I was born in New York City on July 15, 1947. I spent my first three years in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, doing the kind of things infants and toddlers do, in a railroad flat above my maternal grandfather's pickle-making business. It was called Old Reliable, and the pickles were delicious. In 1950, I moved with my parents to New Hyde Park, on Long Island, where I grew up as a suburban kid with the city in my DNA. I attended Great Neck South High School, where I discovered my love of writing and of theater and of smart, talented, and nonjudgmental people with liberal political views.

I went on to Colgate University, where I spent the late '60s doing the kind of things teenagers with draft deferments did (the sound track was fabulous). I was active in college, in all aspects of life. Loving school and having no idea how to earn a living, I moved on to graduate school, and then great-graduate school. Consequently, I have two Master of Fine Arts degrees, one from California Institute of the Arts (as an actor) and one in dramatic literature and criticism from the Yale School of Drama. (Yes, I knew Meryl Streep. I even acted with Meryl Streep.) That pretty much took up the '70s.

After I left Yale I went back to CalArts, where I served on the faculties of the School of Theater and the Department of Critical Studies for two years. I then began a series of jobs that included typing scripts for network television shows and working as a legal secretary at 20th-Century Fox. In the early 1980s I started writing about the performing arts for the L.A. Weekly and the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner and also began to publish poetry, feature stories, and opinion pieces in literary magazines and the GLBT press. By the late 1980s I was working as the managing editor of L.A. Style magazine and had the opportunity to interview a good number of incredibly interesting people, from Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller to Bernadette Peters, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and many, many more.

My first book of poetry, Poems for Lost and Un-lost Boys, was published in 1985. The second, Decade Dance, was published in 1990 and won a Lambda Literary Award. in 1990 I returned to New York to become the managing editor of Interview. In 1992, I joined the editorial staff of Metropolitan Home. During the "Met Home Years," I published a number of books of my own poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as several anthologies. I wrote four books for Disney's Broadway wing, recording the production processes of Elton John and Tim Rice's AIDA, Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, and (with Brian Sibley) Mary Poppins. I also wrote two design books, Decorate and Glamour: Making It Modern. In November of 2009, Metropolitan Home was unceremoniously shut down by its owners, one of the many victims of the world's struggling economy.

I currently live in Greenwich Village with a dachshund named Schuyler. I like to look out my window at the Hudson River and wonder if I'm unemployed, self-employed, or semi-retired. Only Schuyler knows for sure. Maybe the Hudson knows, too.