Read or watch the whole interview here.
Here’s an excerpt:
Heshy: “Everything offends someone. If you want to get offended, you get offended. In the frum community, it’s even worse. I did a show where I talked about my dating life and I heard, ‘You shouldn’t talk about that. It’s private.’
“Our survival depends on our ability to make fun of ourselves.”
“Not that I would ever watch porn. Of course not. In yeshiva, we learned Gemara all day long, but we hid the porns in the Gemaras. The rosh yeshiva had a shiur room with an old antique Shas (Talmud) set that nobody used and we put them in between.”
Luke: “What were your favorite magazines in yeshiva?”
Heshy: “I liked Barely Legal and Finally Legal and all those 18-year old… It escapes me because my dad threw out all my porns when we finally renovated the house. He didn’t care.”
Luke: “He didn’t care about your filth?”
Heshy: “He didn’t care. That was when I was engaged, so I guess it was good. I haven’t bought a porn in years. I have the internet. Why would anyone pay for porn?”
“Someone sent me a porn last week and there were mezuzahs on the doors. They are those white really cheap mezuzahs. I was looking for the Rebbe picture. That’s what I wanted to see. Reb Moshe, not the Rebbe. Reb Moshe in the background and you see a whole Shulchan Aruch set in the background while they’re doing a threesome. There’s a shtender and they throw them over the shtender. There’s a whole frum porn aspect in my mind. ‘Honey, do you want to do galilah (rolling and tying the Torah?”
“I taught myself SEO and search engine tactics and getting links and back-links and whoring myself out for interviews. I’ve gotten jobs [from my blog]. I worked as an internet marketer for a year for a business in Monsey [New York]. I learned PPC and AdWords and things like that and getting into video blogging. All sorts of things came out of blogging, really good stuff. It’s been life-changing.”
Heshy talks about his evolution as a blogger. “It started out, who the hell is reading this? That is one of the pluses of being anonymous. Being anonymous allows you to write whatever the hell you want. Being nonymous allows you to make money and to do shows and to take it to a different level. I used to write more about people and events and dates. I remember the first time I got caught writing about someone. I wrote about this girl I went out with. Her mom invited me in. Her mom was smoking hot. And then the girl came down. It was not possible they were from the same family.
“Her friend found it. Her friend knew it was me. Her friend put the two and two together. The shadchan (matchmaker) was going nuts. How can you write that?
“And the whole point of the post was that I wanted to go out with her again even though she was so nasty because she was so cool.”
Luke: “Did you take the post down?”
Heshy: “I think I did. I’ve taken down a lot of posts. When I became more popular, I realized that you can’t write things. I did a post on the similarities between blacks and charedim. I took that down.”
Luke: “Why?”
Heshy: “Yitzchak (Y-Love) Jordan found that and he tuned me into some things. He’s a black Hasidic rapper. A convert. Very religious and very liberal. We were becoming friendly at the time. We’d done some open mics. He said, ‘What the f— is this?’ He also found this video I’d done called ‘Charedi Wigger’. I dressed up a wigger and talked yeshivish charedi wiggerness. ‘Wassup Devorah, I wanna touch your behind.’ It was just stupid stuff but it was stuff that would definitely get me in trouble with the uhh. There are certain lines you can’t cross.”
Luke: “In trouble with what?”
Heshy: “Racism. I don’t want to go there. Although I feel like I should, but I don’t. I can’t risk that. I’m trying to get people in. I can offend my own as much as I want but once you start going out, that’s a problem.”
Luke: “What are some of the other limits?”
Heshy: “I can’t write as openly. I can write openly when no one in the place knows who I am. When they’re not expecting me. I get permission a lot. I tell people I’m not going to write about them. Things change as you realize how many people are reading. Last month, I had 58,000 uniques.”
“I learned a long time ago to not really pay attention, to really be me. If you try to please everyone, you’ll ruin it. I learned that and I keep relearning that. Sometimes I think, ‘Maybe I should change? Maybe I should be more this or that.’ When it comes down to it, I can’t. I can only do what my mind provides me to write.
“I have ten regular contributors. I have an editor. She’ll tell me if something’s too much. She’s a lawyer. She edited out the word ‘butch dyke’ last week. I was talking about the Castro in San Francisco and that’s a term. That’s a term. Just like fags vs. queers vs. fems vs. butch.
“I don’t think my readers are on that level. I think my readers are about 70% right-wing and 30% left-wing, and the commenters are very right-wing. I know when someone is going to read my stuff. I have a meter in my head of what I can pull off.”
“The other day, I told a guy to f— off who commented on my site. A lot of people write on every post I write, this blog has been going downhill for sometime. It’s not frum.
“Now I’m like, F— off. I do this for free. You don’t pay me anything. You say you’re going to show up to shows and you don’t show up for shows. I don’t have to do this. You’re reading this. I’m providing a service. The least you could do is to add some insight, not critique me for spelling and stupid s—.”
Luke: “What does your girlfriend think about your blog and does she affect it in any way?”
Heshy: “She almost affects it because I am so flattered that I have finally… I have gone out with a few girls who were blog readers and every single one of them, after we have gone out for sometime, has said, ‘Your blog is really offensive. I hate the things you do. You’re making fun of people.’
“I’ve been dating this girl since July. She loves my blog. She still reads it. Everyone else, once they start going out with me, don’t read it anymore. She’s been an active reader for a year before she met me. She emailed me and asked if we could hang out because she was an outdoors person and I’m an outdoors person.
“I don’t think it was sexual at the time or any attraction. There might have been on her end, but not for me.
“She’s very supportive. She doesn’t think that I should work for a desk job. She thinks I should do this for a living. I like that encouragement. She’s into a lot of philosophy, that people should do what they want to do.”
