Gay Perry Mason

When I was a kid I used to sulk like hell when my parents put on Perry Mason. The minute I heard the music I knew we were in for what is now known as "adult drama," nothing that could possibly interest a kid. I mean there were philanderers [what the hell was that?] and suspects and long, boring courtroom sequences, and people screaming "I did it, yes I did it" from the witness stand. Nothing to engage the limited attention span of a child.

Years later when I was all grown up I actually enjoyed Perry Mason. I thought some of the stories were clever, and I enjoyed the badinage between Perry, his secretary Della Street, and his buddy-private eye Paul Drake. Then there was the craggy Lt. Tragg and the always-losing district attorney Hamilton Burger.

Paul Drake, played by William Hopper, always flirted mildly with Della ("Hello, beautiful") but he never asked her for a date. Perry and Della had dinner frequently, but Paul was often there, or even Burger or Tragg, and they generally talked about a case. Neither Mason nor Drake were seen very often, if ever, with a female date.

Hmmm ... Paul and Perry? Why not?

I had always heard that William Hopper, Hedda Hopper's son, was gay [which may be just another of those Hollywood rumors, let me make that clear] but I heard nothing about Burr, who also went on to play Ironside in another successful series. After his death, of course, it came out -- pun intended -- that Burr had had a long-time male companion. I finally got around to reading Michael Seth Starr's [don't know anything about this guy, but jeez is that a "gay" name or what?] bio of Burr, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.

Burr went so far as to fabricate a marriage [there was one genuine short-lived marriage], a deceased son, and military heroism, but on the other hand, he sounds like a kind-hearted man who was a friend for life if he liked someone. "Hamilton Burger" [actor William Tallman] was fired from the show after being caught in a nude party [apparently not a gay one] and Burr rallied to his defense and finally got him reinstated on the show. Plus there was his entertainment tours for servicemen, which he never publicized a la Bob Hope.

Some of the people quoted by Starr make rather ridiculous comments about Burr. There's some nonsense about how he supposedly greeted workmen in a shocking pink bathrobe, and other allegedly "gay" stuff that people think they can get away with because Burr was homosexual. (You can't blame Starr for this if that's what people told him.) As Perry Mason, Ironside, and as various heavies in film noir thrillers [including Hitchcock's classic Rear Window] Burr never came off as dainty or stereotypically effeminate.

Burr may have made some outrageous assertions to cover up his sexual orientation, but [except for one brief period] he didn't use a wife as a beard, but lived with his male lover for a very long time. The one and only time he got political in a gay sense was when celebrities were urged to boycott Colorado because of the state's passage of an anti-gay amendment. Burr didn't agree with the amendment, thank goodness, but he didn't think boycotting the state was the correct way of fighting it.

It's interesting to contemplate what Burr might have been like had he been born into a later generation. For nowadays it is not uncommon for actors, character actors at least, to come out of the closet once they've become established or even before.

Rednecks at the Gay Bar

I was at my favorite gay local watering hole about two weeks ago, when one of the patrons told me and a couple of others in my vicinity a joke.

It was the most vile racist joke I've ever heard in my life. It was not just "politically incorrect" or good-natured racial humor that everyone, black or white, could laugh at -- it's punchline was the "n" word. It is the kind of joke that debases the one who tells it, and also debases everyone who hears it. I was disgusted.

And this was in a gay bar in Greenwich Village in the 21st century!

What's going on here?

Yes, I know there have always been racist gays and homophobic blacks and so on and so on, but on the --mercifully -- rare occasions I encounter these troglodytes I still find it a bit startling. Basically this jerk was telling a redneck joke in a gay bar. His mind-set was the same as people who tell fag jokes. I made this point but I'm sure it went in one ear and out the other.

To their credit, the other people I had been conversing with -- all white -- were also appalled by the joke. The only one who laughed was a guy sitting on the other side of the "joke" teller. The two of them bonded in their thought of me as a humorless [yeah -- right!] person who couldn't take a joke. I and my friends were the assholes -- not them. Amazing. "It's all in fun," said the joke teller.

One of my friends said "If it's all in fun, then go tell that guy at the end of the bar [who happened to be African-American]. " Of course, none of us actually wanted this turd to tell the joke to anyone, but we also knew that he never would.

