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MY THERAPIST: You seem to be forecasting your life in only worst-case scenarios.
ME: I was worried you’d say that.

Last Monday night I was invited to gay cocktails at the Rubin Museum to raise gay money for Obama’s reelection campaign. Obama, after doing The View and delivering the Barnard commencement address, was going to be in attendance.

John, my friend and January sidehunk, came with. Outside and giddy:

Inside the pinot gris was flowing and attractive people were carrying around trays of even more attractive food. A beet salad particularly thrilled us, and whenever a tray of it passed we’d eagerly grab another serving spoon. During one of the beet salad’s later laps the man and woman next to us hesitated above it, and I leaned in and said, “Oh, you’ve got to try it, we can’t stop eating it.” The woman replied, “Well, these boys sure are hungry,” diamonds and derision dripping from her every extremity.

Moments later she was but a distant memory, because:

Full of pinot gris and beet salad, I welled up.

I didn’t get to shake his hand — the gays bum-rushed the rope line — but John, being 6’5″ and able to reach over the pomade, did.

Outside we were interviewed by a Japanese television crew (if anyone finds that video, please send it to me — I’m really hoping they caption John and me as “Disney Prince and His Spittoon-Carrier”) along with a few other journalists with tape recorders, and, full of pinot gris and beet salad, I came out in the Post.

For the record, I was not a campaign volunteer in the New Hampshire primary, John was. I’m just thankful they didn’t malign me,  but I’m also fairly certain “writer from Manhattan” is Post code for “commie fag.”

(ISAAC is selling tickets to an OLDER MAN.)

ISAAC: And how did you hear how about the show?
OLDER MAN: I was just Googling gay plays, and this one came up.
ISAAC: OK.
OLDER MAN: Is it a good play?
ISAAC: It is! I loved it.
OLDER MAN: And it’s gay?
ISAAC: Well, yes, some of it is.
OLDER MAN: Great. Thank you.
ISAAC: Sure. And if I could just get your signature on the line by the X.
OLDER MAN: (signing) Aaaaaand notthatyouwouldnecessarilyknowthis, but.

(Beat.)

ISAAC: Yes?
OLDER MAN: I’m in town from Culver City with my “friend.” Where can we … go after the show?
ISAAC: You mean to, like, a –
OLDER MAN: (leans in) — a gay club.
ISAAC: Ah, yes –
OLDER MAN: No offense intended, if you aren’t –
ISAAC: No, none taken; I am gay –
OLDER MAN: OK, whew.
ISAAC: I’m just not good at the clubs, really.
OLDER MAN: Guide us, we are helpless.
ISAAC: Are you looking to stay in this neighborhood?

(The older man nods.)

ISAAC: OK, well, hmm. There are a ton of places in Hells Kitchen. I’ve been to Industry and Therapy on 52nd, or there’s the 9th Avenue Saloon and Posh, those are supposed to be OK –
OLDER MAN: Do they have dancing?
ISAAC: Um? Maybe? I’ve seen people define the space around them as space in which dancing occurs.
OLDER MAN: Will I feel uncomfortable? I’m in my fifties and I’m not out.
ISAAC: Oh, well, see, I’m out, but I stay in, so you might not want to take my nightlife recommendations.

(Isaac hands the older man his tickets.)

OLDER MAN: We’re staying at the Element, and right next door is Hunk-O-Mania.
ISAAC: Oh?
OLDER MAN: I read that they only allow women in, but the other night I watched a ton of men go in.
ISAAC: Well, maybe you should check out Hunk-O-Mania.
OLDER MAN: (small laugh) Perhaps. Sorry to trouble you.
ISAAC: Oh, it’s no trouble –
OLDER MAN: (overlapping) Thank you for your help. (waving with his ticket envelope) Thank you.
ISAAC: Enjoy your weekend with your friend.
OLDER MAN: We hope to.

I told myself I didn’t have a cupholder for it, but that shit is fresh. Hats off, Lena Dunham.

… and you watch his WHOLE VIDEO WITHOUT MASTURBATING, JUST TRYING TO FEEL CLOSE TO HIM.

If anyone knows this guy, tell him I love White Teeth, and him.

