Mike Albo's "Hologram Boyfriends" Is His Last Word (He Claims) on 25 Years of Desire and Tech Intertwining in NYC
The veteran writer and performer (and, yes, my friend) on his hilarious, raw listen-only essays about seeking dick, love, success and inner peace in our cyborgian 21st century city.
Happy Thanksgiving weekend, Caftaners! I think I’ll start on a decidedly unpleasant note and say that, despite the enjoyment of time spent with family and friends, it wasn’t a particularly happy one for me as it quickly became obvious that that lone Afghan guy (brain obviously twisted by serving America’s war effort in his home country) who shot the two National Guard members in D.C., one fatally, was the excuse Trump was waiting for to declare full-out war on all Afghan refugees/asylees and migrants in general. So I imagine this country’s vicious, no-holds-barred assault on immigrants of all sorts will just get worse. Thursday, I couldn’t shake the cognitive dissonance of so many people having abundant and cozy meals with family and friends while we live through these brutal, cruel ICE raids and basically Trump and his scum-sociates declaring war on every corner of American life, turning us into a giant fortress of idiocy, sickness and unending violence. I’m so fucking sick of it. I marvel that I or anyone manages to go about one’s normal life amid it. I hope and pray that more Americans will wake up and realize we deserve better than to be abused and traumatized by a bunch of amoral grifters. And to think we’re not quite through the first year.
Ok, thanks for letting me get that off my chest! This latest Caftan is, yes, with a good longtime friend whom I’ve also long admired (even before we were friends) for having one of the most scabrously, incisively, surreally and often poignantly funny minds and pens of anyone I’ve ever known. Are you familiar with the longtime NYC-based writer and performer Mike Albo, 56? He’s written novels including Hornito, The Underminer (with Virginia Heffernan) and (the young adult but it will blow your mind, too) Another Dimension of Us. And he’s in the longtime comedy trio Unitard with David Ilku and (another friend of mine) Nora Burns, which is so viciously, twistedly funny about contemporary culture and politics that every time I see them, it’s downright cathartic for me. Here’s a rather old beloved clip of Mike and David being gays who work at the Marc Jacobs store, with Nora as the sort of bougie Manhattan woman she always plays so well:
The occasion for this interview with Mike is that he has a new listen-only essay collection out called Hologram Boyfriends, about his past 20 years or so of looking for sex and/or love via the various technologies that have been thrust upon us at least since the late-nineties AOL chat-room era, and then of course since the era of Grindr and Scruff. As I said to Mike when we chatted, I could read, listen to and laugh at his writing forever—I never want his books to end, because they are not only so funny but full of insights rendered in language and ideas that only Mike’s singular mind could produce, and also because his use of both the English language and popular culture is virtuosic. Here is a little taste of Hologram Boyfriends, which I will call HB from now on:
I copy/pasted so many tidbits while reading the transcript of HB (because I actually read faster than I can listen to something). Here are but a few:
“I am out of style. I am a white cis gay guy, which, to some people, is somehow seen a privileged, evil, or greedy or maybe just less trendy than the fluider expressions. Listen, I love it, I appreciate it, and you know, everyone looks cute in a skirt under the age of 30. Go for it. Have fun. Get back to me when you turn 45.”
“My desire is brimming in me constantly, like hot rice water foaming over a dancing lid.”
“It has taken me years to understand that my desire for love, connection, intimacy, sex, is an energy that can be shaped, manipulated, narrowed, reduced. Now I finally see that this energy —my erotic energy—has been packaged, cut up into bits, and sold back to me.”
“My thoughts about the internet and my sexuality can be reduced to two questions. No. 1: Is our super-connected modern life “damaging” me as a person? Is it changing all of us so that we no longer want simpler things like love and family and drinkable, bland diner coffee? Or, No. 2: Are our desires the same as they’ve always been, deep, uncontrollable, timeless, as old as mankind, no matter the means of communication—websites, 900 numbers, raised red lanterns? Basically: Am I just a guy like all those before me?”
“Some pairing of the same four names used in gay porn from 1985 to 2005 — Brock Hunter, Chad Hunter, Hunter Brock, Chad Brock, Lane Hunter, Chad Lane — endless combinations like strands of DNA.”
“Five wines into the night, I told Angela, our book club member, that her daughter was going to have the hottest sex when she started her junior year abroad in Madrid.”
