Category: Malibu
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Lily July 7th 2012
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LA Portraits
Yesterday Anne-Marie revealed her hand. Wise by name…wise by nature?
DA Anne-Marie Wise is taking her prosecution of me very personally. Perhaps because she’s in the employ of her ‘victim’? Perhaps because I wrote she wore terrible clothes? Perhaps because I had a lurid dream about her? Perhaps she’s just an old-fashioned homophobe? Perhaps she is pre-menstral…menopausal? Perhaps she just doesn’t like me.
In which case: Join the queue babe.
I’ve no idea what her problem is…but she sure has a problem with yours truly. Wise: “He writes about lots of people.” Glances over at me. I smile and nod. The days of anonymity for anyone in any profession are over. The internet has changed everything. I am allowed to have an opinion about anyone…and I’m allowed to write it.
Anne-Marie Wise is spending your money, dear tax payer, in which ever way she can in her occasionally amusing personal persecution…oh…I’m sorry, prosecution of Duncan Paul Roy. Yesterday the petulant, pre-menstral hag showed the world exactly what she thought of me and the case she has been specially assigned to.
A few facts:
1. Anne-Marie demanded that my friend Joy, a junior black colleague of hers…unfriend me from Facebook. Joy is now terrified that she may be fired for knowing me. Is that even ethical? Is Anne-Marie Wise a work place bully?
2. She has maintained throughout that she has been eager to find a plea deal solution but her hands have been tied by her boss Alan Yokelson. She told the judge and my lawyers that she has no desire to continue with the case but Yokelson is determined, unrelenting, unable to conclude a deal.
Since Judge Jessic pleaded with her to resolve our deal impasse…my lawyers had a meeting with Alan Yokelson and things were not as Anne-Marie Wise had suggested. Yokelson many times thanked my lawyers for coming to see him. He was amiable and helpful.
Apparently Anne-Marie turns up (previously uninvited) and is rude and petulant. Armed with a huge pile of papers, grimly detailing my ‘anger issues’ (duh) who wouldn’t be angry when they found out they ‘ve been ripped off to the tune of $500k?
The boss sits there silently as she unleashes a tirade against me. Then, when she is done…turns, leaves the office without saying a word of goodbye to anyone…including her boss. It turns out that rather than Yokelson it is her who is determined to see this all the way into the court room.
The State of California is bankrupt and this woman is spending precious tax dollars prosecuting a case that should have been heard in a civil court. She has personally kept this case alive, spending money the State can ill afford, (fame chasing?) a self appointed arbiter of what should be a civil case and champion of some rip off Malibu realtor.
Listen, either way, I don’t mind. We can resolve this amicably or we can go to court. An amicable resolution as prescribed by the judge will not include a gagging order nor a felony. We have been eager, from November 2011, to work with the DA to find a solution. She has refused.
She continues to treat this unusual and absurd ‘letter of the law’ case as if I am some sort of child murdering rapist gang banger. All she has achieved so far is to provide the basis for a landmark immigration case, the ACLU and NILC suing ICE and the Sheriff and, surprisingly, a great deal of sympathy for me. By incarcerating me she may have made me a very rich man.
By refusing to find an amicable solution she allows me to have my moment in court before a jury of my peers with the potential of a ‘not guilty’ outcome.
Then, the law suits will start. Oh, please…let this happen.
A court hearing with jury and all the trimmings will cost the State of California about half a million dollars…ironically the amount of money I am owed. A court hearing will flay the ‘victim’ with lurid details of his personal life and business dealings. It will shine a spotlight into the murky world of Malibu real estate and…no one will come out unscathed.
I’ve no idea what this woman expects to achieve but what ever she throws at me…I’ve dealt with worse. I am stronger for her ill judged, personal loathing of me, stronger from having spent time in jail. When I look into that woman’s hard face all I see is your tax dollars needlessly spent on behalf of some rich Malibu dude. Tax dollars that could be spent restoring a local school, fixing a road, prosecuting a rapist.
I am secure that our judge is fair and equitable, a good man who has made crystal clear and on the record that my attempts to have stolen money returned to me were perfectly understandable. He wondered who, in this case, the victim was? Me or…you know who.
Anne-Marie do the right thing by the tax payers of California. Find a solution for this problem and find it now.
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LA WEEKLY
Director Duncan Roy casts a courtly image of a baronial figure as he sits in his home atop Las Flores Canyon, a modernist, Bohemian hideaway with a jaw-dropping view of the Pacific. His surroundings project an image of California’s creative lifestyle at its mos t alluring. But in February, Roy found himself standing alone outside Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, released after three months of harrowing and wrongful incarceration.
