Category: Queer

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Queer

Jeremy Zimmer #UTA

Jeremy Zimmer reprises his role as Beverly Hills community activist.  Yesterday afternoon Zimmer hosted a demonstration, an invite only demonstration (demonstrators were required to RSVP) in Beverly Hills.  Recruiting a host of Hollywood stars, their star makers and heavy hitting Californian politicians to speak for ‘our creative community’.  For his detractors,  Jeremy flexed his Hollywood muscle.  At the demonstration Jeremy Zimmer ostentatiously spoke out against President Trump and his immigration crack down.

This isn’t the first time Jeremy has thrown himself into the socially active stew.  Jeremy and UTA have a highly publicised yearly event where his staff are required to donate a day or so to help others in… the ‘community’.  Of course, a less fortunate community than the arts community to which Jeremy often refers.  Jeremy Zimmer has his photograph taken with black faces in the other… ‘community’.  Photographs that consequently appear in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Jeremy held yesterdays demonstration in lieu of the UTA annual Oscar party.  Was scrapping the UTA Oscar party a HUGE sacrifice for Zimmer?  Um… no.

United Talent Agency is scrapping its annual Oscar party in favor of hosting a rally at its L.A. office and donating to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been on the frontlines of fighting the President’s executive order targeting travel from Muslim-majority countries.

They made a donation of $250,000 to the ACLU, Peter Eliasberg must be THRILLED.  Think about this.  Zimmer would usually think nothing of spending $250,000 on an Oscar party for his billion dollar clients.  That’s just the tip of the UTA hospitality expenditure iceberg.  Next time you see Jeremy’s grinning face in the Hollywood Reporter holding a basket ball next to a photo-op black boy ask yourself who is really benefiting from this public donation.

“This is a moment that demands our generosity, awareness and restlessness,” wrote UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer to staff. “Our world is a better place for the free exchange of artists, ideas and creative expression. If our nation ceases to be the place where artists the world over can come to express themselves freely, then we cease, in my opinion, to be America.”

As I’ve written before I sat most mornings with Jeremy for the best part of a decade at AA meetings all over Los Angeles.  At those AA meetings I saw the true face of Jeremy Zimmer.  The last time I sat with him at AA… the Palisades Bank 7am meeting, he told me never to come back to AA.  I wasn’t the only one.  I saw him bully many men of whom he didn’t approve… out of AA meetings.  He treats AA like his own personal cult. Understand how terrible that is… those men he made to feel unwelcome (less resilient than me) had no chances left to them.  At AA I heard Jeremy share misogynistic epithets and when things soured between us he was openly homophobic, casually racist.  When non famous black men came to our meeting out of rehab… from west end meetings, Jeremy did not sound like the man we saw yesterday embracing the rhetoric of inclusivity.  He would talk damningly about his wife and fat shame his daughter, his colleagues, his fellow agents.  When Lisa Hallerman left UTA he described her as a cancer… then wished she would die of cancer.

Zimmer joined agents, execs, assistants and other staffers from the Beverly Hills office to spend three hours at Heart of Los Angeles, an organization that provides programs in academics, arts and athletics to underserved youth. UTA has partnered with them in the past for holiday campaigns, employee volunteering and other charitable initiatives.

For all of Jeremy’s community out reach… how many black agents are there at UTA?  How many black execs are there at UTA?  How diverse is UTA?  Do his agents get diversity training or is sending them into the ‘community’ enough?

“As the Oscars draw the world’s attention to our country and our community, we must raise our voices loud and clear: The politics of fear and division do not reflect who we are as a nation, and united we can do better,” said Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency.

A friend of mine, crewing a new feature asked UTA’s below the line for an inclusive (woman and poc) list for hiring consideration.  The assistant sneered, “Good luck with that.”

It’s ironic to those who know him that he has taken against Trump so badly.  For those who know both of them… they are almost identical.  Jeremy is thin-skinned and vindictive, a spiteful bully riven by alcoholic resentment.  Trump is a dry drunk. Jeremy is like Trump and vice versa.  As for Jeremy’s nascent activism?  As thrilled as the ACLU must be, why didn’t Zimmer step up to the plate sooner?  Why wasn’t he demonstrating and making dramatic flourishes whist Obama was busily deporting millions?  Why didn’t he confront Obama about his silencing of truth tellers? Why didn’t he say anything about for profit prisons or the lamentable ACA?

