My mom often says that her generation of the 1960′s “threw the baby out with the bathwater”. By this she means they tore down the bricks of etiquette and repression but forgot to leave the materials to rebuild a house. We all stand without shelter and, aptly, naked. I used to brush this off as aged and cynical nostalgia. The younger set always looks untamed to the parents. But I’ve been pausing lately to try and locate the value of her statement.

I look around and see the lush, plump amounts of sexual awareness. Us gays, while still repressed and oppressed in any number of ways, are often strikingly self-aware and slow to make unnecessary spectacle of our sexuality. We walk with an air of normalcy that Foucault might find dangerous, but that I often find comforting. At times I feel called to fight and make obvious stands for things, but there are times in my life, many, many times, when I prefer to be an average civilian, going about my day like anyone else. This has so much to do with the convenience of my skin color and socioeconomic status, I know. I have mobility and agency that many don’t. I can choose when to fight, and not feel forced to defend. And there are hate crimes and bashing and discrimination everywhere. I hope I don’t appear to be discounting that. But it’s amazing to me that any gay man should be able to say that he has such mobility when so recently the world was an all-encompassing battleground for people like me.

This piece will not be about the enduring discrimination that exists in the world. That subject deserves entire libraries, and I have written on it before. I’m, at the moment, concerned with the privileged “liberated” world that I find myself in, and that I notice Gay Talese writing around in “Thy Neighbor’s Wife”. He takes subjects like Hugh Hefner and builds an social and media anthropology of sex in the 1950′s, 1960′s, and 1970′s. The backcover calls it a “powerful, eye-opening revelation[ ] about the sexual activities and proclivities of the American public in the era before AIDS”.

As I haven’t yet finished the book, I’ll reserve final judgment. But 100 pages in, after a lengthy study of Hugh Hefner and his entrepreneurial sexuality, I’m left wondering Talese was excited about changes that seemed good in intention but left us seriously perverted. Don’t call me a prude. I am willing to locate copious amounts of goodwill in the pages of Playboy. But Talese, at this moment in the book, often mistakes sexual liberation with what might be sexual privatization. Certain aspects of Talese’s supposed revolution seem to me, in some senses, as conservative as Reagan.

I don’t take for granted, if only because Talese carefully and patiently reminds me, that naked bodies in publication is a right, not a privilege. It was absolutely worth Hefner’s time and energy to wrench open the bindings of magazines to put naked bodies inside, and I’m thankful it happened. I can now see nudity wherever, and whenever, I want, thank God. And I understand why he sees cultural figures like Hefner and Diane Webber, in truly Hegelian terms, as bringing mass culture along with them when they disrobe and open up. Good, great, I get it. It’s a story we’ve heard a million times before, though Talese does tell it remarkably well.

Talese never could’ve imagined, when he published the book, that 30 years later, naked bodies would be selling everything from what might be expected (lingerie) to the unexpected (soda, cars, clothes, perfume, music, everything in the world). This isn’t liberation to me. It’s the ultimate form of oppression. Baudrillard has said that it is the West’s eventual goal to privatize everything in the world. I would say that we can now safely say that the human body is up for sale.

You see, while Hefner was faithfully tearing down the Puritan morals of prudish America, a new set of criteria never caught on. The hippies and the post-hippies tried. The feminists tried. The punks tried. Who hasn’t tried? But the only code of sexuality that stuck in post-War America was that of the dollar.

We used to hide behind the Catholic Church and modest clothing, but now we have no where to hide. We are exposed. And the billboards and television programs and movies take advantage of that vulnerability by showing us what is beautiful, telling us that we are not beautiful, and then showing us how to become more beautiful. If the puritans scolded us for being too sexy, the capitalists scold us for not being sexy enough. Be younger! Be more fun! Be hotter! Be freer! What was a call for millions of Americans to lose their white gloves has become a mandate that we diet and shave and primp and pluck.

I had the chance to watch TV last night and it was skinny, tan, shaved body after skinny, tan, shaved body. I can tell you that I did not feel liberated.

The work that the aptly-named Shelter Island does is to provide an asylum of oldness. This is no easy task in a country that replaces century-old brick buildings with gigantic retail structures that promise low, low prices. In so many locations that I’ve visited where I expected some semblance of history, I’ve been greeted by the same strip malls and big box stores that I first saw as a child in Sarasota, Florida. This is the democratic part of America, where everybody can access the same things, and in its equalizing power, it might be something to be admired. But for the wealthy, and hangers-on like myself, a fare can be paid to indulge in the last luxury left in America: old fashioned refinement. In my case, the fare was a $2 token for the ferry from Greenport that took me to the island, and for the residents of Shelter Island, I imagine much more money and energy is devoted to maintain that luxury.

