Month: August 2025

Categories
art

Art and Activism

Artists Statement: The Fusion of Art and Activism Through Lived Experience

Come Death and Welcome

RCA 2024/25

Duncan Roy—a filmmaker, artist, diarist, and unflinching blogger—challenges conventional boundaries between art and activism. His creative practice is intensely autobiographical, yet deeply political. Over decades, Roy’s blog has become not just a personal archive, but a platform from which he reflects on identity, injustice, state power, and the transformative possibilities of creative expression. This essay traces how his artistry and activism converge through five key domains: biography as protest, cinematic resistance, detention and mobilization, intersectional vulnerability, and archival defiance.

1. Biography as Political Testimony

From the outset, Roy’s blog isn’t simply a diary—it is a form of public dissent. He writes of wearing pale-blue overalls in L.A. County Jail “for all the world to see” that he was gay, forcing visibility into invisibility’s place in vulnerability. He observed the oppressive nature of that uniform—that it made him, like countless others, a marked entity at the mercy of authority. This is art as bearing witness, transforming private humiliation into public conscience.

Roy extends this through reflections on American racial violence. Addressing cases like Eric Garner’s murder, he rejects the notion of a “broken system,” contending instead that the system is working as designed—one that disenfranchises Black communities, weaponises grand juries, and allows police brutality to go unchecked. Here his writing becomes moral testimony—a literary act of rebellion that disrupts the sanctioned narratives of law and order.

2. Cinema as Queer Class Critique

Historically, Roy’s most notable work, AKA (2002), dramatizes the life of a working-class gay youth who assumes aristocratic identity to access safety and privilege. Drawing from his own story, Roy exposes how class and sexual identity intersect in the performance of respectability—yet also how this concealment extracts a heavy emotional cost. The film’s narrative is both claustrophobic and liberatory: a personal coping strategy turned cinematic subversion, exposing how identity can be both armor and erasure. This tightrope walk between art and social critique remains central to Roy’s oeuvre, though in later pieces, the activism becomes more overt.

3. Wrongful Detention and Public Mobilization

Roy’s arrest in 2012—stemming from what began as an extortion allegation involving his former lover—quickly turned into a nightmarish saga when an ICE hold barred his bail. Despite being a legal U.S. resident, Roy remained imprisoned for 89 days under a policy most often used to detain undocumented immigrants. His blog and media interviews recounted how the Sheriff’s Department treated ICE holds as arrest warrants, denying bail and compounding a Kafkaesque injustice.

Far from allowing this to remain a private tragedy, Roy stepped onto the public stage. He became a class representative in a lawsuit with the ACLU and NDLON, challenging the detention of immigrants without bail in L.A. County. Through advocacy and narrative, he turned personal trauma into legal challenge—another example of art (here, his blog and public writing) morphing into civic engagement.

4. Intersectional Vulnerability and State Critique

The complexity of Roy’s activism deepens when we consider the intersections of race, immigration, sexuality, and state violence. He poignantly writes of feeling what it must be like “to be black in the USA wearing those overalls” imposed by the jail system. This imaginative solidarity isn’t an appropriation—it’s a deliberate empathetic strategy. By using his privileges and voice to reflect on privilege and dispossession, Roy mobilizes his art to draw attention to broader systems of oppression.

Further, in his reflections on Gaza, Roy does not shy from confronting the global-minded viewer. He condemns the killing of Palestinian children, denounces the complicity of UK and European leaders, and even recounts attempts to raise awareness through his work at the Royal College of Art—which was, in at least one case, removed by staff. Again, his creative output is inseparable from his political stance. His paintings, installations, and writing refuse to turn away from brutality.

5. Archival Activism: Memory as Resistance

Roy’s dedication to archiving—donating forty years of diaries to a national archive, and ensuring his films are preserved at UCLA—demonstrates a profound belief in memory as activist tool. In a world where queer, immigrant, and working-class lives are often erased, Roy’s life becomes testimony, resistance, and cultural artifact. His blog surfaces as his most radical artwork: an unformatted, expansive, messy, and urgent narrative resisting closure.

expanded narrative integration: Art, Activism, and Identity

Let us explore more closely how Roy’s art—across mediums and contexts—becomes activism through the raw force of personal identity.

A. The Private Exposed as Public Reckoning

Roy’s blog is, in essence, a performance of nakedness. His struggles—addiction, mental health, shame—become invitations to readers to probe beneath social veneers. When he writes of being numbed by antidepressants—“no writing and no sex”—only to feel alive again once off the medication, he chronicles mental health with sobering honesty. These entries urge us to confront the stigma around both therapy and creative decline.

His relationship with recovery communities like AA/NA also surfaces tension, as he recounts hypocrisy in recovery spaces that privilege image over truth. These reflections aren’t just introspective; they’re calls to reform systems that are meant to heal but often ostracize.

