Categories
Queer

Gay Rape and Pedophilia

Between oysters and pizza at Gjelina and sultry nights in Hollywood the whole gay world went cray cray…

In less time than it takes to come up on Bath Salts the sex lives of some very powerful gay men in Hollywood changed dramatically.   The unfettered and often illegal activities those Peter Pan like older men were so used to getting away with… ceased… forever.

During the week hundreds of lurid photographs surfaced of a puffy faced Bryan Singer and his friends holding onto young boys at restaurants, in private jets and at clubs.  I wagged my finger at my lap top.  I told you so!  It was only a matter of time before Bryan’s life exploded like a ripe teen zit all over the internet.  Times they are a’changing.

Written by outsiders the Singer scenario seems absurd.  Bryan’s friends have names like second rate gangsters or third rate porn stars: Wayne Castro and Tommy Johnson. Brazenly, flagrantly, indiscreetly photographing themselves with boys and more boys… willow thin, pale and hairless.   Funnelling boys into Bryan’s world: club promoters, model agents and studio executives.

The scale of Bryan’s boy network, his boy compulsion can only be guessed at.  It is without doubt an addiction over which he is powerless, his life unmanageable.  Yet, to many… perfectly normal.   A sex addict amongst sex addicts.

He says, “I don’t see the point of knowing anyone unless I’m going to have sex with them.”

After the premiere I am invited to the Ritz in New York.  When I get to the room they’re there.  It’s one of those parties… the men and the boys.  Snorting coke, drinking beer, young boys sitting on the laps of those revolting, sour men.  It makes me sad and angry.  When I write about their party the following day they are outraged, they tell me to take it down…  I mean, I’ve been to straight parties and met trafficked eastern European girls… hookers.  I feel the same sadness.  They are a long way from home.  They sit with me until they realize I am useless to them.

A young, straight actor/waiter tells me proudly that Bryan takes him to an apartment, gives him drugs and alcohol, hires a pretty girl prostitute and throws himself into the mix as the boy fucks the girl.   The boy tells me that Bryan tapes the encounter.  He has a big smile on his face, this was the role of his lifetime.

By mid week the Singer scandal gains traction and the true colors of the gay community reveal themselves… unsurprisingly they were not the colors of the rainbow flag.  The first reaction from the gays, found in anonymous comments all over the gay online press, are more favorable toward Bryan than Michael Egan, his accuser.  The gays huffed and puffed about Egan having taken so long to come forward.  They say, he must have known what he was getting himself into and generally blaming the victim for his pubescent naivety.

My Bryan Singer blog piece went viral and Egan (who alleges rape) named three other predators… one of them Garth Ancier was once a Facebook friend.  During the press conference Egan’s mother sits by her terrified son.  She is crying.  She blames herself for not doing more.

Even though ‘everyone knew’ about Bryan and his hedonistic mates indulging in the joys of trafficking young flesh… it turns out this lifestyle is in fact a fantasy many Hollywood gays aspire.  They want what Bryan has: the parties, the money, the drugs and the sex. Bryan, they concluded, was living the gay dream.

I spoke with Lucas John who writes the well read blog WeHo Confidential.  Even though Lucas has written terrible things about the gays and their behavior in his blog (he boasts the gay mafia live in fear of photographs of their parties ending up on his site) he reassured me WeHo Confidential wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, it was ‘a game’. Lucas was shocked that anyone was taking Michael Egan seriously, that the wider world might now have a negative opinion about his ‘friend Bryan’.  Lucas vehemently stands by Bryan Singer.  This strident support is not unusual amongst the gays.  The support Bryan receives from the gays sounds like the support Sandusky received initially from Penn State, the support pedophile priests garnered from their reeling congregation and the Vatican.

The opinion from the ‘wider world’, as it turns out, is mixed.  Many news outlets are covering the story tentatively.  Why the caution?   They don’t want to be accused of homophobia.  They don’t want to get it wrong or upset their homo-collegues.  Gay news proprietors like Nick Denton at Gawker are trying to treat this gay tabloid story as they would a straight tabloid story but their readers think him a traitor.