Living in New York City, there are moments when you read about life in the city during other eras and you can’t evade the separation between the romantic old and the honest new. It’s simply not a city of Martinis and elevated subways and jazz music any longer. Manhattan no longer sounds like a trumpet or a clarinet. It’s more like a car stereo with heavy, coughing bass. But to get off the jitney at the tip of Long Island on a breezy evening and pay that $2 token at an old rickety boat house, to take an old, chipped-paint ferry across a windy sound, and to have a dinner of champagne on the other side, is to immediately understand the past’s connection with the present.

Shelter Island is a place of marshes and old boats pulled up onto land that look like they’ve been beached for 50 years. There are small markets that are quaint but not kitschy. A long walk on the curved roads (there are no sidewalks) will expose you to greyish wood-paneled houses with white trim and beat up cars carrying boats worth thousands of dollars. It’s not overtly riche. It’s modestly chic and it reminds of a imagined time in the world when all things were beautiful and well made, not just expensive things, and that charm was everywhere, there was just more of it in places like Shelter Island. Rich people were not garish like they are today with their bottle service and their logo-ed sunglasses and tacky McMansions. They just had bigger, tonier versions of the craftsmanship and care that everyone had.

New Yorkers might be the last Americans to demand this charm. In our heavily curated lives, so many of us expect a quality. And New York is proof that you can get it, for a price. It’s classist to herald it, I know, but so many of New York’s modernist charms are in these grand and exclusive getaways (Though I could argue that a trip to Rockaway Beach is just as charming and nourishing). Maybe we need these calming connections to outdated lifestyles, a world of jaunts and marshy trips, because of the extremity of how we live. Whatever the reason, no other city seems to maintain as strong a connection to the lives you see on novelty postcards and read about in collections of short stories.

New York City is a city of weekend trips, especially in the summer. I was inducted into this mentality almost the moment I arrived in New York more than a year ago. I am not someone that could ever purchase, or even rent, a getaway home, but for young, ambitious tenants of New York, and I’m speaking of those that move here from their liberal arts colleges and begin working at magazines and law firms and publishing houses, there’s always some house, some beach, some pool to visit. These jaunts, regular for most of that specific class of New Yorker, preserve something more than a healthy suntan. They connect us with our old ideas of urban life and pleasure. They make us think of Gatsby.

I’m not arguing that these romantic fantasies of relaxation have anything to do with reality. They are nothing if not carefully constructed dreams for the privileged few, actually. And I write this partly in guilt for my own newfound proximity to New york glitter. My generation confronts a world that is seriously lacking in etiquette and poise and tradition, and some of us vainly search for what has been mostly lost by the rush of postmodernism. It’s never far from my mind that this could all just be incessant, classed snobbishness.

On the Saturday of my trip, I sat in a beautiful, big home in Shelter Island, after swimming in a pool with a labrador named Sammie, and watched the funeral of Ted Kennedy and images of Camelot flashed in my brain. I thought of beached boats on rocky sand and creased khakis and carefully parted hair and CNN aided this by showing old black and white photos of Kennedy’s sailboats in Hyannis Port. I thought with the death of the last Kennedy brother that maybe we lost the last knight of this old American preppy, moneyed delusion. But when they showed newer images of Kennedy and his young wife in wind parkas with Portugese water dogs and realized that this wealthy old aristocrat still maintained that style in his pearly white tower of money, it made me a bit sick to hear all the eulogies of his care for the poor juxstaposed with images of his gigantic home, one that looked and felt strangely like the homes on Shelter Island. I realized that, at least for the near future, the rich will always have their acred compounds of tradition.

The next day I was packed cold meatloaf sandwiches and clementines for the train back to New York. The hazy delusion of my weekend remained until I got off in Jamaica, Queens, exited the station onto the dirty sidewalks that were a far cry from the marshy shoals of Shelter Island, and realized that, instead of the Long Island Sound, the train stop was surrounded by a gigantic new Walgreens pharmacy. I was so relieved to be home. But I still had a good time in la-la land.

In the day we’d sit in our one little air conditioned room with the door closed and eat meals that weren’t breakfast, lunch, or dinner, but rather some satisfying mix of them all. The little room with air conditioning happens to be a bedroom and so one naturally sits on the bed and if one spends the entire day on a bed, sleeping or not, it gives one a muddled sense of the day. Keri has her food stamps and would buy us things that we’d never buy on our own, like pomegranate teas and fig bars and we’d sit and listen to music and eat and drink until someone new would come over and they’d get us high and bring us beers and we’d continue to sit and it would get dark but we would hardly even notice.

