If you somehow escaped seeing it, I wrote an article for Eater that came out last week about the demise of Proteau, my short-lived non-alcoholic drink brand. I had been wanting to write a kind of “tell-all” for a while now and was grateful for my friends at Eater for giving me the space to write this. It ended up being more of a musing on the how the idea of failure shows up in people’s lives than a salacious expose of how predatory the team representing my investor was and how much money I was forced to spend unnecessarily on things like getting trademark clearance from an obscure Portuguese wine producer named “Protos” just on the off chance they would send us a cease and desist. Read it HERE.
And this brings me to another thing that’s ending: my Tip These Queens series for Thrillist. Since the end of 2020, I have been interviewing gender-expansive nightlife performers (ie. drag, cabaret, musicians) and in total I have published 23(!) interviews, some with some very big names like Peppermint, Alaska, Jinkx Monsoon, and Nicky Doll.
For those of you who are not steeped in The Media, Thrillist was acquired by Vox at the end of 2021 (laying off a little more than 3% of that workforce in the process) and then Vox laid off 7% of its workforce earlier this year. (I wonder if executive compensation was reduced by 7%, but I doubt it!) Amidst all of this, Thrillist was taken from a general lifestyle/drinks/travel site to strictly travel. We tried to make it work by incorporating more local content in my interviews and making each one about the place where the subject currently lived, and I am really grateful to my editors for their effort. Ultimately that was not sustainable and a few weeks ago I got an email from my editor that they would no longer be able to publish the series.
So what now?
I have been trying to identify another outlet that might be interested in an ongoing series profiling performers like the ones I have been following for the past two-plus years. Drag and other gender-expansive performers are a huge cultural asset and don’t get nearly the amount of media coverage and just plain documentation of their existence as (I think) they deserve, although Maddy Morphosis is doing an amazing job of it, so are Meatball and Big Dipper. So if you know of anyone who’d want to pick up this series, please let me know.
Barring that, I’m thinking about starting my own substack where I would continue to interview performers and also publish a weekly calendar of drag/cabaret/etc. events. I would also want to publish the “director’s cut” of many of my past Thrillist interviews because my word count was only about 1000 words and in many cases the transcripts of the interviews are over twice that, so there is a lot of good stuff out there that’s never seen the light of day. Would you want to read those?
Also, all episodes of my Saved by the Bellini podcast are out now!