SATURDAY, 09.29.01 last night i went to a birthday party with my friend joanne... i didn't know the birthday girl (claire) at all... when we got to the bar everyone decided to move to a different and less crowded bar... after walking into and out of about five different spots everyone gave up and stayed at this little (and crowded) straight bar... met some great girls (bridget and barbara) and had a good time for a few minutes but joanne and i had to leave to meet up with others for dinner at an afghani restaurant in the east village... we were joined by brian, marin, shri, michelle, and dara... the restaurant is called khyber pass and it's delicious!!! it's on st. mark's between 2nd and astor... go check it out if you're here in new york... show support to afghan-americans and their businesses...

THURSDAY, 09.27.01 so here he is!!!
my cousin paul... got to hang out with him last night at his apartment and look at pictures from his side of the family (the side i never knew)... see!!! good things are coming out of the events of september 11th... i truly feel blessed...

WEDNESDAY, 09.26.01 went to a lyricist lounge presents "jails, hospitals and hip-hop" thang last night at b.b.king in times square. they showed about 30 minutes of the film and the audience really enjoyed it... it was really exciting but i was really hungry... i convinced brian to leave and go to the chili's in the food court across the street for an awesome blossom, but when we got there they were already closed... i was so upset until (*sounds of magical harps being strummed*) my friend john walks around the corner!!! it was great to run into him, but there were more surprises... with him were craig and parker... i LOVE running into friends in new york... especially in places like times square and especially friends you haven't seen in a long time...

TUESDAY, 09.25.01 i'm broke and bored... take me out tonight...

MONDAY, 09.24.01 this article is from www.salon.com... it's about needing to "make it" during wartime... "terror sex"... my friend stephen was interviewed in this article...

Sex in a time of terror
Sometimes being physically close feels like the best defense against death.

Editor's note: Some names have been changed.
freedom's note: stephen's name was not...

By Cole Kazdin

Sept. 21, 2001 - New York -- My sex-kitten friend Ruby met a cute man in a bar Saturday night and he walked her home. "I don't mean to be presumptuous," she said to him as they stood in an awkward moment in front of her building, "but do you want to come up?" Pause. He hesitated, so she jumped in to reassure: "No, no, no, not for terror sex -- just to see my apartment."

Ruby didn't want him to get the wrong idea. And she had been noticing a new phenomenon among her close friends since Tuesday. The world had changed; so had relationships. Now, just about everyone she knew was having what she and her friends call "terror sex."

It sounded so inappropriate. We are experiencing horror and disbelief at what happened. We are grieving for friends, family and even strangers, who were alive just last week. Thinking about sex in a time of crisis seemed cheap. It reeked of bad-movie cliché: Cue the majestic music. The sounds of war outside as the barrel-chested man comforts the weeping woman. She tells him she doesn't want to sleep alone tonight. "Hold me," she cries. And he does. A fighter plane zooms overhead.

Wait.

A fighter planed zoomed overhead. Really. They are flying over my house even as I write this, so nothing seems far-fetched. Anything can happen.

Sonia doesn't know exactly how it happened with her. Exhausted after a nearly 10-mile walk last Tuesday, she watched the news at a bar with friends, and one of them came home with her. The two went to her roof to watch the incomplete Manhattan skyline, still burning. The next thing she knew, they were making out.

"I didn't think about it at all," she said. "When you walk home from Manhattan to Brooklyn with people covered in dust and blood you don't care." She didn't want to be alone. She was in a daze, traumatized.

And the sex was incredible.

"We thought it was the end of the world." She paused and grinned. "Whoops." Still, the sex felt as if their lives depended on it. "We had sex like it was the end of the world, and if I could do it over again, I still would."

How can we make emotional room -- amid the fear and confusion and personal loss -- for any thread of sexuality? People are talking about their deepest emotions with total strangers; message boards are popping up all over the Web. We feel we need to connect with others more than ever before.

Connecting with others is almost an understatement in this case, says Dr. Peter Salovey, professor and chair of the department of psychology at Yale University. We have never faced anything like this before. People are questioning everything and reassessing their priorities. We are feeling that "life is precious and civilization is precarious," he says. In the anxiety and uncertainty, people are reattaching their bonds.

But why not just hug?

"You want some kind of homage to a life force," says Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology at the University of Washington and author of numerous relationship books. "I'm alive, I'm functioning, I'm real. There's a euphoria, a triumph in sexuality that you can see why someone would want to do it as a very profound act." It is the deepest physical closeness, of course. Sex is basic in the most biological sense, she says. It is about flesh, tissue, heart.

