SATC

The Sunday afternoon of its first weekend of release, the audience for the new “Sex and the City” movie here in Buffalo—more accurately, Amherst—was nearly all women. There were about a dozen men in the sizeable crowd, including me and my friend Rick.
As a television show, “SATC” is a cultural icon, so the movie’s backers were smart to get a big-screen version done when they could. Because there was a lot of behind-the-scenes juice about the production of this one, the likelihood of a second movie remains uncertain. I for one would be surprised if the stars would commit to doing another, but then the market for movies for women is strong (check out that opening-weekend box office!). So who knows? And who cares, at least this weekend? Why rain on Carrie’s, Samantha’s, Charlotte’s, and Miranda’s parade? Some nearby whispers gave away the presence of a few SATC neophytes in the theater. As for the rest, they were happy to see the girls again. So was I--which is surprising, given how late I came to the party.
I didn’t watch SATC in the beginning. In fact, I didn’t watch it until it was in reruns on cable and later in network syndication. That once was my idiosyncrasy, not watching certain series. It was partly willfulness, a weird kind of snobbery (how can you be snobby about television when you don’t own one and can’t afford cable?), and my own, odd kind of cultural activism. I hated the idea that television was so accessible. I was still attached to the ideal of high art versus popular art, a breach that hasn’t entirely yet healed. SATC…it was television, and wasn’t that slumming? In the cultural capital of the world? I hadn’t come to New York to watch someone like Carrie. I’d come to New York to live like her, to be her. With the Cosmos, without the Manolos.
So it went…for a while. And whenever I was in the United States of Elsewhere, I could glide through family gatherings and college reunion parties on the fact that I lived in New York City myself, on the fact of having met both Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. More precisely, that I had waited on them. Waiting on them was good enough for Elsewhere, but when I returned to Manhattan, I wasn’t Carrie or Stanford or Aidan. I certainly wasn’t Big. I was small. The city was Big. And Reality and the City was tough. It wasn’t a show, and it was on twenty-four-seven. I didn’t Darren Star in it; I falling-starred. And kept falling. At first just in place. Then behind. On student loans. Tax filings. Credit card bills. I wasn’t getting ahead anywhere—not professionally, not personally. Life was kicking my you-know-what. At times I blamed the city itself. I fled to the mountains after 9/11 for two years, only to return thinking I’d changed (or been forgiven). When you try to escape reality, however, it will catch up to you later (if not sooner) and when you meet again, it will not be happy to see you. And you won’t be happy to see it.
I finally did something. I admitted I had to change, or was willing to change. Everything. From the outside in, inside out. I got help. Therapy. Support groups. More therapy. More support groups. Group therapy. And slowly and surely I did change. I genuinely began to feel lighter. My problems didn’t go away—they were waiting for me, and though I wasn’t happy to see them, to have them, because I wanted to change in order to meet them, it wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so hard. An honest confrontation with an unflattering mirror, not a sucker punch to the jaw.
In the fall of 2005, I left one city for another: Jersey City is only a PATH-stop away, but that five-minute ride under the Hudson might as well be under an ocean. Sure, mostly due to the housing bubble, there’d been a sizeable exodus of Empire Staters for the Garden State. They were making parts of Jersey City like the glittering island across the river, but not the part where I lived. I missed it, but I could afford my rent and my bills and I started repaying my loans and tackled my taxes. I could afford television and cable, and to make myself feel better, I started watching SATC in syndication. I was amazed by how funny it was. How schmaltzy at times, at others profound. It was like Friends without Joey, Chandler, and Ross. Seinfeld with a quartet of Elaines and without Upper West Side neuroses. Even edited for syndication, the show was as hopeful and lively as I myself had finally and genuinely become. I didn’t matter that it took me until my late thirties to reach the place I wanted to be in my mid-twenties. I’d arrived. I was there. It was Jersey City…so what? And watching the show made me believe that, properly scaled, a little properly-accessorized comedy and romance of manners, even largely feminine ones, isn’t such a bad thing.
SATC is post-op Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver with the coastlines and bustlines and orientations all reconfigured and styled within a spiked heel of its multiple lives. And that fits, because back in the Eighties Armistead Maupin’s serial was my SATC. It gave me more than information about the life I needed and wanted when I was a young gay man on the West Coast. Through TOTC I learned about poppers, The Castro, the Stud, the baths, the mores and manners that obtain in urban interaction with strangers and other lovers. I learned about AIDS, about loss, about love, about life. I learned too many of those lessons on paper, however, and at times didn’t get to apply them as much as I wanted to. But I tried. I really did.
Now here we are at last, I and the movie and the city, unfolding on different levels, at different paces. And places. I still live in New York…State. Watching the movie at my local multiplex (seven dollar matinees!) I was happy to settle back for my own romance-and-urban-nostalgia trip. There were almost more layers to watching the movie than I could handle. In the last years before I left—and in reality, through personal and professional circumstances, including my last Manhattan jobs, as maitre d’ in two popular restaurants—I’d become friendly with more than a few of the stars onscreen (genuine tact forbids me from mentioning which). In the last years before I left I’d watched the city shed its grime and grit and become close to movie-scene perfect. But like the onscreen rain-slicked shine on the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District, that perfection comes at a cost only some can afford. I couldn’t anymore. That had become real to me, but I had changed. I’d outgrown running from reality; I’d even learned to meet it halfway. But I hadn’t yet tried to create one, one that was mine.
I have vivid memories of the streets and shops and bistros. I even have my memories of meeting Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. I have my memories of watching Parker in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Many times during the movie thought, I’ve been there. I know where that is. Oh, my God, there’s _________! I didn’t know he/she was going to be in this! Like cuts on a gem, these facts and facets folded over and under each other in several dimensions while I watched the movie, and when I came out it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then, also like a gem, it was clear. Oh, yes, I thought, I’m here in Western New York. This is my life, where the price of gas is over four a gallon and I’m learning and living still. And not just on paper anymore.