Category: Dogs

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Dogs Travel

Police Cell

Decided to stay an extra week in London.

Woke up at 11.30 this morning.  That is LATE for me.  Me!  Me who is usually up so early.  Anyway, we were going back to Whitstable today but I ended up spending the better part of my day at Chelsea Police Station.

Why?

You may well ask.

A drama unfolded at the house that included a cast of unruly, drunk children a lost iPod touch and me trying to enforce an adolescent exit strategy.  I mean, getting 5 unwelcome 15-year-old kids out of the house whilst Phil was at her Dad’s.  Anyway, it all ended up with me being arrested and taken to the police station and then being let go.

The short story is this:  I accused them of stealing an iPod touch.  They accused me of spitting at them, which is a total lie, but it had to be investigated.  So, I got cuffed and dragged to the police station.

Of course, our accusations were ignored.  Impossible to substantiate.

Firstly, can I tell you how utterly charming the policemen were in the station.  The  Desk Sergeant, the constables, the detective..all utterly considerate and thoughtful and even though I had to spend an hour in a cell it really did not matter.  Even the cell was clean, the toilet flushed and someone had stenciled a note for a drug ‘help line’ on the ceiling.

Much has changed since I was arrested 30 years ago.

Fingerprints are scanned, mug shots digital and every time I had to sign my name it was on a pad like you would find in a bank.  Of course there were the usual host of nutter types being held there but sadly, since the mental hospitals were closed down the police and prison service are used to hold the insane until they can be reclaimed by the broken mental health system.

The detective who interviewed me was really good looking.  Big blue eyes.

Now I just feel ghastly.  I felt like crying in the station.  How could this have happened?  That kind of sad moment.   In fact..I did shed a tear when the nice detective was interviewing me.  Had odd feeling of shame telling him that I was gay.

I felt like I was defending our honor against those kids.   They were HORRIBLE.

I am going to Victoria Station to help Jake and the Little dog who went off to Whitstable for the day.

More about this tomorrow.

Categories
Dogs Travel Whitstable

New York/Paris/London

I left LA last week (July 2nd) though it actually feels like months ago, so much has happened.   I flew into JFK with bags and dog and chaos.  He was waiting for me and whisked me off to a beautiful house set in perfect woodland and rolling lawns.

We ate and walked and talked.  I never tire of listening to him.   We have done our fair share of soul-searching these past few months and now it is time to have a few laughs.   I know that at the back of his mind he worries, that he is not truly free.

I loved the countryside and delightful clapboard houses on the border of New York and Connecticut.

In distant, very white upstate town Katonah there were two very black gay men from the Caribbean eating a light lunch.   They were the only black people for miles around.

 

Two days later we were in a taxi back to JFK and onto one of Air France’s spectacular Airbus A380.   The huge plane was almost empty!  Deciding to fly on July 4th was a great idea.  Taking off over a million 4th July firework parties.  Fireworks exploding all around us.

The first part of the journey was not without drama as we managed to get delayed for 3 hours by a bomb scare at JFK.  The entire airport emptied out just minutes before we were about to fly.    We were herded outside and sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking water.   After a couple of hours in the sun we stampeded back into the building directly onto our planes and landed in France 6 hours later.

It is delicious to be back in Europe.  Away from the tangled life I have left behind in the USA.   Once in Paris we checked into Mama Shelter in the 20th, seconds from the cemetery Pere Lachaise.  We loved it!

 

Although I smuggled the dog into the hotel-actually we had no need as dogs, we later found out, are allowed.   The food and service were excellent.  The only vaguely irritating thing was the Internet wi-fi connection which was linked to their rather modern but baffling Apple TV.  Apart from finding it impossible to get on-line their sophisticated interconnected system meant that the TV remote would also remotely control our lap tops..hmmm.

It is so easy to concentrate on what is wrong in life or in others without noticing how beautiful things are.  The staff at the hotel were gorgeous and we drooled over them everyday.

First day of Couture shows in Paris.  We had lunch with William Stoddart at Hotel d’Amour near Pigalle.  Gosh that area has changed so much!   When I lived there with Claire Sant it was ghastly.  Last week it was wonderful.   The weather has been gorgeous everywhere we have been.

The beautiful Edouard joined us afterwards for coffee.  We had dinner with him the night before and 6 others at Italian restaurant.   Very pretty German model who was obviously rooting for Germany in the World Cup..she was tall and womanly and intelligent.  We talked France’s ignominious exit from the competition and sneered at the British teams pathetic attempt to get into the last 8.

