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Christmas Dogs Queer Rant Whitstable

Frances Roy/Spark and the Whitstable Trolls

There is something lost and broken about a small town.  Not on its surface.  Beneath, where the new working class flex what little muscle it has.  Withered by austerity and the banking crisis, lifting their weary faces and skinny fists toward the last of the watery sunlight.

Whitstable has always attracted freaks and frauds.  Crooks and drifters.  Before the gang of yummy mummies arrived with their plantation shutters, gumming up local stores with giant strollers… gangsters sat in Wheelers back room making deals.  Far enough from London, close enough to get home for their tea.

Life is evenly divided between Whitstable my home town and the world I created elsewhere.  You know, in the newspapers and on TV.  To come home is a mixed blessing.  My estranged brothers and frail mother have become litigants rather than family as I sue for my part in David’s will.

Even though Whitstable is a very small town one can totally miss seeing someone for decades.  Yet, with very little effort, I saw my mother on the street.  She looked animated, mid conversation with other mothers, presumably after dropping my nephew Oscar Roy at school.  Frances Roy, Frances Spark, Fran.  I don’t know what she calls herself nowadays. I walked closer, I tapped her on the shoulder… she turned to face me.  I was shocked by how badly she has aged.  The face I once adored is now smeared over her large skull, her features drawn, jowls and ear lobes drooping like melting tallow.

I was momentarily pleased to see her.  I felt protective once again.  I wanted to reassure her things were going to work out.  I thought the violent abuse we received from David would somehow bond us forever. Sadly, she has never been anything other than utterly selfish. She may have once but now she no longer wants the best for me. I am a stranger to her.

Unplanned pregnancy, shame and derision have shaped who she is today.  She learned nothing from her own story.  She never made amends.  She was never proud or encouraging of any of her children.  The older we got the less interest she showed. She had no ambition, no desire, no love.

I used to make excuses for her.  I’d tell therapists, “The nuns at the mother and baby home made her life miserable.”  I explained to psychologists, “Her father was cruel, her mother insensitive.”  “It was a different time.”  “When she looks at me I reminded her of him.”  I said.  And all the while, unbeknownst to her, the world was changing.  She told the doctor at the hospital, when I later read the notes, she was ashamed of me being so obviously gay… a gay child.  The sight of me flouncing around upset David.

They tried to shut me down.  The harder they tried the harder I fought back.  They tried to cure me with anti psychotic drugs.  They gave an 11-year-old gay child, badly abused at home… anti psychotic drugs.

I protected her from what others might say.  I melted when she cried.  She used her tears to avoid the truth.  Any difficult subject… she would cry.  One day I told her the crying wasn’t working.  I wasn’t going to cry with her anymore.  She stopped crying.  She didn’t do it again.  My mother does not deserve my protection. Sooner or later we are all owed the truth.

I was 22, I had a show in the West End.  She didn’t take the train, she didn’t see the play.  She couldn’t be anything other than embarrassed, four gay men talking about our gay lives.  She didn’t see me at the Edinburgh Festival, she didn’t see me.  She had excuses.

The next show, The Host performed in the Oyster Company great hall, my mother came with her sister Margaret and giggled in the back row ruining it for other people.  She didn’t come to the ICA or Sadler’s Wells, she didn’t come to The Hen and Chickens.  I don’t think she said a word when I won my place at a prestigious film school.  To this day and to the best of my knowledge she has never seen any of my films.

I’ve never written about her in this blog, explored who she is or was. I never once described her casual homophobia.  I wanted to believe she was a better person than she actually is.  A better person than me.  But she wasn’t… she accused my boyfriends of being gold diggers, made gay slurs about AIDS and ‘disgusting gay diseases’.  She failed to ask about my relationships, my work and my life.  When Joe and I bought a Porsche I was excited to show her.

She looked at it and said, “You ponce.”

That is the sort of woman she is.  Yet, when she was homeless I let her have one of our homes… even though she was the one who walked out on David… taking nothing.  Like so many women, she left it behind.  She walked out on my inheritance.

I have loyally hidden her true nature.  In the film AKA I did not reveal she colluded with my abusive father.  I continually let her off the hook.

When she called to tell me my brothers had been sent to prison, she blamed the police, she blamed everyone but them. My brother Martin Roy sends an abusive note to my lawyer.  I do not read it.  He storms into the solicitor’s office and demands to see him.

Whitstable High Street.  She’s nicely dressed.  I tap her on the shoulder and say hello.  She looks shocked.  She looked beaten.  She holds onto her friend, she links arms… as if I am going to be rip her away from them.  I ask if we can have coffee.  She shakes her head and looks like she might cry.  “I don’t want to talk to him.” The other mothers try encouraging her to have coffee with me.  They advise her to talk it through but my Mother dare not do that because she has been lying so long… she knows if she accepts a coffee it is time to tell the truth.

Her friends say, “She speaks so highly of you.”

“Really?” I reply.  “She scarcely speaks to me at all.”

I ask them if my mother Frances Roy mentioned to them she did not tell me my father was dying of cancer, she did not tell me he had died and then concealed his funeral from us all.  She grips hold of the other woman frantic, terrified.  Her brain racing for a solution.  Fear.  I return to the car.  She runs up the street as fast as her 73-year-old legs can carry her.

2.

New Years Eve we sat in a small group in his sitting room.  Whitstable people.  An MBE, an artist, the celebrity gardener, the Michelin star chef, the academy award nominee and a couple of imported diplomats… friends of our host.  He is wearing a djellaba.  Black linen, a rust colored silk shawl and Saudi slippers.  At midnight we toast the new year and hug.  I check insta and snap chat.  They are toasting in an ice palace in Reykjavik and the Sydney opera house.  Sam Taylor Johnston posts random snaps of black men preparing her dinner and black men entertaining them with dancing.

The following day, New Years Day… we reconvene at Windy Corner Stores.  At another table I see a man whose name I no longer remember, he has piercing blue eyes, he’s in a local band.  I stare at him.  He knows who I am.  Like looking into the eyes of ones captor.  Throughout my childhood this blue-eyed man mercilessly bullied me using gay slurs.  I thought to myself, should I say something?  He knows me.  He knows what he did. I say nothing.  I just stare.

