As I was stacking boxes for my move I found a whole heap of diaries from the 1980’s. The first day to day diary I kept was in 1982 and that was primarily because life had become so exciting.
We open the first book on this day September 5th, 1982. I am 22 years old.
I am in Greece, on the island of Spetses staying with Sir John and Lady Russell. I am still, at this time, Lord Rendlesham and have flown from Paris to Athens with an older nobleman called Guy de la Bedoyere of whom I had tired.
It was Guy’s Turner that I had marveled in Paris a few days earlier and whose butler, much to my horror, had washed in a washing machine my new Crolla ties.
The magazine Harper’s Bazzar had published the pictures of my infamous birthday party thrown for me by Scott Crolla at the Almeida Theatre. Word was just reaching me in Greece that people were not at all happy. Not at all.
If you click on the diary pages you can read the original entries.
I am in love with a beautiful Swiss boy called Robert and it is he that I wave goodbye to at the beginning of the entry.
The following year September 1983 there is no diary entry until I am released from prison on the 18th November.
September 1984 I am in rehearsal for Pornography: a Spectacle at the ICA in London. There are huge articles about us all in Time Out, The Face and a now defunct London mag called City Limits. I am living in Balham with a girl called Victoria. By day I am in a play about gay pornography and by night I sleep with what was effectively my girlfriend. So was the complexity of my life. “Every gesture must be full and complete.” says Neil. Neil Bartlett, director of the show. During these days he and I began to fall out. Irrevocably as it turned out. When we left each other in Toronto months later after our North American tour we would never speak again.
September 1985 I am writing whilst stuck in a tunnel under the alps on a train from Paris to Venice. My and Ivan Cratwright’s great adventure to Venice. Staying, en route with Fred Hughes in Paris.
The diary for 1986 was missing but now found. I will transcribe the entry. I am yet again in another heterosexual relationship with a woman called Louise. Why?
“Oh dear, I am in The General Trading Company off Sloan Square – Louise by my side. Firstly I did not expect the Bahamian bombshell to come back to Whitstable to see me. I rather thought that she might have given me a miss.
Yesterday before Louise arrived my pinks from Kingstone (?) Cottage arrived, they came to me in a brown cardboard box wrapped in local newspaper. I planted them carefully, laying a foundation of stones for good drainage and surrounded the root system with peat. Maria helped out the best she could but spent the best part of yesterday drawing on the beach. The day before that too she had worked hard on minimalist drawings incorporating the seascape – noticeably the foreshore and the horizon, terribly witty references to dead fish – (?) a family with prawn.
Ivan (Cartwright), we collected him from Whitstable station – Korda (Marshall) and I, he was in such a good frame of mind . He prattled on about being arrested for car thieving and told a remarkable story about having been picked up on Park Lane (London) dressed only in a full length pink, synthetic fur coat, cowboy boots and a micro polka dot bikini! He was picked up by a vast black men in a Buick.
Korda was completely freaked out by Ivan and as soon as he had the opportunity – left. However, Ivan enchanted both Rachel (Whiteread) and (?) with his wit and intelligence. We left for the pub far too late. Ivan was wearing a pair of black cotton stockings, a black tee-shirt and short black sweat pants all topped off with this platinum blond hair and that face which as you know contorts like nobodies business.
We all slept late and woke early, that’s why when big bertha arrived (Louise) I was knackered. We took off for a long adventurous but utterly fruitless journey to a closed park. We did go to Beech House (Hospital School in Chartham) I remembered yet again the horror of being taken there when I was a child – I remember that it was in that place that my life changed direction and I began to fight, so it was rather apt that I went there – my life again on the edge of a potential nightmare. India, 8th October 10.15 – 9 months. It rings in my ears.
As we drove to London yesterday Louise and (?) wrote that evening’s narrative. For she as an eye for the ironic. Firstly we locked ourselves out of Louise’s car and house then we saw the corpse of a man freshly killed, his legs crossed at the ankles, in the road. His clothing partially hidden under a green waterproof police modesty blanket. All of us knew that ambulances take only the living to be mended as best they can. Death has no care. I wondered about his family. The pulse stopped and the narrative ending for him. We drove slowly. Later the image of the corpse quietened me and made me listen.
Louise is my strength whom I do not deserve. Late last night I felt truly happy and secure. That’s enough isn’t it? Enough for a man who rarely lives safely, who is destined to become a lonely old man with personality problems.”
