Categories
Gay

Really Gay

What kind of man is a gay man?

My newly out friend is delighted that other men don’t realize he is gay.

Isn’t that just the same as being in the closet?

Driving to Hollywood last week Andrew said, “That was a really gay hand gesture..”

I said, “That’s because I AM really gay.”

Gwen, when she saw my white cashmere scarf said, “That scarf makes you look really gay.”

Once again I replied, “That’s because I am really gay.”

In the same way that I have a range of sexual possibilities open to me, I also have an evolved behavioral panoply.  I can be as masculine or as effeminate as I want to be..I am, after all, not playing the role of being a gay man.  I am a gay man..and occasionally I will be aggressive and dominant (traditionally masculine) or on other occasions when I am having a laugh I can prance around my place in imaginary heels lip synching to Lady Gaga.

I can be anything I want as long as I am authentic.  I am not going to affect a deeper voice, a darker personality, limited hand and eye brow movements simply so other men will not realize that I am gay!  It’s exhausting to lie like that.

Whatever I am, I am not striving to be, as Iago said,  not what I am.    Authenticity is key.  I didn’t come out of the closet to start pretending all over again, to start fooling my gay brethren.  To fool their gaydar.  I came out to be who I am.  Not what you want me to be or feel shame about my feminine hand gestures, my flamboyant scarves.  I don’t believe in shame!

FUCK SHAME!

If you think fooling other gay men is where it’s at then you are only fooling yourself.

Equally, gay men who think they are wonderful at divining who is gay are in fact utterly useless at figuring out who is gay because everyone can do gay stuff..I mean..man on man stuff.  Casting a spell like a bad fairy is not ‘gaydar’.  The prisons are chock full of men fucking men who are not gay.

On the whole gay men flag their gayness depending on the tribe that they belong to.

This is exactly why I have stuck with straight identified men..it’s just another tribe of men who fuck men.

Mainstream gay culture,  just like the straight mainstream, is not to my liking.  Frankly, my dears, the mainstream bores me to tears!  Normal+Common=Get Me Out Of Here.

Mainstream Gay Culture:  Ripped bodies shown off in tight tee shirts, tribal posturing, childish Peter Pan excitement, arrested development, intensity over intimacy,  endless flirting and sexing up of every single situation.  What are those huge muscles for?  Pumped up like Greek warriors for no good reason.  All form and no function.  It’s just drag dear!  Those boys can’t fight to save their lives!

If you are coming out today or thinking about it..just remember that you have hidden your true nature for a long, long time.  You may not really have a clue who you are.  All I urge you to do, as best you can, is be true to yourself.

I am in a foul mood, trying to overcome this ghastly malaise that has beset me.

Categories
Dogs Gay Love

i Can’t Help You

Stone

All day the Little Dog has been sick.   He is listless and miserable, his little black nose hot and dry.   I checked his gums but they seem ok.  I get scared that he might die.   The past few months would have been utterly unbearable without him.

At about 7.30 he perked up and has been right as rain ever since.  Leaping all over Eric when he arrived for hastily put together dinner.

He is snuggling in my lap as I write.

I think about the darling big dog.  My darling big dog, I miss her more than I ever did.   I still have daily, violent memories of her broken, bloody body.  Searing into my mind.    Replaying the last few moments of her life before that evil truck scraped her across the road.

My fingers angrily bang the letters of those words onto the page.

I CAN’T HELP YOU.

I blame the man driving the truck.  He did it on purpose.  He didn’t stop.  Bastard.

At moments like this I soothe myself with memories of home.  I think a great deal of England-green and pleasant land.  The Kent countryside, the buses to Canterbury, Georgina, The Goods Shed, etc. etc., I nightly drive through Clowes Wood in my semi conscious state..naked..shameless.

I remember a recurring nightmare:  I am a young boy naked in the schoolyard.  I have no idea where my clothes are or where I lost them.   I hide behind the half door in the toilets as the other children are called to class.  I stand naked in the schoolyard covering myself, the cold wind whipping grit into my eyes.  The other children sitting warm inside at their desks.

Last night as he was with me in my bed I lay thinking of how I might get home safely.  How can I get back home?  For all that raucous, interminable thinking we slept soundly.

