Born to Be Brad Read online

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  “It’s like Footloose, minus the hot Southern boys and the angsty solo dance scene.”

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  This collection of outsiders at Theater Ontario? The ones who came from local communities that weren’t always accepting of them? We were thrilled to have found one another. And so we kept the camp spirit alive during the winter by getting together as often as possible. My friend Victoria—with the big eyes and the chestnut, shoulder-length hair—would come visit me in Port Perry; we’d walk the town’s Main Street and she’d laugh. “Why does every store sell potpourri!” she’d say. I couldn’t argue with her; she was right. There wasn’t much to do in Port Perry, I said. This was the kind of place where teenagers take their pickup trucks out to the cornfield and drink cans of beer in front of a bonfire. It’s like Footloose, minus the hot Southern boys and the angsty solo dance scene. And so Victoria and I would sit in the Goreski family hot tub in our backyard, pretending we were mermaids. We were bored. We painted our nails black. We ate too much. We called ourselves Fat Brad and Fat Victoria, and we got excited about putting potato chips in our sandwiches. I tried to dye Victoria’s hair blond, which high school kids everywhere need to stop doing, by the way. It was a disaster. She’d previously put henna in her hair to give it a reddish tint, and when I applied the bleach the chemicals burned her scalp and ruined the color.

  Halloween 1994. I was obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera. When it was announced that the musical was coming to Toronto, my grandfather got on the phone immediately and bought tickets for the family.

  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

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  HOW TO BUY VINTAGE (AND WHEN TO WALK AWAY!)

  1. Don’t be afraid to get dirty. Sometimes you have to dig deep to find that one precious item. Roll up your sleeves, grab some Purell, and get in there.

  2. Know what you are shopping for. Vintage shops and flea markets can be overwhelming. But if you have a direction, you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for—and maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll find some hidden treasures along the way.

  3. Point and click. I buy a lot of vintage online at eBay and 1stdibs to give as gifts—especially jewelry. There are some great resources and great deals and you don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home. It’s always nice to avoid that extra price markup you often find in stores.

  4. Do your homework. When you travel, look for local flea markets and ask about the great vintage stores. Each country/city has its own unique pieces, and your purchases will be mementos of your adventures.

  5. If the price is right but the item is too big, it’s often worth it to make the purchase and then have it altered. Don’t leave behind a good find just because it is too big. You may regret it later …

  6. Let yourself splurge on that designer item you’re lusting over. I almost left a Chanel briefcase behind in a vintage store in Paris and found myself running back hours later, minutes before closing time. It’s one of my fave items I own!

  It was more fun when I went into Toronto on the weekends, taking the train to Victoria’s apartment, where our camp friends would all descend. Victoria was raised by a single mom, a progressive hippie who didn’t much care what we did, and she never asked questions. Friends would come in for auditions and crash at Victoria’s two-bedroom. You never had to give much notice. You’d call on a Friday night and say, “I’m getting on the train. I’ll be at Union Station at ten. OK?” And it was. It was a lot of slumber parties and all-ages rock shows and tickets to Lollapalooza. We’d go to the theater. We’d go shopping on Queen Street, stopping into Black Market for vintage T-shirts and going to the Goodwill store, where you could buy clothes and pay by the pound. Looking back on it, buying used clothing in bulk sounds pretty gross. But for a teenager with no money, there was nothing better than walking out of a store with a couple pounds of new clothing. It made us feel rich. It was a beautiful time capsule. Best of all, at Victoria’s apartment, it wasn’t just that I could be gay. I could talk about it. Out loud. Victoria was “of the city.” She was one of the first people I met where I thought, I don’t need to have any secrets with you.

  This was the nineties. Kurt Cobain had passed away and I’d gotten into the grunge scene. I was often angry in these years. Unable to channel my frustrations into words, I expressed myself through fashion, just like I had as an eleven-year-old pretending to be Don Johnson at my communion. I started listening to the Breeders and Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins and I stopped wearing penny loafers. I fell under the spell of the Seattle movement, and I wasn’t alone. In 1992 I remember watching Marc Jacobs on Fashion Television talking about the grunge collection he designed for Perry Ellis—the daring line that got him fired from the venerable label. Steven Meisel photographed that flannel collection for Vogue in a legendary shoot with Naomi Campbell, Nadja Auermann, and Kristen McMenamy. I tore those pages out of the magazine, savoring the images of Kristen with that pageboy haircut and the beat-up purple Doc Martens and the leather jacket and flannel shirt tied around her waist. It was the antithesis of everything I’d worn before and I loved it. I kept these magazine clippings in a file (which my dad still has). I kept all of the Guess ads, because I was obsessed with Claudia Schiffer—another sort of neo–Marilyn Monroe. I grew my hair long, dyed it auburn and then jet-black.

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  “I was often angry in these years. Unable to channel my frustrations into words, I expressed myself through fashion.”

