Month: June 2010

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
Auto Biography Death Gay prison Rant

Sebastian Horsley Funeral

1983, the year I met Sebastian

Is it possible to believe in God and still take drugs and drink?  Is it possible to believe in God and sleep with hookers?  Is any of this possible?  Obviously it is.

Sebastian will be buried on Thursday, July 1st 2010.   There’ll be a horse-drawn cortege from Meard Street to St James’s Piccadilly where the service will be held.   Stephen Fry will be speaking,  as are others.  Stephen very kindly offered to say a few words on my behalf.

Rachel Campbell-Johnstone wrote to me yesterday inviting me to the funeral, she said,  “We are mountaineers roped together heading for the summit of beauty.”   She warned us that the funeral will be filmed.

Remember, I was 23 when I met Sebastian.  That was 27 years ago.  He was still a teenager working for Jimmy Boyle in Edinburgh.   Our show, Pornography, a spectacle, invited by the Richard Demarco Gallery would play in Jimmy’s cold performance space where Sebastian and I met for the first time.

I would later work for the Demarco Gallery and meet Joseph Beuys, the greatest conceptual artist of our age.   There was a fascinating dialogue between Beuys and Boyle..then styled one of the most dangerous men in the United Kingdom.

The dialogue was initiated by Richard Demarco whilst Jimmy Boyle was serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Barlinnie Prison for murder.  Beuys went on hunger strike because of Jimmy Boyle’s removal from the Special Unit, Barlinnie to Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison where he was no longer able to continue making art.

Sebastian claimed in his book Dandy in the Underworld that he was sleeping with Jimmy and I have no reason to doubt him.  I would have too if I had had my chance.  There was something wildly attractive to me about ex cons and hard men and dangerous criminals.  Remember I had been in prison the year before I met Sebastian and developed a nasty habit for sex with brutal straight men.

If anybody was going to fuck me he was going to be a man who deserved me.    He was going to be a man who knew what he wanted and how to take it.

My cell mate Tommy Cowling, married with two children from Hoxton, East London was the most beautiful man who ever lived.  When the lights went out in our cell he said, “I’m asleep now, you can do what you want to me.”  For nine long months we did exactly that, everything we wanted when the lights were out.   He could make me cum by just rubbing his stubble over my soft face.

Perhaps this is another reason why I spurned the soppy men that I met in gay bars and gay clubs?  Perhaps this is why I would rather have my head buried in a squaddies (soldiers) groin, the smell of wet pussy on his cock than a nice boy from The Abbey.  Prison spoiled more than my reputation.   It proved, if any proof were needed, that straight men with furious urges, hard and hairy bodies and urgent desires were far more interesting than living in the half-light of shameful, gay London, Paris or New York.

This is all a matter of taste of course.  My desires cannot be compared to yours.

Yesterday something a little untoward happened.  At Anna’s birthday party she rolled me a fag and it had a few crumbs of weed in it.   I was as high as a kite for a good few hours.  Everything was totally wonderful.  I had that gorgeous feeling of euphoria and masterful abandon.  I hadn’t felt that feeling for nigh on 14 years.  I demanded to speak to Jake because I wanted to know how the experience of me being high would affect what I thought of him.

He was complaining that it was late and he wanted to go to sleep…he was blithering on about how people might think he was some sort of man whore if I compared his experience of being gay with men who died of AIDS in the 1980’s.   Obviously, I didn’t mean that.  I was trying to be nice.

Fuck it!  Go and be a man whore.  All of you!   Go and be whores.  It doesn’t matter to me.  I was sucking squaddie cock and getting fucked in the back of cars by East End builders.  LUSH.  I didn’t wait around to have a gay life.  I emerged from the womb searching for the most perfect penis to suckle on.

Anyway, as I did not deliberately get high I am not going to reset my sobriety time.  I still believe in God but I’m not going to be so fucking pious.

I will miss you Sebastian Horsley.

