You can read my 2000 Vanity Fair cover story on Heath Ledger which was just posted on vanityfair.com and also a personal reminiscence of him I quickly wrote this afternoon to accompany the story online. I hope the reminiscence is appropriate. I only had half an hour to write it and my mind was - is still - reeling. There is no circus atmosphere like Anna Nicole’s death created. Only sadness.

Hope all my readers out there had a great New Year’s Eve surrounded by those you love or by those you loved for one night or those you will grow to love in 2008. Me? I went to see Charlie Wilson’s War by myself - an odd movie: a comedy about a serious subject, a right-wing movie made by liberals, its two leads miscast but oddly affecting, a kind of sweeping epic-like war movie that came in at 90 minutes, and yet it finally all worked in spite of itself. I interviewed Tom Hanks years ago on the morning after his Oscar win for Forrest Gump - he came up blurry-eyed after a sleepless night to my hotel room for breakfast at the Bevery Wilshire and ended up, surprising us both, spending most of the day with me - and he became one of the actors with whom I’ve always remained on friendly terms. His wife Rita is a gem. Both are “real folk” and have been so nice to my nephews and niece when I took them each out to LA for Oscar weekends for their graduations from high school when we would run into them at parties and picnics during that weekend’s small-town atmosphere. So I’m always glad when I can recommend a Hanks movie. He’s at his rascally best as Charlie Wilson. Anyway, I then came home and - old theatre queen that I am - plopped down in front of the tv and watched a Jerry Herman documentary on PBS and then headed over to a friend’s party for 45 minutes. I stayed till 12:10 a.m. and then headed home to Archie, my dog, and my Ambien. Another friend - who runs the Times Square Business District - asked me to come up to a private party above Times Square right next to where Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin were broadcasting above the throngs, but the thought of making it through those throngs to get there and then to make it through them again to get home scared me away. He asks me every year and one year I’m going to brave the throngs. But, yet again, I was asleep by 12:30 on a New Year’s Eve.

Christmas Eve was spent for the second year now over at Jason Moore’s beautiful loft in the Chelsea art gallery district. Jason is the director of Avenue Q and the current off-Broadway sensation Speech & Debate and is also staging the Broadway musical version of Shrek that Dreamworks is producing this coming year. He graciously has a group of us “Christmas orphans” over for a delicious meal and a game of Celebrity. Christmas Day I went to see Sweeney Todd with all the cute Jewish boys. I’ve seen so many productions over the years - including the originial with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou - and, though I thought that parts of the film version were enthralling, I also thought the critics had over-sold it a bit. Johnny Depp is always good and interesting to watch. He’s another of my favorite cover story subjects back during my old days at Vanity Fair and is one of the few of my subjects who made a point of calling me after the story came out to tell me how much he liked it. A real gentleman and the only person I’ve ever interviewed I wanted to kiss. I’ve wanted to fuck a few of them - and maybe even have - but he’s the only one I ever wanted to kiss. Director John Waters, a mutual friend, once told me when I told him that that I should have. “You should have just leaned over and planted one on him. Johnny would have been flattered,” he said. “Believe me he’s cool enough - and secure enough in his hetero-ness - to have been complimented.”

Okay. I realize this is turning into a gossip column posting, one that will no doubt invite some snarky comments. But sometimes dropping names is like dropping breadcrumbs behind me as I try to retrace my steps to find out why I’m sitting here alone on yet another New Year’s day. So I might as well keep going as I tell you what else I’ve been up to since I posted last. A few weeks ago I went with my old boss from Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, to a private screening that Madonna gave for her husband’s new movie and a little dinner that followed. (The movie had me at-a-loss, a kind of hipster/gangster cinematic treatise re: the id and ego and superego, as full of violence as it was of itself.) Tina and I sat with Barbara Walters at the screening and behind Sarah Jessica Parker. I’d seen Sarah a week earlier at a friend’s baby shower. Modern gay life is like old-fashioned straight life as so many of my gay friends are now having babies through adoptions or with surrogates. I’d asked Sarah about how the filming of the new Sex and the City movie was going - we’ve been acquaintances since back when she was dating Robert Downey, Jr., with whom I’d also been friendly since a wild weekend around the pool at the old Mondrian Hotel in LA when I was Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s interview magazine back in the 1980s and a subsequent even wilder one at the Cannes Film Festival. …. Ahh … The Wasted Youth of The Wastrel … Sarah is one of the coolest and kindest women in NY. As glamorous as she is now, she stays grounded in her midwest working-class upbringing. Everyone in NY who has ever met Sarah, adores her. She makes you remember why you moved to NY in the first place and continue to live here despite its many increasing Wall Street yuppie drawbacks: that a lovely artsy creature like her can move here too and still bestride it with beauty and innate good taste and not just conquer it because of the thickness of a yet another Wall Street wallet. “Can you go back to high school?” I had asked Sarah at the friend’s shower, referring to her returning to portraying Carrie Bradshaw. “You can as long as you realize you’re a helluva lot older and you don’t have the same set of friends as you did in high school,” she said before we turned to more important matters, i.e. how cute and precocious her son James Wilkie is. At the dinner after the screening - when Tina and I had finished our meal and she fled into the snowy NY night - I lingered to ogle A-Rod, the NY Yankee star - who was there hanging with Madonna and her husband Guy and other of their guests, including Josh Groban. It was one of those, yes, lovely artsy yuppie-free NY guests lists, an odd menagerie made even odder to me by my own presence there in the midst of it.

