Categories
Gay politics

Gay Voices

Carpenter NYC 21

In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huffington Post yesterday there was another ‘outraged’ homo article about the Pentagon censuring  LGBT web sites like Towelroad but not ‘hate speak’ web sites Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter.

The Pentagon, like many large companies that control internet access, have deemed that LGBT sites are mostly inappropriate for work place viewing.

Why?  The gays scream.  Why do you censor us and not Rush Limbaugh?

A quick comparison.

Rush and Anne, although not my personal cup of tea, do not illustrate their ‘hate speak’ web sites with images of copulating straight people.

In hetero land hard core pornographic images are rightly limited to porn sites.

In homo land we are subjected to random pornographic illustrations (or advertising) on sites purportedly aimed at debating current queer affairs.  Images that I would not want to share with my co-workers.

Today, in the reputable queer news site Towelroad, well written articles about Bradley Manning run along side a pornographically illustrated story about the death of a gay porn star.

Interestingly, the porn star died of HIV related complications.

Something that supposedly doesn’t happen any more.

Even though every recent statistic sadly proves that HIV is on the meteoric rise in the bare back obsessed gay community… to say so out loud is deemed homophobic/selfloathing.

As for hate speak?  Have any of you read the hate filled rhetoric on most homo web sites… aimed mostly at other gay men?

As I have written many times:  queer men willingly take up the cudgels to beat and bully fellow queers where their supposed hetero persecutors dropped them.

BTW Gays…  a differing opinion is not hate speak.

The separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of The Huffington Post is filled with either outraged queens claiming homophobia or cooing doves describing a gay kiss on net work TV.

A reflection on the vapid, with us or agin us culture so many of you subscribe to.

As usual we refuse to look at our part in the problem. We claim:  They are doing it to us.  They are to blame.  We are blameless.  We do not deserve scrutiny or self-examination.

The Elmo guy is not a pedophile.  He’s a persecuted, misunderstood gay man hounded by the straight media.

In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huffington Post there is a story about an angry ex ‘gay for pay’ porn star who claims that the devil comes out of his ass.

Why?  Why is this story about straight insanity in the ‘gay voice’ section?  Surely it should be on the ‘crazy white hetero’ page along with all those crazy white, straight mass murderers.

By the way, I’ve never understood why it isn’t ok to be ‘separate but equal’, sometimes it’s just easier.

Like being a Hasidic Jew, I want to be separate so I can get on with my business and enjoy my culture without prying eyes.

Of course I need to be equal, however, so I don’t live in resentment.

As a charming postscript I wanted you to know that after my ‘i am not gay piece’ the other day, the gay and lesbian Legacy Project contacted me and as a result my films will not be burned by jack booted gay men… but all of my queer themed films will now be archived (with pride) at The Legacy Project.

As for the film I am currently making?  Let me tell you.  We have come a long way in 20 years.  A very long way.

When a black straight producer wants to make your white queer film… that’s what I’m talking about.

Categories
art

Plein Soleil

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dFDX5Gozzk&feature=related]

Mel picked me up from the house at 6.15am and we drove into The Palisades for the 7.30am AA ‘bank’ stag meeting.  I could only endure a few moments then I left.

I wandered around the Farmers Market looking at the organic vegetables, cut flowers, the smell of fresh samosas baking in the early morning sun.

I felt like Ripley (played by Alain Delon) at the fish market in the original film version Plein Soleil (see above starts at 9 mins and 9 seconds) of the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

He has no idea what is waiting for him…

I first saw this film in Spetses, Greece.  The open air cinema, when I was 21.  Ironic huh?

If you don’t know this film…see it.  It’s available in its entirety on YouTube.

I couldn’t sit in that meeting facing those scoundrels.  One of them told us that he had called his wife a cunt and the other laughed heartily.  He was trying to confess his wrongs, the others behaved like Rush Limbaugh.  They thought it was sooo damned funny.

So I went for a walk in the now blazing sun.   The hottest day of the year so far.

I chatted with a good-looking man and tried to take my mind off the meeting.

Mel and I walked the dogs down to the ocean.  After he dropped me back at the house I tried writing, attempted to eat.

A friend dropped by and we meditated. Yes, we did.

Dinner with Anna in Venice, met a Greek friend, bumped into Rufus. Bed by 11.

Categories
Rant

Glenn Beck/Barack Obama

My irritation with Glenn Beck is balanced almost perfectly with my frustration for Barack Obama.  It is easier to listen to Glenn’s simplistic message (as it has always been when the right open their stinking mouths) than Obama the intellectual buffoon.

The problem, yet again, when the left of center are swept into power by the cheering crowds (when the pendulum swings) is that they are woefully unprepared to deliver what the people want.  When the right get into power they let off bombs and create armies and the fearful are made safe, the patriotic are assuaged, the rich rub their hands in glee.

When the left of center are elected they ‘negotiate’ with their enemies, they want to be ‘bipartisan’ and have absurd ’round table get togethers’ with their opponents to ‘sort everything out’.