Symbolically, it is profound as well. "It's not so much sexual arousal as it is wanting the security and the closeness that it represents," says Salovey. In trauma and tragedy, he said, it comes to represent closeness and commitment, rather than passion.

Schwartz says this connection can be particularly profound for men and that physical intimacy is often a direct line to the emotional equivalent for them.

Julie doesn't know how long she and her boyfriend, Martin, were just holding each other, terrified on the day after the attack, when he turned to her and said, "I want to make love to you."

"He's at his most vulnerable in that state," Julie said. "For him, it was a real need to connect on that level." It was different from the sex they had in everyday life. It was Important. There was urgency to it. She felt like he was going off to war and this could be the last time.

My grandmother felt the same way about 50 years ago. "Boys were going away and you didn't know if you were going to see them again," she told me. She was a teenager -- gorgeous, brash -- and she definitely liked to have a good time. Already, in her native Canada, the military boys that she danced with until long past her curfew had suddenly gone away.

She arrived in the U.S. around 1940. Then, Pearl Harbor left her and the rest of the country speechless. "Everything seemed irrelevant and unimportant," she remembered. War changed everything. It intensified relationships. And though what we now refer to as the baby boom officially erupted when the troops came home in 1946, my grandmother saw the beginnings of it in December 1941.

Today, many are predicting a new baby boom. Sara and her husband, like many New York couples, spent the entire day Tuesday frantically trying to find each other, each trying to get home, frustrated by the busy signals, emergency recordings and disabled cellphones. She foresees a lot of new babies nine months from now. "It's not like my husband and I have been having a lot of sex," she said. "But now I have this heightened awareness of how much I love him." After they were both safe and at home that night, "I kept saying to myself, 'I'm so grateful I have my husband, I'm so grateful I have my husband.'"

This kind of intensity leading to a new baby boom makes sense to Schwartz. "During crises, birth rates go up," Schwartz said. "People want to connect. It's life-affirming to feel your body attached to your head."

Back in the early 1940s, family friends introduced my grandmother to the man who was to become my grandfather. They married quickly. All her friends were doing the same. "We were 'war brides,'" she said. "It was a scary time. We used to talk about how the world was going to end."

This carpe diem attitude that many of us are feeling today inspires throwing caution to the wind. All of our emotions -- not only passion -- are heightened. And sometimes there are consequences. "People make promises," says Schwartz, "and then once their heightened sense of emotion is gone they say the emotional equivalent of 'just kidding.' That can be devastating."

But for many, being able to drop their guard, to be close and to live in the moment is a relief. Alberto and Jonathan recently started dating, and they weren't feeling very sexy last week. At home, the dust and smell of the burning buildings was unbearable. They sat on opposite ends of the couch, legs intertwined, and they talked, telling stories of their childhoods, getting to know each other.

"And that's weird for gay people," Alberto said. "I think gay people engage in hot sex first and intimate sex second. This was a beeline to intimate sex." He felt a connection that otherwise probably would not have developed until much later. Now, they are talking nonstop, calling to check in on each other; and when they do have sex, Alberto said, he feels something more intense about it. "The way we were touching felt more intimate."

Stephen found that same kind of intimacy in a sexual encounter with a virtual stranger, days after the attack. "We talked afterward," he said, almost incredulously. "Which I never do." Stephen was traumatized and almost speechless from witnessing both planes crash into both towers. He had been rushing to get to the World Trade Center for a temp job. He was running late, and watched the entire tragedy unfold, sitting on his bicycle on the Brooklyn Bridge.

"I was watching thousands of people die. Thousands more get maimed. And I felt like I had died." That night and the next day, he went to vigils, online to chat rooms, almost looking for love -- or at least sex. "I wasn't horny," he said. But he wanted to be with someone. "I don't remember his name," he said. "But I will always remember him. We had sex as if it was our last time to have sex." Stephen said that for many gay men sex feels so readily available that, after a while, it almost becomes deadening. Now, that's all changed, he said. He almost laughed at himself when he called it "making love," but he was earnest.

"Whether you have sex with your husband of 20 years or a stranger on the street, it never feels like the last time," he said. But since the tragedy, it does. "Five thousand people had sex for the last time sometime last week."

For married couples who already feel that kind of intimacy that comes from being together for years, it's less about the sex act itself, and more about reconnecting.

"After 27 years of marriage, you want your own space," said James. "But we've slept spooning lately." James received a hysterical cellphone call from his wife as she watched the World Trade Center explode from across the street. After spending what seemed like the longest day apart from each other, they gently hugged in reunion. "I said to her, 'I believe you are here' -- not 'I don't believe you are here' but 'Yes, I believe you are here.' It was the only thing that felt real."

"Relationships are real," said Salovey. "Most gratification isn't from work, material things or routines, but from relationships."