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  Grunge fashion was my armor. I was Ally Sheedy on the outside but Molly Ringwald on the inside. We were listening to Hole and angry Seattle noise. And we were experimenting with alcohol, and later with marijuana. We were leaving Victoria’s apartment after midnight and not coming home until the sun came up. We were part-time club kids, too, plain and simple, and to me it was all very glamorous. We’d board a bus that would take us to a secret location. It was always some secret location and we’d end up God knows where in a warehouse and dancing all night with pacifiers and whistles and candy necklaces around our necks.

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  “Grunge fashion was my armor. I was Ally Sheedy on the outside but Molly Ringwald on the inside.”

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  For me, rave culture was all about the clothing. It was a chance to dress up and play a character—in the same way I did at Halloween. At vintage stores, I drew my inspiration not just from Vogue but also from a Geraldo episode on New York club kids. I wore knee-high socks and terry-cloth shorts and skintight T-shirts and a see-through Pocahontas knapsack. At Victoria’s apartment, I could play dress-up all the time. I could listen to gay house music we bought on cassette and put on a sailor costume and sequins and let Victoria paint fake tattoos on my arms. When I’d been into grunge, my hair was long and always a different color. Now I chopped it all off. Victoria and I would buy Bingo Dabber—it was almost like puffy paint, the kind bingo players used to ink up their cards. But we put it in our hair. We’d squeeze the tube against our heads, and it would look like we had full pink plastic helmets on. It was major. I’d come home on Sundays covered in glitter and sleep straight through until Monday morning.

  Me in my grunge days.

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  “I’m sorry,” I said, still dancing. “I love this shirt. It sparkles!”

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  Oh, and it was all on television. Long before The Rachel Zoe Project, I was on Electric Circus, Canada’s Friday-night dance show, which aired on Citytv. I was a minor celebrity in my town because of it. My dad would make fun of the show, calling it “Electric Titties,” because there were always close-up shots of women’s breasts bouncing on camera. But we loved it. I wore a leopard-print pullover that I found at a vintage store and Victoria and I went to the TV studio, where we sometimes danced with a cartoonlike character dressed in a Winnie-the-Pooh backpack who went by the name Hot Girl. He looked like Tweedledee from Alice in Wonderland, missing Tweedledum. Victoria wore her hair in two buns at the top of her head like BjÖrk. We danced for hours, in these studied movements—we’d punch the air and flail our arms. We didn’t care about anything. There, we felt alive.

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  “This was just another instance in my life where I could see where the party was, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there.”

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  It was an absurd scene. Electric Circus was filmed in the same studio where the eleven o’clock news and the early morning shows were broadcast. We’d be dancing on the same platforms the morning news anchor would use to demonstrate the latest health food cooking trends. We were often on the second floor, only visible in wide shots, and the music was hard to hear. We just felt a bumping bass in the floor. Victoria would say to me, “Are they playing La Bouche?” I’d say, “I think it’s ‘Everything but the Girl.’” Sometimes the cameras did come upstairs, and the show’s host, Monika Deol, would interview some of the dancers live on air. One night, she was talking to my friend Matt up on a platform. He had blue hair. “Is this your first time here?” she asked him. Matt was mumbling, but he managed to get a few words out, telling the host that Victoria and I had brought him to Electric Circus and it was his first time. Monika pointed down at me dancing in the crowd. I was dressed in a sequined green oversize blouse and green velvet bell-bottoms. And I had a choker around my neck, made of sequined material left over from community theater shows.

  “I want your shirt!” she yelled down to me—on Canadian television.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, still dancing. “I love this shirt. It sparkles!”

  Though Victoria and I were often in the crowd at Electric Circus, we were never the cool kids—even there. We used to hand out flyers for clubs. We weren’t paid to do this, we didn’t get a kickback on the admissions, but handing out those flyers made us feel like a part of something, which is all we wanted. It made us feel like we belonged. More than once, the producers of Electric Circus asked Victoria and me to dance in the window—behind a sheet. We’d be the dancing silhouettes, featured players except that you wouldn’t be able to see our faces, which was the whole point of being on television. We wanted to be seen! And we were furious. “We’re not coming back if we’re in the windows,” I shouted. This was just another instance in my life where I could see where the party was, but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. Of course, we came back the next week. And the week after that. We had to! Because we wanted to be invited to the big, annual Electric Circus dance party in Ottawa in the dead of winter. The producers always chose the coolest dancers to go. Try as we did, we were never invited.