At his heart Jeremy can’t stand that somebody like Trump has gotten to be president, someone so incredibly similar to Jeremy Zimmer.

Categories
Gay Queer

Not Like You – Milo Yiannopoulos?

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Milo Yiannopoulos is a loathsome proto fascist.  A disruptor, a camp agitator.  To the gays, he is our familiar. We all know men like Milo.  When gay men are together… in private, competing for attention, without the prying female gaze, without the heterosexual male laughing like a hyena at things he can only guess are funny, men like Milo reveal themselves.

Milo is the club bitch, the bar cunt, the gym queen… who, without introduction or provocation will dismember you with a single word. He will not hesitate to identify and mercilessly herald to anyone who will listen your most tender vulnerability what ever it may be.  He is the gay guy who unrelentingly critiques your clothes, your teeth, your abs… and worst of all?  He is every gay man I know.  He is inexorably cruel.  Straight people think caustic homosexuals, diluted for mass consumption, are funny and unique.

Successful gay male entertainers like Dan Savage, Graham Norton and Alan Carr delight heterosexuals with their cutting jibes, a crippling aside masked with a cheeky grin… and the genesis of their humor?  Self-defense. Ironically, these skills are honed to protect ourselves from each other, from other gays, the queens, from men like Milo.  From you and me.

Do you remember the first queen you ever met? How exotic and frightening they were? Sitting at the bar.  How they crossed their legs, sipped their cocktail, do you remember how they looked at you?  

Milo, Hamish Bowles and I are all from the same cathedral city (and there about) of Canterbury in Kent, England.  Until Milo pitched his tent in the USA I never expected a gay man like him to get any traction.  I mean, have you heard him?  How could anyone take him seriously?  He’s a fool… but his campy insurrection and anti politically correct message were enthusiastically embraced by the Alt Right. Now, like some swishy Pines faggot bowling down Fire Island Boulevard high on meth, talking loudly to himself… he has leapt from the gay swamp into our consciousness.

Yesterday, however, an old radio interview surfaced in which Milo was accused, by his liberal detractors, of condoning child rape.  Listening to the interview it became obvious to me that he was describing, albeit in his usual flamboyant, incendiary way, a very common experience for many gay teens.  Overwhelmed with hormones and hornyness, unable to have sexual contact with our peers… he confessed as a boy he had consensual sex with men.

Milo perfectly described my experience as a gay teen and I’m sure we share this formative experience with many thousands of other gay men.  I was sexually voracious, just like most teen boys but without any kind of outlet.  Comforting myself with a cocktail of shame and confusion.  Remember, when I was born… homosexuality was illegal.  Like millions of others I was… born a criminal.  I came out at 13.  Making criminal sex choices as a young boy seemed perfectly understandable.  What choice did I have?  Only recently have people like me been pardoned by our government for being gay, and those who suffered in prison their records expunged.

Since Milo’s implosion the gay liberal media have kept extraordinarily quiet. It was easy to condemn Milo for hating on the trans, not so easy to shame him for his first time. What will happen if they tell their story of the older man who showed them the way? They might end up like Milo.

On Facebook, defending my own experience as a gay teen fucking men in their 30’s I was attacked by a straight women radio commentator and several straight men who refused to acknowledge that my sexperience is vastly difference from theirs.  They insisted I had been preyed upon by pedophiles.  They felt ‘sad’ that I didn’t understand I was a ‘victim’. They implied that unless I condemned the men I had sex with I colluded with all pedophiles.  They were looking for an angle to bring me down. One of them called me a ‘narcissistic fag’.  “If you are not a victim then you are a perpetrator,” they said.  When I defended myself they told me how angry I was and how I should get help.  Yeah, I thought… I’ve been seeking help for years to get over the trauma of being mercilessly bullied by straight people and their stringent anti gay laws. Who wouldn’t be angry if every time they held their lover’s hand in the street they risked a fatal blow?

I fought with ‘film maker’ Alexandra Billington and some dick called Ed Jones.  I said:

You would like to conflate the experience of heterosexuals with homosexuals but you are wrong and the moment you understand you are dead wrong you can get off your high horse and apologize to the thousands of gay people you’ve just insulted.

As I said, me seeking out and fucking a 30-year-old when I was 13 because I was sexually isolated is not the same as a 30-year-old man grooming and fucking a 13-year-old girl. As much as you want it to be.

