering place for those of us who need to gather. One of the gay guys gathered there in Atlanta was sitting on the back row. He was a very cute college kid. Very cute. I noticed he was with one of the middle-aged women. When they came up for me to sign the woman’s book after the reading and discussion period, she told me she was his mother. I signed words to this effect for her inside her book: For someone who knows the power of maternal love. Mississippi Sissy, as much as being about the coming of age of a little gay boy, is also a book about just such power. (In fact, I was just asked to read at Women and Children bookstore in Chicago on May 3rd so watch for me there.) The mother in Atlanta then asked me to pose with her so her child could take a picture of us. When she stood next to me, she unbuttoned her shirt and displayed a PFLAG t-shirt she was wearing. Her son smiled broadly - he was even cuter when he smiled - and brought out a camera and flashed a couple of photos of us. “You really do know something about the power of maternal love, judging by that smile on your son’s face,” I told her. He lowered the camera. His smile broadened. “She sure does,” he said. “I’m so lucky to have her for a mom.” She buttoned her shirt. “I’m luckier to have him for a son,” she said. I watched them walk through the shelves of books at Borders back out into the parking lot and deeply missed my own mother, as I’ve missed her throughout this tour, as I missed her throughout the writing of my book, and wondered if she had lived would she have ever donned a t-shirt with those initials on it. She might not have, I determined, out of a sense of style but not out of a sense of shame. I made it back to the eerily empty hotel after the reading - all the other guests must have been at the game - in time to watch the announcement of the starting line-ups for Florida and Ohio State. Memories of my basketball coach father overtook those of my mother as I lay in the dark and watched dunk after dunk after dunk and drifted off to sleep. When I awoke I saw that the proxies from Florida had won. But it was those proxies of a happy family - that t-shirt wearing PFLAG mom and her fledgling man of a son - who will stay in my memory from my first experience of being in the same city as the championship game of a Final Four, especially when I watched Joakim Noah from the Florida Gators climb through the throngs of rabid fans in the stands after the game to find his own proud mother so he could hug her tightly and bury his crying, happy face on what appeared to be her always ready shoulder. At that moment, I cried a little too.

The next night I read at Outwrite bookstore and cafe in Atlanta. The staff there, headed by owner Phillip Rafshoon, could not have been nicer or supportive of me. Outwrite is an amazing store and I suggest you check it out if you’re ever in Atlanta and give them your business. We packed the place and afterwards I signed lots of books and met lots of nice and interesting people, including a woman, Sarah Jones, who had gone to school with my father and mother in Harperville, Mississippi, and, as happens at almost every reading I’ve done, told me she had seen my father play basketball. There were two other people there who told me the same thing at Outwrite. “To this day,” one older gentleman told me, “your daddy was the best basketball player I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some great ones. He could put on a show. I once watched a whole team, when playing defense against his dribbling, go and sit on their bench, all of’em just giving up and letting him show off. The crowd went wild.” I guess I come by my showing-off honestly. Anyway, after the event Phillip took me over to E. Lynn Harris’s beautiful home in Buckhead where E. Lynn had, yes, gathereed some of his best friends for a party in my honor E. Lynn is one of the most generous men I’ve encountered in a long time. Thank you, E. Lynn, for opening up your home to me and hosting such a great party. It was interesting to be one of the few Caucasians in the crowd of beautiful African American men and women. It gave me an appreciation of how they must feel when they are in the minority in a crowd. But I have to say, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, as we say in the south - especially when I was talking to the ex-Indiana University football player who now models in Atlanta. E. Lynn knows how to assemble a guest list.

