Stick Shift Learns to Drive (w/Video!)

The folks at BMW were foolish nice enough to invite me down to South Carolina to learn how to really drive a car–on a track, at their Performance Driving School. They were also uncaring enough about their possessions kind enough to let me borrow one of their zipy Z4 s35i Roadsters to drive down there from New York. I was smart enough to learn something from the experience. But don’t think that doesn’t mean I didn’t spin around in circles a million times on a wet skid-pad, because I did. Read all about it in my big gay car column over at Vanity Fair.

Time Out, New York

I have a pair of inter-related pieces out in Time Out New York today about my favorite of favorite New York neighborhoods (and my home of fifteen years.) One is on The East Village and the other is on The Lower East Side, and both contain suggestions and recommendations from long-term residents, fixtures, and characters on the moods, communities, and places that make their neighborhood unique. Click the neighborhood names above to read.

The Gay Guide to Glee Returns!

The second season of Glee premiered last night. Which means, of course, that my…unique perspective on the show will now resume haunting the virtual halls of Vanity Fair every Wednesday. The fall’s first Gay Guide to Glee is now officially up. So click on over to VF.com and read about how the show got its groove back.

Tony Kushner/GMHC@NYPL

The New York Public Library’s flagship branch (the one with the big lions outside of it) on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street will be hosting a special one-day only event on Wednesday, September 22. Celebrating the opening of their recently acquired (and cataloged!) archives of the health and social service organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), the show will consist of six vitrines full of ephemera–pamphlets, comics, posters, videos–from GMHC’s early years combating the AIDS crisis. The show is open all day, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) will give a keynote speech in the evening. For details, and indelible images from the collection, check out my piece over at Vanity Fair.

Ask, Tell? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Or Just Be Gay and Get on with the Killing?

A Federal judge in California found the military’s inscrutable and insupportable Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy to be unconstitutional on a number of grounds. What does this mean for the Military Wedding Industry? Find out in my spot-on analysis of the decision for the Vanity Fair website by clicking this pretty blue bit. (BONUS NOTE: The VF.com piece contains a bigger version of this photo of soldiers spelling “DICK” with their bodies.)

Wheels of Fortune

Printus, the Greek god of magazines, has smiled on me once again. This time, he’s granted me the opportunity to publish a full page piece on the new vehicles from Rolls-Royce and Bentley in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair. Is it some sort of foreboding hubric message that Lindsay Lohan appears on the cover? Maybe. Are you too cheap to spend $4.95 on purchasing the dead tree version of VF? Probably. In either case, you can view the article by clicking the little thumbnail below.

Once again, I apologize for the lame quality of my technical skills.

Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Lee Friedlander, one of greatest living photographers, has a new show up at the Whitney Museum in New York. Entitled “America By Car” it is a series of nearly 200 images taken all across the country. And each one is shot from–and includes in its frame–the interior of one of the myriad vehicles Friedlander drove around the U.S. during the past fifteen years. In my role as Vanity Fair‘s online car columnist, I had the opportunity to wander around the show during a press preview, writing down faux-intellectual thoughts. You can read them in my “review” here.

Plastic Fagtastic

It’s time for another edition of Gayest of the Run, where we ask you, dear readers, to determine the faggiest version of an iconic vehicle. The most recent car to come under our queer eye? The Corvette! So head on over to the Vanity Fair website and cast your big pink vote for the most fabulous fiberglass fantasy of the past sixty years!

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