Robert David Sullivan

Haunting the gay bars of Boston

My good friend Peter Muise just wrote about the possible haunting of Boston's premier (and only) drag bar, Jacques, at his New England Folklore blog. 

Never one to overlook a productive way to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon in New York, I naturally began the task of choosing a place to haunt after my untimely death. A gay bar fits all the criteria: a place of unspeakable heartache and pain, where it always seems to be late at night and any pale, wrinkled figure will prompt shrieking among the occupants.

My preference would be to haunt the Napoleon Club, where the love of my life once excused himself to use the men's room and then somehow vanished from the building without my seeing him. (At least my ghostly powers would enable me to discover whatever secret passageway he used.) Alas, the Napoleon Club met a fate worse than going straight: It was converted into condos. It would be a waste to haunt whichever philistines how occupy the space.

I could haunt the Eagle, but really the worst thing that happened to me there was being told the significance of each and every flag, pennant, and motorcycle-club patch on the walls. I've been told that my yawns can be pretty disturbing; still, I think I should aim higher than that.

Downstairs at the Paradise is another option, thanks to its brief experiment with "underwear parties" in the '90s. As I recall, the club waived the $10 cover charge for anyone willing to leave most of their clothes at the coat-check booth. This meant that the most exposed patrons in the place were also the cheapest patrons. Younger patrons (which included myself at the time) kept to the dance floor, fully clothed, while several older, flabby men in G-strings nursed their wine coolers at the bar. It was a surrealist enough scene for Twin Peaks (or maybe American Horror Story), but not traumatic enough for me to want to haunt the place.

There's the Ramrod, which now refuses to use its leather-bar name and goes by its dance-club incarnation, Machine. I did go to its infamous "back room" a few times, even complying with the shirts-off dress code. But the only action I experienced there was when a friend twisted one of my nipples, in kind of a pity grope. I heard that things got more intense after 1 a.m., but the subway stopped running at 12:30, so I never really found out. I guess I could haunt the MBTA general manager's office over that.

That leaves me with Club Cafe, also known among my friends as Club Snub. Indeed, I had many experiences of spotting someone I knew there only to have him look away and suddenly remember that he had something to do on the other side of the room. At least three times, I ran into guys at Club Cafe whom I had no idea were gay. These encounters were not the beginnings of beautiful friendships, as I never saw any of them again.

Club Cafe was also where someone I had dated a few times asked me to meet him one night, saying he had something very important to tell me. On my way to the bar, I played out various romantic scenes in my head, all ending with my joy that I would never again have to walk into Club Snub alone. After we got a table for two and a couple of Cosmopolitans, he told me the big news: He was pregnant. 

Yep, it was all a practical joke. Now this is a scenario right out of Carrie, something a ghost can really work with. So if Club Cafe is still standing after I go, look for me there, dumping gallons of cranberry juice upon the head of anyone who breaks a poor guy's heart.

Photo by Elmer C. on Yelp. 

 

 

My mother is overhoused

The rents in my apartment building are going up again this fall (new living situation needed, in Boston or New York!), and my mother is indignant enough for both of us. “I can’t understand it,” she said last week, as we discussed the scarcity of apartments near Boston subway lines that rent for less than $2000 a month. “How could they have gone up so much?”

I didn’t have the heart to reply honestly: “You’re the reason rent is so expensive!”

With my father in a nursing home, my mother now lives alone in a house, within walking distance to the subway, where six of us lived a few decades ago. Her best friend lives a few blocks away in a house where five people used to live. There must be tens of thousands of comfortable homes in walkable neighborhoods in the Boston area where big families have given way to elderly people living alone. This is one reason there are so many children in my apartment building, including the monster upstairs who seems to run around in circles at night like a crazed cat. When there are so few houses on the market, more young families have to compete with singles and couples for small apartments.

In 2005, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey played into the stereotype of the heartless Republican when she suggested that many elderly people in Massachusetts were “overhoused,” with property-tax breaks for seniors only encouraging them to live alone in huge houses. The Boston Globe’s Raphael Lewis captured some of the outrage:

“Reading in the paper about what the lieutenant governor said last week, it was quite upsetting about how seniors should just move out because they only use one room out of your whole house,” Leola Coleman, 74, of Mattapan said to Healey.

