Faith & Spirit Quote by Michael Musto

The line lands like a glitter-bomb of self-mythology, and that is exactly the point. Michael Musto built a career by turning nightlife reportage and cultural criticism into a kind of high-wire persona work: part columnist, part ringmaster, part confessional booth with better lighting. “For better or worse” signals a practiced awareness that nonconformity is not a moral halo; it’s a gamble that can read as bravery or narcissism depending on who’s judging and what power structures are in the room.

“March to my own drum” and “tell it like it is” are classic American self-branding slogans, but Musto tweaks them with two pressure points: “integrity” and “style.” Integrity is the claim to ethical seriousness; style is the admission that ethics alone won’t cut through the noise. In gossip-adjacent media, where proximity to spectacle can corrode credibility, he’s insisting that voice can be both weapon and shield. The subtext is defensive and triumphant at once: I’ve played in messy spaces, but I did it on my terms, and you can’t take that away.

Then comes the kicker: “God, I’m fabulous!” The exclamation is not just vanity; it’s camp as a rhetorical strategy. Musto winks at his own grandiosity to keep it from becoming sanctimony, folding ego into humor so the reader laughs with him instead of rolling their eyes at him. It’s also a queer-coded assertion of survival: fabulousness as armor, as joy, as refusal to be made small. The sentence performs what it proclaims, proving that the “style” isn’t decoration - it’s the delivery system.