“His boyfriend came galloping up like a Labrador, wearing a little hat, vintage striped tube socks pulled up over the calves, and a colorful shirt because the boys these days like to look like conceptual clowns on a children’s show from the ‘80s.”
“As more and more apartments are being built in my neighborhood, more and more people are arriving. But are they really here? They look at their phones while they walk their dogs, and don’t smile or say hello when they pass by. They have no expressions on their faces. There’s this couple on my floor who look through me when I see them. It irks me so much that I force them to say hello to me. ‘Hi! Good Morning! What a nice day, right? RIGHT?’ I turn into an aggressively friendly person. Like someone from Our Town, but on meth. They will faintly smile and then ignore me again.”
“I am almost grateful for the meager, nearly nonexistent access I had to satisfying sexual lust when I was younger. No one cared about turning me on then. The gay identity I was shown was one of persecution, death, sadness, and disdain, but still somehow, I still gravitated toward it. I stopped at nothing to pursue it. That was definitely driven by desire, no doubt. But it was also driven by what desire brings with it. To kiss, to be glanced at, to love.”
“No one uses the term metrosexual anymore. Not because it fell out of trend, but more like it accomplished its goal. Now I must endure a daily barrage of ads on Instagram about under eye concealer for men. And there’s no end to the TikTok how-to videos of guys showing off the perfectly tousled bang, Even white supremacists use beard oil now.”
“I hate Fire Island. I am sure I have had some good times there, but I just remember the bad times there, because, well, I hate Fire Island. I am not a dance-with-my-shirt-off person. I don’t care about Kylie. I don’t want to hang out at a pool, floating on a giant inflatable rainbow unicorn listening to her. I’m not interested in upper teas or lower teas. And every time I go to Fire Island I have a haunted, emotional, humiliating, kind of terrible time. It’s more my fault. I become my most grasping, pathetic, worst self there, always hungry, trying to afford a $16 dollar Fantasy Island Wrap from the Pines Pantry.”
OK, so there you get a sense of Mike. As for our talk, more than two hours right before Thanksgiving, all I’ll say is what I was thinking as I was transcribing it, which is that it’s much more like a private convo Mike and I might have over dinner or a drink at the Exley than something we intended for public consumption. But it’s honest, and that’s what I always intended when I started this Caftan project. So I hope you’ll at least find it interesting.
Among the interviews I have coming up, one is with someone I’ve wanted to talk to since, well, shortly after Inauguration Day. And you’ll see why. So stay tuned for that. Meantime, as I always say, if you been with these interviews for a while as a free subscriber and continue to like them, please considering becoming a paid subscriber at $5/month. It really helps. And if you already are, thank you as ever. So now here’s Mike.
Mike, my dear friend, thanks for doing a Caftan chat with me. So, what is the origin story of this project, Hologram Boyfriends? You said that the MacMillan producer came to one of your shows?
Yes, three years ago he came to a Unitard Show and asked me after if I wanted to work on an audio original. So I put together every single monologue I’ve ever done and created an 180-page document. And he was like, “Yeah, no.” But within that were these cultural observations including a very brief version of something I’d written about Li, a beautiful guy from China I dated, after which I started getting messages on Grindr from incredibly gorgeous Asian men who were crypto-bots. So I wrote a piece like “Did I date a hologram?” and the producer liked that, so I created a proposal out of that. I wanted to call this project “Dead Malls and Hologram Boyfriends,” because I’m obsessed with dead malls. But it turned out to be just “Hologram Boyfriends.”
Haha. But that guy Li was real, right? I remember you talking about him.
Yeah, he was real. He wasn’t a hologram.
Mike, there’s a through line in your book about the fusion of desire and tech. You write toward the end: “It’s taken me years to understand that my desire for love, connection, intimacy, sex, is an energy that can be shaped, manipulated, narrowed, reduced. Now I finally see that this energy has been packaged, cut up into bits and sold back to me.” That seemed to define a lot of the feedback loop of the book. Did that theme come into clarity after you decided to call the book “Hologram Boyfriends”?
That part is from the conclusion, which I didn’t write until the end. I wrote 75% of this book from September to December of last year, not including some older essays I polished up. But I’m really talking about the last 30 years of what I’ve been feeling. I’ve been confused about my desire, ashamed of my desire, watching my desire be used since I started using apps. It was definitely a concept I’d thought about but not until I started thinking about what desire is as an energy and reading all these quote-unquote New Age books and doing personal work on energy did I start understanding desire as energy. And that was hard for me to understand. Over the past year I’ve been doing a lot of visualization and energy work and understanding what that means.
