Tag: Homosexuality

Categories
Hereford Queer Ross on Wye Walford

Rat King

The Empty Beehive

1.

The IHRA definition of anti-semitism has been weaponised. Adopted by those who scream any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. However, there is no IHRA definition for homophobia. Until there is an official definition… those of us who experience homophobia, casual or direct cannot call out the perpetrators with any assurance.

The reason there is no official definition of homophobia? Because if we ring fenced homophobia like some have ring fenced anti semitism most people would have to address their homophobia… making for a very uncomfortable time. If the definition of homophobia was as stringent as anti-semitism most everybody I know would qualify as a homophobe.

The reality is: There is no escaping from the stain of anti semitism in the Labour Party because the definition is inescapable.

I remain a non-compliant homosexual. Most gay men keep themselves to themselves. They have learned not to complain, they have coupled up in loveless mergers and they tell me I’m making an unnecessary fuss when I warn about the rise of the right and how our lives will be impacted. Tommy Robinson is not our friend. Religious people are not our friends. After the marriage equality win in the USA I cautioned lgbt people not to take their new freedoms for granted. They sneered at my pessimism. 6 years later I am proved sadly correct. Across the USA our rights are being eroded, even marriage equality has been challenged in some states.

I am the ‘other’. The one who will not back down, the one who may lose everything rather than bow to the wishes of the many. The man who would not take it any more. For years I ignored the homophobia I experienced until it became too violent or extreme. Some would say, ‘this isn’t about homophobia, this is about you’. Yet, the two are inextricable. I have been shaped by homophobia and those who attempt to shame me for being gay.

As a small boy I saw those around me hate gay men and I thought to myself: If they hate me for something I cannot change… I’ll give them every reason to hate me. So, I started a war against homophobes at first to protect myself, but as the years past and attitudes changed, I played those bastards for sport. Now, I habitually call out homophobia because it is my duty.

If I had been a gay man who towed the heterosexual line I may not have driven myself insane with casual homophobia. The nasty aside, the glaring look, the guys who violently demanded if I was looking at them, ‘what are you looking at?’ I wouldn’t have bothered reminding straight people at gay clubs how lucky they were to experience the sexual freedom they enjoyed in our lgbt spaces, a freedom I could never enjoy in straight clubs/bars etc. without risking my life

Quentin Crisp perfectly articulated how most gay men learn not to engage with strangers because they are frighted by the prospect of physical violence. Quentin told me in The Naked Civil Servant I should not directly look at anyone. I should not speak unless I am spoken to. Because he knew he risked certain death if he did. However, I refused to obey the rules. I looked at anyone. I told men they were beautiful when they deserved it. I refused to be bowed. I behaved like any other working class men behaved with woman… with men.

Straight people don’t get to tell me what is homophobic. Straight people need to check their privilege and think twice before they speak to me about homophobia. So, it is with some curiosity I now unfold before you a continuing drama at the land in Walford, Herefordshire where we are attempting to get planning permission to park the car. When I first went to Walford I knocked on the doors of the neighbours attempting to introduce myself, some were very friendly, others less so. It didn’t take long for them to google me and decide I wasn’t neighbour material. My gay story of contentious opposition did not suit them.

The man left… I lay in the flickering light of the mute television. I thought about rats, their tails entwined in some gruesome death. A rat king.

A rat king is a mischief of rats whose tails are bound together by one of several possibilities. Entangling material like hair or sticky substances. The number of rats joined together varies from a few to very many. They remain intertwined until death parts them.

The residents of Cherry Tree Lane, Walford came marching as one into the Parish Council meeting at Walford Church last Wednesday. Crippled by resentment these sour hill-dwelling homeowners, their tails entwined like rats, gummed together, furious, emotional. Whipped into a frenzy of hate by our neighbour at Foxwood House, Fran Blackwell. Dragging her gormless husband Andrew behind her. The same husband we threatened a ‘cease and desist’ for haranguing and insulting anyone we employ to work on our land.

Cherry Tree Lane

Andrew, who rather than enjoying the last of his foggy years, has to act as gate keeper at the end of the lane, defending what little they have. His onerous duty, his frail figure poorly wrapped in the bitter cold. Angular, tall and oblivious as only dementia can render a full grown man.

When we applied for planning… threats followed. I’m used to threats. I’m used to facing the angry mob. The police at early gay pride marches. The demonstration outside the theatre at the gay play. They hate you for speaking up for yourself. They expect you to bow to their heterosexual will. Some of the neighbours on Cherry Tree Lane are no different. So, when they threatened me with a gun… I’m not bowed. When they tie laminated notices on our fence… I laugh. When they put empty bee hives on the land I simply remove them. It’s like being on a tweedy episode of the Jeremy Kyle show.

Now the slut shaming neighbours sit behind me at the council meeting. John Lewis from the ugly 80’s house (ironically called Halcyon Days) his fat red face and waxed jacket fixing me with his best impression of an intimidating stare. He looks like a demented alcoholic. You know the ones… with huge noses. John owns John Lewis Fine Foods, his wife called her neighbours telling them she had no objection to our development, just an objection to me. I am going to report John Lewis to Companies House as unfit to run a company. Andrew Williams from Starry Way, Cherry Tree Lane (before I arrived in Walford) had an appalling reputation on the Hill. Well known as a nasty piece of work… he glances at me but cannot bring himself to look me in the eye. I’m told Andrew works as a state sponsored thug for some governmental GCHQ type organisation. Obviously a candidate for an asbergers diagnosis,  Andrew arrives at the meeting looking like a cartoon undertaker. He sits in his over tight black suit and tie, his neck bulging over a soiled white collar. He is accompanied by his smug wife.

Sitting beside pouting Andrew frail, ex-lawyer Phil Watters shakes with rage. His delicate wrists folded into his flaccid lap like an elderly dowager Duchess. Emaciated Phil and his plump, much older wife Pam live in The Rocks which they run as a dank bed and breakfast. You can see the interior of their dreary house on line. It looks like it might be a themed experience? For those who want to stay at a palliative care home. Maybe they keep a priest in their converted pig shed for guests who come to die slowly from either the Watter’s killer decor or their stultifying conversation? Receiving the last rights rather than a full english. Oh… the pig shed. Did the Watter’s get planning approval for their pig shed conversion into holiday accommodation? Or didn’t they?

Then there’s amazonian Janet Shaw-Crabtree (an affected double barrelled name), the red headed wife of Steve Crabtree, who works at the BBC and live in Greystone House, the local ‘big house’. My friend’s aunt once lived in Greystone House when it was called The Eyrie. Janet, really should know better, sitting at the back of the Parish Council meeting recording everything on her pink, rubber comedy phone.

Janet and Steve invited me into their home when I first visited Walford two years ago. Janet, after three large glasses of gin, asked, “Why can’t you live somewhere else?” We left the party prematurely on account of Janet’s halitosis. The kind of halitosis one can smell a yard from her rancid mouth. Maybe she has rotten gums from excessive gin drinking and hair dye?

At the Parish Council meeting angry Fran and Andrew are lost in the melee at the back of the narthex. Smelly Janet and cunty Fran are perfectly happy to have their phone and electricity cables on our land but could not bring themselves to have it re-routed onto theirs. Jan, Fran and Pam: tonight they look like women who are sure they’ve won the war. Knitting gleefully by the guillotine.

Pam Watters is a respected Airbnb super host, tonight with her rat gang she looks less than a gracious doyenne as described in her many Trip Adviser 4 star reviews, instead she sits pinched and puckered by her anorexic husband. My neighbour David Astwood from dreary Killara House is a slim, mouse man who may or may not be gay… sandwiched between Phil and Andrew, his glasses slipping off his tiny snout. I can hear him behind me grooming his whiskers. Like a Beatrix Potter rodent I’ve seen him pottering up the lane on his electric bicycle. Whenever David sees my representatives on the hill he demands to know who they are, tells them lies about me, advises them they shouldn’t work for me and then demands they google me. Well… Google this, David Astwood mouse man.

I look back at their pale, white faces patinated by veins of fury as it dawns upon them their trip to the beautiful medieval Walford church isn’t going to plan. Rather than putting a little effort into researching how the Parish Council meeting actually works or listening to Frank, the leader of the Parish Council, who explains carefully and in detail how the public get to speak at the beginning of the meeting about anything on the agenda. When the time came for public representation the hurd sat mute and incapable.

When it is my turn to speak (I am invited to present the reasons for our planning application) the rats at the back squirm and squawk realising they’d lost their opportunity to have their say. John Lewis… the entitled, fat faced man from Halcyon Days angrily told the leader of the meeting the rules needed changing after he was told to shut up.

“I’ve lived here for 38 years.” John Lewis screams.

“Yes, and my friends have owned this land for 60 years”, I parry.

“Change the rules!” John Lewis demands.

Of course, that’s what entitled people like him…. do. The white middle class change the rules to suit themselves when they are too stupid to do a little basic research. Overcome with white privilege and false courage David Astwood the trembling mouse man timidly calls me a liar. Squeaking from the back, raising his skinny fist.

I am used to dealing with the mob. During the meeting I speak confidently and directly to the council members. Most of them are local land owners, fully aware of the trials of gaining planning permission and more significantly… nibyism. The land owners looked piteously at the serried ranks of home owners come to bully me with their thinly disguised homophobia. The application passed without objection. I looked back at Phil Watters the ex solicitor whose lips had now turned blue with rage and… I smiled. I smiled a big, gay smile.

Scott Low is one of the planning enforcement officers from Hereford County Council. Sadly, he has not remained impartial or correctly informed during his investigation of this simple matter. He has allowed himself to be bullied by forces beyond his control. He has confused and muddied what he himself described when we first met as a simple ‘permitted development’.

Last September I called Hereford Council letting them know I intended stabilising our barn on Cherry Tree Lane and reinstate access. Preempting complaints from the neighbours I wanted written confirmation from the council before I started work. I left several messages and emailed the planning department many times but had no luck reaching the duty planning officer. I left one final message before the contractor turned up, making clear I had tried making contact and I would start work on the barn that afternoon. I let them know I would interpret their silence as a tacit agreement: I would stabilise the barn and reinstate access to the land.

Finally, Adam Lewis the duty planning officer called me and agreed I could get on with what I wanted without any planning approval. I asked him to write to me which he did, giving me permission and making clear what I could and couldn’t do. At no time did he say I needed planning permission to reinstate access to the land. He did not mention ‘permitted development’ nor did he mention I would require planning permission to get onto our land or stabilise the barn.

After work began on Cherry Tree Lane Fran Blackwell and others called Scott Low demanding he stop us from working on our land. Scott appeared on site with a big scowl on his face. He told us to stop work which we did immediately. I was advised to apply for retrospective planning permission so employed planning consultant Bernard Eacock to draw up the appropriate plans and make the appropriate application.

Then it became apparent Scott Low was pressured to make my life as difficult as he could. Scott Low insisted we get an ecological survey then retracted his demand. Scott Low demanded our tree surgeon stop work at the site then admitted he did not have the power to request this. I met with Balfour Beatty whose predecessors had resurfaced Cherry Tree Lane six years ago and begrudgingly accepted responsibility for a step up to our land. Balfour Beatty let me know they had no objection to the work I’d carried out yet somehow Scott Low managed to find a highway objection.

We received 19 objections to our proposed access to the land at Cherry Tree Lane from local residents. All of whom have had at least one planning application passed without any objection and some… like Phil and Pam Watters may not have bothered with a planning application at all and just built what they wanted. In their whiney objections the neighbours complained about traffic… yet the Watters are allowed to run a very busy bed and breakfast increasing traffic on the lane by 50% a week.

Standing on our hardcore with Kevin, the Balfour Beatty site manager, one of the neighbours (he looked like I always imagined Eddy Grundy from The Archers) stopped his filthy car and told me I wasn’t welcome on the lane and I should bugger off. We laughed. “God,” Kevin said, “what do they put in the water up here?”

