Before I start today’s rant I must just share with you how beautiful it is in Malibu. The house is calm, the colours are peaceful and dreamy. The misty canyon is slowly clearing to reveal the ocean below.
Unusually there is a TV and it’s nice to hear it babbling in the background so I don’t feel so alone. I woke up too late this morning to go to my therapy group. Thirty minutes too late. Perhaps all I need is a TV and a little dog to be happy? I have been wondering since I returned from Europe what or how life will deliver next. Obviously if I were in NYC I would be enjoying the tail end of my relationship with him. Oh, I don’t know.
The insurance man came yesterday to discuss the burglary that happened here in Malibu before I left for Europe. He was polite and thorough. A friend popped by to take me to lunch, a young Japanese actor. We ate at the new Cuban place nearby.
I spent the afternoon imagining how the house might look if I made the essential changes I want to make before I put it on the market this autumn. I drove down to see how the new road is progressing. They have already carved out the route and huge yellow earth movers are shifting tons of debris from the 26-year-old slide. It excites me to see the changes. Driving up Rambla Pacifico is really beautiful overlooking the northern Malibu shores, past vineyards and the vast Santa Monica mountain range. As I have said before, the road makes sense of why these homes were built here. I was sure when I bought the house that one day the road would be repaired so seeing it happen gives me a huge sense of relief.
Went out for dinner with friends last night, they had an elderly black labrador who the Little Dog fell in love with and tried humping. He had such fun! Running around their lawn with his new girl friend.
Something funny happened yesterday morning after therapy. One of my co-conspirators (kinda famous) came up to me and told me that if I ever saw him in public that I shouldn’t speak to him. That my fame as a sex addict might reveal him as the same.
The news on the TV is all about missing boys, bigamy and bombs. For many people just like me yesterday’s great news was the over turning of the morally reprehensible proposition 8. A federal judge declared California’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional Wednesday, saying that no legitimate state interest justified treating gay and lesbian couples differently from others and that “moral disapproval” was not enough to save the voter-passed Proposition 8.
Even though marriage has been small part of my long story I have never really considered marriage between me and another man a possibility. If I stay in Malibu on the side of a mountain I am never going to meet anyone.
Meeting someone. Why has that become so important to me? Why have I abandoned my desire for glorious isolation? I suppose the very fact that for the past few months I have felt connected to someone has woken in me the desire to share what I have and learn to be a pair rather than a single. Of course this happened rather too late in the day. I miss him because he is intelligent and funny and warm and forgiving and when I am with him I feel complete. A rare combination. NYC is not far away but I will stay away because he has to make sense of his new life.
I must spend the morning putting the house together for new renters. The last renters left the house looking beautiful. Some people just leave a really nice feeling in the house. It is easy to remember only the bad renters and forget the good ones. I have been jammed solid with renters this year and most of them were appreciative and delightful. For that, this morning, I am very grateful.
You know if I ever relapsed on anything it is likely to be ecstasy. After nearly 14 years of abstinence I am hankering the oblivion of an overwhelming high.
The sinking, bubbling rush of great e. Sinking into the warmth, the clock ticking,
The moment when we are connected to the men and women around me moving as one, abandoning my individuality, my sense of self for us. The vanishing point, the music throbbing, the sweat flowing. I have already stowed anything valuable elsewhere: my watch and wallet. I don’t want to have to worry about anything. I catch the eye of a beautiful boy on the dance floor, he is glistening too. We find each other and I can smell him, taste his lips. My jeans tighten around my legs and groin.
The music elevates us, I know him more perfectly at that moment than I have ever known anyone. There is a moment of silence, just a beat but the silence becomes interminable. I can hear my lungs fill with air, his lips open, I can see his teeth. His black hair stuck in thick bangs over his white skin, his blue eyes looking at me. Focused on me.
