This is PAPER 1984: a celebration of the year we were born, edited by Mickey Boardman, in honor of our 40th anniversary. This series looks back on the important cultural forces at work in 1984, many of which are still reverberating today. The club, music, food, fashion and gay scenes all produced future legends that year, despite the creative community being decimated by AIDS.
La Dolce Musto debuted in the November 27, 1984 issue of the Village Voice. The weekly gossip/social column was penned by a young, New York-born-and-raised journalist/culture vulture named Michael Musto, who seemed to be at every party, nightclub and happening in Manhattan. Unlike many columnists, Musto was, and is, an incredibly witty writer, and his Village Voice columns were fun to read in addition to being informative and funny. Over the years he served up scoops, introduced new talents who went on the mainstream stardom, titillated readers with his scandalous signature “blind items” and, most controversially, “outed” LGBTQ+ celebrities. The column came abruptly to an end in 2013 when the Voice laid Musto off after 29 years. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the premiere of La Dolce Musto, we’re reprinting his debut column, as well as a brand new, one-week only, return of La Dolce Musto. Dig in and enjoy. Also, check out my interview with Musto at the bottom of the page!
La Dolce Musto ’24
Happy 40th anniversary to me! “La Dolce Musto” was my snarkily written Village Voice gossip and nightlife column, which started in 1984 (just like PAPER) and grew until my last column 29 years later. Debuting in the issue which came out November 21st, 1984 (but which was cover-dated November 27th), it was billed as “the column without a conscience,” but I soon realized that I actually did have a conscience; this was more like the column without a filter. I wanted to espouse opinions mainstream columnists wouldn’t dare go near, while celebrating underground characters you’d never see in People magazine and take readers on a breathless weekly jaunt through clubs, fashion shows, avant-garde theater and gay activist rallies. Yes, the column had to go through meticulous copy reads, fact checking and legal vettings — this was professional, after all — but still, there was tremendous freedom in being able to choose my topics and go against the big guns in a fearless way that was liberating for a freelance writer like me (and hopefully for the reader too).
And Mama’s still got it! While the entire landscape has changed — the internet long ago revolutionized things so that everyone on earth is basically a gossip columnist who writes about drag queens — I still have items and points of view that I think make me separate from the pack, for better or for worse. And so, here is a mini version of “La Dolce Musto” for 2024:
As someone who’s a talking head in virtually every documentary known to man — except for the one about potato salad that I’ve been desperately trying to get into — I’m the king of doc development goss. And I’ve learned that a short film about Marie’s Crisis — the long-running West Village piano bar where no one can drown me out on a Sondheim song — has been expanded to feature length and is as ready for release as the inevitable next Annie revival. Sing out, kids! Also, Steve Buscemi’s company, Olive Productions, is working on a series called Tales From The Lower East Side, with the first season focusing on the Pyramid Club, the East Village dive that lent a spotlight to drag queens and other performance artists in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The place was extremely cutting edge, and not just because of how scary it was to venture to Avenue A.
There’s more! Various producers — in partnership with Sarah Jessica Parker’s Pretty Matches Productions and Greg Scarnici (AKA drag star Levonia Jenkins) — are doing a doc about Robin Byrd for HBO. Byrd, of course, is the onetime cable diva (still in reruns) who lounged in a crocheted bikini while glossing her lips, telling viewers to get comfortable and bringing out an array of porn stars to strip and shimmy, ending the show with a group symposium, complete with wacky call-in questions. As a frequent cohost on the show, I suffered the horror of Robin once lifting up my tunic during a group dance number and brazenly revealing my privates. All was fine, until the audience remembered that the camera adds 15 pounds.
But enough about dick docs; let’s move on to the disco round, which I’ve never moved from, requiring constant diaper changes under the increasing challenge of strobe lighting.
Rebar — a-long running gay bar in Chelsea — is being sold, but the queens needn’t worry. It’ll still be a long running gay bar in Chelsea… Two Bridges Luncheonette, Trigger Thompson’s cozy diner slash rock dive on Canal and Ludlow, won’t be having live shows anymore, but it’s still cute. The shows were apparently too much of a hassle, and besides, they can never top the Lou Reed tribute they put together in March. It was a rare “walk on the wild side” with White Castle sliders, which was the perfect deadpan touch for the late vegetarian rocker.
A former pasta place in HK is now a fascinating gay boite featuring some very clean debauchery. It’s VV Bar (that stands for Vice Versa, not Village Voice), which has been re-done as a tribute to the old Roman baths. Across from the inevitable disco glitter ball is a completely nude statue of the young Julius Caesar, making for three balls and counting. (And no, Robin Byrd is not needed to do the unveiling.) In October, VV hosted two Gladiator nights, which featured erotic oil wrestling, shower shows, and “our Wolf Den backroom” — not to mention gogo boys in your face in the outdoor garden. If you missed it, they have the “shower show” every Wednesday, usually around 9 PM. When in Rome…
HK is also the home of legit theater, so let’s go there for some highbrow tea: Machine Dazzle — the flamboyant costume designer for performers like Taylor Mac — was called in to do a design job for the Broadway-bound musical version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (starring Tony winner J. Harrison Ghee as trans personality Lady Chablis, with a book by Mac.) When I ran into Machine at the MAD Museum, he gushed about the show’s Chicago preview: “It’s totally ready for New York, it has the best set ever and the songs are so good, you remember them!” Well, Midnight is indeed headed to Broadway next year, and though Variety gave the show a mixed review, they also said it has “an abundance of riches” that could become clarified into something extraordinary.
In the local theater world, Nora Burns’ dramedy The Village: A Disco Daydream took over the Soho Playhouse in July with its witty romping about disco-era hedonism and pathos. Eileen Dover, who deftly played a jaded Village queen, revealed to me that offstage, she has halted her transition. Eileen says she was diagnosed with LADA, a type of diabetes, and if she kept transitioning, the risk of heart attack and stroke would go up. “I made the decision to focus on my health,” she said, “as I’ve been through so much, and my life as a drag queen ain’t so bad.”
“I also realized that gender is fluid, and ‘passing’ or hormones wouldn’t make me more or less trans,” she said. “And I wanted people to know that the ‘detransition narrative’ that the right wing spews about everyone regretting transition is not true. Lots of people who detransition do so for health reasons that shouldn’t be weaponized. I will always be a feminine person and I’ll always be under the trans umbrella, but I don’t want to do so and suffer massive health consequences.”
Speaking of femmes in theater: Next year’s Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical should result in the most competitive category since Leslie Uggams and Patricia Routledge tied in 1968. (Google it!) Already, the announced possible choices include Audra McDonald in Gypsy, Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard, Idina Menzel in Redwood, Adrienne Warren in The Last Five Years, Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her, Jasmine Amy Rogers in BOOP! The Betty Boop Musical, Katie Brayben in Tammy Faye, Sutton Foster in Once Upon a Mattress, Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga in Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends, Natalie Venetia Belcon in Buena Vista Social Club and Helen J. Shen, in Maybe Happy Ending, plus plus Samantha Williams for Pirates! The Penzance musical. It sounds like camp diva heaven. Sorry, straight people. This is another year where you’re going to have to just stay home.
And the season after that too! I hear Hairspray is coming back next summer. You can’t stop the beat.
But let me end with one of my notorious blind items: Which aging faygele is thrilled that blind gossip items have become fairly obsolete because almost everyone famous is out and virtually everything is now reportable? Little old me, that’s who. Fabulous! Now let’s move on to the Wolf Den backroom.
And below, check out the original La Dolce Musto as it appeared on November 27, 1984.
La Dolce Musto ’84
It was the kind of week where I’d wake up screaming, then realize I hadn’t even fallen asleep yet. But all worries dissolved when I landed this column. Sure the only gossip I knew was something about Nastassja Kinski changing the spelling of her name, but somehow the minute my appointment was announced, everyone turned delightfully informative and obsequious. Publicists volunteered to be my surrogate mothers. Surrogate mothers volunteered to be my publicists. Alan Rish— the Elsa Maxwell of the 80s (the streets, not the decade)—had called me a “filthy whore,” but was suddenly planning a Michael Musto party. Everyone was being so kind and understanding with only Anthony Haden-Guest cautioning, “That’s a difficult column to do with a conscience. Good luck.”
Breathlessly, I ran home and scurried thought closets in search of a conscience—any conscience. All that turned up was a silver lamé shawl, so I wore it to lunch with venerable John Springer at the Russian Tea Room, still the best afternoon party in town. Springer, onetime confidante of Garland and Monroe, now says his big clients are Care Bears and Betty Boop.
We were seated next to Whoopi Goldberg, wearing a Death of a Salesman bomber jacket as she wheeled and dealed with RKO. “Pardon my derrière,” she laughed, showing us her best side. In barreled Dustin Hoffman himself, introducing luminaries to “my good friend Whoopi.” You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Glynis Johns shake hands with Whoopi Goldberg.
Same shawl, same face (deeper creases) at Studio 54’s birthday dinner for Randy Jones, the only Village Person who’s opening an East Village art gallery. Asha Putli, the only Indian disco diva with her own cable TV show, said, “Michael, you look fat! It’s fashionable. I look fat. Tell me it’s fashionable. My show will be about global shrinking. God, I’m making it sound like hemorrhoids.”
The buffet, inevitable, was Tex-Mex. “I love ribs, they make me feel so sexy,” I said, echoing Morgan Fairchild in Paper Dolls. Then I looked down and spotted a huge glob of sauce on my crotch. “Don’t say we don’t take care of you,” said publicist David Granoff, packing cactus plants into my bag.
Bristling with cactus pines and aching with psychosomatically induced hemorrhoids, I landed at Danceteria’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood fete accomplie. On a bad night, Danceteria lives down to its slogan, “the supermarket of style” (attention K-Mart shoppers), but on a good night it could make you believe in nightlife, and fairies, again. This was a good night; it could make you believe in Frankie again. No one wanted to hear two more words about these Crisco cuties, but they’d heard the right ones—“open bar”—so they went. All of them.
Dianne Brill, whose amazing bosoms are really holograms, and Rudolf, The Weimar Ed McMahon, were charming hosts amid the half-naked lumberjacks and sex changes with sequined nipples (and those were the hired guests). On meeting the group’s Holly Johnson, I didn’t dare mention Malcolm McLaren’s rude remarks about Frankie, Boy George’s condescending remarks about Frankie, or even McLaren’s unforgivable remarks about Boy George. (He told me he’d fired George for fear he’d seduce the male Bow Wow Wows in their dark motel rooms.) I only asked why he was sucking on his raccoon hat. Did he have a fetish? “Yeah,” Holly leered, unconvincingly. “Dianne Brill.” “Good answer,” I said, à la Richard Dawson. Then I gave him a phony kiss à la Richard Dawson and ran; Frankie’s dismal cover of “Born To Run” was coming, and so was the cash bar.
And so were those recurring nightmares. “Even my cuticles are hung over,” I said the next morning to no one in particular. It was a line from The Cartier Affair. But I didn’t feel like Joan Collins. I felt like Ma Rainey’s black bottom. Fortunately, my continuing search for a conscience has turned up some fabulous new outfits.
Musto Talks Gossip, Celebs and Studio 54
Did you read gossip columns growing up? Was it your dream to eventually become one?
I grew up reading breezily entertaining writers like Liz Smith and Rex Reed, and I did imagine what it would be like to eventually be them. When I started becoming a professional writer, I wrote them both letters to introduce myself and they wrote back lovely responses. That has really stayed with me, so I try to be nice to the new Michael Mustos coming up, providing they’re not a little too Eve Harrington, of course.
What would you say your biggest scoops over the years have been?
My buzzy blind item spilling the details about the club kid killing of 1996 is by far the best known item I wrote. And two weeks before that, I had an item that hinted at an aspect of the same story. I also ran the scoop that gossip diva Cindy Adams was pretending that her dog Jazzy was still alive, even though the poor thing had gone to bow-wow heaven. See, there was a whole lot of merchandise based on the dog, so Cindy had come up with an imposter pooch to keep the cash flow going. It was sort of like the Billy Wilder movie Fedora. Other than that, I spent 29 or so years doing that column and constantly updating people on developments in nightlife, celebrity and even politics. Back then, you could actually break an item four or five days after you filed it (when the paper came out).
What makes a good scoop?
The best kind of scoop involves more than one celebrity and also includes something controversial and/or combative. A star getting a new pet turtle is not interesting. Amber Heard accusing Johnny Depp of crapping on the pillow is interesting.
You got a lot of attention back in the day for outing closeted celebrities. Rosie O’Donnell even called you a gay Nazi on Larry King. Looking back, would you change anything?
I wouldn’t change anything because it was a time when AIDS was decimating the community and the government was very weak on that subject, leaving us desperate to summon any visibility and strength that we could. To have so many celebrities cowering in the closet was not an option, so I joined with [fellow reporter] Michelangelo Signorile and wrote the truth, take it or leave it. The media never had a problem with writing about celebrities’ straight sexual antics, so we were just leveling the playing field to show that queer was not a dirty word. Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche were far from mad at me. In fact, they had been flouncing around being openly a couple as the media pretty much turned a blind eye. And Rosie O’Donnell has become a friend and a great ally. She was one of the brave people who first stood up to Trump and she’s still doing it, bless her lesbian soul.
You once told me that at Studio 54, there were sour pusses who complained, “This sucks. Max’s Kansas City was better.” What do you say to people who complain that New York isn’t as fun as it used to be?
I can’t really criticize these naysayers that much because no one’s written “the death of Downtown” more than me, LOL. But it’s important to remember that, while nightlife is inclusive, it’s best served to the young. If you’re experiencing your first nightlife, you absolutely love it, no matter what. Having some old fogey tell you that the past was better is a real Debbie Downer, not to mention a cock blocker. So, when someone says that New York used to be better, I pretend I can’t hear them and just keep dancing, even though it’s against the cabaret law.
What were the most fun clubs in your opinion, over the years? The most fabulous events?
In the 1970s, Studio 54 was the ultimate disco — one-stop shopping for hedonism. Once I found out ways to get in lol, it was a democracy on the dance floor and you could easily boogie down with Margaux Hemingway, bump into Michael Jackson or chat with Chita Rivera’s daughter. The ’80s were the era of downtown super-clubs and my favorite was Area, a Tribeca dance space which was art driven and brilliantly executed. Every five or so weeks, they would redo the theme of the club and even the invitation would match the theme. For something a little less slick, I adored the World, an East Village multi level ballroom that looked like it could collapse at any moment, which was part of the charm. A tall, bald drag queen named Dean Johnson did cleverly punky shows there, and there was also a back room with a monitor, who eventually just gave up. As for events, I enjoyed Susanne Bartsch‘s two Love Balls, which were gigantic all-star voguing balls to benefit an AIDS charity. I was even involved in a house at each of those events. Yes, I did both balls! And I live for the Glam Awards every year, which honor the best of LGBTQ nightlife. Did I mention that I’ve won Best Writer 10 times, plus the Living Legend award? Hello?
Have you ever been sued by an angry person you wrote about?
No, but there are worse things than being sued and I have paid the price. As for actually being threatened with a lawsuit over outing, Liza Minnelli’s ex-husband at the time, David Gest, had his lawyers write to me that he was not gay and I should never again say that he was or else. I promptly showed the letter to the editor of the Voice and he ripped it to shreds and we both laughed our heads off.
If you had to move out of New York, where would you go?
New York.
Who have been your favorite celebrities to write about over the years?
To me, there’s nothing sexier than talent, so I’ve always loved writing about the grand dames like Meryl Streep but also about the dazzling divas like Liza, Diana and Cher, who have glitter in their veins and live to entertain. I also like discovering new talent and helping them along to their inevitable success. Among the performers who credit me with promoting them when they started are Bridget Everett, Murray Hill, Jackie Hoffman, Justin Vivian Bond, Bianca Del Rio and Jinkx Monsoon. But two comic geniuses always gave me the best interviews — Carrie Fisher and Sandra Bernhard. Witty, brilliant, and insouciant. I could never get enough of writing about them.
Photos via Getty
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