 

Three days in Paris followed by a train ride to Calais and a ferry to Dover after a short taxi ride home to Whitstable we were sitting on the beach eating venison burgers and the travelling companion couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was and complained that I had underplayed how Whitstable really is.

 

Today there are warnings that old people may overheat.  We are going to take a train to London.

I am sitting writing this from my room overlooking the sea in Georgina’s home in Whitstable.   It was my birthday yesterday.   The day started well enough with coffee at Dave’s deli catching up on gossip and drinking his perfect latte.   I left the companion in bed.  He is not really a morning person.  We met my mother for lunch at Wheelers where Mark Stubbs the chef there continues to surpass himself-this time with delicately spiced soft shell crab.

I really had no desire to see anyone other than who was at that table.  I am certainly not interested in tangoing in front of 500 people like an eastern European gypsy.    My mum and Georgina bonded over their hatred of Asylum Seekers.  My mother pointed out that some asylum seekers were pretending to be gay so that they could stay in the country.  If it’s not the Mexican’s it’s the Eastern Europeans..there always someone to blame for never having enough.

I thought that the fear of others getting something for nothing was an American phenomena but no!  It’s British too.

After lunch Adam took my picture as part of his photographic Whitstable project and his lovely mum cut my hair.  We sat in their lush garden drinking lemonade and lusting after his gorgeous, recently tattooed, diver brother.   After the pictures were taken we walked the couple of miles home up the beach.   I have never been so happy.

When we got home the companion had a drama unfold which he needed to deal with.  When he finally tore himself away from the Internet we sat in the garden and ate dinner with Georgina.  We ate huge organic pork chops that I managed to burn on the bbq.   After dinner we sat outside the Neptune pub with Barry and other drunksters.   The dog was tired and lay on the beach and fell asleep.  The night was balmy and the sea lapped lazily over the shingle.

This morning I woke at 6am and walked the dog up to the harbor.  He loves it here.   The Greens who own the Oyster Company scrawl unfortunate notes on black boards all over their property.  Don’t do this and don’t do that. Those black boards used to be charming now they just look vicious.

Some people like to get their own way..I am one of them.  When you finally meet your match, as I seem to, it can be less than comfortable.  I am trying to be sensitive to the needs of others but I am a stubborn old fool.

As for him..the traveling companion..he’s finding his feet and I am finding mine.

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Categories
Death Dogs

One Year Ago Today

Therapy, collect cheque, Jennie Ketcham for breakfast.

Jennie and I walked the length of Abbott Kinney, found a new collar for the little dog and chatted about our various relationships.  She, of course, has a relationship..I do not.   She is in love and making a TV series and I am off to Paris with a friend.   A friend, nevertheless, who makes me smile.

Last night we saw some cool live music on the roof of the Standard down town..that would be Ryan, Justin and I..then we ate dinner at Bottega Louie.  I ate pork chops.  Somebody sent us a Shirley Temple with delicious cherries floating around in it.

I have to be discreet about the location but Prince and Lionel Ritchie played impromptu performance on another roof in another part of town..it seems that Prince is always up for an unexpected gig, I have seen him perform at hotels and bars and in that huge house he rented with purple carpet everywhere.

The night we saw Prince and bumping into Barbra Streisand in the Pacific Design Center are perhaps my most startling close encounters with celebrity..oh, and befriending Roseanne in Starbucks.

From out of the woodwork crawl all sorts of characters from the past and this week an old friend called after he lost his job.  It was all the more interesting because we had not had a cordial end to our friendship a year and a half ago but time heals and we said our brief apologies and got on with being friends again.

There is probably more to gain from knowing me than not knowing me.

Time is the greatest distance between two people. Tennessee Williams wrote that.  It is time that will end up miraculously mending all the smashed Ming vases that I am surrounded with.  Remember what I said about love being like a Ming vase?

Joan brought me a rather splendid Japanese tea-pot for my birthday that arrived in a huge box from Memphis.  I felt like a five-year old again.  Opening my birthday presents.

This day last year the darling big dog was killed.  Ripped apart in front of me under that truck..she kept on trying to live, trying to stay alive for me as we lay together in the back of my truck..in the flat-bed.  Jennie drove us to the animal hospital on Ventura Blvd and the nurse put her down with a lethal injection as I sobbed my little heart out.

The next day we collected her from the freezer and I cried all the way to Malibu, apologizing to her, reminding her of all the great time we had, crying and laughing until we buried her in a coyote proof hole in the garden she loved.