Of course I am disillusioned by Obama just like you are.  I cried when he was elected.  I was so happy.  He promised so much and has delivered so little.  He and his administration cow tows to the likes of Glenn Beck.  Obama moans and whines, he says pathetically that “change is hard”.

Was the only ‘change we could believe in’ the black faces of the first family?  Was that it?

For those faces to then be called liars out loud by pasty white-faced congress men?  For those same black faces to doff their caps to people like Glen Beck?   To be called racists? Obama has not adequately taken the reigns because deep down he fears the consequences, he may be president but he does not behave like a president.  His rhetoric is merely that..rhetoric.  Hollow promises, empty gestures.  He looks haunted, like those negro men and women in the black and white photographs taken in the deep south, covering their heads as the police hit them with batons.

He looks beaten.  He sounds washed up.

Yet, all it would take is just one moment of clarity, one moment to take back his power, a moment of shock and awe.  It is unlikely to happen.  He is just too busy having his photo taken like JFK in the oval office with his little daughters.

Last week a friend of mine confided in me she had heard from reliable sources that Obama would not run a second term and that Hillary would be elected and everything would be just the way we want it.  Bullshit. Of course a second term for Obama is unlikely but not because Hilary is waiting in the wings to take the crown that was promised her. The people will choose a simpler message, a familiar message.  One that they can understand.  Change maybe what they want but they have washed their hands of change.  It’s too complicated.

The nation is crippled, the people are meek and fat and stupid and unable to change anything.  The nation is crippled by inactivity, inertia, fear.

The banks and their paid friends in government have deliberately crippled the USA.  They will do nothing to heal this country until they have an elected government who sees things exactly their way.

When the dependable right get back into power..everything will change.  Lending practices, house prices, small business..all will suddenly change and the people will breathe a sigh of relief.  The banking reforms will vanish, the Obama health care system will too.

My friends tell me that President Obama has achieved much but they forget that I come from a country where real socialists have changed the fabric of society for the good and the bad.  Where the pendulum really swung, where the people were represented and the legacy of that extreme governance is health care, education, infra structure.  That’s all I want for you.  So I do not have to endlessly put my hand in my pocket for the steady stream of homeless beggars now on every street in America.  Millions of desperate unemployed.

Obama has achieved nothing of any consequence, no real and immediate healthcare, no real financial reform.  How could he?  He surrounded himself with banking insiders.  Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner are complicit in the devaluation of your house, the loss of your job and as one government melded seamlessly into another oversaw a massive banking Ponzi scheme: the banks took your TARP money tripled the value of it and with huge grins on their bloated faces returned chump change to you the people.

Nowhere else in the world did this happen so effectively than here in the USA.  The Americans tried exercising monetary hegemony in Europe but the European Union is too disperate.  There are simply too many politicians from too many fractured political parties to bully and bribe and most of them have more integrity in one member’s little finger than the entire American congress and senate put together.

The European Union cannot be bought.  This explains the British ruling elites fear of the Euro, the European Union and everything east of the Channel.  Yet, look at what is happening in Europe.  The economies are growing, the people did not lose their homes, communities were not compromised.

We have had revolution in Europe.  Revolution is essential to destroy the status quo for the status quo is not good for the people.  It is good for the few.

The media and Obama hating pundits, as well they might, evoke the ghosts of the French Royal family but Michelle Obama is no Marie Antoinette.

It is easier for us to discuss Michelle’s vacations and high-waisted fashion faux pas than the dead and the maimed and the wounded in our fruitless wars.  Fruitless, unless you are the owner of a munitions factory or a service industry dedicated to war.  We will never be able to stop profligate war funding because we are coerced by the rich to believe it is our patriotic duty to support our troops by giving them more and more money as our schools rot and our teachers become beggars.

I am eager for revolution in whatever form it may take.  The people voted for Obama not to be meek or timid or careful of his enemies but to take back what had been stolen from us during the Bush years.  To restore what Glen Beck is now touting..some American honor.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have chipped away at the truth of Barack Obama so that today more and more Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim, that he bailed out the banks, initiated the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

They believe that Obama is not and has never been..is not and has never been a bone fide American.  They believe that he is not like them, that he has become president by suspect means.  That the good people of America could never have deliberately elected a black man and his descended from slaves wife.  How could that have happened?

Their racist outrage has never been stamped upon, outlawed, mocked.  Why?   Because we were too busy, like bullied kids in the playground, crying and running away after trying to befriend and engage those who are simply incapable of listening.

Categories
Hollywood Rant

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

Christoper Hitchins tells us that he takes great delight in the misfortune of his enemies and I am sad to admit that I can be prone to the same kind of misanthropic pleasures.

So, it was a bitter-sweet moment yesterday morning when I bumped into two recently sacked talent agents eating their breakfast at  Cecconi’s in West Hollywood, one from CAA and the other from William Morris/Endeavour.

One of them had been less than helpful to me when I was actively seeking representation and the other had been less than kind when I lost my representation some years later.

They looked downcast and old.  Their verve and arrogance gone.  Husks of what they once were.  One of them mustering the energy to boast of his young wife’s producing achievements.  The young wife that I never see with him in public anymore.  The young wife I saw kissing a handsome young actor behind the Coffee Bean on Sunset, caught in the full beam of my F150.