September 1987 I am a patient in the Henderson Hospital in Sutton Surrey where I spent the majority of that year. I had a breakdown after a particularly bad bout of Hep B. The Jay who would be fetching me from hospital is, of course, Jay Jopling.
For some odd reason I did not keep a complete diary in 1988. I am not fully well from my breakdown but have decided to go to New York to see Ana Corbero and Colin Cawdor. Paul Benny the artist was also staying in the huge apartment. An entire floor of a converted girls school just over the Williamsburg Bridge.
There is no entry for these dates in 1989.
1990, my thirtieth year. Living in Chelsea with Phillipa having what looks like a rather glamorous time.
1991 Coppers Bottom has opened at Sadler’s Wells. Karen, the lead actress is threatening to walk. I am now living with Anthony H. in South London.
1992 Tim and I are laughing about Damien Hirst not winning the Turner Prize that he seemed so certain to win. I rather cruelly called Jay and told him how sorry I was whilst sniggering with Tim.
Not long before I get sober. Just another 5 years.
After 1992 I kept a journal less and less. I began every year enthusiastically writing everyday like I do now in the blog but by July had lost interest or life was simply too overwhelming.
Whitstable, that’s where we grew up. The High Street, a shingle beach, abandoned oyster beds, abandoned boat yards.
I knew I wanted to make something. I never knew quite what. Writing, knitting, print-making, drawing, theatre, acting, fashion. Good… but never good enough. Wanting to be included but unwilling to participate. Confident to be part of what was going on but seldom sure. Always there, never present.
Had I been allowed, as planned, to go to St Martin’s College of Art to study fashion I would have become a fashion designer. I still have note books crammed with crude fashion drawings and swatches of hideous fabric made when I was 8 years old. Each ‘season’ I would design a new collection and between ‘collections’ I would write and illustrate articles about the history of fashion.
An avid fashion commentator who had unwelcome, prepubescent opinions about everything. My damning critique of Princess Anne’s ‘boring’ ivory duchess satin wedding dress in 1973 irritated my short-tempered, royalist Grandmother. “Look at those ghastly sleeves…”
I was an industrious child. At boarding school I excelled.
When I wasn’t busily designing imaginary runway collections I worked hard remaking my life, a life I could control. A life reimagined included: a 30 page illustrated story about a happy family of mice. A precocious teenager at boarding school I spent months writing and rewriting rambling plays about unrequited love with other boys.
Theatre! I must make theatre. The lights, the tension, the smell of the theatre. The warmth and silence of the audience, laughter erupting around me, muffled crying from the red velvet stalls.
Oddly, I had absolutely no great passion for film or television. Of course, I had seen many films but it wasn’t a world that piqued my interest. I had a fondness for black and white Hollywood films from the 1940’s (particularly musicals) that I would either watch on the television on my own or walk up Whitstable High Street to the cavernous Oxford Cinema.
I was inspired. Stealing an idea for my ‘new collection’, a sleeve or muff. I watched the credits roll: costume designer Edith Head… Funny Face. Adrian, who designed the costumes for The Wizard of Oz.
I’m 12 years old. I discover Marilyn Monroe without ever knowing she is already an established gay icon. The following year I insist that my parents buy me Norman Mailer’s illustrated biography for Christmas.
Theatre and fashion people referenced film but nobody I knew would ever have thought about making one.
The years after I left Shotton Hall School in 1976, before I went to prison in 1983 were culturally the richest of my life. I scraped into Medway College of Art and Design with one ‘O’ level. I befriended punk rocker Billy Childish. I learned how to etch and screen print and draw. Punk was determining music fashion and graphics but scarcely impacted the institutionalized, established, sewn up world of British contemporary art. Britain would have to wait until 1989 until Michael Clark, Tilda Swinton and Leigh Bowery performed in the Anthony d’Offay Gallery.
Whilst at Medway, I saw a very ordinary man wearing a badly cut suit his tie askew commuting from London to Thanet holding a copy of The Sex Pistol‘s single God Save The Queen and nearly fainted in fear. I was wearing a pair of my mother’s bottle green woolen tights. I wonder what he must have thought about me? He alighted at Rainham.
Unable to study fashion at St Martin’s College as my garrulous stepfather refused to let me. I had to get a job. The job I was offered, selling clothes at Yves Saint Laurent on Bond Street, London became the beginning of what would turn out to be a great, although misguided, adventure. An adventure that would shape the rest of my life.