Hereford Council, colluding with the hysterical residents, did not redact personal or inappropriate remarks from the posted online objections. In effect Hereford Council are colluding with gun toting homophobes.

I left Walford Church and drove back to the hotel in Ross. After a short while in the bar with my friends I lay on a huge white bed. I checked the gay dating apps on my phone and soon had a local man riding me like an eager yearling. Enjoying the sweat and rough kisses of yet another closeted brick layer. I didn’t ask his name, his thick arms and thighs burying me in this new flesh I found, burying me enough to erase the faces of those nimby fools at the Walford Parish Council meeting. Enough to transport me far, far away.

The following day Phil Watters, the frail ex solicitor told his next door neighbour he risked getting hurt if he continued supporting my planning application. The same neigbour was forced off the road by Andrew Williams, made to scramble for his life. He was frightened Andrew would kill his dog. The neighbour lodged a complaint with the police. PC Ashley North from West Mercia Police advised the neighbour, ‘things get heated’ when there are planning disagreements. PC North also investigated the homophobic invective and the threats of gun violence.

2.

I returned last year from the USA with a renewed passion for equality. I was interested to know what it was like for gay people in Whitstable. The town of my birth and formative years. There are plenty of out gay couples and singles in Whitstable, Ed and Scott for instance. The guys who own Fred and Ginger builders who seem single handedly responsible for architect lite additions to ugly semis all over town. Their taste is lamentable and obvious… anyone who owns ubiquitous Tom Dixon lighting needs to think twice about their taste level. I think you know what I mean.

Like many gay men they do ok, because they ‘don’t want trouble’ they want others to challenge the status quo and merely enjoy the consequence of difficult people like me making it better for people like them. So, I started looking for examples of homophobia as and when I experienced them.

a) A young man made an appointment with me who wants to go into the film industry. He cancelled at the last moment. He was warned off because I was gay.

That is homophobia.

b) Zana Gradus, the rich owner of systems technology, is a remarkable women but let’s face it… when she tells me I am the kind of man she wants to meet then looks annoyed and tells me that being gay… is a waste.

That is homophobia.

c) When Nikki Billington the owner of JoJo’s Restaurant (arrested for people smuggling) tells her friends she doesn’t believe I am gay and adds a whole cache of equally vile invective from her homophobic canon including a list of resentments she has carried around for twenty years.

That is homophobia.

d) When Nick Batchelor screams he doesn’t ‘give a fuck’ what people do in bed… when I share my experience of being gay adding, ‘you can fuck animals for all I care.’

That is homophobia.

They ask about my work in the film industry, they ask if if they have ever heard of my films? I tell them I made LGBTQ films for niche audiences. They ask me if I ever make normal films.

That is homophobia.

But of course, Nikki and Zana, Nick and the Bulls Hill neighbours can’t be homophobic because they know gays. Ha! That tired old trope wheeled out to pink-wash ingrained homophobia.

My gay history is their homophobic playground and because I, like all lgbt… have had to construct my own definition of homophobia rather than have the IHRA do it for me… all of the above can get away with what they want. I have called the police but the police are really incapable of doing anything.

White heterosexual privilege is beyond question. Most people don’t mean to be stupid or homophobic, they don’t consider themselves cruel. The majority aren’t… they are simply careless, thoughtless, inconsiderate. Yet, some know exactly what they are doing, they expect to shame, malign and diminish me and get away with it. Don’t get me wrong, people like Ed and Scott the gay builders are just as liable as anyone else. In an environment when people like me pull up people like them, fragile white people have everything to lose. Consequently they coalesce around extreme politics and rise up against anyone not like them.

I can’t imagine things getting any better on Cherry Tree Lane, not any time soon. Perhaps I will indeed end up with a bullet in my head. Let’s see how far they’ll go to protect themselves from the other.

Categories
Gay Rant

i am not gay

IMG_3401

1.

Nope.  Not any more.

I AM NOT GAY.  I am OUT.

Unambiguous?

My New Years resolution: don’t call me gay.

I am The Other.  I am simply… Out.

I have resigned my gay membership.  I renounce the word GAY.

The Other is different from you.  He is neither superior nor inferior.

He is not alone.  He is out.

2.

Are you kidding?  I still like sex with men… but I’m not interested in being gay.   Do you understand what I’m saying… gays?  Yes you.  I’m talking to you.   I’M TALKING TO YOU!  Yes you, the gay in the bar, on the street, editing his Grindr profile.

Let’s face it.  This separation will work out just fine for both of us.

I loathe you and you hate me.

I know, amongst other things, what galls you… you (particularly) don’t like when men in their fifties own up to having a rich and varied sexuality:   I’ve been called a ‘dirty old man’ by more gays than I ever have by straights for wanting or having beautiful younger men in my bed.  The gays write it anonymously.  They post it all over the place, whenever they can.  As If I should be ashamed?

You, you who have cornered the market in nihilism, immorality, homogeneousness, bitchery, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, self-obsession… in fact anything with the self prefix… apart from self-awareness.

I am peeling off the parade.  I am letting the party wend its way elsewhere.

2. (a)

They told me at Triangle House in LA when we were making our documentary about older gay people:  they say that old gay people end up going back into the closet because… it can get ugly… it can get dangerous.   They say that gay men are more likely to end up homeless than in any other demographic… because they have no community.

You gays are the very worst at hating yourselves.  But you reserve more venom for the elderly homosexual than any other group.  It is a sickening idea to many young gays, that we (the elderly) exist.  Some young gay people believe that past 50 our penises shrink appropriately into our bodies.  Retract.  In old age we become like wrinkly Ken dolls with smooth, pink groins.

No longer a threat to anyone.

I thought that when I became old… I would start wearing women’s clothes.

