Oral Fixation: Mouths Wide Open at Splashy Pride Poetry Slam

You can show your pride by grilling on a Chelsea fire escape or marching down Fifth Avenue behind your leather-dyke master, but New York isn’t just any town (hi, our Home Depot has a concierge) and Pride weekend here isn’t just about ogling boys and bois. Thankfully, there are events like the House of Xavier’s Glam Slam to remind us that it’s a time for reflecting on the nature of gay identity. It’s about reckoning with our place in society. It’s about sexy lingerie. If you crossed As Four with the Bloomsbury group (with three times the fabulous factor) you’d get a poetry collective that treats verse as competitive sport. No, sissy, not the bad, humiliated-in-the-school-yard sports: Think ballroom competition. Go watch the boys duke it out in such categories as Best Erotic Poem (performers have to don something sexy and are allowed to use props) or knock back some Bellinis and jump onstage yourself: There’s a cash prize of 100 bucks at stake, after all.