Last week I was a special guest on Naked Radio Live’s podcast, recorded at Ars Nova. I read a love poem and a brand-new story. Click to listen:

I was lucky enough to be invited to an Obama campaign event at Chelsea Piers the other week where I got to, you know, meet Michelle Obama and stuff:

She’s beautiful and she glows like a well-spoken sun. She looked me right in the eye and said that the campaign needed my help, could they count on it? I gay-gasped in her face, and cried a little on her hand, and she moved on. It was a moment I’m sure we will both cherish for years to come.

I highly recommend Once, which I finally saw last week. It’s beautiful and tender and sad, with gorgeous singing, design, and movement, not to mention achy-breaky moments of silence. AND HARMONY. AND STEVE KAZEE IN A HENLEY.

I also saw Venus in Fur, which I’d recommend for Nina Arianda’s performance. Unfortunately Hugh Dancy was out the night I saw it, but his understudy acquitted himself well. I was thinking while watching it, boy, how lucky for Nina Arianda that this play came along, but then I thought, boy, how lucky for this play that Nina Arianda came along. It really is an impressive performance, one at the beginning of what will surely be an impressive career.

And then I saw Lady from Dubuque, which I also very much enjoyed. It was in one of the Signature Theater’s brand-new spaces, and the seats are so comfortable I could’ve sat there all night. The elderly subscribers around me were bewildered by the comfort and the incredible sightlines — “I have no complaints,” the man behind me said, and he actually sounded disappointed, so I suppose that in and of itself was a complaint.

I’m sitting in a bar
at a party for a friend,
trying on a brown liquor evening for size.

I see you outside on the street corner,
both of you are framed nicely by the window I’m sitting at:
you and your friend.
His head is pressed to yours,
snowflakes are salt-and-peppering the air around you,
and I think to myself,
all right, I’ll watch them make out a little;
it’ll kill time while the ice melts and appeases this
sulfuric acid in my glass.

But then his arms drop from around you
to dangle at his side,
and he pitches forward a little,
and it becomes clear that you are supporting all of his weight.
You embrace him not as lover
but as buttress,
and without you standing there
he would surely drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes,
like the sack of potatoes that made the vodka
I could’ve ordered, but no, I wanted to be like
Glenn Close on Damages.

He is very drunk.
Your hands go to either side of his face
and you speak directly to him
with loving firmness.
You reach for something in his pockets,
and he squirms, dodges you,
runs from you,
all with his head still pressed to yours.
It’s like you’re a maypole
and he’s a ribbon that won’t remember any of this
in the morning.

Finally you procure a phone from his pocket,
and as you dial a number he pushes away from you
and stumbles jelly-legged into traffic.
You pull him back and hold him
by the nape of the neck
with one hand,
and again you speak to him with that
loving firmness,
and oh, how I’d love for you to speak to me that way
in Duane Reade,
or when I can’t pick a restaurant.

My drink diluted a little,
I swish a sip around and down and
ache to be yours.
It tastes like the holidays we could share,
our families.

I imagine you’re calling your friend’s roommate,
making sure she’ll be up to help him out of the cab
and up the stairs and into bed.
And to call you once he’s there,
lest you start to worry.
My god, you’re the most wonderful person
I’ve never met.
You put his phone back in his pocket
and turn to hail a cab,
your charcoal coat open,
the crisp white shirt you’re wearing the fuck out of underneath
hardly protecting you from the elements.
Who, I nearly wonder aloud, do you have to
remind you to button your coat,
especially on Avenue A,
where people give each other piggyback rides
and Hepatitis C?

I want to put on lipstick
and kiss all the collars of your shirts.
I wanted this to be my Year of Yes
but I just keep digging in my heels on every little thing.
Whitney Houston died today;
I remember making carpet angels
on my bedroom floor when I was eleven
and listening to the Bodyguard cassette tape
over and over again,
and OH, THERE’S THE BROWN LIQUOR.

Funny, with vodka it’s quips and doom,
but with these burning brown sips
all I want to do is run my bare boy-feet through that carpet,
and tell my parents I love them
without being all awkward about it,
and feel your hand on the back of my neck when the fan collects
those first flecks of shit, I swear to god,
I’m scared of so many simple, inevitable things.

I am also suddenly in the mood for hard-won accordion music.

I look up and you both are gone.
Perhaps you got in the cab too,
perhaps you thought you’d have better luck one block west (you will),
perhaps you put him in a cab as planned and walked off,
coat and shirt open to the flurries,
to continue your night.

