Category: Queer
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Black Mold
When your friends take time to ask what is wrong, what’s going on.
They offer considered advice. A theme emerges amongst your most trusted accomplices… one must take stock.
One must take the time to address the concerns of others.
It is obvious that I have been in a very dark and negative place for some time.
A place where paranoia, conspiracy and resentment take root like black, toxic mould blighting paradise.
The windows have been closed. The curtains dawn, the taps left dripping and the fire is on.
I withdraw. Excited to meet new people for the briefest moment. I only want a few old friends around me.
You must be very pleased with yourself that you caused all of this. Mining the weakness… manipulating me.
Then, when the dust settles, you tell everyone that I took advantage of you.
The irony must not be lost on you.
Let me describe what I see. how the light has gone. How the day is dim.
Last night I read my work in a small room. The jail story. It was well received. It was the first time since I wrote it that I had read it.
Evocative and startling. I had buried it. Exhuming it was a spiteful thing to do.
It’s my birthday tomorrow.
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Cross Country Adventure
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Sister Love
I thought I might write about marriage equality today. Marriage, fidelity and misogyny. I may write about that tomorrow. Instead, I’m going to post some boy pics, something from the garden and tell you all about meeting my long lost lesbian sister.
Yes. My little sister has turned up. Of course I knew about her. I had been told about her. Perhaps Natalie or Jessica or Rebecca told me… I can’t remember. All the stories I heard about my father have melded into one. From one sisters mouth. All the stories about him spewed out of one mouth. So, I knew about Roya and finally she revealed herself.
She has lived with her girl friend for the past three years. She doesn’t drink much. She can speak Farsi. She came out when she was 11. She has a sweet voice. Her mother was a singer in one of the clubs my father owned. She is perhaps the most forthcoming and inquisitive of all my siblings. She doesn’t like being called a dyke. She’s a lesbian. She insisted that my brother James tidy our father’s grave and replace the headstone. She told me that I had a small inheritance. She told me that my father had mentioned me to her mother. That was the sweetest gift of all. That he spoke about me to someone he cared about. That he remembered.
So all the other stuff, the gay marriage stuff that haunted yesterdays news… well, I had my own gay news and she was it.
Of course there was the usual vitriol about anyone who doesn’t agree with SCOTUS from the gays… and I took time to placate my rabid gay brethren and remind them that the way we treat the vanquished will determine our victory.
The day of the decision I took myself down to Weho with the dogs to watch the crowd. Everyone looked very happy, quietly jubilant. Sort of fatigued. You know, after a fight is over.
Now what? The war is won. American gays will have to work out what it all means… this equality. They have redefined marriage, will they redefine morals? Will they mock the single man like straight people do?
For those of us who are single we enjoy the peace of mind that being single affords us.
I urge you not confuse single for lonely… or lonely for single.
Categories
DOMA. Prop 8. Equality.
This morning, before dawn, I began wondering about the Supreme Court DOMA and Prop 8 outcome… as the sun rose over the mountain I considered how important the result seems to so many people.
Marriage Equality. Something I had grown used to ignoring. The idea. The idea of getting married. An alien notion.
Yet, many ordinary American people seem to really care very deeply that people like me can get married.
Gay men tell me, those most affected by DOMA… that they feel like second class citizens. How is that so? Will they feel like first class citizens now? As we acquiesce into existing institutions.
I wondered about the justices. Our elders. Those making sweeping decrees about our lives in this litigious country.
Congress and the Senate hog tied by dogma, unable to make any sort of decision.
They announced on the morning news that DOMA was overturned. Eight white people stood on the steps of the Suprem Court and held their hands up jubilantly… victoriously. Melissa Etheridge said she was proud to be an American. A white man said that this would change the lives of gay people ‘all over the world’. Don Lemons took his camera crew into a gay bar. “If you’ve never been inside a gay bar before, this is what it looks like.” The cameras ambled in. There were a few white lesbians in their mid fifties and a drag queen playing a piano.
I started ranting on Facebook and Twitter.
I said: ‘I’m remembering queer hero Bradley Manning. He will have to get married in jail. The issues of privacy, hegemony and cruelty remain. Monsanto et al can breathe a sigh of relief as this gay issue deflects attention from them. This may be a great day for lgbtq Americans… unless you are black or a woman. Those inequalities still remain.’
I quoted a friend from Arizona: “I’ve felt second class or less than my straight contemporaries every day of my life growing up in the US. Guess you would have to have been born and raised here to understand Duncan”.
There seems to be a great deal riding on this DOMA decision. Self Esteem, A First Class Life, Equality.
He was, however, the first person to confirm what I always feared. That some gay men compare their lives to the lives of straight people and despair… they despair that they are not as valued as straight people. It made me sad.
I knew in my heart that DOMA would be overturned. “You’ve got to give them hope.” Harvey Milk said. This is the hope. After a week of catastrophic decisions for those interested in civil rights: the evisceration of voting rights, work place bullying condoned, Monsanto unchallenged. It has been a catastrophic week in America for whistle blowers… for the truth… for the constitution. In Florida it’s a bad week for young black men gunned down for no good reason.
Today was a great day to be pink washed.
A great day to set aside your disappointments for a moment and celebrate.
So, I decided to listen to Keith Jarrett‘s Koln Concert and wrap up warm… I decided to make hot chocolate.
I was 15 when that album was released.
I sat on the terrace listening to the piano echo through the canyon. I celebrated my single life.
I am not, any time soon, going to get married. I am not, any time soon, going to propose to anyone. I am not, any time soon, going to sweep another man off his feet.
Whilst so many around me are.
After a day of fury yesterday I feel much calmer today.
The great thing about anger management? Legitimate anger. I have good reason to be angry.
Yesterday was a very angry day. The neighbors started building their un-permitted retaining walls at 6am. They are meant to start at 7am. This isn’t the first time I have been woken by them earlier than they are permitted. I stood on the deck and screamed. The white contractor called me an asshole. I said, “This asshole is going to shit in your face.” The Mexicans laughed. The white guy looked horrified. “Where’s your permit? ” I demanded. They downed tools until 8am.
I drove to Venice. I was knocked into by a young woman eager to get to the counter at GTA. She apologized but it wasn’t good enough. I said, “This is what’s wrong with your country, you’ll knock over anyone to get what you want.”
The perfectly revolting British Tara Summers arrived for lunch. Her friend asked me to move my car. I threw the keys at her and told her to move it herself.
My lunch arrived. Pork Belly sandwich. I sat opposite a 30’s something guy in a suit with his 60’s something dad. They were enjoying the day. I prayed that they didn’t speak to me but they wanted to talk about the dogs. I kept my answers short. Then the personal questions came. Where are you from? What do you do? How long have you lived here? So, knowing that I was not in the best mood to have any conversation I asked what he did here in LA. He was a public prosecutor.
I couldn’t believe my luck. There was the father and son, a young black man sitting on his own and me with the dogs in the court-yard eating our lunch.
I couldn’t help myself. I asked if he knew the corrupt and rabid prosecutors I had to deal with. He did not.
I told him that I knew a prosecutor called Todd R (now an entertainment lawyer) who would get blown by hookers at lunch time when he was prosecuting in court. Leaving the courtroom to break the law. Prosecuting others then breaking the law himself.
His father laughed.
I looked directly into the younger man’s eyes. “Have you got morals?” I asked him.
His father said, “I used to spank him.”
“You might have spanked him for not wanting to join the KKK.” I said. They laughed. They thought I was joking.
The lawyer was intrigued. “Why do you ask?’
“Because 80% of the prison population are black.” I said. “I wonder how you live with yourself.”
“How do you live with yourself when you know the jails have become mental hospitals nursed by sadists?”
Then I started a tirade that lasted a good five minutes. I covered as much ground as I could, including work place discrimination and the essential difference between the rights of straight and gay people. I asked him if he had ever considered the differences? I asked him if he had ever considered anyone other than himself and his own needs?
I ended with, “I’ve been radicalized by your country.” He looked taken aback, “Are you a Muslim?” I smiled into his dumb, entitled face. “No. I’m queer. I am a radical queer.”
I met a boy on Grindr. We had coffee.
I can’t remember where I went next but we all ended up (me, Lily and Chuck) in Duke’s eating $3 tacos.
There are so many straight people on our side. There are lots who are not.