Where do young gay men learn how to be dignified old gay men?  I learned from older men in AA how to be an older man.   The respect that AA old timers get, applauded for their contribution to the community of AA stands in stark contract to the respect that older gay people don’t get from younger gay people.  Unless, of course, they are famous… or comical freaks… or rich enough to buy the boys they used to get for free.

Young gay people don’t want to be reminded that the party comes to an end.

2 (b)

So, today…

I resign my membership.  I am no longer a true believer.  I’m handing back my awards, my medals, my history, my pride.

It’s yours not mine.  Take it.

I renounce: gay pride, gay film festivals, gay beaches, gay basketball, gay bars, the gay ghetto, the gay plague, gay marriage, gaybies, gaydar.com, gays in the military, gay cruises, cottaging, felching, gay news, gay voice, gay face, the gay sub section in the book/video store/Huffington Post.

So help me God!

I’m praying the gay away!

The terms of this divorce:

You can keep it all.  The gay plays I made, the gay films I directed, the gay art I painted/etched/sculpted.

Take everything I ever made in your honor.

If you don’t want it?  Burn it.

2 (c)

When I offered our award-winning film catalogue of gay films to The Legacy Project (the gay and lesbian film preservation project) based out of UCLA… the gays turned it down.  Even though AKA  had won the LA Outfest audience award and opened (and closed) many gay film festivals all over the world with all of my films.

The Legacy Project said no to the free gift.  They wanted me to disappear.  They don’t want any evidence that I existed.  As a man or an artist.

“He’s trouble.”  “He’s angry.”  “He’s a parasite.”

Gays!  Look at what you’ve become!  Examine, for just one goddamned gay second…. the mediocrity!  Your righteous indignation! Your mock elegance!

Being with you is like drowning in cold tea.

3.

I don’t drink or take drugs.  Tom blew weed into my face.   He put vodka into my virgin mary.  That’s how the gays bully one another.   Try wearing something unusual when your companions  just want to be invisible.

“Who does he think he is?”

Their artificially deepened voices.  The plaid shirt, the super hero tee.  The cloak of invisibility.

INVISIBLE.

Tom asked incredulously, “What are you wearing?”  A man who wears nothing but ugly jeans, ill-fitting t-shirts.

Tom has an ‘opinion’ about individuality:  He doesn’t believe in it.  These gays are terrified of being seen.  Gripped by the politics of invisibility.   At least that grotesque, lying freak I used to date… he and his boy friend have some sartorial audacity.

Even if it is TOTALLY misguided.

Who are these gays?  These invisigays?

Like Tom, they may appear normal.

4.

How can a gay man expect to age with dignity when nobody gay wants to age at all?

I saw it in LA… my destiny. If I chose to take it.   At first, Adam looked just like any other confident gay man claiming to be 48.  His gay parties are the talk of the town.  Richer than most of his friends, though not very well connected … not to the real gay power in LA.

I mean, David Geffen wouldn’t be seen dead at this piss elegant, graceless house in the Hollywood Hills.

Adam invented the heart valve.  At one of his parties (to his chagrin) I photographed every single one of his guests.  A snap shot of LA gay life.

He has never been elegant, he has never been a great beauty.  He will never be tall.  He is, however, manicured, botoxed, his teeth reinvented, his flawless skin, his demeanor… (that only great wealth lends you).

It was at that last raucous party I attended (as a plus one) I saw him upset (rattled)… why?

He looked like an old, vulnerable man.

“What happened?”  I asked the gays.

They told me imperiously (as if it were obvious) that the young, chiseled boy he imported from NYC just wanted him for his money.   Adam looked… beaten.  Crest fallen.  His frail hands shook, the delicate skin around his eyes failing.

The gays stood around helplessly as their host fell apart.  They stared into the plastic cups of vodka.  They played with their nipples.  The pimps and the whores waited silently by the sodden beer pong.  He turned the music off.  Finally, he threw everyone out.

They lined up on the steep drive.  A hideous parade of grotesquely young boys, graded online or in public bars for their sexual prowess, their social fallibility, their youth.

The man who invented the heart valve, it seems, suffered from a broken heart.

5.

Take the gay man who gave up his 160k surrogate child for adoption because she had a small birth defect on one of her legs.

Yes, you heard me.

When we interviewed the doctor who makes hundreds and thousands of gay dollars from the gayby industry… he told us that the gays want perfection.  Nothing less will do.

Take it all… this gay culture.  This gay community.  Take it.

Take the video of Bryan with 25 Bel Ami boys jacking off over him.  Moisturized with Czech sperm.

Or the man/boy with the huge cock who they pay to sleep with a hooker and unbeknownst to him… tape him.

This tribe of entitled, elitist gays clinging to gay marriage and their smart phones.

6.

I had lunch today with a 30-year-old man/boy who just came out.  “Why did it take you so long, ” I ask, “To tell the truth?”  He said, “I didn’t… (he paused dramatically) …I mean I still don’t… I don’t want to be gay.”

“That’s ok,” I reassured him.  “You can describe yourself however you want.”

When, as frightened teens, blooming… prepubescent boys… infants… when we understand that we want to fall in love and fuck and suck and slide into another man… what choices do we have?   To describe ourselves?

Gay is the only way.   And if you don’t know what you are.  The gays will tell you exactly what you are.

The gays are so prescriptive.

He’s gay, they claim conspiratorially.  They claim anyone ‘hot’ is gay.  They all know someone who had sex with Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman.  “He’s fucking his ‘assistant’.”   Oh Yes!  He’s had sex with a man… he’s gay.  He’s experimented… he’s gay.

Prescriptive.

6 (a)

Hollywood does not lend itself to morals.

CAA agent Kevin Huvane.  When you first meet him, he shakes your hand and pulls you toward him.   Trying to pull you off-balance.  The first time he met me… it worked (I was rocked) the second and third times I was prepared and we set to a gay tug of war, an argy bargy, him attempting to pull me and me attempting to pull him.

The fourth time I let him pull me onto him.  I crashed into him.  His tiny frame overwhelmed by 6′ 2″ me.  He landed in a heap beneath me.  “Oh sorry,” I said.  “You pulled me toward you.  I lost my balance.  Sorry… Kevin.”

