Party of One (23 page)

Say What? Karaoke
was what television people called a “strip show”: it would air Mondays through Fridays, and we'd record a whole season in three or four days. If
TRL
took a few days off, they'd clear its set out of the uptown studio, build ours, and we'd crank those episodes out, seven or eight at a time. Audience members who thought they were there to watch a thirty-minute show would be stuck in their seats for nine hours, so PAs would hand out Hershey's Kisses and Miniature Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to keep their energy up and stop them from revolting. We were quick and efficient, but even when you're working with the best people in the business, the whole thing can become a blur. You can check out a little bit, and forget to watch what you're saying.

In what was maybe our fifth episode on our fourth shoot day in a row, a contestant did a cartwheel in a crop top while singing Britney Spears's “Sometimes.” As I congratulated her on her performance and prepared her for the judges' critiques, I said: “The straight guys are going to love you.” Our executive producer said “Cut” into my earpiece.

I said, “Why?”

She said, “You said all the straight guys were going to love her. Just say all the guys are going to love her.”

I said, “Really?”

She said, “Yeah. Go again.” And I should have held my ground, but we had a couple more episodes to go, the audience was about to go into a sugar crash, and I probably wouldn't have held my ground anyway. So we went again and I said all the guys were going to love her.

I was openly gay at MTV, but on the air, I wasn't out. I played with it a little by making a point of mentioning how hot I found Justin Timberlake on the occasions when I hosted
TRL,
for example. But nobody thought anything of it, because finding Justin Timberlake hot was one of those things we were beginning to do together as a culture. I didn't pretend to be straight—I didn't feign attraction to Britney Spears or get all hubba-hubba toward Destiny's Child or make lewd comments about Willa Ford (and she
wanted
to be bad)—but I wasn't out.

I met my friends at gay bars, and I brought guys I was dating to events. I'm sure I even engaged in some kind of public display of affection somewhere, but our phones didn't have cameras on them yet and our culture had not yet embraced the idea that its huskier, nerdier boys could be gay, too. Or nobody cared. Either way, it didn't register. I could have made it clear by saying “I'm gay” out loud, but I never did—not even during the endless discussions of Eminem's use of the word “faggot,” where it would have been relevant and useful.

And the fact is that I wanted to be out, because I had needed someone like me to have been out when I was fourteen. If Kevin Seal had been gay and said something about it, that moment would have been a seismic event in my life. It might have sparked a conversation in the Candy Store that would have saved us all five minutes of feeling awkward about ourselves. It would have been an easy, important thing to do for the young versions of me who were watching. So why didn't I do it?

I did try. Rod was the highest-up of the talent executives, and a gay guy also, so I asked him about it early in my MTV days. Rod understood the business part of show business better than I did; he's one of those handsome, well-dressed, put-together gay guys who always looks like he's a little bit disappointed in you. “I kind of want to come out publicly,” I told him. “I feel like I'm hiding, and I don't want to.” Rod looked me up and down, and I saw him sizing up the spare tire, the inept attempt at stylish dressing, the absurd Ricky Martin stripe of blond I'd asked the hair department to bleach across my hairline. “I think…” He paused, trying to say
no
in the most diplomatic way, “I think you should be just exactly like you are.” And that was that. So I stayed exactly like I was, which was kind of nothing.

MTV didn't really know what it wanted to be, either. MTV prided itself on being at the forefront of social issues, gay rights especially. And in many ways, they deserved to be proud. Pedro on
The Real World
brought gay people—and gay marriage, and AIDS—into people's living rooms in a way no other network would have allowed. They included gay men and lesbians and bisexuals on those
Sex in the '90s
specials they reran a million times. But beyond that, they were as conflicted as I was. There were two all-gay episodes of
Singled Out
that aired exactly once, late at night, and then were abandoned by skittish executives. We had a stretch of
Say What? Karaoke
episodes planned with downtown drag legend Kevin Aviance as a judge, and after we shot our first episode of the day, a high-level executive—another one of those handsome, well-dressed, put-together gay guys—came down to the control room and ordered us to replace him. “Too gay,” he told us. We had a reputation for being inclusive, and a shelf full of GLAAD Awards, but we had no real policy on the ground.

