and the reviews are in (continued)

when i wrote the first part of this post, it was with the full intention of coming back in part 2 and doing a point-by-point response to the reviews of this blog referenced therein.

thankfully, i'm sober now and back to my usual semi-indifference to the opinions of others, so i'll spare you most of it.  but i did wanna address a couple things.

first, one of paulo's readers weighs in:

what strikes me most about gregory's review of my blog--aside, of course, from its typical compassionate-liberal viciousness--is how it completely misses the point.  no sense of humor?!  this whole goddam blog is nothing but a dark cosmic joke, and i thought i'd made that fairly clear.  so either gregory's an idiot, or i've been deluding myself as to the extent of my supposed cleverness.  god, i hope it's the former.

as for paulo himself, while he professes to love the blog, he seems to see its author as nothing more than an amoral, aging lothario drunkenly crowing about all the boys he's nailed.  to this, i can only respond with the following, from an email i once wrote to faithful commenter noblesavage:

the reason you cringe at my trick stories, rob--in fact, the reason so much of what i write is cringeworthy--is because that is the intention of this long, five-year gutter-morality tale.  or, to put it another way,

oh mother, tell your children, not to do what i have done

(and yeah, will, i know--the animals did that one, too.)

where paulo nails me to the wall, however, is with the following observation:

I believe that even though one should have some courtesy to the person reading their drivel, paying a reader too much mind can fuck with your head as a writer.

boy, is he right about that.  i'm starting to care about what you assholes think, and it's clearly fucking with my head.

and the reviews are in

I'm just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood

                                                       some old song

i've been writing guttermorality for almost five years, and have nearly called it quits as many times.  while i wouldn't trade the experience for anything, it's been in many ways a long and lonely slog.  i have few readers and even fewer commenters, and those commenters i do have--and i love you guys, don't get me wrong--tend to focus on the surface of whatever i've written, rather than the substance.

consequently, in the absence of any real criticism and feedback, i've been basically writing in a vacuum all this time.  believe it or not, i agonize over every one of these posts, try to distill 'em down to their bare essence, make 'em look offhand, layer in all sorts of subtle meaning--you know, say what i wanna say without actually saying it, and hope somebody gets it.  but i'm usually left to wonder if anybody ever does.

well, tonight i got an answer, of sorts--from not only one writer, but two.

lemme talk about paulo a minute.  i first came across his column many years ago whilst flipping through a new, cheap-newsprint biweekly weho rag called fab!, and, after lingering for probably too long over his picture,

gritted my teeth and steeled myself for whatever inane, crayon-scrawled prattlings with which this pretty-boy had managed to fill the space below.  because, clearly, he couldn't possibly be anything but a desperate, gay-affirmative action hire to draw readers to a struggling new paper with eye candy, right?

wrong.  this boy had the chops--his writing was brazen, honest, shameless, street-articulate, hideously un-PC, not to mention dead-on and funny as hell, and he had me from word one.  and i came back issue after issue not only to see what gay sacred cow he'd be (usually accurately) skewering this time--and, often as not, and to his credit, that included himself--but to snicker at how the peanut gallery had reacted to his last incendiary blast.  because lemme tellya, there was nothing more entertaining to ol' mkf than a buncha clutching-their-pearls, outraged fags writing letters to the editor week after week who couldn't decide what they needed more--to hate paulo or to fuck him.  (me?  i was conflicted too--i couldn't decide whether i wanted to fuck him or be his best girlfriend.  i settled for neither.)

sadly, fab! eventually went the way of all truly interesting gay publications--i.e., outta business--and i lost track of paulo. but i never forgot him.  i'd eventually launch guttermorality as a political blog, and, when one drunken night i tired of that shit and decided to get a little personal but wondered how far i should push it, i thought of him and how he'd owned his shit and decided, "fuck, if he could do it, i guess i can, too."

which brings us (almost) to today.  see, a few weeks ago, i got a hair up my ass to google ol' paulo, see what he was up to, and found his blog.  turns out he'd been through a lot in the ensuing years--through the ol' meth rabbit hole and out the other side, victorious--and the experience had tempered and matured his writing.  gone was the boy who had so ruthlessly lashed out at those gay stereotypes he had feared becoming, replaced by a man who had every reason to be proud of who he had actually become.

so i referenced him in a post, sent him the link.  and not only did he write me back, he actually wrote a post about my goddam blog, urging his readers (who number far more than mine) to check it out.  at least one of 'em did--a writer himself--and gave me his own mini-review.

so, do they get me?  check out the link above, compare their impressions to yours, and come back next time to see what i have to say about it.  because, after five years, i think it's time i quit laying it between the lines, and explained a few things straight-up, straight-out.