He’ll put you on a ‘list’ they told me.  “I’m on so many lists.” I murmured.  “More lists than Cathy Griffin.”

7.

After claiming on the Dr. Drew show that I wanted to make healthy decisions about sex.  Somebody wrote to me or about me:  If Duncan Roy doesn’t like gay sex… he isn’t gay.  He wasn’t far from the truth.  At first, I was outraged by their attempts to isolate, malign and lambaste me.   They had tried for years.  Without success.  Every time they try… they fail.   This last time… the jail.  What the hell did they expect?  That I would buckle?

Those who throw rocks at me are seldom innocent of that which they accuse.

8.

The Gays, have become so… bourgeois.  Do you understand what that means?  Let me refresh your memory:

Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.

When I was young… gays like you knew their place.  They stayed in the closet.  I mean.  Coming out of the closet was brave!  Now anyone can do it and become a fucking hero.

9.

Gays… why are you killing yourselves?   You kill yourself because you can’t take a joke, because you can’t hold your liquor, because you can’t say no to crystal… because you don’t want to be gay.  I don’t remember young gay people killing themselves in the UK.

It gets better?

What gets better?

Better than death?

10.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when any oppressed group gets a bit of equality… but what will the USA gays do with their equality?

I’ll tell you.  They will make it even harder for the rest of us to be different.   There is a hideous conformity to which these young gays feel they must adhere.   Gay life in the USA.  A blushing desire for ‘straight acting’ has become a tsunami of heternoramativity.   The foundation on which this miserable gay monolith now stands.

Who are you?

A greek god, perfectly muscled, forever young… dressed to be ignored, as bland a personality as he can effect.  He is Peter Pan, he is Hercules, his personality as glittering as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Do you care about anything other than marriage equality?  No.  He eats what his parents eat.  He would vote republican if they could only find it in their neo con hearts to see that the gays are perfect conservatives.

So.  We are divorced.  I am no longer gay.  I’m OUT.  I’m out of here.  I’m out but I’m not gay.

Happy New Year!

Categories
Gay Love politics

Marriage Equality and Shabbat

Lady Rizo in Kokon To Zai

Sunday 23rd 2012.

New Harris tweed trousers.  They are so thick and keep the cold wind from whipping around my legs.

I had two very different experiences on Friday.

1.

The first, an unfortunate spat on Facebook with a Canadian writer called Michael Rowe.

I think you know, those of you who read this regularly, that I struggle with marriage as the means by which gay and straight people find parity.

That marriage in of itself doesn’t seem to work for many of the people who sign up for it… so why do so many men and women in the LGBQ community want it so badly?

Is it just because they want the ‘benefits’?

I thought about it a great deal this week.

For those of us gay men and women who are now in our early fifties marriage was never an option.  I never hankered after it, nor cared to think about it.

I read this in a British newspaper.

British MPs are planning to create an “exception” in marriage law for same-sex couples and will not alter the definition of adultery.

Either they don’t take us seriously or we don’t take us seriously?

Perhaps gay marriage is indeed separate from straight marriage because we can’t be trusted with monogamy?

Those I respect seem to value marriage equality… so I have been posting thoughts and feelings on my Facebook page.

I am perturbed by how many angry responses I get whenever I write about my marriage equality concerns.

If marriage equality was all we needed or wanted are we selling ourself short? Are we like any cultural minority that lives side by side the majority needing to be tolerated rather than nurtured? Do we need to be understood? Do they need to learn our language? Or, like Hasidic Jews do we evolve separately once we are ‘equal’. Somehow this is not attractive to me.

This question incensed Michael Rowe.

Where are you getting “all we needed or wanted” from? It’s a basic right. That’s not “tolerance,” that’s equality and strength.

The conversation continued privately.

Talking to Michael was like talking to a Zionist.  Realizing that his problem with what I was saying was more about me than the conversation I decided to tread carefully.  He is the sort of man who believes that any gay who comes out of the closet is an unqualified hero.

I’m not an intellectual, nor am I particularly bright… but I am willing to listen… and I am desperate to understand why I am so conflicted about marriage equality.

Because, I think,  it doesn’t seem like equality at all.

So, why am I bothering to fight for something I simply don’t believe in?

It feels like another way to join another elite gang.  A gang that will, if given half the chance, bully you mercilessly.

I’ve seen straight women do this.  Brag about their married status to their unmarried friends.  Causing those unmarried women to burst into tears when they are far enough away from their persecutor.

I asked Michael what he thought marriage would do to our gay culture.  I said, I really want to understand your position.

Not sure what there is to “understand.” Until there is no foundation of complete legal equality for LGBT people, the rest of it, worrying about “our culture,” is frosting with no cake. That’s my position.

Our gay culture is very important to me.  Even if it is on a separate page, in it’s own section at the book shop or the video store or on Netflix.   I enjoy the separation.   You see, I’m not very interested in what straight people make of me or the culture that has sprung up around me.

What will marriage equality do to the gay community?

How will these huge changes affect us and our behavior toward other gay man and women.

If a gay man tells his straight friend that he is getting married will his straight friend feel a flush of envy?

I asked if Michael felt ‘more equal’ than his American friends? He said:

Of course I do. I have approximately 300 more rights than American gay couples whose relationships are not legally recognized, rights that have financial and legal implications.

And no, I don’t feel sorry for gay couples who aren’t married by their choice, but I do feel sorry for those who don’t have that choice.

I don’t think that screaming about how proud you are not to be married carries a lot of weight when that right isn’t even on the table.

Like employment protection. Or do you also feel that a law that protects LGBT Americans from being fired also hurts “our culture?”

Oh dear, Michael was watching the NRA press conference at the time so his irritation may be excused.

He is, as you know, a very important Huffington Post blogger.

A ‘gay voice’.  In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huff Post.

There is a great deal in this last quote that may make you wince… as I winced.