Sarah sang a beautiful song.  The little dog said his goodbye.

This year has been all about death.  The death of friends, the death of my dog and of course the death of love.   Tomorrow I want it to be different but I cannot be sure.  All I know is that I am trying to be the best man I can be, let go of the past..even the recent past, and forge ahead.

Categories
Death Dogs Malibu

Eclipse

The Big Dog

7am Friday morning Los Angeles.  It’s time to come clean.

This week last year was the last I would spend with my Darling Big Dog who is now buried in Malibu.

I miss her so much.

The occasions when I just breakdown and cry for her are fewer nowadays but it still happens.

If it weren’t for the little dog I don’t know how I would have survived the darker days this year, the dread comes upon me but I have to get up and go on because his needs come first.  He is a little dog, he comes from a damaged place and I made a promise to him..

The dread.

There is, I hear, something quite magical about drowning.  There is a euphoric moment just before death that could make a long swim quite an attractive prospect.

Up and down, up and down.   The trip home will, I know, keep me balanced and sane.  So much to do and see.   Spoke to my travelling companion last night.  He seems well and happy.

Yesterday I woke at dawn and filled my time until I could legitimately start the day.  The little dog sleeps as I potter around in my bathrobe and read the news.   I am going to climb Runyon this morning.

Over in Malibu I saw another huge snake in the garden but it was hot and angry so I didn’t fetch my shovel.  Anyway, I still feel guilty for killing the last one.  So may people asked why I didn’t keep the meat and eat it.

The problem with changing your life so completely is that you are left with a huge hole where your life once was.  Sex Addiction meetings are not enough to keep me happy or secure or in touch.  Gratitude lists look paltry when written down.  Even meeting up with my friend and mentor can’t seem to shift the immense longing I have in my heart that periodically casts such a deep shadow over me.

My happiness eclipsed I look to the usual suspects to shine light into the darkness.  Sadly their batteries are dead.

Listening to loud and uplifting music can go some way to making life better.   My choices may seem suspect, Elton et al.   I can’t listen to Joni, her obsession with lost love merely plays into the pessimistic thoughts I am already prone to when the sun stops shining.

Dentist yesterday.  The dentist gave me a lecture about flossing and I lectured her about the perils of white flour/sugar/rice etc.   I don’t think any kind of doctor here likes being told anything because they are so used to dispensing advice and usually remain unchallenged.  She tried to scare me with apocalyptic visions of the bone around my teeth falling away that can only be solved, she said, by spending thousands of dollars and endless hours in the dentist’s office.

I think I will ignore her advice and see my lovely dentist in Sydney when I am there this winter.   Oh yes, I am going to Sydney this winter.   I decided this morning.

After seeing Sebastian this week I thought a great deal about my father.  Dead, maligned,  reviled..much like I expect I will be.

Another Sebastian to think about, my friend Sebastian Horsley who has finally become the glittering star he always wanted to be.  I knew it.  In death he has become the man they wanted him to be.  Death becomes him.  In death we can acknowledge the fantasy of who he was rather than the stinking reality, the crazed drug addict.  I will remember him for twenty-seven years from Edinburgh to London.  I will remember him struggling to stay clean, vulnerable, and helpful to other heroin addicts.   How can I forget?

I stopped in on Andrew yesterday.  He had a square, roughly glazed vase of white hydrangea mixed with other tiny, yellow flowers.  The mere act of filling the house with flowers lifts the spirits.  They have hung huge photographs and his found chair collection grows weekly.  I fell asleep on the sofa and when I woke up he was gone.  When did I stop appreciating these tiny gestures of good will?  When did I stop buying flowers?  How did my house get so full of other stuff?  That’s why I like going to the Malibu because I have stripped out all of the mess.  I am left with an African seed pod on a porcelain plate.

My Darling Big Dog

When did I start forgetting that aesthetic?  The aesthetic that Patrick taught me when I was Andrew’s age?

Meanwhile I am dealing with the birth of a monster.  One I can scarcely contain.  One I have done my level best to avoid for many years.   The goblins hold a cracked mirror to your face and all you can see is the ugliness.  Not the age, (because I am sure of my age) but how very ugly one is.  My confidence stems from this:  that when I look into the mirror I appreciate what I see and hope that others may see me just as I see myself.

OK, off to Runyon with the Little Dog.   Time to go now.   Time to get on with the day.   Busy, busy, busy.