'”But I think we should have the privilege to do that if we want to,” Coleman said. '”And you know what I mean, like we have to leave and give up our homes because of the baby boomers.”

Oh, those arrogant baby boomers, living in their fancy crowded apartments and looking askance at people who allegedly use only one room out of their whole house. What would they have the good elderly folk of Massachusetts do with their millions of rolls of gift wrap? (And we’re not really talking about baby boomers coveting houses anymore; they’re now old enough to be the ones who refuse to go.)

I don’t blame my mother for not wanting to move. If she sold the house, she’d only have to deal with the same ridiculous rents and home prices that the rest of us face. But if all the widows and widowers in the Boston area sold their houses at once, we’d get somewhere. Many of the houses would go to young families now in apartments. Some of the houses would be subdivided into apartments or would be shared by students and other young adults. (Cities and towns would have to permit this re-use; posh suburbs like Dover and Weston would undoubtedly ban the disgusting habit of housing more than one person per acre.) At the same time, some of the widows and widowers would move in with other family members, and some would get apartments with roommates. The overall result would be a reduced demand for apartments, and at least a slowdown in rent increases.

There will be no exodus from too-big houses any time soon. Homeownership is too precious to people who came of age anywhere between the Great Depression and the early 1970s. In the 1980s, comic Kevin Meaney made a running gag out of his mother fretting, “We’re gonna lose the house!” It really is an obsessive fear among American working-class families, even when it’s unlikely that the house will be passed down to the next generation.

And though this may change as more people live in apartments for longer periods of time, Americans never seem satisfied with the amount of room for their stuff. As the Washington Post recently reported, “living space available per person has doubled over the last 40 years,” the result of the median home size going up (from about 1,500 to 2,500 square feet from 1973 to 2013) and the average number of people in a household going down (from three people to just over 2.5 people over the same period). In fact, the living space per person has quadrupled or quintupled over the past 40 years for seniors who remain in houses where they once raised families—but that means the living space has shrunk for families who cannot afford houses and have to compete with young singles for apartments.

Since we’re not going to force people out of their homes, a more reasonable solution is to build more housing in desirable areas, including apartment buildings in neighborhoods with public transportation. That’s been happening to some extent in the Boston area, and my mother is all in favor of that. But most of her homeowning neighbors, in a city just north of Boston, are of the NIMBY persuasion, and they loudly oppose new apartments and the “transients” they attract. (My own building, in a formerly all-commercial area a block from the subway, has 11 stories, and that was enough to scandalize the city into imposing height restrictions to make sure it never happens again.)

I get it. A big, quiet, almost empty house is a reward for raising a family, and it hardly makes up for the cost, the work, and the heartaches of shepherding three or four kids into adulthood. But please don’t accuse me, struggling to come up with enough money for a cozy one-bedroom apartment, of bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.

10 reasons for me to feel Gay Pride

It’s Pride Week in Boston! So far, I’m spending it in my apartment getting headaches from the backhoes tearing up a parking lot on the next block and the six-year-old boy upstairs stomping around as if his apartment were carpeted with smoldering cigarette butts. I’m also waiting for confirmation that I’ll actually be paid for an editing job, and waiting for information about my dad’s health.

And it’s getting hot. Fortunately, the New Kids on the Block tell me it’s OK to go commando if I use the right toilet paper. I don’t think they really know why men wear boxers and briefs. (Zippers have something to do with it.)

But I promised to be positive about Gay Pride. What am I thankful for this year?

1.) I’m old enough for people to think my lack of a husband is due to ACT UP–era objections to marriage as an assimilationist and patriarchal institution. (That’s not it. At all.)

2.) The website Hotties on the T! is a thing.

3.) Gay bars in Boston have Quiet Hours for people who don’t look good in tight T-shirts. It’s just tough to be productive when I’m drunk by 4 p.m. every Monday.

4.) There is so much on TV now that no one expects me to watch the shows with gay characters.

5.) When I want to experience a vibrant gay neighborhood, Montreal is just a few hours away.

6.) I know all the sassy words that are acceptable in Words with Friends.

7.) The “dating” app Scruff makes it possible for me to pre-emptively give dirty looks to guys in my building who would ignore me if I texted them.