I come from England where Tony Blair gave Waheed Ali carte blanche to equalize the lives of hetero and homo sexual people.

I remember eating lunch in Malibu with Waheed who explained to me how the legislation was written.

He explained that the word Marriage may have been attractive to some but perhaps a little too divisive. They chose civil unions as the way forward.

Total equality (excluding the word marriage) was a great incremental step in the right direction and one that the majority of my gay friends in long-term relationships were happy to embrace.

Michael is not so sure.

“Civil unions” aren’t marriage, and they’re not equality.

He continued inaccurately:

They weren’t “chosen,” they were all they could get because no one would allow them to be married, with full marriage equality, including the rights of citizenship for spouses.

Just to be perfectly clear: the British do have rights for citizenship for spouses and UNMARRIED partners.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

After many years of legal parity, the British gays… from a position of strength are asking for the word marriage and asking a very conservative government to boot. They are certain to succeed.

Civil Union may be the best incremental baby step on offer?

What are the incremental baby steps that seem to get American gays no closer to federal recognition of same-sex marriage?

Married Michael Rowe is very proud of his life.

He has achieved what his parents probably wanted for him all through his childhood. The dream of a heteronormative existence.

The rest of the conversation disintegrated into name calling. He called me tiresome, I ended up calling him a cunt and he blocked me on FB and that was that.

If I were in my early thirties I might think that this is a golden age for gay men and lesbians.  That I could enjoy a fully ‘out’ existence,  meet the man of my dreams, marry him, buy some surrogate children and live happily ever after.

That is a perfectly lovely dream to have.

But I am still in two minds.  Shouldn’t we all be fighting for something more than marriage, that marriage should not allow those who are to have so much more than those who are not?

This is not equality.

Some married gay men (like Michael)  are already behaving like my mother and grandmother behaved toward their spinster/old maid/barren friends.  Looking down their married noses.

Do I feel cheated out of different sort of gay life?  If I had grown up around gay men getting married would I have thought differently about the men I dated and the future we could have had?

I have, undoubtedly, missed the man/man marriage boat.   Joe and I talked about it briefly.

When I was growing up the thought of marriage (one man to another) was simply not a consideration.  Like an orthodox jew would never think about eating bacon.  I didn’t really think anything of not being married.

Being brought up in a small town where the majority of my straight peers had children but no marriage… marriage seemed Victorian and absurd.  The people who were getting married were not… cool.  They were… boring.

My straight friends who remained unmarried with many children did very well for themselves.  They ran successful businesses. Their children went to great universities.  They struggled and excelled equally along side those children who came from married families and broken homes.

There really was no difference between them and any other child.

The emphasis on family values seems to have gripped the gays as firmly as the straights.

What ever family means we don’t want to be left out of the explanation.

We all have a family of sorts.  Some have blood relatives, others have an extended family of strangers.

Obviously, I have invested in the latter and have never been let down.

Which brings me to the final part of my blog today.

2.

Sitting with the dogs on Franklin outside my coffee shop of choice I met a young Rabbi.

Charming, Cambridge educated and very enthusiastic.

He invited me to Shabbat the following Friday night.

I had, of course, enjoyed many a Friday night with the Cohen’s in LA.   David, his wife and their 6 children.  40 people for pot luck dinner around a huge table on the lawn then talking about world events with a talking stick.  It was perfect.

This Shabbat was very different.

There were several rabbinical students.  I arrived mid prayer.  For an hour we prayed.

The most exquisite boy with the most beautiful voice (and a baby) sang something on his own before the others joined in.   When he started singing I began to cry.

They prayed and sang (they sang in Hebrew) and faced East, my rabbi friend was particularly enthusiastic.  I sat beside him and he kept apologizing for everything, as if it were a trial for me to be there… when in fact it was beautiful.

I sat there thinking about the gays.  After my run in with Michael.

I wondered if they would have confused my thoughts about how beautiful the singer was with wanting to fuck him.  That most of my gay friends wouldn’t have just enjoyed him, they would have wanted to fuck him.  “He’s hot…”

We ate a huge dinner.  We washed our hands ritually.  After the dinner and conversations with truly wonderful people (I avoided talking Palestine) we sat together for more prayers and a fascinating chat about the Torah.

The young rabbinical students and scholars discussed in a really modern and interesting way what I had been taught was the Old Testament.

Jacob, Joseph and the blessing of the Pharaoh:

My years have been few and difficult.

They talked about other things.

A young man with thick, raven black hair told us he had just visited Sandy Hook.  To offer ‘solace’.

At first I was irritated by the apparent intrusion, it seemed so arrogant.

I was wrong.

He explained that the town was packed with people from all over the world.  That he had witnessed a funeral of one of the murdered children and the parents of the dead child were holding up signs in the car that said, very simply:  “THANK YOU.”

I found him after dinner and thanked him for reminding me that it’s easy to let other people do the difficult tasks.

If Sandy Hook had been an isolated incident then I might have felt differently but Sandy Hook is part of a macabre American theme and we must all, collectively… own it.

It is our responsibility.

That young Jewish man and his five friends had taken responsibility and travelled to Sandy Hook.

By doing so, they had a spiritual awakening.  They were thanked by the parents of dead infants.

They understood (unlike those of us who did not go) something more about America, about bravery, about priority, about consequence.

The two parts of my day could not have been more different.  The childish spat with an entitled gay man and the spiritual warmth of new family offered me by a group of heterosexual strangers.

Inclusion versus exclusion.

Last night Lady Rizo and I had dinner with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter.  I was not the only gay at the dinner for 50.  I avoided the other gays.

I have nothing to say to any of them.

Categories
Gay Rant

Andy Gipson Kills Gays for Jesus

Dear Andy Gipson Mississippi state Rep. (R),

Apparently, on Facebook recently, you posted a note advocating the murder, slaughter, deaths of homosexuals after (black) President Obama had some personal feelings about gay marriage.

Well, I wholeheartedly support your ‘put homosexuals to death’ position…you know…kill a gay for Jesus. Yay. You’ve got my support.