All through my twenties I took drugs recreationally. Always at weekends, with friends all over London and New York. The finding and buying and taking of the little pill. I am the first one on the dance floor. There are a thousand gay men around me and it is so fucking gorgeous, so fucking glamorous. I am slim and agile, my arms are long and muscular, my hands are behind my head then they are up in the air above me playing in the light. I know how delicious I look. Passed from one man to another, passed from the arms of one man to another. Kissing the ones I want, briefly. Kissing the men I want as the music slows and panting, filling my head with the thoughts of the men dancing around me.
Drugs gave me so much more than a human could ever give me. For a few moments I am granted a reprieve. No thought, no care, nothing. Just me and the moment.
Just spilled water all over my lap top which after a few shakes is now working again. So clumsy today. All over the place.
Firstly, I have to tell you THIS: The NYC heat is frying my brain.
Now, I must tell you this:
I have been sitting on/keeping from you an insane and shocking moment the past couple of months. I just didn’t know how or if I should even mention it.
One of my freaky Hollywood neighbors text me after we had dinner before I left California asking if I had ever ‘been intimate with the little dog?’ it was NOT a joke.
He intimated that he had ‘feelings’ for his kitten.
I really didn’t know what to do.
I urged him to get help.
This is just one of the many reasons I don’t want to go back to LA. I missed my flight – overslept. Had to buy another ticket. It’s all the same. There must be more insane/lonely/desperate people per square mile in LA than any other city in the USA.
I know that this might sound a bit racist but every time a Korean looks at the little dog I wonder if they are thinking what sauce they would eat him with. Once, outside the Mud Cafe on 9th a Korean told me with a smug smile that she could not understand our absurd preoccupation with an animal that they grill.
Saw the Kids are Alright yesterday evening with Amelia. We had a lovely lunch in Williamsburg. We made plans after her genius performance at Joe’s Pub the previous night. I had to walk over the boiling hot Williamsburg Bridge as it was unexpectedly closed to traffic. Walking over the bridge made it all the more exciting adventure.
After our lovely lunch in Williamsburg– omelets and watermelon/mint juice we, Amelia and I hunted the shops for exciting sale items. I bought socks and underwear at the 70% off Paul Smith Shop.
Saw Amelia perform Lady Rizo with Jake. He loved the show.
Afterwards we hung with Amelia and her husband at a small bar on Lafayette.
The following afternoon me and Jake bid our adieu. I have absolutely no idea if or when we will see each other ever again. We have not made plans. We will see each other if it feels right I suppose.
Last night, the streets were boiling hot and humid. At night the thunder, lightning and torrential rain cool everything down for a few glorious moments.
Anyway, The Kids are Alright: Annette Benning is marvelous in Lisa’s movie. A totally convincing alcoholic dyke. The other performances were wonderful too but Benning’s was by far my favorite..and there again was Mia Wasikowska! Our Whitstable lunch condiment. I assume she is well on her way to getting an Oscar, possibly next year?
Julianne Moore lacked control in A Single Man, her talent all over the place like a prolapsed labia. Compare that asinine performance with the very genuine, tight..measured performance in the Kids Are Alright. I would have preferred Olivia Williams of course but who the hell wouldn’t?
My ONLY gripe with the movie was the wholly unresolved issue of Ruffalo’s character who just vanished in a puff of metrosexual angst, ferociously seen off by Benning’s well observed impression of an alpha male. Unfairly berating Ruffalo on her doorstep, telling him that he was an ‘interloper’.
He was the sperm donor. After all they had been through, he should have been included in the family at the end of the movie. The kids wanted a relationship with him. It seemed unfair and churlish to jettison his character..although probably quite realistic. After all, it was they that contacted him. Moore who seduced him, Benning who suggested the ill-fated dinner at his house etc. etc.
I wish, when I had found my real dad he had been like Mark Ruffalo rather than the lying villain on offer.
Somebody suggested that if it had been a straight couple who had cheated with a surrogate mother..would the mother be part of the family? Well, if the kids wanted her..I suppose so. It posed many interesting and complex questions about what family means. What it could mean.
I loved everything about this exquisitely crafted movie but one thing above everything else totally blew me away: all of the characters took turns being the persecutor/rescuer/victim. Genius. There was so much at stake for all of them.