B. Political Witness Through Creative Embodiment

Artistic symbolism saturates Roy’s reflections. The pale blue overalls, the black paintings, the textual imagery—each becomes emblematic. When he speaks of shadowed bodies, body bags, gardens scorched by Malibu fires—all rendered in paint or prose—he transforms trauma into aesthetic form. These objects and narratives become carriers of suffering, evoking empathy, recognition, and resistance.

C. Institutional Confrontation and Individual Agency

Roy’s detention and subsequent litigation forced institutions to justify their treatment of detainees like him. His visibility as a legal resident trapped by ICE highlights the arbitrary cruelty of mass detention policies. Through that personal story, he exposed the broader machinery. His blog entries, media quotes, and court actions formed a tapestry of resistance—one woven from the threads of art, suffering, and legal claim.

D. Empathy Beyond Identity, Anger Against Complacency

One striking dimension of Roy’s activism is his willingness to use empathy as a political strategy. He acknowledges his positionality: a white, affluent man—but also one displaced, detained, shamed. This bifocal lens allows him to inhabit both vantage points: identifying with the incarcerated, the marginalized; but also critiquing the mechanisms that made him complicit. His blog becomes a device to dismantle complacency—even among those comfortable with their privilege. He purposefully irritates complacent white gay men, reminding them “the battle is never won”.

E. Globalized Conscience

Roy’s activism extends beyond U.S. borders. His reflections on Gaza, and the institutional suppression of anti-Israel artwork at the RCA, illustrate an artist unwilling to be neutral. His making art about tragic events—and then having it removed—becomes an act of protest. In recording these censures, Roy reveals the fragile tolerance for dissent in academic and artistic institutions—and underscores the political nature of art itself.

Conclusion: The Art-Activist as Lifelong Witness

Duncan Roy’s work—spanning film, blog, archives, painting, and public interventions—demonstrates how art can be sustained activism. His artistic voice is inseparable from his ethical concern; his identity is not cloaked, but exposed as conduit for broader social reckoning.

Whether describing jail uniforms as markers of racialized vulnerability, recounting detention as legal grotesquery, bearing witness to systemic racism and international atrocity, or preserving queer working-class narratives for the future—Roy’s creative practice manifests as civic testimony. His life, captured most fiercely in his blog, is his most radical art: an unfinished manifesto demanding both recognition and justice.

Categories
art

Chamonix

Thoughts and Feelings August 2025

The white, much older American sitting with his very young Thai wife at the cafe… where I am writing this diary, wonders out loud how there can possibly be so many ‘obvious muslims’ in France and wonders more how they even got out of their Muslim countries to enjoy a holiday in Chamonix.

1.

Yesterday Morning. Walking with my friend Helen and her little dog through the Gorges de la Diosaz, up and down the perfectly beautiful river path, along a steep, well constructed board walk.   There are many beautiful waterfalls to see as well as an outcrop of black slate and glittering quartz to admire.  On the viewing platform at the highest point we looked further up the canyon toward a huge rock jammed into the narrowest part of the gorge.

Dramatic and beautiful.

A perfect place to contemplate and relax. 

On the way down from the furthest point we were stopped by a young, rather jovial father of two toddler boys.  He asked how much further a walk to the summit.  I answered his question and asked where he was from. 

“Israel”, he said. 

My blood ran cold.  Who would have guessed this normal looking man was from a country where it is perfectly acceptable to support child killing monsters in the military and the government?

I felt for my life.  If I told him I was Iranian maybe he would try and kill me? If I had kids… would he try killing them? How intimidated the Muslim people climbing the gorge would feel if they knew this man was on the same path.  

It has become apparent… there are no innocent Israelis. 

I was immediately plagued with violent, intrusive thoughts! Imagining him throwing little kids into the gorge.  I imagined him killing, killing, killing.  Here he was, enjoying the waterfall as if… as if he were a normal young man, not a member of a murderous ethnostate, a citizen of a country who daily mutilates and kill babies, who murders unarmed civilians, whose politicians unashamedly call for more mass murder, who lie compulsively or control the democracies and media of most Western or ‘white’ nations… then accuse anyone who tells the truth about their cruelty and mass manipulation as racist.

My look must have said all of this because in the split second it took me to acknowledge his reply he looked very uncomfortable… even though I said ‘enjoy your walk’ and turned on my heels.

Walking away from him I contemplated this despicable, smiling man and the state of the ongoing genocide… angry and sad just how little I could do to help the people of Palestine. Regular people like me are forced to live ‘genocide adjacent’.

We are powerless. Reduced to micro-protests.

I wondered, after this is all over, after the last Palestinian has been killed by Israel… how I could ever look into the eyes of anyone who described themselves as an Israel supporter or ‘proud zionist’ like our nasty, complicit Prime Minister.