There is a strong current of Eastern/New Age modalities in your life. My friend Mikey tells me on our all-day thread, “You’d be in such a better mood if you’d only meditate in the morning.” And I’ve had periods where I did, but it dropped off. I’ve never in my life really had any kind of meditative practice. Can you articulate the role that it plays in your life?
Most mornings I will do a qi gong practice called The Eight Brocades, then a smile meditation where I send smiling energy throughout my body to all my organs, then I chant for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. And later in the day I’ll do a kundalini practice, this crazy kind of yoga with repetitive breath and movements that makes you feel zingy in your body. Then I’ll take a nap-itation, basically lying on the ground for 10 to 20 minutes where I’ll either go into a sleep state or just feel the energy around my body.
To put this in completely crass western terms, what do you derive from it?
There are so many metaphors in Buddhism for enlightenment or equanimity, and the one I like is dying cloth in indigo. When you do it once, it barely has any color. You have to keep dipping and dipping to make it vibrant. I started chanting in 2016, and without it I don’t think I’d be as grounded as I am now. I can see the effect in retrospect. It’s made me much more compassionate. Someone today said they’d read in that book On Tyranny that part of being a citizen is looking people in the eye and engaging in small talk, connecting with people in small ways. I really liked that. That’s what I do.
This comes up in your book. I am so inclined to chit-chat with everyone and I feel what you talk about in the book, which is a kind of sadness of—well, I remember a very different New York where you would regularly strike up a conversation with a stranger. The city seemed full of these jabbering, Seinfeldian types. But this new wave of kids who’ve come in sometimes feel like holograms to me, very averse to chatting. They make me hedge on my own chattiness because I don’t want to seem freaky. But maybe it’s ageism—like I’m some old weird guy who wants to talk.
I moved to New York because I wanted it to be like Sesame Street. I love connecting. It’s hard to know if things are getting worse or not, but I do think people are using AI more than I thought for everyday emotional support. I was watching a Ted Talk where a woman said, “When you date, take a break from AI for three months.” What? I use AI to ask how long you can have yogurt for before you can’t eat it.
I can’t understand the mindset of someone who would turn to AI for emotional advice or support. What comfort would you derive from that? A machine is talking back to you.
That’s how I feel when some guy online says, “Hey let’s get on cam and jerk off.” No! I don’t want that. I want a physical body.
Well, at least that person is real, presumably.
[laughs] True.
Mike, walk me through a typical day.
I wake up around 8 or 8:30. My building [he has an affordable unit in a slick new building in Brooklyn] has free coffee and pastries, so I go up to the lounge for my mini-scone and pouch of oatmeal and coffee and read the Times on my iPad. If I remember my dreams, I’ll write them down. Then I’ll do my meditation practices until 10 when I start working. I feel like my work all day is admin. I often have to get out of my apartment to write. I’ll print out my notes or a draft and then take them somewhere like [Village longtime gay bar] The Monster for Happy Hour where I scribble all over my notes. Then I’ll go home to the computer and do a revision. One of the essays in the book, the one about “Clancy”—
Oh yeah, I know who that was. [laughs]
I wrote most of that in Ptown, some of it on the beach, writing on paper. I have to see my work physically on a piece of paper at some point.
Do you take breaks?
I’m always working or worrying about not working. Usually I make chicken salad for lunch every day.
And when do you finish work for the day?
I’m usually going to see a play or to someone’s reading at night, in which case I’ll bring my work with me on the subway. I might do some work when I get home, but usually it’s lights-out around 11:30. This is unless I’m traveling.
What about when you’re off your daily habitrail? I love any time I’m not with my laptop. My default is to work, even on weekends. There’s always something to work on, including a novel. What about you?
It’s usually walking, exercise or social life. After this call, I’ll probably go for a walk then come back and get a little high and do a one-hour kundalini session, then make two different lasagnas. But same—I never stop working in a way.
For me, being alone all day, I yearn so badly to do things and see people most nights. Are you like that?
I love being alone. I yearn to be alone.
Indefinitely?
Well, yeah, I can get so depressed and I don’t even realize it’s because I’ve been isolated. But ever since I was a kid, I’ve played by myself. I used to love to take my soldiers and make stories about them. I’ve been playing with myself my whole life. [laughs] My whole life has been, “I’m in a magical Narnia!”