LA gays are shocked and confused that their sex conduct could be considered somehow… wrong.  Those rules, they squealed, don’t apply to us.  Fucking a persistent, consenting 15-year-old wasn’t pedophilia, they scoffed.   It’s fun!  Don’t shame us!  Without a hint of irony they argue that the victim ‘could have said no’.

The victim could have said no.  The predator could have said no?  No.  The logic of the gays.

The truth is:  many gay men willingly had sex with older men (in lieu of our peers) when we were teenagers.  We liked it, we wanted more.  Most gays can’t understand why Egan is complaining.  After all, he got to hang with celebrities, taken on a private jet and all the drugs he could manage.

Gay men can’t get their heads around the reality of man/man rape.  It’s a total mystery to them.  Rape is what happens in porn films or to women or closeted straight men who can’t face the truth about their first anal experience.  Some gay men can’t make a connection between the girl held down and raped by the lacrosse team and the boy held under water and raped by the studio executive and his friends. There is a disconnect for most gay men between these two narratives.

The gays operated, until very recently, in the shadow of heterosexual society, where they evolved their own rules, their own standards, their own language.  The gays must now learn to live in the light and dance to a different tune.  For some this is a hard transition.  Facing the responsibilities equality affords us.  Like willful children holding onto old ideas.

Gays: It’s time to grow the fuck up.

On Wednesday I was hounded by Buzzfeed to tell what I knew about Bryan but generally I kept myself to my blog.  The comments section on Gawker lit up with the usual kind of screaming homo hate I have long been used to.  They claimed I was a hypocrite for ‘discrediting’ Bryan when I have a hairy 25-year-old boyfriend.  The difference?  My boyfriend and I have monogamous, consensual sex and have done for the past 8 months.

In other news, my old buddy the teen loving Dustin Lance Black hit the headlines again this week because his former college in Pasadena thought it inappropriate for an ex student who took pictures of himself having anal sex (with a porn star without a condom) lecture their students.  Lance Black cries Homophobia! and Shame!   He proves to be another entitled, white gay men who lives beyond the consequences of his actions.

I mentioned this to one of the bone fide journalists I met with this week.  I explained what I had seen, innocent boys being trafficked from model agencies in New York to the hot tubs of Hollywood.  He asked why I wanted to get involved… why I wanted to share my own story of gay Hollywood, knowing how unpopular my opinions are to my fellow tribe members.

I told him this:

When I was 8 years old I ran away from home, away from my abusive father.  When the police caught up with me I told them what was going on.  They took me home and told me if I ever repeated those allegations against my powerful and well-respected father they would fall on me ‘like a ton of bricks’.  This terrible injustice shaped my view of authority.  After the policeman left I suffered 6 more years of merciless brutality… in silence.

The gays have no sympathy for the abused because they have always felt abused,  they say: Suck it up, stop complaining, boo hoo.  They have learned to forget their miserable past, their bullies, their abusive parents.  They have learned to ignore what I refuse to ignore:  things must change and the only way that is going to happen?  We talk about the abuse/rape/pedophilia… we go on talking about it until it stops.

Until we can learn to say no without shame.

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Categories
Gay Rant

What Kind of Gay Am I?

Excuse me for rambling.  This may have something to do with the painkillers.  I don’t usually take pills but a mashed ankle and a severely strained leg…I gave in to the ibuprofen.

The news looks bad.  More unemployment misery, few jobs, double dip, creationism, President takes a vacation, stock market tanks, texting in church…etc.   That’s the news.

Some people are telling me that the only way the USA is going to save itself is when the American people accept third world wages.  The plan: the people will become so desperate they will work any job at any wage anywhere and the corporations will abandon India and China and return to America.

If this is true…and I suspect that it is, we are in for a long and desperate time.

There were journalists in helicopters filming black people lining up for a ‘Jobs Fair’ in Atlanta.  Well presented, educated black people.  The usual people who suffer when the economy slows.  Apparently some employers don’t want to interview the unemployed.  I have no idea why.  Can someone tell me?

The images from the helicopter reminded me of the Hurricane Katrina footage.   Desperate black people.  Waiting in badly organized lines.

