Our messing around with our categories has finally led to the creation of sub-categories!

Exciting? Fuck no!

Useful? Well, you decide.

Okay, we’re only going to be slightly ridiculous about this…

So since our post last week about accepting an offer to contribute work to the purposefully-gay local mag GET, we’ve been slowly getting acquainted via email with GET’s publisher Bonnie Simon. Now Bonnie’s been a total peach to us the entire time, very chummy (maybe a little too friendly, too fast) but we didn’t think much of it — just wanted to get some work out and feel satisfied with ourselves.

So we sent over a 500-word article about the dreaded Saaabbbllleee, which, somehow we haven’t gotten into depth in on Bitchidence.com — although the Trannymania blog couldn’t have been more explicit. Anyhow, the article wasn’t lewd and littered with profanity (like you might expect), but it was a little salacious and we certainly weren’t looking to tone ourselves down for GET. Bonnie fucking loved it. Although, that’s all she said — and that’s when we should have started to be suspicious!

You see, we’d already heard from a couple of reputable people that Bonnie was difficult to work with (five, actually), and while we’d made mention to her about Bitchidence.com, we weren’t completely sure that she’d actually visited and read our diatribe — and it turns out that she hadn’t! Now she admitted today that she “dropped the ball” by asking us to contribute to GET (gee, thanks), but seemed completely sincere when she admitted (after finally reading our rather gentle criticism of GET) that her magazine and Bitchidence.com were probably not good matches for one another. And we couldn’t agree more — our porn stars, trannies, drag shows, pageants, bar fights, lube wrestlers, feature films, Fat Scott, and Therapy-Bomb Dome animations have absolutely no place among twelve pages of b&w East Providence restaurant adds, interviews with beleaguered social workers on arcane marriage law, and labored essays bemoaning the word “bitch”. For christ’s sake, that’s our goddamn name!

So here’s us wishing GET a successful future — hopefully blessed with improved production value, clearer purpose and social relevance.

And if you bitches are at all interested in the article we wrote about Sable, you can read it (unedited, and clearly in support of GET) below. It’s kind of wordy and out of date for Bitchidence, but we’ll be damned if Bonnie attempts to print it anyway after another change of heart!

Enjoy!

Sable & the Forces of Gossip

Greetings, bitches. If you’re reading this, or simply scanning through your shiny, new copy of GET ­­– then you’ve stumbled across my very first contribution to this most robust, GLTB-focused local mag. So go you.

If you’re young (or just young upstairs), then you know how many of us tend to substitute an online presence with a real one. Your Facebook wall and your tagged photos are quickly becoming very acceptable versions of you for people to interact with when you’re not physically around (creepy). In the beginning stages of social networks like Facebook, it was our goal to represent ourselves with as much accuracy as possible — though in a totally innocent way — since the internet seemed to be one of the only places you could be gay and truly honest. Unfortunately, nobody five or six years ago would have believed how quickly polite online society could be turned against us.

I’m talking specifically about the infamous (yet still anonymous) Sable, a short-lived local Providence phenomenon. If you were out and about in the bars downtown, or spent more than a few minutes online early last month, you’d have come across her name. The trouble was, “Sable” wasn’t a real person — she only ever existed online; taking time every couple of days to release via Facebook unbelievably juicy details pertaining to anyone and anything else that could get the community to gossip and point fingers. For example, who had sex with who before showing up to their bartending job on drugs prior to getting fired. None of it was true (although what little was true gave the rest traction), but for weeks, “Sable” managed to blend online fantasy with reality, affecting personal relationships and creating social unrest that was both destructive and captivating. Well, until her Facebook account was deleted, anyway. The fallout from such silliness though, is the point of this story. The ongoing hunt to discover the true identity of Sable, although fruitless, became rather dramatic as it threatened to tarnish reputations and derail weekly club nights (Miss Sarah Beyers’ Fusion Tuesdays at Union).

But this was weeks ago, so why bring it up now? Because as stupid as it all really was, looking back it provides us with a rather telling look at the state of Providence’s under-40 gay community — since there are actually two of them — the one we get when you sit around at The Stable on a Sunday afternoon, and the one you find when you’re sitting at home online sifting through someone’s vacation photos of Brazil.

So who the hell was Sable? Well, I still don’t know, but it’s really too bad she wasn’t selling something, because this was an excellent exercise in online viral advertising, and generating unstoppable buzz. That, or we’re all way too susceptible to the whims of some tricky queen. Either way, once we all figure out who she was, after she gets her ass kicked by a few of her own targets, I’ll shake her hand.