Micah and I went to see the Roundabout’s excellent revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on Friday night. Sitting directly behind us was a young straight couple, and the male half made his displeasure known immediately: “Oh, man, they’re British?” he asked his girlfriend at full volume. “This is boring. Can we go?” She told him they could go at intermission, so at each scene change, as if willing it to happen, he’d say, “Intermission!”

“This is boring, let’s go, let’s go, I’m bored,” he kept saying. Finally, one of the characters said (and I paraphrase), “I heard from Helena,” and another said, “Helena who?” and the guy behind us said, “Helena Rigby!”

WHICH ISN’T EVEN THE NAME OF THE SONG.

Micah looked back at him, theater aficionado code for kindly shut up, you are not in your living room, and in response the guy said, “Faggot.” The air around us went dead. “What?” Micah asked, in disbelief. “You faggot,” the guy repeated, “turn and look at me again. Turn and look at me again and I’ll knock you out.”

Micah and I faced the stage, both in shock. Now, I’m terrible with confrontation. I much prefer an icy dinner party where, say, my uncle’s new girlfriend is being openly ignored by the entire family. Micah, on the other hand, fashions himself a gay sheriff and thrives on the thought of justice being served — I still chill at the memory of a heated interchange he had with the manager of a shady smoothie place – so I thought to myself, there’s going to be a fight, my glasses are going to get broken, and everyone in this theater is going to hear me scream for help and think an elderly woman’s husband needs a doctor.

The guy continued to rant to his girlfriend: “He takes it in the ass, but he turns and looks at me? Fuck that. Fuck that.” And he just kept going, emitting little angry blips every two minutes: “Fucking queer. (two minutes) Fucking snob.”

Finally they zipped up their coats and left. We allowed ourselves to breathe again and, for the first time in thirty minutes, paid attention to the play. We’d missed some really key contextual shading, and a whole new character was onstage (“Helena Rigby,” if you will), but to the production’s credit we were easily drawn back in. At intermission two adorable nearby straight guys informed us that they would’ve had our back had things escalated. Nice to know, and hopefully the girlfriends at their side, endeared by their mates’ modernity, rode them after with extra liberal arts vigor.

Two things in closing. First of all, taking it in the ass is extremely painful and therefore anyone who can withstand it is REALLY FUCKING TOUGH*. Second, I don’t know for a fact that one of the slurs he hurled was “snob.” It is, after all, a five-dollar word, and I’m pretty sure he spent his five dollars on tolls coming in through the Lincoln Tunnel.

* Except for me. I am not tough.

My parents, brother, and I were driving around with my grandmother in Ohio over the holiday. Hers being a town of staggering smallness, she knew the inhabitants of every house we passed. Invariably something horrible had happened to all of them. In that house on the right lived a couple who threw a barbecue one summer – their sons got too close to the fire, and the fire “got the boys.” Just down that road a ways was a young woman from Mexico who gave up everything she knew to live on her new husband’s farm – his tractor flipped over on him in a ditch. Next cornfield over belonged to a newly-retired couple who were trying to be more active in their third act – on one of the morning walks they were really starting to love, they were mowed down by three bicyclists from out of town who didn’t slow on their turns and didn’t see them, you know, over the corn.

We began to dread every new story. It was a census of fatal mishaps. Her eyes would catch sight of a house in the lessening distance, and she’d say, “Oh, you know who lives in that house? Ralph Lerner, from church,” and after a while we’d all shout, “No! Stop! Don’t tell us anything else about Ralph Lerner; we don’t want to get attached or start to care about him!”

Later in the trip, my grandmother said to me, “I never wanted to marry your grandfather, you know.” I was standing in her doorway, and we’d been talking about New York. She continued, “I wanted to move to the city and become a journalist. But Grandpa’s love was like God’s love. It took hold of me and my life.” Another night we were dropping her off at her retirement home, and as she got out of the car she said, “Sometimes I shake my fist up at heaven and I say, ’Darn you, Hal; you left me here!’” She hugged my mother and said to her, “I’m ready to go. I’m just ready to go, you know?” and we walked her to her door. I didn’t know what to say. I cannot imagine being ready to go. But there’s time for that, I suppose. It’s a life’s work.

I hadn’t been on Grindr in a couple weeks, being so busy with show preparations, but on Sunday during some downtime I logged back on. Two minutes later I got a message from someone that said:

omg you’re so gross dude

Just an out-of-the-blue, friendly memo that my face is gross. Amazing, and altruistic. I deleted Grindr, figuring I could do without that kind of energy in my life, at least for a few days. Apparently I deleted it just in time.