However, I support you on one condition. You can kill any one of us..as long as you can look us in the eye and kill us with your bare hands. Your hands around our throats. For Jesus.

You know, like vegetarians who urge carnivores to try killing their own meat before they eat another burger.

I mean, it’s one thing to say something terrible like that Andy but it’s another doing it…isn’t it?

I’ve posted some pictures of some gay people and their friends below for you to imagine shooting or gassing.

I saw you with your kids. You’re obviously a good dad. I mean…apart from wanting to commit genocide.

Have you seen pictures of the gestapo on their days off? Holding their kids in their arms?

I noticed too that you dress your kids in army uniforms. Are you training them to kill gays?

I was in a pub once called the Admiral Duncan in London that was bombed by a man like you who wanted to kill gays. He killed as many heterosexuals as he killed homosexuals. He went to prison for a very long time.

Will it make you happy or sad when you squeeze the life out of your first gay?

Andy!!! God forbid! Have you ever thought your children might be homosexual? What will you do when your children want to come out? When your children ‘come out’ will you enjoy killing them?

How will you feel? Taking their lives for Jesus? I thought you people were pro-life?

Apparently, at the concentration camps in Germany (during the last great state sanctioned homocleansing) where large numbers of gays and lesbians were murdered…the guards tortured us before butchering us.

Could you imagine doing that?

Do you ever have thoughts like that?

How exactly do you want to kill us? I mean, there are millions of us…in God’s great plan…he sure fucked things up.

Disposing of all that gay meat and bones may very well increase the deficit you despise so much.

I’ve given your problem of eradicating us gays a great deal of thought.

It occurs to a simple-minded man like me that however many of us you kill we will return.

Every generation you straight people manage to make more gay people.

If, for instance, you could determine when we were fetus that we might be gay…would you offer free abortions to women…NOOOO!!!! No abortions. Nothing FREE!!! The deficit!!

OH…yes…we’re probably evidence of the devil’s work? Is that right? But, I can eat garlic and sprinkle holy water on my forehead without turning to dust or the water burning my skin.

I must admit that I’ve thought about murdering some of my exes and if you could start…when the day comes…and you get permission to murder us…can you murder my ex first? I mean, before me. So I can see it happen maybe? Then you can turn the gun on me.

Have you ever considered just murdering gay people for fun? You seem like you might enjoy it.

Thank God Jesus has people like you to help him at difficult times like this.

I thought ‘thou shalt not kill‘ was a commandment but you people seem to make this bible stuff up as you go along.

Do you think you could help me go straight, stop hankering after a mouthful of cock?

I may renounce my gayness and come join your congregation. Come and live at your house. Ex gay. I’m too old to be gay anyway.

No. I’m not doing that. I’m a butt fucking gay. Too old to be ashamed of who I am. Too old.

I live in California. If you are ever here and feel like killing me for being gay…or any other reason…just let me know.

Facebook me.

And just in case you didn’t think it could get any worse:

The charming words of Charlie Worley, another gay killing pastor.

 

Categories
Gay

The Way We Were

19 Years Old

If gay marriage had been an option when I was young would I have made different sorts of decisions?

Would I have behaved differently?

Would I have looked for a serious relationship with another man to whom I would have proposed, married and had children..rather than leaping from one man to another…exhausting each and every one of them?

If that narrative had been on offer, as it is now, would I have married Joe or Matt or the beautiful Dane?

Joe and I were as good as married but it was a marriage of convenience.

If I had believed that a commitment between men was possible or respected or had some kind of future, perhaps I wouldn’t have wasted other opportunities.  I may have stuck around.

Did I even trust the love that dare not speak its name?  The legitimacy of love between men?

When I hear a man say, ‘I love you’ it turns me on.

Tell me that you love me.

I will make love to you.  Be part of you.

When I was a young man I felt hopeless, convinced that this strange love was simply…pointless. That to say ‘I love you’ to another man…meant nothing, could never mean what it meant when I loved a woman.

But you’re gay!  Did she know?  This woman.

One woman in particular.

When I fell in love with PH, it was a surprise to everyone…me included. She was so beautiful. She was so beautiful and she wanted me. There are very few things I do not write about here. She is one of them. Our relationship that spanned half a decade.

After years of enjoying a gay life I saw the world renewed. I looked into her eyes and I never wanted to forget her face. Every time I left the house I would memorize an indelible snapshot of her.

When we were in love every record played on the radio meant something. Holding hands in the street and never once a strangers savage glance…my love blossomed. Without the withering contempt of strangers my love blossomed.

Do you know what I mean? Whenever I held a man in my arms in a public place I felt the withering contempt of others. Have you ever felt that? It soured me. What other people thought.

Biracial couples know what I mean.

The artist, Marc Quinn said to me when he saw me and Phil together, “I knew you weren’t gay.”

That was then. This is now.

Before he and I stopped speaking he told me that he had met a man in Central Park and kissed them. They held him in their arms. He told so many lies yet somehow this lie was forgivable. He told me that it had happened before I met him…but I knew from the look on his face how new and exhilarating it had been.

An experience that he wanted to share but was too afraid of hurting me.

Well, we may never know how it might have been if I had the luxury of marrying a man.

Time has past, now I am too old to fall in love and make a man my husband.

Darling PH, even though we are estranged at the moment because of what happened last summer with him.  I want you to know that had you not been in my life I would never have experienced a brimming heart.

You trusted me and nurtured me and protected me and loved me unconditionally.

Watching my young gay friends emerge into the light, they have a different sort of gay life on offer.

During the past 50 years life for gay men has changed radically. When I was born homosexuality was still a criminal offence. So, I was lucky to have grown up without my sexuality outlawed.

This generation of gay men are freer than any generation before them. I salute the work we did to make a more equitable life for them.

Occasionally I am pissed that the young don’t recognise the sacrifices we made..but I am also aware that I seldom give a thought to those who fought for me to live a free and abundant gay life.

