Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Was I being ridiculous in the way I was reacting to a glowing profile piece by my favorite local writer? Absolutely, yet my reaction wasn’t a reaction to the story itself, but the earlier parts of my life that were represented here, and on this blog. It was a mirror held not by my own hands, but by someone else; I couldn’t move to re-position the light or shift the angle to my best side. Steve held it, and I was frozen in the reflection. If I saw narcissism and ego there, it wasn’t in the telling of the tale, but in the substance of the story. And to be critical or bothered by that was unfair to Steve, and unfair to myself.

Yes, vanity plays a certain part here, particularly in the early years when vanity was all I had to keep me from completely hating myself. It was my weapon and my wound. It propped me up when there was nothing inside me. It proved a way of pretend that allowed me to work on the serious stuff behind the scenes. Slowly, the inside caught up to the outside, and in a strange way I was going through that same journey in how I was reading and taking in this story. 

On the third day after it came out I spoke with the main players who so graciously offered their views for the story. Andy told me I was overreacting; Sherri thought I was overthinking it; Suzie thought it was a fine piece; Skip thought my insecurities were getting the better of me – and they were all correct. I’d written a few messages of thanks to Steve for taking the time and making the effort to write the story, but I wondered whether they were coming across as hollow. That third day, he reached out to ask if I was doing a blog post on it, and if so whether I wanted to flip our roles and interview him about what it was like to write it. I was honored to be asked that by someone I’d always admired, and in order to do that, I would have to read it. 

To the backing soundtrack of my favorite Madonna song ever, I sat down alone in the attic and opened the newspaper again, slowly reading and savoring every carefully-chosen word, marveling at the artistry, getting lost in this story of someone I thought I knew so well, seen through the eyes of a relative stranger, seen honestly and critically and somehow affectionately in the way that the best artists and writers are able to view and appreciate the most flawed and awful among us. 

He allowed me to get out of my own way and see myself for all the contradictory, ridiculous, worth-while, talented, courageous, scared, and silly things that I was – vanity was just a naughtier word for pride. He showed me what the world had seen then, and what it sees now. He gave me the opportunity to embrace being fabulous and flamboyant in the most authentic and genuine manner possible. 

That shouldn’t have to come from someone else for me to believe it, and the fact that it still does is further evidence there is more work for me to do. Much more work – and I’m grateful for that. 

The work I put out twenty years ago is infinitely different than the work I put out today. The person I was then was entirely bereft of many of the most salient traits I exhibit now. But that’s what happens in twenty years. I can acknowledge and embrace and decry and condemn all that came before, and at the same time move beyond them for the person I’ve become now. Twenty years of blogging don’t define me anymore than a single profile defines me – and I can celebrate both. Steve gave me that gift, even if it took a while to fully figure it out. 

And so it was that learned to accept this celebration no matter what the naysayers and haters might say. After reading the story late that night, I stayed up even later to explain my response to Steve, and include a few interview questions to wrap it all up. What follows are excerpts from that exchange:

ALAN: When I first contacted you to discuss the possibility of a story on the 20th anniversary of my blog, I was genuinely seeking your honest and real thoughts of whether it was a story worth writing. At that time, I wanted you to tell me your honest opinion on whether there was something there, and as we talked it through, it almost felt like you, through your experience at sussing out a compelling angle that most of us couldn’t detect, were carving out a narrative that juxtaposed the creatively flamboyant self-expression of the blog with my equally-long career in the state of New York. By the end of our conversation, it almost felt like you had talked me into doing a profile instead of me having proposed it. How far off is that description and what do you recall of that first phone call?

STEVE: A story needs an angle, a pitch. I don’t go in having decided definitively what the story is, of course: You have to be willing to throw out all of your preconceptions if an interview turns a corner you weren’t expecting. That’s why I prefer to interview in person or on the phone vs. emailing questions: There’s spontaneity in the give-and-take of a conversation, and people are also more likely to roam across subjects when talking than if they’re focused on getting the words and sentences right as they type. For example: If I’d emailed questions to Andy, I highly doubt I’d have gotten the great quote about him not being willing to pay $1,000 even to see the pope in a hula skirt, singing while playing ukulele.

That’s all a preamble for saying that when you pitched the story, I needed some idea why it was worth doing. What’s the peg, the hook? It could be timeliness: This is happening now. So the pitch in January would have been the 20th anniversary of the blog. Knowing it was unlikely to get done by the end of January, I needed another timeliness angle to sell to my editors, and pitching it for the centerpiece of the Unwind lifestyle section on the day of the Albany Pride parade became a natural. (You are gay, right?)