I’ll tell you the help I need. I need men like you to stop telling me what my experience of being gay is like. If I need help with my anger then it’s because people like you have tortured me all my life with your heteronormativity.

Alexandra Billington I suppose only characters in movies are rageful?  Don’t you understand… you’re surrounded by people who are full of rage which is why we have Brexit and Trump. I don’t understand why you are not full of rage?  You should be on the streets fighting austerity but you’re at home criticizing other people’s sexual history on Facebook. I can’t imagine how dull your films must be.

Hasan Piker from The Young Turks seemed overjoyed that Milo had lost his book contract, his speaking engagements and his credibility.  Yet Milo lost everything for the least incendiary of any of his bitchy comments.   Of all the dumb things Milo has said, of all the cruel and meaningless attacks on trans, women and people of color… he loses his book deal describing an experience he possibly shares with millions of other gay men.

Categories
Queer

Junta

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1.

What would you say if I bought an orange kitchen?  Tangerine or blood orange?  I’m very excited.  The house is full of light reflected from the snowy lawns.  There are huge icicles hanging from the gutters.  Everything is melting.  Everything is dripping.  The stoop, partially renovated, is covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin. I make porridge and coffee every day after I make my bed.  I use raw milk from Churchtown Dairy, Abby Rockefeller’s Linlithgow farm designed by Rick Anderson.  Sometimes I find myself wearing both pairs of reading glasses and a woolen hat and scarf inside.  Dude hates the snow, The Little Dog loves it.

Most days I eat lunch at Murray’s on Broadway.  The women who writes the menu is very creative. Yesterday I ate mofongo, a Puerto Rican dish usually made with plantain but cook improvised, replacing the plantain with sweet potato.   A big ball of crushed sweet potato, bacon and garlic sitting in a bowl of chicken soup.  Fragrant.

There are a few dishes I cook all the time.  I don’t mind cooking for myself.  I like one particular dish, I cooked it last night.  Chicken thighs with white beans.  I threw it together years ago.  Perfect for a chilly night spent at home.

Pre heat the oven to 350 degrees.  Using a heavy bottomed casserole with a well-fitting lid melt butter into hot olive oil over a medium flame.  Add well seasoned chicken thighs to the casserole and fry until golden on both sides.  Remove thighs from pan and reserve.  Add bacon to the oil and butter, fry for 3 minutes then add one finely chopped leek, one chopped onion, two stalks of chopped celery and 3 crushed cloves of garlic.  Saute vegetables until translucent.  Add salt and pepper, bay leaf, the reserved chicken and one tin of white beans or beans you have soaked over night, I use Barlotti beans but any bean will do. Barely submerge ingredients with equal measures of good, home-made chicken stock and white wine.  Bring to the boil, cover, then bake in the oven for 70 minutes.  Serve with sautéed spinach or cauliflower cheese.

2.

At Trump’s behest, immigration raids sweep further and deeper into our rural and urban immigrant communities. Friends remind me these raids happened discreetly the past 8 years.  Obama deported millions. To Obama’s shame he deported more undocumented workers than any president before him. He scored no points by doing so with the republicans whose approval he so desperately sought.  Unlike Obama, who encouraged ICE agents to focus on less sympathetic groups, Trump’s ICE directive has no such qualms. Agents are knocking on multiple doors in immigrant communities demanding papers. There are checkpoints on busy roads. They take anyone who cannot prove they have a right to be in the USA.

People vanish into the system.  People vanished in Chile or Argentina, after the coup. Bodies appearing years later in unmarked, mass graves.  Meanwhile, the elderly dictator lives elsewhere in luxurious accommodation… claiming he is innocent of crimes against humanity.  This is how it begins.

Nobody really seems prepared. Everyone thinks the ACLU are going to save the USA.  The courts put an end to the ‘Muslim Ban’ but border officials ignore the court.  People.  This is what a right-wing revolution looks like. The dictator and his trusted generals. This fledgling third world junta.

For the time being you may not notice any real difference. Resistance may mean… adding to the chorus of outraged voices on social media about this trump abomination and that executive order but mostly your circumstances will not change.  