So last week we were surprised to be contacted by a Ms. Bonnie Simon, publisher of GET Magazine, and regular Bitchidence.com visitor — about nothing less than becoming a contributor to her local publication. In case you’re not aware, GET is one of Rhode Island’s newest GLTB-oriented full-size, glossy magazines that you can often find laying around in restaurants and bars like Downcity (where we just picked up May’s issue) and the Dark Lady. Frankly, it’s what Divine Providence would likely have turned into, given more resources, man power and creativity.

We’ll admit though, we’ve flipped through GET several times over the last few months, and while it’s clearly focused on the Providence’s gay community, it tends to dwell on either the minute details of marriage and adoption law, or other issues that we care even less about. And if we don’t care about what’s in it (there aren’t even any racy photos or tacky personal adds to make fun of), then why should you?

Well it’s since become our little pet project to help GET Magazine change that! And we might not even have to resort to being sleazy! Well, being a little juicay never hurt anyone… Either way, this sounds to us like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

June’s issue is likely to be our first, so will you start reading GET Magazine once we’re in it?

So last Thursday night something special happened! Do you know what it was? Well at this point, you probably do.

Providence gays gained (or, regained depending on whether or not you ever went to Wheels) a new gay-everyday watering hole, renamed appropriately, The Stable — about which, there’s a lot to say. So let’s get to it.

It seems that an appropriate place to begin would be with Mr. Michael Slade, long-time employee of the Dark Lady and Alleycat under GET Magazine favorites Buck and Rande, who in the frustration of their own adventures in bar renovation managed to lose the favor of Mr. Slade’s employment — presumably over money and position. The long and difficult remodeling odyssey that’s consumed both the new Dark Lady and Alleycat location would have provided all employees with more work and more responsibility, but Ralph, a handsome older gentleman in charge of Wheels managed to lure Michael down the block to Washington St. with a brand new bar (yet unnamed) and a GM position. Michael would have been silly not to take it, and so was soon after fired from Alleycat several weeks before his new location would open, which probably felt like a jab, and certainly looked like one.

This left Slade several weeks to take some time for himself at the Wheels renovation progressed. And as it progressed and surfaces were removed and exposed, what emerged from behind layers of the interior was a surprisingly intact and legible wall mural advertising transportation and stable services — for horses. Now as the Dark Lady and Alleycat are finding out now, the Providence Preservation Society enjoys overseeing renovations taking place in the downtown area, and once alerted to the presence of such a well-preserved piece of Providence history, wasted no time in making sure that the old Wheels’ “new” mural find was left untouched. Luckily for this new bar, the mural reads “Stable”. Honestly though, things could have been much worse, we could have a bar named “Blanchards Here”, or “Babe’s Hot Dogs”, or even something less culturally acceptable like “Gringo’s Cafe”. As much fun as that would be…

Luckily, The Stable is a great name for a gay bar, as it evokes such terms as “horse hung”, and images like leather, horse tack, boots and metal studs. And this is all before it even opened.

So Thursday rolls around and Providence accepts the invitation. While The Stable’s color scheme is very dark, warm and earthy, a long, seamless silver steel bar runs its length and multiple flat screens stream edgy pop music. Everything’s clean, new — and we all already know everyone who works there — it’s been a guaranteed hot spot, day and night, through the weekend and into it’s first full week.

So The Stable did it right. Gay Providence embraced the damn place and the memory of whatever it was called before becomes more of a bad dream than anything else! But not everyone’s impressed. Paul Murphy skulks in every so often to see if the place is still busy (it usually is), and the poor Alleycat, still boarded up like a common plague victim (thanks, Providence Preservation Society) is left to sit just out of sight down the street and around the corner. And to add insult to injury, Wheels transformed into The Stable in a matter of weeks while the new Dark Lady has been lying in wait for at least ten times that long.

The frenzy down at the Stable will calm down in a couple weeks though, and before too long we’ll all be blessed with a new gay “district”, with three gay bars within two blocks — making that trek down Snow Street to Mirabar in the dead of winter even that much more undesirable. In the meantime though, we have a brand new bar to enjoy, giving just about everywhere else in the city something to look at.

So what’s the bottom of the barrel now? Energy?

UPDATE: After a few weeks of hearing about this from various people, it seems appropriate to update this post concerning one Michael Slade and his separation from Dark Lady/Alleycat. As it turned out, Slade was not fired by Buck and Rande, they simply came to agreement after so long working together, to no longer work together — and continue to maintain a valuable friendship. Concerning our misunderstanding of the story, it was probably silly of us to believe that people like Buck, Rande and Michael who understand the community and its functions so well, would resort to a straight-up job termination resulting anything but continued success and harmony amongst two newly refurbished businesses.

So does anyone know the story about the JWU college girl that was found dead in her dorm room at The Cove not too recently? We didn’t see it on the news either, but you bitches know how mainstream news outlets work — you’re never getting the whole story, if you’re even getting it at all. So this poor girl was found in the bathtub with a needle in her arm by her roommate after coming home from a school break — not an overdose exactly, but she didn’t cook the heroine enough and it shot straight to her heart and stopped it cold. Tragedy? Absolutely.