Remember gays and lesbians. We would not have won this battle without the help of others. People with no stake in this fight other than your happiness.
Now, go help those not so fortunate as they have helped you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjCuupHPk7Q
Categories
Secrets: A Letter From Queer America
Written for Beige in the UK and published today.
My inaugural letter from America is sent at a time when American secrets and lies take center stage.
I’m staying in Petrolia, Northern California, eleven hours from my home in Los Angeles with Daisy Cockburn, the daughter of Emma Tennant and political journalist and contrarian Alexander Cockburn who sadly died last year. I am writing at his desk overlooking his wild and beautiful garden. Alexander Cockburn, like his friend Noam Chomsky, would have slammed the US government for the actions of the NSA recently revealed by Edward Snowden.
Whilst I am amused by the audacious lengths government will go to hold onto its own secrets while harvesting yours… he was not. Like this present generation of internet babies… I have never valued secrets. I am an open book. I have always believed that everything I am is yours.
Do you remember the biggest secret you had to keep? You know, the queer secret?
When I realized I was different, that my sexual/social narrative did not correspond with those around me, I was baffled as to how I should make the difference known. I was just a child. I did not ‘come out of the closet’. I didn’t understand why I should make a big emotional announcement. I decided that I wouldn’t tell anyone. My actions would speak louder than words. It was up to them, those around me, to frame the reveal. Not me.
It was obvious that being queer, telling people that I was queer during the 1970’s… was like letting off a bomb. It was an act of terrorism. For some, it still is. Holding my lover’s hand in the street… a rebellion.
So, instead of having a difficult conversation with my secular loved ones about my sexuality, I spoke openly about my same-sex desires, my plans and my heroes. They looked askance but they got used to it… or else. I was a teenage whistleblower.
There is nothing more honorable than being a whistleblower.
This month, two extraordinary whistleblowers are top of the news. Queer hero Bradley Manning and straight hero Edward Snowden. Manning is currently on trial in a semi-secret military kangaroo court and unlikely ever to be released. The other brave whistleblower, Edward Snowden, a fugitive in Hong Kong, unlikely to see his country of origin ever again.
My gay brothers and sisters in the USA have, on the most part, turned their back on Bradley Manning citing his law breaking as treasonous. Maligning his motives, distancing themselves from his gay story. Manning’s narrative is bound up with the recently abandoned DADT, a messy ‘coming out’, Manning’s extreme family poverty and the witnessing of cruel and illegal horrors that no man should ever see.
Manning has unwittingly created a schism in the LGBTQ community, cleaving the queers from the gays. The queers have on the most part embraced Manning, his activism and conscientious objection. The gays have not. The Queers had Manning elected as a San Francisco gay pride parade grand marshal in late April, but the LGBTQ board quickly rescinded the ‘honor’ after a white male gay outcry.
Queer supporters of Manning held demonstrations, crowded a Pride board meeting and packed a community forum all with the hopes of seeing Manning reinstated as a grand marshal. The Pride board has not budged.
Why are the majority of USA gays so repulsed by Manning?
Perhaps if Manning had been a muscular, army guy of the gay-for-pay porn star variety so popular amongst the gays, they may have ‘evolved’ a different point of view. Manning is not that guy. He is small and slight and wan. He joined the army to get an education and ironically ended up educating the whole world.
He is lauded by Michael Moore, Vietnam Vets, heterosexual politicians/presidents and liberal intellectuals all over the world. His actions are widely credited with hastening an American withdrawal from Iraq and the Arab Spring.
To many across the world Bradley Manning is a hero.
Yet, the gay establishment ignore Bradley. He is routinely ignored by the HRC and GLAAD. He is viciously bullied on anonymous gay, online discussion boards. GLAAD would rather honor a homophobic, straight film director rather than one of our brave own.
Many of the USA gays who publicly hate Manning are upper middle-class, affluent white men. They seem embarrassed and angry by his openness, his honesty, his despair. They call him impertinent, arrogant and narcissistic. Yet, had Bradley Manning been a bone fide journalist with a fancy ivy league degree he might have become a hero… or like Edward Snowden who currently enjoys the support of over 100, 000 people on the White House petition page demanding a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs.