And everyone has a story to tell. Corey came in and told us about his time in a sweat lodge in New Mexico and he said that it got so extreme at one point that it was like being high. I pictured his tattooed arms dripping with sweat. He also told us he smoked a peace pipe with Indians outside of town in a little leather shack the size of a small room.

The next day I ventured a bit to go on a bike ride and I stopped at my friend’s dark, basement apartment while it rained and we listened to music and got high and ate a bit (chocolate chip cookies, bread and cheese). We looked at magazines. He told me a story about a friend who almost killed himself because of a girlfriend. The girl also used to be his editor at a magazine. Years later, she had quit and he was still working at the magazine and she broke up with him and that’s when he considered killing himself while he was vacationing in Paris but decided that it wasn’t worth it. He wrote about it as an essay for the magazine. I told him I thought people like to read things like that, but I wondered what the girl thought when she said read it. Flattered, probably, and a little embarrassed and worried. Then I went home to our little air conditioned bedroom and drank some more and smoked some more and ate some more and then when we realized that it was, in fact, nighttime, and we gathered our things and leave the house in a big caravan of kids and go to a bar where we could continue our feelings of listlessness, but while surrounded by strangers. We passed around poppers while we sat on the bar stools and almost everyone was drinking too much whiskey and I even tripped off of my chair. People came in and out; I was one of those that went: I went to Manhattan, an ambitious trip even though it’s only one subway away. When you are high it all seems bigger.

In Manhattan things were a bit more sped up and I danced in the back room of a clean, fancy bar and at around 4 in the morning and everyone was smoking cigarettes. As we were getting ready to leave it began to pour so we grabbed a table by the big, floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the rain and someone turned to me and said “I hope this rain washes every god damn thing away”. Some boy who’s name I’ve forgotten and didn’t even remember at the time put his hand on my thigh and offered me a cigarette and I took one and flirted with him as payment. Me, my friend, and a third person I did not know ran across the street in the rain to a friends apartment. The third, whose name I did not know, was nice but boring, and by making the conversation seem grown-up and professional, he ruined any of the 5 AM ambiance that we could’ve had. He was small talking all over my evening. So I left and took a taxi home and came home and wanted to listen to music so I stayed up for a bit, I don’t remember how long.

The next day I had a terrible headache so we took Keri’s food stamps and got turkey sandwiches and orange juice and coffee and we turned the air conditioning on and sat for a while and listened to Big Star a lot and tried to sing exactly like the lead singer. We went on a bike ride and sang to each other from our bikes and laid around the park and then biked home and baked little pizzas with more friends and watched part of some alien movie that I didn’t like. I have a tendency to leave the pack, and I did, again, that evening and met other friends so that I could get high. On top of a nice, new apartment building, we went to a rooftop party and you could see the JMZ jilting along and you could see my little blue house and everyone at the party kept calling it my little blue house. I thought I was acting weird because I was so high but then I realized I was doing an okay job. We took a little ecstasy, the pills shaped like little stars, and it made everything brighter and nicer and we drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes. We danced in the elevator, too, when we had it to ourselves. There were three kids on heroine there and they wandered up to us, leaning and hanging on each so that they looked like siamese triplets, each forward step a hazy consensus from the group, and asked us for a lighter but they could barely say the word. One of them had a white button down shirt with big, outlined stars all over that were the same shape as the ecstasy pill I just ate. I really wanted the shirt. I thought about trying to get it off of him in his drugged haze but I realized that was cruel. The party was getting boring so we drank more beer at my house and did more and different drugs and we all felt a little crazy and we drank lots of water but the bark was bigger than the bite and we weren’t quite high enough to completely lose ourselves and I think that disappointed everyone. One of the boys I was with told me that he works at an addiction clinic and in very rare cases they actually advocate controlled use of substances for their patients. He told me that some of his patients have enough money and stability that, about once a month, they can spend a whole weekend doing drugs and by Monday start a normal life again. I stayed up all night.

When I woke up I bought two coffees for me and Keri and we drank them and ate a bit in the little air conditioned room. I spoke on the phone with my friend in Chicago and we talked about drag queens. We biked to a thrift store in Bushwick and I bought a bag and two shirts and saw a boy that was cute but he had an unattractive girlfriend. We got teas on food stamps and since I hadn’t slept much I was a bit high from the whole thing and it felt like it was still the day before and I was acting a bit crazy, rolling around in the grass at the park and yelling at cute boys that would walk by. When I looked at the sky it seemed like I was still on drugs because everything was really clear. When I told Keri this she called me a hippie. I sent zen text messages to all my friends. When we came home, we went right back to the little air conditioned room and I’m sitting there right now, a bit high from being tired and a bit worried about going to work tomorrow but generally pretty optimistic about how things are and really looking forward to getting clean in the bath and putting shampoo in my hair.