That party and the receptive customers at Outwrite were just what I needed to lift my spirits that night. My Amazon numbers - which I foolishly checked before heading out were not that good (up in the thousands) - and I had gotten a call from the managing editor of Allure magazine, where I am (was now) contributing editor with an offer of a new contract that I was not pleased with. It was odd being on the New York Times Bestseller List for the last two weeks (alas, I fell off this week because of Bill Bradley and Jerome Groopman selling lots of books, but I plan to claw my way back on with your help if you continue to spread the word about the book for I’m counting on the gathering - there’s that word again - force of our numbers out there to get me back on it) and then receiving a professional kick in the teeth like that. I decided on the ride to Outwrite that I wouldn’t accept the contract offer and take a leap of faith and see what unfolded in my life. It scares me to take this leap but I feel this is the universe pushing me forward in some way. The problem I’ve always had is trying to be the successful version of the idea I had about myself when I first moved to New York when I was 19 and a fledgling man myself and seeing my future self as a proxy of the dreams I had back then. I am now no longer a fledgling man, but a full-grown one and it’s time I started owning that. We can none of us be proxies for ourselves or even the idea we have of ourselves. We must BE ourselves. I must BE myself, more specifically, and this is not who I thought I would be at 51. But this is who I am. It is time to be this person and let success be the byproduct of a more evolved acceptance of myself. This tour and all the reaching out from you and to you has taught me that. I really do feel I am a different person after these intense three weeks on this part of my tour. No, I take that back. I feel as if the person who started the tour was the different person. This is now, simply, who I am. Thank you.

But that night in Atlanta, after the party, I couldn’t sleep because of the panic attack I was feeling in the middle of the night when my eyes flew open and I started wondering what if I never worked again and couldn’t pay the rent. I said a prayer. I took deep breaths. I prayed some more. But my heart continued to race. Finally, I got up and retrieved the video tape that my brother had made for me of an old PBS show in which Frank Hains was interviewing Eudora Welty back in the early 1970s when I knew them both. I had been lugging that tape around through the myriad airports I’ve been trudging through on this trip. I’ve kept it in a plastic bag along with my father’s baseball glove my sister gave me back in Vicksburg, the two objects the talismans I tend to touch when I’m waiting for my plane to take off and carry me to yet another city to meet more of you. I put the tape in the VCR in my Atlanta hotel room, the first VCR machine I’ve had in a hotel room so far. I had not seen Frank Hains in this way - alive there on tape, dapper, sweetly erudite - since I found him murdered over 30 years ago. He has only lived in my memory and in the writing in my book. It was oddly soothing to lay in the dark in that hotel room in Atlanta and let his voice and visage and Miss Welty’s lovely lilt wash over me as they discussed the musicality of her written language, their love of the south, the almost physical germination of her fiction, her hatred of electric typewriters. The spectral aspect of their continuing presence in my life was not only heightened by the flickering light of the television screen but also, as I closed my eyes and listened as they soothed me back to sleep, by a kind of lullaby formed by the loveliness of their voices alone, their ever well-chosen words, the comfort they could always give me by keeping my mouth shut and being completely still - stillness is an overlooked accomplishment in this world of ours - and listening to what they had to say, a kind of lullaby circling back to me all these years later to let me know that I would be okay if I continued to listen as they taught me to listen - yet again to them technologically conjured in the darkness in which I found myself and to my calming heart.

The next morning I got up and caught the Southern Crescent, a train that Miss Welty always liked to take to New York City when visiting her publisher and friends up north. I was taking it to Birmingham, however, for my next reading. On the train, for the four hours it took to get there, I was sitting in front of a woman and her small son. Again, a lullaby-like voice lulled me. The child was a talkative one and ended almost every sentence in a low, almost whispered word: Mama. “Look at me, Mama,” he would say. “See the pretty trees, Mama,” he said, pointing out the window at the spring greenery rushing by. Then, at one point, this: “Read to me, Mama.” Softly, she read aloud, as my own mama would read to me so long ago, from the grown-up book she had been silently reading while all his mama-entreaties had been aimed her way. It was from Anne Lamott’s new book Grace (Eventually). It was the essay titled Chirren. “What’s chirren?” asked the child. His mother explained as he cuddled next to her behind me and I heard the adult words “abortion” and “breeder” read aloud amidst all the innocent love that was in that essay about Lamott having her first child in her late 30s. I also heard a line about holding that child which was like holding a part of her soul. I heard the book close behind me when the woman finished that particular essay. “Can I hold it, Mama?” came her own child’s voice. At first I thought he meant a part of her soul, but then realized he was talking about Lamott’s book. “What’s this say, Mama?” he asked. His mother read aloud once more: “‘Where is the Life we lost when living?’ T. S. Eliot,’” which I later discovered at my reading that night when I picked up Grace (Eventually) to more closely peruse it, is the quote Lamott uses to open the book. Mother and child fell asleep on the train. As did I.