A few days later I post this on the Overheard in Whitstable… Anything Goes, Facebook page.

Returning to Whitstable has been a positive experience. However, I’ve seen a few people around town who were openly and violently homophobic to me as I was growing up. I have never been ashamed of being gay and those who resorted to homophobia were the kind who resented ‘openly gay’ men, us who refused to be cowed by their hate. These people may now explain away their homophobia as a cultural phenomena but as with historical child abuse, historical homophobia must be answered to. Attitudes may have changed but the effects of homophobia should be acknowledged. If I see anyone in the town who was homophobic in my past I will remind them of their past cruelty. Most gay men in their 50’s either forsook marriage or children or waited until late in life. We lived through an aids epidemic. Whilst that was happening graffiti was written on the side of my house in island wall, it said: aids available here. LGBT people do not have to hide who we are and who we love. The privileged white men I have confronted so far claim they are the victim because I had the audacity to remind them of their hate. The homophobe, the racist, the misogynist is not the victim. Those who peddle hate must own it and make amends.

Of course, this note punctured Whitstable’s fragile, dark heart. I am harangued and homophobicly abused.  Along side the homophobic abuse, energetic white people assure me nobody cares anymore if you are black, gay, fat… etc.   As long as you keep quiet about it.  If you complain… these illogicals demand you pipe down.  It is still typical for white heterosexual people to shut down gay people who have the audacity to share their negative experience and challenge homophobia.

Of course, being a public figure I am used to the abuse.  I have never been compliant.

I was most interested to hear from one commentator, Kris Howell. The rest: feckless female trolls, thin-lipped and spray tanned, their dyed hair in lank bangs.  When I returned fire with equally vile invective they became outraged, like prodding a termites nest.  The little termites ran around screaming.

For my amusement I suggested to one morbidly obese woman she may be in receipt of benefits.  An excellent way to upset an oik.  I found a picture of her wedding, her huge pink body wrapped up in acres of synthetic fabric. Her husband, pallid and inert.  She told me she owned three cars.  ‘You think I’d be on benefits with £70,000 worth of cars in front of my house.”  It brought into sharp contrast just how different their world is from mine.  I looked at my watch and smiled.

Kris Howell, better known as Les (ironically he also changed his name) caught my interest because once reeled in said exactly what I expected to hear.  He wanted me to know he had bullied me not because I am gay… but because I am me.

He refused to differentiate between the two.  As if the two could be separated.

Compliant homosexuals put up with being picked on, bullied, imprisoned and generally kicked around.  They learn how to be invisible.  Those of us who refuse to go quietly are branded difficult, hated for not keeping quiet.  Other gay men who play the game as prescribed by straight white people are just as offended when a fellow gay rocks the boat.  As the trolls railed and raged over my post the local gay hairdresser pinned his colors to their mast not realizing he had been co-opted into a seething pit of homophobes.

Les Howell refused, despite reasoned argument, to grasp that being gay had defined me, and I have good reason to be angry and better reason to fight back.  How did a ten-year old me deal with being repeatedly called pooftah and bleached nigger at school?  I was keenly aware of both racism and homophobia.  We were taught by the vicar of St Alphage that the black boy sitting naked before Christ was a savage and would not know how to use a toilet.  My uncle Norman confirmed this by pointing at black children, reminding me they were filthy savages.

Remember, even though homosexuality had been decriminalized by Woolfenden in 1965 gay men were still being arrested for consensual sex well into the 1980’s.  I was born a criminal and I had every reason to be angry but that anger, as the years passed, turned me into something I would have preferred not to have been.

Yet, as Les Howell spewed his vitriol, so full of hate… like most enraged fools, he lost his grasp on reason.  It was perfectly ok to remind the world of a man’s indiscretions he said, but not his triumphs.  He told me he was law-abiding but balked when I reminded him both his friends Stuart and Martin Roy had been in prison for worse crimes than spending money on a credit card.

Like most fascists his argument have nothing to do with logic and what he may or may not think of me… and everything to do with who he is and the resentments he carries.  Hate, like water, will find its level.  It will seep into everything and rot where ever it remains.

He wanted me to know I was a liar.  He said, “You were a liar before you went to prison and you’ve never learned your lesson.”  I wondered what the lesson should be? And I thought, you know, lying is a particularly gay thing.  I called Stephen Fry and we talked about gays and lying.  The genesis of our fantastical lives.  He had also gone to prison.  He had stolen credit cards from other people, I had merely run up a huge bill on my own credit card.  The difference?  He would still have gone to prison in 2018, I would not.

Why do gay men lie?  We lie to save ourselves.  We lie until we come out of the closet.  The longer we are in the closet the more we lie, the easier it becomes, there is no longer a taboo.  The truth is negotiable.

The following day the trolls were chattering on-line like agitated chimps.  Upset ’cause I had removed the thread.  “Has he tagged you?”  The wannabe silver back asks the girl with thin lips.  He is holding up his metaphorical pool cue reminding everyone he won the argument.  He won the fight.  They talked cryptically about rinsing and reeling people in and unicorns.  The woman in the synthetic wedding dress said she was sick of being maligned (my word not hers).  A couple of them private messaged me in the hope I would re-engage.

Anything Goes’ on this Facebook site simply means: trolls and their dumb friends get to spew hate at anyone they feel they can bully and misinterpret, using xenophobia, misogyny, racism and homophobia as their weapons of choice. Their lives do not bear scrutiny.  They are neither patriots nor evolved. They hide behind fake accounts because their truth is unbearable. They lie yet cannot bear anything but the truth in others, they insult but cannot stand being insulted.

They are kids in the school toilet.  Writing notes and passing them around, scrawling over pictures, insulting who they believe are more vulnerable.

Dealing with the mass market can be very revealing. The British general public, like the woman in the white synthetic dress, are presently emboldened by Brexit.

3.

The following day I had tea with Barry Green at his hotel, The Continental.  His son Richard was my best friend in the 80’s.  We talked about Brexit.  He told me he was a keen leaver and I asked him why.  I’ve always respected Barry.  I want somebody I respect to convince me Brexit is good for the country.  I want to be wrong about Brexit.  Barry Green was the second successful business owner, Susanna Atkins at The Goods Shed in Canterbury was the first, who came out to me as a stalwart brexiteer.

