Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making it Work

by Tim Gunn

  When I used to give tours of Parsons, it was a real dump. I would proudly talk about all the positive aspects of the school and would avoid mentioning the poor facilities. With some frequency, parents would say, “This places looks … crummy.”

  Antagonistic tour takers would make me crazy. Sometimes they’d be especially rude, and I always thought, What if your kid winds up going to this school? He’s going to be the Son of That Jerk from the Tour.

  But the ones who asked why the building looked so bad had a point. For a long time, I would try to ignore it, like that W. C. Fields line, “Get away from me, kid, you’re bothering me.”

  Finally, I realized I had to address it, so I turned it into a joke. I would say, “I’m sure you’ve noticed the state of our building. Well, this didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years—and years—for us to get it to look this way. Ha-ha.”

  It didn’t lessen the amount of peeling paint, but at least people would laugh. And it gets directly to my point about the monkey house. If you’re going to live in one, you at least have to keep reminding yourself that it still does stink!

  Know What to Get Off Your Chest and What to Take to the Grave

  “GET IT OFF YOUR chest” is one of the all-time worst clichés. If you have done something shameful, the logic goes, you should confess and be forgiven.

  Hold it right there. Think about it. Would revealing your mistake hurt others? If so, then hold your tongue. It may make you feel better to tell someone you’ve cheated on him, for example, but it makes the other person feel miserable. That’s not fair. He did nothing wrong, and yet he has to suffer while you get to feel cleansed.

  I know a woman who said of her husband: “If he cheated on me, I would hope he had the maturity to keep it to himself. Let him suffer with the secret. It’s his penance for doing what he did.”

  I’m with her. You hear people say, “I’ll feel better if I tell my spouse I was unfaithful.” Of course you will. But maybe you’re not supposed to feel better.

  On one Project Runway home visit, I was struck by how the designer’s parents’ divorce was still weighing on her. Her mother and father had been separated for years and years and came together for the occasion of this home visit to celebrate their daughter’s success.

  I thought that was lovely, but I also felt so sorry for the designer’s mother. She was reminding her daughter of what her father had done, and you could tell she was still suffering years after the fact. Then the father walked in, happy-go-lucky and carefree. Clearly, when he revealed to his wife that he was a cad, he felt purged and had his catharsis. Meanwhile, his wife was destroyed by it.

  That’s why “getting it off your chest” isn’t necessarily a good idea.

  As you probably know, if you are familiar with any recovering addicts, those in twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous typically try to make amends to those whom they have hurt. But in my experience some people don’t pay attention to the second part of the step: “Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

  I know someone who received an amends call that informed her that her friend had stolen from her for years. The friend said, “Sorry!” And that was the end of the amends.

  Well, not good enough. My friend was furious, while the thief felt totally relieved that she’d unburdened herself of this secret. Who was really served by this? The victim had to suffer more, and the perpetrator was vindicated. If the apology had to happen, it should have been followed up with a great big check to make up for all that had been stolen.

  When you’re thinking of volunteering advice, you also need to ask yourself this question: Will revealing my feelings on this subject actually help?

  My friend Richard Thomas was in David Mamet’s play Race on Broadway, and one night in 2009 Anna Wintour was in the audience. Richard called his teenage son, Montana, who is obsessed with fashion, and said, “Anna Wintour’s here! You should come over.”

  “I’m afraid,” the boy said to his father.

  He had reason to be. Anna took Richard aside after the show and said, “I have a note for you about your performance. You’re dressing very poorly. You need a much more expensive suit.”

  The suit was Prada. How much more expensive does it get? I can’t believe that a costumer, a director, and all these other people would let an actor out onstage in a starring role if he didn’t look great. She apparently couldn’t help herself from expressing an opinion. In a case like this, if you have a criticism, you really should keep it to yourself.

  This question of what to say or not to say is a running theme in my family. One tense holiday season, we had a family conversation about what we could do to have a better time together.

  “We could all say a lot less,” I suggested. “Everyone in this family shares entirely too much. Before speaking, let’s ask ourselves if this is something people really need to know.”

  As I anticipated, the Gunns nixed my strategy.

  There was one night when we were visiting my mother and all hell was breaking loose. She was going after my sister about the inevitability of some problems my sister was having with her son. “I spotted it at a very early age,” my mother bragged.

  Not even remotely helpful. It just pushed a button in my sister that caused her to lose it. She was sobbing and ran out of the room.

  “Was that really necessary?” I asked my mother. “You took a nice little gathering in your hospital room and turned it into The Jerry Springer Show.

  “Besides,” I asked her, “why not say something when the situation is actually fixable rather than years later when the damage has been done?”

  “I don’t butt in,” she replied.

  Translation: When it’s fixable, I don’t say anything. I wait until it’s done, and then remind you about it. If you’re so sure at the time, do an intervention. Otherwise, you should keep your mouth shut forever after.

  This is my whole way of operating on Project Runway. After the judging, we’re back in the lounge and sometimes a designer will tell me, “Nina and Heidi were telling me how bad this aspect of the garment was, and you never mentioned it.”