I met Lady Clare Rendlesham and within a few months I was in Paris pretending to be her son.
Clare Rendlesham and others
Along with changing my identity, in Paris I threw myself head long into the very accommodating worlds of fashion, performance art and theatre.
The land of sublime artifice.
During the pret-a-porter I would run with my friends through the streets of Paris from show to show. Although my time in Paris seems less, in retrospect, about theatre and more about fashion and art, I was introduced to Robert Wilson and members of his company, traveled to Holland to see Lucinda Childs in Dance with music by Phillip Glass and travelled more to see beautiful work by Pina Bausch.
Pina Bausch died this year.
I was one of the first people in Paris to wear a Walkman. I think I may still own that original item. Some rich friend of a rich friend left it at my place. He had bought it from Tokyo where he’d been modeling and never asked for it back. Suddenly I had my very own soundtrack. My life scored by Super Tramp. The optimistic opening bars of Take The Long Way Home soaring over the controversial rebuilding of Les Halles that seems only recently to have settled into its surroundings. Music altered my perception of where I was and how I experienced it. Paris was never so beautiful.
It was during this time in 1978, as a willowy teenager, I chanced upon Fred Hughes at John Jermyn’s Rue de Bellechasse home. That beautifully, wonderfully decorated house… rococo monkeys fucking on the drawing-room walls painted by Harry Gromelion and acres of Fortuny silk.
Fred had been, the year I met him, diagnosed with MS and had become nihilistic and surly.
“When Fred got sick, he had to go to the American Hospital, and I decorated his room. I went to visit him, and brought pictures he liked, from his house and flowers…” Julian Schnabel
Fred, so reviled, cut a sad and lonely path through his own life ending up incapacitated and angry. At the end, surrounded in his Lexington Avenue home by the most beautiful things, nothing could placate him. His terrible Texan mother moved in to help, firing his loyal assistant. We never saw him again.
When I met Fred he had slicked back black hair and tailored suits, he lived in an apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi and was, to a provincial teenager, incredibly glamorous… a true dandy.
“It was I who found Fred Hughes his Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where Warhol would stay.” Pierre Berger
He liked me because he thought I was a British aristocrat. He was a terrible snob. Later, when he knew the truth, he would laugh and mock the moment we met and feign outrage. He only ever called me Anthony.
Fred took me to New York, bought me Vetiver and appropriate underwear, gave me drugs at Studio 54, lent me shirts that belonged to Farouk, the last King of Egypt. He wrapped me up in linen sheets and laughed at my jokes. Fred introduced me to Yves St-Laurent and his muse LouLou de la Falaise, Baron Eric De Rothschild, flame haired owner of Egoiste magazine Nicole Wisniak. I sat entranced by these people. Wearing clothes Fred had bought for me, a brand new name. Sloughing off the past… a past for which I had no need.
Perhaps we understood each other because we had both abandoned our past for a far more thrilling present. After his death he was described as ‘a consummate liar, social climber, and a bespoke SOB who grew to total ghoulishness because of his connection to Andy Warhol.’
Isn’t everyone a social climber of some kind… and why the hell not? It’s galling to have Fred’s memory so maligned. From what I saw he managed or rather… baby sat Andy Warhol, pulling him out of relative poverty, protecting him from the unworthiest.
Was that a lie? I really don’t have a clue. As a teenager I thought he was just swell.
It is so sad to see him like this, stricken with MS:
This photograph is amusing. Tim Hunt, Princess Anne of Bavaria, Me and Alexis de Toqueville at Anne’s apartment in Paris. Like so many beautiful young men from that time, Alexis would die of AIDS. Hid family refused to acknowledge his life as a gay man and his death as a gay man.
Samia Saouma’s Gallery (another social hub as great galleries tend to be) I was introduced to the work of The Baron de Meyer, Man Ray and Joseph Kosuth. I followed the crowd and applauded the sparse and mannered work of Robert Wilson. We saw I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating and Death Destruction and Detroit.
In Paris I learned about artists and their power and prestige. Most of these men and women, invited to Europe during the late 70’s early 80’s, were American. Flooding the world with new ideas; polemical and challenging.
What happened to the arts? Even though British theatre seems to have maintained it’s edge, British art has become increasingly bland and decorative. Says nothing of the war or the bloody peace.
