Mike Albo on Cock Cages, Cult Workouts, and the End of Youth Culture

If you’ve been hanging around New York for the past 30 years, you know that one of the city’s great under-appreciated wits is writer-performer Mike Albo. When I planned the day to talk to him for his latest project, I wasn’t at all surprised when he told me he couldn’t Monday because he was flying down to Atlanta to give a TED Talk. His work is always hopping form—novels, essays, plays, performance, articles, not to mention his membership in the comedy trio UNITARD. Some might describe Albo as a satirist, but I think he’s just reporting from the frontlines of the weird culture we all inhabit.

Now comes Hologram Boyfriends, an audiobook where Albo goes for the gay, social-media jugular in a series of personal and journalistic essays that dissects the current state of gay desire. Albo doesn’t skim over his own romantic ordeals, from hook-ups at East Village bars to chats on Grindr, but the book is far more than an “encyclopedia of erotic error.” Albo is merely his own guinea pig, as he sets out—via Hollywood pitch meetings, Brooklyn sex clubs, erotic energy seminars, creepy stalkers claiming to be casting agents from Star Search, the ascent of the throuple, and newbies to New York who quickly become well-oiled gay machines—to unearth what’s left of a real, intimate connection when one hand is always typing: “Into?” “Hung?” and “Host?” Part of the joy of the book is Albo’s reading of it (much of it recorded live at Parkside Lounge on the Lower East Side). I finally spoke to him two days after he got back from Atlanta, safe at home in his gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn.

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CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN: Hi Mike. How was your TED Talk? 

MIKE ALBO: I can’t believe it happened. But it was fun. It’s such a weird culture. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced any of that TED stuff?

BOLLEN: I actually know very little. But I imagined you on stage with a microphone headset in a black turtleneck. 

ALBO: The people there are so on the top of their game, and the TED people themselves, it’s the most tightly run conference and everyone was so nice. They were like, “We want you to do this crazy comedy sketch.” And I was like, “Okay.” So there are all these people talking about the power of science, and whether AI is destroying our lives. And then I went up there and did my comedy bit. I was so confused.

BOLLEN: Is there a live audience? Who are these people? Are there TED Talk fanatics?

ALBO: Yes, TED Talk fanatics. Yeah. It’s a huge, cultish thing. 

BOLLEN: It’s just like the Landmark Forum, which you mention in your book. Why was everyone so obsessed with that twenty years ago? I was losing one friend after another to the Landmark Forum. Does it even exist anymore? 

ALBO: Someone should do a study on how these kind of trend cults curdle on themselves. It’s also how I feel about Upright Citizens Brigade although I know they’re still around.

BOLLEN: There are so many New York cults. Like Barry’s Bootcamp or SoulCycle, which I guess are outgrowths of CrossFit. 

ALBO: For a year I did Rumble, which is the boxing version. That was very cultish.

BOLLEN: I feel like it’s too late for me to try Barry’s. I missed that wave.

ALBO: Yes, it would be like going into Tomorrowland at Disneyland. Everything’s all scuffed up, and a little sad.

BOLLEN: Well, I love Hologram Boyfriends. I felt like someone finally gave a voice to everything that’s been confusing me about being a gay New Yorker over the past 25 years. I listened to it twice and the meat of it is really about how technology has taken over gay culture and, to an extent, hollowed it out. I feel like gay people never had that utopian vision of technology that persisted in larger culture for a while. Its potential always resided in the sexual possibility. Still, why do you feel like gay culture had to get swallowed by the apps until it became a soulless circle of hell?  

ALBO: So quickly, too. I think part of me can only talk about it emotionally. I mean, some things haven’t changed. I don’t think I waste any more time than I did standing around the bar at The Boiler Room for eight hours a week. Now it’s just these fractured moments. I probably spend eight hours a week, but on the toilet looking at Grindr. It’s just like everything else in our digital lives, including ordering delivery. Everything just became so easy, and effortless, and wordless. So being at a bar and actually going up to talk to them is so much different than knowing their dick size and having to list the menu options of what I’m into. Do you know what I mean?