I’m able to be alone for long periods of time or I couldn’t have been a writer, but I also badly crave being with other people. I’ve had to say to myself, “Learn to enjoy a night by yourself.”
I love a night by myself. But part of my being alone is chatting with 100 people online.
Right, now there’s this digital space in our lives where we both are and aren’t alone. A huge source of comfort in my day is that I’m chatting with my friends on our threads.
Totally. I text my friends all day, “How are you? How was your day?” But I do love being alone. Some of my best memories are the time that I was going through the copyedits of Hornito and got a share with a bunch of people in Sag Harbor and they all had 9-to-5 jobs in the city, so I’d go during the week when nobody else was there and I have such pleasant memories of being myself out there working on that book. And working on other books in Ptown alone in more recent years.
One thing I noticed about the book is there’s a strong tension between grievance and gratitude. We’re both middle-class, middle-age gay white men who haven’t hit the jackpot but have had, and still have, great, rich careers—we’re working writers, in your case also a working performer, who’ve managed to keep doing it. I love that you lean into grievance and disappointment in the book, because I think that [in an obnoxious voice] “Gratitude!” is so American, it’s almost become part of this American self-help ethos. “You must be grateful all the time!” You talk in the book about going into that dark room in your head of self-pity and self-loathing. That’s very real to me. Maybe some people are so meditation-ized that they can’t conceive of self-pity, but I tend to not believe anyone who claims they have no resentment, grievance, regrets, disappointment and self-pity.
Right. Those are the same people who say they don’t gossip. I’m like, “Fuck you.”
But at the same time with disappointments in my own life, in the past few years, whether this is right or wrong, I say to myself, “Think of Gaza.” Think of daily life in Gaza. There is nothing in our lives that we should be legitimately angry or disappointed about, because life on this planet is a continuum of getting by and sucking it up. My father once said to me during a very difficult time in my life, “We all have a cross to bear, and this is yours.” Now, that’s not coming from a very Zen place—probably more from a Catholic place—but it contains the idea that it’s ridiculous and incredibly solipsistic to get overly disappointed about one’s own life when you think about the whole spectrum of human experience. So, what is your inner tape when you think about these two things, grievance versus gratitude? Because gratitude does come up a lot in your book, especially toward the end.
First of all, it is really hard to talk about gratitude in our culture, because of what you just said, in that voice you said it in: “Gratitude!” It’s such a commercial stupid term now, so gross and Tony Robbins.
Right. It’s the self-improvement industrial complex.
Right. But in my practice, when I’m doing my smiling meditation, I do sit and put gratitude in my heart and feel, as much as I can, gratitude for my body, and for being here, and the blessing I have to have an affordable apartment and the ability to feel happy. I try really hard to find gratitude. And it’s a muscle that you have to work.
Do you ever have moments when you feel it organically? I mean, like, yesterday when I was just having this really nice day with my friends upstate…
…I don’t think I had a moment when I consciously said to myself, “I’m feeling gratitude,” but I certainly felt it. Do you ever have moments where you’re just—happy? [we both laugh] I’m not asking that rhetorically. You must. When do they occur?
Oh, all the time. At the end of the book when I say that I’m becoming one of those people who’s like, “Oh, look at that brave weed growing up out the sidewalk”...ever since I was a child, I’ve loved looking at pretty things and singing songs to myself. I still do this, and I’m not joking, but if something looks like a passageway to Narnia, like two trees really close together, I’ll walk through it. In the city, there’s this one sign in the West Village where the posts of the sign were shoulder-width apart from each other. I used to always walk between it, and when I did, I’d thought, “Life is good, and when I go through this portal, I’m going to experience joy.”
But when it comes to grievance, I still can’t figure out how to talk about this in a clear way. I’m having a real hard time not making HB a definitive thing for myself, like, “If this audiobook doesn’t achieve x, then I’m going to y.” Especially this one, since it’s so autobiographical and contains everything I’ve ever wanted to say. I don’t think I’m ever going to write another book about looking for love in NYC. This is it, and however it’s received really does feel consequential and it’s hard for me not to take it as a message. If it just sort of flounders and doesn’t sell, then how can I not take it as a sign that I should shift things up?