Saturday after the movie met Ian at Soho House NYC, which was jammed with gays. One particularly drunk, gay in swim short was making a total fool of himself. He should have been chucked out but everyone was a bit scared of the repercussions I think. Ate pork chops. Took cab to The Phoenix, a gay bar in East Village. Drank sickly diet coke. Met 20-year-old Persian boy. Nice for the ego.
This morning I saw Mike Z, a friend from LA, at the park whilst walking our dogs. Now I am waiting on him to come pick me up for lunch. He may forget. I am really hungry. Ravenous.
Ended up eating polish sausage on my own. Never trust a drinker to do what they agree to do.
Busy week ahead. No idea what’s in store. All I know is that once I get home I am going directly to the new road to see it being built. I can’t wait.
Understandably I totally erased from my memory the briefest of moments we spent in St Tropez.
There is something you should definitely know about St Tropez: St Tropez is shit.
Two miserable hours in what could only he described as a hot Margate – the tackiest of British seaside towns.
Like Margate there were miserable old ladies with dyed, fluffy blond hair cut short over ruddy complexions eating styrene trays of limp French fries.
Crowds of hopeful ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ types sit silently looking over at the multimillion dollar yachts hoping, one assumes, that they will glimpse the filthy rich (with whom we were meant to stay) eating their three-leaf salads served by lithe flunkies.
In between the vulgar, plastic looking yachts and their brasserie bound spectators a torrent of fetid, badly dressed tourists divide the audience from their theatre. Like an open sewer running through what once was paradise.
We drank coffee behind a defunct HSBC. It was interesting that none of the ATM’s worked in a place that relies so profoundly on the buck, the yen, the mark and the pound.
Our original plan had included an extended stay in St Tropez but thankfully we did not.
Our final days on the Cote d’Azure were, at times, a little sad. Not only was our nearly month away together drawing to a close but after spending every single waking hour with one other person one becomes slightly worn by that other person..even if one really loves them.
In nearly three weeks we had traversed major cities in three countries and two continents with a little dog, far too much luggage (my fault) and my BIG BIRTHDAY.
Before we left Europe we had one final excursion to Cap d’Antibes.
As St Tropez is shit, Antibes is gorgeous. We spent hours exploring this authentic little port. This is what, I assume, St Tropez used to be like before Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot made it famous. I wonder if this travesty will blight my darling Whitstable, made vile by it’s own success? For that I feel partly responsible.
We happily wandered the tiny, cobbled streets until dusk then found a divine little restaurant called La Taverne du Safranier and ate St Pierre and Frito Musto. The crowd: reassuringly posh.
On our drive back to Cannes we saw the tail end of the international firework festival exploding over the sea. The beaches were crammed with half-naked young people grilling on makeshift bbq and playing unnamed ball games.
The train to the airport the following morning he fell asleep on my shoulder and when he woke up we chatted to a handsome, 18-year-old musician called Clovis.
The flight home was a little uncomfortable but once we landed we were swiftly processed through customs and immigration.
I watched four films on the plane:
Tom Ford’s A Single Man is without doubt one of the most indulgent movies ever made. Tom should be an art director rather than a film director? An exercise in style over substance. The attention to detail (art direction and costume) was painful– though not quite as painful as the total lack of any human emotion throughout the entire movie.
Brokeback Mountain was also about gay men experiencing loss and stifled emotions. The differance? Brokeback is a wonderfully human film told with charm and compassion and a Single Man is not. It’s odd isn’t it that two inarticulate cowboys made me cry buckets whilst an uptight English Professor with excellent taste could not.
Stephen Jones, the milliner, mentioned in an article for Vogue that Ford had lent heavily on Madonna during the making of the film and that is why it is perhaps so profoundly flawed. There was some nice editing and camera work but it was like a huge fragrance commercial rather than a film about loss and love and yearning.
Irritatingly there is an unreasonable death..the protagonist: this SINGLE MAN could not grieve and make his partner’s death a part of his life…oh no..he had to die.
