How 'Pansexual' Neal Boulton Pranked His Way To Celebrity
Neal Boulton is reportedly orgasmic. The editor of a magazine for gays and a website for bis signed a book deal (with an agent) and claims to be drowning in reality show offers following a profile in Page Six Magazine. Everyone wants to screw and/or sign the sexual libtertine, supposedly, because of his oh-so-exciting and freewheeling life. But all indications are that his most famous antics were manufactured in the press. Take his alleged macking with Rolling Stone Jann Wenner, for example, Boulton's claim to "pansexual" fame.
Page Six first reported on Boulton and Wenner last year — that they were running around town together and making out in front of the Time Warner Center. But Wenner denied, and we heard the gossp was all manufactured by Boulton himself — a "weird press play by Neal." Which no one at the time understood. "What motivation would Boulton actually have for this?" a commenter asked.
Someone whispered to New York that Wenner and Boulton were still dating, but the magazine's website didn't see fit to stand behind that story. It's the story that just won't stick.
But Boulton, not at all shy about emailing bloggers, or being quoted, somehow stayed in the news. An "irate lady source" in February sent Queerty two remarkably well-photographed and posed shots of Boulton nuzzled up to her model-perfect body (including the one at top). Boulton protested, probably a bit too much, without actually denying he had sexed the vixen. Did he send, or arrange to have sent, the tell-all email from his statuesque "lover?"
As time went on, Boulton started making direct appeals. In July he sent us a bizarre letter advising women not to flatter themselves that he might be hitting on them in bars, because he's just being friendly. Then we got seemingly random emails from supposed women admirers trying to get in touch with Boulton, and from people claiming to see him leaving MTV's offices (that was him, he merrily confirmed for us, in talks about a pilot, which we never heard about again).
And now, with the book agent deal and the purported reality show, we finally see (duh) what motivation the Genre editor might have for whipping up interest in his WILD and CRAZY "pansexual" lifestyle, "pansexual" being a pointless synonym for "bisexual," presumably plastered on Boulton's website because it sounds sexier and more marketable than the latter.
The endgame is familiar to any fameball, straight out of the Julia Allison playbook: Reality show, book, internet startup. A pedestrian play rooted in already-pedestrian notions of sexual decadence and roleplaying. Neal Boulton, you're boring us.