I’ve not written a word these past few days.  Full moon blues I call it.   I lost interest in my blog as things calmed down with my (ex?) and my new friend holidayed in Italy.

I had to deal with a moving traffic violation issue that meant going to the Superior Court twice this week.  The judge was very fair and funny but going through a stop sign still cost me $550.  I have opted for community service.  The art auction last Sunday seemed to vindicate my ability to pick the winners.  Things sold mostly at the upper end of the estimate.  I bought a beautiful candle stick by a potter whose name I have forgotten.

Prevaricating.  Stifled.  Tongue-tied.

The point is:  I can’t really write down any of my true feelings.  I am in shut down mode.  I can’t do anything, move anywhere, release myself..rant or rave.  The malaise seems to affect every area of my life.

After the headiness of New York I’ve fallen into a sharp decline, my confidence at an all time low.    Dinner with friends last weekend I simply couldn’t hold my head up, my libido, my enthusiasm, my recall deserting me.  She was a very cool next generation producer.  CAA agents greeting her at our table.  Hugs and kisses.  Fast track.

I say to myself, “I am on my own with no one to focus on, no one to say that I love.”    It feels like a terrible waste.   I had some real hope!  Hope that I could travel the world with a man I was excited by.  How those dreams crumble into dust.  I am fractured by time and distance.  I am in the wrong city, in the wrong country, on the wrong fucking planet.  I am desperate for a change of circumstance.

The road that leads to the Malibu house is weeks from being repaired.  It maybe the very metaphor I am looking for.  The road to the house is being repaired so I can escape my verdant prison.   Yet every day I do my best to make it more like paradise.

I want to write about The Great BP Catastrophe but I can’t.  I want to write about anything other than me but each time I begin I am stopped by something inescapable.  I just don’t care. I don’t care about anything.  I am exhausted..spent.

Beaten by the sheer force of inequity:

BP, miserable pictures of delicate Pelican eggs smeared with crude oil.  The watered down banking regulations that caused Wall Street a collective sigh of relief. Congress about to pass an additional $32 billion to pay for war in Afghanistan yet it struggling to justify a $23 billion bill to forestall the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers next year.

What kind of country are we?

Categories
prison Rant

Guardian Article

duncan roy as anthony rendlesham

This week, we met Thomas Salme and Adam Wheeler, the former fined for lying about holding a commercial passenger pilot’s licence and the latter for reinventing his academic career.

When I read about men like this, I remember the time I was, in the words of the News of the World, “The Lord of The Lies”.  I was the “Credit Card Earl” who apparently funded his “jet-set lifestyle” by spending money on his credit card with no intention of paying the bill.

For this petty crime I was sent to prison for 10 months.  I was 23.  Made an example of just in case there was some other working class lad who thought he could con his way into the aristocracy.

Wheeler, also 23, was “showered with scholarships” and will be harshly punished; Salme has escaped with a smallish European fine.  Yet, even as they wish to punish them, the public’s attitude toward accomplished liars will be tempered by some envy.

Yes, of course, it’s scary that a man with no formal training can fly commercial passenger jets but, really, who gives a damn if Wheeler reinvented his CV so that he might enjoy the delights of a great university?  Wouldn’t we all, at some level, like to reinvent ourselves?   Public condemnation conceals a private longing for becoming who we always wanted to be.

Come on! Let’s face it, we all tell lies. Some of us just do it rather grandly.

I was 18 when I changed my name. The press loved to describe me as coming “from humble beginnings”.  I would describe my childhood differently: born into a complicated family shamed by illegitimacy.   I realised that there was a better life, a simpler life to be had by telling a lie.  Lying from the earliest age because I simply had no idea what the truth was. My family was riven with lies. My father was in fact my stepfather and the entire family colluded to keep a secret from me, a small boy, by telling lies.

I ran away to Paris, away from the tears and the drama, the secrets and lies. I took the truth by the scruff of the neck and chucked it on to the Rue St Anne. I not only changed my name to Anthony Rendlesham but also appended a delicious title.

Lord Anthony Rendlesham.

Oh, just remembering it now, that moment in Paris after nearly 30 years of not lying about my name causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. It was so bloody exciting!

When I first lied about my name I expected the lie to vanish after a few hours. In fact, I would tell the same lie for nearly three years. Every time I said my name I buried my sad and ghastly past under the psychic woodpile.