I brought coming out up again once I'd been there for a year or so, once I felt like I actually worked there and was not just some sweepstakes winner—okay, sweepstakes
loser
—who'd overstayed his welcome. “What if we did some kind of National Coming Out Day special?” I asked a couple of production executives. “We could get Rufus Wainwright, and…” and I had trouble thinking of a second name, because it was 1999 and who else was there? George Michael? Chad Allen? Fran Lebowitz? They seemed into it, but you have to stay on people if you want something like this to happen. And I didn't stay on them, because I wasn't sure if I wanted to make my sexuality the subject of a television variety special.

There was also the question of exactly how big a deal I wanted to make out of being gay. I wanted people to know, but the only way to let people know was to tell them, and telling them automatically made it a
thing.
To say I was gay even once, forcefully and unequivocally, felt like an imposition on the audience. (Years later, I would go on to guest-host G4's
Attack of the Show
for a couple of weeks after Kevin Pereira's departure, and one day I mentioned that my boyfriend, Ben, and I had seen
Looper
the night before. Later that day, a commenter said: “Dave Holmes needs to lay off the gay shit. WE GET IT, DAVE. YOU'RE GAY. FIND ANOTHER TOPIC.” This is a reaction to my having said—during ten hours of television stretched over fourteen days—the word “boyfriend”
one time.
)

This is something straight people on television never have to deal with. Take this, for example: during the 1983–84 season of
Saturday Night Live,
the opening sequence featured the main cast interacting with the New York skyline, scrolling right-to-left like Super Mario Brothers. Rich Hall lit a cigarette off the flaming top of the Chrysler Building; Billy Crystal bathed in Yankee Stadium; Julia Louis Dreyfus re-created Marilyn Monroe's subway-grate
Seven Year Itch
moment and flew up into the air as an animated man on the Times Square JumboTron looked up her skirt. And then Gary Kroeger, observing via binoculars a tenement full of silhouetted women in various stages of undress, turned to the camera and winked. Dude
loved the ladies.
Here's the thing: not one person said to Gary Kroeger, “What we can infer from this opening-sequence moment is that you're heterosexual. Are you sure that's what you want to lead with? Are you comfortable letting people into your personal life that way?” At the very least, nobody ever said to Gary Kroeger, “WE GET IT, YOU'RE STRAIGHT.”

(Talking about my sexuality in the context of work still seems self-indulgent, especially when what I should be talking about is that when I'm looking for an example of still-rampant heterosexual privilege, Gary Kroeger in the season-ten opening sequence of
Saturday Night Live
is the first thing that comes to my mind.)

Now, if we had had blogs or Twitter accounts or any way to connect to audiences directly, in our own words, I would have been out. But we didn't. In the time of dial-up, if you had a message you wanted to tell the world, you needed the press to help you. And if there's anyone less interested in a fat nerdy dude than a guy in a Chelsea gay bar, it's the press.

Finally, in 2001, with the help of MTV's press department, I reached out to the publisher of
Out
and
The Advocate.
“I'm a VJ on MTV, and I'm gay, and I want to come out publicly,” I told her. “Okay, sure,” she said. “Next time you're in Los Angeles, let's have breakfast.” I said I would, and then I immediately booked a flight to Los Angeles. I struck while the iron was ambivalent.

The publisher of
Out
and
The Advocate
was a very sensible lesbian who showed up to our breakfast date in a smart car and ordered a bowl of muesli and berries, and I respected her immediately. I went through the story of how I got my MTV gig, what I was doing there, and how much I wanted to be out, how much good I thought it could do. She said, “Okay, then, let's do it. Let's do it in
Out.
” I said, “Great!” We shook hands. “What are the chances of getting the cover?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said, “that's probably not going to happen. To be on the cover you need to be handso—” and then she stopped and her eyes darted down to her muesli. “I mean…I mean,
I
think you're very attractive,” and I thought,
Holy shit, all gay people can stop time.
“It's okay,” I said. “I own a mirror.” And we laughed, maybe a little too much, and that was that. We had made a plan.