What creates a gay person like this? Self-hatred, of course. A well-adjusted man has no need to hate another minority group just to feel better about himself. You learn in sociology 101 that prejudice is generally the product of an inferiority complex.

Over the years I have, sadly, met gay men who had issues with Women, Blacks, Jews, and so on, although they are in the minority, let me make that clear. Generally they are not well-adjusted people, and they have issues over their sexuality. I'm sure without a doubt that the person who told the joke is in the closet, and that deep down he's ashamed to be gay. if his parents are still alive he's never told them he's homosexual [although they probably figured it out long ago.] He could probably benefit from counseling or therapy, but he'll never go get help.

He'll just tell his jokes, hoping to encounter the occasional sad stranger who's as fucked up as he is and will also find them funny.

The thing is, he's a middle-aged man who would probably resent being called an old fart. But his jokes -- which used to proliferate thirty years ago and more -- are "old fart," even redneck jokes. They don't make him seem hip or up-to-date, youthful, but very old and out of it. He actually seemed surprised by those of us who found the joke totally offensive. I hope he tries to pick up some younger man someday, tells his little jokes, and discovers just how hopelessly out of date he is. [There was a younger man in the bar that night who also found the joke completely reprehensible.]

It's shocking, shameful, that people like this still exist, but the good news is that where once many others would have joined in with the laughter, nowadays the joke teller is more often put in his place in no uncertain terms.

Schizoid Gays in a Quiet Place

A Quiet Place, an opera composed by Leonard Bernstein, was recently presented at the New York City Opera [not to be confused with the Met] where it got some surprisingly good reviews. A Quiet Place, which had very few American performances during Bernstein's lifetime, began life as a tuneful 1952 one-act entitled Trouble in Tahiti. With an engaging score and a pretty good libretto by Bernstein, Trouble told the story of the dysfunctional marriage of Sam and Dinah. It was a memorable short work, the title of which referred to a piece of "technicolor twaddle" that Dinah goes to see at the movies.

But Bernstein wasn't satisfied with Trouble; it wasn't serious enough, so -- working with librettist Stephen Wadsworth (whose personal life I know nothing of, except that he has a wife) -- Bernstein expanded his little one-act into a full-length opera entitled A Quiet Place, the title taken from one of Dinah's songs in Trouble. It made its debut in Houston in 1983. All of the music from Trouble in Tahiti was used in the new work in flashback sequences.

In the new opera, Dinah has been killed in an accident, and their little boy, Junior, is a schizophrenic. His lover, Francois, is now married to Junior's sister, Dede -- talk about making someone schizophrenic!

Now at this point I must interject that Bernstein was a married homosexual who -- like many married homosexuals do -- probably preferred to think of himself as a hip bisexual. Therefore the whole idea of Francois ditching Junior to marry his boyfriend's sister, may have just seemed like some trendy bisexual chic. In reality, it's an utterly cruel and grotesque situation, which librettist Wadsworth never really explores. I mean, talk about situations that would fuck a guy up. As I wrote in my book The Opera of the Twentieth Century, it's never made clear if Francois' falling for his sister exacerbated or actually engendered Junior's instability. It is suggested that Dede and Francois married out of their mutual love for Junior, who needs looking after, but Francois sings a [second-rate] aria reaffirming his love for and commitment to Dede. Poor Junior.

Perhaps something interesting could have been made of this, but Wadsworth's libretto is pretty lousy, being more pretentious than profound, and does little to illuminate these rather screwed-up characters [I mean, a woman who would marry her brother's boyfriend, and vice versa!], although there's a fairly moving wind-up and Bernstein's relentlessly non-melodic music [aside from the excerpts from Trouble in Tahiti] doesn't help.

What's more interesting is some of the comments Christopher Alden, who directed this latest production of A Quiet Place, made to Olivia Giovetti of Time Out New York Magazine. "There's a lot of Bernstein in many of the characters. [In Francois] there's that fantasy of bisexuality or a gay man suddenly turning straight." As for Junior, Alden says, "It seems a bit of a throwback to the past where anytime gay characters were presented, they had to be shown to be problematical people." While it might have been admirable to present some sort of gay characters in an opera some years ago, it's the Same Old Story when we see a shizoid fag and a "bisexual" man who opts to marry his lover's sister. Sheesh! No thank you, Bernstein!