Both the fake pilot and the fraudulent Ivy Leaguer must have known that they would one day get caught. Yet, from my experience that risk fades into the back of one’s mind as the lie grows exponentially. The lie becomes one’s life; the past becomes hard to recognise as one’s own. I often wondered when the ghost of Duncan Roy would come claim me.

For some, pretending is cathartic – a rubbing out of the past one seems to have no control over. I can spot a liar at 50 paces and can tell the truth about others like no one else I know, but the truth about myself was far too excruciating.

Telling the truth is made harder because we live, in the words of Michael Moore, in “lying times”. Honesty has very little currency in modern life – especially in the US where everyone feels that to tinker with the truth is essential if one is going to get on – from the monumental lies politicians tell about weapons of mass destruction and secret torture to the grotesque micro lies we tell ourselves when we allow the plastic surgeon to reinvent our faces.

Both of this week’s imposters worked very hard on their lies: Salme trained all night on a flight simulator; Wheeler became a convincing academic. I was a mere amateur compared with these two. I did not profit from my lie (the credit card was in my own name – I used it right at the end of my adventure, to pay for dinners and shirts).

I simply changed my name and learned how to hold a knife and fork properly. The various aristocratic tribes I infiltrated seemed to accept what I told them as the truth because I sounded right and I was a great deal of fun. They liked having Anthony around.

Of course I didn’t know how (Anthony’s) friends would react to finding that they had a dog in their aristocratic manger. Years later, however, a few of them contacted me, invited me to dinner and told me how sad they were that I had vanished, that they wanted me to know they had liked me, whoever I was pretending to be.

It was a very moving moment. Yet, regardless, they didn’t really know me.  I didn’t really know me.

It would take years of therapy, trauma work and sobriety for me to get to know who I am and put a stop to the fear and shame and resentment.

Like Wheeler and Salme, I know how it feels to be thrust back into one’s own skin.

Part of me will always be Lord Anthony Rendledsham. Anthony is the dynamic, charming, forceful part of me that gets things done. He is stronger than the Duncan me. He protects me when I feel vulnerable or afraid. He is the furious part of me, the catty, sharp-tongued bitchy part  of me who can make terrible enemies. I know that he wants me for himself.

Recently in therapy I realised that I can take what I need from Anthony, the good parts, and leave the rest.

Occasionally I can feel him surging through me.  Whenever I feel that crippling toxic shame I used to feel every day – I can feel him want to stand in front of the child me and fight those who give me pain. But now I can say to him, hey, I can deal with this. Thanks, but no thanks. And he skulks away.

As I grow older I strive for authenticity. I embrace the truth. Even though I fail, I try living without telling lies.  It is the hardest thing of all, the decision not to delude others or myself.

Categories
art Love Self Sufficiency

Donald Judd’s Bedroom

Plane home to LA.  Lovely few days in NYC.  Returning Delta.  Man had panic attack and had to be removed just as we were taking off.

Really lifted my spirits.  (The trip not the panicking man.)

Upon my arrival in NYC and the ghastly Comfort Inn I had a few moments of bitter disillusionment (the cause of which was mainly in my head..actually the cause of which was totally in my head)  I had the best time with Jake, Dan, Lady Rizzo, John and Jamie.  The little dog hated the rain but didn’t like being left at home.

Drank far too much coffee in the East Village.

At the behest of a new friend Bernard, who works for the Judd foundation,  John, Jamie, Jake and I privately toured the Donald Judd private residence at 101 Spring St, Soho and reminded myself that on that very corner one cold winters afternoon in 1983 Fred Hughes and I saw John Gotti smoking a fat cigar.

We brought expensive cookies and marveled at the Japanese themed bathrooms and kitchen.  How come the HUGE Dan Flavin in the bedroom felt like it was spewing microwaves?   That thing, however beautiful, must have fried Judd, his wife and children.

I was recognized by one of the staff who LOVED the sex rehab show.   “How you doing now?” she asked with a sympathetic crumpled brow and puckered lip.

After The Judd residence tour Jake and I celebrated his birthday with a dinner at the restaurant of his choice and the waiters brought him his desert with a candle on top.