It took a few months, because magazine publishing moves slowly and there was not yet a website on which to do any of this quickly. But it happened. I did an interview with a charming writer named Jeffrey. A photo crew came to my filthy apartment and immediately suggested an outdoor shoot, so I grabbed my best Clem Snide T-shirt and we clicked away.

My profile was to be in the issue that would hit newsstands in May. And in May, I went to my local newsstand and picked it up. The cover photo was of an underwear model in a baseball uniform holding a bat, at least semi-phallically, baseball shirt wide open, abs exposed. This model was there to represent an actual baseball player who was allegedly dating the editor of
Out,
and who had written an anonymous letter about his experiences as a gay guy in Major League Baseball. The letter was published in full, along with eight to ten more photographs of the underwear model in various states of baseball uniform undress. A few pages past that, there was an interview with
Can't Hardly Wait
's Ethan Embry, who was then in theaters as Reese Witherspoon's sassy gay friend in the romantic comedy
Sweet Home Alabama.
There were three or four pictures of him with his shirt off, which I have to concede was an impressive sight. And after that, me.

You agonize over something like this for years, and then it happens and it's behind pictures of an underwear model who represents an anonymous baseball player who may or may not exist, and beefcake shots of a straight actor who's playing an interior decorator.

But it happened. I came out.

And nobody really noticed. I showed up in the bars of Chelsea like a conquering hero. Like,
here I am!
And nobody cared. I still couldn't get laid before 2:00 a.m. Fat officially trumps Timberlake adjacency.

But it felt good. It still does. It feels good to be an out gay television person. There aren't many of us, even now. I hope that the fourteen-year-old version of me who needed to see himself reflected on television saw it.

And anonymous baseball player, if you really exist, join me anytime. The water is warm.

Excluding babies and certain members of the dementia community, I am the last person in New York City to have found out about 9/11.

In the late summer of 2001, I spent a few weeks in Los Angeles working on a new game show for MTV called
Kidnapped.
It was a hot time for torture and humiliation on television:
Survivor
had just completed its third blockbuster season of starving its contestants;
Temptation Island
stranded fragile young couples on an island full of alcohol and fame-hungry models; and
Fear Factor
was burying people alive, dangling them from low-flying helicopters, and making them hang out with Joe Rogan. As ever, MTV smelled a passing trend and ordered itself up some. The premise of
Kidnapped
was this: a group of four friends would think they were going to compete together, but then on the morning of the shoot day, one of them would be taken from their home by our goons and held in a jail cell. The other three would have to answer questions about their missing friend and one another. If they got enough answers correct, their friend would be freed and they'd all win an all-expenses-paid trip to Cabo San Lucas or whatever exotic locale we could afford. If not, we stripped them bare and whipped them with reeds or something. It was a really magical time to be working in the industry.

We began a two-week hiatus on September 10, and I spent that day with Shane, a semipro beach volleyball player I had been casually dating. We walked on the beach, and he asked me, “Do you miss New York?” I said, “Yeah, especially with autumn around the corner.” He said: “Autumn,” and thought about it for a few seconds. “That one's
fall,
right?” Shane was really, really hot.

At the same time, I was trying to get myself on Broadway. There was a revival of
The Rocky Horror Show
at Circle in the Square at the time, with Sebastian Bach as Riff-Raff, Daphne Rubin-Vega as Magenta, and Terrence Mann (the original Rum Tum Tugger, thank you very much) as Frank N. Furter. Dick Cavett, who was playing The Criminologist—you know, the guy who tells you how to do the Time Warp—was taking a few weeks off, and they were stunt-casting the role with a revolving door of New York City media types. I begged my agent to get me in. That afternoon, when Shane and I were roaming the Third Street Promenade, I got the call. “You start a week from tomorrow. Eight performances,” she told me. “Rehearsals start tomorrow afternoon. Get yourself on a red-eye tonight.” The moment felt very Neely O'Hara.