So we were talking with Miss Bomb Dome the other night about this, and we started to wonder to ourselves… After almost a decade in the club scene, we know for a fact that you can find just about anything you desire to get high — you name it.

But where the fuck does a college kid even GET heroine?! We wouldn’t know, even if we wanted to find it! It just goes to show us that college kids in Providence are fucking crazy and by and large need more supervision, Ryan Haxton notwithstanding.

1. forgot to send out subpoenas.
2. forgot to disclose witness list to defense.
3. forgot to uphold laws of how to avoid gay scandal!

Does this sound like your case? CALL ME NOW! (Miss Cleo… no idea? click hea

UPDATE: We were high and smoking weed with Ada when we wrote this (just look at the timestamp…). We do make an effort NOT to post while fucked up, but upon reinspecting this post for quality the next day, we decided to keep it! Who could edit out a Miss Cleo reference anyway?!

“tranimosity” — the innate bitchiness that ensues when two trannies meet face-to-face in the club, or anywhere else really.

Bitchidence.com congratulates Mr. Gordon Fox for bringing the gay to our state government hardcore as RI’s new Speaker of the House! What does that mean for gays? Well probably not a ton, Gordon’s not really a gay activist, just an openly gay government official — which in itself is surely a form of activism. Anyhow, we’ve had drinks with Mr. Fox more than once and can say for certain that if nothing else, the House is about to get a lot more… fabulous! CLICK HERE for Projo’s story.

Good luck bitch!

The day started at Downcity for brunch. It’s not quite breakfast and it’s not quite lunch, but it’s fabulous and it comes with a slice of cantaloupe. There’s always people we know down there so some ridiculous antics are typical and expected. Two bloody marys later we showed up at the Alleycat for a sangria with Michael Slade. Now we’ve commented in the past on how the renovations at Alleycat have been coming along — but the changes have never been so visible as when that big glass pane in the front of the bar went in. The place is looking fierce — congrats to Buck and Rande for pulling it together like that — it’s going to have street frontage like no other gay bar in Providence. Mirabar, the old Dark Lady, Eagle/Union and Wheels all have opaque, protective brick faces that seem to hide whatever it is we’re doing in those places. The Alleycat showcases us and invites people to see what’s going on, it’s fabulous. That is, until someone throws a brick through it and it becomes to expensive to replace. We’ll still enjoy it while it lasts though!

So after some socializing at Alleycat, we remembered that we had to buy Bernard a birthday cake for later that night. So off to Stop n’ Shop! Some broken-englished man reluctantly helped our drunken-in-the-daytime asses to write “Happy Birthday Bernard” on the cake. Unoriginal, yes, but it was either that, or “Here’s to 5 More Years, Drunkie”.

Anyway, we got to State later that evening around 10:30p, running a little late, showing up to find the place totally buzzing with people already. Great, right? But there was no fucking DJ, there was some silly euro-lounge CD playing — our DJ Marcus Christian had clearly spent too much time at Therapy the night before, didn’t get to bed and was now sleeping through his shift at State. Who does that? Now Marcus is a good friend and a good DJ, but shit like this is clearly not acceptable — how can we continue to use him? So we called in Tommy Stylez, who flew on over from across town to completely save the night — he was just sitting around about to go to bed anyway. Then Marcus showed up and we had to turn him away in the parking lot, lest Alex Tomasso bite off his head.

So the night totally packed, all night long. There was food, drinks and cake, and straight (?) JWU girls making out all over the place (not kidding) — it truly was a birthday party fitting of Bernard’s taste. Naturally though, something fucks it up and we end up dragging Gallery bartender Nick into the kitchen with a bloody face. Now we didn’t actually see what happened, but it was not a pretty sight. While it’s likely that there were some words had, the tiff eventually escalated into Nick on the ground being kicked in the face by two other guys. Seriously, who are these people that go around getting into fights with everyone? Since when is it okay to carry around such a penchant for violence? We can tolerate bitching, yelling and arguing, but the second people start putting their hands on each other, the whole situation degenerates and becomes completely intolerable. Nick spent the rest of the evening in the hospital and hit up the police station this morning to file a police report.

Get it together, bitches. Oh, and happy birthday Bernie.

We almost forgot! Well kind of, these have been languishing in a sub-playlist in our iTunes for about three days, it’s just a pain in the ass to get them in to the Streampad WordPress plugin we use to stream it to your asses.

In case you’ve never tried it, go ahead and fuck with the dark blue bar at the bottom of your Bitchidence.com screen. Oh, and turn on your speakers. Not working? Ok, well are your speakers plugged in? Ok, plug them in, and commence play.