During his ordeal, he learned to dodge angry Los Angeles County Sheriff’s jailers and to trade with fellow prisoners for dried ramen toppings. He was helplessly trapped in a Kafka-esque corner of America’s immigration war, where he disappeared into the bowels of the system without explanation or apparent legal recourse.
In 2006, Roy was an up-and-coming star of the British independent-film community. His first picture, AKA, had received notice and awards around the world, and he followed the well-worn path to Hollywood in search of a bigger canvas — in particular, a film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, to which he was attached to direct. He purchased the Las Flores house with the help of his then-boyfriend, a Malibu real estate agent who later would be featured on Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing.
Five years later, the dream had fizzled. The relationship with his partner had ended. The Dorian Gray film hadn’t materialized. Roy even sought counsel from Dr. Drew on his show Sex Rehab, where the director’s outspoken manner made him a reality-TV cause célèbre. A bout with cancer led to the removal of one of Roy’s testicles. With his visa due to expire in December 2011, he prepared a move to his apartment in Berlin.
But in Los Angeles, the most tangled dramas ultimately come back to real estate. Selling the house was proving thorny. Once it was on the market, geological issues arose, dramatically lowering its value. Then, Roy says, he received a middle-of-the-night phone call from someone claiming to be the geologist who had worked on the house’s assessment. He told Roy that he had been pressured to cover up problems in the foundation but, having become a born-again Christian, felt obliged to come clean.
Roy called his ex-boyfriend and, Roy recalls, “I said, ‘You’ve conned me out of $500,000, and why don’t you take the house back? I’ll give you the house back for $500,000 — or I could just blog about what you’ve done to me.’ I threatened to blog about him.”
Thus began Roy’s trip into the twilight zone.
The next day, Nov. 17, he got a call from a Sheriff’s Department deputy asking for a meeting. His former lover is an influential figure in Malibu, and Roy briefly “wondered if it was a setup,” but he met the deputy at Country Kitchen on Pacific Coast Highway. He was stunned when the deputy arrested him for “extortion,” and took him to the Sheriff’s station at Hidden Hills, the same facility whose deputies gained infamy in the disappearance and accidental death of Mitrice Richardson in Malibu Canyon. Roy was booked, fingerprinted, questioned and placed in a cell. (His ex-boyfriend did not respond to the Weekly’s requests for comment.)
Roy viewed his arrest as an overreaction, which was sure to be cleared up soon. He was offered release on bail. But then something happened. The deputies told Roy’s bondsmen they could not accept his bail or release him because he had been placed on an “immigration hold.”
Such holds begin with a notification from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to local law enforcement. The Sheriff’s Department is a partner in the federal Secure Communities program, which is aimed at removing “dangerous criminal aliens” from the United States. When Roy, a legal resident of the United States, was fingerprinted, his data were forwarded to ICE, which issued the surprising “hold” notice.
This is where things get murky. By ICE’s protocol, its “hold” is merely a 48-hour restraint. Local authorities are essentially told that if somebody is about to go free on bail, they should hold them briefly until ICE can pick them up — at which time ICE will determine whether or not they should be deported.
Sheriff Lee Baca, however, takes a different view, classifying an ICE hold like an outstanding warrant for arrest, and uses that technicality to refuse to release such people on bail. The department’s spokesman, Steve Whitmore, says Baca is not happy with the broad net cast by Secure Communities, but nevertheless, “If a legitimate agency puts a hold on an individual, we need to respond to that. It is not our practice to ignore a legitimate law enforcement request.”
As a result, when ICE requests that a person granted bail be held briefly until ICE can pick them up, the Sheriff’s Department interprets this as allowing deputies to ignore court orders granting bail.
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This was the never-ending Möbius strip Duncan Roy suddenly found himself on.
He says he spent the first night in a cold holding cell with no blanket, while his attorney, bail bondsman and an immigration lawyer tried to find out why the hold had been placed, who could lift it or how to persuade the Sheriff to release Roy pending some sort of review.
Roy’s bondsman, Morris DeMayo, recalls, “The minute he got arrested, it was one weird incident after another. The jailer basically said, ‘We have an ICE hold, so we can’t accept the bond.’ There was just a runaround.”
Roy contacted immigration-specialty lawyers, who went to ICE regional headquarters in Santa Ana to find out “who was handling my case.” Instead of providing that basic, public information, the feds met this effort with “a wall of resistance.”