Actually George Wilson, our local Scottish millionaire, was the third but we didn’t get past talking planning permission.

I am fascinated by their Brexit.  How it works for them? Susanna’s family (sons and cousins) had to bring in the harvest last year because they couldn’t get anyone to work on their farm.  Susanna thought it was great, she suggested we all bring in the harvest.  As it was, long ago.  I could not imagine the sickly woman in the synthetic wedding dress on her knees in the fields.  She might have a word or two to say about that when the local aristo land owner requisitions her, dragging her screaming from her smart phone, from Celebrity Big Brother on her giant flat screen… to pick asparagus for the 1%.

Barry told me he voted Brexit… he assured me not because of immigration (he is married to an Eastern European) but because of the common agricultural and fisheries policy.  Ok, I said, so who is going to write the new agricultural and fisheries policy for the UK?  Barry didn’t know what sort of policy or quota we would have after Brexit because he thought we might not have one at all.

“Do you think a free-for-all out at sea will work fine for our fisherman and fish stocks?”  I inquired.

Both Susanna and Barry think the country will be best served by an army of artisans, baking bread, catching fish and selling our surplus to who ever wants to buy it.  They believe their small-scale business model can be translated into something the whole country will adopt, setting the country free from the rest of the world.  They crave autonomy, they crave sovereignty.  They resent the rules, they want to catch what ever they want when they want it and bugger the cod stocks.  They know what is best for the people if only we can return to simpler, less complicated ways.  Bringing in the harvest with a new peasant class and take what we want from the sea as we need it.

Profit now, conservation later.  They believe in the Dunkirk spirit.  They believe the English will overcome adversity.  An adversity we created for ourselves…  we now delight in overcoming.  Meanwhile the EU are preparing a no deal Brexit while our government prepare for nothing.  Hurtling toward an arbitrary date when we fall gently off the cliff.

Barry Green sat on the brown leather Chesterfield whilst we chewed over the past.  I congratulated him his success.  He told me I was the kind of person who could have done anything.  I remind him, I’ve done more than most.

“Those houses you sold are worth £3 million pounds now.”

“But I wouldn’t have had any adventure, Barry.”

He remembered the play we performed in the Oyster Company, the summer of 1985.  “The red knickers.” He chuckled. “Tatiana’s red knickers.”

“Do you remember the vase of blue Corn Flowers?”

“Yes,” he marveled.

I’m not going to explain.  You had to be there.

4.

The dogs curled up on the sofa.  They ate cheese.  They are still sleeping.  It’s midday.  They don’t have to worry about the pig and the dog we shared our time with these past few weeks in Barnes.  We are going to walk in the rain.  We are going to meet him, feel his soft skin under his coat.  Just like the old days.  Kissing in the street.

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It’s Black and White

1.

While few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some 70 years after the liberation of the concentration camps—we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger—we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in the USA.

Revealed, these past weeks, for the world to see: America’s racist underbelly.  News stories narrated by dumb white folk, binging unashamedly on their justified racism.  The condescending white news anchor asks a black man to explain his fear of the police… then scoffs at his reply.  Others crudely condemn the dead black men “He was no angel.”  “His parents were known to the police.”  “He was resisting arrest.”  The same ‘news’ shows use the millions of crowd sourced dollars raised for the white murderer as proof, as if any were needed, that Darren Wilson and men like him are: “Innocent until proven guilty.” “The grand jury proved there was no case to answer.” “Let him get on with his life.”

The KKK leave cruel and hateful messages wherever they can all over social media, proudly letting the world know: ‘a good nigger is a dead nigger’.  Black men doubly assassinated, in life and death… white supremacists proudly spew vitriol over the bodies of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.

They demand, “This isn’t about race.”  “Why do you bring race into this?”

White folk have no incentive to let go of their white power, their white privilege, their sense of superiority… their entitlement.  White people remind you with their slippery smiles that slavery was abolished in 1865.  “It’s up to the blacks to help themselves.”  “If we weren’t killing them, they’d be killing each other.”  “They have the same opportunities as everyone else.”

2.

Every Mexican, working illegally in California, is a slave.  White people loathe manual labor.  White people love slaves.  Everybody needs a slave in SoCal.  The fruit growers would have nobody to harvest fruit without Mexican slaves.  Slaves stand outside Home Depot offering themselves for hard labor.   Mexican slaves mow my lawn, scrub my hot tub.  Slaves clear brush in the Santa Monica Mountains under the midday sun.

Serried ranks of plump Mexican women smelling of disinfectant and carbolic soap clean house, serve slim, white wives their afternoon mint tea.  There are thousands of them!  Thousands of enslaved, undocumented maids.

Have you ever seen a white person use a mop, hand wash dishes or polish a crystal glass?  Have you ever watched a white person try removing a stain from a carpet?  Have you noticed how inept white people are?  They don’t know how to look after their own stuff.

“Do you know how to remove a stain from a carpet?  When your dog pees on your rug?”

He shrugs, “Mexican people know how to do that.  I don’t need to know.”

Those Mexican slave women used to be black slave women.

Last week President Obama liberated 5 million slaves by giving them the opportunity to ‘come out of the shadows’.  Watch the white elected officials in Congress and the Senate balk.  Their fat, pink cheeks huffing and puffing indignantly at the partial liberation of more slaves.

Without slaves the USA ceases to function.  The USA is addicted to slavery.  The USA was built on hard work… the hard work of unpaid black slaves.  Conveniently written out of white history.  California’s false economy is carried on the backs of Mexican slaves.

When the black slaves were freed the white folk wanted them to go back to Africa.  “The slaves are free… free to go home.”

Those black folk who thought they were equal to white folk were outlawed, harassed.  If they had entrepreneurial ambitions they were made to think again.  When they opened stores on main street, their stores were looted by white folk whilst the police watched… and did nothing.

There was no opportunity given to black people which could not be taken away.

3.

A black face reminds America’s of its not so distant violent racist past (black neighborhoods were being bombed and burned in Boston and Chicago by white police as recently as 1970).   To liberal white people a black face remains a shameful embarrassment: liberals never did enough for black people.  Liberals turned from the thorny problem of race to an easy fix: marriage equality.