Today is just like any other day… last month, last year, the year before that.  There’s food in the store, the train runs on time, the sewers are functioning.  The big difference for most of us are the stories currently captivating us. The daily drama, each report more outrageous than the next.  The cast of new characters.  The crazy president who you, yes you… you think he’s going to be impeached. You hanker for his removal, you pray his corruption, his lies, his business deals, his baddest badness will get him removed from office… but he’s not going anywhere.  He’s staying put.  The impeach Trump story line is just another red herring designed to engage and disillusion those who hate/love Trump.

My friends are panicked, but I say: don’t worry affluent white friends. You’ll be the last ones to suffer.  Trump is creating this alt right paradise just for you! A brand new Eden made of paper trees and wax fruit for compliant white folk… and believe me, you will comply. This is what it must have been like in Germany… when they started raiding Jewish neighborhoods. But nobody believed it. Nobody really cared… because they were just rounding up illegals, Mexicans. Oh… I mean Jews. Then one day you faint because the gardener cuts his thumb the next you are crawling over a mountain of corpses.

Categories
Gay politics Queer Rant

Civil War

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1.

Acting as an English aristocrat during my formative years I would meet men and women of the British upper class who openly sympathised with Hitler and fascism. So it was I met the original alt right British leader Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana the year before he died in 1980. His mind riven by dementia.

We were invited for lunch, Charlotte Mosley (their daughter in law) and me. In the car to Orsay, Charlotte warned Oswald might mention his belief the British people were still eagerly awaiting his inevitable return to power and I should ignore his delusion if he shared it with us.

When we arrived, Diana Mosley (a dedicated Nazi) was overwhelmed… lunch was canceled because Oswald had taken a shit in the dining room.

2.

“Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order.”

Ernst Röhm, the openly gay founder of the Nazi party.

A young gay fascist, UK born Milo Yiannopoulos has stolen America’s alt right heart. Milo reminds me of another gay man, Ernst Rohm who ‘discovered’ and groomed Adolf Hitler. Röhm ran the thuggish SA, the precursor to the highly effective SS.  Hitler initially protected Röhm from other elements of the Nazi Party who held his homosexuality in violation of the party’s anti-homosexual policy.  However, Hitler later changed his mind fearing Röhm a potential threat to his power. Ernst Röhm was executed by his formerly close friend Adolf Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives.

Like the SA before, the Waffen-SS offered sanctuary to a large number of closeted and not so closeted gay men… (think gay priests hiding out in the catholic church), gay men in the SS were protected from the more rigorous Gestapo. Consequently the SS gays arrested the dykes, the pansies and the trans and put them into concentration camps where they were experimented on: castrated, filled with water like balloons until they exploded.

Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men served as a legitimate reason for the police to make an arrest.

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but Jewish men and women would beat them too, many gay men were beaten to death by other inmates. The SS were known to use gay men for target practice, aiming at the pink triangles their victims were forced to wear.

Are Milo Yiannopoulos’s views abhorrent to me? No. I think he’s a clown, Trump’s gay jester who The Donald uses as evidence of non discrimination.  Does he deserve to be silenced?  No. At present, Milo lives on the super fuel liberal censorship affords him. As Trump’s power increases Milo’s influence will become a nuisance to the alt right.  Milo’s campery will prove too much for macho fascists. As Trump’s alt right message becomes purer and more distilled Milo will be dispensed with. Like Ernst Röhm, he will become a liability.  

At that time… the civil war will be well underway. Milo will vanish, added to the vast pile of bodies I see before me.

Milo referred to Donald Trump as ‘daddy’. It is maybe the first time I’ve heard my own particular bent described so efficiently, so eloquently and with so much erotic charge.

3.

For thirty years gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe have been gay. Fascism isn’t a nasty heterosexual habit, it is a gay thing… and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and stop smelling the amyl nitrate.

Germany’s leading neo-Nazi during the 1980’s, Michael Kuhnen died of AIDS a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of A Study of European Fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something super-macho about being a Nazi, as well as being gay, both of which enforced his sense of belonging to an elite. He told a West German journalist homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

Whenever I mention gay nazis to liberal gay men they become outraged. It is beyond their comprehension. They call me a liar and a fraud.

Now all I have to say is: Milo Yiannopoulos and they shut the fuck up.

4.

My Trump prognosis?  I predict a short, violent civil war with a million or so casualties.  I can hear my friends scoffing, but they scoffed when I said Trump would be elected. I’ll say again: civil war is inevitable.  Rather than ignore this inevitability… we must accept a terrible truth: it is perfectly normal, when ideas become entrenched, for opposing humans in the same tribe to start afresh elsewhere or fight each other to the death.  Nowadays, there’s nowhere to emigrate, we are stuck with our enemies.  