Two days later, Roy was taken to Los Angeles Superior Court in Van Nuys for arraignment on what he says is an outrageous charge of extortion. “They put you into this bus, where you’re in a cell on the bus, little cages, and you’re handcuffed,” Roy recalls. “They took us along the PCH so I saw my little hometown and I had this real sense of, I’m never going to see this place again.”
Roy was about to enter the arms of the larger county justice system, which moves people through at conveyor-belt speed with little care for niceties: “The woman or man who frisks you will quite violently run his or her hand up the inside of your leg, and on two occasions really badly hurt my remaining testicle.”
At the arraignment, the judge set bail at $35,000 and was informed that an ICE hold had been placed on Roy. He was remanded to county custody and, bail still refused, taken by bus to Los Angeles County’s infamous Men’s Central Jail.
Roy calls his arrival at Men’s Central “theatrically unpleasant. You’re being shouted and screamed at. You’re not allowed to look anybody in the eye — you have to look at the floors at all times. It was an understandably barbaric situation. You have a bracelet, which defines who you are, it’s your bar code. Then they intake you and ask you questions about your health. They ask if you’re suicidal or gay. I said I was gay. Immediately I was taken off the line and away from the other prisoners and given a new bracelet, which identified me as a gay man, and I was sent to another place with the other gays.”
Ending up in a designated gay dorm might be the one saving grace of Roy’s incarceration. While the general population is noted for violent behavior and beset by racial politics, Roy eventually found his fellow gay inmates, divided into four large dorms of about 100 men each, to be a source of comfort.
“The majority of the people were incredibly polite, incredibly kind. Eighty percent were tranny hookers, and those were the people who really looked after me. They are the ones who bring life into the dorm. They would repurpose their uniform and make dresses. It’s amazing what you can do out of a pair of boxer shorts, which becomes like a halter net top and a miniskirt. It was like being on Project Runway. They would take this pair of shorts and blue smock and turn it into an evening gown.”
Longing for food became the major motif as his mysterious jailing lengthened from days to weeks. He says there were overly long intervals between “feedings” of often inedible food, and the few inmates who had money bought small, grossly overpriced rations.
“Whenever the food is delivered, on Monday,” Roy says, “the whole place would turn into Bombay, people begging food. There was then this whole sort of element of trading, like a Victorian marketplace. People wandering around the dorm going, ‘I’ve got cookies and juice.’ … People are also trading sexual favors for food.”
He claims: “People in that jail are hungry, and nobody gives a damn.”
Weeks passed with no ray of hope. Roy sat stupefied in front of a single, shared TV perpetually tuned to police dramas, claims he was repeatedly threatened by the deputies, and was allowed a single physical activity — a once-weekly trip to a roof, where he could see sunlight or, on bad days, sit in cold rain.
He made regular trips in the cage buses to Van Nuys for his criminal case. Roy insisted he was innocent, declining a plea deal and believing that the charge was an insane reaction to what was, first of all, a dispute between ex-lovers over a business deal and second, a clearly noncriminal threat to blog about it and thus exercise his right to free speech.
But, he says, “One judge was yawning whenever my lawyer spoke, refusing to listen to us.”
Roy says he placed numerous calls to the British consulate. No action was taken on his behalf by the consulate. (A spokesman for the consulate says that it has no record of this but it is now investigating.)
Bondsman DeMayo has seen a lot, but he was on edge over Roy’s lengthening, unexplained incarceration. “Everyone was stonewalling us. We can’t find the file — or he’s not at this facility. Or they’d put me on hold [on the phone] for 45 minutes. I had the booking number, but they would say, ‘We don’t know what to tell you — he’s not here.’ ”
The ACLU, which is probing Roy’s case, asserts that a legal dead zone exists between the ICE hold and Sheriff Baca’s procedure. The ACLU and DeMayo say they have seen many such maddeningly inappropriate jailings.
Jenny Pasquarella of the ACLU of Southern California says, “A lot of time, when you talk to immigration about a person who is in custody, they say, ‘We can’t do anything about it because the person’s not in our custody. Talk to the Sheriff.’ Then you talk to the Sheriff and they say, ‘We can’t do anything about it. We didn’t place the hold.’ They keep pointing fingers at each other.”
Many cases are quickly resolved — for example, if, under the initial criminal charge, the jailed person agrees to a plea bargain. Then the person either serves a sentence or is turned over to ICE for deportation.
But Roy refused to consider a guilty plea for extortion.
And that, the Los Angeles County jails system did not like.