BOLLEN: It’s also changed the notion of sexual opportunism. Before Grindr, you had to take what was in front of you if you wanted to go home with someone. And occasionally it was someone really out of your league but there you had it, so you really scored. Now, there’s so much competition in terms of the entire city selling their wares on an app at all times.

ALBO: Yep. And also there’s so many more beautiful people. I don’t know how that happened, but everyone’s hot now.

BOLLEN: But isn’t that a sign of age? Now, magically, anyone under 30 seems like they should be a model. 

ALBO: I think that beauty has become over proliferated just like every career has, just how there are 8,000 photographers now. There are 8,000 models. A long time ago I wrote an article on male models for New York Magazine. It was really interesting to hear these older models be like, “Back in the day, there were just 25 of us, and we all did the Armani campaign.”  Then Hedi Slimane came along and kind of democratized beauty, and realized that every droopy-looking NYU student is hot.

BOLLEN: You just needed a little malnourishment. 

ALBO: And really pale skin. So beauty became democratized in a way, and everyone became an aspiring model. Everything’s aspirational now. It’s like everyone has an OnlyFans account. And there’s this even new twist on Grindr where even the people who contact me want me to subscribe to their OnlyFans page. 

BOLLEN: They’ve learned how to monetize it.

ALBO: Yeah, and in thinking about what you said about how it’s become me soulless, it’s because my desires are being sold back to me in fragments.

BOLLEN: You make a point in the book about how we have this tendency as a generation to mythologize the era of our gay elders, pre-AIDS, pre-apps, in the 1970s, as if it was all free love and openness and jealousy didn’t exist. But do you think if technology and apps hadn’t come along, in some alternate universe, we would be more satisfied homosexuals? 

ALBO: The bedrock of my belief is that my emotions are as old as time. The reason why I can read literature from hundreds of years ago and find connection in it is because I’ve felt jealousy and rage and envy, just like Clytemnestra. I’m a bitch just like her. But yes, there is this sort of gauzy Tom Bianchi Polaroid version of what gay life was like, and I believe that if I lived in that time, I would still be the same confused person. When I talked to [sexologist] Joseph Kramer, founder of the Body Electric, and he said there was as much pair bonding back then, I think I still would’ve been on the piers in 1975 being like, “Fuck you.”

BOLLEN: It’s like Edmund White, who always talks about the endless sex possibilities of that era. But I think behind that story is another one, which is that Ed was such a romantic, he really just wanted to fall in love. I don’t believe that there weren’t romantics even on those piers. You know what I mean? In Hologram Boyfriends, though, you do capture the 90s scene in a romantic way. You have a part where you describe being in DC and going to a club kid night and falling in love with some guy with a bleach-blond Caesar haircut with gelled icicle bangs. Don’t you think at heart you’re that same pining teenager? 

ALBO: Oh, yes. My longing has been in me forever. I guess at least I’ve matured enough to be able to cope with it more than I used to. It used to be so painful, and to my benefit or demise, my longing really is the reason I started writing. I was writing poetry and longing ever since I was a kid.

BOLLEN: I think that’s the reason a lot of us fell into literature or art and even New York as gay kids. It was the place to put our longing and desires. I was struck by the part of the book where you talk about pitching a gay television show in the early 2000s and the network execs saying, “Oh, we already have one gay show on the network.” I don’t think people realize just how little the world wanted gay material back then, even if it accepted you as a gay man.  

ALBO: It was definitely true that gay men themselves were not a lucrative market. The 2000s were full of these attempts to create gay media like Logo. In America, we become the audience profile that they want us to become, but back then they still hadn’t cornered the whole gay-male straight-female demographic, which now is a completely marketable thing. They hadn’t figured out how to exploit gay men and make them a buying block. So yeah, in the 2000s, it was so hard to get any projects greenlit. I can’t tell you how many experiences I had where I was looked over and told to my face, “But we can’t do that. You’re a gay guy.” It happens so often, especially in the comedy world. Then it changed right around the time of the smartphone and streaming, when “queer” became a market. 