As much as I hate to remind you, these rights and freedoms could be taken away just as easily as they were given. We must not take our good fortune for granted. There are dark forces at work against us.

It’s election time!  Here they go again, debating my future, my expendable rights.  Using their disdain for our lives to get votes.  Championing gay hate to ‘motivate their base’.

Listen to what they say about us.  The cruel rhetoric they use.

I am tired of being the liberal hot potato thrown around at times of national debate/election.

Gay marriage, gays in the military, hate crimes, equality.

And finally mr/mrs republican candidate…what do you think of the gays?  Is this the kind of America we want to call our home?   We want our country back from the niggers and the faggots!

We are once again the devil’s proof of an evil, liberal America, a decadent America, a democratic America that Jesus would never sanction.

Apparently, like abortion, we must be outlawed.

I am sick of having my nature, my rights, my existence used by others in some heartless polemic.

Read my lips:  My rights are non-negotiable, un-repealable….mine to keep.

If you vote Democrat I am not proof positive of a better America. If you are Republican I am not responsible for every natural disaster.  I am just what I always was…alive. Doing what I always did…living. Hoping like I always will…that you leave me and my sexuality alone.

Some woman on FB reassured me that Jesus loved me but hated my sin.  The sin of homosexuality.  The Jesus I was taught about on Sunday mornings in St Alphage church Whitstable never really hated anyone.

All he wanted was a fair and equitable life for us all.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Rant

Gay Pride?

Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe.   The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil.  The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil.  It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.

Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it.  Until now.  Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it.  I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing.   Nothing.

It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.

Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea.  I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.

Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA.  I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued.   I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.

Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut.    I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself.  It simply isn’t worth it.  I am tired of being the uppity gay.

I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared.  Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.

My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community.  My plays and films aimed at men like me.  I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community.  They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles.  If I had gone ‘mainstream’.

All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives.  I am proud to have done so.  I am proud to have served my community thus.

I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen?  How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?

What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence?  What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am?   How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?

How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?

Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.

How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man?  What does it mean when two men say that they love each other?  Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it?   That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we?  But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered.   My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.

I love you.  I love you.  I love you.

What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love.  That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.

We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs.  By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution.   By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have.  On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures.  When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off.  It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?

It seems so..undignified.

In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly.  At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year.  Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.

It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest.  The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.

I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more.  It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.

The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived.  I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men.  I don’t know what they look like.  I have never seen them, been introduced to them.  If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.

The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path.   If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it.  But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man.   I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins.   I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.

Categories
Gay Malibu

Dog in the Manger

I think that it’s best that I don’t write about relationships.  It tends, as so many people read this blog, to upset the very people I love most.

So we must bid adieu to the continuing adventures of Lamb Head and the 18th Century Man.  We must set aside our interest in the comings and goings of my complicated love life and concentrate on politics, goats and all things beyond my immediate inner circle.

So, let’s talk about George Rekers.

You know, well most of you do who read this blog regularly, that I am all about individual choice.    Particularly, the choice to determine our own sexuality and how we choose to describe it.  Sadly,  there are so few words to describe the extraordinary range of sexual choices on offer to the average man/woman.

And, of course, we all tell so many lies about our sexuality.  Let’s put it this way, most of the men I know who describe themselves as straight have had their fingers in the gay honey pot.  I have no reason to doubt their description of their sexuality so why don’t they just celebrate their sexual diversity?

Well, we all know just how narrow-minded people get when they are asked to describe themselves sexually,  mainly from fear of how they will be treated by their peers.  The gays are all too willing to accept anyone who has occasional same-sex relations into their gay camp and the straights are just as eager to throw that same anyone out of their frat house.

If George Rekers wants an erotic massage from a rent boy does this make him gay?    If a man drinks to excess does this make him an alcoholic?  The answer to both of these questions has to be NO.

As I have said many, many times before: we live in sexually prescriptive times.    It is not up to me to tell you that you are either gay (or an alcoholic) it is up to you to make that choice and deal with the consequences.

It has to be up to the individual to decide what he is and how best to describe himself.    If you are a man who loves men and their bodies and all things homosexual would the word gay properly describe what you are?

If I had another choice of word rather than gay to describe myself would I?  YES.  This is not about me being a self hater, this is about me feeling like I am a bit too old to be gay, a bit too sober, too few sexual partners, a vague interest in the gym and not in tune with the collective who describe themselves as gay.

Just as I now no longer call myself an alcoholic preferring to call myself a sex addict.  It best describes the specific disease of addiction from which I am in recovery.

Of course I find George Rekers despicable, not because he vacations with pretty rent boys or refuses to be associated with the gay word but because he so virulently attacks the unalienable rights of others.    He makes life uncomfortable for those who choose to describe themselves as gay.   He peddles hatred and disinformation.

He has been described as a hypocrite.  Does the fact that he likes erotic massage make him a hypocrite?  No.  If he were living with his husband and children in suburban Tallahassee and telling others that they shouldn’t now that would be hypocritical.

I’m not sure that he is gay.  Is he?  He’s certainly not living a life I would describe as gay.  He is probably just desirous of erotic massage.

Being gay is surely not simply about sex?  Is it?

Are we doing ourselves a disservice calling George Rekers gay?   By claiming this man as one of our own are we throwing the net too wide?

After I was on Sex Rehab somebody wrote to me telling me that if  ‘Duncan Roy doesn’t like sex with men then he isn’t gay’.

I felt rather reassured by this.   It was a complex accusation and one that I had oft considered myself.  Am I gay if I don’t like sex with men?   Am I gay if I believe in monogamy?  Am I gay if I don’t drink or take drugs or, and I expect to be hounded for saying this, if I am not HIV positive?

Very recently I HAVE started to like sex with men-well one man who I no longer have sex with.   I still don’t like the word gay.

So, George Rekers vacations with rent boys.  Elena Kagan looks like a lesbian but is she?  And,  in the UK the Liberals and the Conservatives and making a very big bed to share after the inconclusive general election.