is for Dorian Gray. The speed with which the heterosexual's body goes to seed testifies to his lack of vanity and self-preoccupation, the girlish narcissism that leads the homosexual to mummify himself in the quack cures of consumerism. In contrast to the careless blue-collar slob, gay men are timeless vampires, Dorian Grays who flaunt their perennial good looks even as their once youthful portraits, locked away in their attics, shrivel and turn to dust. Having become the slave of consumerism, which fed his fears of getting old, the gay man launches a restless, lifelong effort to rid himself of his guilty sense of fakeness, of artificiality, and to recover his "naturalness," which he restores through a series of elaborately costumed impersonations.