Categories
Gay Rant

Beware of False Gods

After dinner, before the last US election, I sat in a ‘circle’ with a bunch of my Jewish hippy friends who live in Northridge, California.   They were praying quietly and not so quietly for the Obama presidency.

An African healer sat silently with us wearing traditional headdress and multi colored robes.   He had been flown to their house from Africa so that he might share his wisdom.

In turn they held a gnarled wooden ‘talking stick’ and gravely shared their optimism for the creation of Obama World.  The Obama paradigm shift, the liberal equal and opposite reaction.  A world where sanity and fairness would be restored.  Where this young black man’s promises would come true and Guantanamo would be shut down and wars would be ended quickly not slowly.  Where Bush/Cheney corruption would be revealed and the culprits brought to justice.

Some of the women cried.

When I was handed the talking stick I advised them carefully not to worship false Gods, that I did not share their optimism and that they would only be disappointed.   The hippies laughed at me with desultory guffaws but the silent African suddenly spoke up, “He is right!”  They looked at him aghast!  He pointed his long bony black finger around the room.  “He is right.  It is you all who are wrong.”

Duncan: 1.  Hippies: 0.

Stunning naivety, ignorance and blindness have kept liberals in the USA an amateur political sideshow, they remain inchoate and powerless.    They do not realize that they will never be represented by any established political party.  Ever.

So Obama has not, as I suspected, provided the ‘paradigm shift’ that so many of my crystal loving film industry friends thought he would when they rushed to elect him.

Indeed, quite the opposite has happened.

After 10 years of Bush/Cheney there was no equal and opposite reaction, there was just more of the same.  This time from a sweetly smiling, articulate black guy rather than the gruff inarticulate white guy.  He has let you down and it is all the more galling.

In Britain another altogether more intriguing story is unfolding..

I am oddly optimistic about the Cameron/Clegg coalition.  With no real power Prime Minister Cameron will have to toe the line and be more representative of the British people and their desires than cow towing to the ruling elite.  Even though he is cut from aristocratic cloth he seems rather more inclusive than the scarily evolved Tebbit/Thatcher type of Tory who changed Britain over three decades ago.

Watched the England/Germany game.  Proving that the squad seem more interested in their hair than scoring goals.  They are an unruly mob of shopping addicts who have lost their passion for soccer and developed an expensive taste for power and prestige.  Arrogant bunch of wankers.

Had a long chat with Dan in NYC.  I was describing how my newly gay friend was evolving.  I noted that he seemed to own and accept his power and beauty and acted accordingly.

We both agreed that if we had been that sure of ourselves when we were younger both of us would be dead.   It was people like my newly out friend (not that I am suggesting he is sleeping around) who died first of the mysterious disease that became an epidemic and withered away the most beautiful boys.

AIDS, thankfully, never got me.  I was always too much of a prude, never realized quite how beautiful I was and mostly too much of a snob and star fucker..unable to go near the average gay.   In retrospect I think things turned out just fine for gay men like Dan and me.  We survived.  Might not have had as much sex as the others but certainly never paid the ultimate price.

I have come full circle.  He, unwittingly brought me full circle.  Being in love then not being in love.  Wanting to own to letting go and enjoying, from afar, his freedom.

I have always fallen for the impossible.  Yet, unlike before, I do not want to punish him for being who he is and instead just take a small amount of satisfaction from his evolving self.  Like a bird trapped in oil in the Gulf of Mexico he is now cleaned up and ready to fly.

As he flies into his future..what of mine?  Well, I am ok.  I really am.  A great deal could be a lot better but I am OK.

We are off to Paris next week and part of me wants never to come back.

I loved being in love.  It has happened so rarely of late.  As I draw down the shutters on a gay life that I really have no reason to be part of I instead, sit at the edge of that world.

Perhaps there will be a time in the near future when he will come to me and I will be able to hear all of his conquests and heart breaks without my own heart being quite so broken.

Yet, even writing that, I know that he cannot (any longer) break my heart.

I knew with certainty that Obama would never satisfy the lust for change some of my friends thought he might,  just as they knew that I have been naïve about falling in love with him.  He was not sent to be the great love of my life.

He was sent, actually, to be my friend and for that I am very grateful.

P.S.  So Arrianna Huffington is bemoaning Obama and how frustrated people are with him.  How dare she!  It was her daily attacks on Hillary Clinton and lauding of Obama that galvanized so much support for him.  She was short-sighted and more overly impressed by his ivy league nerdyness than his ability to lead.  She wants 5 words to accept her webby award?  How about:  I was wrong about Obama.

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
Rant

Nothing to Report

It has been an exciting few days.   Very Hollywood..just like it used to be before I moved to Malibu.

I can’t really report anything actual as I feel like keeping life secret.  I suppose this is how it has to be.  This time next week I will be elsewhere, gone from LA and occasionally I look around me and wonder why I have stayed so long.

All in all I have absolutely nothing to complain about, in fact I have been a bit of a nag recently and it doesn’t suit me.  Not at all.

I am going to act in my friend Ryan’s film tomorrow.  That should be a great deal of fun then I am seeing a show tomorrow night.  Each day that passes brings me closer to Europe, to home, to familiarity.

I am working very hard to make sure that nothing ruins the good time I have planned.

Categories
Love Rant

My Father

On my knees today.  Waiting to be delivered from the worst.  God, you must understand, never lets me down.   Never has.  Thank you for that.   Everything is just the way it is meant to be in God’s perfect world.

Fuck.  It’s been so hard recently to feel as if life was worth living.  But I just threw myself into the love from those around me.  It’s hard to trust that they will catch you when you fall..but they did.  All day.   Thank you, thank you, thank you.

What, you may be thinking is the worst?   Well, this birthday palava is getting to me.  Was getting to be.  It’s hard to be in acceptance when all around you feels that what was available seems unavailable.

I don’t mean a person..no one person is bringing me down.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m writing about them.  This funk is more about my inability to pull myself out of alcoholic swill and back into the creative life I’ve had for so long.

Today, I prayed that the phone would ring and then the phone rang and I was commissioned to write a piece for a mag.  Then tonight a producer gave me a huge boost, telling me to call when I got back from Europe, that it was time for me to direct something.

Bumped into Sebastian whose father was my father’s best friend.  He said, “Your father was such a cool guy.”  And told me all about my brothers and sisters and what they were up to.

It made me feel very proud.  I do wish that I had had a relationship with him.  I really do.

I am going to sleep well tonight.

PS  The online dating site is yielding interesting possibilities after all.  Not sex but connections.  I was just really honest and said what I wanted.  A relationship.  I want a relationship.

Categories
Rant

Hooters

Anna

Grateful for:  a beautiful day, my little dog, healthy food, my sobriety, a bountiful God, feeling settled.

A beautiful, bright day in LA.  Sitting at home after therapy not wishing the days away until I get to Paris.  Just enjoying the time I have left here.  It goes without saying that I am excited to be in Europe.  Excited to be at home.  Excited to see my family and friends.  The travelling part is a bit of a dreary prospect but we’ll get through it.

The finance issue has been dealt with, I am excited to see what happens next.  I am doing the right thing.  It’s all in all the most grown up thing I have ever done.

I found a huge bronze lamp in someone’s trash.

Last night I had dinner at the 101 with friends.  Spent most of the day with Jenny.

Anna is on her way over with her new film for me to see.

We just saw Anna’s film.  It is called Hooters and is a really funny documentary about the making of The Owls.  If you live in LA please check it out at Outfest.

Dinner tonight with John and Valerie.

Categories
Rant

Gratitude..

Grateful for the little dog, grateful for my truck, grateful for money in the bank, food on the table, a safe house, a holiday to look forward to, my birthday and most of all I am grateful for a higher power that, when I bother to listen, never lets me down.

Dinner with Justin at a deserted Soho House.  He paid.

An old friend called and I was startled and flattered.   Spoke briefly with traveling companion who was feeling yesterday like I was the day before.   Had a long walk with Eric.  Most of all I was just enjoying being here, here being..in my own body, looking out of my own eyes..no interruption on the horizon.

Note from Stephen Fry about Sebastian.   Had a quick coffee with some lad who wanted advice about the film industry but I cannot help him.  I saw Kate Rigg at the 101 Diner.

When the panic comes I refuse to fight it.   I let it wash over me and then I look out of the window and check that I can still see the view, that it isn’t being mired with any unwanted thought.

I am going to overcome this fucking malaise by doing what we do..by taking action and not giving in.  Remind yourself: I didn’t get sober to be unhappy, feel less than or fear that life isn’t worth living.

Off to Ikea with Jenny.

Categories
Love

Jenny A

Lunch with Jenny A at Joan’s on Third.

I tend to avoid anything flavored with Tarragon because it is most often over used.  Used correctly it is the most delicate and fragrant of all the herbs providing a backdrop for other flavors to make themselves heard.

I ate the three-salad combination plate..chicken with Tarragon salad, butter bean and mozzarella salad and snap pea salad.  Gorgeous.  But what was more gorgeous was hanging with the perennially elegant, devilishly witty and endlessly talented Jenny.

I am still off all food made with anything bleached, processed or enriched so am shrinking daily.  I wore McQueen pants, a black tee and Maison Margiella sandals.  The first time this year I have felt confident to do so.  I knew that I looked fucking great and that, my friends, is all your favorite ‘uncle’ requires of the new day.   Elegance.  Who better to dress to impress than darling Jenny.

As you may have divined I am well and truly out of my funereal dirge and feeling very happy, resolute, fearless.  This is all it takes?  Lunch with Jenny to slough off the past few months of misery?  Well no, it was Jenny plus some really good advice, some incisive questioning and hey presto I can deal with anything..including this bloody city.  Jenny left LA a few years ago to set up shop in Todos Santos, Mexico as the purveyor of the most magical B&B in the whole goddamned world.

Incidentally, it was Jenny who I called the day I took my last drink more than a decade ago.  A drink I shared, rather ironically, with Sebastian Horsley and his then girlfriend Rachel.  It was actually a little more than a drink.   Excuse my coyness.

That last night of debauchery in Kensington included falling in and out of black taxies, vomit on the streets, blazing eyes, insulting the host of a very dull party.  The next morning waking up under that cloud.  I called Jenny.  I had been to her home on many occasions where she graciously served alcohol but never drank a drop herself.

She asked if I was ready to stop, that it was about time.

I had a wrap of something in my wallet and knew that I wanted it.  She told me to call when I was ready to get sober, to renounce drugs and alcohol.   It was October 1st 1997.  I was ready.  I put the wrap into the trash and like nuclear waste held it at arm’s length as I threw the trash bag into the street.

After chucking out the last of the alcohol and drugs I set about cleaning the filthy multi million dollar house, fixing the dent in my car, changing my telephone number and putting my life back together.  I slept in clean sheets.  I went to bed when I was tired.  I ate delicious food that I could taste.  In order to escape those whose best interests it was to keep me drunk I booked a ticket to Sydney Australia where I went every day to 12 step meetings for the next six months.

It was magical.   Sobriety is like magic.  That New Years Eve I was three months without a drink,  I did the unthinkable I sat in the Sydney Opera House enjoying The Magic Flute sober.

I have never had a dud New Year’s Eve in sobriety.

Jenny and I share many of the same personality traits..both good and bad and during the past twenty years have helped each other emotionally, practically and spiritually.   In fact, it was she who very generously lent me her beautiful home in Notting Hill when I made my film Clancy’s Kitchen.   Black finger prints not withstanding our friendship remains as strong today as it ever was.

A truly glamorous Brit with red hair and high cheekbones she wanted to know who and what and when..processed it and spat out wonderful advice.