BOLLEN: Yes, and you talk about how quickly a white cis gay guy went from too out-there and progressive to too conservative and straight-laced. 

ALBO: When I started articulating my disappointment in how I’m being considered by culture, my friend Larry was like, “You know what? I kind of like being the cockroach that everyone hates.”

BOLLEN: Right. You get it on both sides.

ALBO: I said to another friend, “I feel like I’m being spit roasted by culture.” Both sides don’t like me. One side thinks I’m a degenerate and the other one thinks I’m privileged. Very few people have been told, “Your time is over” like I have. Even just at the TED conference, which was filled with perfectly wonderful people down there, someone casually said that they were a financial adviser and they’re trying to help people who use financial tools. And she was like, “Well, people who look like you.” And I was like, “Do you know that I have $45 in my bank account right now? Why do you assume a privilege that I don’t have?”

BOLLEN: In the book you say that you don’t like being asked to choose between being a performer and a writer. But this is an audiobook and much of it is performed by you—some of it recorded in front of an audience at Parkside Lounge in New York. I don’t think most writers are good performers. They are great at speaking. I wonder how much of your experience as a performer is embedded in the writing?  

ALBO: There’s always been a blur between the stage part and the writing part of myself. Since I was a child, I’ve been sort of saying things out loud and performing poetry. I’m also sort of cursed with a comedic vibe—or blessed, or cursed, whatever you want to say. So, there’s this comedic thing that I just sort of do naturally. But it’s not easier to be a performer. First of all, it’s not as lucrative, or it’s equally not lucrative. And my performer friends who make money at it are fully committed to it and really love to be on stage. I don’t know if I’m built to beam. There are some stand-up people. like Dina Martina, who I consider a poet. 

BOLLEN: You mentioned the Boiler Room earlier. You also talk about the Phoenix in the book, which were both East Village gay bars. I’ve been feeling a nostalgia for those places lately. Even for Beige, which I hated at the time. I now think, “God, that was so wonderful, such a great parade of New York’s finest.”

ALBO: I have nostalgia for the energy I had to go to them for sure. My first boo, Hornito, I wrote on the subway on those nights going home. I feel like the subway is such a great artistic residency program. Here I am poo-pooing nostalgia, but I absolutely have nostalgia for those times. All the nights that my friend Mario Diaz did in the East Village. And Squeezebox, which had such an incredibly vital time, that whole gay rock-n-roll movement. And Flamingo East!

BOLLEN: I used to wait tables at Flamingo East. Wasn’t Wednesday night the big night?  

ALBO: Yes, Wednesday night. I remember once having the flu, and being barely able to walk, but being like, “I have to go to Flamingo East.” I probably infected 500 people, but I would not miss a night.

BOLLEN: There’s a great observation you make about seeing some young kid, new to the city, logging into Grindr and listing their favorite Harry Potter character. Then a month later, there’s the same guy, but he’s picked up the jargon and saying he’s a “vers top looking for bottom, no fatties.” It’s sad how quickly one becomes this anonymous carnivore. Do you hold out hope for youth to figure a way back to humanity? 

ALBO: I always want to be the person who’s like “The youth know better than us,” but also I think we’re experiencing the poop end of youth culture. The teenager was invented in the fifties, and then now everyone thinks that young people are so much wiser, and we need to listen to them. I don’t know if that’s true. Everyone of every age is annoying. I think it’s hard for young people now because we’re all too busy looking at our phones, so you can’t really look up and see someone to start talking to. And everyone is already labeled. It seems like there are a lot more labels now than there used to be.  

BOLLEN: Everyone labels themselves and puts their label in their profile. 

ALBO: Totally. And then there are these even stupider things. Do you know what Locktober is?

BOLLEN: No.

ALBO: It’s so dumb. Locktober is basically Sexual Dryuary, which is also dumb. It’s like a chastity thing where you literally lock up your penis and don’t have sex or even an orgasm for all of October. 

BOLLEN: Wow, not a single orgasm? I’ve never heard of that. 

ALBO: It became a buzzword last October. Next October I’m sure there’ll be like a Comic Con level event for it.