Monthly Archives: September 2011

Tell Your Story

My Best Friend’s Dad by

I knew I was gay from when I was a boy at the tender age of eight with my first crush on my teacher, Mr. Barton. Mr. Barton was lovely, just newly qualified so about 22, and athletic. On gym days, he’d dress in his tight white shorts and t-shirt, pull on his trainers and go out to rally our unenthusiastic class. His toned, muscular legs were covered in a dark matting of hair. My attention was always diverted watching those legs move, up and down, side to side, the hairs reshaped around the calf and thigh muscles. I wasn’t particularly sporty, but this was made worse being in Mr. Barton’s presence. I could never catch balls or run in a straight line, as I couldn’t focus on anything but his legs. In class, my attention was then firmly fixed on his face. He had a marvelous thick beard with a moustache that curled gently to the sides. I was intrigued in how it moved when he spoke and wished I could run my hands through the rough hair on his cheeks and play with the ends of his moustache as I did with the tassels on my grandmother’s sofa in her best room; but I never did. As an eight-year-old, you wouldn’t, but my fantasy of being with a bearded and hairy man started at that precise point. Being in a family of clean-shaven men who were pretty much hairless, my attention was always diverted when I came into contact with a hirsute member of the male variety. More…

Art & Autobiography

There’s Never a “Me” Character by

Annie Baker

In our previous installments of Art and Autobiography, we’ve focused on people who have used the raw material of their lives in an unobscured fashion, whether through diaries or performance. In this installment, we meet an author whose approach is quite different. While Annie Baker’s award-winning plays (Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens) often seem so real an audience may assume they are based on her life, Baker says she cares more about emotional truth than “how-things-really-happened truth.” We conducted an email interview over the past month to explore these layers and how they appear in her work. 

Adam Baran: How is your summer going and what are you doing?
Annie Baker: My summer has been pretty okay. A lot of traveling outside of NYC. I was in Florida, then Boston, then New Hampshire, then the Berkshires, then Maine, then the White Mountains, then the Berkshires again. I spent all of July and most of June away from the city.

How is your broken foot?
Oh, man, it still kind of sucks. The broken bone is healed, but the tendon is still really inflamed and I’m still not allowed to run or jump on my foot. Or dance. That’s the hardest part. No dancing.

I know that was a pretty traumatic experience for you. But did it give you any ideas for any of your upcoming writing?
Zero ideas. More…

Production Diary

Day 88: Thriller in Central Park by

Paprika Steen on Set in Central Park. Photo by Jean Christophe Husson.

A funny day. Paprika Steen was with us for her two scenes and she is a brilliant rush of humor, intelligence, and great acting. Working with her and Thure in the middle of Central Park was silly fun and also very difficult. Not because of them, but because shooting in a public park—not unlike shooting sex—is full of surprising challenges. From the director’s perspective it was almost like a thriller because there are all these potential “hits” that might get you (a.k.a., stop the scene) at any moment. Some of the things you have to look out for: the flute player, the Mexican combo, the Church of the World gathering at the band shell, the intermittent downfalls, the group of French tourists who stop to watch. Not to mention that we were working with a dolly and the scene kept being too long to fit into the number of tracks. So editing down on location (thank you, Thure and Paprika). We shoot for several hours, break for lunch—turns out Paprika worked selling t-shirts at what is now Le Pain Quotidien, back in 1983—and then in the last half hour I realize I’ve perhaps staged the whole thing wrong. Instead of two short scenes timed to dollies, I realize I can do the whole scene in one if I use a long lens and the paths of Central Park, from a distance to the camera. We are running out of time before the storm. And the drummer at the band shell will only delay his sound check for another fifteen minutes. The last take is the best. It pours.

Heading out to shoot the last scene in the movie. I will walk the 19 blocks up to the set, which is, by some coincidence (some not) in front of the same building where my ex used to work. I remember taking this walk in harder, tougher times, sometimes in the middle of the night, alone. My sister asked me if filming scenes that were reminiscent of very painful times in my past was very difficult, and I have to admit, they aren’t. This movie comes out of some sort of catharsis that happened in the wake of what was the hardest time in my life. I feel on the other side of a lot of what hurt. It starts by not holding on to anything that’s shameful. Even my mother reads these production diaries and she’s fine. Hi, Mom.

Avery Willard

Adrian and the Dance of the Seven Veils: The Story of An Unknown Camp Classic by

Adrian (Henry Arango)

The story of Salome, the femme fatale who danced for the head of John the Baptist, has long been a source of fascination to scholars and artists. When Henry Arango saw a production of Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1965, his first thought was, “Hell, I could be Salome.” In those days, Arango was one of the bright stars of the legendary East Village underground drag nightclub the Club 82 after emigrating from Castro’s Cuba in 1956. Arango performed under the stage name “Adrian” and was always seeking inspiration for production numbers to entertain the highbrow crowds who would descend into the 4th Street lair (now the location of the Bijou Sex Theater) to watch the glamorous, show-stopping female impersonators. When the cast was booked into a show in Florida, Arango went to work on the Salome number and mentioned it to his friend, filmmaker Avery Willard. Willard thought the duo should make it into a film. Thus begat the one and only filmed collaboration between Arango and Willard, Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils, a 10-minute color film that remained in Arango’s possession, unwatched until many, many years later when drag scholar Joe Jeffreys presented it for an admiring audience at one of his Drag Show Video Verite screenings. Director Ira Sachs and documentarian Cary Kehayan, who are working on In Search of Avery Willard, a documentary about the forgotten gay experimental filmmaker, headed to Arango’s home in Astoria to talk about the film, Arango’s friendship with Willard, and what it was like being a gay man in New York in the ’50s and ’60s.

Ira Sachs & Cary Kehayan: When were you born?
Adrian: I wasn’t born. I was created, because I’m a goddess.

But you left Cuba in ’56, right? How did you get from Cuba to Miami?
I had a friend of mine who actually was gay and who worked at the American Embassy. And I said, “I have to get out of here.” I was working at a nightclub called Montmartre. It was a beautiful penthouse club with a bar and an elevator that opened up into this huge space. But Castro, I think, uh—There were a couple of guys with machine guns and they wanted to kill a couple of people there, and they did, they killed a couple extra people who were there. So they closed the place.

Were you there every night?
There had never been a female impersonator. But they created a whole themed show about Madame du Barry. They made me a huge contraption with a powdered wig and all that. And they had a line of eight boys who actually gave me a hard time because they didn’t want to back-up a drag queen. Though there were no drag queens. They were called “impersonators.” But we did it. The show lasted a week because they killed these guys and then my friend said, “I think it’s time for you to leave.” Already I had an audition at the Club 82. Two friends of mine who were working there got me an audition. I arrived. Got the job. Met Avery Willard in the club—he was one of the customers—and we were friends for many years. More…

Tell Your Story

New York is My Man-Oyster by

Six months ago, I broke up with my boyfriend of a year and found myself single in Manhattan for the first time since moving here. Young, romantic and a glutton for excitement, I am constantly flirting with the idea that the next man who walks around the corner could be the next man walking into my life. I find nothing more exhilarating than locking eyes with a stranger on the subway…or sleeping with a man because he’s sexy, I want to and I have no reason not to. I had already discovered the breadth of opportunity here professionally, but I had not realized just how much this city was my man-oyster. Frankly, I’ve gone a little bit crazy. Quite frankly, I don’t (yet) regret one moment of it.