  Her Madgesty

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  WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM MADONNA

  Some people forget—I don’t—but Madonna was the first female pop star to challenge people’s thinking on sex and sexuality. She pushed her audience to be brave and bold not just in their fashion choices but also in their lifestyle choices. And to be more accepting, which was so important for me growing up. It was a different era for celebrities, because they were so much less accessible. You had to wait for the TV interview or the magazine to come out to see what Madonna was up to. There was no stylist yet. You didn’t know what Madonna was going to do at the MTV Video Music Awards in advance. You had to tune in for the surprise and the drama. The night she performed “Vogue” with the Marie Antoinette costumes and powdered wigs—it was brilliant but so scandalous at the time. Her dancers were gay and overtly sexual. And there was this undercurrent of danger. She was pushing the boundaries, never more so than in the “Justify My Love” video, which I bought on VHS. I had to hide it from my parents, but it was worth it. Here were men kissing and transvestites and breasts. She was everything.

  I’d started bringing some of Toronto back to Port Perry with me. One night, after a long weekend dancing in Toronto, I invited Lina Love to dinner. Lina Love (not her real name) was a go-go dancer I met at the clubs. The go-go dancers were like celebrities and my dream was to be one of them. They were glamorous in their own way, and Lina was no exception. She had fluorescent yellow hair and no eyebrows. She wore platform shoes and bell-bottoms and booty shorts and crazy knee-high socks and basically looked like an alien. She danced like an anime character, with these weird, robotic movements. I was obsessed with her. She was a real woman, but she looked like a drag queen.

  How was dinner that night in Port Perry? Let me just tell you this: My grandparents met Lina Love. On the train back from Toronto, I was freaking out about what they’d say when I brought this Japanese robot to supper. But, I swear to God, my grandfather was so happy I brought a girl home—any girl!—that he welcomed Lina Love to come back anytime. I was so weirded out by the whole thing that I grabbed her hand and took her down to the basement to play dress-up. I wanted her to see these ladybug costumes my mom made for the community theater, which I thought would make excellent rave costumes.

  If I was dressing more outlandishly now, it’s because I was trying to work out who I was. I was the same Brad Goreski who danced to Debbie Gibson. Only I’d gotten more creative. I dyed my hair purple. I wore Fun Fur pants to school in grade eleven. I used my mom’s sewing machine to make my own pants in weird fabrics. One pair was a cotton print of vacuum cleaners. (That is a fashion don’t, by the way.) The pants were basically two flour sacks with a drawstring waist, and I’d wear them with a T-shirt I bought at the Spin Doctors concert all under a peacoat with a fur collar from the Goodwill. I’d stand in garbage pails and have people take my photo. I was a difficult teenager, acting out in other ways. If I wanted the car, I took the car. My mom would tell me not to, and then she’d hear the sound of the garage door opening. She confronted me once—about the late nights out, about the partying. I was so angsty I shouted back, “I don’t fucking care what you think.” Of that time in my life, she would say I was out of reach. Years later I found out that she would sleep with the portable phone in her hand, which crushed me. But I didn’t blame her.

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  “I always thought of the fashion world as a fantasy, make-believe place. But thanks to Unzipped, I could see it, I could hear the paper dolls talk.”

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  My parents had stopped indulging me with clothing and told me I needed to get a job. For a brief time, I returned to the restaurant at my grandparents’ resort, selling ice cream to tourists for four Canadian dollars. But when a job opened up at the local video store I jumped at the chance. The video store was a lifeline to the outside world. And it’s where I discovered the documentary Unzipped. Doug Keeve is the filmmaker, and he spent a year following Isaac Mizrahi as the designer was preparing his spring 1994 collection. The movie goes way beyond fly-on-the-wall footage. You’re in a fitting with a young, brassy Naomi Campbell, who is complaining about having to take her belly button piercing out. She is gorgeous—just like the photo I had of her hanging on my wall, the one from Harper’s Bazaar, where Naomi has straight black hair and is dressed in a Jean Paul Gaultier saddle-harness skirt and bustier. Except here she’s talking! She’s real! Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, a brand-new Amber Valletta—they’re all there in this movie. It’s so chic. For his runway show, Mizrahi has this idea to put up a scrim, like at the ballet, so that the audience will be able to see the backstage area during the runway show, even while the models are changing. At first, the girls are freaking out. They’re standing behind the scrim saying, “Can you see me naked?” But you know they love it.

  Net-à-Porter

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  LOAD UP YOUR NETFLIX QUEUE WITH THE TEN BEST MOVIES FOR FASHION INSPIRATION

  Mahogany (1975)

  This is high seventies glamour at its best. Forget the story for a second, which is absurd: Diana Ross is a secretary who is discovered by a modeling agent and becomes a huge high-fashion model before she gets into a car accident. What Mahogany is really about: hair sculptures (!) and vintage posing. There is energy in Diana Ross’s fingertips.

  Sixteen Candles (1984)

  Jake Ryan has been a fashion inspiration for my entire life; he made button-down shirts, khakis, and boat shoes sexy. And Molly Ringwald is the epitome of eighties approachable glamour.

  Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

  This is the rare movie where the men’s clothing is stronger than the women’s. This is a lesson in tailoring and how to look slick without looking cheesy. It’s also Brad Pitt at his best.