Okay Hi. Louie Fevola has somehow made a career out of hot air. HOT. AIR. LADIES AND GENTS. He is not even influencing. He is making my favourite drink on my favourite streets and talking smack about everyone standing on them.

If you live in New York, you are already as fucking obsessed as I am. If you don't, click this link and come back when you surface.

Our first interview does not exist.

We had it. Two cameras. Forty-five minutes. One martini, built live on my sofa by a man who does not measure anything. Then we sent the audio to the cloud, and the cloud declined.

I broke the news to him a week later. He ruled on it in under a second.

"Girl, there was no cloud. There was no cloud. It was clear skies."

So we did it again. Same guest. Same vodka. Two martinis, because we had learned nothing.

What follows was obtained across two sittings. One of them no longer exists. The other one probably should not. Both are on the record. Neither was sober.

I found him the way everybody finds him. At night. On a phone. Halfway through a news cycle I should not have opened.

And there he is. Walking. Martini in hand. Full glass, real olives, no lid, no legal standing whatsoever. Talking fast. About nothing.

Every interior monologue I have ever had in this city, he was saying out loud, on camera, in violation of the open container law.

I sent it to my husband. My husband sent it back. That is how you know.

Here is the compression.

Williamsburg. Not moved to. From. LIT_ER_AL_LY. The grandfather came from Italy, worked in a cemetery, bought the building. Louie has never left the apartment he grew up in. His mother, Filomena, is one floor up. His sister with her. His brother, one floor down. His aunt across the street with two cousins. His uncle next door with two more. His father's side up the block. His grandmother is still there.

Catholic school. Catholic high school. Altar boy, gagged, four years, and on the record that he did it to skip first period.

FIT on state tuition. Retail at Intermix and J.Crew. An internship at Interview magazine, where he was the first person there to interview Dua Lipa. Then digital marketing, for years, which is what people do in the decade before they become something else.

His brother is gay. His uncle is gay. He is gay. He turns thirty in February and is spending it in Japan. His mother has never been on camera and, he says, never will be.

He now walks around New York with a martini and several million people walk with him.

He does not call himself an influencer. We will get to that.

I want to be precise about what is happening here, because it is easy to file this under “funny gay man yells at tourists” and move on.

The rage is real. It is also a delivery system. Inside forty minutes he went from failing to spell banana to trans women taking the heat for cis gay men, and he did not change register once. The joke and the position run on the same muscle. Most people have to put the bit down to say the thing. He never puts the bit down.

He arrived with his own tea towel, in case of spillage, because he was wearing McQueen.

This is how the conversation unfolded, in spirit, if not in strict chronology.

ON EIGHTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS AND A DONKEY

BJ  We got to see inside your apartment recently. My husband sent it to me and said, this bitch is living in Williamsburg for fifteen hundred bucks a month.

LF  I'm very lucky. That apartment is my childhood apartment. I've never left that apartment. My mother lives upstairs. My brother lives below me. I'm in the middle. Across the street is my aunt and two cousins. Next door is my uncle and two cousins. Up the block is my dad's side of the family. My grandmother still lives there. Basically my grandfather came from Italy, he bought a bunch of property, he worked in a cemetery. Back then Williamsburg was not a good area. He bought my building for eighteen thousand dollars, something like that. I might be making that up.

BJ  He bought it for a donkey and a pack of beans.

LF  Right. And now everyone's like, oh my god, your family, you must be loaded. And I'm like, no. We all live in it. We're not renting it out. I'm not rolling in money because I own property in Williamsburg. It's our house. That's our house.

ON THE BEAUTY PARLOUR

BJ  My mother willed me to be gay. I swear to God.

LF  My mother was a hairdresser. My mom and my aunt had a beauty parlour at the edge of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. So I grew up running around a beauty parlour. There was the blue liquid, and the combs, and everything soaking in. We used to play with the chairs. I literally grew up in a beauty parlour getting highlights. You're surprised where I am today?

BJ  No one is surprised.

LF  No one is surprised.

BJ  If anyone is surprised, please put it in the comments. We would love to know if you were surprised that this turned out to be a homosexual.

LF  And I have a gay uncle.

BJ  They are everywhere. The bloodline is thick.

LF  The bloodline is thick.

