Arts & Entertainment
Pride march brings gayborhood boom years back to Chelsea
‘We will continue what began 50 years ago, to bring us closer to equality’
From long lines to get into gay bars to crowded sex shop aisles to sidewalks dense with drag queens, daddies, dykes, twinks, tweakers, and wide-eyed tourists, Manhattan’s onetime ground zero of gayness had a déjà vu moment that lasted all day long, and well into the next, when Chelsea served as the end point of June 30’s NYC Pride March.
Cheered on by an estimated four million spectators, the March proceeded down Fifth Avenue from its East 26th Street kick-off, went past the Stonewall Inn during its Greenwich Village phase, then made its way up Seventh Avenue, concluding in the heart of Chelsea.
Twelve hours and 32 minutes after its noon start time, over 150,000 marchers had crossed the West 23rd Street finish line, from which point many remained in the area to congregate on stoops, hold impromptu dance-offs, and scoop up Stonewall 50 T-shirts hawked by vendors who turned side streets closed to vehicular traffic into open-air markets.
Some strolled, many strutted, down Eighth Avenue, between West 14th and 23rd Streets—which, at the height of Chelsea’s gay glory, housed dozens of queer-centric businesses, including gay lifestyle retail mecca Rainbows & Triangles, and The Big Cup—a java joint that served the community as, depending on your pop culture touchstone, the “Cheers” bar, Central Perk, Starbucks, or a brick and mortar Grindr, where hookup prospects were never more than 20 feet away.
By dawn, the streets were clean, and little evidence of the previous day’s record-setting revelry remained, save for the Pride-hued confetti that promises to linger, like Christmas tree needles, as a reminder of the season that came and went.
For longtime locals, the Pride March recalled an era when Chelsea was the reigning queen of NYC gay nightlife, retail, and residency.
“I consider the heyday of the Chelsea gay vibe to be when I moved here [in 1996] to until around 2005,” says 49-year-old Stephen Charles Lincoln, creator/proprietor of The Protein Bakery, a neighborhood fixture since 1999.
WorldPride, Lincoln notes, “was a fantastic reminder” of the heyday, “with the streets filled with gay people of every race, age, and sexual preference.”
While the onetime group fitness director at the predominantly gay David Barton Gym strongly disavows the notion that Chelsea is “over” as a gay neighborhood (“I’m still here,” he quips), Lincoln concedes it “has definitely diluted over the past 10 years.”
Unlike Splash, Rawhide, and View, not every gay bar from Chelsea’s golden age has been consigned to history.
Sixty-year-old Derek Danton, “an out business owner for 40 years, 20 with the Eagle NYC,” says there is “really nothing in my history to compare to the events of the last two weeks. Locals and visitors alike were just happy to be alive, happy to be free to express themselves, unconditionally.”
Located at West 28th Street and 11th Avenue since 2001, and one of the only Manhattan gay bars with a roof deck, the Eagle is set to mark its 50th anniversary next year.
“In its storied history,” Danton notes, “the size of the crowds at the Eagle, because of WorldPride, is unprecedented… It is astonishing to realize that so many thousands of visitors from all around the world know and love the Eagle, and that tradition is still valued.”
Andrew Rai, 38, a lifelong resident of Chelsea, talks of vanishing tradition, noting he feels the March “retains some of the rapidly fading cultural authenticity” of his neighborhood.
“Chelsea,” Rai says, “was very gay when I was growing up, was very vibrant, in terms of the variety of personalities, genders, and thoughts. Now, it’s becoming very homogenized. But this really harkened me back to when Chelsea was truly diverse. It makes me feel that there’s still some element of it, somewhere, that lives.”
Fifty-one-year-old Craig M. de Thomas, a partner in the Midtown-based commercial and residential title insurance company, Insignia National Title Agency, recalls “telling my grandmother I was gay when I was 25 years of age,” and often traveling “from upstate New York, to indulge in the gay life that is offered here. I have fond memories of going to the many Chelsea clubs, bars, and restaurants, truly enjoying life and always feeling safe and accepted. Seeing men openly sharing affection and being their authentic selves in public was incredible to me. I wanted to be part of that, which is why I moved here 11 years ago.”