Things got worse for Roy after that. Still recovering from his testicular cancer, he tried to get help from the jail’s medical division. “They kind of ignored it. The only time I ever saw a doctor — the shoes they give you cause the skin to break off your feet. My foot cracked so bad it began bleeding, and I saw somebody about that. They wouldn’t see me about anything else.”
He says the forms he filled out requesting medical attention went ignored.
Whitmore, Baca’s spokesman, insists, “If anybody has an issue that they were not treated properly, they can file a complaint.” (The Weekly reported in its 2011 cover story “Wheelchair Hell” that even seriously ill and crippled inmates sometimes are denied medical help, working wheelchairs and other key needs.)
Authorities began holding it over Roy’s head: Admit to “extortion,” accept the likelihood of being deported and become a free man. As his third month behind bars began, Roy nearly gave in to this unfair pressure. “There were points in there where I just said, ‘I’m going to take it.’ And then I’d speak to the other inmates and they’d just say, ‘You can’t. You didn’t do it. If you accept this, it’s going to have repercussions for the rest of your life.’ ”
Christmas came and went. On New Year’s Eve, Roy began to feel desperate. “I remember seeing those images coming out of New York. I felt very angry and upset. … I watched on TV the ball coming down and felt bereft that nobody was going to help me.”
In the weeks that followed, Roy suffered a breakdown. “There was a time when I literally sobbed, like I hadn’t sobbed since I was a baby. I was regretting things in my life. I wouldn’t want to go back there, I hate the idea that that place exists. I hate the treatment. But in many ways philosophically I think I changed. At that moment I was so frustrated that I just totally broke down. Literally within seconds of me on my bunk, crying into my towel, I was surrounded by people who just made me feel that, whatever happened, it was going to be fine. And that I should not surrender to madness or desperation.”
Help was, in fact, not far off. An inmate told him about Esperanza Immigrants Rights Project, a Catholic Charities of Los Angeles program in the jail. Roy slipped a note under the door of the chaplain’s office. A few days later, “This woman literally turns up at the dorm, Susanne Griffin. And she’s wearing a bright pink suit. She said, ‘My boss doesn’t usually take individual cases, but I think we can take yours.’ They took my passport information to prove that I was here legally.”
Within 24 hours, Lee Baca’s jailers let Roy go.
Griffin explains that her organization knew exactly who to call at ICE. When they laid out the facts about Roy, the feds reviewed it and lifted the hold.
Just like that. After 89 days inside the system.
ICE explains to L.A. Weekly, “Because he had no prior criminal convictions and did not otherwise fall into ICE’s enforcement priorities, the agency rescinded the immigration detainer and Mr. Roy did not come into ICE custody.”
They refuse to explain how Roy got trapped in the nightmare.
On Feb. 12, Griffin broke the news that Roy was being freed. His mind couldn’t accept it. “I thought it was a joke at first. Then they told me that I was going to be released on bail. I couldn’t believe it. I said goodbye to everybody. Gave away my food and my phone cards.”
Releasing a man from the bowels of Men’s Central Jail takes as long as a cross-country flight. Roy was handed his belongings, processed and fingerprinted in the middle of the night. “You are literally spat out of the jail. Then they pull you through a door, and you’re outside. And it’s the weirdest feeling. I’m on the street at 3 o’clock in the morning, waiting for the bail guy who’s going to take me home.”
Weeks later, Roy still seems very much in shock, speaking in a calm, almost disembodied voice that suggests the toll has not sunk in: “I still keep an eye on the roads in case a police car comes. I’m terrified they’re going to take me back there.”
Ironically, Roy is no longer free to leave the country. In a final swipe at his liberty, his passport was confiscated pending trial on the extortion charges brought by District Attorney Steve Cooley. He can’t move to Berlin. And after three months without medical help, initial tests on his cancer turned out to be mixed. He is anxiously awaiting further results.
He is pondering legal action, and the ACLU plans to testify before the Los Angeles County Commission on Violence in Jails on April 16.
“There’s no getting away from it. It is a horrific place,” Roy says. “As much as I’m being strong and I can deal with it talking about it, viscerally, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a life-or-death situation. It was Tennessee Williams who said time is the greatest distance between two people, and that’s how I feel about this. With time, I’ll finally have more of an understanding of what happened.”
Reach the writer at rr@richardrushfield.com.
This well written article…the meat and potatoes of the entire, sordid, event.
Love the picture…
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Raining St. Irish Day 2012
Fire burning, protected by chapter 13.