The Israeli man’s smiling face stayed with me well into the night… as I cooked dinner for us all, as I chatted with my lover (now flown home) and fell into a fitful sleep.  Palestine will be free.  We are all Palestinian, we will be free despite our various governments attempts to silence, outlaw and shackle us. A Free Palestine may not look like we think it should: land returned to the people who own it, a true democracy etc. but those of us who stayed true to the people of Palestine and spoke out despite the threats of imprisonment can live without the shame most should feel for not speaking out.

2

At the head of the Gorges I asked the ticket seller about the impressive rock fall netting.   They must be really expensive, I asked. 

“Yeah, very expensive.” he said.  

At ¢7.50 a pop and over 1500 visitors a day, the Gorges de la Diosaz makes more than enough money to keep the canyon pristine and safe.

Nicola, on her way home from Geneva got caught in a traffic confluence.  She thought it might have been some kind of road traffic accident.  Nicola saw a little white car with a huge dent in the roof.  As it turned out, it was not a traffic accident… more an act of God.  

Despite the steel rock fall netting… a boulder, loosened by the heavy rain, had crashed onto the little white car killing two of the four driving home.  A terrible tragedy.  Makes me think twice about travelling the elevated carriageway from Chamonix to Geneva.

3.

This blog has been my primary artistic practice for decades.  I kept a written diary before the blog.  I started writing my diary in 1980 as I didn’t want to forget a thing happening to me.  Life was so exciting and continues to be.

Then, five years ago, I stopped. I was living in Portugal, taking those antidepressants after my brush with covid death.  The anti-depressants meant no writing and no sex.  I suppose instagram took up the slack.  Picasso said that painting was like keeping a diary. I feel the same about instagram.

Now, I’m writing my blog and having sex.  I’ve missed the rough stubble of a man’s kiss.  I’ve missed the touch of a man. Chamonix is packed with super fit men, young men with thick, naturally coloured beards.  Even though I have one… I really don’t like grey beards. 

Writing my blog.  Journalling they call it.  I like that this blog can be found on-line… if it’s looked for.  I’m still a little embarrassed by some of it… however well written it is.  Did I really say that? 

Over the years I often repeat myself.  Mulling over the same anxieties year after year.  Some things never change.

Today the mountains are hazy with fog, mist lingering in the canyons.  The rain is heavy, thunder and lightening… chasing away the insufferable heat.

I had a fascinating reception to my queer artists blog.  Most gay artists, regardless of how similar their work is to others, fiercely defend their artistic uniqueness.  They seemed a little put out their ‘originality’ wasn’t so original.  One of the younger artists I mentioned in my previous post was a little condescending about our connection as artists and as gay men.  

I’m queer, you are gay. They’ll be another moniker soon enough to describe these Friends of Dorothy.   The list of homosexual description is very long. Queen, faggot, batty boy, pansy, nancy, fudge packer, arse bandit…. Queer is just the most recent re-appropriation.

Ivan, do you remember the list of words we used to describe our penis… when we made the show?  Starting off quite amiably with all the usual: prick, cock manhood etc.… and ending up with ‘weapon of war’?

This blog is my most successful body of work.  A continuing expression of my artistic freedom.  A set of portraits, landscapes, observations and sketches across time and space.  

I’ve noticed recently how I’m less interested in people knowing what kind of art I make.  This is the art.  This is the art.

www.duncanspark.art

Collating the past years work for my art site… I realise I can’t settle on one style.  Each edition looks so different.  Who would know the painting I painted were made by the same artist who make the textiles or the installations or the photographs? Let me be candid… each film I’ve made could have been authored by a totally different film maker.

Of course there are plenty of artists who muddle along exploring various styles without settling… like Kippenburger or Mike Kelley.  One died of alcoholic poisoning and the other of suicide. 

Suicide, certainly something I’ve considered.  Death by choice.  When the opportunities dry up, or life becomes too boring… when I can’t realistically contemplate a useful or creative future.

I assembled all sorts of work at the RCA, using all manner of materials and styles.  I assemble, like I tidy other people’s houses,  rearranging, interfering… knowing when not to interfere.  Never truly happy with what reveals itself until I hit the sweet spot.  

Taking each beautiful element, placing it beside another in the hope sparks might fly from the untapped energy within.

Categories
art

Fear and the Fury

Neil Bartlett, Ivan Cartwright, Duncan Roy and Robin Whitmore, polaroid images from Pornography: a spectacle ICA 1984

I become the gay man I am… not by expressing any innate sexual desire but by joining a particular culture, by learning a particular language. I’ve always thought we should be ‘going in,’ not ‘coming out’. At whatever point we choose, we enter a gay/queer culture which already exists, and in joining that culture we find ourselves amidst a variety of styles which our gay peers offer us. We define ourselves by adopting or refusing these styles.

Even though I had good reason to, I have only recently had the audacity to call myself an artist but have consistently loved, collected and connected to artists. Here are three young queer artists whose work touched me deeply… and explore similar themes.