The boys he encountered remained unkissed and unfucked but in Ford’s world as long as your shirts are well pressed and you are drinking from a Lucy Rie mug…don’t get me started. Even watching him take a shit..you just KNEW his shit didn’t smell of anything other than vetiver.
There was something chaste, restrained and totally chic about it all..and I use the word chic pejoratively, although I never, ever thought I would.
There were rather weak attempts at some polemic as Firth spars with Julianne Moore about the sanctity of gay love and his students about Aldous Huxley.
Firth’s performance is worth noting. Unlike many others (I am not being deliberately contrary) who thought his performance ‘amazing’ it was Firth’s disregard, disconnect with/for the character he was playing that amazed me. What a straight person thinks a gay person is. The oft applauded and often awarded performance (as well-intentioned as it might have been) of a reserved gay English gentleman is in fact, like the rest of the film, totally heartless.
My guess is he actually had very little respect for Ford as a director who most certainly had no idea how to communicate with a classically trained genius like Firth.
After A Single Man I saw An Education again which is well worth seeing a second time and as it is so damned good. Funny, well put together, brilliantly acted.
An Education followed by I love You Phillip Morris, which is definitely my kind of movie. If you can…SEE IT!!!
He reminded me when I finished writing this that we also saw Polanski’s Ghost. What a load of old bollocks.
Disgorged at JFK.
10th street was lovely to come home to and Dan and I sat together as I debriefed him on the preceding three weeks.
Here I am back in New York. The streets are hot and humid; the parks are jammed with sturdy men in silky shorts with huge smiles. I am drawn to want to befriend all of them.
Is it possible to believe in God and still take drugs and drink? Is it possible to believe in God and sleep with hookers? Is any of this possible? Obviously it is.
Sebastian will be buried on Thursday, July 1st 2010. There’ll be a horse-drawn cortege from Meard Street to St James’s Piccadilly where the service will be held. Stephen Fry will be speaking, as are others. Stephen very kindly offered to say a few words on my behalf.
Rachel Campbell-Johnstone wrote to me yesterday inviting me to the funeral, she said, “We are mountaineers roped together heading for the summit of beauty.” She warned us that the funeral will be filmed.
Remember, I was 23 when I met Sebastian. That was 27 years ago. He was still a teenager working for Jimmy Boyle in Edinburgh. Our show, Pornography, a spectacle, invited by the Richard Demarco Gallery would play in Jimmy’s cold performance space where Sebastian and I met for the first time.
I would later work for the Demarco Gallery and meet Joseph Beuys, the greatest conceptual artist of our age. There was a fascinating dialogue between Beuys and Boyle..then styled one of the most dangerous men in the United Kingdom.
The dialogue was initiated by Richard Demarco whilst Jimmy Boyle was serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Barlinnie Prison for murder. Beuys went on hunger strike because of Jimmy Boyle’s removal from the Special Unit, Barlinnie to Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison where he was no longer able to continue making art.
Sebastian claimed in his book Dandy in the Underworld that he was sleeping with Jimmy and I have no reason to doubt him. I would have too if I had had my chance. There was something wildly attractive to me about ex cons and hard men and dangerous criminals. Remember I had been in prison the year before I met Sebastian and developed a nasty habit for sex with brutal straight men.
If anybody was going to fuck me he was going to be a man who deserved me. He was going to be a man who knew what he wanted and how to take it.
My cell mate Tommy Cowling, married with two children from Hoxton, East London was the most beautiful man who ever lived. When the lights went out in our cell he said, “I’m asleep now, you can do what you want to me.” For nine long months we did exactly that, everything we wanted when the lights were out. He could make me cum by just rubbing his stubble over my soft face.
Perhaps this is another reason why I spurned the soppy men that I met in gay bars and gay clubs? Perhaps this is why I would rather have my head buried in a squaddies (soldiers) groin, the smell of wet pussy on his cock than a nice boy from The Abbey. Prison spoiled more than my reputation. It proved, if any proof were needed, that straight men with furious urges, hard and hairy bodies and urgent desires were far more interesting than living in the half-light of shameful, gay London, Paris or New York.
