When I was a grad student at Columbia I  attended a reading/Q&A with Philip Gourevitch, a writer who had begun as a journalist, found acclaim with his book on the Rwandan genoicde, and had recently been appointed editor of the Paris Review. Most of his words that day are lost to me now, except for this: at some point in his career he’d lost interest in interviewing politicians because, he said, “They just lie. All of them.”

We all figure that out at some point, but there was something about the way he said it that day that stuck with me.  Interviewing the dishonest, he said, “Was tiring and – frankly – dull.” It’s much more interesting to hear someone at least try to tell the unvarnished truth.

Politicians lie because they must try to be all things to all people (and, let’s face it, all corporations). Who the hell knows what Obama really thinks about gays? I found his wife, who clearly had mixed feelings about the political spotlight, much more fascinating. She was a little too smart. A little too private. After the election, of course, she had to soften her edges.

At some point all politicians become dull. Who can connect with a liar? Contemporary heroes stay heroic for about thirty seconds. When their flaws are revealed, the world turns on them. But we need each other’s flaws.

The DJ and musician Rich Morel recently commented on his blog about the Killers’ song “Mr. Brightside”:

Brandon Flower’s  vocal has an incredibly vulnerable quality to it. That is what makes him and the band so great.  It’s always the fragile aspects that make me connect with people.

Strength is a glass shield;  my interest slides off those who wave their “strength” around for everyone’s supposed benefit. Which is why I loved Amy Winehouse. In every break-up song she had a part, and she copped to it.

Tell me the truth, regardless of how it makes you look. Tell me where you’ve been broken. When someone gives me that, I feel less alone.

I know what you’ve been thinking.

“All I really want is to kick back in a barber’s chair with a free glass of wine and listen to a series of sexy writers read their work on a Tuesday night in October. That’s it. That’s all I want. Why is that so hard to find?”

I’m here to make your dreams come true.

Yes, the Barbershop Reading Series returns for a special event, co-hosted by LITQUAKE, San Francisco’s biggest, rowdiest, most awesome literary festival. Maybe you remember the Barbershop series. Maybe you even remember me as the host. Well this time, I’m one of the series of sexy writers reading from their work.

The series will also include Michael Alenyikov, Nick Krieger, Malinda Lo, Monica Nolan, and Rob Rosen. I promise you’ll be entertained.

What’s more, you could meet, in the flesh, The Manly Fireplug. For a look at him, my dog, and the shop, you could always revisit that little video I made.

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

The other day I stood in the living room, punching buttons on the dvd remote control as my roommate wandered through. Together we watched as the big flat-screen TV filled with quick-edited shots of naked men – accompanied by the requisite throbbing pulse of a tribal soundtrack – engage each other in activities you’d never find on prime time television.

“You should keep a journal,” my roommate said. “To chronicle your life.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “But I can’t get this #%#$ review copy to work on my Playstation.” Nor would it work on either of my two laptops. I grunted and punched at the stupid buttons, my eyes bleary after a full day at the law firm, now faced with an absurdly short deadline for my second job, writing a series of 300-word scene recaps for a local gay porn company.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Throw them up on their website, I would imagine, giving prospective buyers a glimpse at who does what to whom in each particular movie. Which may sound like fun to some of you, but honestly, there are only so many words for certain parts of a man’s anatomy that are hot without sounding silly.

My roommate wandered off to his bedroom as I settled onto the couch with my laptop, trying to forget about the four newsletter articles due soon for my third job, a marketing-and-social-media gig. I began typing:  Shay Michaels and Lance Navarro swap spit in a dim-lit dungeon…

“How’s it feel being married now to the Manly Fireplug?” people kept asking me.

“Who?” I said.

Somewhere between job one and job two, as the Fireplug buzz-cut the evening barbershop crowd, I’d stumble outside with our three dogs, on three leashes, pulling at three speeds, wagging their tails and weaving in and out of each other’s paths in what I swore was a canine conspiracy of entanglement. As they pulled me along I calculated costs of weddings, health insurance, and real estate.