And when I woke up it was so hot. I had to go into the magazine’s office at 1 PM but it was hard to have all this free time before I had to leave my house so I read a bit by the fan and thought about what I would wear. I hated my outfit as soon as I left the house.

I had a beer (can’t remember what kind, but it was good) with the editor and we talked a bit about the magazine and it was really nice, but as soon as I found myself with a group of the editor’s I started name dropping, a bad habit that I commit when I’m nervous and have nothing else to talk about.

When I left I went to MOMA but didn’t look at any of the art just walked around but it wasn’t as cold as I expected it to be so it wasn’t even that enjoyable so I left and walked down to the New York Public Library on 42nd. I just wanted and needed a big, frigid marble building, which is an old habit I picked up while living in Washington, D.C. where the National Gallery, a cool tomb of art, is the coldest place in the city. I would wander down into the basement and see the 14th century religious art and stained glass and I would forget it was summer and by the time I left I wouldn’t be sweating even one bit.

I read a bit about Ganymede in one of the library books and was really fascinated by him and wondered why I had never heard of this gay god and tried to picture him fucking Zeus. I guess Zeus was the top. I got the idea that I wanted to read more Greek mythology because I remembered being young and thinking that Mt. Olympus was probably so comfortable and clean. All those gods and goddesses havd so much sex. I also started asking people for MDMA because I really wanted it, too. I jumped on the M3 bus to go to Barnes & Noble and I got “The Gods of the Greeks” and immediately started reading it and loved the parts about Aphrodite and about the Gorgons and Medusa.

Later I got high and we walked to Greenpoint and back and then sat on a bench on Metropolitan Avenue for a while and when I walked home I was still high and had an inner monologue about how nice it is that in New York, hour-long walks aren’t self-concious or even particularly noted and that in other cities the same distance would seem a lot longer. In New York, everything big begins to seem smaller.

THERE are so many beautiful people now. Long ago, there was just one or two of them, like Cleopatra or John F. Kennedy Jr. They were worshiped, commemorated on coins and plates, but always far away, untouchable.

I like this opening paragraph because it’s very short, for one, but says a lot and conjures up a great history. My first afterthought on the paragraph was to think of the history of the so-called “Sexual Revolution” and how’s it been co-opted by advertising. How beauty might have once been liberating, but now it just seems oppressive, tough on all of us average people, especially in New York, where beauty and the insistent care of beauty are overwhelming. Every gleaming advertisement shows the romantic ideal of nakedness and sexuality in youthful, subcultural ways. They certainly evoke images of young freedom but frankly, at this point, we should know better.

Albo’s point is nostalgic, and so dangerous a bit, but feels true, if a little crotchety. I think often of my beauty scrutiny. I notice that I sometimes expect all young people to be good looking and am disappointed and critical when they are not.

On that point, most of us don’t know better than to believe the hype. Which is why Albo’s paragraph works in dual ways: some read this paragraph and will think only of more desire – desire to be more beautiful, or at least, be with someone or something that possesses great beauty. Their opinion of the beauty aesthetics power would be validated by Albo and they would be forced to try and adapt. The critical analysis would not be there.

However we react to the onslaught of beauty that we face daily, whether looking through a magazine or watching television or anything else that has turned into a bazaar of fashionable bodies, Albo’s piece will take you through the experience that all of us have at these insecure and strangely artificial moments. The fact that he leaves the store with $600 in merchandise intended to make him look better, younger, gives us some sense of what kinds of panic that insecurity can wrought.

It’s not as if this store is exclusively gay; it’s just secure in its sexuality. Contrary to current film and television, there is a large segment of confident gay men out there who aren’t that obsessed with fashion. They work hard, and just need some nice clothes for jobs and second dates.

I can’t tell if I feel empowered by this statement or shamed by it. Obviously some combination of the two.

“It is often said that the West’s great undertaking is the commercialization of the whole world, the hitching of the fate of everything to the fate of commodity.” (Jean Baudrillard “The Transparency of Evil” p. 17)

This seems right but maybe I shouldn’t have selected it as my quote because its just the local and political argument in amongst Baudrillard’s much larger ideas. His premise that capitalism has, like a balloon, floated away from the grounded reality so that it can self-perpetuate its existence is the point. It’s capitalism’s relationship to our system of values that matters so much. In order to keep afloat, and get bigger, capitalism needs a certain kind of environment. Like any successful machine, it has made that environment, an environment where politics no longer matter but one in which we will never cease to have a system of politics that seems to be doing something. “It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing,” says Macbeth.