8.) As a member of the LGBT community, I personally know several DJs who play music I can stand, and several actors who aren’t trying to live out Entourage in real life.

9.) My Facebook feed is full of fantastic photography. And I’m mostly referring to flowers and architecture.

10.) Trivia contests are a low-cost, no-fuss alternative to circuit parties.

 

Boston’s new slogan: “Don’t sweat it”

Lean into it, Boston.

I know, you’re depressed by two weeks of frostbite temperatures and more than five feet of snow. You’re furious to discover that your public-transportation system is just a movie set, always ready to shine in its scenes with Matt Damon but incapable of getting people to work in bad weather. You’re flabbergasted when you hear the phrase “world-class city,” and you can more easily imagine Death Valley as a suitable spot for the Olympic Games.

But this crisis brings an opportunity.

Boston has a reputation for rudeness, for uptightness, and for excessive punctuality. This winter, God, and the MBTA, are telling us there’s a better way. We don’t have to go on Caribbean cruises to get away from the clock. We can take this once-in-lifetime rebranding opportunity and turn Boston into a city so laidback that San Francisco will go mad with envy.

Forget “the Hub” and “the Athens of America.” Our new slogan will be “You’re in Boston: Don’t Sweat It.”

We can stop worrying about Harvard and MIT graduates skipping town and taking their talents to Austin or Seattle. Imagine if local biotech companies pursued the most promising minds in cancer research by saying, “Your interview is at 11 a.m., but I know you live on the Red Line. So you’ll get here when you get here. Don’t sweat it.” Boston’s Financial District could woo the best and brightest of the Millennial Generation by telling employees, “It would be nice to come in before the stock market opens. But we know that’s not going to happen. Just shove enough people out of the way to get on a train before noon and we’re good.”

Do you have a social obligation you’d rather skip? Don’t sweat it. If a co-worker invites you to her baby shower, stay at home with Netflix. The next time you see her, say you tried to get there but your Orange Line train broke down because of a gum wrapper on the tracks. Tell her about the eight miles you had to walk through dark tunnels (the tinsel on the gum wrapper shorted out the electrical system), dropping bits of your homemade cream-cheese brownies the whole way to keep the rats from crawling up your legs. In another city, your co-worker might respond, “But I didn’t see anything about that on the news.” But in Boston she’ll remember that on the same night, a switching problem resulted in a commuter train crash that killed most of the Red Sox—while they were in the middle of a game in Fenway Park. A dead Orange Line train just isn’t worth a tweet anymore.

Marijuana is going to be legalized in Massachusetts anyway, so let’s do it now. At 4:20 p.m. every day, the entire MBTA can pause while passengers and crew take a mental-health break. Wait, what? You’ve got a plane to catch? You’re late for your shift as an emergency-room nurse? You’re trying to stop a wedding because you’re in love with both the bride and groom? You’re in Boston. Don’t sweat it.

Oh, you’re late for a meeting with the governor? If you can get a signal, call and tell him you’re stuck on the T. That’ll shut him up right quick.

Is it anti-democratic to eat at Chipotle instead of McDonald’s?

The Washington Post ’s Roberto A. Ferdman writes about the success of “fast casual food,” a type of counter-service restaurant that “has grown by 550 percent since 1999, more than ten times the growth seen in the fast food industry over the same period.” The best-known example of the genre is the burrito chain Chipotle, with Panera and Shake Shack also thriving.

What does “fast casual” mean? “It’s surprisingly hard to define what it is exactly,” Ferdman writes. One industry analyst reels off 10 criteria, most of them vague (“food that is wholesome”) or not exclusive to Chipotle and company (you can get “flexible offerings” at Burger King if you insist on it). He does not mention the key characteristic of fast casual restaurants: They don’t have poor people in them.

Ferdman does write that fast casual places are more expensive (“$9 to $13 dollars per receipt, compared to an average ticket closer to $5 for fast food restaurants”), but Chipotle fans gingerly avoid the effects on the chain’s clientele. It’s supposed to be the fresh ingredients that keep people coming back, not the tasteful clothes of the customers.

I go to Chipotle a lot, as well as to Boston-area fast casual chains like Boloco and B. good. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King are off-limits to me, as is New England’s beloved Dunkin’ Donuts. One reason is that the fast casual chains do tend to have healthier options (such as vegetable alternatives to French fries), but equally important is that they so much more pleasant to spend time in.