Categories
art Dogs Gay Love Money

A Message from Kristian

I found a book of photography called Chaos by Josef Koudelka at my house in Malibu that Kristian gave me for my birthday some years ago.  In it he wrote:

“I thought this book was very apt.  Life is never black and white yet always flowing with chaos.  I feel this book goes some small way to prove that even in chaos there is beauty.”

It was lovely to find his note.   A message from Kristian, from the past.  The past, where we must leave him.

I had to make some huge and grown up decisions today.   Decisions and about romance and finance.  The two are unconnected yet have been hideously intertwined as I grappled with one or the other for the past few months.

As my fear of financial ruin overwhelmed me I turned to him to deliver me from the truth.   Today, I just had to face my unfortunate situation head on.

My financial insecurity is undoubtedly connected to uncomfortable feelings of self-worth, prestige and power.  The romance I want but cannot have.   Some things are just not meant to be.  It is challenging to come to terms with these sorts of truths but as I have written here in this blog on many occasions when I do make decisions they are swift and sure.  Something, actually, Drew Pinsky taught me whilst I was on the sex rehab show.

I have deliberately avoided talking about either the romance or the finance on this blog but more importantly I have kept it secret to those who love me best.  Fuck, it is exhausting keeping secrets.  I really hate it.  I have no intention of going into any specific detail about the romance or the finance right now.  All you need to know is that I sat with John after the cake was cut and the presents were opened and told him everything I had been hiding for the past few months.  Phew.

As we all know: the truth will set you free.

I let go of a secret I was determined to keep.  Everything I have ever let go of has been relinquished unwillingly.  With claw marks all over what ever was finally gone.

Deep down I am as sure as I ever was that everything will turn out just the way it was meant to be.   I believe in my fate.

My relationships burn like super novae in the cosmos then shrink and die.  I have an opportunity right now to make a different set of choices: taking contrary action, living in acceptance and handing over what ever gives me pain to my higher power.

Just a few days away from my trip to Europe where I will celebrate a hefty milestone.   I have chosen to travel with a close friend.  Someone I love but not a lover.   We (and The Little Dog) will explore London and Paris.  For the sake of The Little Dog we will once again visit the wallabies in the Jardin des Plantes that my darling, loyal pet found utterly spell binding when we visited Paris last Autumn.   I am sure he must have thought that they were the biggest squirrels he had ever seen.

Am I prepared to walk away with dignity?  From people, places and things?

What I own is not who I am.  Who I love cannot define me.  Of course I would love to be in love with a man who loved me as much as I loved him.

I have come a very long way this past year.  The road to serenity, self-love, sexual sobriety is littered with the corpses of those who could not.

I must have buried 30 people during the last 12 years, killed by addiction.  Overdose, suicide, etc.  Every one my hero for keeping me sober.   Each and every one.

This evening I celebrated my friend’s daughter’s 5th birthday.  I sat with his family and watched his happy little girl blow out the candles on her cake.   After supper I wandered into Soho House on my own and found people I knew to take my mind off of the grueling aloneness.  I am not lonely, I just can’t be bothered to make the effort to accept the invitation nor get in the car and drive to people who genuinely love me.

On my way home, as if by magic, friends called me.  Emails arrived, text messages appeared on the screen of the iPhone and I was wrenched away from the promise of a night of self-pity.  I can be such a pig at that particular trough.

I said to him the other night that what I found so hard to let go of was the promise of enduring love.  The door had been opened then slammed shut.  I am the wise uncle, asexual, decrepit yet ultimately willing to be of service to those who need me.

Without the crutches of objectification, intrigue and seduction I can some times flounder.  I can sometimes fall.  Late at night, when all hope is gone I wonder who will catch me?  Who will catch me when I fall?

For a moment back then, I thought it might be you. I thought, foolishly, that it might be YOU.  I thought it was you when I was 20, 30, 40 and now.   Being in love with Richard in my twenties.  I was heartbroken when he would flirt with girls.  At my birthday party on Island Wall, Whitstable my Mother saw the pain I was in and tried to reach out to me but shame got in the way.

The legacy of shame.

Love has always been my goal.  To be loved.  I crave love the way most men crave sex.

I told him:  I’m really scared that I will never love again.   That I will never be loved.  How could I have got this so wrong?    To believe that love was possible, enduring and could be one day mine?

From out of the chaos comes beauty.  It will give me succour when all else fails.  I am going to Europe to fill my heart and soul with art and architecture.  To walk the streets and parks of two great cities.  To explore what it might have been like to be loved.   I know that when I get back he will be gone.  It is our swan song, our last hurrah.  But before I write the end I must enjoy the journey.  I must not fear the future nor have unrealistic expectations, I must set aside my shame and feel the sun on my face, in my heart.