This is all a matter of taste of course. My desires cannot be compared to yours.
Yesterday something a little untoward happened. At Anna’s birthday party she rolled me a fag and it had a few crumbs of weed in it. I was as high as a kite for a good few hours. Everything was totally wonderful. I had that gorgeous feeling of euphoria and masterful abandon. I hadn’t felt that feeling for nigh on 14 years. I demanded to speak to Jake because I wanted to know how the experience of me being high would affect what I thought of him.
He was complaining that it was late and he wanted to go to sleep…he was blithering on about how people might think he was some sort of man whore if I compared his experience of being gay with men who died of AIDS in the 1980’s. Obviously, I didn’t mean that. I was trying to be nice.
Fuck it! Go and be a man whore. All of you! Go and be whores. It doesn’t matter to me. I was sucking squaddie cock and getting fucked in the back of cars by East End builders. LUSH. I didn’t wait around to have a gay life. I emerged from the womb searching for the most perfect penis to suckle on.
Anyway, as I did not deliberately get high I am not going to reset my sobriety time. I still believe in God but I’m not going to be so fucking pious.
After dinner, before the last US election, I sat in a ‘circle’ with a bunch of my Jewish hippy friends who live in Northridge, California. They were praying quietly and not so quietly for the Obama presidency.
An African healer sat silently with us wearing traditional headdress and multi colored robes. He had been flown to their house from Africa so that he might share his wisdom.
In turn they held a gnarled wooden ‘talking stick’ and gravely shared their optimism for the creation of Obama World. The Obama paradigm shift, the liberal equal and opposite reaction. A world where sanity and fairness would be restored. Where this young black man’s promises would come true and Guantanamo would be shut down and wars would be ended quickly not slowly. Where Bush/Cheney corruption would be revealed and the culprits brought to justice.
Some of the women cried.
When I was handed the talking stick I advised them carefully not to worship false Gods, that I did not share their optimism and that they would only be disappointed. The hippies laughed at me with desultory guffaws but the silent African suddenly spoke up, “He is right!” They looked at him aghast! He pointed his long bony black finger around the room. “He is right. It is you all who are wrong.”
Duncan: 1. Hippies: 0.
Stunning naivety, ignorance and blindness have kept liberals in the USA an amateur political sideshow, they remain inchoate and powerless. They do not realize that they will never be represented by any established political party. Ever.
So Obama has not, as I suspected, provided the ‘paradigm shift’ that so many of my crystal loving film industry friends thought he would when they rushed to elect him.
Indeed, quite the opposite has happened.
After 10 years of Bush/Cheney there was no equal and opposite reaction, there was just more of the same. This time from a sweetly smiling, articulate black guy rather than the gruff inarticulate white guy. He has let you down and it is all the more galling.
In Britain another altogether more intriguing story is unfolding..
I am oddly optimistic about the Cameron/Clegg coalition. With no real power Prime Minister Cameron will have to toe the line and be more representative of the British people and their desires than cow towing to the ruling elite. Even though he is cut from aristocratic cloth he seems rather more inclusive than the scarily evolved Tebbit/Thatcher type of Tory who changed Britain over three decades ago.
Watched the England/Germany game. Proving that the squad seem more interested in their hair than scoring goals. They are an unruly mob of shopping addicts who have lost their passion for soccer and developed an expensive taste for power and prestige. Arrogant bunch of wankers.
Had a long chat with Dan in NYC. I was describing how my newly gay friend was evolving. I noted that he seemed to own and accept his power and beauty and acted accordingly.
We both agreed that if we had been that sure of ourselves when we were younger both of us would be dead. It was people like my newly out friend (not that I am suggesting he is sleeping around) who died first of the mysterious disease that became an epidemic and withered away the most beautiful boys.
AIDS, thankfully, never got me. I was always too much of a prude, never realized quite how beautiful I was and mostly too much of a snob and star fucker..unable to go near the average gay. In retrospect I think things turned out just fine for gay men like Dan and me. We survived. Might not have had as much sex as the others but certainly never paid the ultimate price.
I have come full circle. He, unwittingly brought me full circle. Being in love then not being in love. Wanting to own to letting go and enjoying, from afar, his freedom.
I have always fallen for the impossible. Yet, unlike before, I do not want to punish him for being who he is and instead just take a small amount of satisfaction from his evolving self. Like a bird trapped in oil in the Gulf of Mexico he is now cleaned up and ready to fly.
As he flies into his future..what of mine? Well, I am ok. I really am. A great deal could be a lot better but I am OK.
We are off to Paris next week and part of me wants never to come back.
I loved being in love. It has happened so rarely of late. As I draw down the shutters on a gay life that I really have no reason to be part of I instead, sit at the edge of that world.
Perhaps there will be a time in the near future when he will come to me and I will be able to hear all of his conquests and heart breaks without my own heart being quite so broken.
Yet, even writing that, I know that he cannot (any longer) break my heart.
I knew with certainty that Obama would never satisfy the lust for change some of my friends thought he might, just as they knew that I have been naïve about falling in love with him. He was not sent to be the great love of my life.
He was sent, actually, to be my friend and for that I am very grateful.
P.S. So Arrianna Huffington is bemoaning Obama and how frustrated people are with him. How dare she! It was her daily attacks on Hillary Clinton and lauding of Obama that galvanized so much support for him. She was short-sighted and more overly impressed by his ivy league nerdyness than his ability to lead. She wants 5 words to accept her webby award? How about: I was wrong about Obama.
The Nancy Rubins show at Gagosian is the real deal. Not one wasted wall nor expectation disappointed. Spread over four galleries on two floors this energetic show needs to seen. The huge newer gallery to the south of the original space has never been used so successfully. It is devoted to an ambitious, spectacular forest of kayaks that delight and inspire! Pewter colored boats strung together with high tensile wires exploding thirty feet into the air.
We were shown smaller bronze editions that somehow don’t lose their magnificence even though they seem like maquettes for the larger works.
The art was violent and beautiful just as one would expect. Huge, crumpled graphite on paper pieces bearing down like storm clouds. The whimsical collages..covetable. A most enjoyable experience.
My day began with breakfast at Cecconi’s with John. We talked about an art project for his store.
I called TW but he is in the midst of an obsession so cannot be relied upon to carry me away from mine. My obsession to get out of dodge, to leave these filthy streets.
There was a rat that had to be dealt with in Malibu.
Chatted with travelling companion. Listen, every day that passes until I get onto that plane to Paris is absolute torture. I CANNOT wait. He thought I sounded pensive. Not really pensive, just bored, uninspired. Bored of LA. I need an enriching, invigorating, salubrious experience.
I am glad that I am taking a friend. It is always so delightful to see things through new eyes. I think we both need to run away. What we don’t need is more drama, prying eyes or complicated love affairs.
Even my more evenhanded friends seem haunted at the moment. Haunted by the prospect of no prospect. The economy, the war, the oil spill..the groggy, ineffective Obama administration.
I remember moving here. I thought, back then, that anything was possible in LA. I was wrong.
I am tired of the interminable struggle of living. Every day is a monstrous challenge. Every fucking day. Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits. Driving, parking, dealing with half-wits.
Nancy Rubins
Although I woke up this bright Sunday morning feeling a little less pessimistic I swerve from irritable and discontent to the inner peace of absolute acceptance..then it’s back to the dark side. Malcontent, that’s what I am. Even looking at art yesterday, as inspirational as it was, could not stop me yearning for Europe.
I wondered what steps I could take to not be on my own.
I thought about joining a dating site. I tapped in the name of the site. As soon as the site popped up I was reminded of a time when all I wanted was to hear the reassuring buzz of new messages. Looking at that site was incredibly depressing. Page after page of cock pics, ass pics and naked men. On either side of the multiple cock pics were ads for porn sites. Mountains of white, heaving flesh.
I have no currency on sites like that. I am invisible and rightly so, I have no reason to be there. No reason to be judged simply by my age, weight and the size of my penis.
I know that this plan works very well for many men. I have heard from friends how relationships form and prosper. Many things work for other people that have never worked for me. The ease with which I see my friend become a fully fledged and engaged gay man has shocked me into knowing just how stunted my own experience has been.
The prospect of never being touched or kissed again fills me with fear. Is it so unreasonable to want a man who loves me as much as I love him?
If I have learned anything these past few months it is this: my heart sings when I am in love. Not when I have sex that is disconnected from my feelings. I wish I could! I wish that I had been made that way. But, the truth is..if I had been made that way I would have been killed by AIDS years ago. Before we knew what AIDS was. My reticence saved me though ultimately kept me on my own.
Nancy Rubin
I have never been so eager to meet someone yet so disconnected from the possibility. I am resigned to the fact that it is totally unlikely to happen.
Friends, I suppose, are just as good.
I will be travelling with a great friend. I am grateful for that. Grateful to have a friend with whom I can laugh and although I once wanted more it is with the same resignation that I understand that what I have is just as good.
Some people will always be there. Until the very end. I hope that by sharing this journey he remains my friend. Seldom have I experienced such ease with another and have, on occasions, confused that with being in love.
I spent almost the entire day with Dom. We saw the show at Gagosian, ate lunch in Beverly Hills then I came home had a nap and cooked dinner for the both of us. Carrot and ginger soup, pork chops and peas then cups of British tea. It’s a quarter after 12 and he just left. Shooting the shit, putting the world to rights.
As for sex addiction? What of that? Well, I have been really well-behaved. Not acting out, not objectifying, intriguing, not making inappropriate comments, not looking at porn, not…well, not doing anything that might compromise my sobriety.
Dom Nancy Rubins
I think my friends here worry about me. Think that I might be depressed. They might have a point. It has been a very, very hard six months. Not with people, but with banks and aspirations and an inability to make art.
The trouble with LA is the lengths one has to go to make sense of every day. I have been here for five years now.
Five long years in purgatory.
On Friday night I had dinner at Soho House with a new friend. It was like dining with a ghost. A beautiful man with no soul. A beautiful man who referred to me as an uncle. Again. That fucking word. Asexual uncle. I didn’t pay for dinner. Uncles pay for dinner.
I found a book of photography called Chaos by Josef Koudelka at my house in Malibu that Kristian gave me for my birthday some years ago. In it he wrote:
“I thought this book was very apt. Life is never black and white yet always flowing with chaos. I feel this book goes some small way to prove that even in chaos there is beauty.”
It was lovely to find his note. A message from Kristian, from the past. The past, where we must leave him.
I had to make some huge and grown up decisions today. Decisions and about romance and finance. The two are unconnected yet have been hideously intertwined as I grappled with one or the other for the past few months.
As my fear of financial ruin overwhelmed me I turned to him to deliver me from the truth. Today, I just had to face my unfortunate situation head on.
My financial insecurity is undoubtedly connected to uncomfortable feelings of self-worth, prestige and power. The romance I want but cannot have. Some things are just not meant to be. It is challenging to come to terms with these sorts of truths but as I have written here in this blog on many occasions when I do make decisions they are swift and sure. Something, actually, Drew Pinsky taught me whilst I was on the sex rehab show.
I have deliberately avoided talking about either the romance or the finance on this blog but more importantly I have kept it secret to those who love me best. Fuck, it is exhausting keeping secrets. I really hate it. I have no intention of going into any specific detail about the romance or the finance right now. All you need to know is that I sat with John after the cake was cut and the presents were opened and told him everything I had been hiding for the past few months. Phew.
As we all know: the truth will set you free.
I let go of a secret I was determined to keep. Everything I have ever let go of has been relinquished unwillingly. With claw marks all over what ever was finally gone.
Deep down I am as sure as I ever was that everything will turn out just the way it was meant to be. I believe in my fate.
My relationships burn like super novae in the cosmos then shrink and die. I have an opportunity right now to make a different set of choices: taking contrary action, living in acceptance and handing over what ever gives me pain to my higher power.
Just a few days away from my trip to Europe where I will celebrate a hefty milestone. I have chosen to travel with a close friend. Someone I love but not a lover. We (and The Little Dog) will explore London and Paris. For the sake of The Little Dog we will once again visit the wallabies in the Jardin des Plantes that my darling, loyal pet found utterly spell binding when we visited Paris last Autumn. I am sure he must have thought that they were the biggest squirrels he had ever seen.
Am I prepared to walk away with dignity? From people, places and things?
What I own is not who I am. Who I love cannot define me. Of course I would love to be in love with a man who loved me as much as I loved him.
I have come a very long way this past year. The road to serenity, self-love, sexual sobriety is littered with the corpses of those who could not.
I must have buried 30 people during the last 12 years, killed by addiction. Overdose, suicide, etc. Every one my hero for keeping me sober. Each and every one.
This evening I celebrated my friend’s daughter’s 5th birthday. I sat with his family and watched his happy little girl blow out the candles on her cake. After supper I wandered into Soho House on my own and found people I knew to take my mind off of the grueling aloneness. I am not lonely, I just can’t be bothered to make the effort to accept the invitation nor get in the car and drive to people who genuinely love me.
On my way home, as if by magic, friends called me. Emails arrived, text messages appeared on the screen of the iPhone and I was wrenched away from the promise of a night of self-pity. I can be such a pig at that particular trough.
I said to him the other night that what I found so hard to let go of was the promise of enduring love. The door had been opened then slammed shut. I am the wise uncle, asexual, decrepit yet ultimately willing to be of service to those who need me.
Without the crutches of objectification, intrigue and seduction I can some times flounder. I can sometimes fall. Late at night, when all hope is gone I wonder who will catch me? Who will catch me when I fall?
For a moment back then, I thought it might be you. I thought, foolishly, that it might be YOU. I thought it was you when I was 20, 30, 40 and now. Being in love with Richard in my twenties. I was heartbroken when he would flirt with girls. At my birthday party on Island Wall, Whitstable my Mother saw the pain I was in and tried to reach out to me but shame got in the way.
The legacy of shame.
Love has always been my goal. To be loved. I crave love the way most men crave sex.
I told him: I’m really scared that I will never love again. That I will never be loved. How could I have got this so wrong? To believe that love was possible, enduring and could be one day mine?
From out of the chaos comes beauty. It will give me succour when all else fails. I am going to Europe to fill my heart and soul with art and architecture. To walk the streets and parks of two great cities. To explore what it might have been like to be loved. I know that when I get back he will be gone. It is our swan song, our last hurrah. But before I write the end I must enjoy the journey. I must not fear the future nor have unrealistic expectations, I must set aside my shame and feel the sun on my face, in my heart.
Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe. The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil. The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil. It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.
Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it. Until now. Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it. I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing. Nothing.
It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.
Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea. I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.
Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA. I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued. I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.
Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut. I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself. It simply isn’t worth it. I am tired of being the uppity gay.
I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared. Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.
My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community. My plays and films aimed at men like me. I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community. They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles. If I had gone ‘mainstream’.
All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives. I am proud to have done so. I am proud to have served my community thus.
I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen? How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?
What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence? What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am? How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?
How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?
Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.
How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man? What does it mean when two men say that they love each other? Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it? That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we? But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered. My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love. That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.
We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs. By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution. By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have. On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures. When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off. It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?
It seems so..undignified.
In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly. At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year. Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.
It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest. The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.
I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more. It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.
The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived. I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men. I don’t know what they look like. I have never seen them, been introduced to them. If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.
The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path. If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it. But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man. I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins. I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.
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.
Before I start today’s rant I must just share with you how beautiful it is in Malibu. The house is calm, the colours are peaceful and dreamy. The misty canyon is slowly clearing to reveal the ocean below.