White people who claim to hate racism are privately racist.  Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin at Sony Pictures are revealed to be private racists… when this is discovered from hacked emails they call Jesses Jackson so assuage their guilt.  They publicly call prominent black people to apologize for being private racists… but they merely confirm what we already know: white liberals say one thing then do another when they think they can’t be seen or heard.

For the dogged racists a black face reminds them of an unfinished problem… a problem they tackle every 18 hours when another black man is murdered by the police.  Shortly after the shots are fired, the body transported to the morgue… the excuses begin, the character of the dead black man maligned, the Grand Jury is called and the murder justified… forgotten.

Did it seem this time… after Eric Garner’s Grand Jury refused to indict… fewer people agreed with the decision… or made excuses for the police?  Was it my imagination that after the whole world watched the video of Eric Garner’s murder a million times on TV and the internet that people who might have before… did not want to forget.  In fact they cared a great deal for murdered Eric, his dignified widow and their forgiving daughters.

When the people watch the unnecessary take down and murder of Eric Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes on the streets on New York they are forced to acknowledge 350 years of racism:  state sanctioned torture, murder, rape, abuse, theft…

The people (all ethnicities) began to drag themselves out of apathy and onto the same streets.  The people saw a black man bullied to death and none of the usual excuses from the police or the mayor or the kkk were very convincing.  The people saw Eric Garner bullied and murdered by the police in a country where the police are meant to protect the people from bullies and murderers!

Fear underpins the systematic oppression of America’s black minority.

4.

This week people understood that the criminal justice system isn’t broken,  that police brutality, secret and corrupt grand juries, the deliberate disenfranchising of black men and the unreported/undocumented incidence of murder by police force… is not evidence of a broken system but the system functioning exactly the way it was designed.

Did you know that once convicted, in many states (11 southern states) a felon is never allowed to vote again… ever.  Why don’t you know that?  Most people don’t.  When a black man is convicted of a felony in 11 southern states he is never allowed to vote again.  He is excluded from the democratic process.  How many black felons did you tell me presently reside in jail and prison?  How many of them are working for free (cotton picking, uniform stitching) in American jails and prisons?

America’s untreated racist wound stinks like Michael Brown’s uncovered, bloated corpse on a humid Ferguson street… and no amount of Fox News deodorant will take away the stench.

Did you know, that until modest changes were made to the selection process, people of color were excluded from the Grand Jury?  Those modest and unenforceable protocol changes were made within the last few years.

They say, the secretive Grand Jury was originally conceived to weed out malicious prosecutions.  That’s just a big fat lie.  The Grand Jury is now as it always was… a secret court used by the police and police friendly prosecutors to help crooked cops out of difficult situations so they can continue waging war against the black minority.

The cop’s unwritten law of the street:  all black faces are fair game.

The Grand Jury is unknown anywhere else in the world. It works so effectively because there’s no one in the room defending the victim. In the case of Darren Wilson he was presented as the victim by the prosecutor rather than Michael Brown and this wholly spurious narrative persists.

5.

Criticize racists and the police at your peril.

The police say they have been ‘thrown under a bus’ by Bill de Blasio, Mayor of NYC because Mayor de Blasio told the world he advised his black son Dante: should he ever have occasion to be stopped by the police, Dante should be very polite, not reach for his cell phone or make any other sudden movement.  Dante should assume, like all black young men stopped by the police, that at any moment the police may kill him.

The following day white, bull necked cops feign indignation.  They know they’ve been rumbled, their credibility smashed to pieces.  They’ll have to do what bullies hate having to do: next time they’ll have to think twice.

Bill de Blasio has been warned by the police union not to attend Police funerals killed in the line of duty.   The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association posted a link on its website telling members not to let de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito “insult their sacrifice” should they be killed. The union posted a “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” waiver officers can sign requesting the two politicians not attend their funerals due to their “consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve.”

Good cop?  Bad cop?

Are there any good cops?  There’s no incentive to be a good cop.  The good guys are weeded out.  It’s a tough time to be a good cop.  Crime figures diminishing, the police have to justify their huge organization, their overtime.  They say policing is a dangerous job.  How dangerous?  Policemen are not all killed by criminals,  30% are killed in road traffic accidents… the police are too arrogant to wear seat belts.

Whilst men like Eric are being harassed and murdered on the streets of New York for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes by police thugs, a couple of miles away in another part of the same city the most audacious crimes this century go unpunished.  Wall Street steals a world of wealth and gets away with it.  They say white-collar crime is too sophisticated for most regular cops to grasp.

The cops protect the rich, protect the 1%… as it turns out they’re protecting them from us…  from you and me.

Cops are used to raise revenue for local government, make politically motivated arrests, used by the rich to silence and poleax their enemies.  Cops illegally hold undocumented workers without opportunity to post bail then deport them after lengthy stays in private jails.  I’ve met undocumented workers who were introduced to their mule (a mule illegally smuggles an undocumented worker back into the USA) by the same border patrol guy who originally arrested and deported them.

The cops take their cut, trafficking slaves.

6.

The conspiracy theorists I scoffed at 10 years ago… well, they got it right.

The jails are kept artificially full to justify more cops.  The artificial wars on drugs and terror are in fact… a war on us.

There is a profound connection between criminality abroad and criminality at home. The so-called “war on terror” and military aggression abroad are linked to repression within the United States.  The drive by the American ruling class to build up the infrastructure of a police state is in preparation for the inevitable confrontation with the working class. This is what lies behind the unprecedented levels of domestic spying, the assault on basic democratic rights, the CIA’s trampling on legality and the Constitution, the militarization of law enforcement and the ongoing police rampage against working class youth.

The Hollywood street performer shot in the head by the police, the Down’s syndrome kid choked to death by the police, the homeless woman repeatedly punched in the head by the police, the deaf guy trying to sign tasered by the police, the countless murders committed by the police remain uncounted.

A pattern emerges, you better be a healthy, able-bodied white male to survive the streets of now USA. You better not be black or disabled or deaf or performing or homeless. You better blend in, become invisible, forget any aspirations you might have to be extraordinary.

White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerated a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.

America: it is still a nation of slaves and slave owners. The system that perpetuates this must be deconstructed and if you are white that deconstruction starts with you… asking yourself this question: am I willing to give up my slaves? My white power? My white privilege? My unfair advantages? Am I willing to acknowledge that implicitly and explicitly I colluded with the historical suppression, bullying, false imprisonment and murder of a minority?

My gay friends believe that winning human rights for black people will be as polite as winning human rights for gay people. They think it’s THE SAME.

There must have been a moment in 1945 after the American’s liberated the concentration camps, when the German people were forced by the allied forces to watch news reels of what was found there… there must have been a moment when the German people collectively owned up.   A moment when they realized what they had done. I’m waiting for white people in the USA to own their part, their collusion with a system that murders, brutalized and demeans a minority… then blames them when they complain.

It never really occurred to me until yesterday that the mass murder and incarceration of black men in the USA is deliberate, systemic, entrenched and unlikely to change until white men learn to share their power.

7.

I bought my first house when I was 20 years old. Remember that cottage? 13 Island Wall, Whitstable. 15 years later I sold it and bought Peter Cushing’s house and the house beside it. 2 and 3 Seaway Cottages, Wavecrest. That was a pretty address. I sold them both and moved to California. 2828 Hume Road, Malibu. Now, it’s time to head east. It’s Time.

I sold my house. Goodbye Malibu. I hope the new owners are happy here. It has been quite a ride up (and down) this mountain… literally and figuratively. This is where I buried my dog and this is where I will leave her. This is where the twins lived, this is the location of many spectacular parties, lovers and probably the worst decision I made in my life… to reply to Jake.   But there you go, it’s sold now. The furniture has been packed, the art wrapped and stowed in boxes. I am relieved.

I am only a few months away from having the gagging order lifted so I get to tell my side of the story… how another rich man used the police and the prosecutor to hide the truth.

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2013 Roundup

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I felt both overwhelmed and liberated in 2013.  Simultaneously.

I spent the past few hours un-subscribing from 100 mailing lists from whom I receive emails begging for money.  All perfectly decent causes, gun control, black theatre, saving the ocean, climate control, Unicef, the world wildlife fund, democratic causes, mercy for animals, slow money…

I un-subscribed from cook shops, travel companies, furniture stores and fashion lines.  I spent a few moments each day erasing my name from the lists I added myself in the hope of being better informed, no more Gawker or Huffington Post or the Daily Beast.

It was an odd year.  It was unusually diverse.  I continued writing my film tho I stopped talking about it.  I met thieving producers and film industry liars.  I spent time with weed smoking Susan Sarandon in the back of her ping-pong club.  

Away from the film I travelled to Martha’s Vineyard, to Des Moines and over the Rocky Mountains.   I travelled by car all over America.  Los Angeles to New York and back again… three times.  I was constantly surprised by American kindness whenever I found it.  

I fell in and out of love with AA.  In and out of love with the gays tho… mostly out of love.

We are presently finalizing our divorce.

During the past months I began a strange adventure with a young man who I tentatively call my boy friend.  I began to dream again… of better things… even though I am still cautious and burned.  Erring toward single at all times.

I wrote a great deal but never published a word of it.

I wrote indignant things like this…

I am queer.  They are gay.  They are white and affluent.  They want to get married and join the army.  They want to assimilate.  That’s what they say.

When you question them… when you ask them what assimilation looks like… they still want to keep gay pride, gay bars, gay apps, gay film festivals, gay morality.

They want the gay section in the bookshop, the ‘gay voice’ section in The Huffington Post.  They don’t really understand what assimilation looks like because most of them are too comfy not assimilating.

He said, “This is all about your internalized homophobia.” I smiled.  “It’s not internalized, it’s externalized.”

One can devote ones life to betrayal.  Betrayed by parents, family members, institutions, schools, by loved ones even the country of ones origin.  I have felt a smidgen from all of the above.  Yet, I forgave my family, my school, the class system, my beloved country.

Because I wanted to be free.

I huffed and puffed about the NSA, I applauded Glen Greenwald and Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowdon.  I stopped worrying about who could read whatever I was writing privately or which ever websites I was wacking to because there is nothing private.  Not any more.

I met literary heroes on Fire Island like Andy Tobias and had breakfast with John Walters, I spent sultry nights on Cape Cod.  I started Anger Management classes and enjoy them tremendously.

My counsellor asks things like, “Where in your body to you feel the anger first?”

I began to identify the genesis of my anger and feelings of uncomfortability.  It usually starts with a demand for money from a worthy cause.  A picture or video of a screaming rabbit as it is having it’s fur pulled off or a pile of euthanized dogs waiting to be incinerated.

It was the hopelessness that infuriated me, the cruelty, the stupidity, the hypocrisy.

I came to conclusions in 2013.  That I do not, have never had, am not interested in… A CAREER!   Careers, I realized, are… for other people.  For those who may be interested in a legacy.  I stopped calling myself a film maker and started telling people, if they asked, that I do… nothing.

I understood that wherever I found myself both good or bad I was meant to be.  It was all for a reason.  A reason that would one day be revealed to me.  That my life was a series of choreographed moments. The life of a narcissist.  That the cameras I learned to love whilst in the reality show had always been there and had never gone away.

In 2013 I never gave up.  I waited patiently.  I didn’t worry about the future nor was I enslaved to the past.  For this I was grateful.

Occasionally I hankered to go home but knew that after a few days in Whitstable I would find my life shrinking and darkening.  I did not go home.  Though, I spoke more to my Mother this year and was curious about my nieces and nephews.

Finally the JB entanglement came to an end one nondescript day in November.  I wanted to write to him and make amends for the mess I had caused.

But I wrote this instead… it was never sent.

An apology is owed.

I was wrong to lie to you.  I was wrong to lose my temper.  I was wrong to fight you.  I was wrong to have asked for money to be paid when you owed me nothing.  I was wrong to have blamed you for any part of our unhealthy association.  The blame must fall squarely at my feet for everything that went wrong.   The moment you came out I should have politely walked way… I did not.   I was advised by everyone I knew and cared about… to walk away from you but chose to ignore their good suggestion.   I should have thanked you and walked away.  I regret very much that I did not.  I am extremely remorseful.  Due to my weakness of character I initiated a drama that harmed you and caused distress to your family.  I should have walked away.  The moment you told me you were gay.   I know that you are happy now.   I know that your happiness will continue.

