Sorry I haven’t posted in a while but have been taking a few days off from thinking about Mississippi Sissy to concentrate on the inchoate novel that’s increasingly making itself known in my already crowded thoughts. So I have been trying to clear away some space for it - in my head, on my computer, during my days, bits of my dreams, and a large chunk of the emotional acreage I guess I can call “hopes for the future” now that Sissy, a book about my past, is itself slowly becoming a part of that also.

A week ago today I took the train down to Washington D.C. for a reading/signing at Lambda Rising off Dupont Circle. When I first arrived at the store I have to admit I was a bit depressed by the surroundings. There was really no space in the store to stage a reading. There were no chairs set up for an audience, etc. I crossed the street to a Starbucks and had an expresso and some madeleines - which always can raise my spirits if only from the caffeine and sugar - and by the time I got back to the bookstore the place had filled up with - no choice here because of the lack of chairs - a standing-room-only crowd. I cleared some books out of the way in the window of the store and stood up there as if it were a stage and did my reading. The crowd responded well and I met a lot of transplanted southerners there in D.C. Among them were ex-Mississippian Joe Stewart and his lovely wife Rachel. Is there really such a thing as an ex-Mississippian? Once you’ve been born there it’s always a part of your DNA. Willie Morris once said that if you’re a native of the state that “you will always love Mississippi but it doesn’t always love you back.” Joe and Rachel are two big fans of my book who have been so sweetly supportive of me and it through this blog. It was great meeting them in person. They are each wise and witty and Joe is full of Mississippi stories of his own. Also, T. Michael Womack, a senior Cataloging Specialist at the Library of Congress on the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages Team of the Social Sciences Cataloging Division (only in D.C. could all that be on a business card), showed up to buy a book and have me sign it. When he got to the table he also had - ever the archivist - a folder of programs from some of the plays in which I starred at Millsaps College in Mississippi and a few of the newspaper clippings of reviews of those plays with photographs of me when a had a full head of shoulder-length hair. It was a nice surprise to be reminded of my youth when “hopes for the future” was an emotional landscape with less constricted acreage.

A dear friend of mine - Andrew Sullivan, who, in my opinion, is the best blogger out there in the blogosphere - was also at the reading and we went out to eat afterwards to catch up with each other’s lives since we had seen each other last. We both live up in Ptown during the summer and are longing for our days there this year. We met an old Millsaps pal of mine, Diane Wiltshire, at the restaurant. Diane moved back to the States from Tokyo years ago when she met her husband, Dick, there where he was posted at the American Embassy. She had been married to a Japanese businessman and had two sons with him who are now in college. (The older one is my godson.) Dick also had a child from a previous marriage who was her younger son’s age and they raised their blended family out in the leafy suburbs of Virginia, where I stayed with them on this trip. Andrew and Diane and I had a great time talking about our disparate lives and, in this Bush league age we live in, our increasingly less disparate politics. The interesting thing about being in D.C. - it really is a lovely city - is realizing that the more Bush and his Rove-ing henchmen have tried to divide us in this country for their own selfishly nefarious political reasons, they have, in fact, brought so many of us closer together politically in opposing their nefariousness. Hey, I was in D.C. so I should be allowed some politics in this posting.

