Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, Andy Cohen [the best books to read txt] 📗

and praying that I could somehow unzip my skin and throw it away. I wanted to walk out of that bathroom a completely different person, and yet I knew I couldn’t.

When my legs finally stopped shaking enough for me to stand and leave the stall, an alarmed stranger looked at me: “Are you okay? You look like you don’t feel right.” I saw my reflection in the mirror. My pink Polo button-down shirt was drenched with sweat. I splashed cold water on my face and rejoined my friends while Eddie Murphy continued to merrily spew his best faggot material. (Though I would never be able to laugh at Eddie Murphy’s comedy after that night, rest assured I was highly entertained years later in 1997 when police pulled him over with a transvestite prostitute in West Hollywood.) Watching my friends cheer Murphy on that night reinforced my secret fear that homophobic bigotry was perfectly acceptable. It also reinforced that I should never do mushrooms again, and I haven’t. I do love me a mushroom pizza, though.

*   *   *

When it came time to go to college, I chose Boston University because of everything it wasn’t. Its social fabric wasn’t dependent on a fraternity system. It wasn’t built around a campus. It wasn’t the only thing going in a small town. It wasn’t anything like St. Louis. It was urban, with a good communications school and, I’d found out on the sly, a semblance of a gay community. Not that I was rushing out of the closet yet, but I needed to know that if I came out (or was pushed out), there’d be a safety net there to catch me. My two girlfriends Jackie and Kari decided to go, too, and so off we went from St. Louis to Boston in the fall of 1986.

Over orientation weekend I was randomly assigned a dorm room with a guy who would become, thank God, my best friend, like a brother, and—some would say—the straight version of me: Dave Ansel. Dave had arrived in the room first and dropped off his duffel bag. When I got there and saw his bag, I did what any self-respecting freshman would do: I opened it up and snooped around. I found the same pair of Vuarnet sunglasses as I had and the same kind of paisley boxers I wore. When I returned to the room later, Dave was there.

“Hello, Louis,” he said. Not only had he read my luggage tags (with my dad’s name on them), but he soon confessed that he, too, had snooped in my bag. We bonded over our lack of boundaries immediately, and as suburban Jewish boys whose families were both in the food business, we had even more in common. From that day on, we were together 24/7. It was a new kind of friendship for me. He was the first guy to tell me he loved me; it was a platonic, brotherly love and we were deep in it. He told me everything and I listened. The one hitch was that during our hours-long late night talks, Dave offhandedly peppered the conversation with a catalog of gay slurs. Which meant that while I was getting to know every detail about him, he didn’t really know who I was at all. It was a kind of torture, feeling that close to someone but not being ready to tell him the truth. And as the months passed, I often wondered: Would he ever be ready to hear it? And would I ever be ready to tell?

For most college kids, the point of going to Europe for a semester is either to experience a foreign culture or maybe to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. I saw it as an opportunity to convince my nearest and dearest that I was a raging heterosexual. But fate was against me.

Before I began BU’s London Programme (that’s how they spelled it, and it bugs me to this very day), I traveled through Europe for a month with Jackie. Apparently, her mother’s conviction that I was “safe” still applied, because Jackie and I had already had one amazing trip together, escaping Boston freshman year to jet off to Manhattan. It was my first trip to New York, and every direction I turned, I ran into a place I’d seen in a movie or on TV, bigger and better than I ever imagined. The first time we left Jackie’s parents’ pied-à-terre, we had only walked just a couple blocks, and who came toward us but Andy Warhol. We screamed when he walked by. To this day I can’t believe that I saw Andy Warhol on my first ever day in New York City; it seemed to portend something about my future and what New York had in store for me. (If he were alive today, I’d like to think Warhol would be painting the Housewives.)

The summer before my London semester, Jackie and I Eurailed our way through France, Spain, and Italy. Then she had to go back to St. Louis. For the first time in my life, I was completely alone somewhere far away, which made me feel scared and liberated all at once. I spent a couple of weeks doing whatever I wanted. Everyone back home surely assumed that I was hiking and seeing the sights, but what I was really doing was visiting a bunch of gay bars in Florence and Rome. It wasn’t my first time in a gay bar—I’d been to a few in Boston and once or twice in St. Louis—but in Europe I wasn’t terrified that someone was going to see me and turn me in to the authorities, or (worse) tell my parents. The freedom felt great. In retrospect, when I think of myself in those bars, I realize that I was a twenty-year-old freshly plucked chicken just out of the cage, and it’s a miracle I got out of there alive. But that’s giving me all sorts