I first discovered Ty Locke at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury in 2018. His degree show was utterly compelling.

Locke is currently enjoying a well deserved solo show at Commune in Vienna. As part of this show the spectator is drawn into a darkly lit basement past posters suggestive of adverts for drag performances mimicking past events of an imagined venue. Within the room they are met with a series of melted plastic chairs arranged as though in a sex club.

Prem Sahib was my visiting tutor at the RCA. Another well respected queer artist. Central to Prem Sahib’s earlier work are men only cruising clubs, where you can ‘lose yourself, escape societal constraints, or simply fuck’.

For ‘DESCENT I. People Come & Go’, held in November 2019 at Southard Reid gallery in Soho, London, Sahib reproduced the subterranean area of a cruising club. Viewers felt their way through immersive tunnels of steel where they met half-stripped men, abject and unresponsive.

Diogo Gama is a Portuguese artist who pushes for queer visibility. His show Teleny at the General Assembly gallery in London drew its name from a pornographic text he found as a boy in an abandoned house. These works by Teleny are attributed to Oscar Wilde. Gama’s show is a synthesis of borrowed images, words and media. In Before I forget, Teleny Sweats, Albeit Covertly, Elsewhere, Gama utilised a towel purloined from SweatBox, a gay sauna located in London’s Soho.

These three young artists among others revisit themes we were unpacking in 1982 during the making of our devised performance commissioned by the ICA, Pornography: A Spectacle. We too were reclaiming gay sex spaces: saunas, fetish clubs, drag bars… fearlessly talking about our sex lives, dragging up, getting naked on stage.

Walking into Prem’s show at Studio Voltaire in 2024 felt like walking into the ICA in 1984.

The space we created at the ICA 40 years ago directly connects us with Prem’s cruising club, Ty’s sex club… haunted by Teleny’s ghosts. We are in the same space! The vastness of this tunnel, this mineshaft set over decades, unchanging… the smell of cigarettes and rotten beer, sticky floors… voyeurs glimpsing the same cast of men pretending. Drugs muffling the thumping beat, my heart is beating. Listen, can you hear the distant, thudding music pierced only by the gasp and grunts of men penetrated, men cumming… undeniably the same… wearing leather drag… disco drag… I’m on my knees.

Time is the greatest distance between two sex clubs.

They came to see us naked. I must have handed a thousand fliers late night at Heaven, The White Swan, The Two Brewers and The Vauxhall Tavern as they were lining up to get in. They asked, Are you in it? Will we see your cock?

We packed the ICA with gay men and made a ton of money.

At first I was petrified, Neil Bartlett the director was scary and uncompromising. My voice was tiny. We opened the show with a dance routine, Hot Stuff by Donna Summer. We were almost naked. The audience were salacious, lascivious… then, after ten or so minutes I found my voicehe. The audience started to see themselves in all of us on stage and relaxed a little… then they laughed… then they cried.

One particularly gripping monologue, describing violent sex with a hook up. The details were shocking, a foil to the tenderness and vulnerability reached by the end of the scene: the two holding each other, sobbing. There is only one man to whom I say, ‘I love you’. My lover. “I love you” marks a status, not a feeling, therefore “love” becomes the most taboo of all words men say to each other.

For all our bravado the audience recognised how vulnerable we all were.

I’m assuming the word queer is more inclusive than the word gay. Apart from the rebranding… what else has changed? Prem, born 22 years after me, Ty Locke was born when I was 36 and Diogo… when I was 38. Yet, these artists are making sense of their gay/queer lives in much the same way Robin, Neil, Ivan and I were unpacking ours in 1984.

‘Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert

Using the language and locations of our gay lives as the springboard from which we leapt into something unimagined for the purpose of our devised spectacle. Using our experiences of the clubs, bars and saunas in London during the late 70’s early 1980’s. Wryly comparing the reality of our sex lives (we were all in our 20’s) with the fantasy of available paper/video pornography and the attributed pornographic work of Oscar Wilde who used the pseudonym Teleny for the purposes of his erotic writing.

All of this… against the looming spectre of an AIDS epidemic which had broken over London, was no longer an American ‘problem’… and, of course… the casual, often violent homophobia from the Police and the general public alike… whenever they could get away with manhandling us.

Sahib recreated interiors from The Back Street (1985-2022) an East End leather bar at Studio Voltaire in Clapham as we recreated scenes from similar leather bars and bath houses at the ICA.

The Back Street opened the year we made and toured our show.

As we used the red flock wallpaper from the gay bar coat check… the tantalising space between the street and the promise of cheap beer and easy men. Prem appropriated the lockers from the changing rooms at Chariots bath house (1997-2016) they were dumped in the car park. The lockers were subsequently acquired for the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection.

By contemporary standards the spaces we inhabited in 1984 were neither inclusive nor safe. The bars were frequented by white gay/bi men, sexual assault was common place and I don’t know if we knew anything about consent.