With that settled, it needed to be honed. There are lots of gay people, and lots of gay writers, so why you, and why now? Because it’s Pride month and you’re gay and you have a blog that is 20 years old that you write posts for every day and you have million-a-month traffic and you refuse to make any money from it even though with some effort you could likely double your annual income and your blog is racy and you have a state job in human resources… And I knew I could get a compelling story out of it.

Did I talk you into being profiled? No. I refined the reasons for doing it, so I could make the case to my editors about why [we] should commit resources to a story that, even today, we knew would upset some readers because we’re splashing a flaming homo all over their Sunday newspaper.

ALAN: What were your doubts or stumbling points as you began to solidify ideas for the profile?

STEVE: None, except I knew I’d have to write the hell out of it. Writing about a writer, after all, has its perils. You don’t get paid for writing, but you absolutely are a real writer, and a good one.

ALAN: How did you research and decide where to dig for the previous posts you referenced?

STEVE: You dig until you find something useful to the story you’re trying to tell. Since the blog is at the 20-year mark, it was natural to go back 10 years and see what’s there.

ALAN: Confession: it took me three days to read the story in its entirety. I was just too freaked out by the barrage of what I saw as self-obsession, narcissism and ego – I thought that the Capital Region would hate me – and then my insecurity reached a point where I started to question whether you had intentionally just let me go on with just enough vanity to destroy myself with my own words and images.

STEVE: Oh, good lord…  

ALAN: Only after realizing what I had done did I go back and give it a close reading, at the exact time you contacted me about doing a blog on the process of writing the piece, which I took as something significant. Since you reached out about that, what did you most want to convey in this follow-up of sorts? It felt like you might have more to say. 

STEVE: You’re still overthinking it. I truly just thought you could get a fun blog out of it. It’s a regular habit — for journalists, anyway, who are always prospecting for new material — to pass along ideas to colleagues. 

ALAN: You spoke with four of my favorite people in the world ~ Andy, Suzie, Sherri and Skip. What was your impression of each of them, and how did their responses change or shift the narrative? 

STEVE: Each was an excellent interview suggestion and valuable to the finished story. Andy I didn’t know at all. He was funnier than I expected. He was essential for the domestic/relationship angle. Suzie I needed for history. Sherri for professional. Because you described Skip as your blogmaster, he was, I thought, much more heavily involved in the blog than he turned out to be. But I got something much better: The unexpected, unusual and very touching story of a close friendship between a flamboyant gay man and a straight married dad who’s so utterly comfortable in his own skin that he fully embraces the friendship.

ALAN: It is apparent how much work you put into this piece, and I am touched and grateful that you helped make what could have been silly and frivolous into something that was deeper and yet still fun. What are the rewards for yourself when you complete an article about another person? 

STEVE: That I’ve used my interviewing, reporting and writing talents to share with my readers an interesting person, whom they otherwise might not know about, in a way that is fair, accurate, compelling and true to that person. I basically wrote your obituary, but you aren’t dead, so it’s a profile.

After our interview/exchange, I thought back on my relationship with Steve. It was a leap of faith for me to entrust a profile to someone I’d known of for years, but didn’t really know at all. After the emotional reckoning that seeing my best and worst aspects in print brought about, I got to see and accept things from his view, and ultimately that was an incredibly valuable gift. I shared a few more private observations about my takes on our limited in-person interactions over the years, and asked that he send me some of his work that was most personal to him.

The first was this touching story about his mom and changing traditions – a story that starts out as a sweet memory of holidays past and evolves into a poignant reminder of loss and grief. Those same themes are present in this post about the unexpected death of a friend, and how the seemingly mundane turns of life – the making and sharing of a meal, the deceptively-insignificant brushes of existence – take on unbearable emotional meaning when the one who once performed them is suddenly gone. Companion pieces of sorts, they form bookends of the somber beauty that can sometimes frame the only way we can make sense of a brutal, ugly world. 

Reading his words left me feeling a little closer to him, and made our recent interactions mean more than just the transactional workings of story, subject, and writer. It feels fitting to leave the last words of this post, and this chapter, in the capable hands of Steve himself, and this was his response to my recollection of our previous meetings: “Though we’ve been aware of one another, and read each others’ work, for more than two decades, we’ve met in person only a handful of times. We don’t know one another. I wanted to figure out what makes you tick. And I like the challenge of telling an interesting story for my readers, telling it well, and telling it in a manner that befits the subject.”

