Aidan Wharton grew up in a yurt in the middle of the Hawaiian jungle. He says it like a punch line, which is also exactly how it sounds. The combination explains a lot about him: a kid with a wide imagination, plenty of time outside, and an early suspicion that the interesting stuff happens close to the ground.
Theatre came next. A degree in musical theatre from Penn State. Regional work. National tours of Wicked. A Broadway run in Girl From The North Country. Films, too: Fire Island, then Bros. It is the kind of résumé most people would frame and hang. He wrote it down once and then quietly moved on.
The next thing was a column. He started writing Gay Buffet between performances on tour, posting on Substack from hotel rooms and stopping in each city to highlight its queer history and raise money for local nonprofits. By the time the tour wrapped, the column had readers, the readers had questions, and the questions had pulled him toward something he could not quite walk away from.
In 2024 he came home to New York and started writing full time. Gay Buffet became weekly: an honest, sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about queer sex, open relationships, and the daily practice of staying close to the people you love. The same year, he launched Getting Close, a podcast for the room behind the column.
He lives in Brooklyn with his husband. He answers DMs. He writes back. The work is, in his own words, a small attempt at making the world a slightly better place, one connection at a time.
“I would be nothing without my community of people who remind me, every day, that this is what I should be doing.”