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This year the one character every gay man wanted to know better was Ryan Tripp, son of that woolly mammoth with a tape recorder.

This is the way the year ends: not with a bang but with the sound of animated bugs, animated biblical figures, and the highly animated Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan having that gayest of all things, a cyberaffair. Future generations may sniff at Michelangelo and Oscar Wilde, but they will revere us through eternity for coming up with the CentralJerseyGBMCross-Dresser chat room.

It's been the year when everything that could happen happened online. The Lewinsky mess--I mean the case, not the girl--was first tinkled out by Matt Drudge, the Internet gadfly. Nobody believed him in the early stages, but as his reporting proved to be cannily timed and accurate, the whole idea that the real story behind anything could probably be found somewhere on the Net seized the national imagination.

Within weeks you couldn't open your E-mall without getting dozens of forwarded messages, most of them pretending to be inside information but winding up to be rumor and speculation mixed in with a heaping portion of urban myth. How many a) cures for AIDS involving aspirin, enemas, and everything but leeches; b) proofs of government plots to start AIDS; c) theories on how the government-planted AIDS virus got "out of hand" did you receive this year? The lowdown on everybody from George Michael to Boy George sizzled through cyberspace.

The problem with nuggets found on the Net, of course, is that no matter how outrageous they are, if repeated enough times, they become the truth--at least to a large number of people who decide not to know better. Do you personally know anybody whose hard drive was destroyed when they opened an E-mail? Neither do I, but I got that message about 5,000 times.

As the year careened on, cyberworld began "kicking in on the positive tip," as everybody who answers the phone at Motown says when they put you on hold. The torrent of grief and consequential activism put out after the Matthew Shepard murder made everything you've ever heard about the Web's being worthwhile ring true. I know for a fact that the sheer volume of concern galvanized the straight media. And for the first time in my memory, the Internet actually began serving its purpose as a community forum. From the Godhatesphelps Web site that was set up as a reaction to the beyond-reactionary Kansas lunatic to the many letter-writing campaigns and announcements of demonstrations to the impassioned pleas from Tony Kushner to condemn the Human Rights Campaign for its support of Al D'Amato, the Web was doing what its inventors always hoped it would do: be the new center for the exchange of ideas. And not just a marketplace.

The enormity of the Matthew Shepard crime and the extraordinary reaction of the straight community--who might at last be connecting the dots between the antigay ad campaign and antigay violence--put pretty much everything else this year in the shade. It got hard to work up much enthusiasm for the Ellen-versus-Chastity debate in the face of such stark reality. In fact, for a lot of people, it was sort of a laissez-faire year politically, Tammy Baldwin being the only bright spot. So many people were turned off by the carnival on the Potomac that just starting a conversation about it was a better way to clear the room than bean dip.

Nevertheless, the winner of this year's Kato Kaelin Award--the one character in the drama every gay man would like to get to know better--had to be Ryan Tripp, the angelic son of that woolly mammoth with the tape recorder. Walking shyly two steps behind his mother, always preppily suited, he exuded star power. You could almost hear a deep-throated chorus bellowing, "Out of the way, woman! You're blocking my view!" I understand he was on Inside Edition and that we actually heard him speak. And he turns out to be a fairly average college kid. Of course, I only heard that in the Ryan Tripp chat room. So it's not really authoritative. But if we repeat it enough times, it will be. So it's your turn.

Standing in the fluorescent-lit lobby of a funky SRO hotel on Manhattan's West Village waterfront, an elfin lad with intelligent eyes, an alabaster complexion, and a soft, throaty voice swaddles his neck against the rainy chill of the night. The wall behind him is plastered with posters of a rock-and-roll diva in a black skintight minidress, standing at a microphone in a smoky spotlight with legs splayed and hip cocked: Marlene Dietrich reborn as Courtney Love.

It's hard to believe they're both John Cameron Mitchell, the 35-year-old star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the off-Broadway hit show he cowrote with Stephen Trask of the kick-ass rock band Cheater, which shares the stage with Mitchell.

Not since Torch Song Trilogy has such an upfront gay portrayal rocketed from the depths of queer subculture to mainstream adulation. Suburban couples, European hipsters, and celebrities such as Glenn Close and Danny DeVito have all flocked to the Jane Street Theatre to applaud the most surprising theater sensation of the year.

Developed over a period of four years at the Manhattan drag-grunge rock club Squeezebox, Hedwig swirls stand-up comedy, dramatic theater, and undiluted rock and roll into a unique cocktail. Mitchell plays "a mere slip of a girly boy" from East Berlin whose unlikely saga includes a botched sex-change that leaves her with an angry inch of indeterminate genital and a marriage to a black GI who dumps her in a Kansas trailer park. There she befriends an Army brat named Tommy and grooms him into a rock star whose newfound fame she both scorns and envies.

The show has roots in Mitchell's autobiography. Like Tommy, he grew up the son of an Army general. Always on the move, he attended 20 different schools. His companions were science fiction, Marvel comics, glam rock (his favorite LP was David Bowie's protoglam classic Hunky Dory), and theater. Bisexual as a teenager ("Guys were great for sex, women for emotional support"), he came out in college while visiting his brother in San Francisco.

"I wandered out to Polk Street, and a guy handed me an invitation to an orgy," Mitchell says. "I was terrified by the flying penis figures, but I spent the weekend with this guy, who was kind of a hippie auto mechanic from Thunder Bay. He lived in a commune and drove me around on his motorcycle. It was hot."

From the beginning he was always out as a gay actor. "I was tired of those actors who say `None of your business' or `I'm not into labels'--the more you do that, the more it perpetuates the pejorative connotation," says Mitchell, eating sushi, his face faintly sparkling with leftover glitter makeup.

"I wasn't the type of actor where my livelihood depended on women wanting to fuck me, so it's never really affected me," he says. "I remember doing a big action movie and thinking, I'll have to be discreet now, but it requires so much energy to do that. And being an actor is being powerless anyway. There was a certain amount of `You're going to treat me badly and tell me how to live my personal life as well? Fuck you?'"

Nearly all his biggest roles have been gay characters, including his stint as a fashion designer on the short-lived Fox series Party Girl, but until playing Hedwig, Mitchell had stayed away from drag. "I was scared of the feminine within," he says, "as most gay guys are at some point." But he started hanging out at Squeezebox because his boyfriend at the time was in the house band alongside Stephen Trask. "The drag queens there were very inspiring," Mitchell says. "They were singing instead of lip-synching, and in rock and roll you don't have to sing as well as Diana Ross. Mistress Formika was the hostess, and she would just kick ass! She would stage-dive, and I would be amazed. My favorite right now is Justin Bond. She takes drag to the extreme, playing a character named Kiki, who's a cross between Eydie Gorme and Johnny Rotten. It's really aggressive and very moving. Having seen her, I was inspired to open up and interact with the audience more as Hedwig."

Although New York theater audiences have admired Mitchell for years in plays (Six Degrees of Separation) and musicals (The Secret Garden, Hello Again), Hedwig has catapulted him from actor-for-hire into the realm of actor-creators such as John Leguizamo and Eric Bogosian. He's making a short film for HBO; the album of Hedwig will be released in February; and a movie is in the works, to be produced by Christine Vachon for New Line Cinema. After performing as Hedwig for a year, though, Mitchell's ready to take a break and let someone else step into her platinum wig: "This show uses up everything I've ever learned as an actor and a singer."

Whatever's next, he has our attention.

Shewey is the editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.

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