Anything affiliated with Richard E. Grant simply oozes elegance and sophistication. Scene-stealing turns in ‘Gosford Park’ and ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ along with caddish portrayals in ‘The Age of Innocence‘ and ‘Downton Abbey’ are what I remember most of Grant’s vast catalog (along with a hilariously-cheeky strut through the Spice Girls’ movie). I’m happy to report that his first foray into fragrance, ‘Jack’, upholds the sterling image he’s crafted for himself, while treating us to a remarkable cologne that reeks of classy potency, managing to be both refined and somewhat edgy. The very best of British attitude.
Opening with a lime and mandarin punch, it soon settles into something warmer, with notes of pepper, clove, and nutmeg. This spicy interlude then gives way to a richer layer based in vetiver, oud, white musk, tobacco, and olibanum resin. Orchestrated by Alienor Massenet, it’s a refreshing whiff of London gentility. Defining ‘dapper’ and ‘debonair’ with one sniff, ‘Jack’ attacks in playful prissiness, as fresh as a summer day, and surprisingly sinful as a summer night.
I’m hoping to score a sample of his follow-up frag, ‘Jack – Covent Garden’, named after one of my favorite places in the world. If it were possible to take a specific piece of a city as a lover, I’d make mine this delicious corner of London. In the meantime, there’s just ‘Jack’ – and I think I want it for my birthday. Parents and husband, take note.
There comes a time, usually around the age at which I now find myself, when you have to make a decision to keep fighting to carve out a place in the world, or to resign yourself to what you’ve been given and what you’ve earned, and make the best of it. At its essence, the decision is one largely dictated and designed by a society in which getting older is more frightening rather than something to be revered. Maybe it’s getting worse, or maybe I’m just noticing it more as the world around me grows younger and I go in the opposite direction. To be honest, age has never mattered much to me, and it never will, but that won’t make a difference to everyone else. Too much of our existence is based on perception, and once you hit forty, particularly among gay men, the perception is that you’re too old to play in the big league anymore.
THIS IS MY FIGHT SONG
TAKE BACK MY LIFE SONG
PROVE I’M ALRIGHT SONG
MY POWER’S TURNED ON
STARTING RIGHT NOW I’LL BE STRONG
I’LL PLAY MY FIGHT SONG
AND I DON’T REALLY CARE IF NOBODY ELSE BELIEVES
‘CAUSE I’VE STILL GOT A LOT OF FIGHT LEFT IN ME
Madonna has been attacked for it for the last decade or so, and I know my time is just around the corner. The gray hair has come, the stomach around me thickens, and it’s just a matter of time before I metaphorically disappear from society’s sight. It’s a world for the youth. Always has been, ever will be. When you’re young you don’t always realize that because it certainly doesn’t feel that way, but I had glimpses of it. I relished my time there, even as I guarded against giving into such a dreamer’s paradise. It’s the surest way of losing your footing, to lose sight of the future and gain glory for the moment.
I’ve seen it more as I get older, which makes sense. The college-age revelers I watch stumbling along the streets late at night get younger and younger – only they’re not. I’m simply getting older. They don’t see me, partly because of their drunken stupor, partly because I’m beyond their interest. At a certain age, we all become invisible. I don’t mind that – it’s the aggressive attacks against someone older than them that indirectly sting more.
I was never vicious that way, not when it came to age, or gender, or race, or religion. I’ll judge you for your crocs and capris, not for the God in which you do or don’t believe, not for the size or shape of your body, or the color of your hair or skin, or for how long you’ve been walking on earth. I respected and looked up to everyone who was older than me, and often the older someone was, the more wisdom I assumed they had. That’s a fallacy in itself, but a graceful one.
LOSING FRIENDS AND I’M CHASING SLEEP
EVERYBODY’S WORRIED ABOUT ME
IN TOO DEEP
SAY I’M IN TOO DEEP (IN TOO DEEP)
AND IT’S BEEN TWO YEARS
I MISS MY HOME
BUT THERE’S A FIRE BURNING IN MY BONES
AND I STILL BELIEVE
YEAH I STILL BELIEVE
AND ALL THOSE THINGS I DIDN’T SAY WRECKING BALLS INSIDE MY BRAIN I WILL SCREAM THEM LOUD TONIGHT CAN YOU HEAR MY VOICE THIS TIME?