Thank you to everyone who came to my show on Friday. Thank you as well to the staff at Ars Nova, my director Jason Eagan, and my co-star John Behlmann. It was an evening I will cherish for a long, long time.

Photos: Alexis Buatti-Ramos

The other week I was asked out by a Gorgeous Spaniard, or at least I think I was.

He’s a performer, and the company he’s a member of was doing a show at my theater. One night he was the company’s box office liaison, and when I let him inside my office to put his stuff down I admired his coiffure, his glasses, his scruff. Then he began to speak, in seductive, surprising cadences, the words falling out of his mouth like fucking European glitter. I thrilled to his presence; it had gifted an unremarkable evening with wattage.

We began to batner. I thought to myself, don’t get carried away, he’s way too gorgeous to be into you, flirting is like breathing to a Gorgeous Spaniard, even his farts bat their eyelashes, and then I thought, fuck it, I’m going to get better at this and flirt back a little, for practice, or at least a memory to cling to irrationally when I’m old and crossing the street with my Duane Reade bags. And then, as the curtain went up and he was signing the box office reports, he said, “I feel like having a glass of wine before I head home. Would you like to join me for a glass of wine?”

My face got hot, my clothed body parts began to sweat, and my heart fistbumped my ribcage. It seemed like such a natural question, and it was so smoothly asked, like in a movie or the life of a confident person. I wanted so desperately to say yes.

But I couldn’t. I had a dinner meeting in a half an hour with someone insufferable, and I didn’t want to cancel at such late notice. “I would love to, but I can’t,” I said tragically, “I have to meet this guy about a thing,” and then I asked, “But what about tomorrow? I could do tomorrow,” and he said, “OK, tomorrow,” and left.

As I walked to dinner I felt vibrant and triumphant, like Angela Bassett at the climax of all of her movies. I’d met and in a matter of two hours been asked out by a dashing man who smelled nice and said his sentences like questions. At the dinner with the guy about the thing, which was excruciating, I kept thinking about making crazy Almodóvar love to the Gorgeous Spaniard — I imagined us collapsing in a heaving heap on his kitchen floor in Williamsburg, covered in flour and Spanish wine, tatters of his shirt in my fists, my earlobe bloody from the hoop earring he tore out with his teeth.

That night I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I wanted this man in such a high-stakes way that the excitement gave way to fear. As the garbage truck made its sunrise route along 181st Street I was awake and convinced that we hadn’t made firm-enough plans for an actual date, and that the movie I was in did not star Angela Bassett, it starred Imelda Staunton.

My fears were grounded. He did not show up to the theater the following night. There was a work-related reason, the company manager assured me, but I was too busy weeping and why-god-whying to hear it. I scraped together a shred of the previous night’s high, stole his number from the contact sheet, and texted him, asking if he’d still like to get that glass of wine sometime.

And I have not heard a gorgeous word from him since. De radio el silencio. I mean, what? Does he have glasses of wine with men every night, and that first night was my only shot because he had a last-minute cancellation? Did it even happen? Was there a Gorgeous Spaniard? I suppose I’ll never know.

I do have a memento — high-end shaving cream, provided by one of his company’s sponsors, which he gave me from a gift bag the night he worked. It’s under a pile of papers right now, but every now an then I open it up and smell it. It’s pretty amazing. I can’t use it; I can’t do fragrances, on account of my eczema, which is worse than ever, what with the mild days and the cold days, and the going to bed in a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy and waking up in a Mike Leigh despair porn.

I’m off to the Middle of Nowhere, Ohio with my parents and brother to visit family, write my show, and count Bachmann bumper stickers. Maybe I’ll see a shirtless farmhand, and maybe he won’t beat me with a tire iron for taking a Hipstamatic picture of him with my phone. Safe and happy holidays to you all. Back in a week.

The MTA should have them on payroll — god knows they’ve got everyone else on. Also, swoon for the Alexander Skarsgård doppelgänger on saxophone.

I was hiding in the kitchen at a holiday party near the people I knew and the champagne punch I’d just met when I caught sight of a good-looking young man sampling cocktail wieners from of a Crock-Pot on the counter. I’d had half of a pot cookie and two cups of punch, so I felt emboldened enough to lean in and ask him, “How are those wieners?” Unfortunately I wasn’t emboldened enough to ask this in a flirtatious tone, so I sounded like I was conducting a door-to-door survey for Crock-Pot.