A Quiet Life looks at homosexuality from the confines of the closet, where Bernstein and others like him resided for most of their lives. It doesn't present a hip look at bisexuality or "sexual fluidity" so much as to all intents and purposes it simply avoids the subject of homosexuality altogether.

"Brothers and Sisters" Straight Gay Couple

The ABC-TV series Brothers and Sisters, which has been running for a number of years now, admirably has a few gay characters, as I've noted in the past. The main couple is Kevin Walker (Matthew Rhys, on the left in the photo), who is part of the main family in the show, and his boyfriend Scotty (openly gay Luke Mcfarlane, on the right).

Although it also dealt with other issues, the main storyline for the past two weeks has been a crisis in the marriage between Kevin and Scotty. It's a question if the relationship will survive. It centers on something that Scotty did several months in the past.

Now you might wonder, what did Scotty do? Did he fall in love with someone else? Decide to become an ex-gay? Tell Kevin he was lousy in bed and wanted out? None of the above. The horrible, unbelievable, absolutely awful thing Scotty did was ---

-- have a completely meaningless one-night-stand with another man on a night that Kevin blew him off for an event that Kevin knew was very special to Scotty.

Did I say this was meaningless casual sex? No one caught any diseases. Scotty did not see the fellow again, he did not fall in love with him, he did not have a male mistress or a continuing romantic affair.

It was just one lousy night, sheesh.

But Kevin and Scotty and all of the relatives are acting just the way some straight couples do when there's an "indiscretion." [And let's not call this an extra-marital affair; it was one night or less.] Yes, they are a monogamous couple who had even planned to raise a baby and Kevin is all hurt and what-not, but even women whose husbands stray in this fashion can forgive and move on. Presumably that will be the case for Kevin, but all the fucking angst in the last two episodes, you would think Scotty had impregnated some gal and was planning to march to the altar with her.

It's just all so terribly conventional, so middle-class. Like an episode of Dr. Phil, where he counsels a fat, fifty-year-old housewife who's all hysterical because her husband had sex with a hooker [had sex, period!] or went to a strip club. You can see Kevin on the show whining to Dr. Phil about Kevin's infidelity, even though it happened months ago, that it meant absolutely nothing, that Scotty still loves Kevin, and Scotty only did it because he understandably felt abandoned by his somewhat self-centered and borderline bitchy lover.

Such angst, such hand-wringing! I mean, get over it already! The most (unintentionally) hilarious scene had Kevin's gay uncle Saul (Ron Rifkin), who is seventy and spent most of his life in the closet [he didn't even come out when he learned he had a gay nephew] daring to angrily lecture Scotty, who is such a sweet guy [borderline cloying at times] that it immediately seemed like massive overkill.

[Speaking of Uncle Saul, he didn't come out until he was seventy and he winds up with Stephen Collins as a boyfriend (Collins plays "Charlie")! Even at sixty-three handsome Collins is a mite out of Saul's league. Collins plays the role just a touch stereotypically.]

I recognize there is a movement to "humanize" gays and make it clear that we are just like everybody else -- how depressing -- but the fact is that the gay community has always had its own rules and a freer mind-set. Now that more gay people are coming out of the closet, we're getting the viewpoints and influence of more conservative -- more conventional -- gays. I'm all for the diversity of the gay community, and feel every gay person has the right, more or less, to live as they choose, but there's something a little disquieting about a major gay couple on a popular TV program reacting to what should be a minor incident the way that a stereotypical straight couple would.

No offense whatsoever intended to heterosexuals, but what the world doesn't need is straight gay people.

These two episodes were excruciatingly awful, never more so than when the guy Scotty had the one-night-stand with shows up at the restaurant he owns. The guy was depicted as slick and callow, and at one point he even gets punched in the face by Kevin's straight brother [this uncomfortably reminded me of a gay-bashing]. This happens after pathetic Kevin punches out a completely innocent waiter, confusing him with the other guy. None of this was funny or dramatic, just silly and quite desperate. Surely the writers of the show can come up with more dramatic developments for Kevin and Scotty than this hysteria over a one-night quickie? Even the straight characters on the show don't carry on so over infidelity!

It's great to have gay characters on TV, but when they're poorly handled it seems like a shameful waste of a great opportunity.

What's in a Letter?

Homosexual panic can strike at any age.

Take the case of an acquaintance of mine who has an Irish last name with a "Mc" in front.

