'Bachelor Party Confidential'
David Boyer's first book was about gay kids going to prom, so perhaps it makes sense that his second is about the ultimate straight-man fantasy, the bachelor party. But one with very distinct homoerotic overtones, let's not forget! Last evening, Doree and photographer Nikola Tamindzic braved the sleaze of the Pussycat Lounge to see what Bachelor Party Confidential was all about.
Bachelor parties have been around since at least 500 B.C., when soldiers in ancient Sparta caroused with each other on the evening before their mate's wedding. Of course, that doesn't tell us how, exactly, we got to the current age of dwarf-tossing and people sticking things in strippers' vaginas! "Straight men need to hook up with each other and bond," said Mr. Boyer's boyfriend, Ken Helman. "Gay men already have bonding experiences! They talk, they go shopping, they go to movies." But in this new era of civil unions and gay marriages, would gay men start having bachelor parties themselves, even if, in Mr. Helman's words, they already bond? "I think it's a really good possibility!" Hey, anything for a party, right? Then Mr. Helman offered cute some words of support for his boyfriend of six months. "I totally thought it would be a puff piece!" he said of the book. "But it has depth and heart! It's a lot deeper than I thought it was going to be."
After a woman did some things to a hula hoop that seemed unnatural, Mr. Boyer said that at first his idea was to do a book about bar mitzvahs, but then that book Bar Mitzvah Disco came out, and even though we think that there can probably never be too many books about bar mitzvahs, Mr. Boyer thought otherwise and decided to write about bachelor parties. "For a straight guy to do it, it would be like treason!" he said. "And I realized, that because women aren't invited, that was probably why it hadn't been done." (Except for that time when Melissa de la Cruz dressed up in drag and crashed her fiance's party and wrote about it for Jane! Oh, and she's in the book as "Melissa D." How cute.) "It took a gay man to do it!" Right on, gay! —Doree
