Hugh Ryan

Freelance writer

A Gay Oasis, With Beer and Barbecue

First published in The New York Times on August 11, 2011. Read the original here.

WALK past the low-ceilinged bar, the jukebox and the pool table. Keep going, beyond the stage where “Queeraoke” erupts every Tuesday, and right out the back door. Feel the sunshine on your face and inhale the relatively fresh air (this is New York, after all) that makes Metropolitan the most popular gay hangout in Brooklyn on summer Sunday afternoons.

Is It Summer? Time to Party at the Museum

First published on The New York Times on July7, 2011. Read the original here.

THREE young girls zipped across the crowded dance floor, dresses fluttering, as a new D.J. took the stage. Their parents watched from beneath a small grove of plum and oak trees, drinking beers and discussing the exhibition of Ryan Trecartin videos. Nearby, two intricately coiffed hipsters in tight black cut-offs dipped their feet in a pool and waited to play table tennis.

Fall Getaways

First published in Westchester Magazine’s August 2011 issue. Read the original here. I contributed three pieces to this round up: (Rox)bury Your Cares Away, Life’s a Beach, and Tons of Fun in Bennington.

Excerpt

Even from a distance, it’s easy to see that The Roxbury is not your average Catskill Mountain motel. The vivid green detailing on the white wooden walls, the elaborate mosaics and murals, the scintillating LED displays that light up as the evening crickets begin to chirp—taken together, they hint at the delights and surprises that await inside this unique destination hotel. No two visits to The Roxbury are the same because no two rooms are the same. Suites range in style from a baroque dream of gold and mirrors (“Amadeus’ Bride”) to electric disco fabulousness (“Tony’s Dancefloor”) to Swinging Sixties chic (“The Mod Pod”). No element—from the lighting fixtures to the bathtubs—has gone unconsidered. It is this attention to detail that allows visitors to immerse themselves fully in the fantasy that each theme room evokes. Those seeking added luxury can visit the on-premises Shimmer Spa (open from 8 am to 8 pm). At night, guests are welcome to build a bonfire in the Motel’s fire pit, or borrow one of the many movies and games available in the main office. All rooms also come with HD flat-screens and cable.

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Dining Dilemma

First published in Westchester Magazine’s August 2011 issue. Read the original here.

My parents’ dining room table is early 20th-century mahogany, with solid columnated legs and comfortable seating for six—eight if necessary, 10 on desperate family occasions. In the morning, it’s newspaper sprawl and pots of coffee. In the afternoon, laptops and lunch. Family dinner, whether for two or twelve, is always at the table. It is the anchor to which life in the house is tethered. When I think of living in Westchester, I think of that table.

Since leaving home, I have, by conservative estimate, lived in nine New York City apartments. Not one has had a dining room table. In fact, not one has had a dining room. For years, I dreamed of four walls dominated by a massive wooden slab and a dozen hard-backed chairs, blaming space and money and time for my lack. When I could fit a table, I couldn’t afford one. When I could afford one, I was worried I would soon move and need to transport it. And always, always, always, there was the question of carving a dining room out of my already too-small apartments.

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Not for Navigational Purposes

First published on The Morning News on April 27, 2011. Read the original here.

Present
Lenni and I take turns changing in the shelter of the bus stop outside the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport, in San Juan. It’s August, we’ve been friends for two decades, but this is the first time Lenni and I have traveled together.

After only an hour in Puerto Rico, my jeans are stuck to me. I peel them away like the moist layer of skin over a cut, and replace them with terrycloth shorts.

A woman in the tourism office gave us a map and a bus schedule. To get to the publicos, the gypsy cabs, we must take the B40 bus to Rio Piedras, the river of stones. From there, a publico will take us to Fajardo, where there is a ferry to Vieques, a small island east of Puerto Rico.

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On William Buehler Seabrook’s The Magic Island

First published in Tin House on March 1, 2011. Purchase the issue here.

Excerpt
I’m a sucker for a good monster-origin story. What’s Cujo without the rabies, Godzilla without the bomb?

So how about this: Imagine a man born at the end of the nineteenth century, the all-American son of a traveling preacher. He drives a French ambulance in World War I, gets gassed, and receives the Croix de Guerre. He becomes a reporter for William Randolph Hearst, but something is wrong. He can’t sit still. He travels–Arabia, West Africa, England, Timbuktu. He becomes obsessed with the supernatural and befriends Satanist Aleister Crowley. He moves to France and cavorts with ex-pats. Gertrude Stein writes about him. His sex life is the stuff of morbid pulp novels: bondage, sadism, wife swapping. He samples human flesh, which he categorizes as “like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.” His drinking spirals out of control, and for eight months he has himself institutionalized. When that doesn’t work, he plunges his arms into a vat of boiling water, hoping that by immobilizing them, he will stop himself from drinking. Eventually, at sixty-one, after writing nearly a dozen books, he kills himself, destroying the monsters in his mind.

All but one.

That man was William Buehler Seabrook, and though he’s forgotten now, his book The Magic Island midwifed into existence a monster that lives on in undead fecundity, reaching out from beyond the grave to top the New York Times bestseller list, meddle with Jane Austen, and routinely scare the crap out of me: the zombie.

Read the rest in Tin House’s Mysterious Issue.