Categories
Dogs Hollywood

Sharon Osbourne

Coffee.  6am.  We didn’t get into bed until 3am.  Still, it’s impossible to sleep.   Perhaps coffee after midnight just doesn’t work.   Spent early part of day in Malibu swapping out locks, preparing for visitors.  Trimming the over grown canopy of Bougainvillea leading to the top apartment.    After a week of intensive organization I am making headway with downstairs and this autumn Louis will come and paint everything cream and clean.

It was good to have Andrew help me clean both apartments.  He is incredibly thorough and dependable.   It’s fun hanging out with him.  Yet, saying this I also miss you-know-who who may never call enough for my liking.  It’s odd to have your heart so evenly split between two so very different men.   He is on the East coast making sense of his new him and I am here with Andrew on the West making sense of mine.

The closer we get to going to Europe the more peaceful I become.  I am going home.

So, I had this invitation for the Warhol opening at Jared’s gallery on Sunset.  I really had no intention of leaving the house but Ryan called and insisted that I come join him so I dragged myself into my new Nantucket reds and set sail for the social high seas.

Prism is a huge cave of a gallery that only the son of a billionaire could possible own.   There were very poorly guarded yet beautifully hung Warhol’s and several hundred frantic club kids drinking free wine and beer, not paying the slightest attention to the art.  Very skinny girls and very pretty boys, I am glad I was with Andrew as he was, by far, the prettiest of them all.   He was wearing a pair of lively patterned Comme des Garcons pants and a simple black tee-shirt and looked divine.   The little dog was wearing a wagwear collar.   We chatted with Sharon Osbourne for a little while but when she realized I was British-or perhaps realized who I was-she affected this weird accent and became decidedly odd, testy.

We ate dinner at the Chateau with other friends and ended up at Soho House where I spotted Bryan Singer with a gaggle of frat boys.  Robert Downey Jr and I had the briefest of chats and by midnight I was fully engaged with my old and abandoned social life.   I sat with my Australian friend Peter S for a good hour remembering Sydney leaving Ryan and Andrew at the bar drinking stout.

You know I spent a rainy week on Fire Island with Bryan Singer years ago when I was with Jamie.  I have nothing to report about that week other than to say it was before I got sober.  A blur of interminable drinking.

Duncan. Unknown, Brandon Boyce, Bryan Singer Fire Island

 

Ryan and I discussed just how distracting LA can be.  How one can achieve absolutely nothing yet feel as if one has had a full and accomplished day.

Poor Soho House are having a terrible time placating their near neighbors and the beautiful restaurant has to be cleared at midnight for noise pollution reasons.  I really can’t imagine that you can hear much of Soho House from the street over the traffic or the other noisy clubs/restaurants but people seem compelled to complain and bitch and moan about almost everything and anything all the time.

It was fun going out although I felt incredibly tired by 2.30am and eager for my bed.   I used to live this sort of life every night in LA and I could once again if I could be bothered.  It’s just so tiresome being ‘on’ or being me and since making the show there is the added element that people know rather too much about my life ahead of meeting me.  Too much for comfort.

This morning I have to meet John for breakfast, our Saturday morning pre-therapy ritual.

I heard a great deal of damning gossip about Kay and Amanda but may have to hold off reporting this until another time.

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
Dogs Gay Money Rant

Drug Companies Profit From Gay Self-Hate

Eating cheese and pastrami with lashings of piccalilli smeared over the top.  The inside of my mouth is burning.  My lips are burning with desire.  Not really.  My lips are just bored.  I am waiting for the mail to arrive so I can walk to bank and get on with the day.

I just scaled Mount Runyon with Sherpa Lil Dog, we saw two gorgeous yeti and had to: Alert! Avert! Affirm!    It’s simply no good for me to gaze longingly at the perfectly honed abs of my fellow Runyon climbers.

Yesterday I realized, after chatting with a friend of mine with HIV that the average drug company will make over $2, 000, 000 out of a single person with HIV during their life time.  Where is the incentive for those drug companies to educate gay men about staying negative?   Anyway, I am fast realizing that the sexual health education that gay men need is nothing to do with safe sex and everything to do with self-love.

The drug companies have no compassion for gay men, no desire to educate an underclass with no real rights, who are despised by most Christian bigots and have so little respect for themselves that they routinely get infected with HIV and become another $2, 000, 000 meal ticket for big pharma.

