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 SOAPBOX: The Loudest Voice In The Village Looks Back On 20 Years Of Gossip
One of my first Village Voice columns was on the set of that horrible movie A Chorus Line. I quoted a publicist trashing the cast members, and he almost got fired. And then I wrote something about Marla Hanson, who was this model in New York who had been slashed.
Her boyfriend at the time, Jay McInerney, the author, was fuming. Smoke was coming out of his nose! He came up to me at a party and I thought he was gonna kill me. I remember thinking, He’s gonna beat me up, but he didn’t. I think he just made me a character in his next novel—the ultimate revenge.
I’m an only child, and I grew up very much internally. It wasn’t till I started writing that I found this cathartic venue of expression for my rage. When I started in the gossip world and realized everyone was tippy-toeing around celebrities’ sexuality, that filled me with even more anger. In the early and mid-’80s, when AIDS started hitting big, that really upped the ante for my fury. It was like living in a science fiction movie. Everybody around me was dying, so you’re filled with grief and terror and absolute rage at the government for not even mentioning the word AIDS, let alone doing anything about it. And with all these celebrities cowering in the closet, it just seemed the right time to really go wild on them. Nobody else was doing it. The daily columns were really squeamish about talking about gayness.
Now it’s fair game. The whole landscape has changed so much since I started. It’s okay to write speculation if someone is gay. It’s not considered
a smear anymore. Everyone’s snarky. Everything is gay. It’s kind of the world that I dreamed about and it’s the world that I fought for.
You do get an attitude sometimes from the newer members of the blogosphere who want to kind of write you off. People are afraid of their own mortality, so they tend to make fun of people who have been around awhile because you remind them of death. I’m like a walking specter of the Ghost Of Christmas Future for gossip columnists. I don’t perceive blogs as a threat. I honestly welcome the new energy. Online it’s like a Wild West situation where anything goes. People are able to go farther, especially in dealing with celebrities’ sexuality, which is something I’ve always pioneered writing about. Even though a lot of things online are erroneous or complete fabrications, so are a lot of things in the print media. I don’t see anything worse about blogs than daily columns in the papers, and I think we have to embrace the fact that they’ve pushed all of us forward.
Putting my book, La Dolce Musto, together was really quite a daunting task. I literally have written over a thousand columns. I fortunately already had kind of picked out a lot of my favorite ones just to have in folders, which made it easier to narrow down. Also, I wanted to have diversity on display. It’s not just celebrity gossip, but it’s also gay politics. I wanted a section on my blind items. I wanted a section on my feature stories. And I wanted a section on personal journeys and trips and voyages and adventures—like being a slut and being a TV soundbite whore!
In the book, I included the column from when I interviewed Brad Pitt for Johnny Suede in 1992. I actually predicted that he’d become a big star, and I have to say I’m usually wrong. I thought Madonna was going nowhere…and I still say I was right! But I just sensed from the explosive charisma that was coming out of this guy that he was going to become a true screen icon and matinee idol to millions. He was quite disarming and charming without revealing much. But he’s so adorable about it, you just melt at his feet. When I first came into the room to do the interview, he said, “Oh, I hear you’re kind of like the King Of New York.” And I said, “No, more like the Queen Of New York,” and he loved it. He laughed for five minutes, and I thought, That’s a cool person.
La Dolce Musto (Carrol & Graf) is out January 5.
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