Category: Queer
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The Endless Summer
1.
The definite seasons on the east coast. The passing days, changing. Slowly.
Each day has a brand new identity. New light. Color.
The bland, endless Los Angeles summer has finally come to an end. After 8 long years. I am heading home.
I wear my long, grey cashmere coat (Hermes) and fur hat (Dior).
I pull on my knee-length, woolen socks and my heavy boots.
I am going to therapy… daily. I am finally addressing the issues I have been ignoring this past year. You know, those pesky medical issues.
Strangely, without warning… even though we share the same streets. I never see him. Nor do I wish to conjure him, manifest him, make him appear… I had lunch with one of his co-workers the other day, a youngster (we met at an AA meeting) who wanted his job.
It was funny being at the same table as someone who works in close proximity to him. Their opinion.
They knew the story. An urban myth that they delighted in fact checking.
Oh well.
Of course there’s loads going on (Film/House/Social) but somehow I don’t have the energy to write it.
I take pictures and let that suffice.
2.
I found a picture of Joe. He’s obsessively going to the gym. A man mountain. In his late 60’s now.
I scarcely ever think about him. Isn’t that odd? To have no thoughts about someone who was once the center of your world.
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Greenpoint
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James in Hollywood
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Alan Downs Party
1.
It is dawn again. Dawn in the desert. The smell of the earth and the dew. The sounds of the chirruping birds.
The pervasive silence of the long black night coming to an end.
My night blindness is getting worse. I sat on my spectacles so am guessing, largely… where the keys are.
The days get hotter and hotter. The sun beating down relentlessly. The lawn toasting, the dogs roasting, the mountain tightens around us as it bakes.
Hot days in Dorset/ hot days in Malibu. Hot days on the sleepy ocean, lapping around me.
Coffee, editing, read the daily news. It sure looks bad in Syria.
We cruise down to the beach and play in the surf. We are tangled at night in the white linen sheets. We read side by side in silence. A familiar smell, a beating heart, the man I want but do not need.
He asks what we are. Nothing. We are nothing, I say. He struggles with ‘what it means’ to love another man.
My struggle is over. I am too old to give love a second chance.
He sees me thinking. He will read this and tell me to talk to him as if talking will solve everything. Just shut up and make love to me. Stop asking me what it means. Don’t expect me to know anything. Work it out yourself.
I don’t really care.
For all the terrible, meaningless cruelty I am still besotted with him. And, like the parent of a missing child, I wonder daily about his safety. Even though he is undeserving of my worry and considers my concern an intrusion..
I continue to fret about him, however violently I have tried to expunge the memory.
2.
I am mostly happy. I know you don’t believe me. I know that you think I am lying to you about my happiness.
Well, if you could see me… if you were the one laying beside me… you would understand.
Island Wall. The tiny cottage there. It was enough. It was perfect.
Now I lay my head down and it is enough.
Perhaps, you say, you could be happier? How much happier?
Facelifts, apparently, make women happier.
Then I realize that you are confusing your own thoughts about getting older with what you think happiness is. How can anyone be that old and be happy? How can anyone have so little and be happy?
Then, you try convincing me that I should want to be young again. Forgetting, of course, that I was never young. Always old. Always.
I have a spectacular ability to get on with what I have and be happy with it.
I don’t want more. Even in the jail. I found comfort. I found solace.
So, you think I am unhappy because you do not know what happiness is.
Could you imagine a happy person killing themselves? I could.
Come death.
3.
I had another dream about the DA. This time my thumb was in her mouth. She was sucking my thumb. Pressed down on her tongue. Like a calf. Her big brown eyes looking up at me.
Whenever I dream about her, her cheap gold jewelry tinkles like ice cubes in a crystal glass.
4.
I am writing my screenplay. Finishing it. I am enjoying a social life. I let the man beside me massage my neck.
I understand that I am in love with struggle. Struggle is sustenance. It feeds me everything I need to live. I am alive when I fight to survive. I am alive when I feel myself emerge victorious. Even though you could not imagine what I experience as victory.
I dream that I am walking by my primary school in Whitstable. The black, tarmac playground is always empty. The lawn is green. The classrooms, I assume, are full.
I remember the boy who ate coal, the butcher’s son. He looked like a pink pig. Fat, pink, bespectacled. He drowned you know. You knew that… didn’t you? When he couldn’t take it anymore.
5.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives.
Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea.
And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
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?
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Friends
I used to be a Quaker, a member of the religious organization also known as The Society of Friends.
I went to my first meeting when I was 13 years old, primarily to get out of British boarding school Sunday morning chores.
My headmaster John Lampen and his wife Diana were running the small independent school near Shrewsbury called Shotton Hall. They were both very enthusiastic Quakers. They radiated that peculiar peace for which Quakers are renowned.
When everything at school seemed chaotic John would provide, in retrospect, a different kind of solution. I was drawn to him yet baffled. Nothing seemed to annoy him…and he knows I tried.
His alternative Oxbridge way of thinking both irritated and inspired me. He was self-assured but never smug.
He had something I most definitely wanted.
I asked if I could go to their Quaker meetings.
Sunny Shrewsbury Sunday morning. The meeting was held in a regency building set off the High Street. Cobbled streets, plane trees, red sandstone peculiar to the region.
I was an unruly, difficult child. At my first Quaker meeting I felt immediately accepted. This was an inclusive church. One where a young gay boy might find solace rather than damnation.
I heard, “There is that of God in every man.” and I was sold. The God I knew existed. No longer dressed in extravagant robes, tradition, canticles or phony ritual. A simple room filled with love. No more priests or clergy to funnel God into me like a goose choking back the corn, but there I was a 13-year-old boy looking within to find God in my heart.
I started going to meetings regularly, sitting silently for an hour, attempting to find and nurture a God of my understanding. “Like a spec of gold.” Diana said. If moved to share, a Friend would stand and speak. Sharing whatever God Shot was on his or her mind.
This was revolutionary! We were all priests.
It was as evident to me then as it is now that this was how human beings, focused on a power greater than themselves connected with their ‘God’ and each other…found joy. Without the myths and tales and dogma of organized religion it was here that we set aside our differences and focused on thinking our way into right action.
I knew instinctively that when I sat quietly in a room of meditating humans I was probably doing something that we had learned to do millions of years before. On the tundra, in the shadow of Stone Henge.
Some of us.
Reflection and God-consciousness does not suit every man. It is apparent that not all men are created curious.
My years as an active Quaker were perhaps the happiest times of my life. I loved the room. I have never been frightened of old people, different people, sick people. Perhaps that’s why I get into so much trouble?
I left school, striking out on my own into the dramatic new world of my own creation. I left the tranquility of those Quaker meeting houses behind me. I left God behind me. Nearly twenty years later, smashed to pieces by my own bad choices I would once again seek out some fundamental truths and a relationship with a God I knew was indeed in every man….including me.
I did not return to The Society of Friends but to the rooms of AA where a healthy relationship with God is essential for an everyday peace.
Yesterday was my birthday and hundreds of you wished me well. One of the great benefits of Facebook: we can celebrate our lives with an extended community of friends and acquaintances. Amongst the notes Kevin Sessums wrote to me.
He said, “Happy b’day .. have a special day with special friends not just FB ones …”
I wondered if friends on Facebook were any less special than those I met in the real world. I have never met Kevin yet I enjoy our Facebook friendship. I don’t know if I would necessarily enjoy him more if I met him.
Pen Pals we used to call them when I was a child. People I wrote to in different countries who would tell me about their exotic lives and I would live vicariously through them. Facebook is no different. I like to engage as I do in the real world. I like my ‘friends’ to see what I am up to and like when they comment. I like when they share their holiday snaps, their location and trial and tribulations.
I have several real communities that I keep up with virtually. Whitstable, Sydney, New York. I have friends in all of those places (Jake cruelly called them my sycophants) and Facebook allows me the opportunity of enhancing and deepening my ties to those disparate people.
Real people disappoint me. Facebook friends rarely do. I have no expectations of those I meet on-line. Enter my world or my house and I may not know you for very long.
I had lunch with Jennie Ketcham in Venice. We hadn’t seen each other for an age. She looked great.
Later that night Toby threw an impromptu party for me at his house and many LA friends arrived to wish me well. Were they special friends? The ones I know from AA and SAA most certainly are. I have a deep connection with those friends with whom I sit quietly, go in peace and share a common interest in God.
I didn’t take any pictures.
Regardless of any drama that may or may not be unfolding in this real world I recognize at my core a stillness that I learned as a teenage boy from long dead Quakers on quiet Sunday mornings in Shrewsbury. It is to you that I give thanks this morning. Thank you Joyce, Priscilla, Raymond, Susan, Diana and John. Thank you.
If I hadn’t met you, if you hadn’t shared so humbly what you knew to be the truth about God I don’t think I would have celebrated this last birthday nor many, many before it.