And trauma makes that all the more salient. "Love is more potent than death," James said of his personal experience. "I believe in this moment right now more than I believed in any other moment up until now."

So perhaps it is not terror sex so much as it is a breed of love that touches strangers and longtime lovers across the board. Roberta and her husband would have been in Manhattan were it not for an appointment with her obstetrician in Long Island for a sonogram. She is four months pregnant. When she heard the news of the terrorist attack, she said it felt "not so much like the end of the world, but the end of our world if something had happened to the other one."

My grandmother thinks the whole idea of terror sex or terror love, though crass in phrasing, was inspiring in spirit. "It is possible," she says, "not only to fill the need to be close to another human being, but a belief in the future, that our children and grandchildren will continue to keep this beautiful country alive."

went to fez last night with my baby brian, howard and stephen to see the new unitard show... can i just say, "hillarious!?!?!?" at times i could barely breathe i was laughing so hard... mike albo does this britney spears-ish strip tease in patriotic gear... some feel that it's inappropriate this soon, but i think this is the kind of thing that we need to escape the heaviness of it all... nora burns was amazing, as usual... and david ilku (whom i'd not seen before last night) is such a riot!!! the show runs every sunday at fez through november 18th... consider this a big ol' recommendation from mr. freedom...

SUNDAY, 09.23.01 check this out... the day after the attack on the wtc, i get this call on my cell... i don't recognize the new york number, but i answer... there is a man's voice on the other end, "danny?" i don't recognize the voice, either... and no one but my close family calls me danny... so i really don't know who this is...
"yeah, who's this?"
"this is your cousin paul."
"i don't have a cousin paul."
"well, yeah, you do..."

long long long story short, he's the nephew of the grandma that i never knew growing up... he's been living here in new york for about ten years but is from san antonio, also. so we talk for a while and i give him my email address...

"four-two-nine at aol dot com," i say.
"four-two-nine? what's that mean?"
"oh, the numbers 4-2-9 correspond to the letters g-a-y on a telephone keypad..."
(pause)
"ooooh, um, that's... (pause) that's very clever... well, i guess i'll let you go... let's try to get together sometime for lunch or something... we should meet."

so now i'm thinking, great, this guy already hates me... then...

i get an email from him that night:
"It was cool meeting you on the phone today. It's a small world.
429; very clever. Maybe I could use, 63-866@hotmail.com..."
("63-866" would be "me, too")
YAY! I HAVE A GAY COUSIN HERE IN NEW YORK!
so we talked and emailed and he checked out my site... almost two weeks later, and last night, he and i decided to meet... i was going to a friend's birthday party in the east village so i thought it would be a good time to meet, since i would have my friends around to fall back on in case things between he and i didn't work out. we planned on meeting between 10:00 and 11:00... at 11:30 he still wasn't there and i was getting pretty nervous. he stood me up... he doesn't want to meet me... he thinks i'm freaky... i go outside to leave another message for him...
"hey, so it's 11:30 and i'm here... ummmm... maybe i gave you a wrong address... i'm on 5th street between a and b... and..."
i turn around and i see an adooooorable guy walking toward me... he's smiling a huge white smile...
"and... i think i see you... bye bye..."
it was him... we hugged and it felt sooooo good... so we hung out for something like three hours talking and connecting... it was great!!! i suddenly feel a sense of some sort of completion, no matter how friggin' sappy that sounds... wish i had taken pictures... will soon...

SATURDAY, 09.22.01 so if you want to waste a few hours, ten bucks and make an escape from everything around us right now, try a little juvenile fun... try GLITTER!!!

THURSDAY, 09.21.01 i HATE my camera... it's so fucked up!!! it won't take pictures outside if the sun is too bright... it stays turned on but refuses to let me use it for anything!!! i've called minolta and i have to send it in for repair... i don't WANT to send it anywhere... i just wanna walk toward the edge of a mountain and throw it off like bjork does... (oh my god, have you heard vespertine??? it's so yummy!!! *pats tummy*) yeah, i'd love to get rid of the thing, but i don't want to be without... plus brian gave it to me for christmas last year... he's so sweet... i'm sure he'd understand as i've had nothing but trouble with this stupid thing... i know i should just go out and buy something new, but i'm so broke... does anyone have suggestions on a great digitimal camera for me to look into???
in other news, brian and i had stephen and howard over last night to watch dubbya give his address to the nation... we should have voted his writer into the presidency... very elloquent speech... but i am so friggin' scared... appointing the "death warrant king" of pennsylvania, tom ridge (who, by the way, also signed into law a ban on same-sex marriage in pennsylvania and does not recognize those granted by any other state) to the newborn cabinet-level post "homeland defense"??? i cried... and then to say that this would NOT resemble the conflicts in the persian gulf and kosovo, ''where no ground troops were used and not a single american was lost in combat'' and follow almost immediately with "be calm and resolute..." right...