Well, I don’t think you should. I know what you’re speaking to. With my last book, Speech Team, I thought, “Wow, you’ve really put the self-pity front and center this time.” I don’t regret it—it was an honest reflection of my adolescence. But it doesn’t play well to many people. I noticed a pattern in the Goodreads reviews where older gay men were more moved by the book and “got it,” but a lot of women were very hostile toward it, toward this gay white male protagonist who had a lot of bruised feelings and couldn’t turn the page on his past. So, no, I didn’t attach big expectations to the book, in part because I had a gut feeling it wouldn’t do well.
But also, Mike, we’ve both written great things and they have not made us rich. And you can’t—and maybe I’m contradicting myself, because I know I told you recently that maybe I just want to stop writing novels and devote the rest of my life to getting stoned—but, and this is very Buddhist and very 12-step, taking the action and letting go of the result. Because we can’t attach what we’re going to do next to how well any one project of ours does. All you can really do is say, “Do I still have an appetite to create? An imagination that’s still active? Would I be happier if I started working on something new?” And then do it, regardless of the results. Right?
Absolutely. I totally agree with you. It’s one of those things where I need to take my own advice, because I always say to someone who’s writing a book, “You have no idea where this is going to take you. Have all your fantasies that it’s going to win the Pulitzer. But you have no idea where it’s going to take you. Maybe you’ll meet your stalker!”
Yeah. You can say you’ve had a stalker, a story you recount in HB! That’s glamorous. Well, I don’t think having a stalker is glamorous. I think it’s scary actually.
That essay in particular I had been doing onstage as a funny story for a long time. Then when I went back and rewrote it for this book, I realized how fucking scary it really was.
I just interviewed Javier Muñoz and [I recount to Mike the horrifying stalker situation Javier told me about]. It sounds like one of the worst things that could happen to someone in terms of shattering your whole sense of privacy and safety.
When my stalker situation was happening, I was so confused. “Oh, this is happening!” and I was kind of ignoring it. But I started believing there was some kind of hex against me.
So I wanted to ask you about relationships, and I’m going to say up front that I’m projecting my own experience into this, because I recently ended a five-year relationship. There’s a through-line in your book about wanting a boyfriend, a long-term relationship, as well as jealousy and annoyance toward gay guys with their [annoying voice] “husbands” with their “opes relaysh.” [This is Mike’s shorthand for an open relationship.] But anyway, when I was telling someone very close to me whose identity I won’t disclose that I’d ended the relationship, she was like, “But now you’re not going to be in a relationship!?!? Do you really want to live the rest of your life alone!??!!? Who’s going to take care of you?!??” And I realized that, as far back as when I came out to this person who shall not be named, the message from her was “It’s fine that you’re gay, but you have to be in a relationship!” Like, I had to find something that mirrored a conventional heterosexual marriage.
And I thought for the first time about how much that idea had ruled my whole life the past 30 years, and how more than once I stayed in relationships that I wasn’t really happy in, but I was like, “Well, this is what a relationship is…you just grit your teeth and make it work, for better or worse.” And I’ll be clear, I still don’t want to stop falling in love, because falling in love feels great. But I’ve also thought, like, I really think that if I don’t have another relationship, I’d be perfectly happy with the friends and family I have. I feel like maybe for the first time I’m letting go of this externally ingrained idea that if, especially by our age, you don’t have a relationship, then you’re less-than or you’ve somehow failed as a so-called normal, well-adjusted gay.
But I’ll admit, I still struggle with this idea that there’s something deeply wrong with me that I can’t even see because I haven’t done enough therapy or meditation or something, that is holding me back from this ultimate thing without which you are incomplete. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe I spend the most time with the people I do because because they’re the ones I most like spending time with. And guess what? They’re my friends.
So anyway Mike, that was a big tee-up to my question, which is: there’s definitely a through-line of romantic yearning in your book, wanting to have a boyfriend, and you have interludes with people like Li. But I was also thinking, “Mike, you have a wild mind. A crazy mind. You don’t have a normal mind. You have a highly imaginative mind. And how many people would you really be a match with?” So, is there a part of you that acknowledges that you are and you have everything you want already? Most minds are middling, and your mind is insane, brilliant, explosive. You are constantly exploding with feeling and thought. And that’s not most people.
There’s always the moment when I think about dating somebody, and then I’m like, “Oh my God, I can feel myself becoming a c*nt.” [we both laugh] But I get sad when I spend time in New Hampshire with my parents.
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