Today on Alphabet City:  Jon Paul makes a pass at a pop-star’s husband. Guest stars: Gloria Estefan, Teri Hatcher.

Thank God for Publicists.  PR professionals enjoyed Even Jesus Had a Publicist enough to catapult that post’s popularity ahead of the two sex-related stories One Night in Bangkok and Hello, Meat Grindr.  Until then, I was beginning to think that only the most prurient details of my life might be enticing to readers.

As a relative newbie to the blogosphere, I wasn’t aware of how much global traffic would be driven to a relatively innocent story about a gay bathhouse in Bangkok.  Hopefully, the readers from Taiwan, Bangladesh, Mumbai, Russia and the Middle East who found Alphabet City by googling “Bangkok massage” enjoyed some of the tamer episodes.

It’s not just the Internet where sex seems to be a connector.  Live sex tales seem to be popular as well as I discovered on Thursday night when I headed back to one of The Moth’s storytelling nights.  Having learned from my disappointing experience in Like Moths to a Flame, this time my friend Shannon and I stood in line outside SoHo’s Housing Works Bookstore & Café starting at 6pm for doors that opened at 7pm.  Theme of the night was “Lost”—and I don’t mean the TV show.  The host of the night, author Dan Kennedy, began the show by saying, “I don’t know why we bother to give the night a theme, because somehow you will turn it into a story about sex.”

And 4 out of 5 storytellers agreed—the first ones up all related their tales to something sexual.  First up was a guy who lusted after his friend’s girlfriend, followed by the guy who last week nearly caused a riot outside Nuyorican Poets Café with his vigilante storytelling.  He spun a tale of unrequited love/sex in the aisles of a Virginia Food Lion.  Then there was a zany story of a religious cult leader deflowering the storyteller when she was 14.  Although intriguing, her tale was much longer than required 5 minutes and at one point included the line “to make a long story short…”  Isn’t that generally the point of time limits and editing?  And I’m still not sure what to make of the nut case whose story included a long riff on the power of being a virus in the Matrix (originality?), and a ski trip to Aspen with a cougar girlfriend whom he volunteers to have sex with an actor/author with whom I was not familiar.  He ended with a lecture about how friends hold you back.  In this case, I wish they had.

While the night was odd, I’m glad I went because now I have a clear strategy.  The next Moth StorySlam theme is “Nerve,” and I was thinking about telling the Whoopi Goldberg Oscar story—I had the “nerve” to pick it up.  But now I’m rethinking.  Maybe a story with a little bit of a sexual angle—like the time I had the nerve to make a pass at Gloria Estefan’s husband while escorting Teri Hatcher to VH-1’s Divas Live.  CLICK HERE to enjoy this excerpt from Alphabet City’s Episode 6: Sex in the City and let me know what you think.