Last night Dan and I attended a charity auction at the Milk Gallery to raise funds for the Stephen Petronio Dance Company.  I was in a spectacularly good mood and was seen to be so.  I met Cindy Sherman who had donated a huge, dark work, which raised over $20k for the troupe.

I bought 3 works including a very beautiful Dustin Yellin.

Dan and I had a late dinner at Westville where we saw Sam Rockwell.

Back in LA soon where I have a traffic court date, a returning lover and Mary the organic gardener has her new driving license which means she can continue tending the garden.  I have a great deal to look forward to and a huge amount to be grateful for.

 

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Categories
Rant

Comfort Inn

East 10th St,  New York City 2010 again.  The little dog and I traversed the city (east/west) three times today.  It makes us very happy.  My feet hurt.  The little dog is curled up, fast asleep, beside me.   I flew out of LAX yesterday afternoon, arrived late at JFK and miserably stayed at the JFK Comfort Inn as amazingly could not find a single room in any hotel near to where I usually stay in NYC, in fact, there wasn’t a room anywhere in Manhattan less than $1, 800 a night.

The Comfort Inn is a bit of a misnomer as it isn’t very comfortable nor is it ’in’.   My room stank of old cigarettes and feet.  Even the little dog was suspicious of the bed and refused to get under the covers.  There was a $250 fine for smuggling animals into the rooms apparently.

Thank God we didn’t know.

When I arrived I was warned not to leave the hotel because it was dangerous.  Hmmm.

“Is this the hood?”  I asked innocently.

All week I received evocative, beautiful letters from Italy, descriptive, sexy and exciting.  I await his return with delicious anticipation.   I will be back in LA ready to be there fully for him.

It delights me!  Everyday I get his beautiful loving emails. All this comfort and joy from a man who loves me and is not ashamed to say the words: I LOVE YOU.  He is sure to tell me that he loves me, to make sure that I understand what this means.  That it means something.

I came to NYC to help celebrate the birthday of a man who said he didn’t have anything to do.  Now, apparently, he is sick and unable to leave his house so it looks like I am in NYC spending money needlessly.   Call me foolish, call me an idiot tell me that I shouldn’t have made the effort!   Remind me once again; wagging your fat pink finger at me ‘what did you expect?’.

The following morning I took the subway from The Comfort Inn into the West Village where I met J&J for lunch.   It seems that VH1 is very well watched by the residents of Queens as once on the Subway I was stared at, talked about and asked for autographs.  Once up on the Soho House roof we ate an emotional lunch due to my realizing that if my friend had known he was sick the morning I flew here why didn’t he just let me know?

So, there I am on the roof of Soho House telling my best friends that I am a fucking idiot and hating myself more than any one of you could ever hate me.

I was pleased to have two of my closest friends in town.  I couldn’t actually eat my lunch because I was so ‘emotional’ and a ‘drama queen’.    I am so sick of being treated like an idiot by a man who obviously has no respect for me and considers me some kind of sappy pushover.

Oh fuck it.  I can’t be bothered to work it out.  Anyway, he got what he wanted-I am now disengaged at a much deeper level than I was before.  Totally.  It is hard not to feel like I have been used.   Needless to say my gesture of friendly goodwill has massively backfired.  Some things are just not meant to be.

That all said of course, I am happy to be home in NYC and immediately lose weight pounding the streets.  It is wonderful to be back in the city.  Wonderful to have all those faces to gaze, everyone is so handsome.  Windows to stare into, the anticipation of rain, city life at my fingertips.

The little dog loves NYC and we were up at 5.30am in Tompkins Square Park where we saw a feral cat and NO RATS.   He fixated on squirrels and I on the vagaries of this mad and exotic city.

Back at home in the East Village now.  Dan and I are catching up.

Dinner at Prune last night, I ate the mussels in lobster broth.  Delicious.

IMG_2358 IMG_2363

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Categories
Gay Hollywood Malibu Rant

Renters From Hell

The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.

A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog.  Thanks friend.  The fact is:  I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had.  Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness.  Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David.  Bad idea.  Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice.  Bad idea.  My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.

I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression.  It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations.  After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast.  You guys were all so sweet to support and love me.  The reason I write this blog?   Because you are all there to read it.  To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.