There is no such petition for Bradley Manning. Bradley was not well-educated… he’s a white trash gay kid with ideas above his rank.
His detractors, formerly closeted gay men, have their own relationship with the truth. By necessity, after years of experience, they have become slick liars, natural spies, covert experts. In their every day life they create the illusion of perfection: socially, physically and sexually. A tribe of American gay men who have an overwhelming urge to be over-achievers. They are clean-cut and conservative in appearance, they throw themselves into their jobs with the same fervency they got through school.
They champion marriage and the military rather than the end of LGBTQ jobs discrimination. They have no interest in helping others in the coalition of oppressed minorities cobbled together by President Obama because they do not consider themselves an oppressed minority.
Why should they? They are white, affluent and male. What’s not to be proud of?
Since I arrived in the USA I have (rather proudly) been subject to not one… but two gagging orders imposed on me by white gay men.
Both ex-intimates, both terrified of having their secret gay lives revealed. Professional white men, a 32-year-old and a 45-year-old. The younger man works for a famous publishing house and is perhaps the most interesting because he supposedly respects the first amendment. The other, a rich businessman caught lying and cheating.
The former was well ensconced in his comfy closet when I first met him, about to be married to a women, living a double life. When I found out about his deception I told him, “Either you tell the woman you are deceiving… or I will.”
When I tell white gay men this story they are outraged. They blame the deceived woman for being dumb. Their thinly veiled misogyny revealed.
“How stupid of her to not realize he was gay.” they scold.
One Saturday morning two years ago he told her he was living a double life. After he came out of the closet he had a great deal of sex with many men then settled down with the man he intends to marry. Free from her sociopathic ex she is now in love with an honest heterosexual. Of course… he demonizes me. She probably does too. No good deed goes unpunished.
Like a lot of over-achieving well-closeted gay men, the publisher operated under the “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome, a term from Andrew Tobias’ seminal coming-out autobiography of the same name, published in 1973, describing a certain type of middle-to-upper-class gay man.
Gay men are still terrified of the truth: personal or public. Their worst fear when growing up was having their gay truth revealed. We all want to control the message. Nobody wants to be told that they are queer ahead of their own declaration.
Many gay men still behave like small boys grappling with who and what it means to be gay. Scarred by shame, they loathe any queer person who draws negative attention to him/herself in case it tarnishes them or the gay corporation.
They loathe Bradley Manning for outing the nation.
When gay men are ready to tell the truth about being gay they demand recognition and plaudits for doing so. A heroes welcome for coming out of the closet. Yet, after this initial flush of candor, their honesty only extends so far.
Beyond the great revelation there is a darker side to being gay that the gay white elite doesn’t want you to know.
They have gone to extraordinary lengths to make you think we are JUST LIKE YOU. They are still placating their heterosexual parents, school mates and the straight friends who don’t mind them being gay… as long as you don’t do anything gay around me.
The gays don’t want you to know about the meningitis epidemic, the continuing HIV epidemic, they don’t want you to know about their loneliness, their propensity for STDs, the unreasonably high gay adult male suicide rate, the sexual unmanageability, drug taking, racism, sexism, classism, narcissism and ageism that blights the gay ‘community’. They don’t mention how they routinely commodify women’s bodies/reproductive labor so they can have children. They don’t want you to know just how hard it is to be straight acting, to be ‘masc’ or to find themselves remotely attractive when they look in the mirror.
They don’t want you to know that for many LGBTQ… it doesn’t get better.
Manning broke the first rule of the white gay American elite: Don’t rock the boat.
The gay businessman’s gagging order expires early next year and he will, inevitably seek to extend it. The publisher will do the same. The problem is: as they know all too well… the truth is eventually revealed.
I met a man. A medical doctor. He was well put together, handsome, the president of a large gay organization that supposedly represents the interests of the gay community. Our trusted servant. He couldn’t stop crying. Under his well cut trousers he had a permanent needle in his leg for jacking meth. He begged me not to write about him.
I couldn’t make that promise. He is the perfect white gay American metaphor.
In modern America secrets both public and personal are simultaneously considered defending and deflowering at the expense of the constitution. At both micro and macro levels this secretive bipolarity has come to define my stay in the USA.
