6. The first time I went to a gay party, I stepped on John Cameron Mitchell’s foot.

You might know him as Hedwig from the seminal transsexual punk rock film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I didn’t know him from Adam.

A filmmaker, a fantastic documentarian (check him out), was throwing his annual birthday party in SoHo, which he calls the Virgo Delight Party. I had been invited by my boss at the Whitney Museum, and as I was FRESH out of the closet, this was my very first gay function. And wouldn’t you know it? A giant zit appeared directly between my eyebrows the day of the party.

That just was not going to do for my début on the New York gay scene!

So 20 minutes before the party, I phoned for reinforcements, and a girl whom I had met in the elevator of my building (who became one of my closest friends) came up with a make-up kit.

I sat on a stool in front of an overly ornate mirror in my crazily decorated apartment, and my new friend “did my make-up.” When she was done, we decided I should wear my reading glasses, just in case.

I was in my tightest jeans and a brand-new shirt, with my new Prada sneakers on…you know, the ones that had the ridiculously long toe? Don’t judge me…so the combination was sort of ripe for disaster: too-tight pants, zit making me even more self-conscious, reading glasses skewing my perspective a little, and shoes making me just a little more clumsy than usual.

The party itself was dizzying. The small SoHo loft was filled with the gay Who’s Who of New York, each wearing a thin veneer of propriety, but my tush was getting far more pats than I would have expected. I would strike up conversations with people, and…Wait a minute…Did he just wink at me? What does he mean ‘if I ever need a lawyer?’ It is so HOT in here. And someone should tell that lawyer guy that he sweats too much to be handing 22-year-olds his business card. Whoa, these glasses make me feel drunker than I am. I am getting dizzy. I need to get out of here! PANIC! Must get air. MUST get air. Thank GOD I smoke! Great excuse!

So I burst outside to see my boss’s boyfriend smoking a cigarette, too, and talking to a perfectly nice looking young man.

“Jonathan! Thank GOD! Can I get a light?”

I think it might have been that lawyer’s residual sweat on my hands, but I dropped the lighter. When I bent down to pick it up, my super-long toe caught the tree grate, and I teetered precariously forward, about to take a dinger into the gutter. But I grabbed onto the tree, thinking madly how I was going to make this debacle seem graceful in front of an entire street filled with fabulous men. I righted myself, popping up with a smile, but had over compensated and continued backward. With frantic stutter steps, I finally came to rest upon the foot of an extremely annoyed, small man. But he graciously told me not to worry about it, and I sort of half apologized, too embarrassed to acknowledge what had just happened to me. Maybe I was in shock.

And Jonathan made it soooo much better by saying, “You know who you just stepped on, right?”

And the rest is history.