After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply.   The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England  arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere.  I can’t say I wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people.  Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.

Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy.   I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit.  When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet.   Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.

They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident.   As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems.   On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up.  I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then.   I was embarrassed for him.

When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it.   The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog.  Well, blog on this bitch!  I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.

My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.

I walked briskly down Sunset.  I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys.   A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun.  This may be my future!

Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.

Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligent British friend.  Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA.   My new theory?  That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’.  That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own.  The threat, real or imagined was always there.

Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY.  White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.

After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops.  Handsome but dull.  We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric.   The full can hit me squarely in the chest.   I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum.  At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the  anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.

‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand.  I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’.   These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.

Categories
Death Gay Love

Gaping Hole

Nothing.  Nothing to say, write or comment on.  In my own head.   Do you know that feeling?  When life is so overwhelming?   I could not sleep last night.  Perhaps it was the cheese again.  Must stop eating cheese before bedtime.

It is easy to look over ones life and just remember the things one has lost rather than what one has found.

I am going to New York this weekend.  Staying on 10th street again.   Comfortable.

It seems like for the past few months I have made one bad decision after another.   If only I could tear myself away from the self-loathing.  To love myself enough to give the man I see occasionally in the mirror..a break.  Do you think that is possible?

I just made a huge pot of black coffee and drank it all.  Friends arriving from London today.   Dinner with Toby last night.  Saw Please Give with Katherine Keener.   It was a lovely film.  Very New York, very sad.   I shed a tear at the end.

Did I ever tell you that for a short time I was friendly with Katherine Keener?   She has a lovely house in Santa Monica, beautifully decorated with really well-chosen furniture.  She has the most amazing taste.

I tell you what is happening in my head.  I feel as if I am in some terrible competition.  A competition that I can never win because it’s not my game.   I am not like ‘them’ so I can’t win.    I feel very unsafe.  Not like I was going to die because that would be easy.  To know for sure the time and place of ones own death.

Unsafe, because I want something so badly knowing that it can never ever happen.    That something is not a person or a thing or a place but the peace of mind that has eluded me for so long.   I have learned that nothing can fix me.  Nothing can make it better.  Maybe a more complete relationship with God but to have that relationship with God I must remove the lead cap I am wearing that keeps me in the dark.

I sat in a room yesterday morning with 70 men who all looked so fucking miserable.  Every man in there just trying to make sense of what and who he was.   today, I have no idea what the answer is.

To wake up with no answers is a terrible thing.

The little dog is sleeping.   He is waiting for me to pull on my pants and take him for a long walk.  I used to think that if I could just keep on going, keep the momentum then everything would be ok but I have nothing to look forward to right now.

Just a gaping hole where a life should be.

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.

Categories
Gay Whitstable

I Heart Whitstable

I thought about Whitstable today.   I miss you so much!  The shallow lazy sea, the honey coloured shingle, buying espresso from Dave’s deli, walking the little dog on Duncan Downs.  I wondered, like I do occasionally, if I could ever live there again.

Part of me wants to be there but most of me is perfectly as ease with where I am right now.

If I went back what would I be returning to?

It’s a great place to visit but maybe it’s never going to be my home.   Maybe it never was.

Taking that bloody, stinky train to London.  I never had the money for a ticket.  Hiding in the toilet.  One hour and fifteen minutes.  Faverham, Sittingbourne, Rainham, Graveney, Bromley SouthVictoria Station!

Walking to Mayfair.  Sweet-scented drawing rooms, thick carpet and polished silver.  Oh God. I know why I am thinking about this!  I am dreading being left on my own on Tuesday evening when the man/boy leaves for Italy.

I want to travel too!  Paris, Sydney, Whitstable or New York where do I go next?  If I go what am I running away from?  I’ll tell you what:  a great,  gaping God shaped hole.

18th Century boy/man was up until 2.30 last night pottering around, tidying, making a mother’s day card and finally fell into bed exhausted.   We had dinner at Axe on Abbott Kinney.  I ate the farmer’s plate with prosciutto.   This morning we toured the Santa Monica Farmers Market and bought fresh almonds and pale pink hydrangea and delicate budded peonies.

