GAYLETTER

Let’s recap: Vaporizing heats herbs to a temperature that is hot enough to release active ingredients, but cool enough to avoid combustion (which is smoke, which is filled with toxins, which we’re supposed to avoid.) The magic part is: different temperatures result in completely different medicinal and buzz properties. Most portable vaporizers have one temperature setting — it decides your high and you’re stuck with it — until now.

Enter Crafty: I didn’t know quite what to expect when he appeared. He’s a bit coy and hard to pin down on first impression. Tall, dark, and mysterious. Let’s start with the face pic. I would describe him as early Star Wars meets Black & Decker chic with a future norm cordless look we’ve yet to see in 2015.

Crafty is comfortably hand-sized and portable, but not quite suited for carrying in your pocket — he’s packing a little too much meat for that. He’s not for movies, he’s not for concerts and he’s not for walking to work. Crafty hosts. He is to a vape pen as a Roor is to a joint.

Aside from pulling so smooth it feels like you’re breathing oxygen, Crafty offers precise temperature control ranging from 104F to 410F. It’s an invitation to study advanced technique and Crafty completely flattens the learning curve.

311-316F is for the daytime. It also helps with your ADHD and any pain relief. 320 – 334F is great for the anti’s. Anti-septic, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory. 365F is where we get calm, cure our insomnia, and is right for nighttime, or come-downs.  …

Isaac Oliver lives in fear of a home invasion: waking up to the unstoppable advances of a sadistic serial-killer’s padded pitiless steps in his Washington Heights apartment, a phobia which is the turnt up version of his ever-present fear of letting men in. This inability to experience vulnerability in a stable, relational way is the premise for Intimacy Idiot, the award winning playwrights debut book, which could have been just another amusing-but-cloying collection of young-Gay-NYC-single-male stories of sassy woe, but very much isn’t. Intimacy Idiot is unfailingly hilarious, until its small, pasty white hands suddenly summoned a strength I could not have known they had, collared me, gutted me, and left me for dead on my tweed tufted couch at 5 am like one of the psychopathic home invaders the author lives in fear of. I’m still fucked up about it.

Intimacy begins with Oliver’s satirical “online dating profile,” which is witty in a way that leads us to believe we are in for a chatty, boozy picnic, as opposed to a fully realized feast. His first proper chapter, “How I Didn’t Learn to Drive” gives a preview of the darkness of the book to come when, after ten pages of charmingly varied “New York observed” banter and keep-em-coming dick jokes with the zing of a decent midtown margarita, Oliver concludes the chapter on a tragic metaphor for his relational life so powerful and chilling that it turns your stomach. You’re suddenly hooked because damn this faggot can write. …

NYC Pride is the perfect opportunity to indulge in some non-stop summer partying while also supporting the LGBTQ community and celebrating our fierce-as-fuck history. That being said, there are almost too many things to do, so GAYLETTER is here to lend a ‘helping hand.’ We’ve made you a definitive list of parties and community events that you can’t afford to miss — if it’s not on the guide, it’s probably not worth going to.

While I know we’re all about equality these days, don’t for one second think there isn’t a party-archy here: the GAYLETTER Pride Ball is all you’ll be doing this Saturday night — they’re ain’t no party like a GAYLETTER party ‘cos a GAYLETTER party is… MANDATORY! We’ve got free tequila, boys on PReP plus we’ll be donating a percentage of the tickets sales to FIERCE an awesome charity that helps support LGBTQI kids of color. Come for the vogueing, come for the surprise guest, or just come for the community. We’ll all be there.

Your Pride week starts now…

TUESDAY, JUNE 23

PARTY: Azealia Banks at WestGay
The legendary party WestGay is coming to an end. As one of their last events, they’re bringing the super-cunt Azealia Banks. It’s the grand exit for this iconic space, and it’s setting the tone for the rest of pride week. WestGay will not be forgotten.
$20, 10:00PM, The Westway @ 75 Clarkson Street, New York, NY.

PARTY: STRÜT
Remember Strut? We do too. The pride edition is happening at Acme, a fabulous restaurant famous for attracting fashion queens. …

The critically panned (but still hot) 1998 film 54 starring Ryan Phillippe, Mike Myers and Salma Hayek (about the legendary nightclub Studio 54) was waaaaay gayer before power producer Harvey Weinstein got his chubby little hands on it to cut out over 44 mins of queer scenes to make it more “palatable” to mainstream audiences. I remember when this film first came out, thinking there was something missing from the story, that something was being held back. It definitely had a queer undertone, but never delivered much more than a bunch of a scenes with a shirtless Ryan Phillippe (which was greatly appreciated) and Mike Myers rolling around a bed piled with $20 bills. It’s good to finally hear the real story behind the film. Here’s how it went down:

“Writer-director Mark Christopher spent five years researching the disco scene to sketch this authentic portrait of the notoriously outrageous party palace ruled by its founder, unctuous Steve Rubell (Mike Myers, in an acclaimed dramatic turn). When test audiences condemned some of the film’s controversial content (involving Ryan Phillippe’s busboy turned bartender and Breckin Meyer’s husband to club-diva Salma Hayek), Christopher was asked to recut the film and reshoot key scenes, including the finale. Seventeen years later, the filmmaker’s intent, which includes 44 minutes of never-been-seen material, has been restored. “The path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” claimed Rubell, and Christopher’s director’s cut honors that Dionysian vision.”

Come see the original edit, in all it’s gay glory this Tuesday, June 23rd at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. …