If I picked the top 10. (notes from a blond).

Magazines love to make lists. Top 10 gynecologists in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island--that was part of a cover story recently in New York magazine. Nobody in New Jersey was worth a nod. I guess when Carmela Soprano has her pelvic, she comes into town.

A local magazine listed the top 10 sushi bars in Phoenix, a city surrounded by sand and no fish whatsoever. Entertainment Weekly lists the biggest people in Hollywood, and Forbes offers an annual accounting of the richest people in America.

This magazine has enjoyed compiling lists of gay people who made a difference or came out or otherwise got their horn blown in the past year. Out, another member of The Advocate's publishing family, recently offered a list of the 100 most intriguing gay people of 2002.

I did not make the cut. Probably, neither did you. My intrigue factor rises and falls with the years. At the moment, it is lower than the toilets at the Munchkinland Hilton. I wasn't bowled over with intrigue at Out's list. They were all names I'd read about. And they weren't as intriguing as, just for starters:

* The gay couple who put Rudy Giuliani up in their apartment after he split from the wife and couldn't yet start living with the girlfriend. What tales they could tell! Firefighters coming in and out at all hours, color-coded alerts (just like hankies in back pockets), how much time the man of the year spends in the bathroom. A trove of intrigue.

* The publicists who engineer celebrity comings-out. Who got the NFL's Esera Tuaolo on Bryant Gumbel's show? And for that matter, who's advising those closeted TV and movie stars to remain below the radar? There's intrigue for you.

* Gay political candidates who are willing to subject themselves to media hysteria in order to join a legislature that largely ignores then and a constituency that will be ready to blame every shortcoming on their sexuality. Who's crazy enough to get into that mess in the fantasy hope that they can make a difference? Somebody very intriguing.

* The audience in Palm Springs, Calif., that is packing the showings of Del Shores's hilarious movie Sordid Lives. It can't all be gay people, even in Palm Springs, famous home of the newly wed and nearly dead. I'm intrigued, aren't you?

* The guy who took the gay mafia stuff seriously and wrote a piece for a leading gay magazine, in which he related the supposedly true story of how the gay mafia all banded together to remove a movie producer's prostate. Mesmerizing.

* Gay right-wingers, also known as neocons (new conservatives, not to be confused with compassionate conservatives--remember them?). These gay people agree with Republicans on nongay issues and have somehow deluded themselves into thinking Republicans care the slightest bit about gay people. Intriguing.

* Gay left-wingers, many nursing hangovers from the `60s, who spend most of their time arguing with each other, usually with the firm belief that unless you share their personal views, you are probably a registered sex offender or shortly will be. Even more intriguing than neocons.

* Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, whose territory covers West Hollywood, where a number of gay men were followed on their way home late at night and clubbed over the head, a series of incidents that Cooley felt didn't constitute hate crimes. Come election time, he may discover that gay bashers don't turn out to vote quite as much as their victims do.

* The lesbian security guard at a recent TV special I wrote who watched thin, long-blond-haired teenybopper Aaron Carter, in a tie-less white suit, enter the theater and then announced over her walkie-talkie that Ellen DeGeneres had just arrived.

* Kathy Griffin, who has taken the underground concept of the gay myth (you know, Keanu-David, Matt-Ben) and turned it into mainstream network talk-show fodder. This may be the most intriguing gay person of all. And she's straight.