I went to my first, late night gay bar in Margate 1976 and stumbled out into the morning light in New York City, 1997. The year I got sober.

I have always craved the right to be visible… yet in 2025 I still think twice before I hold my lovers hand in the street. For 40 years I have second guessed myself and recognise the same PDA editing in the work of these younger artists. Invisibility, shame, fear and isolation have figured in the work of all these artists and… this old artist. Both then and now I summon those ghosts who haunted the lives of my gay ancestors: Shame, Fear and Isolation.

Is this inevitably who we are? Is this why gay artists 4 decades apart continue to explore the same themes? The streets are dangerous, the right vilify us, we are robbed, assaulted or murdered in search of sex or comfort.

Why do I want my lover to choke me? To slap me? To piss on me? Insult me? Why do I demand my lover do to me what I fear most on the street? Treat me violently because I am familiar with a glancing blow. Call me names because nothing you can say will ever sting as much as a stranger recognising what I am and calling me a faggot.

I recoil when you know who I am.

Comfort me when the violence is over… kiss my wounds.

As we were touring our gay show about sex worldwide, espousing the sexual freedoms we thought we enjoyed in clubs, bars and bathhouses the AIDS epidemic was crashing into our community.

By December 1985 when we finished our tour, reprising the show at the ICA… 41,200 gay men had been killed by AIDS in NYC alone. Killed in one year. Imagine this. Please. A generation of mainly young gay men. Men like Prem, Ty and Diogo.

I move to NYC in 1985.

I recoil from gay sex. I save my ass. I didn’t die. Why?

Brad, a beautiful young bar man serves me a Long Island Iced Tea at Sip and Twirl on Fire Island… he has a huge smile and perfect abs. I’m going to extravagantly tip him and flirt like my life depends on it. Later that night we pass each other on the boardwalk. Just a kiss. Brad wants to get fucked under the moon in The Meat Rack wearing his black leather waistcoat.

That beautiful boy, and boys like him… after the summer season in the Pines, they’re chasing the dollar serving cocktails back in the city at my favourite bars: Area, Saint, Boy Bar. Those barmen are so fucking beautiful.

We didn’t know what was happening out on the meat rack, as Brad was getting fucked by multiple men hanging from the trees in a makeshift sling… we were unaware. We didn’t know our little community would become the epicenter of the East Coast AIDS epidemic.

October 25 1985: The New York State Public Health Council empowers local health officials to close gay bathhouses, bars, clubs and other places where “high-risk sexual activity takes place.”

As the epidemic worsened, whenever we could face it, my partner Joe and I would covertly visit St Vincent’s Hospital and sit with young men dying of AIDS. We lived opposite the main entrance of the hospital on 12th Street and 7th Avenue. It is gruelling to watch a young man die.

The next time I saw Brad… he’s in St Vincent’s hospital sweating, writhing, delirious on his sodden bed. He’s covered in disfiguring lesions… crying out… crying out he doesn’t want to die! We held him as best we could. A few days later another gay man is in Brad’s bed begging for his life.

Brad will die alone. His Christian family stay away from the city. They are too ashamed to hold his hand or comfort him, mop his brow… he is torn away from life, from his beautiful gay life, a life ended by AIDS… in shame, fear and isolation.

1984/85

January 11: The U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) revises the AIDS case definition to note that AIDS is caused by a newly identified virus.
March 2: The U.S Food and Drug Administration licenses the first commercial blood test to detect HIV.
April 15–17: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization host the first International AIDS Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
April 22: AIDS activist Larry Kramer autobiographical play, The Normal Heart opens Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. The play covers the impact of the growing AIDS epidemic on the New York gay community between 1981-1984. The play’s protagonist, Ned Weeks (Kramer’s alter ego)who is desperately banging on the doors of government and science in an attempt to stave off the annihilation of gay men.
May 1: As Is the first play about AIDS to make it to Broadway opens. The play gets excellent reviews and runs for 285 performances.
July 25: Actor Rock Hudson who played leading roles in over 60 Hollywood films, announces he has AIDS the first major U.S. public figure to do so.
August 31: The Pentagon announces that it will begin testing all new military recruits for HIV infection and reject those who test positive.
September 17: President Ronald Reagan mentions AIDS publicly for the first time calling it “a top priority”.
October 2: Rock Hudson dies of AIDS-related illness at age 59.
October 2: The U.S. Congress allocates nearly $190 million for AIDS research.
October 25: The New York State Public Health Council empowers local health officials to close gay bathhouses, bars, clubs and other places where “high-risk sexual activity takes place.”
December 4: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors enacts strict regulations on local bathhouses to stop the spread of HIV.
December 19: A Los Angeles Times poll finds that a majority of Americans favor quarantining people who have AIDS. By year’s end, the United Nations states that at least one HIV case has been reported from each region of the world..