As I approach the stroke of forty, that golden hour when you can’t really claim to be young anymore, not in any conventional sense, I find myself sidling slowly out of the race. That’s what it sort of feels like to me now: the race to stay in fashion, to stay in vogue, to stay relevant and popular and on everyone’s tongue. Part of me wants to fade away, leaving the party first instead of lingering, because there’s nothing worse than a party guest who doesn’t know when it’s over. Better to leave sooner than later, best to leave them wanting more, the hope that they might even miss you still a happy possibility. At those moments, I have thought of stepping down from this self-appointed/self-anointed throne, and letting someone else take on the mantle of all this nonsense. It’s a bunch of fluff and frivolity anyway, right? When dissected and broken down, there’s not much to any of it. Yet it’s all I have. It’s all that I’ve ever had. And it’s mine, and mine alone.
THIS IS MY FIGHT SONG
TAKE BACK MY LIFE SONG
PROVE I’M ALRIGHT SONG
MY POWER’S TURNED ON
STARTING RIGHT NOW I’LL BE STRONG
I’LL PLAY MY FIGHT SONG
AND I DON’T REALLY CARE IF NOBODY ELSE BELIEVES
‘CAUSE I’VE STILL GOT A LOT OF FIGHT LEFT IN ME
Then I think… fuck it. I’m still here. I still matter. I can still do ten times what someone half my age could only dream of doing, and that little fire burns a little brighter, and suddenly I’m mouthing the words to this silly empowering pop song, popular with a demographic of which I’m proudly a member (since 1975) and my fists are pumping in the air and the sparkle in my eye is a tear of joy, a tear of glory, a tear of reconciliation.
LIKE A SMALL BOAT
ON THE OCEAN
SENDING BIG WAVES
INTO MOTION
LIKE HOW A SINGLE WORD
CAN MAKE A HEART OPEN
I MIGHT ONLY HAVE ONE MATCH
BUT I CAN MAKE AN EXPLOSION
Whenever I’ve doubted myself, I’ve done it. Instead of hesitating, I’ve held fast. That won’t change as I round the corner to forty. Or fifty. Or sixty. And if at the age of seventy I still want to go on ‘tour’ and wear a cape and flash my ass on Instagram, by God I’m going to do it. You may remain seated and watch all you want. The ones who decry those older than they are usually do so out of deeper-seeded reasons: jealousy or fear or the insidious notion of not having the balls to do it themselves. Rarely is it as simple as petty meanness or small-minded cruelty (though sometimes it is). We each have our demons. They rear their ugly heads in different ways.
As for me, I’m embracing every step of this life. With age, comes wisdom, and with wisdom comes power. It’s not a power you can wield over others, it’s not a power that controls. It’s a power that is intrinsic to each of us. You will find it within, and when you do you will carry it with you through life. It’s not something you can give away, and it’s not something that can be taken. It’s an indestructible charm, a magic all your own. Find yours, and don’t ever look back.
THIS IS MY FIGHT SONG
TAKE BACK MY LIFE SONG
PROVE I’M ALRIGHT SONG
MY POWER’S TURNED ON
STARTING RIGHT NOW I’LL BE STRONG (I’LL BE STRONG)
I’LL PLAY MY FIGHT SONG
AND I DON’T REALLY CARE IF NOBODY ELSE BELIEVES
‘CAUSE I’VE STILL GOT A LOT OF FIGHT LEFT IN ME
Named rather obviously, if whimsically, for Queen Ann’s Lace, these tenacious wildflowers were a little too hardy and invasive for me to quite embrace as a child, but I’m coming around to them. In the Northeast, they are troopers in the extremes of weather we get here, surviving the winters with a long tap root and a hardiness at odds with their delicate appearance. I always knew of their survival instincts, I even saw them laugh in the face of fire.