At first, those who disagree with Trump will be silenced… then they will disappear. After a year or so of vengeful President Trump, random acts of violence shamelessly executed in broad day light will be ignored by those who formerly thought themselves brave. Recording these bloody incidents will result in immediate arrest and indefinite detention.  As the numbers of dissidents swell, camps to house them will be built. Our ‘liberal’ society will quickly absorb fascism. Fearful of losing their jobs, their bank accounts, their social media… the people will swiftly acquiesce. They will feel safe once more, hemmed in by new laws written to restrict discredited ‘freedom’.  The police will be fair but feared. We will once again enjoy apartheid and those who rock the boat will vanish.

5.

Finally, don’t be fooled by the black faces at the Oscars this year. One diverse year will not make up for the past 40. Where are the women directors? Where are the black producers/studio execs/agents/managers?  Follow the real money in Hollywood, the fancy mansions, yachts, private airplanes and it leads to one place… white men. Every agency, studio head, management companies and most production companies are owned and run by mostly white jewish men. They have excluded black faces and women from the money, the power and prestige.

Categories
Queer

Slaugh

At night the demons come play. Disguised as good ideas, pretending to help. The dawn is such a relief. Thank god I don’t have the bottle or a gun. Just this slow suicide: the interminable news feed. The comments, my comments. Their comments.

Dead sinners out of the sky, from the west these malicious spirits fly like birds. A great flock surround the house. They shake at the doors and windows, they want to rob me of my soul. Only the thin winter dawn, mother of pearl, glistening snow-covered lawns can save me every day, restoring rational thinking and hope.

In Irish and Scottish folklore, the Sluagh (Irish pronunciation: [sɫuə], Scottish Gaelic: [slˠ̪uaɣ], modern Irish spelling Slua, English: “horde, crowd”) are the spirits of the restless dead. Evil people who are welcome in neither heaven, hell nor the Otherworld, spurned by the Celtic deities and earth itself.  Troublesome and destructive, they fly in groups, coming from the west, known to enter the house of a dying person ready to carry their soul away. West-facing windows should be kept closed to keep them out.  The Sluagh carry souls they’ve kidnapped, holding them for all time.

2.

On the train, on the subway, at breakfast, lunch and dinner… on-line, off-line, across the world everyone has an opinion about Donald Trump.  Conjecture, suspicion and ‘facts’ muddle our minds.  Everyday he outrages some and delights others.  He is shaking the tree as the people demanded.  He is shaking the tree so hard.  When the big rain comes it will afford us no cover.  He roars into the man-made monsoon,  tied to the mast.  His people love it.

I know folk who hate him but what’s to do?  There’s no self-examination, no Democratic autopsy.  They are still convinced the Russians lost them the election.  The genteel Democrats play gin rummy as if the parlor wasn’t burning down around them.

Oh, I’ve found myself loathing Obama this week.  I can’t bear his smiling face.  Appeasing the Republicans, remembering his first year pathetically chasing bi-partisan approval, wasting all that precious time.  Never bloodying the nose of his opponent.   Delighting the gays by making marriage equality easier and dancing with Ellen whilst he bombed the same seven countries whose refugees Trump has now signed executive orders to ignore.

There are simpering blog posts hankering after Obama.  This isn’t one of them.

Last week our very own unelected default Prime Minister Theresa May made a dash ahead of all other world leaders to Philadelphia where she gushed ecstatically over xenophobic republicans at their winter retreat then to Washington where she met Donald Trump.

Very bloody pleased with herself… conceited and smug, the gym mistress thinks her team is winning the match. When will she realize no one else is playing?  Most other Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Queens are either biding their time or have cancelled their visit.

Trump holds Theresa’s hand as they negotiate a marble stair case, she wags her finger at him from across the podium smiling her snaggle toothed, coquettish smile… gently chiding her new fascist friend for his unpopular NATO plans.

Ignoring what the rest of us find impossible to ignore… Theresa May, in search of a mythical post Brexit trade deal (that may or may not include poisoned beef), offers up our very own Queen Elizabeth to Trump, including a full-on State visit.  Mall, flags, banquets.