  “And I never would,” I say, “because you couldn’t have done anything about that particular aspect of your design.”

  At the same time, some secrets shouldn’t be kept. A friend whom I love and adore was diagnosed years ago with a degenerative disease. Somehow, her husband learned about it before she did and kept it from her for some two or three years, until her symptoms were evident to her.

  When my friend told me this story, she suggested that this was a tremendously generous and romantic gesture on her husband’s part.

  “I hate to respond this way,” I replied, “but I’m not even remotely moved by this story. It makes me angry.”

  “Why?” she asked, shocked.

  “What if your last wish were to climb to the top of an Aztec pyramid or to rappel down the side of the Empire State Building?” I asked. “What if? You would have had three years to do those things before your illness progressed.”

  Plus, I found it infantilizing. My friend is a very strong, very smart woman. Her husband thought the diagnosis would weigh on her, and so he thought it was good that she didn’t know, but I maintain it wasn’t his call.

  Still, I know that some of her friends think how wonderful it was of her husband to keep this secret from her for years.

  “He wanted to protect you from this,” they say to her, all moony.

  Protect her? It was going to happen anyway!

  I guess if she’s happy he kept the secret, then he made the right choice, but I still have trouble with that story. Maybe it’s just that it pains me to see people being lied to “for their own good.”

  Maybe I’m just extra defensive because I was lied to by a man for many years and still haven’t fully gotten over it. I’ve had only one long-term relationship in my adult life. In my twenties, I was madly, passionately, uncondition
ally in love with the same man for almost a decade. It was fabulous, I thought, but I was living in a fool’s paradise. What’s the opposite of a monkey house, where everything smells pristine and is not? Maybe it’s just another room in the monkey house.

  We were together for nine years and more or less living with each other, but I still had my apartment. We worked together, so I saw him every day and night. One night we were in bed watching M*A*S*H. He turned to me and said, “I don’t have the patience for you any longer.”

  “What?” I responded. “What am I doing? What can I do?”

  “There’s nothing for you to do,” he said. “I want you to leave.”

  Then he told me that he’d been sleeping around—with any guy, anywhere. And of course this was during the advent of AIDS, 1982. So not only was he throwing me out abruptly after I’d spent almost my whole adult life with him, but he was revealing to me that a major part of our relationship had been a sham, and that he’d put my very life at risk.

  I still remember driving down Rock Creek Parkway back to my apartment that night. I had to pull over because I was hyperventilating. I could hardly breathe from grief, humiliation, and despair. Those feelings later turned to anger.

  His moral behavior was horrible, but he also put my health in real jeopardy. I was monogamous. I was in love, why wouldn’t I be? I never thought he wouldn’t be. To find out he’d been cheating for years was such a slap in the face and also potentially a death sentence. I was tested for HIV every six months for years. Thank God, I was okay, but I’ve never quite learned to trust anyone intimately again.

  And then I still had to see him at work every day. It was no fun being in academic meetings with the person who’d broken my heart. I took the high road. But it was not easy. Doing the right thing can be very, very hard, and I think it was also the right thing that I left town as soon as I could. I moved to New York City the following year, and this breakup was most certainly a catalyst.

  When people hear that I haven’t had a boyfriend since 1982, they often whisper, “Does he not have sex?”

  That’s right!

  You know, much of my one long-term boyfriend’s “I’m over this” was about not having the patience for me with regard to sex. I’ve always been kind of asexual. So now I can’t even consider sex without thinking about him and his disapproval. Talk about something that will make you lose the urge. That breakup was a cold shower to last a lifetime.

  Could I get psychiatric help and resume some kind of sex life at some point? Probably. But it’s a little late for that. And frankly, I am happy being celibate. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had thoughts. I am a human being. But I love my life and don’t feel any need to change it.

  Getting used to being alone was hard, but now that I’ve made a life for myself alone, I really like it. It’s been years since I’ve been interested in anyone. And I really think if you don’t need it, you don’t need it. As hard as it is for a lot of my friends to believe, I really am happy alone.

  Okay, there has been one man I’ve had feelings for since then. When I was traveling to Asia regularly, I often had the same flight attendant, a man named Daniel. He was very cute and very kind, and I always looked forward to seeing him. Well, on one flight, a baby broker boarded the plane with—I kid you not—fourteen Asian babies bound for America. It would never happen now. But there were the fourteen babies, and something had to be done, because this broker was completely outnumbered and overwhelmed, as you may imagine.

  So a flight attendant got on the intercom and asked for volunteers to take a baby for the international flight. I didn’t have much work to do, so I held my hand up and was assigned an adorable baby boy. For fourteen hours, he sat on my lap and ripped up magazines. I made faces at him, and he slept, and it was perfectly lovely.

  Well, I guess this babysitting marathon impressed Daniel, because when we landed in New York, he said, “Would you mind if I called you?”

