by Rebecca M. Alvin
The title of Mike Albo’s memoir, Hologram Boyfriends: Sex, Love, and Overconnection perfectly encapsulates what it is about. With the humor and self-awareness that Albo is known for, he somehow manages to tackle broad themes about the impact of media technologies on our relationships, the timeless search for meaning in an increasingly complicated world, and the very nature of reality, while revealing deeply personal thoughts on identity, sex, and spirituality. The hologram is a perfect symbol for the layers of reality Albo navigates. The hologram is at once a representation of a reality and also present in reality, a thing that’s not an actual thing but rather a projection from somewhere else.
If you’ve spent any time on dating or hook-up apps, you know that these facilitators of virtual connection are simultaneously real and representations of the real that are themselves, like holograms, transparent.
But the memoir, which is created as audio—meant to listen to and not a printed book, delves to these depths without losing its humor. In fact, Hologram Boyfriends is an extremely funny memoir, and so, so relatable across genders and sexual identities.
And Provincetown is front and center in this story. “Provincetown is like a spiritual spiral to me. Like, I remember I was with this Radical Faerie guy one time in Provincetown. He was like, ‘Well, Provincetown is built on a spiral. And so those are very important vortexes in the Earth.’ So you can get really groovy in Ptown, and, as I say in the book, I’ve done so much walking and so much thinking there, and so much alone time, and it’s just such a beautiful place for inner work,” Albo says.
In the memoir he describes our town as “basically an LGBTQ Brigadoon,” and says, “If you haven’t been to Provincetown, I will try my best to briefly describe it: it’s gay heaven, with occasional portals to the even gayer underworld. There is even a club called Purgatory. Provincetown. The sky, the ocean, and how they meet there is uncanny. There’s an indescribable light. It’s been captured by numerous painters and poets…Less common in poetry about Provincetown: sex can be found anywhere, including under a hotel on the bay, a shadowy warren of wooden columns and sand.”
But there are no judgements in Albo’s six-and-a-half-hour monologue. The spoken memoir is something that came out of discussions with MacMillan Audio. Albo, who is well-known as both an author (Hornito, Another Dimension of Us) and a performer with comedy troupe Unitard, thought the merging of his writing and performance was an excellent idea as so many people now are listening to books anyway and also because it combines his creative worlds. “As a performer and a writer, it’s always frustrated me when people can’t make it to a show, or when they can’t read something I wrote, so okay, here you go. Here’s the third way,” he laughs.
Just as Provincetown is essential to his story, so is New York and what it has morphed into in the years since 9/11, in particular. The economic realities of the city, the influx of different classes of people, and its entrenched merging of culture and consumption are all fair game in Hologram Boyfriends. He distills New York’s pleasures and pains with the brilliance of someone who has lived there for decades. And just like Provincetown, New York is a wonderful place to walk as a writer, albeit in a very different way.
“In New York, it’s all about overheard conversations and strange phrases that you see on the subway advertisements, you know, there’s so much imagery to pull from,” he says. He cites an example from when he was trying to write a scene for his second book, The Underminer, in which a character has a medical emergency but Albo didn’t have the medical knowledge to write it. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, what am I going to do?’ And I was sitting in a coffee shop, and lucky me, there’s these medical students sitting right next to me, and they’re like, ‘Okay, what happens when someone has a heart attack? Okay, first get 12 cc’s of…’ I was like, ‘Thank you, fairies of life!’ And then I just listened and just typed down everything they said. And I love that about New York.”
The memoir follows Albo’s exploits on the dating scene, his ruminations on life as a gay man living in New York City at this particular moment, and intensely personal revelations about everything from his discomfort at being labeled and disregarded as privileged for his white-male status to his sexual adventures with the many men he met on Grindr. Part of the immediacy of the writing comes from the fact that he wrote it while still living the life he was writing about. “It’s almost more like an album, more than it is a memoir, in a way, because it really captures a time,” he says. “It was like an emotional outburst, so a lot of those feelings were genuine feelings I was having. It’s less an argument and more of an emotional outburst.”
While a lot of Albo’s encounters are hilarious and there’s always something funny about dating experiences online, it also documents how that landscape has changed, as Albo has been in that world for quite some time. He details all the little changes that took place, from his Gen X perspective. “We just know what it was like before, and especially as gay people or queer people, we know how lonely it was before. And then to be suddenly flooded with so much connection can really dazzle you,” he explains.