Do artists even talk about AIDS anymore?

Neil, Ivan, Duncan and Robin images from Pornography: a spectacle ICA 1984

Categories
art Love

The Devil Wears Walter Van Beirendonck

I arrived in Chamonix a few days ago. The first night I arrived I checked that gay meeting app and left a message for a mysterious man on-line. You know, most messages go unanswered, liaisons cancelled at the last moment, people are not who they say they are. Surprisingly I met the man without any complications. He looked like the pictures he sent, he turned up where we had agreed and he stayed close the four days until he left. He held my hand. He kissed me. He gazed into my eyes with an affection I thought I would never again experience. Now he’s gone. We speak all day, every day. I don’t think I have ever sent so many heart emojis.

I’m staying with a very old friend in the chalet she designed and built in the heart of Chamonix, the various mountains with all their unusual names tower over us. Yesterday we drove through the valley toward Switzerland, parked up, took a gondola and a chair lift to a wide open pasture where in the winter thousands of skiers hurtle through the snowy landscape. We were aiming for a refuge where we would stay the night but we went the wrong way… walking an hour or so in the wrong direction. By the time we arrived at the refuge my legs ached and the big toe I broke years ago… felt like it was dropping off.

However, I loved the refuge, we sat on deckchairs and looked out into the inky black universe above us and the lights of Chamonix below us. As I ate the delicious dinner they served us and played card games with my friend and her daughter I couldn’t help thinking about the starving people of Gaza, all of us under the same sky. I was angry thinking about our white western governments and how corrupt they are and how much I detest our Zionist leader Starmer. How I loathe the way our democracy has been sold to Israel.

As I tried to sleep on the hard bunk in our open dorm I fretted over my powerlessness. There is nothing we can do to make a difference to help those poor people. Those children desperate for food, shot in the head as soon as they are handed their meagre rations.

This weekend hundreds of people will stand up for our democracy in London. Ready to be arrested for holding a sign. Our despicable government. How did we get here? When did I understand the lengths the establishment will go to get its own way? It started with Corbyn being smeared with anti semitism when he won the Labour leadership. Pictures of our military target practicing on his face? It became worse when he forced a hung parliament and Theresa May into an unholy alliance with the Ulster Unionists. Corbyn nearly won that election, the establishment lost their shit and evil Labour MP’s like Lisa Nandy threatened to break Corbyn as a man… the same rhetoric the Israelis use to describe what they are doing to the Palestinians.

Our government is not our own. Starmer is running our country for the zionists and the 1%. Selling off more publicly owned assets to assuage the greed of the 1%, defending the companies the 1% already own who are presently stealing from every man and woman in the country. Poisoning our rivers and seas, stealing our private information and selling it to the highest bidder, letting evil companies like Palentir prepare us for the same violent treatment presently meted out to the innocent, unarmed Palestinians. Mark my words, what you are witnessing in Palestine… Starmer and Nandy, with no hesitation, will do to us.

I was dressed very inappropriately for a mountain walk. I don’t have any mountain gear. I don’t have boots or lycra or a padded gillet. I do have a thick Walter van Beirendonck sweater and an Etro cashmere scarf and wide denim jeans. Although sartorially shocking to fellow alpinists I was perfectly happy.

Anything else to report? Not really. I drank my first Negroni last night… which was rather good. I speak to fellows from the RCA. Apparently the beastly Jordan Baseman is behaving impeccably and let’s hope my blog and the complaints of others will cause him to reflect and think twice before he treats students next year like he treated some of us.

Categories
Alcoholics Anonymous

Drinking Alcohol

The 12 Steps Erased No 1 RCA 24/25

I first walked into the rooms of NA/AA on October 1st 1997.

Narcotics Anonymous is a society of men and women for whom drugs have become a problem. That’s what they say. After a long while of going to meetings, finding my tribe in which ever country I found myself, connecting with others, working the 12 steps, taking others through the steps… what originally seemed so simple became very, very complicated.

I followed my ex lover Jamie into NA. We were cocaine fiends. We fucked on coke, we fought on coke, we were a nasty couple of fools who daily re-traumatised ourselves using cocaine. When he finally got help… I wanted help too. I followed Jamie into the recovery rooms of NA… and after a few months embraced hard core ‘sobriety’ in Alcoholics Anonymous. Graduating, that’s what AA people call sliding from NA into AA. It might be prudent to mention Jamie was not my partner but the side piece.

My partner Joe and me, we were drinkers but never took drugs. It just wasn’t our thing. We had boozy lunches and ended the day, almost every day, enjoying a bottle of Makers Mark. Our drinking, although heavy, was not unmanageable. I would describe myself as an overly affectionate and good natured drinker.

