In the Future Everyone Will Be Famous for Fifteen Minutes. Or in My Case, Less.

Okay, as promised (threatened?) a few weeks back, here's my epochal appearance on The Joe Franklin Show. As you may recall, I was hyping my book Gender Chameleons: Androgyny in Rock 'n' Roll, a literary masterpiece that is unsurpassed and will probably make my name live beyond eternity.

The panel includes some guy with an insane porn mustache, a lovely soap opera actress, and two members of the cast of the then huge Off-Broadway hit Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.



It's kind of hard to explain to non-New Yorkers just what a cultural touchstone the Franklin show used to be. Suffice it to say that its format -- Z-list celebrities and a totally clueless host -- made it extremely popular amongst hepsters with a fondness for alcohol or controlled substances. Also, in the days before everybody had cable, it was pretty much the only thing on late at night that wasn't a rerun.

There's also a very sad postscript to this, I'm afraid. As you may have noticed in the clip, I was trying very hard to flirt with the actress from Vampire Lesbians, this despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I couldn't quite decide if she was, in fact, a biological female. I ultimately concluded that she was, but she proved immune to my charms and after we finished taping the show, I pretty much forgot about her.

Until five years later, when I saw this obit in the NY Times:


Needless to say, an upper middle-class white woman dying of AIDS was pretty much an anomaly back then (as it still is now, actually). In any case, it was just a heartbreakingly awful thing to read; she was so young and so talented.