When I awoke, I was in Birmingham and an old college buddy of mine, Jan Dickson Hunter, picked me up and we had lunch at a barbecue place. Later than night I read at Books a Million at a tony mall outside Birmingham and had a great crowd. I don’t know if it was my exhaustion or my worry about my job situation or the emotional remnants of overhearing the mother-and-son intimacy behind me on the Southern Crescent, but by the end of my reading about going dressed as a witch for the Halloween carnival a couple of weeks before my own mother’s death when I was a little boy not much older than the one on the train earlier in the day affected me more deeply than usual. But I recovered at the Mexican restaurant later with Jan and a bunch of her gay friends and my first cousin’s gorgeous twenty-something lesbian daughter who goes to school in Birmingham. It was great to spend some time with such a lovely second-cousin. It’s the first time we had ever met. She’s a great kid and I hope she stays in my life. I guess it was my own maternal side making itself known.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a very early flight to Miami through Orlando yesterday. When I got here I walked around to some of my old haunts. (I owned a condo here for two years about five years ago.) I ate lunch at my favorite restaurant, Ice Box, on Michigan off Lincoln Road. Go in and say hello to its handsome owner Robert if you’re ever down here. Great food and great desserts. Even Oprah featured his cakes on her show. Dropped by Basics new furniture store back in the alleyway by Books and Books, the bookstore where I’m reading tonight at 8 p.m., to say hi to Steven and his boyfriend, Brian, who own that store, one of the hippest in town. Basics original store is still there, its a clothing boutique on the other side Books and Books. They were also my neighbors when I lived here. Their house has one of the most beautiful bogenvillia trees out in front of it and I used to love to sit in my living room and look out my front window at it. I also dropped by to see my old real estate agent who now has his own firm on Jefferson off Lincoln, Gary Hennes. And next to his office is Galerie, the chicest store in South Beach owned by the chicest woman, the gloriously German Regina. It was great to see all these old friends.

After sitting in Regina’s store and catching up with her I walked down to my old condo on Espanola and Meridian. I thought it would be fun to see what shape the building was in. I didn’t realize when I got there that the one memory that would surface the moment I stood there was the morning I got my HIV diagnosis. I was living in that condo when I got it. I rode my bike back to that corner from my doctor’s office, locked it up, and held myself together the whole ride until I got through the door. I then sat dazed for a few moments on my sofa. When I got up to go get a drink of water I felt my knees buckling and grabbed a wall in a corner and slid down on the floor and ended up in a ball where I sobbed for a long time. Back then, I honestly didn’t know how such a diagnosis would affect me - physically or mentally or emotionally or spiritually. In every one of those ways it has strengthened me. I didn’t know that though back then when I was balled up on the floor. I really thought I had received a death sentence. But isn’t that what we all receive the moment we are born and we are held, like parts of their souls, in our mothers’ waiting arms. I didn’t know back then that this, five years on, would be the Life I’ve found while I am living. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this life on this tour in this city at this moment I am typing these words about that memory. I looked away from that old condo of mine that held that long-ago corner where I was literally a ball of fear. The bogenvillia tree, beautifully in bloom, was once more in my line of vision. I stood - completely still - and fearlessly turned my back on that frightened proxy of myself five years ago whose fear - of happiness, of success, of my true self - had infected me long before any virus had. Some viruses may never be cured. But fear can be. The bogenvillia has always been beautiful.

I meant to post last night after my two appearances in Atlanta, but E. Lynn Harris had a wonderful party for me at his beautiful home in Buckhead and I didn’t get back to my hotel till late so I packed and tried to sleep and got up this morning at 6:30 a.m. in order to catch a train to Birmingham. Who catches a train outta Georgia to Alabama? Who else. Me. Folks last night at the party didn’t even know there was a train from Atlanta to Birmingham. So if you’re over in Birmingham reading this right now, come hear me read and let me sign a book for you at Books A Million at 757 Brookwood Village. I’ll be there at 7 p.m. tonight April 4th, God willin’ and the water don’t rise, as I heard somebody say last night about something else. That’s an old southern expression I hadn’t heard in years and just wanted to use it this morning myself.

In the meantime, you can go on Bookslut.com and read an interview with me about the book by Stephanie Merchant, someone who really understood what I was trying to do when I wrote it. It was just posted yesterday. Bookslut.com is a great site for book lovers and I am happy I was asked to be on it.

I’ll write more once at get across the state line.