WEDNESDAY, 09.19.01 today was the third day of rosh hashanah extravaganza... went down to west 11th and west side highway for ta'shlich with brian and my friends pie and kai... it was a beautiful ceremony, but spooky to look down to the world financial center and not see our towers...

my photo collection of my new york in the wake of the world trade center attack is up...
click here to see those pictures.

TUESDAY, 09.18.01 sent to me from jcm...
September 1, 1939
-- W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

FRIDAY, 09.14.01 it's just after 1:00am and i just can't sleep... that smell (all too familiar now) of burning metal has drifted once again into brooklyn and into my apartment... the curtains hanging in my livingroom windows, once a sheer light blue, now have blocks of black soot clinging to them where the windows were open today... right now i see lightning across the sky... this would normally be so calming for me... but this is not a normal storm approaching... this is a storm that will pour onto the most horrific scene that any american of my generation has ever seen... i've been trying to email all those that have emailed me in hopes that i am alright... trying to be more personal than, "i'm okay, thank you for thinking of me..." i can't concentrate anymore... 1:12am and thunder... twice... and now rain... it's just started and it's coming down hard... today was the first day since tuesday that i didn't cry but right now i can't help but break down...

THURSDAY, 09.13.01 i really wish i could get a hold myself long enough to sit here and tell you what i've been feeling... i don't know, i just can't talk yet... anyone outside of this city really has no idea what this has been like... i'm not knocking the sympathy and compassion that i've seen from people all around the world... no way... i just feel like someone crashed a plane into my own backyard... it's scary as hell... if you want a great moment by moment account from a new yorker, check out ultrasparky!

also (and off the subject), thought i would let you all read this email i received:
Dear GeoCities Member:
Congratulations, http://www.geocities.com/revolutionfreedom is very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Your site has become so popular, in fact, that our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3GB/month (measured on an hourly basis).
In the past we have not enforced that limit, so your site has been uneffected thus far. However, shortly, all free member sites transferring more than the allowable data limit will be disabled for portions of the day until usage falls to within the prescribed limits.

so, if you try my site at any time and it's not there, please check back often until i get out of my cheap-ass mode and into an actual domain of my own... sorry, kids...

WEDNESDAY, 09.12.01 i'm good... haven't had internet access and lots of people, i just found out, had emailed... just want everyone to know that brian and i are fine... i watched the whole thing from my livingroom window over in brooklyn... i hope i can reach everyone out there one way or another very soon...

MONDAY, 09.10.01 so what do you think of the new page design??? i really prefer it, i think... we'll see how long it lasts... so i'm a little mad... i am online all night playing with the site when i get (simultaneously) an IM and an email from this guy (a stranger)... the email is a picture of his rear end and in the IM he asks me if i am a top... i reply with, "well, i've forgotten"... he asks if i want to fuck his ass and i say, "well, even if i did want to i can't because i am in a relationship"... he gets totally furious saying that i'm such an a**hole to "lead him on"... i was shocked... i hadn't approached this guy!!! he found me in some crazy and desperate attempt at an online hookup (which i don't play)... then he says that i'm an a**hole!?!?!? sometimes i really hate gay men (no offense to those of you reading that i cherish!!! you know who you are!!!)... and anyway, he had a lumpy butt... *shivers*

SUNDAY, 09.09.01 dan's birthday party!!! (last night)

WEDNESDAY, 09.05.01 this one has got to be in color... i know i'm breaking my strict style, but it's a great pic and you've gotta get the whole experience... this was taken by my friend bernhard... take a look at my nipple... lol!!! isn't that hot and trashy!?!?!? sunday was so much friggin' fun... i can't believe it'll never happen again... eh, oh well... so nothing else at all has been going on... nothing nothing nothing... it's crazy... my life is so humdrum... i'm supposed to have dinner with my friend gary tonight... haven't seen him in a while and that will be fun...

TUESDAY, 09.04.01 eighth street sugah returns for one day only! wigstock 2001
so eighth street sugah made what will be her final appearance ever at wigstock on sunday... after the event a horrible horrible accident occurred... as ever, tossing caution into the air, she crosses the street while reapplying her lipstick and BOOM, hit by a bicycle taxi... aside from dying, she suffered a broken heel... prior to the incident, she had been quoted as saying, however, that she had a "lovely day" at wigstock... in other news, i'm planning a redesign of this site... wanting to clean it up a bit... plus i'm tired of how dark it all seems... stay tuned!!!