I have no sympathy for the Royal Family, our Queen Elizabeth is well-known for shaking the hand of any murderous dictator her government insist she meet.  I mean, why wouldn’t she?  It’s an amazing deal!  Shake a few undesirable hands for a life time of state sponsored, guaranteed luxury for you and your extended family in perpetuity.  The British are utterly corrupt.  See us for who we truly are when we see the world through the prism of Donald Trump.

Like the Democrats here in the USA, the British must find and define a credible opposition. Something to interrupt this love affair the people are having with these simplistic right-wing leaders and their discredited ideology… and I don’t mean some wooly, middle ground centrist opposition… a charge against fascism needs to be convincing. If we fail to find somebody charismatic… May will win the next election and so will Trump.  Both of them will sell whatever we have that is left of a good life to the super rich.  Their base don’t care.

Trump and Brexit voters are hungry for chaos/intensity.  They may not know what they want is inevitably chaotic. They have no clue they are jonesing for intensity. Yet, it’s not for nothing we have a reality TV star as President of the United States.  He drives the narrative with cliff hangers, ticking clocks, drama and intrigue.  Every day he delivers a perfect hit directly into the veins of the masses.  If our opposition are unable to deliver an equally potent drug… they will not win.

The Democrats are not currently looking for anyone to lead a battle against Trump. For the time being corporate Democrats will keep their mouths shut.  Paid to lose and acquiesce to the Republican establishment.  We watched Obama defer to the same establishment for eight years and we didn’t complain.  He was a nice guy, he could tell a killer joke and made funny and heartwarming videos in the oval office.  We were content with marriage equality and Beyoncé.

This game of Monopoly is nearly at an end.  One of us owns all the green houses and the red hotels.  We throw the dice, we dread landing on anything that will make us even poorer but we know we are losing the game.  The same player owns the utilities and the railroads… soon they will own me and all the other players. Owning everything means the game is at an end.  Yet, there is no civillised end for this game of monopoly.  The electorate is demanding radical change, as humans tend to do.  It will lead inevitably to mass murder: whether it’s by imperial invaders or tribal slaughter or mechanised death camps, mass human death is an essential part of our human experience.

We will only benefit from the near extinction of humans.

After the great plague of 1666 humans in Europe enjoyed a better standard of living.  The plague killed up to 80% of the population,   those who survived organised themselves using established structures: they found and cultivated land, for the first time workers demanded good wages from employers and for nearly one hundred years the working class enjoyed a fair and equitable existence.

We are at a turning point.  Some people are very angry.  A world war or civil war may be in the offing.  It’s what we do.  It is cyclical, it is essential for the human race that millions must die.

 

 

 

 

Categories
politics Queer Tivoli NY

Day 2: Trumptopia

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After the misery of the first day and the badly attended inauguration our lives in Trumptopia cheered up somewhat.  Saturday’s Women’s March was far bigger than the inauguration, bigger by several million people… causing Trump’s press secretary to spring out of his lair, into a press conference frantically denying the facts of the inauguration and present other facts, alternative facts hastily conjured up to satisfy his gilded boss.  There were NOT 250,000 people at the event, he squealed… there were 2 million people.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Groucho Marx, Duck Soup 1933

The weather was glorious in Tivoli today.  Full on climate change.  55 degrees.  Mid January.  The lilac is already budding.  The poor plants are so confused.  If this warm weather continues we won’t have stone fruit in the region again this year.  My friend, farmer Mr. Migerelli lost $850,000 worth of peaches last year.  The trees blossomed in January then a deep frost burned the blossoms on February 14th.  He called it the St Valentine’s Day massacre.

Because of the wonderful weather everyone seemed extra jolly.  The village is full of returning Bard students.  The coffee shop has reopened after the winter break.  I spent too much time in bed perusing social media and not enough time walking the dog.  Director Amy Berg posted a virulent anti Trump post on twitter and I thought… you know it’s not good enough to sit on your butt in some swanky Venice coffee shop stating the obvious.  Take some action, Amy.  Earlier in the day I advised my weekender friends how they might do a little more than post caustic Facebook notes and start thinking about strategy.   For a start, they could transfer their safe city vote upstate.

My friend Natalie who owns the Tivoli General store was crying the day of the inauguration but after yesterdays Women’s March she seemed a lot happier.  I think the march affected everyone.  Sending a really positive message after the horror of President Trump sank in.

In LA 750,000 people turned out and there were no arrests.

