Hank Stuever is a staff writer—now the television critic—for the Washington Post. He's in town to read from his new book, Tinsel, at Elliott Bay Books tonight. Stuever has also contributed numerous pieces to the Stranger over the years. Here's Stuever on fags on their hags...

But in the end, fag hags rightfully belong to you. They are refugees, and we gratefully took them in, loved them, shoe-shopped with them, lent their lives a certain Sex and the City studio-apartment-and-kitschy-shower-curtain cachet that made them more wholly part of some ideal, parallel world, if only because we desperately needed someone to laugh at every goddamn thing we said. They became the wacky fat chick in our sitcoms, and we became the nutty, narcissistic gay neighbor in theirs. We turned them into the cussin', boozin' loudmouths they are today, but you share a good part of the blame: It was you who made fun of them in junior high, heterosexual men, and never asked them to the prom. It was you who would not return their simple phone messages, so they spent hours on the phone talking to us. It was you who ignored them at your happy hours in your bars, which is how they wound up in ours. It was you who jump-started their eating disorders and left them with weekends alone spent watching I Love the 80s marathons. (While still fond of dancing like Belinda Carlisle, fag hags hated the '80s, deep down, and you can see it in their eyes in all those college snapshots, beneath all that hair and those cinched, belted Esprit shirts. This inner pain was mostly your fault. We accept full responsibility for our own forlorn looks in those pictures, our own bad hair, and the fact that we were wearing cinched Esprit shirts, too.)

And here's Stuever on the strange afterlife of uncles...

Sometimes uncles loom large in family lore and whatever you spill in the therapist's office, but mostly we just drift off the narrative margin. We're not your dad. Sometimes we remember your birthday (bet you $10 you don't know ours), and you never know if we'll leave you anything when we die. Mystery is our best uncly asset, because it safeguards us from having you show up on our doorsteps broke and drunk at 3:00 a.m., but it also keeps us out of your lives. Something in our culture insists uncles be kooky or creepy; if we're neither, we're gone.

And here's Stuever on going to straight peoples' weddings...

I was a Wedding Fag—the only male allowed into the bride’s jittery, pre-ceremony inner sanctum. Always a bridesfag, never a bridesmaid, rarely even offered a role in the ceremony, though billed to onlookers as “my best friend!!!”; certainly not invited to any of the groom’s bachelor shenanigans; the “such a nice, handsome young man” who’d sit and talk with great aunts and find a place at tables with a median age of 68. I worked it. I did the chicken dance. I’m in some of the photos—the party pics, often in the background. Wedding fags sometimes spot one another at weddings, and give each other a silent nod. Usually, I’d spot the token older gay couple—some distant cousin or uncle who brought his longtime boyfriend along. They always had the look of refugees from some intra-family war. Before I’d have a chance to meet them, they’d have left, after having sat at a faraway table. They’d made their statement: You’re married. Whooper-fuckin’-do. Here’s your present. We’re outta here.

Stuever is brilliant and insightful and hilarious and his new book—which I started reading last night—is kind of like Christmas in Texas: appalling and endearing in roughly equal measures. I realize it's cold outside, Seattle, but hearing Stuever read is worth leaving the house for. Elliott Bay Books, 7 PM. See you there. (More of Stuever's writing for the Stranger can be found here.)