Dinner at Axe last night with Anna.
Chow time!
My adversaries try shaming me with sneaky references to jail…like silly children.
I can’t stop thinking about HGTV’s Kitchen Cousins. Trapped in a double penetration vortex with these thick thighed men, my face torn apart by their searing Italian stubble.
Yes, who wants a boy when you can have a man?
You know my type? Nebbish, short, hairy, huge brain. Keep your opera sophistication. Keep it!
Doctor’s office yesterday. He wasn’t there.
The receptionist told me with ersatz compassion that they had tried calling me. They had tried cancelling.
She showed me the number they had for me. She let me see the evidence. The right digits, the wrong order.
I remembered telling the young woman who initially took my details. I remembered her thick accent. I knew that she didn’t understand what I was saying whilst I was saying it.
She’s not the only one. I get things so muddled. I can’t spell.
I mean, some words elude me…like the word ersatz. It baffles me.
Hot coffee, very hot microwaved coffee. It’s raining. The dogs are staying in bed.
The boys stayed out last night. I had a friend over. Lit a fire.
Yesterday this mad kid (Turkish origin) from Bel Air in Maryland left violent, racist messages on this blog. He used to call and text. He stopped texting and calling months ago after I threatened the police…so he sets up false Facebook accounts and tells me how he is going to kill me etc.
In his head he is best friends with Peres Hilton.
In his head he thinks he can leave anonymous notes…telling me that I am a disgusting negro lover…and not get caught.
Again, what this idiot, these morons don’t get? They leave their IP addresses , they leave crucial evidence. This is his: 68.55.180.249 It is linked to every email he ever sent, every message he ever wrote.
The kid is a tragic mess who needs help…but I ain’t the one to give it to him.
Robby said yesterday, after I texted some sweet note…’till death do us part’. So I reminded him that death was probably not so far off, (more deaths of contemporaries reported in London) that he would one day organize my funeral.
“Did you get a death threat?” he asked…
No. Not today.
Rain forecast for the next three days.
The kid who shot all those Afghans in their own homes last week…well, he is getting a media makeover.
They say he ‘snapped’, he was ‘drinking’, it was his ‘third tour’. Meanwhile whole families are dead.
Can you imagine the same excuses being made if an Afghan slaughtered an American family. Well, he snapped, he was drinking…he couldn’t take it any more.
Could you imagine those excuses being made?
More details are ’emerging’, more details are being manufactured so we can let this guy off the hook.
Meanwhile the tenant I had downstairs, Matty O’Neil…he has gone…leaving a disgusting mess behind him. The boys took a whole day cleaning up after him.
You know, this kid Matty spent time in jail because of his Arab origins? He was held in a jail after 9/11, probably held illegally by the US government…with his father when he was a young boy…yet when I suggested that his story and mine had similarities he told me imperiously, “I am an American! There are no similarities.”
He moved out, brought a motley crew with him. His sister, her girlfriend….his boyfriend.
The girlfriend was Chinese, the only one there with ancient Mayflower/American credentials was Matty’s boyfriend the acutely fay boy who works in the veterinary office in Malibu who Matty met on Grindr.
Deluded, the week before he left he asked me for a membership to the private club I belong to.
It made me smile. How the American children of immigrants quickly forget the struggles of their fathers.
“I pity you.” He said, as he was leaving.
Along with his pity he left two huge stains on the carpet, refused to pay his rent or accept responsibility for the mess…I pity his next landlord.
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Give it up for Deputy Gonzales!
There are some moments that I didn’t want to share with you…but they have lingered like a prison fart.
Begging to be remembered.
One particular memory I hoped to forget:
Our dorm, as you know, was the school dorm…the honor dorm. On occasions when the police came into the dorm to conduct the evening count, when we lay on our beds, our faces in the mat, our plastic identification bracelets on view for the deputy to inspect…the police would call out, “Give it up for deputy…so and so..” and it was our job to cheer and shout and welcome the new deputy into the dorm.
If the deputy was homophobic we would be primed to make even more noise, the more well endowed, busty trannies to leap up and show the deputy their tities or dance seductively around him.
The blushing deputy, bloated on the attention, would playfully curse his colleagues.
I refused to cheer and shout. It made me sick. I wondered if the Nazis had ever played games like that in the nissen huts at Auschwitz. Making the starving jews/gays/gypsies play games for their amusement.
One night, an attractive deputy called Gonzales arrived and they cat-called him and cheered his arrival. We gave it up for deputy Gonzales and he, in turn, ran a lap of honor around the dorm. I thought, wow, he’s a good-looking man.
