Duncan Roy's Blog
Good news.
The TRUST Act passed the Senate last Thursday by a 21-13 vote.
Senator Lieu voted in support.
Now, the bill will need a concurrent vote from the Assembly (the first version of the bill passed the Assembly last year, so another vote is needed given that the bill was amended this year), and then it will head to the Governor’s desk.
This is great.
My time in jail was worth it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6OYGEDO2mw&feature=youtu.be]
1.
No. Not what you ‘re thinking…hoping?
I set out at 6am for the Men’s County Jail to see my friend Jeremy who is presently residing in dorm 5200. Jeremy is a good-looking white man in his mid-thirties. A meth head with a penchant for transsexuals. He has two kids in Utah. He used to manage an ihop. He is the kind of character I couldn’t invent from a movie I couldn’t write. A charming man with anger issues. Like most inmates he is pre-occupied with his own case, another miserable drug dealer hauled off the streets. We spoke for thirty minutes, I left $50 for him to eat well and I drove home.
The deputies who processed us into the jail were very pleasant, polite.
2.
Yesterday we drove to Redondo Beach where we met with Democratic State Senator Lieu. The second State Senator I have met this month. He has a strange constituency, ranging from progressive liberals in the Venice area to hard-core Odinists in Orange County. We sat in the sparse office with his Harvard educated interns. They were polite but they didn’t offer us water or coffee.
Our successful visit last month to Senator Calderon lead to his decision to co-sponsor the Trust Act. The bill then passed the Senate Public Safety Committee and is now headed towards the Senate Floor . The Trust Act will make what happened to me less likely to happen to others. It may liberate the 3000 un-convicted men and women currently held on ICE holds in California. The Trust Act will demand that ICE follows its own guidelines, its own rules.
It is essential that Senator Lieu support this bill.
Lieu is an interesting man. In his Redondo office there is a huge studio photograph of Lieu and his family lounging on a white, fluffy rug. He is wearing a dress shirt but no tie. He has been a vociferous supporter of the LGBT community, especially the transsexual population for whom he reserves special respect.
I sat with Kristine Chong from The Californian Immigrants Policy Center and three other Immigrant rights specialists… including a day labourer from Mexico in the Senator’s dingy ‘conference’ room. Lieu’s people wore badly cut suits. We all began to sweat in the un air-conditioned office.
Antonio, the day laborer, spoke very movingly about the catastrophic effect ICE and the Secure Communities protocol are having on the immigrant population. Families broken apart, 5000 American children made orphans, their mothers and fathers deported. Immigrants are routinely forced to sign deportation papers or threatened with months held in privately owned immigration camps, camps that are currently costing the people of California 6 million dollars a year
The situation is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
This state has enjoyed, for many years, low-cost manual labour on which their false economy was based. Now, these undocumented migrants are being rounded up like animals. Targeted on the streets, in their cars, in their homes.
ICE have to deport 400, 000 people a year to fulfill a federal government quota. Even President Obama’s announcement last week supporting The Dream Act didn’t stop three ‘Dreamers’ being deported yesterday.
I told my story. I told them what they must have heard many times out of Latino mouths. Spanish speakers, their accents somehow devaluing what they have to say. Listen to me. Listen to my clipped British accent. Listen to me eloquently tell my story. Pay attention to the dramatic pauses.
It is always very shocking for them (especially the starched, ivy league interns) that an affluent white person could have got caught up in the immigration net. They bowed their heads in shame. After 45 minutes our meeting is over.
They tell us that Lieu’s support on the Senate floor cannot be assured, he has to pamper to the right-wing element of his constituency. They say: Lieu, in the past, has been threatened physically for supporting immigrants rights. He received death threats. Pampering to the right? I ask incredulously. Pampering to the right will keep this state poor, our children uneducated, the prisons full and gay men like me… unmarried and childless.
Be brave, I urge him, and do the right thing.
As we are leaving we pass another group of men and women patiently waiting their turn to be heard. They could have been Odinists for all I know, demanding that Lieu hunt down every illegal immigrant in California and throw away the key.
I am downtown. Downtown LA. We are drinking coffee in a chic coffee shop.
It is reassuringly sophisticated. It feels like NYC. It feels like a city. Spring Street. Coffee bar. The people who pass by are dressed well and don’t have that Hollywood vibe. The women are not showing off their chests and legs, the boys are wearing well cut pants and have covetable accessories.
Having the car makes life more interesting. I am scarcely at home. I am writing this on my phone.
I had dinner with an old friend on Saturday night. We ate at Bossa Nova then we saw Clash of the Titans 2 at the Chinese Theatre. There were less than 10 of us in the theatre. The film was terrible, Olivia was terrible. Everything about that terrible film that could be said…was said. He brought two young men. They didn’t say much. One was gay, the other ‘in training’. Outside the theatre there was a costume exhibition. We poured over the ormolu costume jewelry Elizabeth Taylor wore in Cleopatra.
We explained to the boys the history of Century City. You know that story don’t you? How Cleopatra bankrupted 20th Century Fox? How the back lot was sold and Century City was built? Everybody should know that story, if they live in LA.
It was pouring rain. Under the theatre, in the parking lot, valley girls were vomiting out of SUVs onto their fake Louboutins. We drove west, we sat together at my club and they drank cocktails. I drank coffee. The boys remained mute.
Not feeling at all combative, I found myself passionately discussing racism and gay equality which quickly disintegrated into a nasty UK v USA argument. At one point my friend told me that if he could press a button and eradicate all Muslims he would. I pointed out that my father was a Persian Muslim and technically so were the majority of my 11 brothers and sisters. That he would have to kill my young sister Rebecca.
