Between oysters and pizza at Gjelina and sultry nights in Hollywood the whole gay world went cray cray…
In less time than it takes to come up on Bath Salts the sex lives of some very powerful gay men in Hollywood changed dramatically. The unfettered and often illegal activities those Peter Pan like older men were so used to getting away with… ceased… forever.
During the week hundreds of lurid photographs surfaced of a puffy faced Bryan Singer and his friends holding onto young boys at restaurants, in private jets and at clubs. I wagged my finger at my lap top. I told you so! It was only a matter of time before Bryan’s life exploded like a ripe teen zit all over the internet. Times they are a’changing.
Written by outsiders the Singer scenario seems absurd. Bryan’s friends have names like second rate gangsters or third rate porn stars: Wayne Castro and Tommy Johnson. Brazenly, flagrantly, indiscreetly photographing themselves with boys and more boys… willow thin, pale and hairless. Funnelling boys into Bryan’s world: club promoters, model agents and studio executives.
The scale of Bryan’s boy network, his boy compulsion can only be guessed at. It is without doubt an addiction over which he is powerless, his life unmanageable. Yet, to many… perfectly normal. A sex addict amongst sex addicts.
He says, “I don’t see the point of knowing anyone unless I’m going to have sex with them.”
After the premiere I am invited to the Ritz in New York. When I get to the room they’re there. It’s one of those parties… the men and the boys. Snorting coke, drinking beer, young boys sitting on the laps of those revolting, sour men. It makes me sad and angry. When I write about their party the following day they are outraged, they tell me to take it down… I mean, I’ve been to straight parties and met trafficked eastern European girls… hookers. I feel the same sadness. They are a long way from home. They sit with me until they realize I am useless to them.
A young, straight actor/waiter tells me proudly that Bryan takes him to an apartment, gives him drugs and alcohol, hires a pretty girl prostitute and throws himself into the mix as the boy fucks the girl. The boy tells me that Bryan tapes the encounter. He has a big smile on his face, this was the role of his lifetime.
By mid week the Singer scandal gains traction and the true colors of the gay community reveal themselves… unsurprisingly they were not the colors of the rainbow flag. The first reaction from the gays, found in anonymous comments all over the gay online press, are more favorable toward Bryan than Michael Egan, his accuser. The gays huffed and puffed about Egan having taken so long to come forward. They say, he must have known what he was getting himself into and generally blaming the victim for his pubescent naivety.
My Bryan Singer blog piece went viral and Egan (who alleges rape) named three other predators… one of them Garth Ancier was once a Facebook friend. During the press conference Egan’s mother sits by her terrified son. She is crying. She blames herself for not doing more.
Even though ‘everyone knew’ about Bryan and his hedonistic mates indulging in the joys of trafficking young flesh… it turns out this lifestyle is in fact a fantasy many Hollywood gays aspire. They want what Bryan has: the parties, the money, the drugs and the sex. Bryan, they concluded, was living the gay dream.
I spoke with Lucas John who writes the well read blog WeHo Confidential. Even though Lucas has written terrible things about the gays and their behavior in his blog (he boasts the gay mafia live in fear of photographs of their parties ending up on his site) he reassured me WeHo Confidential wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, it was ‘a game’. Lucas was shocked that anyone was taking Michael Egan seriously, that the wider world might now have a negative opinion about his ‘friend Bryan’. Lucas vehemently stands by Bryan Singer. This strident support is not unusual amongst the gays. The support Bryan receives from the gays sounds like the support Sandusky received initially from Penn State, the support pedophile priests garnered from their reeling congregation and the Vatican.
The opinion from the ‘wider world’, as it turns out, is mixed. Many news outlets are covering the story tentatively. Why the caution? They don’t want to be accused of homophobia. They don’t want to get it wrong or upset their homo-collegues. Gay news proprietors like Nick Denton at Gawker are trying to treat this gay tabloid story as they would a straight tabloid story but their readers think him a traitor.
LA gays are shocked and confused that their sex conduct could be considered somehow… wrong. Those rules, they squealed, don’t apply to us. Fucking a persistent, consenting 15-year-old wasn’t pedophilia, they scoffed. It’s fun! Don’t shame us! Without a hint of irony they argue that the victim ‘could have said no’.
The victim could have said no. The predator could have said no? No. The logic of the gays.
The truth is: many gay men willingly had sex with older men (in lieu of our peers) when we were teenagers. We liked it, we wanted more. Most gays can’t understand why Egan is complaining. After all, he got to hang with celebrities, taken on a private jet and all the drugs he could manage.
Gay men can’t get their heads around the reality of man/man rape. It’s a total mystery to them. Rape is what happens in porn films or to women or closeted straight men who can’t face the truth about their first anal experience. Some gay men can’t make a connection between the girl held down and raped by the lacrosse team and the boy held under water and raped by the studio executive and his friends. There is a disconnect for most gay men between these two narratives.
The gays operated, until very recently, in the shadow of heterosexual society, where they evolved their own rules, their own standards, their own language. The gays must now learn to live in the light and dance to a different tune. For some this is a hard transition. Facing the responsibilities equality affords us. Like willful children holding onto old ideas.
Gays: It’s time to grow the fuck up.
On Wednesday I was hounded by Buzzfeed to tell what I knew about Bryan but generally I kept myself to my blog. The comments section on Gawker lit up with the usual kind of screaming homo hate I have long been used to. They claimed I was a hypocrite for ‘discrediting’ Bryan when I have a hairy 25-year-old boyfriend. The difference? My boyfriend and I have monogamous, consensual sex and have done for the past 8 months.
In other news, my old buddy the teen loving Dustin Lance Black hit the headlines again this week because his former college in Pasadena thought it inappropriate for an ex student who took pictures of himself having anal sex (with a porn star without a condom) lecture their students. Lance Black cries Homophobia! and Shame! He proves to be another entitled, white gay men who lives beyond the consequences of his actions.
I mentioned this to one of the bone fide journalists I met with this week. I explained what I had seen, innocent boys being trafficked from model agencies in New York to the hot tubs of Hollywood. He asked why I wanted to get involved… why I wanted to share my own story of gay Hollywood, knowing how unpopular my opinions are to my fellow tribe members.
I told him this:
When I was 8 years old I ran away from home, away from my abusive father. When the police caught up with me I told them what was going on. They took me home and told me if I ever repeated those allegations against my powerful and well-respected father they would fall on me ‘like a ton of bricks’. This terrible injustice shaped my view of authority. After the policeman left I suffered 6 more years of merciless brutality… in silence.
The gays have no sympathy for the abused because they have always felt abused, they say: Suck it up, stop complaining, boo hoo. They have learned to forget their miserable past, their bullies, their abusive parents. They have learned to ignore what I refuse to ignore: things must change and the only way that is going to happen? We talk about the abuse/rape/pedophilia… we go on talking about it until it stops.
Until we can learn to say no without shame.