Weeks later Gonzales took a few of us to the visiting room but not before he had told us that homosexuals had a ‘sick lifestyle’ and we disgusted him.
It was strange to me that such a beautiful man had such ugly thoughts.
Today, I was arraigned which meant that I went back to court at 8.30am and plead Not Guilty. It was odd being in court wearing my own clothes rather than my blues. The DA, Anne-Marie Wise was wearing her badly cut, black suit, treating the event like it was a first degree murder of a small child…or something truly heinous.
Anne-Marie and I had Facebook friends in common (another DA) who she demanded de-friend me. Surely she can’t do this? Unbelievably her entire Facebook history is on view for the whole world to see. Her kids, her vacations etc. Why do people do that?
We were presented with the transcript from the preliminary trial so, I assume, this is all on public record. Who I am, who he is, who she is etc. I am still loathed to use his name…just in case it breaks some obscure law.
We met our new Judge, Judge Michael V. Jesic who seems like the most grown up Judge so far. Like a real Judge. He was a Hardcore Gang prosecutor. Son of Yugoslavian immigrants, born in Belgrade. He has gravitas. He loves animals and met his wife at a pet adoption event. Like most of them he is an ex-DA. He seems, from the video published above, like a fair man.
The LA Times endorsed him in 2008 and he is most likely to be described as ‘ethical’ by his opponents. Read a full description here.
However, he is a registered Republican (fiscally) and was strongly recommended by church organizations during his election campaign in 2008 as most likely to hold beliefs that would uphold their biblical values.
Judge Jesic will be our third and final judge.
The first judge (whose name escapes me) the first time I saw him last November, was a MESS. Papers all over the place, tie off, hair askew…when I returned with TMZ in tow he had combed his hair, wearing his robe…his tie was neatly tied around his neck. Showing his best side for the camera.
Judge Karen Nudell was our preliminary judge. I was still in custody so the petulant, young deputy who lead me into the court would rearrange my chair and tell me off for wearing my spectacles on my head.
Judge Karen sat yawning, shuffling papers, playing with her huge earings and stroking her long hair. She sat at an odd angle to the courtroom, like Mona Lisa…but less enigmatic.
She reminded me of the mother in the movie Carrie.
During the prelim Anne-Marie was trying to shame me for describing the victim as ‘The King of The Cocksuckers’. I reminded her that we were gay and being good at cock sucking was probably not an insult.
You can tell what a fiasco the trial will be. The press will have a field day. Anyway, Judge Nudell looked appalled that the words cock and sucker were being used in her court in such close proximity.
My friend later commented that Judge Nudell’s grandchildren probably made excuses not to visit her on Sundays…
Let’s hope that Judge Jesic isn’t so squeamish.
You asked me to describe my arrest. Well, let me tell you that the very courteous cops who arrested me looked like extras from a ZZ Top video. Long beards. Very, very long beards. So long in fact that their police badges were hidden behind them.
The detectives who interviewed me were charming. The first was a good-looking man probably my age (looked better clean-shaven) and the second a younger, probably rookie detective. I had no complaints about the way they treated me, they were doing their job. I’m sure they would have preferred leaping over cars chasing rapists.
I have been slowly crawling back into my life. The dog, who initially pretended not to recognize me, is back on my lap. Three months apart, he had to make Jason his master. He’s a one man dog. Of course he was confused, poor darling. We are getting on fine. We walked to Sarah and Paul’s house on Hume but they moved out. The house was open and empty…except for the leopard print, wall to wall, carpet. He ran around the house looking for them. So did I.
Mel took me to dinner at the Real Inn last night. I ate fish and chips. We sat by the fire. We speculated about the couple sitting near us, whether they were having a first date. She was wearing heels. Her Angora sweater was too short revealing her fat hips.
The house is back to normal or as normal as it ever will be with three young men who find clearing up after themselves almost impossible. Thank you twins and friend for being here. Filling the house with laughter and youthful enthusiasm. I delight in being mother hen…washing and making good food for them to eat.
I can’t complain about anything…even though I feel like I am already dead.
Malibu. It is even more beautiful here than I remember. Especially after the heavy rain. Verdant.
It is the second day since I left the Men’s County Jail.
Yesterday the maid washed my clothes and folded them on my bed. Robby arrived and smiled a crooked, anxious smile. It was wonderful seeing him.
Friends joined us for dinner. 14-year-old Max and came home from school wanted to know everything. The girls hugged me for ages, especially Hannah who at 12 years old really understands what is fair and what is not.