Who am I? What am I doing? How could I be working so many hours and making so little money? Yes, I had three jobs at a time when many had none. Still, I’m human, which is to say that within each hour of each day I’d dizzily swing between the poles of gratitude and self-pity.

At night in bed the Fireplug would wrap his meaty forearm around me and I’d try to slow my pulse, pondering Steve Jobs.

The man who’d just stepped down from Apple had been bouncing all over the news cycle echo chamber, and I’d clicked on a link and read a commencement speech he’d made, six years back, at Stanford University.

At first his words had moved me, words outlining the kind of philosophy you’d expect to hear at such ceremonies:

 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I believed in his words, and I felt lucky that I’d known for a very long time what it is that I love to do, even if I had yet to make a living from it.

But yesterday at the law firm I fielded a call from my car mechanic, who gave me, in an apologetic tone, some fairly bad news. And when I hung up I found myself blinking back tears.

I was not proud of this. I’m not proud of it now. But I felt tired and defeated and pissed at Steve Jobs, who’d exhorted a crowd of impressionable youth to live each day as if it were their last, and Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, and every figure of inspiration whose quotes leave out the compromises we must make, one foot in bliss, one foot in life.

Which is not to say that I could give up what I love, with a 98% finished memoir that gets exponentially more wrenching to write with each page, and which has all but convinced me to turn next to fiction, where you can just make shit up, a 98% finished book waiting, like my new husband, for the scraps of between-job attention I can muster.

And I need the Steve Jobs and the Joseph Campbells and the Anna Quindlens of the world to remind me that it’s all possible.

Just as I need to know that I’m not alone in my one-foot-there, one-foot-not: that there are folks like Seymour Krim, who once wrote about “those who have yet to find the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”

I need to remember that life falls somewhere between dreams and compromises. That there are worse things than being tethered to competing claims on my time, pulled along in three different directions, at three different speeds.

Happy Birthday to Joe’s Barberhop!

I’m proud of you mister for making more than a business; you’ve built a neighborhood institution.

And thanks to all of the customers who’ve come through the doors in the last seven years. Because of you, we might someday get to buy a little real estate in San Francisco.

Hey, a guy can dream.

In a lovely, rose-tinted alternate universe, I spent the few weeks since my last post lying on a beach in Fiji with the Manly Fireplug, a blissfully unplugged honeymoon.  I’ve never been to Fiji, and I don’t even know if it’s a nice place to go these days, but the poet in me liked the alliteration of Fiji and Fireplug.

But in real life the honeymoon had to wait, and after ten days going from Philly to the Catskills back to Philly then to Brooklyn and Manhattan before returning to Philly on our extended wedding/ Fireplug family reunion tour, we actually had to, you know, work for a living.

I’m writing this on company time, having picked up another weekday of office work, which now puts me somewhere around 50 hours a week between my various jobs. When your health insurance eats up a quarter of your salary, you do what you can.

So a long-winded, carefully-composed narrative of our wedding won’t be forthcoming today.  Besides, this is the internet; who has the attention span for narratives? How about a couple of pics instead…

Since the Fireplug had something like 12 or 13 family members making the trip from Philly to Brooklyn bright and early the morning of the ceremony, the Fireplug’s mom decided to rent an entire bus. What showed up was a stretch limo – the kind with an interior neon ceiling that changed colors, with tiny artificial stars shimmering overhead. I could almost pretend like we were kicking off a Saturday night trip to our junior prom, but really it was Wednesday morning,  and we were heading up the Pennsylvania turnpike.

The driver had some trouble navigating the limo through the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights, and we arrived at the promenade with only a few minutes to spare. The wedding photographer snapped this as I emerged from the limo, fretting:

There’s a few other photos here. (Thanks again to Jonathan Gati for the great shots.) Various friends and family converged on our location but I continued to fret. The judge was late. No judge, no wedding. There’s a reason I shy away from event planning. I fret.

