Fame is about visibility and visibility is about rights

By Steven Phillips-Horst and Eric Schwartau

Two gay guys discuss the Queen's death, Fashion Week, and the dollar.

WELCOME TO TALK HOLE, A MONTHLY TOPICAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN COMEDIANS ERIC SCHWARTAU AND STEVEN PHILLIPS-HORST.

ERIC: Hey Bro.

STEVEN: Sup Bro. Wyd?

ERIC: Just got back from the gym. Have you seen Bros yet?

STEVEN: I was actually too busy being authentically homosexual this weekend — sleeping late, getting haircuts, etc.

ERIC: So it’s your fault the movie flopped.

STEVEN: Now Hollywood is going to outlaw gay cinema.

ERIC: And we’ll never get a gay Marvel movie.

STEVEN: We already have a Pink Panther.

ERIC: I think it’s okay to be gay and fail at the box office.

STEVEN: A feat straight people have been accomplishing for years.

ERIC: Straight people didn’t like Bros because no one died of AIDS in it.

STEVEN: Straight people didn’t like Bros because Billy Eichner isn’t famous or 19 years old enough. Continue reading

By George Civeris

The three remaining survivors address the big controversy, and I’m feeling all the feels

By now you’re probably heard that the Try Guys — the foursome of former BuzzFeed employees who made their name mockingly performing activities traditionally associated with women and gay men on camera in increasingly desperate and grotesque ways, and eventually accumulating a rabid fanbase of incredibly lost people by never once saying or doing a single thing that is funny or interesting — are in hot water. Specifically, one of them — each one has a personality, and this one’s is that he is married — cheated on his wife with an employee, leading to his ousting from the group. His name is Ned.

After a week of processing, the remaining three Try Guys, who by some miracle of venture-funded digital media disruption and Obama-era anything-goes optimism ended up as on-camera talent, are back to creating short-form video content for their hungry, hungry viewers to slobber down along with their daily Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl. Continue reading

By Allie Jones

Sources say the dissolution is imminent

I know we were all hoping Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen would work it out, but I’m afraid these two may be headed to court. The unretired quarterback and Brazilian supermodel have been on Divorce Watch since the beginning of last month, when Bündchen reportedly fled to Costa Rica after an “epic fight” with her husband over his decision to return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for some extra brain-mushing before he dies. Since then, Bündchen has reportedly taken the kids to a water park (a sure sign of a brewing custody battle), refused to show up for Brady’s games, and allegedly moved into a rental in Miami.

Now, the clearest sign yet that these two are headed for an equitable division of their assets: Page Six reports that Brady and Bündchen have retained lawyers. “I never actually thought this argument would be the end of them, but it looks like it is,” a source told the gossip outlet. “I don’t think there will be any coming back now. They both have lawyers and are looking at what a split will entail, who gets what and what the finances will be.” Continue reading

Jeremiah Moss’s ‘Feral City’ revels in the return of grit and graffiti, at the expense of actual living, breathing humans

For 15 years, the writer and activist Jeremiah Moss has fought to restore a city he has never known. His long-running blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, is a painstaking document of Lower Manhattan’s osmotic turnover, cataloging real estate grabs and the ravages of neoliberal policy through elegiac dispatches from shuttered storefronts. As diners, dancehalls, and hardware stores close around him, Moss grieves the loss of landmarks and community spaces, steeling himself for their upmarket successors. Beholding the ceaseless course of retail gentrification, he yearns for the rough-and-tumble city of the 1970s, propounding a Shangri-La of strivers, immigrants, artisans, and agitators.

“One of the great tragedies of my life was that I had the misfortune to arrive in New York City at the beginning of the end,” opens his 2017 book Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul. A trans man steeped in the wistful writings of Joseph Mitchell and Frank O’Hara, Moss moved to New York from Massachusetts in the early ‘90s, planning to write poetry. Within months of Moss’s arrival, Rudy Giuliani took Gracie Mansion, pledging to stamp out petty crime and reestablish Manhattan as a global capital. Giuliani’s favoritism toward upper-class homeowners was codified in the N.Y.P.D.’s quality-of-life initiatives, heralding an open season on the city’s visible poor. 

“Save NYC” is a rallying cry in Moss’s advocacy work, a slogan that might as easily embody the tough-on-crime revanchism of Giuliani’s right-wing supporters. Like Giuliani, Moss is obsessed with the question of who deserves New York. The answer, in his writing, is at once obvious and equivocal. Queer and Black folks, of course: the rest of the country is hostile to them, and New York offers a sanctuary of sorts. From there it gets murky. Despite its rigorous analysis of housing policy, Vanishing New York is primarily an aesthetic doctrine, asserting municipal decorum as a way of life. “It’s a tuna sandwich at Eisenberg’s, an egg cream at Ray’s Candy,” Moss writes of the city’s noble essence. “It’s shoeshines, dive bars, and riding the subway all the way to Coney Island for a corn dog.” Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

The ‘Real Housewives of Orange County’ stars recently visited Disneyland, if that tells you anything

Cheating is red hot right now. Whether you deal in fish, chess, poker, DMs, or Trying, it’s likely you’re cheating as we speak, and your so-called friends are conspiring to film a video about it in which they throw you under the bus for financial and video editing-based reasons. And now? Well, now we’ve stumbled upon the most devastating cheating allegation of all of early Autumn 2022 — that of the suspiciously wealthy Real Housewives of Orange County husband Terry Dubrow.

“This housewife has not been seen filming with her colleagues for weeks,” a tipster wrote into the gossip and I-met-a-celebrity-and-they-were-nice-(anon-pls) Instagram account Deux Moi. “Word on the street is … her husband’s affairs surfaced and we know who is not afraid to air it all out.”

The tipster chose the pseudonym “Fancy Pants” and the subject line “Cheating allegations in the OC,” two clues that clearly link the gossip to Heather Dubrow (nickname: Fancy Pants, location: OC). (Why did the tipster choose to also allude to Gizelle Bryant’s Real Housewives of Potomac taglines [“Word on the street is … I’m the word on the street”; “Word on the street is … I’m still the word on the street”; “If you can’t handle me being the word on the street … then stop listening!”]? I assume because it’s fun to say.) Continue reading