Penultimate Blog – Disrupting

As my interest in blogging dissolved and published less frequently this past year I often wondered how I would say goodbye (once and for all) to this blog.

Before I blogged I kept a journal. Laboriously hand written every day for twenty years.  Secret.  The blog became a paradox.  A public diary… yet intensely private.  If anyone mentioned the blog to my face I became indignant… as if they had snuck into the library and read my private journal.  When asked, I refused to talk about it.  The blog, I explained, was my public life.  If you want to talk about it do so through the blog.  “You are my private life.”

These past months I returned to keeping a hand written diary.  Life is too exciting not to.

Since Jenny Ketcham introduced me to WordPress in 2008 so much has happened.  Some good, some bad.  I’d dabbled with blogging when I first lived in Hollywood but it was only after I met Jenny during Dr Drew’s Sex Rehab that I embraced it.  I embraced the freedom and notoriety blogging afforded me.   Shortly after I began writing daily, as if to confirm my good fortune, Roger Ebert tweeted how brilliant it was.

The show, when it aired, was not well received among gay white men.  My blog too, seemed distasteful to the gays.  In fact, gay white men seem terrified of my blog.  It caused a visceral hatred.   Gay white men have so many secrets.  By exposing my own frailties and perversions the blog threatened to incriminate them all.

Yet, even though one might think many people read my blog, I rarely had large number of visitors, tiny numbers compared with successful blogs.  Occasionally the numbers would go crazy.  The largest number of visitors for one post?  The Bryan Singer blog.  20,000 people in one day.

During my most active period, writing daily, I built up a loyal following.  I was approached in the street, I was given unsolicited advice about my mental health,  I was sent gifts for the dogs.

I always wrote for myself.  I didn’t feel the need to be ashamed of anything.  I wrote about anger, intrigue, sex, sexuality, religion, politics and much to the horror of AA people… I wrote about my relationship with AA as I fell in and out of love with it.   Attendees at the ghastly Palisades Men’s 7.30am AA Stag meeting were particularly angry about this blog.

Fleeting love affairs rather than the cult of abstinence inevitably enriched my writing.   The relationship with Jake B existed more in the blog than it did in real life.  It flourished on these pages and withered on the streets of NYC.

Our love affair inspired me and the blog soared.  As the relationship failed… so did my writing.  When Jake and I split I sank into an obsessive, self destructive depression.  I posted every intimate detail of our life together.  The blog became less creative and more vindictive.  My loyal readers fell away.  Fury enveloping everything around me.  A thick cloud of resentment that took years to clear.  Years in the shadows with only my obsession to give me succor.  I worked it all out here.  Page after page after page. The carcass of our love affair lay there for years, like road kill.  If anyone googled his name my blog would jump up at and slap them in the face.  Page after page after page.  Finally, after much soul searching, I removed the most scurrilous descriptions of him. Why?  He wrote a long email that put an end to the nagging questions.  All I wanted was closure.

I was never very far away from the blog.  The blog came to define my years in the USA.

Of course! The blog, famously, became the instrument for which I was arrested.  It was sited in court documents, extravagantly quoted by the police and prosecutors.. but more of that in my final blog.

As I’ve grown happier, at peace… the blog becomes less interesting to write.  Long before it became a liability… I enjoyed the daily commitment.  I had a wonderful writing routine.  Waking at dawn,  a long walk with the dogs into the dewey Santa Monica mountains.  I spent far too much time overlooking the Pacific Ocean,  but when I was perfectly calm I’d sit at my desk and unpack the previous day.

It is not any more necessary for you to know me.   No longer appropriate for you to know every detail of my life. It is none of my business what you think of me.  That is for the book and the candle.  So, I bid you… my dear reader, adieu.