Over the last few years, de Thomas observes, “We have seen Chelsea shift, as many gay business owners and residents have moved north [to Hell’s Kitchen].” This year’s Pride celebration, he says, “brought with it a much-needed injection of gayness to Chelsea. It was lovely to walk around over the weekend, both day and evening, and feel the gay energy again, to see restaurants, bars, and shops filled with life and happiness. It was a vibe that is reminiscent of days gone by.”
Calling the Pride March the “culmination of seeds sown decades ago, many of which were planted here in Chelsea by residents who still reside here,” de Thomas sees the neighborhood’s gay liberation greenhouse role as an ongoing one, noting, “We are the fruits” of those seeds and, as such, “will continue what began 50 years ago, to bring us closer to equality” while celebrating “the beauty and power of diversity.”
That Chelsea diversity has legs—four of them, in the form of many locals for whom Sunday’s Parade March intersected with the daily duties of dog ownership.
Chicago-to-NYC transplant Abbey Stolle spoke with the Blade while walking her Shih Tzu, Donna, in close proximity to their residence at 21st Street and Seventh Avenue, where one of the event’s green-shirted volunteers held a sign letting March participants know they were two blocks from the route’s end.
“People want to feel joy. They want to feel love,” she says, of the neighborhood’s sudden population explosion. “I’ve been out here all day. No one I know living here has ever complained [about the crowds brought by the March], and I have a mixed bag in my building—young, old, gay, straight, trans.”
Detroit-born Stolle, 37, spoke with this 52-year-old reporter about his having grown up during the height of the AIDS crisis, and put her own experience within the context of “my era, Matthew Shepard, that fear of coming out in the ’90s. I was a raver for 15 years. Gay men took me under their wing.”
As “a straight white woman,” Stolle notes, “I guess I feel a bit inferior on a day like today. This is a weighted year. These are people,” Stolle said, of the Stonewall-era faces in the March and on the streets, “who’ve lived through so much, who are still living here.”
Clarifying her use of that charged word, Stolle says she did not invoke inferiority “in a negative way. It’s just, it’s not my day. What are my woes compared to some of the strife these people are going through? But I’m a woman, so I get that taste, that sprinkle.”
Having watched the day’s events from a table outside Cafe Champignon (Seventh Avenue between West 21st and 22nd Streets), de Thomas recalls, “I stated to my darling friends, gay and straight, as we were sitting in the midst of millions of celebrants, ‘I absolutely love that this is our normal. Isn’t it fantastic?’ ”
The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund National Champagne Brunch was held at Salamander Washington DC on Sunday, April 19. Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.) was presented with the Allyship Award.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
The umbrella LGBTQ sports organization Team D.C. held its annual Night of Champions Gala at the Georgetown Marriott on Saturday, April 18. Team D.C. presented scholarships to local student athletes and presented awards to Adam Peck, Manuel Montelongo (a.k.a. Mari Con Carne), Dr. Sara Varghai, Dan Martin and the Centaur Motorcycle Club. Sean Bartel was posthumously honored with the Most Valuable Person Award.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)
Television
‘Big Mistakes’ an uneven – but worthy – comedic showcase
In the years since “Schitt’s Creek” wrapped up its six season Emmy-winning run, nostalgia for it has grown deep – especially since the still painfully recent loss of its iconic leading lady, Catherine O’Hara, whose sudden passing prompted a social media wave of clips and tributes featuring her fan-favorite performance as the deliciously daft Moira Rose. Revisiting so many favorite scenes and funny moments from the show naturally reminded us of just how much we loved it, even needed it during the time it was on the air; it also reminded us of how much we miss it, and how much it feels now like something we need more than ever.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is why the arrival of “Big Mistakes” – the new Netflix series starring, co-created and co-written by Dan Levy – felt so welcome. We knew it wouldn’t be the Roses, but it seemed cut from the same cloth, and it had David Rose (or at least someone who seemed a lot like him) in the middle of a comically dysfunctional family dynamic, complete with a mother who gets involved in town politics and a catty sibling rivalry with his sister, and still nebbish-ly uncomfortable in his own gay shoes. Only this time, instead of running a charmingly pretentious boutique, he’s the pastor of the local church, and instead of a collection of kooky small town neighbors to contend with, there are gangsters.