But the judge arrived with seconds to spare.

I believe our ceremony lasted about six minutes. It included the exchange of vows we’d written together, which I later posted here.

I made it about two words in before this happened to me:

Yeah, I totally cried. Sue me.

My friend Norman Brannon snapped this photo. That’s the Fireplug’s mother beside him; his best man, Joel; and his niece, the flower girl I mentioned in that other post. Beside me stands my father, my best man that day.

I don’t remember what we were laughing at. In fact, I can’t be certain the ceremony lasted six minutes, because a fierce case of tunnel vision overtook me. Beneath the promenade ran the East River, and beyond that stretched the skyline of Manhattan. Somewhere in there stood the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw none of it.

I only remember one thing from the ceremony.  The thing I tried to focus on during our vows. This face:

And I’ll think I’ll just leave it at that.

“I think it’s just a few minutes till our stop,” the Manly Fireplug said.

“You’re supposed to talk in a whisper,” I said, pointing to the Quiet Car rules posted on the wall.

“Oops!” he said. “This is going to be so hard!”

Today I marry my friend.

I promise to tell you “I love you” every day.

I will encourage you in your work and dreams.

I will celebrate with you our joys and stand beside you during our hardships.

I will remember your favorite things and surround you with them.

I will cherish the strengths and imperfections that make you Joe.

I will fight for you, care for you, and protect you.

I will never give up on you.

I will give you the room to be your own man.

I will cultivate honesty, compassion, generosity, and a sense of humor.

Together we will build a home where friends and family are loved and celebrated.

We will be companions in this life.

One of the things I know I’ll always find at my future mother-in-law’s house outside Philly is pictured at left. Also, scrapple for breakfast. Don’t ask what it is, just eat it. It’s good.

The Manly Fireplug‘s sister recounted for us how she asked her 7-year-old daughter if she’d like to be the flower girl at a wedding. The girl, who loves Cinderella and pink and the Little Mermaid, jumped up and down and said “YES!” Then, “Wait, who’s getting married?”

“Uncle Joey.”

“UNCLE JOEY’S GETTING MARRIED!!” Her eyes got wide and she jumped some more. “To who?”

“To Mike.”

The girl stopped jumping. “Mike?!?”

“Yes, Mike.”

The girl looked doubtful. “How does that work?”

“Well,” her mother said, “Sometimes boys like girls, like me and your daddy. And sometimes boys like other boys. And sometimes girls like other girls. The only thing that matters is that you love someone. That’s all that matters.”

The girl was quiet as she considered this. “Does Mike like dogs? Because Uncle Joey likes dogs.”

“Yes, honey, I think Mike likes dogs.”

“He better.”

So yeah, I’ve been dragging my feet, thinking it was presumptuous of me to create an author page on Facebook before I even finished my first book, that memoir I’ve been working on.

But then I’ve been blogging for ten years, and if you printed it all out it would make for a few books. I tried it once, and several trees died in the process.

If you consider yourself a regular around here, maybe you’d think about clicking that “Like” button (the one on the other side of this link, not the one at the end of this post) and becoming a fan. Word of new blog posts, public readings, and any publication info on that elusive memoir will reach your news feed.

Should that publication come to pass, I’m mulling over ideas to reward those fans for their eternal patience.

And I’ll try not bore you.

They wouldn’t stop. The local media kept calling, wanting one more interview. First the Bay Area Reporter. Then CBS Radio. Channel 2. The San Francisco Examiner. Channel 4.

“What the hell?” I asked the Manly Fireplug. “Are we the only homosexuals in the whole state going to New York to get married?”

I joked to friends about feeling overexposed. That even I was tired of us. Media whores, a couple of friends called us on Facebook, with what felt like an even mixture of humor and bitterness.