“Good,” he said, spearing three wieners on a toothpick. Still not quite nailing a flirtatious tone, sounding more like someone’s inquisitive niece, I asked, “You take three at a time?”

“Yup,” he replied, popping them into his mouth, adding, “I’m a triple threat.”

I laughed congenially, trying to imagine the shadow his strong jaw would cast in the glow from my Christmas tree. Pleased, he reached across four people to tap his friend on the shoulder and tell him, “This guy asked me if I was taking three at a time, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a triple threat.’” They laughed, loudly.

This is why I don’t go to parties — they’re open mic nights for attractive people. And we laugh, because their arms are priceless heat conductors. We laugh, and we dance for them, and when they say jump we say how high. And if, when they’re done laughing at their own nonsensical joke, they turn back to us and dare us to put four cocktail wieners in our mouth, we do it.

Yes, I put four cocktail wieners in my mouth because he told me to. When I looked up his friend had joined him. They were angled towards each other a little — a bitchy migratory V — and they were watching me make not-quick-enough work of a mouthful of spiced meat. His friend leaned in and whispered something in his ear, and they both laughed. It was like middle school, it was like they were bullies in the fucking gay schoolyard, where the sandbox is full of cheap coke and the slide is shaped like a raised eyebrow.

I couldn’t have gotten home to Frasier faster.

ISAAC: Hey, I want to talk to you. I want to give you a piece of my mind.
SHAME: Shame.
ISAAC:  Yes.
SHAME: Shame. Say it with me: shaaaaame.
ISAAC: Oh my god, yes, shame, you’re a movie called Shame.
SHAME: It’s also what I’m about.
ISAAC: (palm to forehead) That is clear.
SHAME: I seem to have hit a nerve. It’s OK — I did at Cannes, too.
ISAAC: No, no. What hit a nerve is that you didn’t hit a nerve. Look, I know shame. I traffic in shame. I once rode the subway 95 blocks before realizing I had cum in my hair. And last night I ate an entire bowl of cereal in the dark.
SHAME: Jesus.
ISAAC: You could’ve been great. You could’ve been incisive and fair, painful and seductive. You could’ve been a complicated experience, impossible now given your grey color palette and ludicrous soundtrack –
VIOLINS: (screeching) Sex with strangers!
CELLOS: (moaning) Can’t connect!
PIANO: (furious arpeggios) Horrible life!
ISAAC: Instead you’re judgmental and heavy-handed and kind of miserable.
SHAME: I bet you enjoyed my sex scenes, though, you dirty fuck.
ISAAC: Not really.
SHAME: Not even Michael Fassbender’s big dick?

MICHAEL FASSBENDER’S DICK: Not even me?

ISAAC: I mean, my god, does the thing wear a sock and a shoe?

I saw a screening of this tonight and really enjoyed it. There were scenes I could barely watch, I was so uncomfortable. Charlize Theron hits it out of the park — a perfect performance. And she and Patrick Wilson are just so beautiful I half-expected the screen to burst into diamonds, which would then rain down on us, scarring our faces and gouging our eyes, making them onscreen together our last sight, which would be OK.

Last week I went to a Q+A with Joan Didion at Symphony Space, during which a young woman approached the microphone and said she had a question about redemption. “A lot of times,” she said, “when people have experienced despair and loss like you have they still have a moment of redemption at the end.
Even in something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which you mention in your book, there’s that image of the blue ocean and the beautiful world, there’s that redemption, and I didn’t find any in your book, so I’m wondering: did you have that moment?”

“No,” Joan Didion answered, “I didn’t.” The young woman paused, and said, “Okaaaay,” and then asked, “So, what, there isn’t any?” to which Joan Didion said, “That was not my experience, I’m sorry,” and for the tiniest of seconds the room buzzed with this crazy energy, a couple hundred people jointly terrified and considering mortality, until the young woman’s final “okaaaay” as she slunk back to her seat allowed for laughter.

I just thought that was the wildest thing.

And powerful:

Stay with us, Jonah. We hear you and are sending you LOVE.

My coworker Brigham, his boyfriend Zac, and their friend made this video which is all over the Internet today. Ten bucks says they’re on Ellen by the end of the month:

Way better than this trash — the “SuperFestive!” reboot, complete with Santa handing out Macy’s coupons to innocent children, Justin Bieber fucking shopping, and Mariah slutting it up with a silver bell: