Let’s be serious people, as we’ve all learned over the last couple years, pretty much anyone can do porn! This creates the distinction between real porn stars, and what we can safely and simply refer to as porn “people”. You know, the real-life everyday people of porn!

CLICK HERE to watch another one of our locals get tag-teamed by old people — there’s even a quick cameo by this year’s RI Pride parade! Hey, you could be in porn too!

Viva la porn people!

So this Saturday at the Dark Lady, you will have the opportunity to attend The Litter’s annual Christmas In July fundraiser. Now you may remember the feelings we took away from this party last year, and this year we have no choice but to expect more of the same. Don’t get us wrong, we are all for a mid-summer fundraiser to boost revenue for all parties during a time of year that notoriously lacks in cash flow, but Christmas In July AGAIN? The first time, sure. The second time? Sure, but weird. But we are now into at least the 5th or 6th of these abominations and it’s starting to give us the feeling we get when we drive past one of those houses that keeps their Christmas tree up all year long — it’s just plain Michael Jackson creepy (too soon?). We have a feeling that The Litter got this idea from the Home Shopping Network (which you’ll notice is currently in the middle of their own “Christmas In July” sale), and no doubt where she buys a lot of the costume jewelry she wears.

Plus, repeating it doesn’t strengthen a cherished tradition, it beats a dead Santa Claus horse, and the heavy red and green deco in the summer reminds us of a dark, dank, tacky lake house — like if we decided to hold a Christmas celebration in a moldy basement. Then there’s the drag costumes — because none of them have more than two or three bright red and green gowns, we now get to see the same ones in the summer and the winter, and nobody even looks good in those colors anyway! Seriously bitches, there’s really nothing at all attractive about this.

So what to do, you ask? Well, if they really can’t think too far away from the silly Christmas theme, how about New Years? White lights and champagne never go out of style, or maybe a Thanksgiving thing (which is probably a little more in line with the concept of charity anyway). Honestly, we don’t really care — just switch it up! It’s confusing the old people who have trouble enough remembering what year it is!

So, it’s our understanding that the 11th Annual Charlie McGraw Boat Cruise (which so far as we know has always taken place on a boat) is switching up the format this year and has plans to commence somewhere on land in view of the bay.

Why abandon the Bay Queen, you ask? Well it seems that after the 10th Annual Charlie McGraw Boat Cruise and the drama that ensues when you herd a boatload of fags onto an actual boat, the organizers of said boat cruise and their guests were asked not to return! And you just know all of those boat cruise companies all talk to each other, so it probably didn’t take long before ACOS & Co. realized that the entirety of the Narragansett Bay has had enough of their shit. And if somehow they do pull a boat out of their ass in the next six weeks, it’s not going to be anything glamorous — maybe they should just move this shit a little further out into SE Mass where they need the tourism revenue.

But wait, there’s more! When you attend the 1st Annual Charlie McGraw Land Cruise, you’ll be paying the exact same price as if you were at the 11th Annual Charlie McGraw Boat Cruise, you know, because the Bay Queen was just donated for the last ten years and had nothing to do with the ticket price.

All donations go to benefit AIDS Care Ocean State 4 eva!

UPDATE: Oops! As it turns out, The Bay Queen doesn’t care how ridiculous those boat cruises can get, and would most likely be hosting the 11th Annual Charlie McGraw boat cruise this year as well if the notorious vessel’s operating company was not now in receivership. Well that explains it!

Land hoe!

OMG Pride, why did you do this to us?! We are definitely still in recovery from the very long weekend that was swallowed up by Providence’s Pride celebration — but have no intention of letting that stop us from talking about it now.

Let’s start with the outdoor Pride festival that took place this year on South Water St. In case you didn’t know, this festival has taken place in a variety of places around the city over the last several years, but none as picturesque as this one. The river, the buildings in the background, the perfect weather and breeze coming off the water — every bit of it made for some very pretty pictures. Other than that though, it was a total carnival. “Causes”, charities and mayoral candidates mixed up with Dippin’ Dots, fried dough and awfully tacky pride flag-wear. A complete mess… but we knew it would be and headed straight for the booze tent! That of course, is where we found everyone we knew — which turned out to not be all fun and games. You see, we’re all pretty used to seeing each other in the clubs, in the bars, in the streets — whatever — but at night… And not for nothing, but half of us are looking ROUGH in the daytime! We always joke about how popular Providence’s gay scene would be with the world if we were to be documented by a reality TV film crew, but we’re starting to change our minds — this is not a good look!

So we headed out of that mess and back over to GLO to fix the giant Pride flag we single-handedly installed on the front face of its Clemence St. building, which by the way was fabulous — it’s the only Providence Pride flag in the city that you can see… from spaaaaaccceee.. We finally got back downtown after some… unpleasantness… at the Renaissance Hotel just in time to see the very, very end of the parade, which is pretty much the same every year so we weren’t too broken up and we just headed to the block parties to gather wrist bands before any of the lines got too crazy.

Now it’s no secret that Dark Lady’s block party gets bigger and more ambitious every year (and taller, poor DJ AV8 was stuck atop his DJ tower all night), but this year was just ridiculous — it was even bigger than Mirabar’s, which is an impressive benchmark to surpass especially since the Dark Lady wasn’t even around ten years ago. What we enjoyed most about this party — was that they themed both the Dark Lady and Alleycat not centered around pride, so it wasn’t a total rainbow-fest which everyone by now had had quite enough of. Instead, it was called the Snow Ball, which is obviously so wrong on so many levels, but at least it was refreshing! And hands-down, Alleycat totally had the best party — the music, the vibe, the size, the bubbles and dancers — everything was right. We know this is “bitch”idence, but it honestly didn’t suck at all!

Most everywhere else though was a convoluted mess though. It consistently took 20+ minutes to get a drink, 20+ minutes to go to the bathroom, everything was expensive and it took forever to find people we knew. And did you happen to notice who was added to the Dark Lady’s outside bar that would normally have been over at the Stable????

Okay, so last Sunday (in addition to our weekly Sunday at State — plug, plug, plug) was the annual Miss Gay Pride Pageant, sponsored of course by RI Pride, and probably to benefit AIDS Care Ocean State. Anyway, it took place at Mirabar this year, ever since everyone decided to stop doing events at Gallery (because it’s a dismal, industrial-looking franken-ant-farm of a space) — which is fine by us since Mirabar’s 3rd floor space is beautiful and its killer sound system remains underused.

We didn’t go so we can’t say much, but what we do know is that some fat bitch (whose identity we still do not know) from Massachusetts won the title against several drag messes that were at least from here and participated regularly in the local scene. Now we’re sure that there are no rules that bar anyone from participating based on where they’re from — but shouldn’t there be? Shouldn’t Miss Gay Pride RI actually be from Rhode Island?

If some unknown drag queen from a foreign land swoops in and beats out every local contestant, exactly what does that say about our pride in Rhode Island if we’re happy to have it represented by someone who had to drive five hours to get here?

Thoughts?

While we cringe a little (ok, a lot) at this ad for The Melting Pot, we are no less compelled to let you bitches know about “Boys Night Out”, which we mistakenly thought was every night, to take place officially now this Tuesday at (you guessed it) The Melting Pot — located in one of the locations at the Providence Place Mall that seems to have the highest turn-over rate.

We’re going!

So in case you’re unaware on account of being uninterested, or just plain uncool, we’re currently in the middle of Providence’s Style Week!

What the hell is that, you ask?

Well it’s basically Providence’s answer to Boston or New York Fashion Week, or any other “fashion week” that takes place around the world — although we have a feeling that Providence’s is called “style week” on account of some legality. But whatever, it’s a great chance for some super-bitchy fashion people to gather together in a series of events, and for us to bask in it! The bitchiness, we mean.

So far it’s been a blast though. We got in touch with Style Week’s founder, Rosanna, because Sunday’s after-party was at State and ran right into our Sunday weekly party at State. Since then, Rosanna’s been super and given us everything needed for a fabulous time — including seats at all of the invite-only shows. We showed up a little early to our night at State on Sunday, only to find the place swarming with lots of pretty and well-dressed people, none of which we knew and all of which knew one another. But they all warm up the more we see them!

Monday afternoon we took our girl Ada and ex-Trixx dancer Devon to the Lucille and Mendoza shows at the Renaissance Hotel, got there early for cocktail hour and made it a priority to make ourselves more comfortable with liquor. Then once in the shows, we were able to join Ada in critiquing the the designers’ collections — which we were surprisingly good at (we should be, we do have a fine arts degree for fuck’s sake). We’re going to spare you our thoughts, but Ada did decide that we’re going to collaborate on creating a fashion collection for next year. We’re going to assume that Ada would be doing most of the work, while we’d just concentrate on cutting holes in convenient places to maximize sluttiness…

Tuesday we showed up back at the Renaissance Hotel, which by the way does not have the best event space setup, for the Yellow Clover and MadMOIselle shows. Yellow Clover by Sarah Proust was fantastic and MadMOIselle just wasn’t finished and had seams and strings everywhere. We do not have expertise in fashion design, but even we could see it — not good! So now we’re watching closely for split seams and whatnot, and who do we spot across the runway? Parrys Hampton herself… and her little dog too! Who knew she was into fashion???

Kidding! We actually had a lot of fun with her and her dog between the shows over a glass of wine (three actually).
Up later this week we have another show with Ada at Hotel Providence and then the Jonathan Peters show on Saturday!

Meanwhile today, RI Pride is attempting their own version of a fashion show (an underwear fashion show, because us gays are equipped to appreciate little else) poolside at the Regency hosted by Jackie DiMera and Haley Star. Poolside in the rain! We’re also certain that they’re making damn sure to parade poor Mr. Gay RI, Ben Huber in his underwear by the pool for all he’s worth… that’s what they get for biting off of Style Week with some tasteless drag-driven strip show!

You betta work!

For real?!

Well if her ten minutes of schtick on the Buddy Cianci Show this afternoon is any indication, maybe so! As crazy as our city government is, we agree with Casey 100% that the only way to improve it is to make it even crazier. And we’re totally going to her mayoral fun party at Trinity Brew House on the 2nd!

UPDATE: CLICK HERE for the audio! We die!

So last night RI Pride‘s Triple Crown Pageant 2010 took place at the Hi-Hat in Providence’s Davol Square. As you may have figured out by this point, the TCP is one of the more bizarre homo-centric events to take place each year, largely due to the very wide range of participants and attendants, the show’s Oscar Award-esque notorious run time, and the extent to which everyone is dressed up and boozed up. It’s often very difficult to fully understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and at times, if anything is even happening at all — since the pageant always seems to be paced poorly, leaving the audience with a sense of confusion. We know it’s difficult to run a 3-hour show smoothly, but jesus, they do it every fucking year — it’s not like they have to relearn how to ride the bike every March.

So after a boozy dinner at Downcity with Ada, we sleazed on over to the Hi-Hat an hour into the show to find an entire who’s who of gay Providence. Although the absence of most everyone from Mirabar was a little weird (apparently nobody’s going to be crying when Mirabar is a parking lot), everyone was in a good mood, and our favorite for Miss Lesbian, Sarah Beyers had already won the interview portion of the pageant, which we understand to be an almost foolproof indication of who will end up winning the title at the end of the show. We don’t dislike the Hi-Hat, it’s dinner theatre layout was not an inappropriate choice of venue, but it was certainly not as glamorous as Lupo’s in 2009, and there was WAY too much lighting — we caught ourselves face-to-face with more than one straight-up dumpster fire that sent us running back to the bar… for another $9 drink.

There was music and singing and what not, but as usual, most of the WTF moments were provided by the contestants that we all know had absolutely no chance going in, making us feel sorry (sort of) for finding most of that shit so funny. We got genuine vocal talent from Miss Jackie Collins, expected back-handed comments from the Litter, a threatening weapons display from Sarah Beyers, and some juvenile coming-out-of-the-closet poetry tripe from another lesbian who ended up actually winning the Miss Lesbian 2010 title, prompting some colorful Kanye West awards shows fantasies in defense of Sarah Beyers. However, as much as we wanted the title for Sarah, the fact remains that she does not have a vagina, making her eligibility to win a title created for a lesbian to be questionable — indeed, it’s been that exact question that’s made Ms. Beyers such a polarizing figure in our community. We don’t think that Sarah is the best representative of Rhode Island’s lesbian community, but we do think that her dedication to RI Pride’s cause, her proven leadership and all-around workhorse ethic made her by far the most eligible — assets that RI Pride could have really used, rather than fussing about whether or not they had a dick attached to them. Now we have a title-holder that we likely won’t see until next year’s TCP, but what else is new, right?

Anyhow, let’s look on the bright side and congratulate Miss Savannah Devereaux, certainly the most deserving, visible and capable winner this year. Not to mention she’s funny as shit, so we’re looking forward to seeing a lot more Savannah. We also got a chance to meet Mr. Gay RI 2010 at State, who while kind of quiet, was probably dazed from the previous four hours, so we’ll give him a pass.

Now if we got any of the details from this event wrong, we blame it entirely on the Hi-Hat’s bar, and on not paying attention to most of it while it was actually happening, so feel free to correct us.

So as you bitches may or may not know, it fell on us to host Mr. DJ Box last Sunday night at State, at our weekly State Sundays weekly. Since there was an Imperial Court function at State earlier in the evening, we’d taken it upon ourselves to book DJ AV8 weeks in advance, for obvious reasons. Somehow though, within that time, State owner Mr. Alex Tomasso came in contact with Mr. Box and decided to bring him down for the evening instead. Not a monster inconvenience, except for canceling on AV8 (who had rescheduled two weekend vacations for the occasion) for a DJ we’d never met or heard before. But whatever, Alex doesn’t ask us for much so what was the worst that could happen? Maybe he wouldn’t play the right music, or maybe he’d be bitchy — a number of things went through our minds before meeting Mr. Box firsthand.

So Sunday night we show up to State WAY early to catch the tail end of the Imperial Court’s Monarch’s Ball & Investitures II (we swear “investitures” is a totally made up word, you know, like they make up words in Dungeons & Dragons). We attempted to get a read on what exactly was going on, but could only manage to get a few “WTF…”-eyes from a few of the drag queens there we knew. That pretty much said it. Oh, and the FTM-chick with glasses who couldn’t help but be condescending to us at Alleycat the other night was there. She said she was a dude but we totally knew better.

Anyway, so DJ Box shows up early — quiet and shy, which was fine since that meant we could push him around if we had to — and starts setting up his shit and getting acquainted with the equipment. An hour later by 10:30p, Box is still working out the kinks in the sound system, so we go over and ask if we can help get him up and running faster. When we find out that he hasn’t even gotten the right deck running and cannot yet mix two songs together, we begin to worry — since we don’t know the first thing about using turntables and mixers and whatnot, and it seems neither does DJ Box. Whatever, at least he can play a mix CD until we get it figured out — the trouble is that the sound coming out of the speakers sounds like a ham radio because Box has been fucking with the sound levels so badly, he can’t get them back to where they should be. Even his CD’s seem to skip wildly throughout the night, and when we went to ask if he needed to clean his discs, or if it was the playhead that was dirty, he explained that it wasn’t skipping, it was “an effect”. Meaning of course that he was creating this erratic skipping on purpose — to which we responded, “oh… DON’T DO THAT!”. At this point, we’re getting increasingly frustrated and begin to refer to him (to his face) simply as “Box”, kind of like in Meet The Parents where by the end everyone’s calling Ben Stiller “Focker”.

This is when we decide we need outside help, so we call State manager Tarik, who is over at Andino’s on the hill for a birthday party, and is thus wasted, causing him to fly over to State like Superman when I inform him that some kid is fucking with his sound system. Tarik, a 6’4 drunken crazy JWU grad swoops in and fixes everything, threatening to break poor Box’s legs if he fucks the sound up again. Fabulous!

Within minutes though, Box brings the sound system back to a scratchy walkie-talkie sound and we decide it’s time to call in the big guns (well, sort of). So we get on the horn and practically beg Therapy manager and resident DJ Jeff LeClair to leave the party at Andino’s for State to kick Box out and spin for the rest of the night. We remember requesting very specifically, “Jeff, fix my shit!”.

Meanwhile, we have some new friends in town — Olivia Bouyea, Miss Dynamic Diva of New England, 2010, and Nikita Le Femme, Miss Dynamic Diva of New England 2009. We’d never heard of the Dynamic Divas before (or maybe just vaguely), but we found them just fabulous — only reluctantly believing us when we told them that crazy DJs who can’t work the equipment is not normal for a State Sunday night.

So within minutes, Jeff flies in the door and we explain to Box that he’s going to step aside while the nice man here fixes his shit for a while. From this point on, the night was fantastic. Miss Olivia and Miss Nikita took to the bar and the couches (respectively) and had a great time entertaining the very eclectic and non-judgemental State crowd for the first time. Poor Box packed up his stuff and was never seen or heard from again, which we felt bad about it because like anyone inexperienced, we were certain that the evening wasn’t totally his fault. In fact, we can’t think of a DJ having a worse experience than what poor Box went through on Sunday night. You can’t use the equipment, you can’t mix, nothing’s working right, and they replace you halfway through the night for reasons that are obvious to everyone. Short of the turntables overheating, catching fire, burning the place down and killing everyone inside — it doesn’t get much worse than the story of Mr. Box.

This week — the Triple Crown Pageant 2010 after-party! While the TCP winners are contractually obligated by RI Pride to bar hop around downtown to Dark Lady, Alleycat, Union, et al — the hottest after-party last year was still at State, and it’s only going to be more out-of-control this year. It’s going to be the Madonna & Demi Moore’s Oscar after-party of the TCP!