I spoke for some time with my friends in Whitstable. Dee called from Antibes. She told me that she did what she could which was, as you know, more than I could have dreamt of. I sat on the phone with him and explained how it felt…he was sweet, understanding, baffled. I wanted to kiss him. I didn’t tell him. He knew.
Sadly, I received the first pass from a really good Producer for my new film It Gets Better. Everyone else has responded very heartily to the material. Never mind. I might not have mentioned before I was arrested I was sending out my new script.
Began talking to the right people about the play/spectacle I want to devise using my jail experience as a spring board from which we can leap into something unimagined. My fancy choreographer friend just returned from Venice. We’re meeting soon.
Today, I chatted with everyone who ever meant anything to me.
When I have a moment, I sit quietly and collect my thoughts, re-reading the diary I kept religiously whilst in Jail.
I don’t want to forget. It was too extraordinary.
Shall I tell you some more? Shall I tell you how I was moved from Dorm 5300 after the mad boy broke the TV with a chair to Dorm 5200, the so-called ‘Honor Dormitory‘. The school dorm.
Every day we woke at 6am, scarfed our breakfast, filed out (shoulders pressed against the wall) past the grumpy deputies, attending class for most of the day. I learned to type. No more one finger typing for me. Typing classes taught by the kind and wise Mrs E.
I lapped up the Anger Management taught by C and M. Apparently anger like mine is shame based. On Monday and Thursday an ex gang member inmate called Jesse taught us life and leadership skills. On Wednesday a gay inmate called Jeremy taught Gay Equality but…not very well.
He was far too self obsessed to be a competent teacher. However, the gays never had anyone take their story seriously so they loved his class.
He taught us the origin of the pink triangle..which I am sure you all know originated in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
On August 3, 2011 Rudolf Brazda died at the age of 98, he was the last known homosexual deportation survivor.
My fellow travelers didn’t know about the pink triangle, they didn’t even know about the concentration camps. They didn’t know much.
They knew I was English but they didn’t really know what that meant. I told one of them that I was British, “Wow!” He said, “You speak English really well for a British.” They’d ask me about England then follow-up with a case specific question like: “Do people use meth in England?” or “Do people like transgender in England?” or “Do English people have tattoos?”
I found a huge atlas and showed them where I lived. I showed them Whitstable, my fingers tracing over the English countryside toward Dorset. My friend Ivan asked, glancing his hand over the entire country, “Is this all London?“
“No.” I replied. Incredulity scarcely concealing my contempt.
Left on my own with the atlas I traced the route we had taken from New York to Paris, Paris to Marseille, Marseille to Antibes. We traveled vast distances in a very short time of knowing each other. Foolhardy, impatient, surly. What did we think we were doing? I wonder if it was indeed a love affair? I can’t remember. Two desperate men clinging onto each other for dear life as their world crumbled around them.
I remember him as if he were a child. Then I feel tremendous guilt. As if I had kicked a defenseless dog.
I took the reigns from Jeremy the bad gay teacher.
I taught them what Neil Bartlett had taught me. I taught them about Fanny and Stella the two trans boys arrested in Burlington Arcade in 1869. I reminded them that had these boys not been arrested we might not have had any evidence that Fanny and Stella and men like them had ever existed.
I reminded them that being arrested assures future generations that we were here. That we are part of an honorable gay history. I told them about Private Flower who was arrested in a public lavatory in 1850 for lewd conduct. If you want to know more about our gay history read this. It is invaluable.
“At Marlborough Street Court, when the assistant gaoler Scott called out “Ernest Cole,” a person looking like a well-dressed woman stepped into the dock and gravely faced Mr. Denman, the presiding magistrate. No one would have imagined that the prisoner, who was attired in a black fur-trimmed winter mantle, large black feathered hat and veil, and carried a muff and neat hang-bag was a man. It was alleged that the prisoner was a suspected person loitering in Oxford-street presumably for the purpose of committing a felony. Detective Gittens, D Division, deposed that, while in company with Detective Dyer, he saw the prisoner in Oxford-street on Monday evening. The prisoner was behaving like a disorderly female. He went up to the prisoner, and told him that he believed him to be a man. The prisoner endeavoured to escape by jumping on to an omnibus.”
The Times, January 2, 1901
Not everyone approved of the classes or the notion of an honor dorm. Some of the deputies loathed the idea that we were being cossetted so. The officers, the deputies. Rookie cops, their young fearful faces. On their own, on the way to the attorney room they would engage in conversation. Their faces momentarily discarding that look of disdain.