Diane and I drove back to Virginia after dinner. She had arranged for me to read to an 8 a.m. combined ethics/drama class at the Potomac School where her sons had metriculated. It is a tony private school where - speaking of bringing people together, toniness has a way of doing that also - many Kennedy children attended as the Cheney grandchildren do now. The interior of Potomac’s new upper school building was more like a ski lodge than a school. (Bill Clinton was a guest at its official dedication yesterday.) When Diane and I arrived last Friday many of the kids were hanging around the stone fireplace in the soaring atrium. I immediately began to feel like that young sissy back in Mississippi when we entered the high school, especially around the ruggedly lovely lacrosse players roughhousing before classes began. I averted my eyes and read a poster up on the wall about a charity event the kids were spearheading, DONATE TO DARFUR. Suddenly Modest Mouse blared from the speakers after the chimes rang for the school’s first class of the day. “That’s Chimes for Charity,” the guidance counselor, who also teaches the ethics class, told Diane and me. “On Fridays we let the kids donate money for their favorite charities in exchange for playing their favorite music between classes.” She led us into a lecture hall where about thirty kids and faculty members were assembling for my reading. It was quite an experience having to summon the energy and emotions to read from my book at that early hour. Plus, I didn’t know exactly how 16 and 17 year olds would react to the reading. But the kids could not have been more attentive or sweet or, judging by their questions afterwards, any smarter. Of course, I let slip a “shit” and a “fuck” before the reading to get them on my slightly subversive side. One of them asked me if I thought it was easier now to be a gay teenager than it was “back in the old days when you came out.” I told them all it is always difficult to be different when you’re a teenager - whether you’re gay or your politics are different than your friends or you dress differently or you want to wear your hair in some other way or even if you stutter. Indeed, stuttering was more emotionally devastating to me as a youngster than my sexuality because it was constantly on display. When I said that, one of the most ruggedly handsome of the lacrosse players sadly put his head in his hands and his buddy, sitting next to him, began lovingly - yes, lovingly, not sexually - to rub his shoulders to comfort him. The physical empathy I had for that young lacrosse player in that sad second or two touched my heart with a deep recognition. The guidance counselor told me later that he was, yes, a stutterer and that she had immediately thought of him when I said that to the assembled kids behind her but that she didn’t dare look back at him. It is an image I can’t get out of my head though since I did finally dare not only to look at him but to see him too. I hadn’t dared even to look his way when he sat down in the lecture hall after having briefly glimpsed him earlier out in the atrium before averting my eyes toward DARFUR. The maleness of his beauty and demeanor intimidated me. But in that moment of comfort displayed before me - tactile, fraternal, unguarded - I realized how the blessings of this book I’ve written continue to unfold. I had dreaded getting up at 6 a.m. in order to eat breakfast and get to the Potomac School on time. But it is a morning that I will always cherish. I hope some of the kids who heard me read will cherish it too. Yet it is that hand on the shoulder of a stutterer that is the one unexpected image from all this book touring I’ve done that will stay with me for a very long time. I guess those are the best blessings we can ever experience: the unexpected ones.

That night Diane and Dick threw me a party at their lovely home. For the third time in 24 hours I did a reading from the book. Among their guests were some of the Potomac parents who had kids who went to school with Kennedy and Kane Kanagawa, Diane’s two sons. The men were graying preppy fathers who had been formed by graying preppy fathers of their own; their wives - one specific one an elegant and beautiful Persian who works for the World Bank - came outfitted in the slightly worn Chanel suits they didn’t mind wearing on a Friday night to a neighbor’s house. Other of the guests were some of Diane’s and Dick’s professional colleagues in the national security business. Their house is down the road from Langley, Virginia, so I’ll let you come up with the correct acronym. Suffice to say, they don’t teach at the Culinary Institute of America. Politics and Prose bookstore in D.C. furnished Diane with copies of Mississippi Sissy as well as the audio version of the book that I recorded and she sold a combined total of 50 of them. It was so gracious and generous of my old friend to open her home to me and give me a party. I don’t think those middle-aged heterosexual couples would have normally bought the book. It was an interesting night. The next day Dick, on his way to a “training session,” dropped me off at Union Station for my train ride home to Manhattan. Dick, when he was the age of those students back at Potomac, longed to be an artist but got sidetracked into drawing three-dimensional maps back in the 1960s which came from the images transmitted from our country’s secret sateillites. His work was seen not in an art gallery, but it was looked at very closely in the Oval Office. He later made his more dangerous professional chops behind enemy lines during the Vietnam War in the jungles of Cambodia and Laos. He had lived life completely and selfishly on the patriotic edge until he met Diane he told me on the drive to Union Station. “She’s taught me about patience and forgiveness and how to talk about tomotoes with my neighbors. I’m not kidding, I thought the first time I had to talk about growing tomotoes with a Potomac parent at a lacrosse game I was going to have to hire myself to assassinate myself. But you know what, now I love talking about tomatoes. I’m even going to get back to my art soon. I started out as an artist. I’ve still got the soul of one. Diane recognized that in me. She nurtured that part of me back to life.” I could not give you a better description of my old friend than the one the man who loves her gave me in the car that morning. I am grateful she has always recognized that I have the soul of an artist too even when I doubted that I did, that I do.