Paris was just how Paris is meant to be: an education for a young man.
Before we leave Paris there was one sublime moment. It was a moment. We all need them. Romantic. I had been invited to the house of some elderly Duke. On an orange velvet wall hung a huge sunset by Turner. Surrounded by furniture, a light supper served in front of it. This is how art should be enjoyed. Domestically.
Turner
Returning to England I was given the telephone number of Erica Bolton by The Princess Anne of Bavaria. I met Erica at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London, where she worked as a publicist. My great love affair with the theatre began in earnest.
David Gothard Riverside Studios
Erica Bolton, in turn, introduced me to a community of successful writers and directors. Men and women who inspired me to make my own theatre, my own films, my own art.
I listened and learned.
Erica sneaks me into the theatre to see Kantor’s sold out show Wielopole, Wielopole. I sit in the Gods looking down at syphilitic soldiers marching, wax figures strapped to the living, a monochrome set with Kantor in the middle of it all tweaking his memories and watching sadly as the dead come back to life.
It was triumphant, breathtaking theatre and in sharp contrast to the very British, academic work of Peter Gill (Cherry Orchard) who I met that year (1978) and his then assistant David Levaux the now hugely respected Broadway director.
There were so many exciting people to hang out with at The Riverside like the precocious Hanif Kureishi fresh from his triumphant stint at The Royal Court.
Pioneering David Gothard, the artistic director, the genius at the very heart of the Riverside Studios. Responsible for bringing Tadeusz Kantor, Miro, Shuji Tereyama and many others not only to Hammersmith but to the UK. Night after night we sat in the canteen drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I loved every moment.
In 1979 I made my way to Paris to see Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord. To Paris by boat and train to see Brook’s Conference of the Birds. The raw brick walls and magnificent arches quite unlike any other performance space. I can’t remember where I stayed that night. I was in heaven. I remember the Persian rugs on the floor, the chirping of the cast as they imitated different birds..a chorus… the dawn chorus.
I wanted to make theatre so badly. When I finally got around to it I made just one good work The Host. The other works (as it turned out) a preamble for my later film making and really not that good.
In 1981 I moved into a small flat in Furlong Road, Islington. The home of director Michael Darlow. The flat came with a job: nanny to their wayward 13-year-old adopted son. Wandering the streets I discovered the derelict Almeida Theatre where I would end up having my 22nd Birthday thrown by designer Scott Crolla. Furniture Designer Tom Dixon was our doorman. William Burroughs came.
‘Come Dressed at Duncan Roy’ the invitation demanded.
Here are Kadir Guirey and Tom Dixon in their band Funkapolitan…
The Almeida Theatre, bought and renovated (Bouffe de Nord style) by Lebanese born Pierre Audi. I managed, by chance, to witness the birth of an institution. Even when derelict, Pierre used the space as a theatre. Amongst many, early notable Almeida productions I saw A Dybbuk For Two People with Bruce Myers and in 1982, at Saint James’s Church, Chillingworth Road at the Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music, John Cage at 70. Stunning.
Early 1983 I was arrested and imprisoned for running up a huge bill on my credit card. I spent the next ten months starved of theatre and art but found another altogether unexpected beauty.
I was 23. Prison, as I have said before, was beautiful.
People like Erica bid their adieu and I would never really see them again.
1983, months after I left Wormwood Scrubbs Prison I answered an advertisement in Time Out Magazine. Neil Bartlett was looking for performers to open his show PORNOGRAPHY, a Spectacle at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was a gruelling process, one I found particularly hard to get to grips with. Acting, as you may know, requires the performer to be real and at this time in my life I really had no idea how to do that at all.
As with my appearance in the ‘A’ list thirty years later, people mocked my decision to be in a gay play about sex and sexuality. Life is for the experience… isn’t it? One grand adventure after another.
Theatre
Pornography: A Spectacle. 1983/84 Actor
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 6 city UK tour, Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto, Canada
Devised with Ivan Cartwright, Neil Bartlett and Robin Whitmore
Robin, Ivan and Duncan in ‘Pornography, a Spectacle’
“Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert
The Critic by Sheridan: 1984 Actor – Mr. Puff
Edinburgh Festival
The Host: 1987 Writer/Director
Institute of Contemporary Art London and National Review of Live Art Glasgow with Georgia Byng and Tatiana Strauss
October Gallery
Bad Baby: 1989 Writer/Director
The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent, Hen and Chickens Theatre, Islington North London
Using a cast of local Kent performers this play examined issues of child abuse using Beatrix Campbell’s Unofficial Secrets as the basis of the text.