I grew increasingly uncomfortable, due in no small part to my upbringing in Minnesota, where the greatest sin is calling too much attention to yourself. But there were other reasons, too.

After the first article appeared, I received two emails, spaced five days apart, from someone I began to refer to as my “Secret Internet Admirer,” someone who used an anonymizing email program to cloak his real address. I’ll spare you the admirer’s particular vitriol, a confusing mixture of jealousy and homophobia that indicated less than full mental health.

I can’t be certain that my admirer was the same troll with whom I’d recently exchanged a volley of ridiculous emails, but the timing seemed suspect. He (I thought of the admirer as a he, though I couldn’t be certain) looked harshly upon the particular nature of my relationship with the Fireplug. Those who know us would never accuse us of being poster boys for traditional marriage, and so the admirer’s opaque argument fell flat with me.

What concerned me was how he ended both emails, two sentences in all caps: DO NOT GET MARRIED! CANCEL THE WEDDING!

I didn’t want to get melodramatic about a troll (and legally this post right here could be construed as encouraging him), but my admirer was talking about the event that would gather together my husband, our families, and our closest friends. So when the rental hall sent over our contract, I paid close attention to the security guard clause.

The Fireplug encouraged me to shake it off, as I spent the next few days scanning friends’ and acquaintances’ Facebook posts for anything vaguely suspicious, and examining anyone in public who looked at me a half-second longer than necessary. As the days passed without another email from my admirer, my paranoia faded. Mostly.

I told the Fireplug the interviews were starting to feel weird. Like we were putting this deeply personal event up for public dissection. So when Channel 11 called, the Fireplug told them we weren’t available.

Immediately I felt regret. Like we were passing up the chance to do some kind of greater good. Bring attention to the cause of same-sex blah blah blah. A lofty sentiment, sure, but maybe I really wanted the attention. So we did a couple more interviews.

And nothing happened. The articles and stories were little more than sound bites, hardly noteworthy, even to me. For the story they told – a couple of guys going to New York to get married – seemed like distractions from the story forming inside my own head.

I dutifully answered the reporters’ questions about why New York, and why now. After the third interview I stumbled upon my own sound bite, which I worked into subsequent interviews: at some point you just have to live your life, and not wait for California’s stamp of approval.

But all the while my conscience nagged at me, asking me a question that, with my handful of part-time jobs, book-writing, volunteering, etc., I hadn’t had the space or perspective to answer.

And that question wasn’t, “Why New York?”

It was: “Why marriage?”

A question I wasn’t sure I could answer. Which, let’s face it, is a tad disconcerting. For I was about to make the most important promise of my life. To a man making the same promise to me.

The reporters’ calls stopped, and the media moved on.

I’ve had a little more time to reflect on that enormous question. And I’m still not sure that I can articulate a worthy response. As the wedding edges closer, what strikes me most is that the promise I’m about to make doesn’t fill me with fear or doubt.

I had one of those unstable childhoods that left me hungry for affection and afraid of abandonment. Common stuff, I know, but they formed me. And though there are no guarantees in life, especially in love, the Fireplug was about to offer me the closest thing.

All I know is that as the big day nears, those long-held fears are diminished not by the prospect of his promise to me, but by my promise to him. I forget myself for a few seconds when I think of what I’m about to pledge: that even in the toughest times I will be his companion. That I won’t give up on him.

It was disingenuous of me to call our wedding a “deeply personal event.” We’re inviting our family and friends. It’s not personal, it’s communal. Others will have opinions on our mutual suitability and future prospects.

Hell, there’s that tense moment in every movie wedding when the minister asks, “If anyone has any reason why these two people should not marry…” (And if any of you are planning on dragging my Fireplug onto a city bus like Dustin Hoffman, I will hunt you down.)

What comforts me aren’t big answers for that big question. Rather, it’s just a feeling inside me when I picture our big day, an intuition, a sort of quiet space in the eye of the storm, impervious to trolls and judgments and Channel 4, a space big enough for me and one other man.