Fausto Fernos was hoping for a really big present this Christmas. For nearly two years, with the help of his all-but-legal husband, Marc Felion, Fernos has been podcasting the gaycentric Feast of Fools talk show an hour a day, five days a week. Created in the couple’s Edgewater condo, each podcast is accompanied by chatty program notes, penned by Fernos and posted on the FOF Web site (feastoffools.net). In November Fernos was selected from a field of hundreds by Gay Bloggies, an American Idol-style competition, as one of the dozen best gay bloggers on the Web. Contenders for the championship who stayed the course then battled their way through 12 challenges, with a public vote at each step determining who would continue.
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When Fernos learned in mid-December that he was one of three who’d made it to the finals, he had a pretty good feeling: in 2006, when the Bloggies had given awards in several categories, FOF won as best podcast. In 2007, though, the contest narrowed to blogging alone. While the challenges included photo and karaoke tasks, the competition was basically an essay contest with assigned topics. So Fernos blogged away about who he is, where he lives, and what he and cohost Felion are trying to accomplish on Feast of Fools.
When one of the later Gay Bloggies challenges required Fernos to write about the most important moment for him in 2007, he didn’t have to ponder long. His beloved but distant father, an architect and “UFO fanatic” who lived in Puerto Rico, died last year. Fernos says he wrestled with how to present their last moments together in the hospital, “both of us crying,” without being morbid. His entry describes that meeting, tells how a volcanic eruption on Montserrat kept him from making it back again before his father died, and talks about the funeral. “Years ago my father picked out for his service one of the strangest funeral parlors in Puerto Rico, the Celestium,” Fernos wrote. “Maybe he discovered it in a local architectural journal because of its unusual structural design: monolithic domes, arranged in a triangle.” This exotic place, where his father was displayed in a “‘Sleeping Beauty’ like plexiglas case” before being cremated, looked like a “concrete spaceship” and “was home to an equally strange staff”: they looked to him like “Puerto Rican new-age lesbians who could have even been off-worlders themselves.” It reminded Fernos that years earlier his father had looked him and his sister—then a couple of stunned teens—in the eye and made this pronouncement: “My children, when I die I will go to live on other planets in outer space and enroll in the great University of the Cosmos.”
