Michael Musto (born December 3, 1955) is an American journalist who has long been a prevalent presence in entertainment-related publications, as well as on websites and television shows. Musto is best known as a columnist for The Village Voice, where he wrote the La Dolce Musto column of gossip, nightlife, reviews, interviews, and political observations. In 2021, he started writing articles about nightlife, movies, theater, NYC, and LGBTQ politics for the revived Village Voice, which returned as a print publication, with accompanying website. He is the author of the books Downtown and Manhattan on the Rocks, as well as a compilation of selected columns published as La Dolce Musto: Writings By The World's Most Outrageous Columnist and a subsequent collection, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back. He currently writes about pop cultural and sociopolitical issues for the Daily Beast and pens a monthly gossip column called "Read Now, Cry Later" for Queerty.com. Early life Musto was born in Manhattan to an Italian American family. He was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and graduated from Columbia University in 1976. During his studies, he was a theater critic for the Columbia Spectator. Career Musto is gay and has been published regularly in several LGBT publications, including Out and The Advocate. He contributes to Huffington Post, has written the weekly, entertainment-related Musto Unfiltered column for NewNowNext.com, and has had bylines in The New York Times, W, and Vanity Fair. Among Musto's first journalistic jobs were assignments covering culture for Circus magazine, SoHo Weekly News, and After Dark magazine, as well as becoming the music critic for Us magazine in the 1980s. In 1982, he began writing for Details, then a downtown style-and-nightlife magazine, and in 1984, Musto began his Village Voice column, after having already written features for the publication. Musto's breathlessly dishy and opinionated first-person column celebrated nightlife and LGBT personalities, described outlandish New York club fetes, and gave vital early coverage to up-and-coming performers like John Sex, RuPaul, Kiki and Herb, Bridget Everett, Jackie Hoffman, Bianca Del Rio and Peppermint. A 1989 appearance in Slaves of New York—based on Tama Janowitz's book centered on the New York nightlife scene—was called the film's only moment of credibility by critic J. Hoberman of The Village Voice. Other cameos through the years were made in Garbo Talks (1984), Day of the Dead (1985), Jeffrey (1995), Death of a Dynasty (2003), The Big Gay