It struck me at that moment in Cecconi in West Hollywood that being an artist of any sort elevates not only ones position in life but elevates morally.  An artist will never get the sack.  An artist seeks the truth an agent lies for a living.

As as artist I convince myself that I am what I make.   I am making very little at the moment, (apart from this little blog) perhaps I am very little?

Do I loathe those two men?  Do I derive enjoyment from their demotion?  Perhaps, for one adorable moment.   Yet, however hard I try hanging onto resentments, there is no one that I can’t forgive.

Resentments are exhausting!

Unsurprisingly I have people who resent moi.  Yet, after a few years, a resentment has more to do with them than me.  Why are they holding on?  What’s in it for them?

A forgiving heart is all one strives for.  Surely?

After a couple of years of sobriety I decided that it was time to forgive my violently abusive step father.

I went to see him at his place of work and told him that we both knew what had happened and I wanted him to know that I had forgiven him.  He was struck dumb and tried to hug me.

When I reported this to my Mother she said, “Why did you let him off the hook?”  I replied, “I didn’t let HIM of the hook, I let ME off the hook.”

If I can forgive him, you can forgive anyone.  Including me.

Elton John, might be hard to forgive for performing at Rush Limbaugh‘s wedding.

A despicable act of treason.

I feel great.  Surely this can’t have anything to do with giving up flour based products?

As it turns out…it very well might be.  White flour (the enriched and bleached kind) is apparently the worst thing imaginable, causing not only all sorts of intestinal problems but can severely affect our mood…our temperament.

There is plenty of research to support this.   The consumption of bleached, enriched white flour has also been linked to neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

So, I am oddly happy, energised and focused since abandoning all white flour products. No longer taking a nap in the afternoon and last night met Spencer out late at the Coffee Bean and chatted until midnight.

The older one gets perhaps the more careful one has to be with what one puts into ones body.

As much as I love crusty white loaves with marmalade, thick slabs of buttered toast and Marmite this may be the very thing that is compromising my mood day in day out.

The only problem with me being energized is trying to control the ‘high’.  I am feeling far too robust.

I vowed to sit at my desk today and deal with all of the practical papers that need dealing with, like paying my road tax etc.  Forcing myself to sit down and focus like a naughty child.

After my few moments of Schadenfreude I felt rather sad for those abandoned agents who find themselves at the edge of Hollywood’s universe.  It is a cold and lonely place for those who hanker after the life they once had at the very center of the entertainment community.

They miss the endless phone calls, the paid trips to Cannes and Sundance and the kudos bestowed upon them daily for no damned good reason.

It won’t be long before the elder of the two ex agents will get hair plugs and a face lift and like Gustav von Aschenbach from Mann’s Death in Venice will sweat rivulets of black hair dye onto his pallid cheeks.  Propped up in a musty deck chair behind The Chateau Marmont, will die of metaphorical typhoid on the beautiful beaches of California.

There is nothing sadder than a clapped out agent.  After all, they have nothing to fall back on apart from past glories.  An agent’s past glories in Hollywood are not worth the Hollywood Reporter they are printed on.

An artist will always have art no matter what age he/she is.  An artist will always have currency.

Finally, there is one particularly nasty agent, the vile and despicable Jeremy Zimmer.

I have had much reason to put him at the top of my list of those whom I loathe most in Hollywood.

Yet, even he will end up on the agent scrap heap…albeit counting his millions, wishing the phone still rang.  That he hadn’t made half the enemies he ‘went after’ during his years running UTA.

Agents are never respected, always reviled.   Dressed like Mormon missionaries they stalk the lunchtime streets of Beverly Hills.  Unlike Mormon missionaries they are bloated with self-congratulation.

Knowing, surely, that one day they will be humbled by obscurity.

I know Jeremy Zimmer very well.  We sat in the same AA meeting day after day for nearly three years.

His story never changes, battling with everyone he comes into contact with, his partners at UTA, his wife (in couples therapy) and his poor teenage daughter whose only act of rebellion was to pile on weight like her fat, arrogant father.

Although occasionally amusing one quickly tires of his acerbic assessment of everyone but himself.

I once flew to NYC in the same plane as Jeremy Zimmer.  He was in First Class I was in coach.  An amazing transformation took place .  At LAX he was ‘Jeremy Zimmer, partner at UTA’ demanding special privilege at the check in.  On the plane he was ‘Jeremy Zimmer, partner at UTA’ walking up and down the aisle as if he owned the airline.

In NYC, however, he was just another fat Jewish dad at the carousel with his surly, argumentative daughter waiting for their luggage.

Lugging their own bags, cutting a slight and meagre route through the crowd of other travellers.

It was a portent.  Eventually the phone stops ringing and those he has treated so shoddily will revel in his eventual fall from grace.  He will be replaced by younger, more astute, smarter…more ambitious men and women.

And as he gasps his last breath…will he be remembered like Irving (Shifty) Lazar?   Or forgotten and reviled like the capricious Henry Wilson?  What will Jeremy Zimmer’s legacy be?  Let me guess.