ON THE ALTAR

LF  I had a Catholic high school education. I was an altar boy. Did you know that?

BJ  No. That is wild.

LF  It was wild. It was fun. I spent a lot of time on my knees.

BJ  And you still do.

LF  It's really me on my knees worshipping a different kind of man, though.

BJ  How long were you an altar boy?

LF  The entire time I was in high school. I only did it because if you had mass during class, you missed the first three periods of school. And also, I don't know. It was kind of a flex. I'm an altar boy.

ON TRANS WOMEN, AND WHO TAKES THE HEAT

BJ  The gay community. It can be toxic out there.

LF  Especially in New York. There are a lot of subsectors, a lot of groups. Misogyny in the gay community runs rampant. A lot of gay men think that because they're gay men they can react to women any way they want. It's crazy and it's beyond me and it frustrates me. I'm super protective of women. My mother, my sister, my aunts. All the women in my life I'm so close to that I'm protective of any woman.

BJ  And the transphobia.

LF  Those women were out there fighting for us long before we were fighting for anything. And now they're being criminalised. Not victimised. Criminalised. Portrayed as demons in the media every day. Gay men need to be like, okay, I get it, our rights are under fire too, always, it's always going to be that way. But right now the priority should be protecting trans people.

BJ  If you are a cis gay white male, you need to be vocalising support, and quickly.

LF  Correct. Trans women should be behind us, and we should be taking the heat. That's what I'm trying to say. And I think a lot of gay men are transphobic. I've seen it out in the clubs. There's a slight inconvenience and the exchange of words is immediately derogatory towards a trans person. It's disgusting. Cut it out.

BJ  And in the media they get roles like Prostitute One.

LF  Prostitute Three. Sassy secretary.

BJ  Here is a thought. Why can she not just play a woman?

LF  Don't piss me off, because it's going to piss me off. And these people go, oh, they don't get it, they don't understand it. All right. I don't understand neuroscience. Does neuroscience exist? What am I going to do, cancel neuroscience? No. Grow the fuck up. Mind your fucking business.

ON MINDING YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS

BJ  Even within gay men, I hate the lack of acknowledgement of fem culture. Some of my friends cross the boundary of gender. They appear very masculine and they will still wear a skirt and have the most amazing style and look incredible. And there are still people in our community who go, why do you need to do that? And I am like, why do you care?

LF  Mind your fucking business. Someone called me a weirdo online the other day, and I said, you're a weirdo, talking to someone you don't even know. And they said, well, your profile is public. Would you walk up to me in the street and say this? I'm in public. Stop being a fucking freak. People are very brave online. They flex their muscle online all the time.

There is more. There is so much more. There is a full section on Tito's bottles wearing Christmas sweaters that I have had to cut for space and I will regret forever.

I have spent a lot of time since then trying to work out what he actually is, because online personality is his word and it is not enough, and influencer is influenza, and he is right about that too.

Here is what I keep coming back to.

Everybody in this city arrived here. That is the deal. You come to New York to become somebody, you sublet, you scrape, you move nine times in six years, you build a self out of distance from wherever you started. It is the founding myth and most of us are living in it. I flew fourteen thousand kilometres to sit in a room and ask a man to spell banana.

Louie has never left. He lives in the apartment he was a child in. His mother is up one flight. His brother is down one. His aunt is across the road with the good scissors. He learned to be who he is, running between the chairs of a beauty parlour on the edge of Greenpoint with the blue liquid and the combs, in a building his grandfather bought with cemetery money for the price of a donkey and a can of beans. He did not go anywhere to find this. It was all already there, five floors of it, waiting for him to stop pretending it was not the whole point.

And that is why the martini works. It is not a bit about drinking. It is a man walking through the exact streets that made him, at speed, out loud, refusing to be inconvenienced by anyone who is only visiting. The glass is not a prop. It’s the NYC flag huuuuney!

He told me he does not know why people care. He says it constantly. He watches his own videos and thinks they are stupid. I would like to offer, on behalf of several million people, the answer he keeps declining to accept.

We care because he is not performing New York. He is New York. The most authentic New York experience you can have. And if you live in this big pain-in-the-ass of a city that you can never let go of, you get it. AND, like the rest of us, he is eternally late for something. So get the fuck out of his way.