It took me three full days before I could bring myself to do a close reading of this excellent profile that Steve Barnes wrote about the 20th anniversary of my blog in the Times Union in its entirety. It was available on newsstands last Saturday, and early that morning I went out scouring the area to pick up a few copies. Not having purchased an actual newspaper in years, I was surprised by how few stores even carried them anymore – I made it in and out of several gas stations, a Stewarts, and a Starbucks before finding a few at Coulsen’s News, and then they didn’t take American Express so I couldn’t even purchase a copy there. I had, however, glimpsed a tantalizing preview of the front page of the ‘Unwind’ section, and its accompanying artwork, the main photo of which I’d sent to Steve just about a week or so prior. It looked impressive at first glance, and while part of me shrank at the exposure – the same part that always shied away whenever anyone proverbially sang my praises or drew attention to me in any way – I still thought it would be wonderful to read, and I’d trusted Steve’s words not to do me dirty. 

Finally finding a hefty stash of the local paper at Price Chopper, I picked up several copies out of vanity and excitement, hastening home to feast upon what was surely to be a great, if self-indulgent, read. Unaccustomed to seeing or reading about what anyone other than myself wrote about me, it was a new experience, and an unexpectedly uncomfortable one. As much as I trusted Steve, it dawned on me then, in the panicked realization that it was too late to do anything, that I’d given up complete control over the telling of my story to another person for the first time in my life. All of the perfectionist control-freak tendencies I’d held for over forty years came bubbling to the surface. All of the social anxiety I relatively-recently named and tamed, and was only starting to understand, came rushing back. Perhaps worse, and more damaging than anything else, all of the insecurities and wonder at my own worth came out of hiding in grotesque and frightening fashion, prompting me to begin reading the piece in the mindset of the most critical and trollish reader and jumping to the worst and wildest versions of how I might be viewed.

Such was my suddenly-terror-stricken state of mind when I began (and I would only just begin and do a quick skimming of the article at that time) that after reading a few paragraphs, I put the paper down. A poisonous seed of self-doubt, scattered to a dry wind decades ago and left to languish in inhospitable darkness, had been brought to light and nourishment, fed by the manure of my own neuroses and issues. All the ultimately-false accusations of narcissism and vanity, all the photos from the past twenty years conspired to rope me into a place of despondent paranoia.

My own words, which sometimes felt very grand and powerful as I wrote them out in the quiet environs and privacy of my home, where the only response or reaction was the silent relief at having put them down and out of my head, looked questionable and simplistic. The superficial silliness that dominated the early years and provided salacious click-bait to trick people into visiting the site felt frivolous and indulgent. And still there was more – all those photos submitted by me, and many other pictures culled directly from my site – selfie after selfie after selfie, from a time before anyone even knew what a selfie was – paraded in a way that made me almost sick of myself. (Not a foreign land by any means, and never a fun visit.)

Imagining any of the many strangers who had taken shots at me over the years for vanity and ego, my first thought was that if anyone read this I would be the most hated man in Albany, and it already felt like I’d cracked the top ten a long time ago. Reading the profile in that mindset proved impossible, and so I had to stop. For all the reports of excessive vanity, and for all the accusations of acute narcissism, I genuinely didn’t want to read another word about myself. 

When the article reached the homes of all the newspaper subscribers the next day, I began to hear from people – and still I didn’t open my copy or scroll through the online story. Out of respect for the writer, and to outwardly assume a stance of pride, I shared it half-heartedly on my social media feeds. The comments were overwhelmingly kind, but that has never fed into any authentic shift in my own estimation of myself. Years of not feeling like I belonged anywhere would not be forgotten so easily, despite an equal amount of years spent working to correct it. 

It had been out for two days, and I still I hadn’t read it in full. Andy encouraged me to give it another go, adamantly expressing that it wasn’t coming across like I thought it was, but for various reasons I couldn’t do it. A testament to its title, I was genuinely too shy to look too closely at it. I went to bed and spent another restless night trying to focus on anything else.

Then, on the third day, the writer himself contacted me and proposed a blog post on it, one in which he welcomed questions on how he went about writing it, turning the interviewer into the interviewee for this subject. I would have to read the story now, and figure out a way to politely decline… the way the truly shy among us have been declining life for years. 

{To be continued…}

Things occasionally get a little dense and packed here, and that will prove doubly true for tomorrow, when two very wordy posts are scheduled to land. To inject a bit of lightness into the proceedings, I give you the red hot poker. This variety of Kniphofia seems a bit more manageable, coming in at a shorter height and more compact form than the red hot pokers of my youth. And that is where we shall leave the heat on this Friday night. 