“I’m a single mother and I am looking for a job.”

I’m not writing what’s been bugging me..apart from my aching foot.

I want to write about being gay, being a gay film maker/artist.   I have not written enough about my recent brush with the ‘gay community’.  I have been having the same multiple contractions of apprehension that I had years ago.

The same anxiety.  The same question plagues me…even after years of therapy and insight.

What kind of gay am I?

Is this the same question as what kind of man am I?  Is this a question I need answering?  I just don’t know who my tribe is.  The community that has sprung up around me on WordPress is as good as it gets.  I like that you write to me.  Some of you disapprove but you can’t get everybody to love you all the time.

Those of you who wanted the coyote to rip my throat out…well, it didn’t.

I called my friend Zach and I said, what kind of gay are you?  By the time he replied I had lost interest.

I don’t want to know what sort of gay he is.  I want to know who I am.

I tried to make gay films for a gay male audience…specifically, unapologetically.   We need to see ourselves as we really are.  We need to champion the language and locations of our lives as well as be critical of our bad choices, challenge our culture…reveal it, understand our politics..the differences as well as the similarities.

I loved making gay films, I loved travelling the world…meeting you in cinemas on every continent, in every major city.  I like meeting you, eating with you, sleeping with you.

You were very accommodating!

Recently, I have been tempted by the mass market.

I had a meeting with a well-known, important producer about my Surrogacy film.  Even though he was moved by the story he said that the story would be much improved if I could somehow incorporate a straight man’s perspective.  He thought a latino character would complicate the story.

He was part of the problem…not the solution.

His ‘take’ was woefully un-evolved.   Shame based.

At first I was irritated then it nagged at me: the suggestion that a regular audience could only identify with us if we sympathised with them.

I have sympathised with straight characters in movies all my life.  I have gone out of my way to understand their lives and loves.  I have walked in their shoes.

We all do.

I don’t think my producer friend is very interested in me.  He wasn’t interested in the film or the rare books he came to see.  I think he was interested in the twins.  Why shouldn’t he be?  It amuses me that he would have made so much effort to accommodate me when all he had to do was take Robby’s number.

Of course he has more to offer Robby than I ever could.  Robby would be a fool not to capitalize on that friendship.

I felt the same way when ever Jay Jopling visited me.  He would take what ever he felt he wanted..or was valuable from me.  He took a beaver lined Edwardian driving coat, he took books by Aubrey Beardsley and Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Parker.

He wasn’t the only one.

Korda Marshall borrowed and broke the rare and valuable  Venini vase that The Duchess of Argyll had given me.   Now he is rich I wrote to him asking him to replace it.  He did not reply to my email.

Robby is very special, he has a quality that may not get him modeling jobs but…and I rarely say this, may make him a star.

I felt that about Tom Hardy.  He used to be such a brat.  I had a very ‘loud chat’ with Tom in Soho House, London years ago about his excessive drinking.  He heeded my advice and gave up.  Then, a year or so later, he thanked me for telling him the truth.  A truth few dared to tell him.

In actuality I just repeated what Anthony Hopkins told me Lawrence Olivier had said to him about his drinking when he was a young actor at The National Theatre.

It seemed to work.

Pink (Alecia Moore) told me that the hardest thing she ever had to do was ditch her band.  The label wanted her and not the band.  They were her best friends.  She had to tell them as if it were own choice.

We all abandon those who helped us at the beginning.  We have to make hard decisions in life if we are going to get on.  Leaving our best friends behind so that we might succeed.  It is the secret story behind every Hollywood success.  Those that got left behind.

Lastly, from one of my personal heroes British gay activist Peter Tatchell:

“The UK establishment is quick to condemn rioters.  Yet, the police took bribes & failed to investigate phone hacking. No officers jailed. Cash for knighthoods & peerages. No one jailed. MPs abused expenses system. Only a few jailed. Editors bribed police. None jailed. Priests raped kids. No jail for most. Army killed & tortured civilians in Iraq. Soldiers not jailed. British elite = hypocrites. No right to moralize.”