"The Teeth" Sink Into Formspring, Scissor Sisters, and Adam Lambert. Plus, Putting the Gay in "Lost!"

Do you know what it feels like in this world, for a boy?

Bonjour, kidlets! Welcome to my spankin’ new column The Teeth. The captain at the helm is none other than Shannon Loughnane. The name shouldn’t currently be synonymous with much aside from a killer impersonation of Lois from Family Guy, and a penchant for starting dinner table skirmishes over the problems with 90210. Starting with the fact that none of them look like high school students. 

90210 problems aside, I hope my name does becomee synonymous with a weekly fix of joy (and ah… joyness?) for you, oh beloved AfterElton readers.

So to the particulars: I am 20 years of age. I am Australian. This means A) I have been legally permitted to drink for two years but also B) I have been long-starved of a huge piece of the pop-cultural pie known as North America. However, I am New York-bound! Well, New Jersey… but you’ll help a brother out by sustaining the illusion, eh?

As for the actual column, The Teeth is all about having balls. Wait, no – that came out wrong. It’s all about the climate of gay representation as it moves from a tremulous place to a ballsy place and the generation mired right in the center of those transformations: mine.

It’s about guts, it’s about desire and it’s about finding a voice. Not a shaky, squeaky, fleeting voice, but a voice capable of shouting and of being heard coast to coast and continent to continent.

So many leaps are made at this age - boyfriends, school, careers, life choices – and there is an astronomical lack of representation in the great celluloid mirror suggesting how a young gay man is meant to navigate these waters. As such, The Teeth is both the watchdog keeping the hetero signal bandits down, and the howling wolf making a ceremony of gay spectacle.

In other words, how do we triangulate our identities? What does it feel like in this world, for a boy?

Come with, gentle readers, as I venture to these United States and attempt to answer these questions. And who knows? Maybe we’ll all learn a little something about ourselves along the way.

That was totally a joke. I’m not that trite! Oh God! Please don’t abandon me, potential readership!

The United States of Identification: What do you see when you look in the (multimedia) mirror?

How gay am I exactly?

Most of us have asked ourselves that question at some point. For those among us who stubbornly deny its relevance - more power to you. For the rest of us, it has at one time or another, fixated us sort of like that Playboy bunny reality series or Two and a Half Men.

And speaking of masochistic experiences, once that loaded question has been asked, you can’t not hear the answer. It’s a lot like a car crash, or a Justin Bieber performance – no matter how unpleasant, you can’t turn away. Let’s face it : some questions just have to be asked.

Take Formspring.me for instance. Never heard of this social network juggernaut? Be thankful yours is a small world.

The site works a lot like Twitter, except that anonymous questions from other formspring users ‘necessitate’ what is posted there. Formed by a Novel Ideas Syndicate composed of Some College I.T. Graduates, the site is supposedly intended for informative and polite exchanges between celebrities and fans, corporations and consumers or friends.