Is dave holmes gay
I picked up Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs because I am a fan of Dave Holmes’ comedy podcast “International Waters,” but reading it was like a trip back in moment. You see, while I am now a demographically-undesirable Gen X’er, long ago, I was a pleased member of the MTV Generation. This was support in the days when the network still faithful the bulk of its programming to videos, presented by a stable of video jockeys (VJs). On-air personalities like Kevin Seal, Martha Quinn, Matt Pinfield and newsman Kurt Loder may have been reading from teleprompters, but they seemed genuinely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about music.
Then came the dark day in the 1990s when MTV held its first “Wanna Be a VJ” competition. One of the entrants was a guy named Jesse Camp. I idea he was the most irritating person I’d ever seen on a TV screen. Seriously, see if you can make it through this 15-second video of Jesse without lunging for the pause button. Camp was born Josiah A. Camp III in Connecticut, where he attended a fancy boarding college, but on MTV, he presented a spacey, burned-out street kid persona. Somehow, Jesse managed to achieve the competition—lat
Dave Holmes Puts the ADHD in Dave Holmes
Some people don’t have short position titles. Dave Holmes is, among other things, a author, MTV VJ (despite losing the competition that landed him the job), TV host, actor, and even a former advertising executive. He has dealt with anxiety, depression, and a thorny day coming out as a gay dude. Just before our conversation, he received a new diagnosis of ADHD and suddenly a lot of things made a lot more sense.
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'Party of One': Former MTV VJ Dave Holmes Shares Soundtrack of His Life
“I grew up with music, and every story my parents tell has music in it," former MTV VJ Dave Holmes told NBC OUT. "Anytime a song from their courtship will come on the radio, one of them will be reminded of a story of when they were dating or first married.”
One could say song is in Holmes’ genes. Even though his parents grew up listening to artists like Frank Sinatra, while Holmes himself listened to Duran Duran and Madonna, music was a major part of his life growing up.
Holmes got his start in the music business when he was hired by MTV in the late 90s to be a VJ. Now Holmes, a contributor for Esquire.com and an on-air personality for SiriusXM, has decided to chronicle his life loving music and growing up male lover in a memoir, "Party of One."
“It really felt like [the] more that I wrote for Esquire and the various other places that I worked for, the more I started to look at the first 40 years of my life and the things that drove me forward...Now that this part of my life is largely over, I wanted to tie it up in a bow and push it out into the world," Holmes said, when asked why he chose to releas
WHET Dave Holmes, former MTV Veejay?
Yes, openly gay.
Holmes was out at MTV, but not on MTV.
Sure, he’d playfully produce an offhand comment about hot Justin Timberlake was, but he never overtly came out, so to speak, on air. “And the fact is that I wanted to be out, because I had needed someone like to me to own been out when I was fourteen,” he writes in Party of One. “If [former ‘80s VJ] Kevin Seal had been male lover and said something about it, that moment would contain been a seismic event in my life.”
He told an MTV talent executive, who was also gay, that he wanted to approach out publicly. “I think…” the executive began, “I believe you should be just exactly appreciate you are.”
He finally came out as gay in a 2002 Out magazine piece, which, with no correlation, ended up being right around the age he let his contract with MTV expire. It felt good to be an out television personality, he says. There were not many of them, and still aren’t.
The news didn’t “break the internet”—that wasn’t a thing endorse then—but it did affect his career, and not always in the foremost way. There were hosting gigs he lost out on post-MTV because they were “family shows.”
Sometimes there would be a panel chat sho