In the fall of that year, a dried bouquet of seeds, intact in the skeletal umbrel of the flowerhead, had made its way into our garden, where it became brittle and bone dry. It was an ill-advised and unsuccessful attempt at transplanting one from the wild. As a rather dangerous experiment in easier brush removal, I lit one of them on fire, watching the seeds explode and disperse and then forgetting about them over winter. The next spring, a mass of fernlike seedlings had cropped up in the area, more than I have ever gotten when intentionally tending patches of perfectly-planted seeds. I knew then that this queen was far from fragile.
She is a signifier of summer, standing up to the most oppressive heat in the road-side stretches she favors. She also makes a decent cut flower, although when picked at high heat of day, she sometimes tend to droop, and may never recover. As with many things, timing is crucial. Earliest morning, preferably after a few days of restorative rain, is the ideal window.
The cream-colored lace, and soft green foliage, reminds me of summer. As heat-horny insects buzzed in hidden leafy canopies, and the sun moved directly overhead, the lace remained refined and elegant. It nodded its floriferous carriage, held stalwart in the face of strong winds and rains, and perhaps its very airy nature allowed it to deal with forces that would have crushed more solid floral forms. The lace of a queen sometimes needs to be as strong as it is pretty.
A perfect July weekend comes to a close, and I’m still hanging onto memories of all that I did (lounging by the pool, reading, watering the gardens) and mostly what I didn’t have to do (anything else.) It was [sigh] practically perfect. And like all things that good, it had to come to an end. But other weekends are bound to follow, and exciting things are already on the way, so let’s take one quick look back before we go forward into fabulousness.
The most important development of the week, however, came in the form of the first glimpse of the Final Tour. It’s what I’ve been working on for the past few months, and the reason why things here have been light and hectic and somewhat less than what I hope you expect. That’s all about to change. The reveals are about to arrive…
“A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.” ~ Edith Wharton
March 1995: The first stop was my friend Ann’s house. As my manager, she would oversee this first leg of my first tour, ‘Chameleon in Motion: The Friendship Tour‘ and we were departing for a weekend in Potsdam, NY. From the bleak winter doldrums of Boston and Brandeis, I was headed into bleaker terrain. Someone hadn’t anticipated that early March was still winter, so with a torn vintage faux fur coat, and a colorful silk scarf tied to the antenna of my parents’ Blazer, we began our trek northward. I hadn’t been that excited and happy in a long time, and my giddiness now was mostly because of Ann, and our destination of seeing another friend, Missy.
The roads were caked with dirty snow, while more pristine expanses of white stuff stretched out in the distance. We stopped at the edge of a little lake at one point, and somewhere there’s a photo of me in a sea of white, arms folded across my chest to keep warm, but smiling a broad and genuine smile for Ann, and for the hope of a tour.
Back then a tour was just my way of emulating Madonna in a mostly-delusional manner. It consisted not so much of performing, though in some way everything I did back then was a performance, but more of traveling around the Northeast visiting my friends at their respective universities. From Cornell to the Crane School of Music, from RIT to U of R, and from Brandeis to SUNY Albany, it was more properly a college tour, but it was becoming something more. On each stop, prompted by me or gleefully taking the reins themselves, my friends had the generosity and good hearts to treat me like a visiting celebrity. Everyone should be so honored at some point in their lives. Because of this, the notion of being on tour was more than just a whimsical fancy (even if not by much.) For that, I owed my friends much. They didn’t know how much they saved me, mostly from myself.
As we wound our way along the curving roads to Potsdam, listening to Aretha Franklin and laughing our asses off over nothing, my very first tour began. It would be one way of coming into my own, even in the adopted emulation of an idol, and it would be the state in which I flourished. In running away from every home I’d known, I found a way of making a home within. That has proven to be just as valuable now as it was back then. In the quiet, snowy start of my first tour, all that lay ahead.
This time around, things are decidedly different, but in many respects I’m still the same person who set off with my friend Ann to parts not-so-unknown. The Tour Book is a bit better (professionally printed, and a whopping 232 pages – a far cry from the hastily-assembled black-and-white photo-copies from the basement of the Brandeis Library) and my style is slightly more refined (never again will I be mistaken for a clown at Ponderosa), but the same wonderful cast of characters awaits my arrival, and the same joy I felt at seeing friends and family in the heightened sate of Touring is about to be revisited.
The Final Tour.
The very last time.