Sleeping on the flight was out of the question, even though I had a whole row to myself; it was all too exciting. I bought the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
and watched it on my portable DVD player twice in a row.

I landed at Newark at around 7:00 a.m. on the eleventh, as excited as I have ever been. I remember passing all the people going through security on my way to baggage claim. I remember thinking:
I will never forget this day.
A new life was beginning!

I took a taxi into Manhattan and got to my place in the East Village just in time for my roommate Lee to leave for work. His girlfriend, Michelle, was still sleeping in his bedroom, so I whispered the good news and he whispered congratulations. We hugged and he went downtown to work.

Around this time, I started to get a little sleepy, and my first meeting with the cast wouldn't be until late afternoon, so I went to my bedroom to get a little shuteye. As I recall, this was right around 8:30 a.m.

At 10:00-ish, I started to hear a female voice in the living room. Michelle was very, very young (twenty-five to our twenty-nine) and had a habit of calling in sick to work, doing bong hits, and watching classic game shows on the Game Show Network all day long. We'd come home, there would be cold pizza on the coffee table, and she'd say: “You would not believe what Brett Somers said today.” It's one of those things that's a lot less cute when you're not having sex with the person who's doing it. So when I heard the chatter, I thought it was either Michelle or Fannie Flagg, and I wasn't down to hang with either.

I was groggy and starting to get a little nervous about the single biggest event in the world, which was my tiny role in a Broadway show, and I vividly remember thinking:
I cannot imagine anything worse than having to talk to Michelle about
Match Game '76
right now.
I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Sleep comes hard when you're just off a red-eye and there's nothing else going on, so I snoozed pretty soundly for the next three hours. At 1:00 p.m., I woke up again. Same female voice from the living room.
All right,
I thought,
I'd better face it.
I got up and walked out into the living room.

It wasn't Michelle at all. It was Stacey, the woman who was subletting our vacant bedroom while our other roommate Brendan was on an assignment out of town. I hadn't met her yet. I thought:
Oh, do I have some exciting news to tell her.

And then I saw the TV. Wreckage. Confusion. Peter Jennings at his most serious.

“What's…”

“Do you not…”

“What is that?”

“Do you not know?”

“What is happening?”

“The Twin Towers have fallen down” is all I remember her saying, and I remember hyperventilating and her hugging me and telling me everything that I had slept through, which by this time was
everything.
I got the whole story, all at once, while what used to be the World Trade Center smoldered two miles away: planes used as missiles, a terrorist plot, nobody is sure whether more attacks are planned, the towers burned for an hour or so before they fell, one after the other. And then, after we sat stunned and silent in front of the TV for a half hour or so: “Oh. I'm Stacey. I'm your roommate.”

“Oh! Right. I'm Dave. Hi.”

Our building had a roof deck with an unobstructed 360-degree view of the city, and Stacey hadn't been up there yet. We went up and looked. There was a massive dome of dust downtown where the towers had been. Gray and growing. A lot of people were up on the roof, including a few of my neighbors who had just walked out of the cloud. They were covered in it. Like bodies from Pompeii. I don't even know if they knew. (I do hope at least one of them got something close to a laugh at my expense. They had witnessed the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history and had the morning to process it and call their family, and then the dummy in 1C came up in his jammie bottoms in the middle of the afternoon, like: “Wait,
what
happened?”)

We went up and down like that for a few hours. Roof deck to TV and back. Just finding new places to say, “Oh, my God.”

The worst thing at the time was that you couldn't help. Nobody was allowed anywhere near what they were just then starting to call Ground Zero, and word was starting to spread that they were turning away blood donors.
They have enough,
we thought. But that wasn't it. They just didn't need any. Anybody who wasn't out wasn't coming out.