It took two years to own up.

2013.  Un-subscribing to websites, making amends, keeping my side of the street clean, owning up, anger management.

Let’s see what 2014 will bring.

As the years pass by, unrelenting, amazing, fulfilling, desperate, happy, sad.

Even though I have filled my homes with art and furniture and friends and the lingering smells of delicious feasts… even though I have made films and plays and paintings…. all I have ever wanted, really craved… was peace of mind.

I’m getting there.  Slowly.  A Happy and Prosperous New Year everyone.

Categories
Brooklyn Christmas Dogs Fashion Gay Money NYC Photography Queer

December 2013

Catie Lazarus, Lady Rizo, Our Lady J

Categories
Christmas

Wiki Christmas

I love wiki leaks for this reason:  It’s like getting to hear what everyone ever said about you behind your back…confirming exactly what you thought they might be saying.

Today…I had lunch with Tom, his wife, daughter and assorted friends.

I am now in bed with the most terrible flu so here are some pictures.  Lunch was delicious.  Conversation amusing.  Children delightful.   Discussed Scott Crolla.

Tom’s Garden
Tom’s Garden

Sir Tom and Lady Croft

me
Categories
Christmas Dogs Love

Merry Christmas From Whitstable

A lot of what artists do seems to involve watching and waiting to see what will happen. When I’m desperate enough just to do anything, even if it seems completely stupid, it’s such a relief.

Bruce Nauman

Seems like an odd quote to start my Christmas blog but without doubt much of this years nonsense would have been resolved sooner if I had thrown myself all the more harder into some sort of work..paid or un paid.

Firstly, I want to thank you all for so loyally following my blog.  I bumped into my friend Josh last night at the Pearson’s and he told me how much he loved reading it.  Such a surprise!

Christmas in Whitstable has been a great deal of fun.  The pubs packed with revelling youths.  All the chavs are dressed in padded country jackets.  Caps and Barbour type padded jackets.  They look great.  Consequently I can no longer wear mine.

Met my mother for lunch.  I gave her a lovely etching by Wendy Croft that I found in the Caxton Gallery that my friend Tom’s cousin owns and where I am negotiating to live next summer.

Alma and I are off to Church this morning to sing Hymns.

St Alphage is a blunt, crenellated,  Anglican church on Whitstable High Street where, as a child, I sang in the choir.

I took Alma for communion and we sang hymns very heartily.  There was one very good choir boy..too good.  Amongst the ancient old ladies this tall, mop headed youth..like David Beckham playing on a local 5 a side team.

After the service we hung out in the vestry with the choristers, some of whom were in the choir when I was a little boy.   I showed Alma the picture of me back then dressed in my cassock and surplus.  I will see if I can scan it for you.

Alma teared up during the ‘peace be with you’ segment of the Anglican Christmas Service.  We all shook hands and hugged.  Everybody seemed very genuine.

I had a blog comment about my continuing, yet more occasional (indeed diminishing), mentions of Jake.  I now only mention him when I want to share how obsession/addiction/compulsion ruins my life.    I don’t really care what he, or if he knows about it.   As for how long we were together..that really doesn’t matter.  If your heart has been revealed and riven…well, I’m just telling you…it takes time.

I could write about the big dog being killed every single day.  The two incidents are sort of similar: the death of something special.  I think about both of them every single day.  I don’t care if that inflates his ego.  In some way, whenever I am inactive or having a quiet moment I will either remember the moment she was killed or the moment I understood that he would never be my boy friend.

The death of love.

When the Big Dog was killed I couldn’t stop crying.  It might have been the realest thing I ever experienced.  As a result it brought up every painful moment I ever felt but refused to cry over.  The death of my Grand Mother, my real father’s death…oh the list goes on and on.

It is TIME TO FEEL.  I am happy that I am coming out of it but it was essential to experience.

Before I left NYC I met a young man who has been emailing me and with whom I am building a connection.  He is a really special man.  An artist and an intellectual.  I am not keeping any of his emails.  They are immediately burned after reading.

Yes we did fuck the first night we met which is not ideal…and maybe that will impact on our future liaison but I am seeing where this one is heading.  Let’s hope that this next year will be productive, considerate and filled with love.

Christmas Day was okay.  I found a blond wig and clowned around for the kids.  We opened a million presents and May bought The Little Dog a reflective coat for the miserable New York nights ahead of us.

Alma, May, Me, George Christmas 2010

I forgot to mention that I met my brother’s beautiful little son who had his first birthday on the 1st December.  His name is Oscar and had a ready smile and a charming disposition.  He LOVED the Little Dog.  Perhaps I should leave everything to him when I die?

I have to leave my money to someone…maybe him.  I really liked him.  That’s an odd thought isn’t it?  I have to think about it sooner or later.

Ended up helping with the cooking of Christmas lunch.  The turkey was great..really moist and cooked through.  Cooked for 11 people.  I felt a little distant.  I wonder when I am going to sink back into my own skin?  They asked me why I was so ‘subdued’ I felt that the correct word might be contemplative.

We devoured the St John’s Christmas Pudding with lashings of clotted cream.

After lunch hung out at my friend Sasha’s cottage. Her dog Pip and her friend’s dog played with the little dog who tried fucking them both.  He was very funny.  Saw some very good British TV…however my once friend David Walliams (Clancy’s Kitchen) has a new show that isn’t at all funny.  A mocumentary about airports…terrible.

A few more days in Whitstable.

Need the results of further tests from last Wednesdays hospital visit.

I am going to Florence next week for NYE then I am in NYC apartment hunting.  So, lots to do.

Have a very happy Christmas everyone…unless you are jewish…or a muslim..or don’t give a fuck.

BOXING DAY update.  My friend Rachel Weisz is all over the news today…leaving her husband for Daniel Craig.  I could just tell that was on the cards.  She looked miserable the last time I saw her.

St Alphage Church 2010

 

Alma, May, Me, George Christmas 2010

Sasha
Categories
Christmas

Fuck You John McCain

Fuck You John McCain for telling the world that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a ‘sad day’. This is a small step toward equality for gay people in the USA. One Small Step.

The Senate vote is a vindication of Obama‘s decision to push for congressional repeal as opposed to unilateral executive action, though activists note he could have done both.

I am in Whitstable at my friend Carol’s house. She is having a huge party. It is thumping loudly in the cellar as I write. I know everyone in the house..everyone. This is small town living and I love it. Carol’s handsome son is a chef and has made delicious food.

They are downstairs drinking vodka and gin. They are listening to Senegalese music. They are eating the food and clapping and we are all wearing false moustaches.

I fell asleep.

At 5am I woke up and wandered downstairs to see what was going on and ended up with some good-looking 33-year-old. Really sexy man..blue eyes, hairy tummy.

I have been thinking a great deal about the life I left behind in LA. I wrote to a man I see around town called Dan Halstead..a manager. At his behest I wrote a little note explaining what has been going on with my health…sooner or later I will write in-depth here about the tumor..anyway, I wrote explaining everything and I received a two-word reply. I wondered why I even bother?

Before, before the show, before Jake, before returning to my home town..I would have been disappointed. Now, I just think it’s funny. His constipated reply made me laugh.

LA, NYC, LONDON…Sydney. The list goes on. I wish I could start again. Just like I did when I got sober. I started again and everything was new. Born Again.

The truth is: I am so disconbobulated that I don’t know where I should be.

Earning so much money these past months from selling art that I presently have no financial worries…but you know as well as I do…the drama, the interminable drama continues.

I could really do without what has been happening this past year.

Left a message for Phil to call me. When she returned my call I couldn’t bring myself to speak with her. It’s fucked up. Yet, I have held onto her for many years (for all the wrong reasons) so that she too becomes just part of the narrative.  The unfolding drama of my life.

On a good note I have been speaking to writers informally about our project. I think the majority understand what the film is about. Most of them get it but can any of them write it?

I am really enjoying watching British TV. Good political debate, fresh ideas and very little tabloid sensationalism. The news, when not competing for ratings, does as it is meant to: inform impartially.

Thinking a great deal about AA and my other 12 Step programmes and how much time I have wasted adhering to a programme that looks to all the world like some kind of white country club. There’s more to mine there, these thoughts about my cultish AA.

Really want to get back to a time where I was free of resentment. It is a gruelling, miserable state of affairs. Every fucking day my loathing is renewed.

Have a great deal to sort out and the only way I think I can sort any of it, overcome the profound sense of loss is to create..make something useful.

Categories
Christmas Rant

It Gets Better?

It’s six o’clock on Friday morning.  There’s more snow forecast and plummeting temperatures.  I really love the cold.  I love wearing long coats and big hats.  I love roaring fires and drinking hot tea in the street.  The little dog has miraculously grown a thick white coat and his previously bald belly is now covered in downy fur.

I spent the day in London yesterday.  Partly to deal with the Jake’s lost iPod incident and partly to see friends but mostly to go to an AA meeting in Soho and connect with my tribe.

I left my laptop and my iPhone at home and consequently enjoyed the train ride to London thinking..thinking about how it doesn’t get better.  Dan Savage‘s ‘It Get’s Batter’ campaign is a load of baloney designed to encourage gay youngsters not to kill themselves because anything is better than death.

The truth is not so obvious.  I have been thinking hard about America, about gays in America and how totally useless my gay brethren have been about getting things changed for themselves, politically, socially and morally.

I wrote to Peter Tatchell last summer asking his advice about how things could possibly change for gays in America..his response…from a brave, hard-hitting activist shocked me.  He thought the situation depressing and hopeless.

It is.  The people refuse to be seen.  They refuse to leave the comfort of their den, their TV, their fast food..they refuse to hit the streets and demand a morally accountable government.

The simple fact is this:  gays in America, for all the millions they spend trying to change the laws, with a ‘sympathetic’ Democratic government and a ‘change’ motivated President things have not changed one iota.  Marriage/Civil Union is still a state by state privilege and not a federal right.  Gays are still not welcome in the military and I have come to realize that gays are simply not welcome anywhere.

Gays are not welcome to live honest and open lives in America..so they don’t.  The gays I meet in the UK are leagues ahead in their thinking and the openness.  They can depend on their government, their church, their judiciary to support them.

In a country like the USA where Christians define the moral terrain I have never lived anywhere that is so morally bankrupt.  The people are routinely lied to by successive Presidents, they are gouged by the government they elect, they are continually bullied by church and state and do nothing what so ever about it.

The people are not free.

They are terrified of their government.

Unlike our students in the UK who got off their asses and demonstrated (invigorating a generation of new activists) Americans angrily run to their expensive lawyers and seek judicial review for their many and varied problems which end up taking so much time to resolve that when their cases are finally heard the fire, passion and determination has been dampened…the urge for change forgotten.

Change happens: sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly.

I despair for the gays and the liberals and the moderates in the USA.  

Morality has been hijacked by the right because we were too cowardly to understand what it meant to us.

Mention the word morals to most gay men and they balk.

We have no morals. Jake invited me into his amoral world and I willingly walked through the door.  Most gay men think it is perfectly reasonable for him to have behaved immorally.  Morals don’t count for anything in the gay community.

How does it get better by not killing yourself?

Most American gay men I know have, at some time, wanted to kill themselves.  They have given it serious thought.  So, you don’t kill yourself…what have you got to look forward to?  The gay community riven by sex and drug addiction, by racism, by homophobia.  Yep, you heard it here.  The gay community is riven with homophobia.

Delicate gay men who don’t want to sleep with anyone unless they are ‘straight acting’  (read invisible).   They are terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves age.  They are terrified that will never be rich enough to buy a baby.

Sometimes I wonder what will happen to Jake.  Will he settle down and want a baby?  Will he get the sex with everyone out of his system and concentrate on one man?  When I meet him twenty years from now, when I am an old, old man..will he have lived the life he bargained for?  Will he become one of those ghastly gay men flying around the gay world, refusing to grow up,  like some grotesque Peter Pan?