Later that week I was part of the “entertainment” at a fundraising dinner honoring writers at the Waldorf for the Democratic National Committee. I had done similar duty - reading excerpts from literary works - at an earlier dinner that honored gay and lesbian writers. I had almost backed out of doing it this time because I was so mad at the Democrats in Congress - especially NY Senator Charles Schumer - for caving to President Bush yet again and approving his water-boarding (i.e. torture) supporting new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. If we Democrats can’t stand up as a party against torture then what the hell do we stand for? I told Andy Tobias, the Treasurer of the Committee, that I hoped they would take some of the money from the dinner and check the spineless Schumer, et al, into one of NY’s hospitals for a vertebrae fusion so they could grow stronger backbones in facing Bush. I finally decided to do the dinner as a favor for Andy, an old friend, more than any allegiance to the yellow-bellied Democrats. Gov. Howard Dean was the featured speaker and Andy pulled me over to the side before the evening began to tell me that he had told Gov. Dean how upset I was re: Mukasey and that he had convinced him to open up the floor for questions so maybe I could voice my concern at that point instead of doing any grandstanding during my portion of the evening. I agreed. When the floor was opened up for questions - after a couple of soft-ball ones for the governor - I told the technician to turn my microphone back on and hit him with the Mukasey question and how could we approve an attorney general who would not come out against torture. Dean hemmed-and-hawed about how different we were from Republicans re: health care and the minimum wage. I interrupted him: “I asked you about torture. Don’t filibuster me - which, by the way, we had the votes for in the Senate. We could have filibustered Mukasey but we didn’t. It seems the Republicans are the only ones who ever have the balls to threaten to use the filibuster.” He then started to talk about how we must be doing something right since Senator Trent Lott had just resigned. “I wouldn’t bring up Trent Lott, if I were you,” I interrupted him again, “since we also approved his pet homophobic, racist Mississippi judge.” Governor Dean: “I think you can tell we didn’t plant this rather inflamatory question.” Me: “Are you saying it’s inflamatory to bring up being against torture at a Democratic fundraiser?” Dean: “Look, Kevin, I think you and I are from the same wing of the Democratic party, you’re just further out on the leftwing than I am.” Me: “So now you’re accusing me being left of you since I’m against torture? What is becoming of our party?” At that point, the crowd began to applaud me but my mic was cut off. Dean never did address the question directly but I did go up to him after the dinner to thank him for engaging me. Also after the dinner, Tony Kushner and Edward Albee and Nora Ephron all hugged me for stirring things up a bit at what was becoming a rather boring night. It was, in a way, the most fun I’d had in a long time. Rabble-rousing does tend to make one feel a bit more alive - though I’m not sure if Tony and Edward and Nora and their ilk would appreciate being referred to as rabble.

So as much as some of you might think I’m just a name-dropping nabob-wannabe who lives a rather shallow life much of the time, I do love politics as much as show business. I think it has a lot to do with my growing up during the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s and witnessing the passion and purpose it put into people’s lives. I’ve always been a political junkie. Sunday morning talking-heads shows and Keith Olberman at 8 p.m. on MSNBC and Chris Matthews’s Hard Ball at 5 p.m. are my favorite tv shows and Andrewsullivan.com and Talkingpointsmemo.com and dailykos.com and americablog.com and huffingtonpost.com are my favorite websites. So I can’t wait till Thursday for the Iowa results and then Tuesday for the New Hampshire primary. (I’m an Obama and Edwards leaner.) I’m even starting to do some work for Parade magazine - I decided, believe it or not, I’ve had enough glamor in my life and want real readership and Parade has 71 million readers a week - and I’m heading down to my little hometown in Mississippi next week to do a story about the effects of immigration on it. I’ll next be doing a story for Parade on my mentoring of Brandon - those of you who read this blog know about how I’ve mentored him for the last five years. And then, alas, I’ll be doing an interview with yet another big movie star.

But back to New Year’s. Here I am watching CNN do a marathon of all the presidential candidates and their speeches and town meetings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Feeling, I have to admit, rather lonely - which just seems to be my existential state though, existential or not, I do resolve to be less so in 2008. Yesterday I was feeling very low before I went to the gym to try to work it out of me. Sweating from my extra long treadmill run, I walked out into the brisk cold day and at the corner a stranger named Peter - thank you, Peter, if you’re reading this - stopped me to introduce himself and to thank me for writing Mississippi Sissy this past year and how much it had meant to him. I teared up on my way home but tried not to cry so I wouldn’t look too crazy to other strangers I passed on the street. But teary-eyed right now I would like to thank all you strangers out there - well, not strangers really, if you read this blog or have read my book, but friends I have yet to meet in person - who have supported me so this past year. It’s been a true blessing. I even signed on to Amazon for the first time in a long time this morning when I woke up and saw - though I know it changes from hour to hour - that Mississippi Sissy was at that particular moment still the #1 gay and lesbian memoir/biography. And the paperback - which will be out on March 4th, you can see what it looks like already since its image is up on Amazon - was already #18 in the same category. So the book in hardcover and paperback took up two places at the end of this year on that particular list’s Top 20 spots. I thank you for that.

And don’t forget to read my theatre reviews on Towleroad.com. I haven’t mentioned seeing all the plays I’ve seen since I have written so extensively there about them. Also, you can log on to the NYtimes.com and click on Real Estate and then on the past Habitats columns to read about Archie and me and our apartment in an article that recently ran in the Sunday Times. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that before.

Okay. Enough. This was a bit stream-of-consciousness-y today. But New Year’s Day calls for that, I guess. Again, to everyone out there: Have a happy and healthy 2008.

Onward.