I owe you an apology.

Yes, you – you who are reading this now and wondering if I’m actually talking to you because you might be someone I’ve never actually met in person. 

This is for you.

I’m sorry, because I sometimes forget you are here. 

This space – this blog – has become, over the last twenty years, my own diary of sorts. It’s been a place where I can explore and experiment with writing and images, where I can post anything and everything my heart desires without censorship or limits or worry. It’s my own little public playground where I can frolic and flail, but sometimes I forget that it is so public, that you are reading this, that it’s a diary open to all. 

When I write a blog post, it is usually done in the quiet and silence of my home. While ideas and phrases and sentences come to me throughout the day and night (usually at the most inconvenient times such as right after I’ve stepped into a running shower) to put them onto proverbial paper, or laptop screen, is a task I undertake in solitude and stillness. It’s the spirit in which I’d like it to be read, and it’s only right that I should honor that by crafting posts in similar fashion. That sort of solitude, however, has fooled me into forgetting about you – the reader, that other side of the equation, with formulas likely worked out in a very different manner, no matter how similar we wind up in the end. 

That doesn’t bother me – you are always welcome to share in this ongoing exercise of self-examination and self-analysis – yet it’s created a minor conundrum, because in addition to the isolated way in which these posts are crafted, it’s also given me complete and total control over how my story is told. There are blind spots and weaknesses and failings in that though, and navigating this treacherous journey can not fully be done on one’s own, no matter how I might try. That means when someone else tells my tale, it can be a terrifying new experience, one that recently wreaked great havoc, even if it was all in my mind. Even if I made it all up. 

“I hadn’t quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I’ve taken all of my clothes off.” ~ Margo Channing, All About Eve

If Margo Channing can feel such sabotaging self-doubt just after she turned 40, then surely my own own flailing as I approach the age of 48 can be forgiven, or at the very least understood. As for you, while my opening apology was heartfelt, it also rings a bit hollow, because if I think of you too much, if I allow you to occupy my head, then there isn’t as much room for me to run free. And while I’m good when I’m reined in a bit, I’m better when I’m wild.

Catching sight of something out of place is one of my strengths, so when I walked into the living room to meditate I immediately noticed the screen on one of the windows, where a new addition hung like a little ornament. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I took a whimsical reading of it as a heart – the visual embodiment of love, or an on-screen love scene. Approaching it slowly, I liked holding the idea of love visiting our home. Up close, I saw it was a moth, hanging upside down, perhaps peering out at the Chinese dogwoods in full bloom, pixelated from my view thanks to the screen. 

Sitting lotus-style on the floor and softening my gaze, I slowed my breathing – allowing a small smile to barely tug at the corners of my mouth as the breath deepened. The day had been one of those purgatorial days – mostly overcast with occasional peeks of sun in between cloud cover – neither one or the other, and leaving the spirit feeling restless, unsettled. Meditation calmed that. The day would be whatever the day was going to be, and after breathing deeply for a few minutes, I felt the worry begin to dissipate, the way it always did. 

The moth kept me company for the entire meditation, resting there until it was dark, then carried on along its own journey. The love remained. 

Yes, it’s still just spring, though it feels like we’ve been through a spring, summer and fall in the last week alone, and that’s only referencing the weather. That sort of atmospheric rollercoaster doesn’t always bode well for those of us whose moods are sometimes dictated by the surroundings, but I’ve been steadying myself through daily meditations, walks along the shore and in the garden (when time and location allow), and the general happiness that always comes with the spending arrival of summer. On with the weekly blog recap…

It began with the promise of something vulgar, a promise that would be delivered by the end of the week.

There was also the promise of a peony in bud.

Was this Chris Hemsworth’s actual naked butt or just clickbait? (Both of these things can be true.)

Returning to a city of smoke.

Let Pride by your guide.

The eyes of nostalgia.

A fiery haze.

A climb that’s taken over twenty years. 

A birthday lands amid the buzz of bees and sweet memories. 

Our spring visit to Ogunquit was an enchanting adventure that began with a couple of summer-like days before ripening all too quickly into a fall-like throwback, and all of it was pretty wonderful.

The unwinding set to a waltz.

The lone Dazzler of the Day was Andrew Christian, and he was more than worthy to carry the entire week. 

A vulgar jockstrap post closed the week out with a bulge of sparkle and pizzazz.