As it turns out, it really does feel cut from the same cloth, but the design is distinctly different. Set in a fictional New Jersey suburb, it centers on Nicky (Levy) and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) – he openly gay with an adoring boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez), yet still obsessive about keeping it all invisible to his congregation, and she drudging aimlessly through life as an underpaid schoolteacher after failing to achieve her New York dreams of show biz success – who inadvertently become enmeshed in a shady underworld when a gesture for their dead grandmother’s funeral goes horribly awry.
They’re surrounded by a crew of equally compromised characters. There’s their mother Linda (Laurie Metcalf), whose campaign to become the town’s mayor only intensifies her tendency to micromanage her children’s lives; Yusuf (Boran Kuzum), the Turkish-American mini-mart operator who pulls them into the criminal conspiracy yet is himself a victim of it; Max (Jack Innanen), Morgan’s live-in boyfriend, who pushes her for a deeper commitment and is willing to go to couples’ therapy to prove it; Annette, his mother (Elizabeth Perkins), who lends her society standing toward helping Linda’s campaign against a misogynistic opponent (Darren Goldstein); and Ivan (Mark Ivanir), the seemingly ruthless crime boss who enslaves the siblings into his network but may really be just another slave himself. It’s a well-fleshed out assortment of characters that helps our own loyalties shift and adapt, generating at least a degree of empathy – if not always sympathy – that keeps everyone from coming off as a merely “black-and-white” caricature of expectations and typecasting.
To be sure, it’s an entertaining binge-watch, full of distinctive characters – all inhabiting familiar, even stereotypical roles in the narrative – who are each given a degree of validation, both in writing and performance, as the show unspools its narrative. At the same time, it makes for a fairly bleak overall view of humanity, in which it’s difficult to place our loyalties with anyone without also embracing a kind of “dog eat dog” morality in which nobody is truly innocent – but nobody is completely to blame for their sins, anyway.
In this way, it’s a show that lets us off the hook in the sense that it places the idea of ethical guilt within a framework of relative evils, as it permits us to forgive our own trespasses by accepting its “lovably” amoral characters, each of whom has their own reasons and justifications for what they do. We relate, but we can’t quite shake the notion that, if all these people hadn’t been so caught up in their own personal dramas, none of them would have ended up in the compromised morality that they’re in.
However, it’s not some bleak morality play that Levy and crew undertake; rather, it’s more an egalitarian fantasy in which even “bad” choices feel justified by inevitability. Everybody’s motivations make enough sense to us that it’s hard to judge any of the characters for making the choices – however unwise – that they do. In a system where everyone is forced to compromise themselves in order to achieve whatever dream of self-fulfillment they may have, how can anybody really blame themselves for doing what they have to do to survive?
Of course, all things considered, this is more a relatable comedy than it is a morality play. As a comedy of errors, it all works well enough on its own without imposing an ideology on it, no matter how much we may be tempted to do so. Indeed, what is ultimately more to the point is how well this pseudo-cynical exercise in the normalization of corruption – for that is what it really about, in the end – succeeds in letting us all off the hook for our compromises.
In the end, of course, maybe all that analysis is too deep a dive for a show that feels, in the end, like it’s meant to be mostly for fun. Indeed, despite its focus on being dragged into the shady side of life, the arc of its messaging seems to be less about a moralistic urge toward making the “right” choice than it is a candid recognition that all of us are compromised from the outset, often by choices we only force upon ourselves, and that’s a refreshing enough bit of honesty that we can easily get on board.
It helps that the performances are on point, especially the loony and wide-eyed fanaticism of Metcalf – surely the MVP of any project in which she is involved – and the directly focused moral malleability of Ortega; Levy, of course, is Levy – a now-familiar persona that can exist within any milieu without further justification than its own queer relatability – and, in this case, at least, that’s both the icing on the cake and substance that defines it. That’s enough to make it an essential view for fans, queer or otherwise, of his distinctive “brand,” even if he – or the show itself – doesn’t quite satisfy in the way that “Schitt’s Creek” was able to do.
Seriously, though, how could it?
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Calendar: April 17-23
