LVW Col: I'm (Not) Coming Out

Here's this week's LVW column on where my head is these days as it pertains to gay pride events. Please don't misunderstand: They're important and valuable. They're just my thing anymore. Read on. -sf

I’m (not) coming out
Why I won’t attend Gay Pride

By STEVE FRIESS

I am what is wrong with the gay community in Vegas. And since this is the season of Gay Pride, I must stand up and say I’m pretty proud of that.

It’s an odd declaration, to be sure. Also, it’s true. I have a great deal of respect for those people who spend so much of their lives “being gay,” but I’ve been there, I’ve done that and now I’m over it. I still care and I follow queer politics as carefully as the next gay, but, to quote Elphaba from Wicked, something has changed within me, something is not the same.

There was a time, as I just mentioned, when it was my whole thing. When I moved to Las Vegas in 1996 with my first long-term partner, we were a super-active couple. We went to every AIDS Walk, we catered tables at the Black and White Party, we volunteered at the Gay Pride Festival. Hell, we even started a monthly gay book group and were the youngest duo to regularly attend a monthly gay couples potluck. Rainbow flags adorned our cars, provocative male photos were prominent in our home and a direct-deposit donation to the Gay & Lesbian Community Center went out every month. We set the alarm to be up in the middle of the night to watch Princess Diana’s funeral live and sobbed through it, burying our faces in the fluffy mane of our white poodle, Ozzy.

Yeah, I know. Super-duper gay.

Read the REST at LasVegasWeekly.Com

Revisiting Manilow, Le Reve, Shark Reef

Hey kids. Miles and I are just now going to sleep after a treacherous travel day from Vegas to Long Island on that trailer park in the sky, Southworst. I didn't realize we were committing to two layovers -- in ABQ then BWI -- and in BWI we had weather problems that grounded us for five hours. Then we got on the plane and sat because, well, in five idle hours they forgot to make sure there was someone on hand to fly the bird. Sheesh. Anyhow, we're here now, will be in NY for a few days seeing some shows and unveiling my late grandfather's headstone, a Jewish year-after custom. So, for now, I leave you with this week's Weekly column about the spree of shows and attractions my niece and I saw last week and my thoughts on revisiting them.

The Manilow Principle

Why some shows are better the second time - and why some are not

By STEVE FRIESS

About 15 minutes into Barry Manilow’s Music & Passion show at the Las Vegas Hilton last week, I received a mocking text message from my partner. Miles had ducked out of having to go with me, my 16-year-old niece, Courtney, and my mother because he had to go to work at the last minute, but he hardly seemed unhappy about that twist of fate.

“So, does it suck yet?” the message taunted.

I missed the message. To my utter shock, I was having much too good a time.

Yes. At Manilow.

But, faithful and puzzled readers might be thinking, didn’t you just a few weeks ago mention how much you despised that very show in that commentary about all that was wrong with the new Cher production?

Indeed, that is why I was so bowled over. When your family visits, you tend to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily want to, and my mother was, is and probably always will be a Fanilow. So off I went, preparing both myself and poor young Courtney to suffer. I prepped the teen for the idea that this would fall into the so-bad-it’s-good category.

Except it wasn’t. It was so good it’s good. Really. In my guidebook, Gay Vegas, I had given this production a “C” and complained that it was a “rush job” with “dancers who seem confused about what they’re doing.” Yet on this night, a good 75 percent of the songs were not in the prior edition, Manilow was unstoppably exuberant and energetic, and even the closing “Copacabana” was less grating and, so it seemed, mercifully a little bit shorter. Also, unlike Bette, Celine or most notably Cher, Manilow remained on the stage for all but about three minutes of the concert. Of course, his “costume changes” involved changing his sportcoat. But still.

This revolution in my thinking led me to a spree of revisiting shows and attractions I hadn’t seen in a long while.

Read the rest HERE

Excellent Deals, Great Cause

There's a silent auction going on through Dec. 9 for a long list of pretty cool Vegas-related items and packages at what are, at present, offensively low prices. The auction benefits a charity called Family Promise, an agency that helps homeless Las Vegans get off the streets.

Go here and take a browse at the dozens of items, including a long list of Phantom-related packages, tickets for O, Blue Man Group, Stomp Out Loud and Gordie Brown, massages at Canyon Ranch, Starbucks stuff, art and, of course, "Gay Vegas" by yours truly.

My Mamma Mia! Review

I'm amazed that I've never opined in anything published online about "Mamma Mia!" but Bay's comments from the "4 Worst Ideas" piece and a couple of emails made me think it might make good sense to post this entry from my guidebook, "Gay Vegas." Buy the book for all your gay Vegas-loving pals for Xmas by clicking here.

