In the 1960s or 1970s, if you were in the right neighborhood, especially a small Southern town, you could hear someone pronounce that “White is Right!”
In the 2020s that’s been proven true. Mike White is right! 6.2 million people watched the season finale of the third season of White Lotus. I love this show. It’s like Curb Your Enthusiasm, with wealthy, mainly white, liberals, skewered by their internal contradictions. In Larry David’s world they’re at home, and they’re Hollywood Jews, so it’s played for comedy. In White Lotus they’re on vacation, and it’s played for anxiety.
A sub-theme in White Lotus are its gays. Writer/creator Mike White says he’s bi, and lived with a man whom he recently broke up with because the guy didn’t want to be Penelope to White’s modern Odysseus as White travels the world filming, from Hawaii (season 1), to Sicily (season 2), to Thailand (season 3). White’s well-known for an indie film I saw when it came out, Chuck and Buck, which includes somewhere in the dialogue, “Chuck and Buck suck and fuck.” Buck (played by White) is a creepy, scrawny, Asperger guy who stalks a tall heterosexual Adonis (Chris Weitz) with whom he shared a teen sexual encounter. Stalks him until Chuck gives him a repeat! And I think this film may have an autobiographical kernel.
In White Lotus the gays are very bad, and sometimes hilarious and always mesmerizing. They aren’t prissy or preachy like a Max Mutchnik Will and Grace gays. They’re not an After School Special. They don’t have a moral to teach. They’re just as messy and fucked-up as the straight people all around them. In the first season the gorgeous Murray Bartlett, a stressed out resort manager, falls off the wagon and does a variety of drugs, and is finally caught by a subordinate eating the ass of a bellhop (Lukas Gage) in his office. In the second season, a coterie of Eurotrash gays plot the murder of a lonely Jennifer Coolidge, after they pretend to make her their best straight girlfriend, mercenaries in the pay of her husband who wants her vast fortune (calling DOGE!—hubby’s a federal bureaucrat). In this last season Patrick Schwarzenegger is a finance frat bro who keeps pushing his virgin little brother into sexual encounters, not realizing little bro is gay, until they both end up drunk in bed with an older woman who’s prostitute-adjacent, and a brief act of homosexual incest transpires.
These are the gay people I’m used to. Let me tell you a tale. You may recall Bob Hattoy. Bob was the first HIV+ person to address a Democrat Party nominating convention, a Sierra Club staffer who ended up a Clinton administration appointee. Bob passed away in 2007, which is why I’m using him as my entree into my story of messy, Mike White-style gays in DC in the 1990s and 2000s. I met Bob at the gay Democratic Party or Human Rights Campaign events back then, sometimes for fun, sometimes to troll for real estate clients, sometimes with a lesbian best friend who didn’t like to go to events alone. Like some in the DC political demimonde, Bob had bad credit and a history of substance abuse. Bob asked if I could help him find something to rent. I sent some listings and offered to show them, but I think he found something privately on his own.
Hattoy had an associate, “Lanny,” another low-level gay Clinton appointee, who managed Bob and tried to keep him out of any public trouble. I met him when we were both the “boys” doing the grunt work at a small fundraiser for something called the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Breast Cancer. The only two guys there, Lanny and I hit it off, just as friends. Lanny, a Texan, had worked for Trammell Crow, which got him a job with Bush’s Points of Light Foundation, which got him into the Clinton campaign. An appointee at Interior, Lanny found a husband, “Mark,” through a match-making service.
Mark was someone who’d been a law enforcement officer in one of the wealthy counties that ring DC and are watered by the spigot of your tax dollars. This county virtually forced their police officers to go to college and get a degree, paying for their education. Snooty, wealthy counties that only wanted educated cops. As a result they all study criminology, since they don’t really want to be in school. Mark also didn’t want to go to college, but by the time he’d finished his BA he liked it. And went on to law school while being a cop. He transitioned to working in banking and real estate law, and ended up very wealthy.
When I met them Lanny and Mark were buying tear-downs and empty lots in Rehoboth Beach and building spec homes. Very profitable in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Eventually they broke up —Lanny continued to buy property to renovate and flip after Mark was no longer interested, but only by convincing agents and sellers that Mark was on board. Mark retired to one of the wealthy enclaves in Florida, but Lanny continued to speculate in Delaware beach property, and involve Mark against his will.
Through Lanny I met someone like a Mark White-creation. A New Yorker appeared named Antoine Bourbon-Parme. An interior designer. Lanny had come across him as Antoine offered his services to wealthy people with Delaware beach houses. And then he appeared in D.C. where he became a “client” of DC’s highest earning realtor. He never bought anything but ended up taking commissions from many of the realtor’s wealthy clients. Antoine was a quirky character. Allegedly from a European aristocratic family, Antoine had a classic car, a neurotic whippet, and always stayed in DC at the same hotel. We had an affair. The first night we spent together Antoine made an incorrect assumption about pitching and catching and when I demurred he instantly offered to switch who was in the outfield. I found that astounding, and then had to explain that I was really more of a volleyball player anyway. This was just a fling; Antoine was always very secretive. He couldn’t receive email because his IT was behind a “firewall” to protect his business data. I made a surprise visit to Manhattan, not to see him, but welcomed him to join me, and he was terrified that I could just appear on his home turf.
A few years later, I heard that Antoine was in big legal trouble. He’d taken money from wealthy people, some elderly, to “do” their houses in Bethesda, D.C., Rehoboth, Newport, Manhattan. Some he’d done beautifully. Some he took huge sums up front to buy art and antiques and did half the work. For some he did nothing. He ended up on Rikers Island. And managed to find a wealthy boyfriend who hired a lawyer and bailed him out! It turned out Antoine was really Anthony, and not a de Bourbon-Parme. His Italian last name came to him from his dad, a New York state trooper.
Years later I googled “Antoine” to see where he was. He’d been the CEO for an upstate New York food bank. And he’d gone to prison for embezzlement. I’ve known other messy, “Mike White” style gays, some real estate clients. One was involved in a gay rights march on Washington where hundreds of thousands in donations just disappeared. But none of these other characters were related to Bob, and Lanny and Mark and Antoine.