Lee came home around 3:00, and I don't remember which one of us suggested it, but it was decided that 3:00 was an appropriate time to start drinking. So we did. We went to 7B and began ordering whiskeys. It was absolutely silent in 7B, which it never is, especially when it's crowded, which it was. Everyone watched the TV. Ned came to meet us there. So did my friend Kelly Sue from my improv days. We didn't talk. We couldn't talk. We had our arms around each other, tight.

Every few minutes, someone in the room would remember a friend who worked down there, and they'd pop up and run outside and try to reach them. You'd have to try your call a bunch of times before they'd go through. Sometimes people came back inside looking relieved, and sometimes they didn't come back. You could see them get the bad news through the window, hazy with cigarette smoke. My friends were okay. Thank God.

By the early evening, the smell started to reach the East Village. I had never smelled anything like it before. None of us had. It was like an electrical fire mixed with gasoline mixed with burned hair. It was people and planes and buildings.

The story goes that we were united as a country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but that was definitely not the case in 7B. Some people cheered when Bush spoke, some people hissed. When he recited that Bible verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, some people heckled. Kelly Sue heckled back at them: “What if this is giving someone somewhere some
comfort
?” When the newscasters speculated as to whether our military would retaliate, half the bar whooped and half pounded their tables and said “NO.” The bar was turning into a Parliament meeting, and we had heard and seen and drank enough, so we left. We walked up to Union Square, candlelit as the sun fell, where people were writing messages on the ground in chalk: “USA!” “INTIFADA!” “PATRIARCHY FUCK OFF!” Everyone was already claiming this thing as their own. It was already a mess.

We kept walking, and walking. The only things open in the neighborhood were the bars and the churches, and they were all crowded. Someone hung a huge American flag over Fourth Street. By the next morning, a few chunks had been pulled out of it.

We passed Bowery Bar, where “Beige,” the Tuesday night gay dance party, was actually starting, right on schedule. People were going about their business like normal, but in a state of shock, and so were we, so we walked in. The DJ opened his set with Siouxsie and the Banshees' “Cities in Dust,” which we agreed seemed a little on the nose. We left.

Kelly Sue had just quit drinking a couple of months before, so she went home. Lee went uptown to be with Michelle. That left me and Ned. Again, I don't remember who suggested it, but it was resolved that we should go try to get laid. (“Disaster Sex” ended up being a real trend in the city that week. All sorts of random hookups and unplanned pregnancies.
Salon
did a piece about it and everything.) We went to The Cock, because it seemed like the right place to go for such a thing. I think we both expected the place to be crowded, but when we walked in, there was only a handful of people at the bar, two people dancing to Soft Cell's “Sex Dwarf,” and, on the periphery of the dance floor, smoking a cigarette and holding a rocks glass full of some flavor of white liquor, with a single, perfect tear going down his right cheek like the Native American in the litter PSA, Rufus Wainwright. We left again.

We didn't know what to do but keep moving. By that time, people were starting to hang up signs with missing persons' faces on them. Like lost dog flyers. Like they thought their loved ones had pulled themselves out of the pile and were wandering the city. Like they were just lost, with amnesia, waiting for a kind soul to point them home. You could start to believe that, too, if you watched these people hang these signs up, if you got a good look at their faces. You could make yourself think:
It's good that they're doing this. It's going to make it easier for everyone to find one another.
It sobered us up. Ned and I went back to our respective apartments, alone.

The actual cloud reached the East Village the next morning. Everything was hazy, like it had a filter over it. A big group of us had dinner together that night, and someone in the restaurant dropped their fork, and everyone jumped. We all had private conversations about where we kept our weed and/or porn, so we could parent-proof one another's apartments in case anything happened to us. I called one of the producers on
Kidnapped
out in Los Angeles to see whether we'd even continue doing the show, and he said we would eventually, though the set—a bombed-out warehouse space—would probably have to be rethought. We talked about the whole thing for a while and he said: “A bunch of us went out for dinner last night, and the waiter asked if we wanted dessert, and we all just went ahead and
got some.
This thing is really affecting everybody.”