The shaming frenzies around smart alecs from Harvard and MIT

One of the biggest stories in Boston this week, which quickly spread to national media, is about a Harvard Business School instructor nagging a Chinese restaurant for being overcharged $4. While not directly about politics, the Case of the Shredded Chicken with Extra Price is a fine illustration of how easy it is to shape and set public opinion in a few hours. It’s also an example of the anti-intellectualism, and hostility toward scientific inquiry, that course through American society.

Boston.com broke the story on Tuesday, publishing emails in which associate professor Ben Edelman complained about being charged $1 more than the website price for each take-out item he ordered from the Sichuan Garden. Edelman wrote at least five emails, getting more verbose and lawyerlike as he went on. (“I have already referred this matter to applicable authorities in order to compel your restaurant to identify all consumers affected…”)

Read my blog (Un)Conventional Wisdom at America magazine for more on politics, demographics and civic life. Recent posts include "Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Perversity of Political Triage" and "How Big Can America Get Before Its Political System Starts to Buckle?"

 

Boston doesn’t yet have the Olympics, but it still has me

After spreading the news about an imminent move to New York, I despaired about what to do with all my possessions and signed a six-month lease to stay in my Boston-area apartment. The rule is not to spend more than two-thirds of your income on rent, right? Or at least not much more than two-thirds. So I’m good until mid February, a marvelous time to go apartment-hunting in various cities of the Northeast.

In the meantime, I’m still blogging about politics at America magazine. (See recent posts on the Wendy Davis “wheelchair ad,” voter ID laws, and the Supreme Court’s punting on gay marriage.) I’m also copy-editing and proofreading for various clients among the boxes in my living room. Should there be a comma somewhere in that sentence?

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has stepped up his efforts to keep me here by making a serious bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, at the risk of inspiring several movies about South Boston mobsters controlling the construction of the Olympic Village. Just about everyone living in Boston is horrified by the thought of the Olympics coming here and leaving more sweat all over the seats on the subway.

Perhaps New York can take some solace that Boston will disappear too?

In news that millions of Americans won't believe because it's in the New York Times, so-called "scientists" are warning that it's probably too late to stop rising sea levels from one day swamping major coastal cities:

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

It's all good news for Colorado Springs, Wichita, and other heartland cities that could emerge as America's newest world-class cities:

The effects will depend in part on how much money future governments spend to protect shorelines from a rising sea. Research published in 2012 found that a rise of less than four feet would inundate land on which some 3.7 million Americans live today. Miami, New Orleans, New York and Boston are all highly vulnerable.

Where you can pay New York rent in Boston

The blog Very Small Array has a cool map matching neighborhoods in Queens to neighborhoods in Manhattan with equivalent rents (go to the site to see a bigger version). It got me thinking how rents in Boston neighborhoods compare to those in New York City. Where could you live in the Hub if you were willing to pay the same as residents of Brooklyn Heights?

It will take me a while to figure out how to make a map, but listed below are Boston neighborhoods paired with NYC areas that had similar median monthly rents as of November 2013. The data is from Zillow Real Estate Research.

Nothing in Boston matches Tribeca ($4850), DUMBO ($3950), or NoHo ($3895). But the Hub’s most expensive neighborhoods edge out the West Village ($3525), Chelsea ($3495), and the Upper West Side ($3450), and Harlem ($1895) comes in between Brighton and Roslindale. And our Chinatown is more expensive than New York’s Chinatown.

Keep in mind that these figures are for median rent. The rankings would be different using sale prices for houses and condos. For example, West Roxbury has high home values, but it doesn’t have a lot of luxury apartments. It’s also probable that some of the neighborhoods in central Boston have higher average rents, skewed upward by some very pricey buildings; the median rent instead indicates the point at which half the apartments are more expensive and half are less expensive.

Rocks thrown at "broken windows" theory

On the occasion of Bill Bratton's return as New York City police commissioner (and he was Boston's commissioner first, you Hub-haters), Pacific Standard's Lauren Kirchner notes that the "broken windows" theory has lost some of its shine since Bratton first served under Rudy Giuliani. The gist of the theory is that when low-level crimes (graffiti, subway fare evasion, etc.) go unchecked, the atmosphere of decay emboldens criminals to commit more frequent and more serious offenses.

