Bob Saget, playing an old gay in The Drowsy
Chaperone.Photo: Getty Images
Today Doree Shafrir told us a little bit about ourselves, and by “ourselves” we mean the tragic young gays who like to go to piano bars like Marie’s Crisis, and the women who sometimes have to go with them. The Observer scribe divides all young homosexual men into two categories: new gays and new old gays. Here are the classifications in a nutshell.
You Know You Are a New Gay When:
• You live in Williamsburg and the East Village.
• You wear pointy shoes and tight cutoff shorts.
• You studied queer theory and dabbled in heroin at Sarah Lawrence or Bard or Wesleyan.
• You hang out at bars like Metropolitan and Sugarland in Williamsburg or the Phoenix and Eastern Bloc in the East Village.
• You listen to Chromeo and Girl Talk and Le Tigre.
• You hang out at Brighton Beach.
• You do karaoke at Sing Sing.
• You watch America’s Next Top Model.
• You are Christian Siriano, Jake Shears, or Rufus Wainwright.
You Know You Are an Old Gay When:
• You are old, fat, and can’t, in all likelihood and despite your best efforts, get laid.
• You go to Musical Mondays at Splash and regular nights at Marie’s Crisis.
• In fact, you love everything about musicals, especially Cheyenne Jackson and the guy from the Broadway production of Footloose, after whom you named your cat.
• You put together a reading of a Wendy Wasserstein play. [To certain of our gay friends, you are so called out on this one.]
• All of your friends are musical-theater fanatics, as well.
• You watch The Golden Girls. [R.I.P., Sophia!]
• You are Austin Scarlett.
We know we have some gay readers (hey, hey, hey! We don’t assume, but when you contact us on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore), and we’d love to hear what you have to say about these categories. But if you did try heroin at Bard, let’s just keep that between you and Natasha Lyonne, okay?
The New Old Gays [NYO]