And you’re invited to come along for the journey…
“You’re not well enough for the story they’ve planned.” ~ Isabella Blow
When someone as physically fine as Pietro Boselli poses for an Attitude cover story, it deserves a post of its own. Mr. Boselli is the math teacher who took the gay internet by storm with his banging body and dreamy good looks, and he’s going even further in this photo shoot for the popular British rag. Of course he’s already been named a Hunk of the Day, but he’s likely due for a second run any day now. Enough of my yammering, you just want to see the goods.
With Tom Ford’s Private Blend summer offering, Fleur de Portofino, proving a little too floral for my taste, I’m requesting an easier and more financially reasonable wish for an anniversary gift from Andy. This month marks our 15th year together – a whole decade and a half – but rather than go for the extravagant, I’m keeping it tried and true with this summer request from Hermès. (Besides, people should be getting the big guns ready for my 40th birthday.)
In his last official submission as their cologne guru, Jean-Claude Ellena has crafted ‘Le Jardin de Monsieur Li‘, inspired by a fictional Chinese garden. Slightly reminiscent of ‘Un Jardin après la Mousson‘ (one of my favorites) this is a gorgeous watery scent, evoking aquatic gardens and summer evenings. As the sun sets on Ellena’s glorious Hermès run, the gorgeous swan song of Mr. Li is a beautiful way to complete this line.
[‘Le Jardin de Monsieur Li’ is available at Sephora (online here, or on the right side of the Colonie Center store). The 3.3 oz. Just saying.]
Summer can be sticky, but we haven’t had enough of it yet to start complaining. Still, the humidity of the last few days has begun to feel oppressive. The sky wants to let loose with a storm, but the air is holding onto every drop of moisture as though afraid to release it now. Perhaps air knows something sky doesn’t, that to let go of itself at this point would prove far too perilous than trying to hang onto what little it has. Sooner or later we all get a little desperate.
This past Sunday I finally had the chance to simply float in the pool. Up until now, I haven’t had the opportunity or luxury to do so, in spite of all appearances otherwise. Those whose lives appear the most effortless are often paddling double-time beneath the surface. Just don’t call me Howard the Duck until I get lift off.
Hot on the heels of his grooming product release (including a citrusy Eau de Toilette), Ben Cohen is currently finishing up his autobiography, set for a September release. While I’ve never been  big fan of the genre, exceptions must be made, particularly in the case of a Mr. Cohen (see Andy.) He’s got a grand story to tell, both for his accomplishments and tragedies, and I can’t wait to read it. )If he’s wise, he’ll include some behind-the-scenes stories of photo shoots like these. Or just some photos.
Not really sure what to say about the recent photo that Justin Bieber put up on Instragram… My ass certainly wouldn’t fly if I put this on Instagram, but maybe he’s taken it down already. He was kinda naked already on this blog, and was definitely in nothing but his underwear. As for the fully naked shot below, have at it. I’m neither impressed nor unimpressed.
Though there is no summer vacation for us coming up, I finally finished the bulk of project work this past weekend (and clocking in at 232 pages it’s one of the grander works I’ve created). After downloading it to the printer, I spent much of yesterday by the pool, alternately pruning the overgrown backyard cherries and reading on a float. The latter was the more fun of the two, but the former needed to be done. It was the first time I’ve felt relaxed since serious project work began three month ago. Now we settle into promotional mode, but first the weekly look back.
Like Greek Gods and Goddesses, the most stunning wardrobe most athletes can don is nothing but their skin. It’s an art form really, to sculpt your frame into something akin to a statue through hard work and competition. Luckily, that is being captured, and by an entity whose acronym remains a mystery to me. There’s only one thing that ESPN has proven good for over the years: the Body Issue of their publication, in which they coax the fittest players into taking off all their clothes and posing for action shots of their preferred sport in the buff. It’s resulted in some stellar exhibitions by Michael Phelps, Rob Gronkowski, Evan Lysacek, Matt Harvey, Giancarlo Stanton and Tomas Berdych.
The latest edition provides a pair of pectacular gentlemen: Bryce Harper and Stan Wawrinka. Feast your eyes upon their fit bodies, and a bonus video of Mr. Harper for those who want to see things in motion.