Kirchner writes that academics have dialed back the praise for the Giuliana-era crackdown on taggers and panhandlers:

Many critics of broken windows have pointed out that violent crime fell in New York at the same period of time as unemployment dropped and the economy strengthened — surely factors at least as important as the disappearance of squeegee guys. An influential 2006 article in the University of Chicago Law Review by Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig argued that the falling-crime trend in 1990s New York ran parallel to the natural waning of the crack epidemic that had ravaged the city in the years before. Other researchers found from their experiments that disorder does not cause crime; rather, disorder and crime co-exist, and are both caused by the same social and economic factors.

The broken-windows theory was certainly overhyped. But perhaps it was also a successful bluff, or self-fulfilling prophecy.

A blogger's hopes for 2014

It’s a new year, but I’m in my old apartment, looking out over an abandoned health club and its weedy parking lot, still waiting for a Starbucks to open nearby and validate my six-year-old bet hunch this would become a thriving neighborhood. There is already something new about 2014: Marty Walsh is now the mayor of Boston, and I share Scot Lehigh’s hope that he’ll end the “big chill” that silenced civic debate under the thin-skinned Tom Menino. (Disclosure: I live 3.2 miles from the city line, so I don’t vote in Boston elections, but Walsh is my mayor to a greater degree than Barack Obama is the president of Puerto Rico.)

As a Boston-area resident, I’m looking forward to the MBTA running trains until 3 a.m. on weekends, and I hope that the late-night service doesn’t become known as the Puke Line. I hope that Walsh doesn’t spend all of the city’s discretionary funds replacing Menino’s name on countless signs all over Boston. (City Hall refuses to give an estimate on how many signs, Hubway stations, and trash bins give thanks to the mayor.) I hope that Boston’s population continues to grow, and the NIMBYists realize that none of the city’s problems — including high housing costs, deteriorating public transit, and empty downtown storefronts  — can be solved by keeping people out.

Personally, I hope I have a better-than-average 2014. (My apologies to half of you.) My only new year’s resolution to find someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve so I can go a full 365 days before breaking it.

For all my readers, I hope that each one of you gets the chance to experience schadenfreude in 2014. (You might have to take turns.)

And for everyone who follows me on this blog, Facebook, Twitter, or any other kind of asocial media, my resolution is not to post anything that you’ll regret sharing with others. No hoaxes, no stories that are too good to be true, and no dubious quotations. If it’s not confirmed by someone whose full-time job is reporting news within a few minutes of surfacing on Facebook, I don’t believe it. (And I wanted to believe that Kim Jung-un executed his uncle by feeding him to wild dogs.) I promise to take to heart Luke O’Neil’s “The Year We Broke the Internet,” in which he writes, “This conflation of newsiness with news, share-worthiness with importance, has wreaked havoc on the media’s skepticism immune systems.”

Happy 2014, and remember to get your flu shots, everyone.

Gay bars unlikely to benefit from any improvements to Boston’s nightlife

Slate’s June Thomas has a post titled “A Texas Ban on Gay Two-Stepping Shows Why We Still Need Gay Bars,” focusing on a case from that state’s 54th-largest city:

According to the Victoria Advocate, a gay couple was pulled from the dance floor of the Cactus Canyon on Dec. 20 and told that club policy prohibits gay couples from dancing to country music. Justin Meyer, 21, and James Douglas, 30, had already danced several songs without incident, but a manager intervened when the music switched to Dustin Lynch’s “Cowboys and Angels.” […]

Several [newspaper] commenters said that if gay men want to dance together, they need to go to a gay bar. Except, of course, that there isn’t one in Victoria. Indeed, there are fewer and fewer gay bars all across the United States. Back in 2011, when I wrote a series about gay bars, I reported that between 2005 and 2011, the number dropped from 1,605 to 1,405, a 12.5 percent decrease.

My recent conversations with gay men in their 20s leave me skeptical that the couple would even want to go to a gay bar. They may prefer a place like Cactus Canyon because they don’t want to be pursued by older — probably much older — gay men. I’d love to read about a gay bar opening in Victoria because of this story, but I wouldn’t consider it a wise business investment.