MY NEW BOOK "1001 BEDS"

My new book "1001 Beds" was published by University of Wisconsin Press. The book won the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for best book in Drama-Theatre! “1001 BEDS” is a collection of my essays, performances, manifestos, performance touring stories from Tokyo to Chattanooga and my tell-too-much journals. There is also be a fun and fierce new performance based on excerpts from the book which is touring all over the place. "1001 BEDS" is a kinky and funny journey thru the beds and hotels and life on the road as a traveling salesman- oops I mean a performance artist! I was doing the math recently and I figured that if I continue to tour as a performer for another twenty years, I will end up sleeping in at least 1000 hotel beds in my lifetime on the road. For maximum poetic oomph, let's say 1001 beds! Here's a video of me performing a crucial section from the performance 1001 BEDS at PS 122 in New York City.



(It is this dangerous of love of life-statistics that made me calculate when I was seventeen how much semen I was likely to ejaculate over the course of a lifetime. I figured, based on a reasonable per orgasm average of 1.5 tablespoons, cumming at least three times each day until I was 35, somewhat less since then, I was going to fill two large Hefty garbage bags with cum!)

But it seems important to think about those beds. To let them wash over me, crush me with their rusty springs, dust mites and polyester comforters that Holiday Inn will never once wash! When I was a kid, I once saw in A Ripley’s Believe it or Not book a monument to a bed. The image was a four-poster bed up on a tall pillar like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. As you might imagine, the monument was somewhere in the Midwest- maybe somewhere near Peoria- an area I have racked up many of those 1001 Beds! Anyhow, this monument was a tribute to the bed- a place where most of us are born on, most of us die on and most of us spend one third of our lives on. This idea thrilled me as a boy, since I loved being in bed greatly and knew in my life bed would loom large as an emotional, political and psychic hot spot. I knew my deepest sense of self would be forged in bed, history is made in bed, creativity and life force is generated from between the sheets: all those 1001 hotel beds I would travel to in the Midwest, just like that one up on the pillar in my Ripley’s Believe it or Not memory!

These 1001 beds today have become the symbol of my life on the road as an artist and activist. My mission -- and I have decided to accept it-- is to be always ready to run around and perform my lean-n-mean homo-drenched performances, cultural agitating, teaching and general being a way-out gay role model and/or target. Whenever I need to hop on a tiny plane for Des Moines or Chattanooga and show the rainbow flag I am ready to do this. This new book explores my journies and adventures and observations of this mission !