Pharmaceutical executives must be rubbing their hands in glee when another gay man converts from positive to negative.

This has to stop.  We must start educating the next generation of gay men to love themselves enough to make good sexual health choices.

I got to thinking about my friend Amanda and how we recently hit a bit of a rock.  I think deep down, even though she has gay men around her to dress her, she really has no respect for gay men. For many people we are clowns who have no right to complain or behave as anything other than grotesque queens.   We are, to her, useless absurdities.   Her notion that it is somehow ridiculous for us to have children, for us to have politics, opinions, etc.  She’s not alone; I think many people are outraged by all of that and more.

Whatever I may have written about gaybies in the past I now see gay men having children as a delicious act of rebellion.  It confronts homophobia head on.

Categories
Dogs Rant

The Man Who Lives Elsewhere (reprise)

An odd and contradictory day began with my Saturday morning breakfast buddies.  They were all so fractious!  I ate a three cheese pizza with prosciutto.    It was delicious.

The night before was spent chatting with the other who was drunk and emotional.  Today I invited him to come with me to London but the ‘pressure’ was just too much.  Apparently it is hard to just be friends when we are still awash with uncharted feelings.

The truth is I am just not as involved as I was.  I am ACTIVELY seeking other men to fall in love with.  An invitation is an invitation and that’s that.  Whereas before I would find his indifference and hesitation devastating asking many times if he would change his mind-this time there will be no repeat invitation.

Jennie moved out of her apartment here in Hollywood and in with her west side boyfriend.

I received some bad, bad news yesterday whilst on my way home from Malibu and it took a whole 24 hours to process what to do next-waiting for the next intuitive thought.  Bad news bottom line:  the little dog and I will be making our way to London and Paris for longer than I expected.   Perhaps for three months.  Perhaps it means making my movie there rather than here.  Perhaps it’s all for the best.  Anyway, I can’t write the detail because the devil is in the detail.

Today, I attended two fundraisers and was asked on two dates.  I declined-kindly declined.

I discovered that my heart was still taken by the attentions of folk who live elsewhere and even though I have no intention of rekindling any sort of relationship or entertaining the idea of a relationship ever again with the folk who live elsewhere (and even though I am actively searching to have a relationship with a man who might live on my very street) it would be unfair to anyone who is interested in me to get involved whilst there are unresolved and deeply held complex feelings.

Everyone is a little bit discombobulated at the moment.  A li’l bit prone to rudeness.  A fat red haired woman trod on the little dog with such force that he screamed and emptied his anal glands all over a very posh shop.

I had a lovely dinner with Jane in WeHo then wandered home, throngs of young people with big smiles on their faces weaving up Sunset Boulevard.

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Death Dogs Love Malibu

Crying

The Sex Rehab show effect has been cumulative.   When it first aired I expected to be immediately recognized.  As the weeks and months pass more and more people come up to me in the street and introduce themselves.

Shown daily on VH1, making it easier for old ‘friends’ and acquaintances to reach out to me.  Long forgotten, now reminded by Sex Rehab re-acquainted on Facebook, twitter etc.

Reality TV is truly life changing.   Opportunities include film projects,  book deals,  lovers-I am anywhere but where I thought I might be at my age.

Outside, this rainy afternoon, the gardeners are pulling out tons of weeds.  It is good to hear them chattering away in Spanish.  So, that’s what life will be, a life of chattering Mexican gardeners until Dorset Mary pitches up in her airstream and tends the goats and the chickens.

I have to call the bee man today about getting the bees up here.  I know where I want them to go.

I wrote yesterday about crying, a commission for a new magazine.  There’s been a great deal of crying during the past few months as my focus shifted from the big picture to just one man.   Ones view narrows exponentially when one falls in love and at the same time balloons into something huge.  My tears were not often for him but for past traumas and relationships and deaths.  My focus became very shallow and as I retreat from love I seem to be more aware of the horizon.

I cried when my Darling Big Dog was killed. I sat in my bed for a week and sobbed like a child.  I am still prone to sink into that deep, black well of sadness, tears  flooding my eyes and my heart.

If I had not witnessed that terrible moment I would be a lesser man today.  In many ways to have suffered like that unleashed all I had been denying myself throughout the years.  So many times I should have, could have, would have cried but remained stoic and dry-eyed.

The architects have just been to the house to check out the layout.  She was a rather wonderful, practical woman with a great attitude.

My film is taking shape, the garden continues to give pleasure and I am getting into my creative groove.  Although I am still mourning the death of love I am looking forward to a brighter, leaner future.