My favorite was the fascinatingly sexy Deputy Beeman. Short black hair, piercing blue eyes, a body to die for but most delightful of all…his sexy swagger, his perfect ass…his figure hugging uniform holding him snugly, perfectly…fueling ghastly fantasies…late at night I would imagine him forcing me to do unspeakable things.
As I have said…for people like me…it was hard not to eroticize his demands.
The school dorm is the idea of forward thinking Deputy Baca, the controversial head of the jail. Baca believes that inmate education is the way forward. He has thrown his weight behind the Share Tolerance scheme run by the kindly and considerate Deputy Vargas. Share Tolerance is aimed mostly at breaking the cycle of recidivism and gang related violence in the General Population but we (the gays) took the class too.
We were taken to a warm carpeted room (the jail is freezing cold) decorated to stimulate and comfort. We were asked to kick off our shoes, sit where we wanted then invited to watch a mawkish video about intolerance introduced by the awkward Deputy Baca.
The story may have been familiar to me but I learned fast that for most the ideas posited in the video were entirely original. We watched gays and homophobes working together at the Museum of Tolerance, mothers sobbing at the deaths of their young sons to gang related violence. Tentatively introducing these men to a new way of thinking.
It was a crudely made video and occasionally naive but the enthusiastic Vargas has a real heart and believes passionately in what he is doing.
There is an odd right-wing Christian bent in the jail. I was told that John McCain was a hero to many of the men who worked there. McCain and Jesus Christ. I heard both McCain and Jesus quoted during the Share Tolerance class.
If Vargas and Baca wants to beat recidivism in the gay dorm they are going to have to work quite a bit harder.
For a start…relationships form in the gay dorm. Fearfully loyal and tenaciously protected. Gay boys, queens and tranny-lovers. Remember, many of these people have nobody, they have burned all their bridges. Most of them just have the streets, a card board box, mooching off customers at Sizzler.
I have so much in comparison. I never forget how lucky I am.
I witnessed many instances when a star crossed lover would get deliberately arrested days after release simply to return to his still incarcerated husband.
Every day it seemed like an old friend would wash up in the dorm, looking beaten by the journey but happy to have arrived. All the tranny hookers knew each other. Clutching their mat and a few miserable papers. A cheer erupting as they entered the dorm. A swarm of cackling men carrying the new arrival, their old friend to her bunk and listen avidly to the ‘T’ (the gossip).
At around the time of the second trans murder on Santa Monica Blvd., (“She was shot in the weave!”) the trannie hookers sat together sharing their memories of her in hushed tones. Murder or the threat of murder is an occupational hazard for these girls. “He held a gun to my face and told me to blow him, then he took off without paying me.” They agreed that back on the street, looking for clients, they would alter their routes, stay in the light, never stray far from the others.
Trannies are violent and fearless.
Months earlier a straight friend of mine, high on crack had his car stolen by a tranny hooker. When he shared his sad story at the Wednesday morning SAA meeting the other men were outraged. It seemed outrageous. I was outraged…now it would make me laugh. He deserved it.
Trannies are resourceful and creative.
At night, after lights out, someone would find a stick and a towel and beat the bathroom window like a drum. The black trannies would parade between the bunks wearing amazing clothes they had fashioned from the four official items of clothing we were given. They tore up everything they had and re-purposed it. It was like being on Project Runway. You wouldn’t believe just how many ways you can wear, remake, recycle one pair of short, Chartreuse boxers or a white tee. The tee would be shredded and dyed pale blue with the wrapping from a toilet roll.
Sabrina cut up her plastic mat cover and made a warrior princess costume with shorts and bra.
Then the Portugese tailor arrived who made himself a needle. He made a needle. You heard me. He made it out of a found paper clip. He sat cross legged on his bunk and started sewing. Suddenly the girls were all wearing beautifully hand stitched gowns cut out of blankets and trimmed with their pale blue uniforms.
Girls sure love to be girls, even if they are boys with their cocks tucked between their legs.
Their mini skirts, their halter necks, their contraband bras proudly showing off their implants, their hormone induced, lactating titties.
At night after second count, in the half-light, singing tribal songs, parading, shimmying, twirling, cat walk, house of Ferragmo…the singer introducing each performer by his/her drag name…when the singer called out Shablam! the dancers would hit the floor and writhe around until it was over.
At night after second count we would eat together, ‘cook’ a ‘spread’.
I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow.