In which The Gay Recluse presents a gay/impressionistic alternative to this week’s Modern Love offering in The Times. Those looking for our quantitative analysis should click here.
By JULIE BUXBAUM and THE GAY RECLUSE
Published: May 11, 2008

SEVEN months ago, I was married in an ivory lace dress to a woman in a gray suit on [...]

In which The Gay Recluse suggests a link.
The most beautiful ads are always for dead companies.

Like this one we recently took on 35th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.

Does this company still exist? We hope not, because we don’t want to have to think about buying anything.

New York City is filled with ads for dead [...]

In which The Gay Recluse hopes that a young woman will not succumb to the more conventional pressures that sadly ooze from this week’s Modern Love offering in The Times. Those looking for our quantitative analysis should click here.
Want To Be My Girlfriend? Please Don’t Define
By MARGUERITE FIELDS and THE GAY RECLUSE
RECENTLY my mother asked [...]

In which The Gay Recluse attempts to use a new “macro” lens.

So yeah: The Globularia stygia we bought last year at Stonecrop Gardens is in bloom.

These first two pix we took with the regular lens.

Then we took some drugs tried out a new macro lens.

We are reminded of a record cover for one of those [...]

In which The Gay Recluse lives in an alternate reality.
For a long time we’ve kept an eye on the triple vacant lot at 573-577 West 161st Street, which we walk by  every day on our way to the 163rd Street subway station. In January, we were pleasantly surprised to see two of the three lots [...]

In which The Gay Recluse retires to our garden in Washington Heights.
Date of photograph: April 28, 2008, around 6:30pm

It’s hardly a secret that sometimes the spring garden looks better in the rain.

Today was one of those days…

One of our favorite plants is the creeping yellow groundcover, which we bought a few years ago at [...]

In which The Gay Recluse contemplates an old friend.
Date of Picture: April 24, 2008
Location: Our garden in Washington Heights.

Even as a child in Pittsburgh, we loved this table.

All winter it would sit out on the porch as we stared longingly at it.

Every May, when it was finally warm enough (this obviously before global warming), [...]

In which The Gay Recluse becomes a flaneur.
Date of pictures: April 23, 2008
Location: 35th Street between 5th Avenue and Madison.

We often think about the city streets as we would the surface of a lake.

We imagine worlds beneath us we cannot ever see.

The windows down are beautiful, however.

Looking through them, we forget how much we long [...]

In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with The George Washington Bridge.
Time and date of photographs: April 1, 2008, 7:00 - 8:00 pm (ish).

The sunset sky — even this tone of blue — is perhaps not as promising as we’d like to believe. (We think of someone we recently overheard describing her life as [...]

In which The Gay Recluse provides a gay alternative to this week’s Modern Love offering in The Times.
Mom, It’s Me, Your Gay Son, Finally
By PETE MacDONALD and THE GAY RECLUSE
Published: March 22, 2008
A YEAR after my partner Alan left me, and on the day before my estranged mother would have turned 77, I [...]

In which The Gay Recluse photographs birds.

Hmm…what kind of bird is this? (We need to do some homework.)

Hi everyone! What kind of birds are you? You kind of look like seagulls. (Omg! Is that an insult!?)

Sometimes you just want to be left alone.

In which The Gay Recluse holds a contest. Sort of.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Los Angeles is kind of like New York City except it’s in California, and instead of subways you have to drive everywhere! Crazy, right? But that said, like New York City, there are LOTS of gay men [...]

In which The Gay Recluse kills two birds with one stone.
Today we received a certain amount of shit for “trashing” Arthur C. Clarke as a major closet-case only milliseconds after he died. Fair enough, we trashed him a little. But our purpose in doing so — besides being an internet traffic whore, of course — [...]

In which The Gay Recluse provides a postscript to our gay alternative to this week’s Modern Love piece in the Times by Kayla Rachlin Small. (For those looking for our informal-but-telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, click here.)
Dear TGR,
I loved your riff on “The Steep Price of Your Forbidden Kiss” (a
title which, for the record, [...]

In which The Gay Recluse provides a gay alternative to this week’s Modern Love offering in The Times. (Note: For Kayla’s response, please click here.)
By KAYLA RACHLIN SMALL and THE GAY RECLUSE
THE rules forbade me from being within three feet of her. I knew those rules; she knew them. Sharing a drink meant coming [...]

In which The Gay Recluse photographs birds.

Mary-Kate and Ashley? Elliot and Silda? Tristan and Isolde? You decide. (Our Jonathan Livingston Seagull moment for the day.)

In which The Gay Recluse compares the Richard Wagner opera Tristan and Isolde (first performed in Munich in 1865; financed by King Ludwig II of Bavaria and now running at The Metropolitan Opera) with Loveless, the final record by My Bloody Valentine (Creation, 1991).
While the music is dissonant, it’s never abrasive; it’s just another thread [...]

In which The Gay Recluse thinks about shit on the daily commute.
As we walk through midtown each morning and each afternoon, we often pause to observe a fading silhouette on a wall; while somewhat decrepit, it provides comforting evidence — of a sort we are always on the lookout for — that Andy Warhol did [...]

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinion pieces in The Times.
Paul Krugman/Deliverance or Diversion
The Short Version: Why did Obama have to come along and wreck everything?
In his words: “Some progressives are appalled by the direction their party seems to have taken: they wanted another F.D.R., yet feel that they’re getting an oratorically upgraded version [...]

In which The Gay Recluse contemplates an uncommissioned masterpiece from the walls of an uptown subway station.