Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,79

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