Joe and I lived between NYC, Whitstable, London and Fire Island Pines. Jamie badly wanted my huge gay life. He wanted me to fail Joe so he could take my place. Jamie couldn’t understand why Joe never batted an eyelid when things went badly wrong. When I came home covered in scars, when the expensive coffee table was broken because Jamie had fallen onto it, when the police came to the house looking for Jamie… Joe just continued to love me and support me without any judgement.

In an attempt to escape Jamie I fled to Sydney, Australia… Jamie followed me. He followed me where ever I could run. He turned up in Fire Island, he turned up in Whitstable. You know what? I was both terrified and delighted when he found me.

I had taken drugs occasionally during my life. Heroin with Freddy in Paris when I was a teenager. Ecstasy whilst clubbing in the 80’s, acid on one occasion. I hated weed… it made me paranoid but I loved mushrooms. Mushrooms made me roar with laughter. Mostly, I couldn’t be bothered with drugs because they were expensive, I didn’t know where to buy them and it was a struggle to know what you were buying. Jay J gave me my first ecstasy tablet on platform 2 of Whitstable Station. He just popped it into my mouth. It was fab.

Joe was hugely rich. With Joe’s money I could buy my own cocaine. We were throwing a party at our house on Adam and Eve Mews. Julian, a perfectly pleasant drug dealer turned up at the event and I bought my first bag of cocaine. For the next six months I used cocaine every day, fuelling the violent insanity I shared with Jamie.

After 6 months of constant cocaine use I could not leave the house. I only opened the door to let Jamie in to fuck or Julian to buy more cocaine.

That summer poor Joe fled to NYC and Fire Island. He called me to say Diana, Princess of Wales was dead. Jamie wet the bed. I consoled my self with more cocaine and tuba roses.

A month later, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, unemotionally observing bright red blood from my bleeding gums swirl down the drain. I heard a voice, a man’s voice quite clearly behind me, telling me if I didn’t stop what I was doing… I was going to die.

I called my friend Jenny, explained the deep trouble I was in. She told me I was an addict, suggested I get to a meeting. It was the first time anyone had the guts to call me what I am. The following day I stood up at my first meeting and identified as an addict.

I was delighted when I realised what I was! Addiction made sense of everything. Of course I behave this way, I’m an addict. Little did I know… cocaine and alcohol were mere symptoms of a far bigger problem. I wasn’t addicted to sex, drgs, alcohol, money… I am addicted to intensity. I am… an intensity addict.

Even after these years of ‘recovery’ I’m addicted to flirting, to danger, to trouble, driving fast, fearless debate, mercilessly rooting out the defects of others. I am addicted to holding up a mirror to those who think they are beautiful… revealing their putrid ugliness.

Even when the truth became evident and Jamie was finally booted out of my life for good… I did not seek an alternative remedy. I remained in the rooms of AA and NA and latterly SAA in hope that a god of my understanding would save me from myself.

I loved my new life in AA. I went every day… sometimes three times a day. I couldn’t live without the intensity of other alcoholics. It was easy to stop drinking and drugging because I am not an alcoholic or a drug addict. I am, as it turns out, addicted to sick people and AA/NA is jam packed with the sickest people I could ever have wished.

I had no business being in the rooms of AA/NA, no business ‘fixing’ desperate alcoholics who, after I understood how to work the steps, I considered my divine ‘calling’. I was not alone. There are plenty of recovering addicts and alcoholics in the rooms of AA/NA simply there for the personal glory of fixing others in recovery.

I left Joe two years into my relationship with AA/NA. When I stopped drinking he lost his best friend. I regret choosing AA over Joe but there you go. I stayed sober. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs and stayed close to a group of familiar men and women who loved AA/NA as much as I thought I did.

I packaged my horrible mental illness into one word: addiction. And in NA they told me my insanity had only one cure: GOD.

Could I tell you honestly, after 28 years of AA/NA, if I was truly powerless over drugs and drinking? No. I cannot. I have been powerless over buying shit on Ebay, I have been powerless around cigarettes and a few men I thought I loved… but I can take or leave a pint or a shot or a line. What I wanted from AA/NA was, and this is difficult to admit… a connection in a lonely world. I was lonely. AA/NA gave me the intensity I needed.

Wherever I was in the world I sought out the rooms of AA/NA and made the people there my family and the many splendid rooms my home. I moved to LA not because of the film industry… because I was addicted to the AA/NA in Los Angeles. The rooms of AA in LA are the most intense in the world. Jammed with the sickest ego maniacs, violent crazy zionists and best of all desperate celebrities one after another playing out the worst of themselves in AA… flaying themselves before a willing audience, packaging and rebranding their mentally unstable behaviours as ‘addiction’.

I listened avidly to desperate men and women tell their stories of chronic loneliness, it was all I needed for an hour or so to pull myself out of my own self pity and feel better about myself. I would go to three meetings a day and introduce myself as an addict. I began circuit speaking to hundreds, loving the applause… telling my story, predicated on six months of cocaine use and a self diagnosis as the basis to inspire others. It never occurred to me… I am not a drug addict. I am selfish, I am self obsessed, I have a huge ego and a crushing self hatred. I have profound mental health issues but I am not a drug or alcohol addict.

