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Authors: Maria Dahvana Headley
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disaster.
There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:
The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.
The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knewwere gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.
The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.
The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.
The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.
The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.
The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.
The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.
The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.
Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.
Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating histrademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.
“You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.
Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.
“I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close
There were several categories of male to be met in the Dramatic Writing Program, and, with the exception of the last two, I was critical of them all:
The Rainbow Bullets. As in, gay like Liberace. One of these was writing a response to Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, entitled The Penis Monologues. He claimed that the penis had been marginalized, too.
The Gayts. Gay-straight men. Obviously gay, but in denial. Usually, these guys would spend their time at NYU writing five or six scripts featuring characters that everyone knewwere gay, except the playwright, who’d finish things up with a hetero wedding.
The Strays. Straight-gay men. Dated girls, but used hair products that made girls suspicious of them. Always prettier than any woman in the department.
The Comedians. Interested only in fart jokes. No one ever got a good look at them, because they never removed their scraggly baseball caps. Traveled in packs. Deadly serious.
The Tragedians. Usually strikingly handsome, and in possession of appealingly troubled souls, and extensive knowledge of French new wave cinema. Interested only in making experimental, Warhol-esque films consisting of five hours of footage of the Empire State Building. At night.
The Cult of Personality. Generally, slam poets. They paired wildly mismatched 1970s shirts with nylon workout pants and Converse high-tops, and vacillated between above-it-all silence and rabid ironic monologue. Asexual.
The Do-Overs. The thirty-something guys who were happily beginning their youth again, this time as the only “real men” in a program full of hot eighteen-year-olds.
The Gurus. The thirty-something guys who didn’t notice the eighteen-year-olds, and therefore were fervently desired by all of them. Usually yoga teachers on the side.
The Professors. Though there were rules against dating one’s students, they were not well enforced. A side effect of writerly repression was that several people in the program were obsessed with scripting sadomasochistic onstage sex. The rest of the unlucky workshop participants would have to pretend to be actors, and read the scenes aloud. “Ohh, ahh, yesssssss. Pleeease, plunge my head into a bucket of pee.” Nothing could have been more unappealing. Except for the semifamous professor in charge, lech-erously informing my friend Elise that she looked as though she’d been really turned on during her reading of a rape scene.
Zak. Lovable, but not dateable, given the roommate situation. Zak had his own in-program dating woes. He’d had a brief interlude with the blonde Russian babe that all the straight boys in the program followed around. Something undisclosed had gone wrong. Now he was forced to hide every time he saw her.
Griffin. Lovable, but not dateable, given that, other than Zak, he was my only male friend in the department. He, Zak, and I formed a triumvirate of late-night intellectual obnoxiousness. When Griffin was in our kitchen, Zak and I were allowed to be as loud as we wanted to be, because he’d charmed Vic and could do no wrong. Griffin was a small Greek guy from Indiana, and in possession of a talent for making anyone, in any room he walked into, fall instantly in love with him. All of his female friends had tried to sleep with him at some point, and I was no exception. In my case, I’d hung out with him one night until 4:00 a.m., eating histrademark bad pasta and drinking wine. When it was too late for me to go home, he’d given me his bed.
“You can stay in here with me, you know,” I’d said.
Griffin had taken a couple steps toward the bed, then a couple back.
“I can’t. I’m from Indiana,” he’d finally said, and flew from the room, his pillow clutched to his chest. It wasn’t that he was confused about his sexuality. It was that he was one of the last men on the planet who believed in sleeping only with people you loved. He’d later revealed that he’d spent the remainder of the night conflicted. We were close
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