I arrived home Saturday and met my old friend Darrell Wilks at the Biltmore Theatre to see Lovemusik, the new Harold Prince musical about the love affair between Lotte Lenya and composer Kurt Weill, two artistic souls who nutured each other in rather Germanic, tortured ways. Michael Cerveris seemed to be channelng Weill as if he were giving us a three-dimensional image from his own creative surveillance systems. I’m a big fan of Donna Murphy but she seemed miscast as Lenya, though I’m sure she’ll get mostly raves. To me it was like watching a term paper on Lenya - she had obviously done much homework - yet I never felt as if she inhabited the character. But it was a Saturday evening performance so maybe she was tired and marking the performance a bit. It happens. I did love the renditions of Speak Low (lyrics by Ogden Nash), Surabaya Johnny (lyrics by Bertolt Brecht), That’s Him (lyrics by Nash), It Never Was You (lyrics by Maxwell Anderson) and September Song (lyrics by Anderson). The book by Alfred Uhry - A Pulitzer Prize and Tony and Oscar winner - seemed a bit too jokey and clunky to me. The whole production ironically seemed old-fashioned and out-of-date for a musical about Weill and Lenya and Brecht (a Borsht Belt version of him, alas), three progenators of a new-fashioned idea of the musical when they stunned the world with The Three Penny Opera. I’ll be interested to know what my old friend Hilton Als thinks of it. He reviews theatre for the New Yorker. Hilton was sitting by Darrell and me and before he got up to leave at the end of the evening whispered, “I’m going home to read your blog.” If you haven’t read Hilton’s own memoir The Women, you should do yourself a favor and get a copy. In it, he writes an astonishingly insightful portrait of the late Dorothy Dean, a Manhattan cultural fixture who held court in her fabulously scrawny and cantankerous way. There was a little Lotte Lenya in her and alotta Lena Horne.

Monday I took an old boyfriend, Danny Edwards, to see Coram Boy. It was a huge hit at the National Theatre a couple of years ago but the New York critics this morning did not know what to make of it in their reviews. I admit it was a bit melodramatic but the stagecraft of the piece was quite exciting and I was never bored. There’s even a kind of Borsht Belt version of Handel in the production (his Hallelujah Chorus plays a big part in the production) which bothered me as much as the Brecht protrayal a few nights before. But overall it was a stirring evening in the theatre. I remember reading a rave review of the original National Theatre production during a layover at Heathrow in the American Airline’s Admiral’s Club on my way back to Manhattan from a dinner in Qatar given by the country’s royal family. (I should write about that trip at some point.) Anyway, I loved the girls who played the young boys (you’ll have to see the production to understand) and any story that touches on father/son relationships moves me as those of you who have read my book can understand.

Feeling like a father with two sons at the table, I had dinner last night with two of my favorite new people in New York, Josh and Josh of the website Josh and Josh are Rich and Famous. They are so adorable and smart and sexy and full of bushy-tailed enthusiasm for New York City. (Hmmm … I wonder if their tails really are bushy.) I name-dropped for them and they acted impressed for me. Anyway, after spending the evening with them and being touched by the freshness of their attitudes like a comforting hand reaching out to rub my sad shoulder, it added a much needed hopeful acre or two to my emotional landscape. I’m not joshing, Josh and Josh, thank you for your sweetness. I didn’t talk about tomatoes with you two but I went home and, patiently, forgave myself for ever doubting in this process of publishing a book that I am artistically capable. I wrote a few more paragraphs in my novel. I downloaded some Modest Mouse.

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