So, I went to court yesterday to deal with the Jake iPod incident.  I told the court that I was Not Guilty and now there will be a full on trial in March.   It made me hate Jake even more.  Fuck you Jake.  Timid, cowardly Jake encouraged me to go after those kids, standing behind me, not stopping me, encouraging me, knowing that I would defend him because I loved him.

He lost his fucking iPod.  He lost his iPod in a drunken blackout and I am now having to deal with this shit.  It infuriates me.

If you are a sober person..try and avoid people who take drugs and drink.  Please.

Had a lovely evening at Soho House, met Suzanne Portnoy who is great fun and told me that she stopped blogging because it impacted her sex life.  Ironically she too met a literary agent through her blog with romantic complications…those fucking agents.

William Borthwick the cool director and the very beautiful, very flirtatious blue-eyed Kenny Doughty on the terrace for mince pies.

They were lovely.

Had dinner at Wheelers with friends.  Haddock.  Delicious.

Categories
art Christmas Dogs Gay Whitstable

Bollocks

Spent the past couple of days in London. Stayed at Dean Street Town House which is just perfect.  Perfectly well-appointed.  Huge rooms, pale pink curtains, heavily interlined.  A wonderful shower and a great coffee-making facility.  Delicious, hand-made biscuits.  The little dog and I luxuriated in acres of white linen and huge, fluffy pillows.

This morning I walked to Oxford Street through Golden Square.  Lovely to be home in London.  Lovely.  I was stopped by a beautiful, blue-eyed youth who wanted to talk about the little dog.

The beautiful youth not withstanding the streets are unusually crammed with ugly British people Christmas shopping.  Big faces on bald heads.  Prematurely middle age.  Marching up and down Oxford Street clutching at grim paper bags and their final straw.  Pasty, miserable, bespectacled boats.

Boat race=face.

The damp streets.  The gray sky.  Oh this is my darling England.

Stopped in at a pop up gallery on Berwick Street and bought:

By Christian Brett.

I thought in the circumstances..very appropriate!

Anyway, if you are interested in this and other work go to:

www.picturesonwalls.com

As a free gift, comes with every purchase, they gave me an original art work by Banksy….a brown paper bag with a Marks and Spencer type logo that reads ‘Marks and Stencils’ and is already selling on eBay for ninety quid.

Had a long chat with the curator Sam (knows Wendy Asher) who felt that the whole STREET ART movement had been suspended in aspic for the past decade and I think that he may very well have hit the nail on the head.  He didn’t feel as if he had ‘grown up’ that things had remained static, unevolved, complacent.

My own contemporary art world gripe: how come so few artists have anything relevant to say about world altering current events like Iraq?  For instance?  Who is making work about that?

Most conceptual, contemporary art is so bloody insular and self obsessed.   The entitled, bloated Tracy Emin (for instance) has become unashamedly bourgoise and so, I am sad to say, are the rest of the YBA wankers.

Why make work about a corrupt war when I can tell you all about my vagina/blood/self?

The art of ME.  I am all I ever think about… etc.

It’s Jay’s fault.  He loves a good title and a decorative flourish.  Jay Jopling has never been interested in political art and that, my friends, is very sad.

I mentioned Joseph Kosuth to Sam the pop up shop curator as an example of an artist who might have an opinion about the war and the bloody peace.

What is conceptual art?  The ‘value’ of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.

Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation. It is called Idea art, Post-Object art, and Dematerialized art because it often assumes the form of a proposition (i.e., a document of the artist’s thinking) or a photographic document of an event.

Conceptual art practices emerged at a time when the authority of the art institution and the preciousness of the unique aesthetic object were being widely challenged by artists and critics.

Conceptual artists interrogated the possibilities of art-as-idea or art-as-knowledge, and to those ends explored linguistic, mathematical, and process-oriented dimensions of thought and aesthetics, as well as invisible systems, structures, and processes.

Artists such as Joseph Kosuth and members of the Art & Language group wrote theoretical essays that questioned the ways in which art has conventionally acquired meaning. In some cases such texts served as the art works themselves.

Dinner with Nicola and Chris on Saturday night.  Lovely.  We ate oysters, game pie and vegetables.  Ended up flirting with a cute doorman with footballers thighs in some club on Dean Street.  He was ‘straight’ so I walked away.  Damn.

This evening I met Charlie at a huge ‘A’ gay Christmas event.  I met loads of people.  Lovely (sexy, charming, witty and down-to-earth) Dutch/Kiwi man and his friend but the BEST was a gallerist/singer songwriter called Robert Diament who I could totally FALL for.  I kissed him goodnight.

Out sexy gay man with a brain.  Huh?  How did that happen?

Well, it’s not going to happen  In the cold light of this sober day (Monday morning) he’s far too young and until my heart is mended…I really can’t imagine letting anyone near me.

Drove back to Whitstable with Alma who is very funny and we giggled for miles.

Anyway, as I have said before..after letting you know my initial impressions of someone ‘special’ I won’t be writing about them again.  Can you tell that I am having a nice time?  That I am happy?  Can you?  I am safe and warm (house is a bit chilly) and enveloped by love?

I forgot to mention yesterday…I bought a hat at Kokon to Zai.  It is rather splendid.

Then I went to bed…good night…sweet dreams.


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Categories
Christmas

Snowed In


Totally trapped in Whitstable!  So many old friends to be trapped in the town with.  Lovely seeing everyone.  Had tea in Wheelers with Anita and Michael.  Adam and I drank more tea and ate mince pies by the fire at Carol’s house.  Saw Tim at Tea and Times where Ronnie came a’visiting and I caught up on all the local gossip.

Ronnie showed us pictures on his phone of a dead polar bear.

Meant to be in London today dealing with Jake’s iPod fiasco but God dumped a trillion tons of snow on Kent so we are all stranded.  Hurrah!

The Little Dog just LOVES the snow as you can see from these pictures.

[wpvideo 1ChbTjQG]

I am rather hoping that I get stranded here for Christmas!

By the way, did I ever mention to you that whilst I was in the police cell that miserable day in July Jake met a man from Manhunt and sex with him.    That was supportive wasn’t it?