How did he feel about that? His genocidal zeal was not diminished.
How come it’s become ok for reasonable men to become so islamaphobic? The conversation further disintegrated into how retarded the Brits were for accepting equality without the word marriage in the equation. It made my blood boil that he would rather have nothing if he couldn’t have the word marriage. Civil unions in the UK seem, to those who have them…just like being married and my friends who have civil unions think of themselves, describe themselves, as married. Anyway, the m word is now being fought for in the UK but more as a nice after thought attached to the equality that we already enjoy. You know how I felt, and people like me felt about that word. Archaic, patriarchal bull shit…antiquated in the secular UK.
Then, this morning, I found myself listening to Democracy Now on the radio as I drove the 101 Freeway.
Van Jones being interviewed.
He pointed out that in the civil rights game played out in the USA…if you are prepared to be arrested for what you believe…and there are enough of you, change happens quickly.
Be seen to fight for what you believe rather than playing the faceless gay equality/marriage ‘incremental’ tactic…employing expensive lawyers and fighting state by state… He mentioned the names of 5 or 6 black civil rights leaders. I got to wondering where our civil rights leaders were? Who are they? Why can’t I name them?
I suppose Lance Black has become a recognizable leader/voice of the gay community but this seems accidental rather than deliberate. It has always been my dream for the gay men and women of the USA that they get the human rights they deserve. But…what are they prepared to risk when demanding those rights? How many windows do they need to break?
There is something weedy and unfocused about the movement. Worse, by articulating this frustration I risk people like my friend telling me that I am letting down the cause. We need leaders, we need direct action. It is the only way the unelected justices (who get the final say) at the Supreme Court will truly understand how important equality is to us.
The system has failed us.
Meanwhile, Justin Bond shared on Facebook a piece from the NY Times about the suicide of a gay man struggling with the notion of old age…amongst other things.
Read it here: gay suicide
Some of Justin’s friends dismissed the piece as worthless. Some of them understood how important it was. Some of them, quite rightly, wondered why the piece was in the style section. Our community wrestles with all sorts of problems peculiar to our people. It is absurd, at moments like this, to pretend that we are just like everyone else. Our generation of gay men, used to unlimited sex, sexual validation, Peter Panism at its worst…has to wake up and acknowledge the wrinkles.
So, it’s been quite a week. A date last night that went really well. Passionate discussions and…well the dogs.
What more could I want?
[wpvideo JBz5DIg9]
1.
Before I hit the doctor’s office I stepped into Regen Projects on Santa Monica Boulevard.
Owned by Shaun Regen this is by far the most interesting gallery in LA and consistently shows challenging and stimulating work.
Regen Projects is currently showing work by German artist John Bock.
Born 1965, Gribbohm, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin.
The show reminded me (inevitably) of fellow German Martin Kippenberger.
Kippenberger is one of my favorite artists. His work has been inexcusably and crudely plundered by the YBA (Young British Artists).
Bock influences include: Paul McCarthy, Otto Muehl, Paul Thek and Maurizio Cattelan.
John Bock is a performance artist and sculptor whose three-dimensional works often serve as props for his performances.
Bock creates entire universes using a wildly eclectic range of materials, described in multiple languages, and presented with an antic energy that is equal parts mad scientist and Buster Keaton.
A dizzying mix of pseudo-scientific, aesthetic, social, and political commentary, Bock’s works defy logic.
This view of the world has various precedents, notably in the post World War II Theatre of the Absurd, a movement whose goal was to shock audiences into facing up to life “in its ultimate, stark reality.”
Bock believes the pre-conscious associations inherent in words are unavoidable and that only through experience and empathy can we penetrate what he terms the “heavy numb dumb world” of daily life.
Bock’s lectures seduce and confound, simultaneously proving perhaps, the inexplicability of the interrelationship of man and his universe.
2.
When I let God take the reigns of the humble buggy I drive down the promised path of happy destiny I am sure of one thing: things are going to turn out just the way they are meant to. Good and bad.
When I angrily push him out-of-the-way and drive myself I am sure of nothing.
I used to think that if I let God take control of my life, my life might be ever so slightly boring but that simply isn’t the case. God and I can still go on a wild ride, we can still have excitement and ambition. We just do it the right way.
I get to have all that life has on offer without paying the terrible price I seem to pay when I wilfully drive the buggy myself.
I used to think (convinced myself) that doing the right thing meant that I had to live a pious life.
This simply isn’t true. God doesn’t want me kneeling at his feet all day praying that his will be done. He knows that I believe in his will being done, but what I have come to understand of late is that his will needn’t be dull.
Everyday things get better in my head. Everyday without the grip of obsession, compulsion and the like I am calmer, more centered, more and more in my own skin.
Getting back to work and in touch with my God-given desire to create (and a means to do so) I feel more like the man I was meant to be rather than the man I have been lately.
Yesterday I went back to the doctor, had more scans and lo and behold there are yet more problems to deal with. The difference between this time and the last is that I now have a skill set to deal immediately and healthily with these problems rather than the last time when I associated the problem with him.
It is remarkable to me that for nearly a year I let somebody else rule my head and my heart. By so doing I allowed the deep shadow cast by another to blot out the sunlight of the spirit.
When I talk about God I don’t mean a christian…organised religious God. I mean a God of my understanding, a higher power to whom I must defer at all times if I am going to live a healthy life.