Mamma Mia!
At Mandalay Bay
702/632-7580
Sun-Thurs 7:30 pm, Sat 6 and 10 pm
Price: Tickets start at $49.50

BEEFCAKE-O-METER: 9 of 10
OVERALL QUALITY: A

What could be more queer than a ditzy musical scored to ABBA music in which a gaggle of well-toned shirtless studs actually undress the lead male character on stage and slip him into a skimpy spandex wet suit while singing “Lay All Your Love On Me”? There's a story in here somewhere -- something about a young girl trying to figure out who her father is -- but even in that effort a gay surprise awaits her. The only off-key note when one of the female lead’s friends, a likely candidate for lesbianism, instead ends up turning all girly-girl in swooning over the man's-man of male leads.

Thank you, WSJ!

I'm sure by the time you read this, the moment will have passed. But right now, "Gay Vegas" is ranked #1 on Amazon.Com in the category of gay/lesbian travel, #2 in Las Vegas travel guides and #11 in all gay and lesbian nonfiction. Also, the book is at #24,593 overall. To understand the tremendous impact of Tammy Audi's Wall Street Journal piece that referenced the book, I was at #600,000ish on Friday morning. Wild. Keep it going. Buy yours now.

Now, how do we get WSJ to write about "The Strip" and "The Petcast"?

The WSJ piece...

...is online and in Friday's edition. I'm quoted and the book is mentioned and I'm pleased as punch. Read it here.

Sunday Newspaper Musings

Sigh. Review-Journal publisher Sherm Frederick opted to lay off the masturbation stories this week, so there's only a couple of things to point out from today's newspapers:

* Omar Sofradzija in the R-J has a terrific column looking back at the 2000 predictions by a transportation expert on the Las Vegas Monofail. The expert had every aspect of the miserable future nailed down pat and Las Vegas' Mormon Mafia rolled right over them and built the thing anyhow. Oh well.

* It's kind of funny to see a front-page "think piece" by the Las Vegas Sun's J. Patrick Coolican pondering whether Hillary Clinton's negatives may doom her presidential bid on the same day that the no fewer than THREE rock-ribbed conservative columnists (Charles Krauthammer, Rick Lowry and David Brooks) are published in the combined R-J and Sun all begrudgingly praising the senator's preparedness for the presidency in one form or another. When she's even winning over the right-wing chattering classes, it does seem that speculation about the hatred she stirs in people who would never vote Democratic anyway is last year's story.

* I got my first mainstream review for "Gay Vegas" today. It's from the Chicago Tribune. See it here.

Most Churches Per Capita? God, No.

There are some cannards that journalists like to employ to show something ironic about Las Vegas, and the most frequently used one is the notion that Las Vegas has "more churches per capita than anywhere else in the country."

It popped up again in a Q-and-A by Jerry Fink of the Las Vegas Sun conducted with comic Lewis Black. He asks Black for a thought on this apparent paradox, and the comedian gave a standard-issue response about Sodom and Gomorrah hedging its bets.

Except it's not true. This 1997 piece from the Review-Journal takes us through some of the numbers, figuring that at best we had, at that time, a ratio of 1 church/synagogue to 1,700 people. Memphis, Tenn., by contrast, had about 875-to-1. And that was a decade ago, so add another half-million Las Vegans which would have necessitated about 300 new Houses of Worship just to keep at that old pace. I can assure you that if Vegas was opening 2.5 new churches every month, somebody would've noticed.

What's more, do a simple Google search and you'll find countless American cities wishing to, without any further statistical backup, claim to be the most pious city in these United States. Among those is Nashville, Grand Rapids, Mich., Waco, Texas, Wheaton, Ill., and Berkeley, Calif.

Interestingly, there's no such bragging-rights war going on in cities overseas. But either way, Vegas doesn't win this title. And thank God for that.

My New York Magazine Debut!

After I was shut out of getting to do any major pieces on "Spamalot" by the show's NY-based PR folks on account of my admitting I wasn't in love with the production, I decided to go ahead and find someone to let me write the piece that had been stirring in my mind for a long time, the denouement on why Broadway fails in Vegas.

Our podcast listeners will recognize many of these themes because Miles and I have been working them out orally for more than a year now and on this blog since it began in March. It is a piece that likely would've emerged sooner or later as it'd been on my mind for a while. Being treated badly didn't create this piece; it just accelerated my willingness to write it sooner rather than later.

So go here and see my first New York Magazine piece, a snappy look at the topic.

Apologies in advance for the WHHSH violation atop the story: "What Opens in Vegas Closes in Vegas." I didn't write it. But I did, as I mentioned on last week's podcast, pen a violation of my own in the body of the story, something I felt was suitably clever to be forgivable. Alas, they cut mine out of the piece so they could commit their own. All in all, though, it's less noxious than many of the examples I cite in my new Las Vegas Weekly column, the first one of which you can read here on the topic of WHHSH abuse.

Help Mug Me

I had some new mugshots taken yesterday because I was unhappy with the original one I had for my guidebook, "Gay Vegas," which is about to go to press next week. I'm curious which of these you like better, Serious Steve or Smiley Steve. Answer in the blog or via email, but please say something today.

Thanks to photographer Denise Truscello, who is opening a gallery of her black-and-white stills from Paris at the Venetian later this week. Check out her site here.