But there were also important developments in terms of self-image and sexuality that have shown up in these spaces. “In the beginning, especially for the sort of hookups sites for gay men, there was a lot of shame that I had, and a lot of like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to show my face. This is embarrassing. If I’m ever caught…’” he recalls. And in fact, when he first went on hookup sites, the photos were all of men from the neck down, as showing one’s face was still a risk not worth taking. “I think just over the past 20 years—or however long it’s been, 800 years—I’ve learned to feel shame or name it or know it, and that’s been really helpful. And also, you know, I think we as a culture have become less shameful about our desire, too.”
The memoir relentlessly goes back and forth between the positive and negative, rather than hand-wringing about apps causing the downfall of human connection. “There’s just not a part of me that is that polemical about this. It was more of an exploration of the good and the bad and what it’s done to me, emotionally, or how I feel about it,” he explains. “And I did try to make the point that I don’t think my love life was any better before the apps.”
One of the good things, Albo says they offer is a way to quickly assess someone’s personality, even if it seems like a reductive method. “It’s almost like Name That Tune. I can detect someone, what someone’s like in one word. Now, the way they spell, you know, the way they say ‘hi,’ the way that they answer you, you really can tell a lot about a person. And I think that one thing that people have made a mistake or have misconstrued about themselves is that they are themselves online. You know, you’re the same person. If you’re racist online, you’re a racist. If you write ‘No Asians,’ then you’re racist in real life. So, the way you behave online is part of you. It’s not separate from you and I think a lot of people think it’s a separate character. Or they want it to be,” he says.
But it’s the inner work and those aspects of life one can control that have been a life saver, things like just walking every day. “Whenever someone asks me any advice about writing, I usually say, get away from the computer, you know,” Albo says. “Writing isn’t the stereotypes of sitting at a desk, you know, I don’t know, with a pipe and a candle. At least, it isn’t for me. It’s about moving.”
In the memoir he details walks in Provincetown where he came to realizations he could only come to that way, making walking not only important to his writing process but also for his well-being. “I’ve walked and walked up and down that tidal basin, mostly alone, like I was the Widow Ghost of Herring Cove, except in breathable cotton sweatpants. I’ve had many revelations there, some that I can’t quite explain. I do remember the moment I realized, ‘Wait, I don’t need to believe my thoughts!’ and ‘Wait, the answers don’t lie in other people!’ And ‘Wait, to be kind to others, I first have to be kind to myself!’ And along with that one, came the major revelation: ‘Wait. I’ve been so hard on myself, for so long,’ pecking and pecking at myself as if there was something wrong with me.”
Passages like this point to Albo’s spiritual awakening, something he comes at from all directions in the memoir, whether it’s a Celebrating the Body Erotic course to teach men how to reach inner orgasms or listening to Dharma talks by Buddhist thinkers, or simply observing life’s coincidences and the signs all around us with a more mindful consciousness.
Speaking about it now at a rest stop in Delaware on his way up to New York, Albo can point to various strange things he says happened just as he settled into writing this memoir. “In the beginning I said, you know, this is an exploration of desire, and where desire lives, and how I feel about it, and where it is in my body. And the minute I got that assignment, it’s like all these coincidences and tricky things happened around me,” he says, like the time his car broke down, for the same reason, twice in rapid succession. “Only when you’re writing a memoir about desire do you drive down the road listening to Carl Jung’s Red Book and your tires blow out twice! There’s so many weird things that happened that I feel like it kind of took me over and and I kind of felt like writing books, especially when it’s something longer, there is like a magic to them. There’s kind of spell-casting that’s going on,” he says.
He also says meditation really saved him. “You know, there’s a metaphor in Buddhism, meditation or practice, that it’s like dying a garment in indigo. And, you know, you dip it once, and it barely makes it fade. You just have to keep dipping and dipping and dipping. And I think whatever practices I do have really set my weathervane in the right direction without me even knowing it has… I feel very grateful for the strength I’ve received from meditation.”
So, is Mike Albo still on these dating apps looking for love and connection? “Oh yes,” he answers without hesitation. “I’m part robot now.”
Hologram Boyfriends: Sex, Love, and Overconnection is available wherever audiobooks are sold.
