As a young man in the early 90s, I often escaped to downtown Baltimore, reading copies of The Village Voice, obsessing over Michael Musto ’s column, and imagining living with those people. I’d sit at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe on Charles, sometimes indulging myself with their infamous brownie sundae.
A few years later, I enrolled at Goucher College, just up the road on Charles. In my first year, I did way too many drugs and got average grades (not counting the embarrassing D in Russian, a class I took at Hopkins, Goucher’s sister school). Baltimore just seemed too small. I was not happy.
I decided to transfer and apply to the Fashion Institute of Technology . In the fall semester of my sophomore year, 1995, I remember collecting everything I owned, posters, CDs, a stereo, some toys, eye shadows, and some clothes, some of which I’d made myself, and I loaded them up in my grandfather’s minivan the last week of August. I was finally going to NYC.