He reminds me of Patrick Kinmonth, the same sensibilities and creativity.  He is so tall and elegant, so curious about everything, which can all at once excite and tire.   It is good to live again with someone on my arm that has such an extraordinary zest for life.  He wants me to teach him how to sew.  I would love to do that, pass on a few of the many skills I have that were meant for some unborn child in an imaginary family.

I wish that I hadn’t killed the snake but I was scared that it would bite the little dog then where would I be?   John watched the video of me killing it and looked delighted at the very manliness of my snake murder.  I should have been more proud but I wasn’t.  I value life, even the life of a dangerous snake or the rat I killed the previous week.

Josh, my sober A gay friend and I toured Barney’s yesterday.  Trying on expensive clothing neither of us would ever buy.  Bumped into a friend of Charlies who was wearing cut off denim shorts, a sleeveless tee, a man bag and Jackie O sunglasses.  What a fucking STATE.  Also bumped into my friend Jody who has recently had two surrogate daughters-the $250,000 a pop kind.  I asked, like I would my straight friends, if he is signing them up for pre-school.  He spat back that he had no intention of sending them to pre-school as their nanny had them on the Einstein system for infant learning.  He said that he wanted to control who came into their lives as he had no intention of letting them socialize with other kids as they might pick up bad habits.  Now tell me if that doesn’t sound unhealthy?   Child as project.  Lot’s of my gay friends have chosen this route when they become parents.  However, this is not peculiar to gay men, I know straight parents who do this too.  In my opinion it can only lead to disappointment and resentment.

I thought about my mother and where she might be this overcast mother’s day.  I wondered if my brothers had brought her flowers or sent her a card.  I did not.  Then I thought about Kristian’s mother who seems to loathe the idea of his friends getting together to celebrate his life and I wondered how she could be so bitter about this simple act of remembrance?

I pay scant regard to my creative life.  My desire to create comes in huge waves that crash inconsequentially and leave me feeling tired and unfinished.  Why can’t I seem to finish anything?  My novel remains unfinished, my film too-as for everything else?  I don’t know.

As his departure looms so do the morbid thoughts.

I find myself thinking about the NYC man and grieve for what was and what is lost, broken or as dead as the headless rattlesnake.   I am all at once in celebration for what I have and desolation for what was and how that affected me.  Man/Boy asked if I was on the rebound last night which I strenuously denied.  But, of course, there is some truth to his accusation.  John cautioned me yesterday about euphoric recall, the yearning for an acting out partner rather than the fully fledged, present young man who I now have.

I have no reason or right to have wanted more from NYC man.   As I have said before I was an inconsequential blip in his life.   It’s hard to own that.  Yet, in a way, it has made me a stronger man for what I have now.    I look at this new man and love him and care about him with new eyes.  The eyes of a man who has loved and lost but is lucky to have loved at all.

As for my sobriety, I am sober!  I have that to be grateful for.   Gratitude is key!

Have to write for the Good Men Project.  I am going to write about how to be a man when other men don’t recognize the sort of man you were born to be:  A quest for validation.

Categories
Gay Hollywood

Kristian Digby Memorial Cancelled

Paula Dubois,  Kristian Digby‘s Mother,  outrageously threatened to disrupt the Memorial Service to be held for hundreds of her wonderful son’s friends and family next week at Southwark Cathedral.

As a result the cathedral will no longer hold the service.

The indignity of it all, that the love he had for so many and they for him could not be felt by his own mother.

The news infuriated me.  It totally ruined my day.   That this so called ‘mother’ who bore such a beautiful, kind-hearted boy seems so determined to destroy any attempt his friends have of getting together and remembering him.

I am confused.  I am sad.  Mostly I am angry.

I killed a snake this week, a five foot rattle snake in my garden.  I chopped it’s head off with a shovel.  I felt bad doing it.  Terrible.  This beautiful serpent that had as much right as I did to live in my garden.  In my canyon.

I will write more about it tomorrow but in the mean time here is a picture to whet your appetite.

The beautiful boy/man remains sleeping in my bed but he is off to Italy on Tuesday for two weeks and so that I might not feel any pain (the pain of separation is the worst) my head is already elsewhere.  We had dinner with his best friend last night which I always hankered to do with NYC man but never did.

I was so nervous.

The Spanish restaurant where we had dinner was expensive and ghastly.

Serpent in the Garden