Rachel Rabbit White Columns

To enter the home of Reverend Jen Miller is to enter another dimension. The front half of her rent-controlled apartment is the “Lower East Side Troll Museum.” Hundreds of trolls line the walls, naked and bejeweled. Further inside, Rev. Jen’s paintings hang on the walls — unicorns, aliens and fairies swirl in pastel colors. Jen collapses onto a hot pink couch with her Chihuahua, Rev. Jen Junior, in her lap. “I just got out of the gym, so I don’t have my ears on,” she says. Jen perpetually wears pointed elf ears, attached with stage glue, when they fall off she buys another pair and the cycle repeats. This ritual is the inspiration for the title of her new memoir, Elf Girl which is about Rev. Jen’s psychedelia-laced art-world adventures. The book is a follow-up to Live Nude Elf, which tracked Jen’s work a sex writer for Nerve. “So tell me about that, what are the wildest things you did in the name of experiential sex-journalism?” Jen’s first task was nude house cleaning. It was snowy and Jen trekked to the Upper East Side, to a posh apartment building. “Yo...

In the basement of a Brooklyn bar, the members of Schmekel are sitting across from me on a couch. A band called Girlcrush is playing upstairs, and Schmekel’s up next. “Do you want to hear the names of our new songs?” Lucian Kahn, who does lead vocals, asks. “Okay!” “There is “You Are Not the Only Bear I Fisted”, he says, counting them off on fingers, “The Binding of Isaac” which is about a guy named Isaac who is binding. And “Homotaschen” which sounds like hamantaschen, a triangular shaped Jewish cookie that looks like a vagina or an anus.” Ricky Riot, the band’s keyboardist, interrupts —”why would your anus be triangular?” I try to be helpful — “well the anus could be like two triangles, you know like a star. Like a Star of David... that could maybe be a song title?” A cute guy bolts down the stairs and mouths something at Lucian. “I’m doing an interview,” he says and the guy does a sort of “jazz hands” move as if to say “ooooh!” Lucian gives jazz hands back, “that is my boyfriend,” he says. The fancy hands are well deserved, the band have been getting...

I’m meeting Preston Charles at Metropolitan in Brooklyn, a gay bar with a particular Williamsburg charm — the decor is dive-y, the beer is cheap and the boys are bearded, tattooed and looking to hook up. The masculine look recalls Castro in the ‘70s. Preston, who is notable as the first out, black, gay man on MTV’s The Real World, is not out of place in a plaid shirt, the top three buttons un-done. We aren’t here to talk about The Real World, necessarily, but about Coming Out, the one-hour special Preston recently produced for MTV. The show is a documentary that follows Rachel, a lesbian coming out to her estranged father and Nevin, a gay man coming out to his rubgy team. I order a beer for myself, a whiskey for Preston and we settle into a booth. “What I wanted to do with Coming Out was show the public that gay people are sexual entities,” he says, “but that got mixed up because of MTV. Their audience is younger so it couldn’t be that sexually explicit.” Preston says he initially imagined a show centered on the emotional and sexual side of coming out —...

These are stories from dendrophilaics — people whose celebration of trees goes year round. In three parts, here are tales of tree orgasms, beautiful willows and the tantric tapestry of nature: