Month: March 2012

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date March 31, 2012

All change. The days fill up rapidly. Meetings with lawyers and press advisors.

Life is more different now than it has ever been. The fast receding recent past. The life I no longer inhabit. The new life that beckons.

Journalists try making sense of what happened to me. I spend each and every moment simplifying, honing, editing both people and possessions out of what remains of the life I now live.

Men I know from jail are released and we meet in coffee shops all over the city. I drive to the ghetto. I drive to South Central. I drive to Watts and Compton. I am a long, long way away from The Chateau Marmont.

I have committed myself to the most onerous of tasks, bringing attention to the vast numbers of men and women currently held in Californian jails who have no reason to be incarcerated.

When we meet, my allies at the ACLU and NILC, talk about the criminalization of immigrants, we use a lexicon that I am slowly getting used to. No longer an abstract concept…I am at the very heart of one of the USA‘s most vexing problems: immigration.

Immigrants have little or no sympathy from the general public. Just like the gays. Little or no sympathy…as much as we kid ourselves.

Now I find myself at the edge of two marginalized communities. My immigrant gay friends in NYC do not consider themselves immigrants until they go back home and have their visas renewed. There, outside the Embassy, they find themselves in long lines of migrant workers, stripped of their status.

That’s why this state by state gay marriage fight means nothing to me. It will not help those men and women who had the audacity to fall in love beyond the border.

A marriage that is recognised in Europe, where a family can walk to the checkpoint together…is suddenly separated at the Immigration desk. We do not recognise your ‘family’ here. If we complain we risk being arrested or worse. Ask my gay friends what that feels like, those of them who marry Europeans, Australians…

Life has become very serious. My opinions about film and art and literature are worthless. I try, but the words splutter out of my mouth incoherently.

I want to be interested in what previously enchanted me…but I can’t.

I am so subsumed by my new task that what mattered…means nothing.

The Daily Beast article was well written, a little TMZ. The last time I had a piece in The Daily Beast Jake contacted me. It was the beginning of that painful fiasco. Ironically, the picture they used of me for the piece…you can just catch a glimpse of Jake’s arm. It is ironic how he remains in my life.

Yesterday they sent a photographer from the LA Weekly. He snapped me with both his very expensive camera and his iphone. We met at Intelligentsia on Abbott Kinny. Afterwards I met a young philosopher. We walked the length of Venice with the dogs. Talking.

I have stopped telling people I make films…because I don’t.

I spend time on Twitter, amusing myself with Deepak Chopra and Arianna Huffington. Asking them absurd questions about HGTV.

There is an infestation of ground squirrels and gophers. I kill them with acrid smoke bombs.

A few weeks ago a friend explained to me how he and his girlfriend fell out because, when they argue, he wants at any cost to be right.

If I’m not right, I’m nothing.

It’s the scourge of the addict.

I was wrong. I’ll have to get used to saying that. It’s not very American. Nobody ever wants to admit the mistakes they make…unless there is something in it for them.

There was a time, not so long ago, when all I wanted was to be moving. Now I am quite happy to sit still. I do not yearn for anything.

I am happy not to write this every day.

prison

Jail Momento

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date March 23, 2012

Hollywood

Fame Whore

Power and prestige can be just as intoxicating for those who are powerful and prestigious as for those who seek them out…or chance upon them.

Infamy can have the same mesmerizing effect. Mass murderers, on their way to the electric chair, marry formally reasonable women.

The mother/father killler Menendez brothers, still get proposals of marriage from star struck suiters.

I have seen gown adults buckle before the very famous and the not so very famous.

The youth of Hollywood, like so many generations before them, have been levied.

Sexual expediency is a price silently adhered to any deal.

I don’t need to tell you Marilyn‘s story…do I?

It’s quaint! It’s so old fashioned…it’s happening today.

Somehow everybody knows that if you are going to go the distance in this town you better go the distance with whomever has the power in this town.

Many people masquerade as powerful and do very well thank you very much. Taking advantage of those who are want to trust them.

Gays are particularly vulnerable.

It’s best, they are told, for a life as an actor…to stay in the closet.

The closet protects and it taketh away.

To be a young, beautiful gay man arriving in Hollywood for the first time has a million, unforeseen drawbacks that seem, to the uninitiated, like wonderful gifts.

Noticed by rich and powerful men (when you have lived your life in relative obscurity) perverts the course of any fate you might believe in.

There are plenty of fate healers.

Look at him.

Picked from a legion of other boys. He feels special at last.

Boys who would not normally indulge in the crepe flesh of the elderly become their most ardent moisturizer.

Especially for a young gay man who may have been deeply closeted, living in the jet black shadow of toxic shame.

Never realizing his own beauty. His own worth.

Ignorant to the attention he receives as he walks innocently down the street.

Like Dorian Gray, shown for the first time how gorgeous he is…becomes immediately vain and arrogant.

Throws off his mantle of quiet humility and becomes addicted to the adoration of others.

Watching my gay brethren in Hollywood flocking to the shrine of the generously rewarded can be a sickening sight.

Young boys arrive uninvited from small towns in far off states armed with copies of US weekly.

Sitting in the Chateau Marmont hoping for a glimpse of Josh Hartnett or Lindsay Lohan.

Hoping to make everything better, validate and soothe away the pain of a miserable and isolated childhood.

Unless those boys are fabulously gifted, educated or similarly bequeathed the last of their youth is stolen from them by the unscrupulous.

Their talents go unnoticed. Their dreams unfulfilled, their virginity discarded to the most affluent.

Another notch in the bed post.

Get them drunk or worse.

People say, let them make their own mistakes.

It’s very hard to do.

So, the fame whores and the star fuckers line up…pig pink, shaved and waxed for the jovial grandees who take turns like so many commissioned shop assistants on the floor of the biggest meat market in the whole damned universe.

Tags Chateau Marmont Hotel, Fame, Gay, Josh Hartnett, Lindsay Lohan, Marilyn, Picture of Dorian Gray, prostitute, Us Weekly

prison

Illegal Incarceration of Aliens

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date March 21, 2012
2 Comments on Illegal Incarceration of Aliens

Things are moving rapidly.

My fight against the illegal incarceration of aliens at the Men’s County Jail in LA and jails across California gathers both support and credibility.

There will be a press conference during the first week of April hosted by NILC.

Follow me on twitter @duncaninla for further details.

Also, if this blog is emailed to you (1800 of you) remember that I often add and edit each post as the day unfolds.

Check into the blog for updates.

I will be Testifying at the LA County Commission on Violence in Jails on Monday April 16, 2012 at 9am at 500 West Temple Street 381BM.

And, most excitingly, I was asked yesterday to consider testifying before the senate in Washington.

Look out for interviews in both the LA Weekly and Newsweek during the coming week.

Meanwhile….

Tags California, County commission, LA Weekly, News conference, Newsweek, NILC, Washington

Gay

Retweeted

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date March 20, 2012

The weeks and the months pass by.

Since my release from the county jail, life has become…tranquil…passes effortlessly…with relative ease.

I imagine this is what Percocet feels like?

I have settled back into my life but scarcely write about it.

The twins are living here with their friend Kevin. They move out on the 26th. We cook, we prepare good food. We eat at the table, we use the linen napkins before they are packed up or sold.

They drink red wine from crystal glasses they have no idea are as valuable as they are.

I know that these formal dinners are at odds not just with these youth but with all youth.

I am trapped in another universe, insensitive to their discomfort. They have no use for anything I know.

I am not sad. All I have to do is re-imagine life in jail and I am delivered from self-pity.

I have tried going back to AA but I’ve no stomach for it, nor the people. I am done with AA in LA. It’s over. Over.

Occasionally I have to go back to court and they hand me more papers to add to the huge stack I already have on my desk.

You can feel that neither the judge nor the DA has the enthusiasm for the case now I am not incarcerated.

Certainly, with the serious press and the ACLU in pursuit of answers re. my illegal incarceration and with a huge law suit in the offing…I can’t imagine that it’s party time at the DA’s office when they mention my name.

Anne Marie the special DA looked positively miserable when we saw her yesterday. Her hair looked good tho. Nicely quaffed and bouncy.

She was wearing a very chic black, cashmere coat belted at the waist with dramatic lapels and long hem line.

I was a bit hard on her in earlier blogs. She is prettier than Michelle Bachman.

I am most eager to go to court. To clear my name. To start the law suit against the realtor who started all this mess.

I am not allowed to sue him whilst we are in this criminal tangle. That’s the law…apparently.

Yet, even that may be taken out of my hands by HSBC, my lender.

The twins birthday on Monday. They will be 22 years old. Remember last year? How they bounced down stairs in the morning and sang Dave Mathews songs?

I met Miles when he was 19.

Robby has fallen for someone and my surrogate child spends nights on end away from the house with his new love.

I want him to be safe, he looks at me like I’m an idiot when I remind him to be true to himself.

Watching Robby grow into a fully formed young man, the young man he wants to be…not who I want him to be.

He reminds me of another young man who liberated himself from the closet not so long ago. Before my very eyes.

There are so many similarities. Robby and Jake. But the outcomes are so different.

Again, I play over those past events. The events of that doomed love affair. Wishing I had done things differently. Wishing I could have helped rather than hindered.

The death of love.

Mostly, as Robby reveals who he is, I have the same feeling I had when Jake came out. That he shouldn’t be betrayed, that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes I made.

It was so hard to let him go.

Now I can’t even remember that he was beside me in Paris or London or New York…because, I suppose…he was a ghost or I was never truly allowed to enjoy our time together.

He was tortured by self doubt. Guilt.

Sometime, I wish I could call him and listen to his voice, listen to his loves and losses. How he has evolved.

Then, seconds later, I know that I don’t want to hear anything. That it would still be too painful. Isn’t that absurd?

We are strangers. We are strangers. We will remain forever…strangers.

If I had lived in NYC when I was seeing him things would have been different. We both needed continuity. The goodbyes destroyed me. Every time he said goodbye. I was bereft.

Well, that was then…but even so, just writing about him again…my whole body ached. He was consuming and passionate and never mine to have.

Meanwhile on twitter Roseanne and I have been publicly sharing our philosophies and mutual revulsion of the way things are. Two old people meeting in the virtual town square putting the world back together the way we think it should be.

I like Roseanne.

Tags American Civil Liberties Union, HSBC, London, Oxycodone/paracetamol, Paris, Robby, Roseanne, Twitter

Malibu

Raining St. Irish Day 2012

Fire burning, protected by chapter 13.

Dinner at Axe last night with Anna.

Chow time!

My adversaries try shaming me with sneaky references to jail…like silly children.

I can’t stop thinking about HGTV’s Kitchen Cousins. Trapped in a double penetration vortex with these thick thighed men, my face torn apart by their searing Italian stubble.

Yes, who wants a boy when you can have a man?

You know my type? Nebbish, short, hairy, huge brain. Keep your opera sophistication. Keep it!

Tags Rain

Gay Malibu

Death Threat

Post author By Duncan Roy
Post date March 16, 2012

Doctor’s office yesterday. He wasn’t there.

The receptionist told me with ersatz compassion that they had tried calling me. They had tried cancelling.

She showed me the number they had for me. She let me see the evidence. The right digits, the wrong order.

I remembered telling the young woman who initially took my details. I remembered her thick accent. I knew that she didn’t understand what I was saying whilst I was saying it.

She’s not the only one. I get things so muddled. I can’t spell.

I mean, some words elude me…like the word ersatz. It baffles me.

Hot coffee, very hot microwaved coffee. It’s raining. The dogs are staying in bed.

The boys stayed out last night. I had a friend over. Lit a fire.

Yesterday this mad kid (Turkish origin) from Bel Air in Maryland left violent, racist messages on this blog. He used to call and text. He stopped texting and calling months ago after I threatened the police…so he sets up false Facebook accounts and tells me how he is going to kill me etc.

In his head he is best friends with Peres Hilton.

In his head he thinks he can leave anonymous notes…telling me that I am a disgusting negro lover…and not get caught.

Again, what this idiot, these morons don’t get? They leave their IP addresses , they leave crucial evidence. This is his: 68.55.180.249 It is linked to every email he ever sent, every message he ever wrote.

The kid is a tragic mess who needs help…but I ain’t the one to give it to him.

Robby said yesterday, after I texted some sweet note…’till death do us part’. So I reminded him that death was probably not so far off, (more deaths of contemporaries reported in London) that he would one day organize my funeral.

“Did you get a death threat?” he asked…

No. Not today.

Rain forecast for the next three days.

The kid who shot all those Afghans in their own homes last week…well, he is getting a media makeover.

They say he ‘snapped’, he was ‘drinking’, it was his ‘third tour’. Meanwhile whole families are dead.

Can you imagine the same excuses being made if an Afghan slaughtered an American family. Well, he snapped, he was drinking…he couldn’t take it any more.

Could you imagine those excuses being made?

More details are ’emerging’, more details are being manufactured so we can let this guy off the hook.

Meanwhile the tenant I had downstairs, Matty O’Neil…he has gone…leaving a disgusting mess behind him. The boys took a whole day cleaning up after him.

You know, this kid Matty spent time in jail because of his Arab origins? He was held in a jail after 9/11, probably held illegally by the US government…with his father when he was a young boy…yet when I suggested that his story and mine had similarities he told me imperiously, “I am an American! There are no similarities.”

He moved out, brought a motley crew with him. His sister, her girlfriend….his boyfriend.

The girlfriend was Chinese, the only one there with ancient Mayflower/American credentials was Matty’s boyfriend the acutely fay boy who works in the veterinary office in Malibu who Matty met on Grindr.

Deluded, the week before he left he asked me for a membership to the private club I belong to.

It made me smile. How the American children of immigrants quickly forget the struggles of their fathers.

“I pity you.” He said, as he was leaving.

Along with his pity he left two huge stains on the carpet, refused to pay his rent or accept responsibility for the mess…I pity his next landlord.