Just for the record: this is what I am grateful for this sunny LA day in 2010:

My health, my life, my little dog, my great friends, my sobriety, food on the table, my trip to Paris, my upcoming birthday, my view, the new road to the house..

Actually, I am grateful for rather a lot.  Now, that’s the way to start the day?  I think so.  With a gratitude list.  Perhaps that’s how I need to start my blog rather than the list of all that is wrong in my life.

For a while I forgot why I got sober!  I didn’t get sober to mope around, to complain about shit or live in fear.   Good God!   Dr Jenny laid me on her couch and reminded me of what I needed to hear.

As a result I challenge those thoughts of obsession to come to me.  Every time my head is clouded with unwanted thoughts I say, bring it on.   There is only so much pain I can endure.  Rather than fight the thoughts or submerge them in drugs, alcohol or orgasm I let them consume me for a few moments and they vanish a few seconds later.

It’s odd that when one is obsessed with anything by simply trying to marshal those thoughts one merely feeds them.   By letting them wash over me like heavy rain the storm passes.

This too will pass.

Joan of Joan’s on Third sat with us for a few minutes and told us about an armoire that she had seen in Paris three years ago that she thought was going to be perfect for keeping her linens.  Sadly, the shopkeeper told her that the beautiful piece was already sold.  For three solid years Joan lusted after that armoire, looking at pictures of it on her phone.

When she finally returned to Paris a short while ago Joan popped back into the store to find that miraculously the armoire had not been sold after all, delighted she opened the door and upon closer inspection saw that it was full of safes and totally inappropriate for linens.

Of course she didn’t buy it.  She said, “I was obsessed with it because it was unavailable and I hadn’t looked inside.”  Which is exactly how I get obsessed…with that that is unavailable and because often..I haven’t looked inside.

I dreampt that I drank a pint of amber-colored beer.  It was cold and sparkling just like I remember it.   It was delicious.  In my dream I noted that it had no effect.  That I was as sober at the end of the pint as I was when I took the first sip.  Oh, if only that were true!

I am determined that nothing will get in the way of the good time I am planning to have in the UK during this next few weeks.  I am going home to celebrate with old friends who expect me to return from this stinking hole triumphant!  I am triumphant.

I have been weakened of late and it does not suit me.   Who says that happiness depends on me being loved, being rich, being anything else than what I am?  Who wrote that bullshit?  I really have no right to anything other than this very moment.

For fuck sake I have survived on my own for nearly five decades.  Why the hell am I so inclined to believe that I can’t do that anymore is a totally mystery.  Who the hell is running this insane asylum?

I have an adventure, life’s adventure to complete here and nothing is going to get in my way.

I think some of you were rather hoping that at this point I might do what my other less determined friends have done..and kill myself.   No such luck!  If the fags don’t get me,  the pancreatic cancer might but never, never expect me to do myself in.

There’s too much to look forward to!

Categories
art Gay Hollywood Love Rant

Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins

The Nancy Rubins show at Gagosian is the real deal.  Not one wasted wall nor expectation disappointed.  Spread over four galleries on two floors this energetic show needs to seen.  The huge newer gallery to the south of the original space has never been used so successfully.  It is devoted to an ambitious, spectacular forest of kayaks that delight and inspire!   Pewter colored boats strung together with high tensile wires exploding thirty feet into the air.

We were shown smaller bronze editions that somehow don’t lose their magnificence even though they seem like maquettes for the larger works.

The art was violent and beautiful just as one would expect.   Huge, crumpled graphite on paper pieces bearing down like storm clouds.  The whimsical collages..covetable.    A most enjoyable experience.

Nancy Rubin lives in Topanga, Los Angeles.

My day began with breakfast at Cecconi’s with John.   We talked about an art project for his store.

I called TW but he is in the midst of an obsession so cannot be relied upon to carry me away from mine.  My obsession to get out of dodge, to leave these filthy streets.

There was a rat that had to be dealt with in Malibu.