Several years ago I co-authored a book with a friend of mine and this guy -- we'll call him Mc -- was listed in the acknowledgments.
Unfortunately his name was misspelled with a "q" instead of a "g" and when my co-author went to correct it on the page proofs he made the mistake of underlining the "q." The typesetter interpreted this as meaning to capitalize the "q" so now it was a "Q."

In other words, it looked as if the guy's last name was McQueer or something along those lines.

Now a normal person would understand this was just a typo. I mean, I'm openly gay, why would I want to call anyone a "queer?" This fellow and I were hardly good friends, but we had had no quarrels over the years.

Anyway, he and his girlfriend decided to host a publication party for my co-author and myself [I think this was more for my co-author than for me, and it was probably the idea of the girlfriend and not "Mc," but it was still a very nice gesture. And a very nice party]

Mc went so far as to post the proper spelling of his name on the front door where everyone could see it.

He then went through the book itself and spotted an error and told everyone that I must have been the one who made the mistake -- not my co-author. [The irony was that it was my co-author who made that mistake and also compounded the original typographical error by underlining it!]

As I was a guest in Mc's home, I couldn't say what was on my mind [very, very frustrating for me] so I simply ignored his tackiness.

It wasn't long after this that Mc and his long-time live-in girlfriend got married or became domestic partners or something along those lines. I guess he was scared that because of a simple, inadvertent typographical error everyone would think he was, like, McQueer.

Like I say, talk about homosexual panic [the fear that you are or people might think you are gay]! And this was no teenager but a middle-aged man bordering on senior citizenship!

Well, at least it got him to marry his girlfriend [a lovely woman by the way].

Disturbing Matters -- and the Stonewall Again!

It's a shame to realize that even in these much more [but not completely] enlightened times there are still young gay men (and women) killing themselves. There's the tragic case of Tyler Clementi [pictured] who committed suicide after his roommate at Rutgers and another "friend" taped him having a homoerotic encounter and then posted it on the Internet. These people may not have thought Tyler was doing anything wrong, they may have felt they were doing the right thing in "outing" him, but a.) they were committing a gross invasion of privacy [which would have been the case even had the encounter been heteroerotic in nature] and b.) they should have realized that "coming out" is a rite of passage that everyone comes to in his or her own time. Outing hypocritical homophobes is one thing; an 18-year-old college student is another. [The legal aspects of this are so, sadly, fascinating that you can bet this story will be used as the basis for a Law and Order:SVU episode as well as many others].

Tyler probably had other issues. He seems like a sensitive young man. He was not conventionally handsome but he had a sweet face and other qualities that may have in time attracted someone to share his life with him, had that been what he desired. His roommate took what might have been a tentative first step into finding and accepting himself and turned it, whatever his intentions, into a dirty joke. Tyler may not have killed himself over being gay, but it's clear that having his actions taped and displayed for all the world to see drove him over the edge.

Despite all the achievements in Gay Rights, gay teen suicide is still a very real and terrible issue.

As is homophobia in general. Although things are much better than they once were, there still are plenty of reports that remind us that to some people we're as hated as ever.

Just the other day a man was gay-bashed in the famous [or infamous] Stonewall bar here in New York. Not that this surprises me, as I had an unpleasant encounter there myself many moons ago. The victim was taking an honest piss when they guy beside him asked what kind of bar it was, and when he discovered he was in -- gasp! -- a gay bar, took out his aggression on the customer. Another straight guy joined in. Both of the gay-bashers were arrested.

What kills me is that the Stonewall is claiming they do everything to protect their customers, to have a safe environment for everyone. But how did this [probably] shit-faced straight guy [or self-hater] get into the bar in the first place? There used to be a time when bouncers in gay bars made sure that every customer, especially the straight ones who wandered in, were aware they were in a gay bar, so that they could withdraw -- or be refused admittance -- if their reaction was hostile or negative. Now most gay bars don't even bother to do this, the reason allegedly being that gays and straights mingle more today and no one should be excluded etc. etc. but which really has more to do with money. Years ago straight people entered gay bars with their gay friends, and they were generally cool and respectful. Now we get inebriated meatheads who bounce in, unaware they're in a gay bar or too drunk to care [until they're made aware of it], and gay customers wind up paying the price for it.