How do I know? Am I protesting too much?

During the Covid pandemic, 5 years ago, I started drinking. Not heavily, I drank as and when I wanted to. I didn’t touch drugs. I have stayed drug free for nearly 30 years. But that doesn’t count in NA. Only the purest of abstinence matters to addicts and alcoholics. ‘Alcohol is a drug’ they drill into you. If you drink one sip of alcohol the flood gates of hell will open and you will die. I must have sternly warned a thousand or more addicts… drinking will kill you if you deviate from the strict (non rules) of AA.

One afternoon, with Ana Corbero in the deserted village of Carmona in southern Spain, I ordered a small glass of white wine and… I didn’t die. I was not beset by craving. ‘The phenomenon of craving’ AA people call it. I expected it. It didn’t happen. I drank one glass. That was it.

A few weeks after the first glass of wine I sat in my local Portuguese bar and drank another glass of wine, convivially with a friend. Again, there was no craving, no powerlessness, no unmanageability. I have continued to drink like this for 5 years. Yesterday, I had dinner with a friend, we ordered a glass of white wine each. He finished his then drank mine.

I still go to the occasional AA meeting. Why? Because leaving a cult is bloody hard. There’s something soothing about the language and locations of AA/NA meetings. Dingy church basements, chocolate biscuits, the mesmeric readings. But as with any cult it is impossible to pick and choose. You are either all in… or all out. There are no half measures.

I don’t feel comfortable around hard drugs or the people who use them. I don’t feel comfortable around pornography. Yet pornography has taken me faster toward powerlessness and unmanageability than any drink or drug. Love, or the intense feeling of love can also overwhelm me, causing me to go totally insane. Unfortunately I have fallen in ‘love’ and taken others down with me. Poor Jake.

Fixing others, it turns out, can also drive me into insanity and chaos. Making other people’s problems my responsibility. Fixing anyone who cares to take my ‘advice’. Not once did it occur to me… nobody wanted my advice, it was none of my business. My head was bruised and bloody from the brick wall I was banging against again and again. Innocently saying, ‘I can help with that…’ ‘would you like a hand?’ ‘I think it would be better if…’ I know someone…’

Who am I if I cant help? If I can help you… I have a reason to live, to be in your life. My relationships are historically built around ‘helping’. If your place is a mess I can clean it. If your marriage is failing I can talk you through it. If your child is sick… I know a great doctor. Like many children of alcoholics/rageaholics/addicts I am perpetually looking to repair the irreparable. None of my relationships are built on the level. They are all transactional. Swinging wildly from people pleasing to taking control… and all supposedly for the benefit of the person I am supposedly helping.

My constant desire to interfere in other people’s lives found a natural home in AA/NA. ‘Let me take you through the steps.’ The moment I understood what I had been doing compulsively for decades… I took action and changed tack. I went to Al-Anon.

Although people commonly turn to Al-Anon for help in stopping another’s drinking, the organisation recognises the friends and families of alcoholics are often traumatised and in need of emotional support and understanding. According to Lois W. the wife of Bill who founded AA:

After a while I began to wonder why I was not as happy as I ought to be, since the one thing I had been yearning for all my married life [Bill’s sobriety] had come to pass. Then one Sunday, Bill asked me if I was ready to go to a meeting with him. To my own astonishment as well as his, I burst forth with, “Damn your old meetings!” and threw a shoe as hard as I could.

And just like that, I’m in Al-Anon. I found my tribe. I let myself off the hook. I check myself whenever the desire to ‘help’ others overwhelms me, when I feel my ‘helping hand’ come on. Even so, I’m still a long way away from the peace of mind I craved for so many years in AA/NA but I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Al-Anon, is the antidote to all my fanciful ideas about my own alcoholism and addiction. In the rooms of AA/NA I competed to be the maddest mad man in mad land. In the rooms of Al-Anon I strive to be kind and gentle, to erase my desire to fix and control and make right. Al-Anon, where I can live by the tenets of AA/NA but need not live such a strident and frustrating life. A life governed by competitive abstinence. Where, despite being sold the opposite, I found a cruel and damning (god) higher power.

One of my closest friends is a real alcoholic. A bottle hiding, litre of vodka drinking, black out drunk. A real alcoholic. I am not and will never be like that. I know a real addict who will take a sip of beer and 3 hours later will end up in the gutter with a crack pipe. I am not him.

I am a responsible drinker and I haven’t touched drugs for 28 years. Drinking and drugging are not my problems today. My today problems are isolation, alienation and shame based anger.

Every day I seek to annul those problems. Every day I fail. But I am heading in the right direction. Heading toward death for sure… but eager to die with a smile on my face.

The 12 Steps Erase No 2. RCA 24/25

WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com