Chatted with travelling companion.  Listen, every day that passes until I get onto that plane to Paris is absolute torture.  I CANNOT wait.  He thought I sounded pensive.  Not really pensive, just bored, uninspired.  Bored of LA.  I need an enriching, invigorating, salubrious experience.

I am glad that I am taking a friend.  It is always so delightful to see things through new eyes.  I think we both need to run away.  What we don’t need is more drama, prying eyes or complicated love affairs.

Even my more evenhanded friends seem haunted at the moment.  Haunted by the prospect of no prospect.  The economy, the war, the oil spill..the groggy, ineffective Obama administration.

I remember moving here.  I thought, back then, that anything was possible in LA.  I was wrong.

I am tired of the interminable struggle of living.   Every day is a monstrous challenge. Every fucking day.   Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits.  Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits.

Nancy Rubins

Although I woke up this bright Sunday morning feeling a little less pessimistic I swerve from irritable and discontent to the inner peace of absolute acceptance..then it’s back to the dark side.  Malcontent, that’s what I am.  Even looking at art yesterday, as inspirational as it was, could not stop me yearning for Europe.

I wondered what steps I could take to not be on my own.

I thought about joining a dating site.  I tapped in the name of the site.  As soon as the site popped up I was reminded of a time when all I wanted was to hear the reassuring buzz of new messages.  Looking at that site was incredibly depressing.  Page after page of cock pics, ass pics and naked men.   On either side of the multiple cock pics were ads for porn sites.  Mountains of white, heaving flesh.

I have no currency on sites like that.  I am invisible and rightly so, I have no reason to be there.   No reason to be judged simply by my age, weight and the size of my penis.

I know that this plan works very well for many men.  I have heard from friends how relationships form and prosper.    Many things work for other people that have never worked for me.  The ease with which I see my friend become a fully fledged and engaged gay man has shocked me into knowing just how stunted my own experience has been.

The prospect of never being touched or kissed again fills me with fear.  Is it so unreasonable to want a man who loves me as much as I love him?

If I have learned anything these past few months it is this:  my heart sings when I am in love.  Not when I have sex that is disconnected from my feelings.   I wish I could!  I wish that I had been made that way.  But, the truth is..if I had been made that way I would have been killed by AIDS years ago.  Before we knew what AIDS was.  My reticence saved me though ultimately kept me on my own.

Nancy Rubin

I have never been so eager to meet someone yet so disconnected from the possibility.  I am resigned to the fact that it is totally unlikely to happen.

Friends, I suppose, are just as good.

I will be travelling with a great friend.  I am grateful for that.  Grateful to have a friend with whom I can laugh and although I once wanted more it is with the same resignation that I understand that what I have is just as good.

Some people will always be there.  Until the very end.  I hope that by sharing this journey he remains my friend.   Seldom have I experienced such ease with another and have, on occasions, confused that with being in love.

I spent almost the entire day with Dom.  We saw the show at Gagosian, ate lunch in Beverly Hills then I came home had a nap and cooked dinner for the both of us.  Carrot and ginger soup, pork chops and peas then cups of British tea.  It’s a quarter after 12 and he just left.  Shooting the shit, putting the world to rights.

As for sex addiction?  What of that?  Well, I have been really well-behaved.  Not acting out, not objectifying, intriguing, not making inappropriate comments, not looking at porn, not…well, not doing anything that might compromise my sobriety.

Dom Nancy Rubins

I think my friends here worry about me.  Think that I might be depressed.  They might have a point.  It has been a very, very hard six months.  Not with people, but with banks and aspirations and an inability to make art.

The trouble with LA is the lengths one has to go to make sense of every day.  I have been here for five years now.

Five long years in purgatory.

On Friday night I had dinner at Soho House with a new friend.  It was like dining with a ghost.   A beautiful man with no soul.   A beautiful man who referred to me as an uncle.  Again.  That fucking word.  Asexual uncle.   I didn’t pay for dinner.   Uncles pay for dinner.