At school, I was brown and all my classmates were white.
From an early age, people have questioned my identity. People ask me sometimes why I’m so confident. Sad things have happened to me, but they’re not who I am. “What makes me happy is not pretending I’m not sad. How did he get to a point where he’d describe himself as “slightly too self-assured”? He says it’s about balance. “No one ever puts a nice bow on it,” he explains. But in person and in his book, there’s little finality to any of it, no clear-eyed summing up of what are very complex situations. Yes, he is “slightly estranged” from his father, who once called him a disappointment, and he’d sometimes drink to excess in his twenties, and his flatmate died by suicide. “Such base-level, dick analogy chat.” He feels similarly distant from other mini-traumas that happened after. His years of pretending to be straight as a teenager were more anthropologically fascinating than scarring: “Horny and grim,” he says of his heterosexual male friends at the time. He writes that his childhood was “fine”, his psychological tablecloth “fairly spill-free”. Smith grew up in Brighton, the only child of a white mother and a Black father, who split up shortly after he was born. I’ve repeatedly been told I’m not like other boys. “Did I write this whole book to prove I don’t just do jokes? But he’s like… ‘The book is funny, though.’” It felt like the only way to prove that I was smart.” A few days ago, he had a conversation with his husband about why Men had come about. I hated it, so for a while I became more and more serious. When I was at school, people wouldn’t take me seriously because I was funny. “If you’re online all day being funny, which I am,” he says with a wink, “there is a feeling of being misunderstood. In tone, it feels like an astute, elevated version of Smith’s Instagram feed, something he’d hoped for. It’s as wise as it is bawdy the chain-smoking baby of Eve Babitz and Kim Cattrall. There are tales of fathers, boyfriends, perverts and Ken dolls porn, steroids, sports teams and lads. Who are they? Why are they? Where did we find them? Raven Smith’s Men is about the males that have come to define his life. And now his latest essay collection grapples with the most omnipresent mammal that isn’t actually talked about very much: men. Smith is also a Vogue columnist, red carpet fixture and bestselling author – his 2020 book Trivial Pursuits anatomised the mini, ludicrous traumas of modern life. The bored it-girl who fell out a window in Sex and the City. “SUNDAYS” appears next to a slide of Trinny Woodall in a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“Christmas shopping on a budget,” he writes alongside an image of Winona Ryder shoplifting.
His captions read like howls of ironic despair and source the universality buried in pop culture camp. To his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, Raven Smith speaks in what could be termed “gay internet”: dry, lusty, disillusioned, pictures of celebrities make up much of his feed. To its credit though, the Abbey famously announced in 2012 that it would ban bachelorette parties until marriage equality was achieved, which helped to shore up its gay street cred among some of the faithful who felt it had overextended itself in its efforts to be hetero-friendly.Raven Smith: ‘The thing I’m most proud of is not quite fitting into a box’ (PR) If there’s a downside to the Abbey it’s actually the bar’s success: Not so very long ago, it was the nucleus of gay life in West Hollywood, but as its popularity has grown, increasingly the crowd-particularly at night-seems to be made up of tourists. The drinks at this West Hollywood stalwart are notoriously strong (albeit pricey) and the upscale, Gothic-meets-the-Mediterranean indoor/outdoor spaces, plentiful cabanas and hunky bartenders are all aesthetically satisfying.
HUGE BLACK COCK GAY BAR BOSTON FULL
The Abbey is annually voted one of the world’s best gay bars, which explains the long lines on the weekends to get into this once-humble coffee house-which now boasts four full bars and five times the amount of real estate it originally occupied.