Marrianne Fearnside in Bad Baby
The Baron in the Trees: 1990 Writer/Director
Adapted from the Italo Calvino novel of the same name for The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent
Copper’s Bottom: 1991 Writer/Director
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, starring Aiden Shaw
Call me Susan: 1993 Co-writer
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Festival Fringe;
Call Me Susan explored issues surrounding prostitution across Europe. A dramatized discussion between two prostitutes interspersed with real-life recorded testimonies and pictures of prostitutes working in six European cities.
Oscar Wilde enjoyed the extravagant promises of the Victorian Age, capturing the imagination of London’s aesthetic elite. However, beyond the enlightened few, everything about the man provoked consternation to the prudish, hypocritical Victorians—from the green carnation in his buttonhole to his sensational novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Like his suits, Wilde, a tireless self-promoter and purveyor of the unforgettable bon mot, was exquisitely tailored. While young, he was best dressed in bold plaid, plus fours, starched shirts with high, tight collars or gabardine suits cut short above the hip. Wilde traded his own slender, youthful visage (French
pleated hair and Cupid lips) for a bloated middle age rife with extravagant capes and voluminous fur-lined coats.
In his revisionist biography of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, Neil Bartlett describes how Wilde became a huge man with a penchant for young, willowy boys. He was an intriguing mass of contradictions: The love letters he sent to his wife, Constance, are as beautiful as the letters he sent to the dark-hearted “Bosie,” his lover. The innocent stories he wrote for his beloved children were a counterpoint to the pornographic tales he created from his forays into London’s dank underworld.
The pornography attributed to Wilde in the British Library, under the pseudonym “Teleny,” reveals his sado-pedophilic fantasies. Young boys figure highly in these violent, disturbing texts. The virginal youths are deflowered by older, cruel men, their innocence torn from them.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is the reworking of these same themes that lead Wilde to his pessimistic and wholly modern conclusions about our shared horror of the loss of youth and how we might reclaim it.
When casting for a perfect Dorian, I was not interested in hiring a great beauty, but rather, a young boy. After all, beauty is subjective, youth indisputable.
For the movie’s Dorian Gray, it was imperative that our actor, David Gallagher, look effortlessly chic. David is very much the stick-thin look of right now and Dior Homme (as reinvented by our costume designer, Hedi Slimane). Dressing the literary youth icon of our age was a perfect solution for us and Dior: Slimane set his homoerotic boy-man aesthetic against the new Puritanism of American mainstream culture.
It is Lord Henry Wotton who appeals to the youthful Dorian Gray and speaks for the moisturized 40-plus generation, when he says to Dorian: “I wish that I could change places with you. To get back my youth; I’d do anything in the world. You are the type that the age is searching for and is afraid that it has already found. The world has always worshipped you—and it always will.”
If Wilde’s sensational sodomy trial had happened today, would the acclaimed wit have ended up in prison? Given that we find it hard to throw celebrities in jail, perhaps not. But Wilde’s predilection for sex with underage boys? I am sure that his hard drive would have been littered with unsavory images of children.
Once in prison, Wilde was given a thin gray cotton shirt and pants. Issey Miyake—or Kim Jong Il—might have gotten a kick out of this minimal Bauhaus look, but Wilde loathed it and woefully described his prison uniform in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A couple of years later, he was dead. (“It’s either me or the wallpaper.”) But as hard as I look, I cannot discover what he was buried in. Except, of course, shame.
This article was edited by Black Book for whom the piece was originally written. It has been pointed out to me that Hedi lent us the clothes for Dorian rather than designing them for the film. I have also been asked what happened to the film. How did it do? Well, in my own estimation it did OK. It closed the London Lesbian and Gay film Festival, opened the Miami G&L film festival and opened the New York G&L film festival amongst others. It had a small life and then vanished.
It was an early morning yesterday. I was up before the dawn. And I really have enjoyed my stay. But I must be moving on.
Sexual anorexia is a term used to describe a loss of “appetite” for romantic-sexual interaction but can be better defined as a fear of intimacy to the point that the person has severe anxiety surrounding sex with emotional content.