I hope the guy who was gay-bashed sues the straight owners of the Stonewall. [Yes, they are straight, don't let anybody fool you. They gave a gay bartender at their other place, the Duplex down the street, a piece of the action and made him manager so they can say it's "gay-owned," which is a trifle disingenuous in my opinion.] The Stonewall gets the overflow from the Duplex, and it's been said that Duplex employees encourage [are told to encourage] the mostly straight, generally drunken tourists pouring out of the Duplex to go to the Stonewall; sometimes they mix with the gay customers like oil and water.

One of the gay-bashers' lawyers claims it wasn't a hate crime. But even if the guy turns out to be homosexual himself, it doesn't matter. If you beat somebody up because they're gay and call them a fag all the while it's a hate crime, be assured.

The Bitch Is Back

A few months ago As the World Turns introduced a new character, a doctor named Dr. Reid Oliver [expertly played by Eric Sheffer Stevens, pictured].

Oliver knew he was an incredibly gifted surgeon and made no bones about making sure that everyone else knew it too. His chief expression was one of withering contempt.

In other words, he was sort of bitchy.

I remember wondering if the character would turn out to be gay, then immediately admonishing myself because I know full well that most gay men are not bitchy and I've certainly met some straight guys who definitely were, so I told myself to put that right out of my mind. [I also recognized that it wasn't that I thought gay men were bitchy but that this has been a prevailing and unfair stereotype for many years.]

Now I don't think it was because Oliver was a bit of a bitch -- at least I hope not -- but it turned out that the good doctor was gay. He was brought in to shake up the relationship between Luke and Noah, the gay couple on the show, among other things [his character has shaken up a lot of people actually]. Noah had lost his sight, and Luke importuned [or rather badgered] genius surgeon Reid to come operate on him. For many weeks, during which Noah kept pushing Luke away [he in part blamed Luke for his accident], the two -- Luke and Reid -- simply couldn't stand one another.

But you could cut the sexual tension with a knife.

As Reid began to fall for Luke and vice versa, the doctor started to become a little more human. The somewhat insecure man underneath the obnoxious shell began to poke through.

And finally, after days and days of teasing us, the two finally went to bed. [Okay, not that we saw much of that. Even progressive shows such as As the World Turns aren't progressive enough to handle that.] But I must say the two characters have had some sexy kissing scenes [all the more remarkable if the two actors are straight, which, unfortunately, would preclude their actually enjoying any of the action, more's the pity].

In the meantime, Noah, who had vacillated back and forth between Luke and other guys, finally decided he was still in love with his old boyfriend, but he was heart-broken when Luke told him he now loved Reid.

But just yesterday Reid was in a terrible accident and is now brain-dead. His heart is going to be implanted in another character. Luke was, of course, devastated. [I don't mean to quibble, but these sequences, while not bad, didn't seem to have the impact of similar sequences involving straight characters. Perhaps it was simply because Luke and Reid had not been together all that long. There are still many people, who despite being gay-friendly, don't quite see gay relationships as equal to straight. Perhaps this could have been explored on the show -- or will be. Everyone just stood around talking about how Reid was gone and let's get his heart prepped and so on while Luke stood there in shock; would they have just let the poor guy stand there if it had been his girlfriend who'd died? But then Luke didn't seem all that devastated; perhaps because he felt more of an infatuation for Reid than anything else? Or did the actor simply underplay too much for some reason?]

In any case, the openly and happily gay Oliver went out as a hero; the last thing he did before expiring was insisting that his heart be used for a colleague whom he died trying to help, and whom he didn't especially like.

Normally I would rail against the killing off of an excellent character like Dr. Reid Oliver [his being gay added an extra dimension to someone who was already quite interesting, in no small part due to Stevens' performance as well as good writing] but As the World Turns is going off the air for good later this month. The gay characters on One Life to Live are, I believe, no longer on that show. And I've already written how The Young and the Restless de-gayed itself, although minor gay supporting characters show up now and then to say a measly line or two.

So there won't be many or any gay characters on the afternoon soaps. Still, it looks as if As the World Turns will go out with its long-running gay couple, Luke and Noah, intact. Noah will naturally want to comfort Luke after his terrible loss [although he'll probably feel kind of funny helping him get over someone else]. Frankly, Luke seemed a little stupid blowing off Noah. Yes, Dr. Oliver was a very handsome guy, but even after he thawed out a bit he didn't exactly have Noah's sincerity and sweetness. And Noah wasn't exactly chopped liver. Still, it's hardly unrealistic for a young guy to fall for a pretty face, male or female.

As the World Turns may not have been perfect, but in general the show did a mighty good job of presenting mostly realistic gay characters of some variety and intelligence.

Party Animals

Many years ago I went to see the film version of the rock opera Tommy.

The movie was horrible. it would have been horrible even without its most offensive scene.

After Tommy's uncle (or whoever he was) sings about "fiddling" with the boy -- in other words, molesting him -- the actor playing the part picks up a copy of Gay News [or a similar gay paper -- it's been a few years] and begins reading it. Tommy's father, played by the imposing Oliver Reed, walks in and sets fire to the newspaper, wearing a look that could kill.

So there you have it in CinemaScope and technicolor: Gay man equals child molester.

Author Robert Hofler makes no mention of this scene in his book Party Animals, which is ironic considering the subject of the book is producer Allan Carr, who helped promote and market Tommy with a world premiere party in a New York subway station [where it belonged]. More ironic is that the openly and flamboyantly gay Carr tried to bring a gay aesthetic to his projects as well as a homoerotic ambiance to his parties [and orgies]. NOTE: Other projects Carr worked on in one capacity or another were Grease with John Travolta, Can't Stop the Music, the Village People singing group, the Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles [suave, borderline swishy-if-straight star Gene Barry was afraid to share an elevator with the chorus boys because he thought he might catch AIDS], and a famously disastrous Oscar telecast.

Interestingly Hofler does make note of the sad but not uncommon phenomenon that the stereotypically gay Carr was also full of extreme self-hatred, stemming in part from his body image and hard-to-hide effeminacy. Carr was someone who decided he would make the gay thing work for him without ever fully embracing his sexuality [except, of course, during sex, often with men for hire]. Hofler writes how Carr would often go out of his way to do just about anything and everything for the heterosexual men with whom he worked, but rarely did the same for his gay male friends and acquaintances. "Allan had a way of treating fellow homosexuals like mere employees and straight male friends like the brothers he never had," writes Hofler.

Which, of course, is why Carr probably wouldn't have given a shit about that scene in Tommy.

Hofler's book is quite interesting, even if the star of the book himself may not interest you all that much. Some of the negative attitudes expressed about Carr by people may have had to do with their homophobia but just as often with his glittering, often tacky, lack of substance. I never met Carr but I've met people like him. They can be fun -- until they think you've somehow crossed them, or their extreme self-hatred beneath the callow, "fabulous" exterior begins to come out through the cracks and then explodes.

Not a bad book of a certain time and place in Hollywood and New York, with a back drop of emerging gay rights and gay consciousness, as well as the terrible rise of AIDS.

And Hofler made me laugh out loud with the line: "In time matching John Travolta with a mate of the opposite sex turned into a cottage industry."

Trapped by BearTrapping and Other Matters

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When It's Time to Call for the Check

When you're on a date with a guy, you know it's time to call for the check -- or a cab-- when he says:

NOTE: Most of these are based on real comments by real guys, either said to me or someone that I know.

1.) "I'll never love anyone as much as I love my ex-wife."
Well, then, we sure don't have much of a future. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not your ex-wife.

2.) "I'm actually bisexual, and I think my preference is women." Then shouldn't you be dating a woman?

3.) "Adult protective services made me move out of my aunt's house because they said she wasn't getting enough to eat." If you think you're gonna eat me out of house and home, forget it!

4.) "I've been thinking of leaving the priesthood." You're -- a -- fuckin' -- priest!!!

5.) "I love to bareback and I say 'fuck you' to anyone who objects! After all, it's my ass, isn't it?" Well, it may be your ass but it's my body and my dick has no intention of entering into it. [While it may be comparatively rare, tops can get HIV.]

6.) "I love you, do you hear me, I love you, I said I love you!" [In bed, from someone you've known only a couple of hours.]

7.) "C'mon, I can tell that you dye your beard. I mean I can see the gray roots." Yes, I dye my beard. I dye it green on St. Patty's day and orange on Halloween. Anything else is none of your fuckin' business.

8.) "You like man-boobs, don't you?"

9.) "You and I are about the same age, aren't we?" [From someone who's a good twenty years older than you.]

10.) "My father and I had an incestuous relationship for many years. After he died and was cremated, I dipped a spoon in the urn and ate some of the ashes." Remind me not to go to your next dinner party.