  I said that would be great, and he did, and we went out and had a wonderful time. We started seeing each other whenever he was in town. About two months in, I started to think, This could be something. I really liked him and he had a lot to recommend him: He was my age. He traveled a lot. And he had almost no stuff. (This was key because I was nowhere near ready to merge households with anyone.) I was, for the first time since my horrible breakup, really and truly happy about being in a relationship.

  Well, I made the foolish mistake of sharing my happiness with a colleague whom I trusted.

  When I told him about Daniel, he had no reason to wish me anything but congratulations. We weren’t lovers. He had a partner of many years. But he went crazy and called me a fool.

  “A flight attendant?” he spluttered. “What a stereotype!”

  “Your boyfriend’s a florist!” I said, furious. “You don’t call a fashion designer and a florist being together a stereotype?”

  We had a big falling-out over it. But he succeeded in shaking my very fragile faith in this new relationship. At least indirectly, it caused me to say good-bye to Daniel.

  This was eighteen years ago. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to Daniel. He was a really good man, and I’m sure he’s made a good life for himself, unlike my former friend, who now lives in a town called Crossville. I think it’s a good place for him, because he is still constantly cross!

  You know people like this, right? People who are incapable of enjoying anything? I’ll never forget the time when someone I know ruined the rehearsal dinner of his dear friend’s daughter by throwing a fit because she hadn’t had him make her bridal gown. He went on and on. By the end of his litany, his friend was sobbing. It was so painful and horrible. He was mad that the wedding wasn’t about him.

  Have you noticed how depressed people seem to show up at memorial services? Maybe it’s because they want to show that they’re still here. Or maybe they can get behind an unhappy event because there everyone feels the way they do every day.

  Some people walk around under a rain cloud of their own making. In my encounters with Narciso Rodriguez and Isabel Toledo I’ve always found them a bit sulky, but at least they make sulking look glamorous, and they can express joy when need be. “The world is a beautiful place,” gloomy Narciso effuses in a cheerful print advertisement for a cell phone. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” I shouted at the magazine page. But I am impressed that he was able to crack such a big smile.

  So there’s a secret that should be hidden: unbridled pessimism. If you think the world is terrible or that someone shouldn’t be so happy with a flight attendant or in any other situation, keep it to yourself.

  Then again, you need to be true to yourself, and for me that means not being coy about my sexuality. One thing that causes me to well up with emotion is when young men come up to me and say that I’ve helped them handle their sexuality; that is, coming to terms with being gay. It reminds me how lonely I was as a child with no gay role models.

  Everyone needs a role model to look up to. When I was young and thinking I might not be John Wayne material, all I had for a role model was Paul Lynde from Bewitched. You may remember him as one of the more insane people on Hollywood Squares? Well, he was completely gawky and ridiculous on screen, and then in 1965, his boyfriend fell out a hotel window and died. (They may have had a few drinks.)

  So that’s what I felt I had to look forward to as a gay man: playing ridiculed characters and having a tragic personal life. The gay people in the popular imagination back then were all predators or weirdos. Meanwhile, my straight friends had Clark Gable, Tony Curtis, Charlton Heston, and a million other heartthrobs to look up to. (A lot of famous fifties actors were later revealed to be gay; if only I’d known at the time!)

  I often say in keynote addresses to college students that I figured out what I wasn’t before I figured out what I was. That struggle to find out who you are is so hard. You have to keep eliminating things that you aren’t and then see what’s left over. Most important, you should never pretend. The
re’s nothing harder than living life as someone you’re not, even if being what you are is very hard, which is what being gay was for me for a very long time.

  One of the few times my father was physically violent with me was the evening we were to meet my grandfather’s new wife. They were coming to our house. That afternoon, I was putting together my sister’s Barbie & Ken Little Theatre (“After the show everything folds neatly away until the next performance!”).

  My father saw me playing around with these dolls in what I can only imagine was an effeminate way, and he started smacking me with a wet washcloth. “You’re not going to be seen doing this!” he yelled at me.

  It was terrifying, and I had no idea what I’d done to make him so mad or why it would be so awful if these people saw me with Barbie’s theater. In retrospect, I can see he thought I was heading down a less-than-macho path, and he was hoping to beat it out of me. Well, sorry, Dad—didn’t work!

  When I told a friend of mine this story recently, she said, “Do you think maybe your father was secretly gay and disturbed by it?”

  It has definitely occurred to me. He certainly did protest too much about those Barbies …

  “And you don’t think he and J. Edgar Hoover were an item, do you?” she added.

  Well, let me tell you, I’ve been there.

  I have no proof, and I’m going to say right now, my mother would deny it up and down, and so, probably, would many biographers of Hoover; I’m likely just totally wrong about this. But … The men were incredibly close. They were both arguably repressed. So even if they were sleeping together, you can bet they never would have admitted it, even to themselves. He would have really beaten it back. He certainly wanted to knock it out of me, literally and figuratively!

  I don’t believe my father ever had an affair. He was very respectful. He may never even have been tempted. He had strong moral fiber, and I can’t believe he would have betrayed my mother. But I do think it’s very possible that he was a big closet case.