4am, Saturday morning. It is almost impossible to sleep. My lover is in town. My sleep schedule rearranged as I learn all over again to share my bed.
We have been in and out of bed all weekend and whilst it is reassuring to have this oversexed lil monkey crawling all over me I end up thinking far too much-both good and bad. The bad thoughts: wanting to escape, trying to remember old conquests, those perfect pornographic moments that always get me off. The good thoughts: fully engaging with newly learned sexual behaviors/insights. It is delightful to be mainly present during the sex. Now, when I say sex what are you thinking? The sex I have is, I am sure, nothing like most people.
When Bill Maher condemns sex addicts I doubt that he understands that most men who consider themselves sex addicts are not having the sort of sex that he is having. They are not meeting, fucking, cumming and leaving. Many men identify as sex addicts but the men I identify most with are actually porn addicts who seldom leave their apartments or Internet addicts on hook up sites with multiple on-line personalities. These men exist apart from the Tiger Woods variety of sex addicts: men who hook up with women or other men whilst wives and children sleep oblivious at home.
Bill Maher’s limited understanding of sex addiction and general scoffing negates those of us who work daily in order not to retraumatize ourselves. Bill Maher is certainly not recreating moments of childhood fear; he is not replicating perfect porno moments nor dealing with erectile dysfunction.
Tiger Woods may be a serial cheater but his story is the exception rather than the rule. Those of us who compulsively masturbate seldom get to meet anyone at all regardless of our engaging personalities. Addicted to the soothing effect of ejaculation, the calming thoughtless moments just after we shoot our dwindling load.
1983. I answered an ad in Time Out for gay performers who wanted to make a play with Neil Bartlett for the Institute of Contemporary Art about pornography. Drawing on historical texts, Diaries of a Marianne (attributed to Oscar Wilde) for instance, we all at once celebrated and condemned the production, consumption and effects of pornography. In one scene we compared the fantasy of pornography with the reality of our own sex lives.
After our 10 city tour in the UK and Canada I went home and never gave the polemic we were positing another thought, yet had I… my life would have turned out very differently.
How has gay pornography influenced my thinking, my relationships, my life?
Pornography has ruined my sexual expectations. Pornography: where men together do not tenderly hold each other, look into each other’s eyes, do not cry gently, do not laugh out loud, and do not ‘fail’ with half hard cocks. The perfect bodies, sexual performance and youth of most gay porn stars are impossible acts to follow.
Yet, the moment I get into bed with a man I try to emulate what I see in pornography. My stance is both dominant and aggressive, my voice lowers, I am uncharacteristically clumsy, and my kisses are full lipped. I have no idea what the end point of any sexual encounter is because I have so rarely ejaculated with another human being. I am rarely even in the same room because I am off in fantasy. I am rarely hard.
My lover is sexually submissive so what good am I to him if I am so full of fear that my cock does not get hard? That at the back of my mind I know my darling pornography waits to own me the moment he is gone? How many men cheat on their wives/boyfriends with pornography?
The past few days of sexual activity have been perhaps the best of my life because I am at least in the same room as the man I have elected to sleep with. I am authentic, present, calm and honest. I tell him the truth. Perhaps too much talking but frankly I would rather talk than be absent. There has been a great deal of consolation since he arrived. There has been a remarkable kindness. I no longer objectify him nor resent him simply because he sees who and what I am.
With the truth comes vulnerability, certainly never evident in pornography unless it’s a ‘mans first time’ with another man. Then the gay for pay virgin simply looks confused or humbled by desire. I have wasted so many years to pornography, so many wasted opportunities, so much lost love.
Men have humiliated me. I have, in turn, humiliated men. I have defined myself by my inability rather than my gifts. I have invested in my defects rather than my talent.
I am trying to have a few wonderful moments before my lover leaves LA and God knows if I will ever see him again. Of this I am sure: we got to know each other before we lay together. This meant that I had no shame when he finally held me in his arms. That I felt comfortable enough to let him know what was going on with me when I could not perform as perhaps he wanted me to perform. That we continue to laugh and cry and feel comfortable doing so.
I only have until Friday and I am going to make the most of it-before he returns to his own war zone and I to mine.
As I was stacking boxes for my move I found a whole heap of diaries from the 1980’s. The first day to day diary I kept was in 1982 and that was primarily because life had become so exciting.