I started wondering, if life gets too bad in the USA, maybe society breaks down, where would I like to live?   All over the world ordinary healthy people are falling for a debilitating bout of nationalism.  This terrible and often fatal disease is currently sweeping one continent after another. Even though the disease of nationalism can be arrested with common sense… some victims never recover.  Symptoms include: intolerance, flag waving and micro-aggression.  Australia, France and the UK (where this stinking thinking originated) have all been badly affected. Also known as Zombie Fascism; this progressive disease leads to dogma, intransigence and intolerance.  It is extremely contagious.  I’m trying my hardest to avoid it by ignoring news channels, web sites and twitter. I’m praying I won’t be touched, moved or fascinated by the ease with which fascism falsely promises to solve all my problems. I’m hoping fascism won’t get me, or those I love. My family in England… they are already afflicted.  How quickly I’ve seen my people fall, developing very ugly symptoms then… boom: full-blown fascism.

Theresa May, caught Zombie Fascism a very long time ago.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Americans don’t recognize her name. Theresa May is the UK’s St Trinian’s style gym mistress (Prime Minister) who scored a ‘diplomatic coup’ as the first world leader to meet President Trump.  She is so very proud of herself.

Words fail me. They may fail her when she meets Donald and realizes he’s full of shit and any ‘deal’ she hopes to make with him will heavily favor the USA. Like many other leaders across the world she should have waited and kept her dignity.  Let’s remember, she’s only the prime minister because nobody else wanted the job of leaving the EU. At that very crucial moment after the Brexit vote… the men were nowhere to be found.

Seriously, part of me cruelly believes Americans deserve President Trump. All their bleating and moaning must sound like sweet music to the ears of those who have been fucked over this past 200 years by the USA.  South Americans, Iranians, Iraqis, Cubans, across the world Americans have interfered in the lives and democratic process of millions of people.

Trump is uniquely American. He is their goddamned president whether they like it or not. Most… don’t like it.  Yet, for decades Americans have been crippled by inertia and complacency. They don’t vote, they feel powerless or encouraged to feel their vote is worthless.  The Trump clown car did not arrive by accident. However distasteful he may be, he is here for good reason. To energize, radicalize and motivate the people back into the democratic process.  Evidence of which we saw yesterday.

Governments loathe the people marching on the streets, they hate the sound of breaking windows.  Governments are afraid of the people.  When the people rise up government is forced to admit its vulnerability, frailty and uselessness.

Today we must all fight, where ever we live, with the impulse to accept things as they are now.  There is a new order… but it has nothing to do with Trump.  It is about you and me finally standing up and not taking it anymore.

This is a crucial moment for all the people of the world. One we would be foolish to ignore.

Categories
politics Queer

Inauguration Day 2017-President Trump

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It might be a good time to remember that many, many people who voted for Donald Trump also voted for Barack Obama… twice.   We must reconcile this paradox.  It’s going to be a tough 8 years if we can’t.  

Frankly, I’m not spending every day for the next eight years incensed and indignant.  The stress will kill me.  It will kill you.  There will be many occasions when outrage or hopelessness will overwhelm us.  If we are determined to resist this presidency we must pick our battles judiciously.  Yet, one of the first battles I’m having is with myself, how do I empathise with those who voted for President Trump?  It’s a tough call.  Last year I had to set aside my resentment and accept the decision made by the British people and members of my family who voted for Brexit.

A desperate need for change is not peculiar to the USA.  All over the world people are expressing anti-establishment sentiments, electing anti-establishment leaders and pushing for anti-establishment solutions like Brexit and Trump.  I’m less upset than curious, less sad… than prepared for a scrap.

President Trump’s inaugural speech astonishingly laid bare his distrust of a corrupt and self serving American government and by extension our distrust of a corrupt and self serving government.  He audaciously described his contempt for the very people he shared the bipartisan stage.  A truculent POTUS at odds with both democrats and republicans, the Intelligence Community and The Deep State might (I’m clutching at straws) turn out to be what we all need.

Part of me is still pissed that Bernie Sander’s fight for the presidency was scuppered by Clinton fanatics at the DNC as revealed by Wikileaks.  Both Sanders and Trump energised the nations voters with the promise of revolution.  They both understood what Clinton failed to grasp: voters were demanding radical change… at any cost.

Hillary Clinton and more of the same was never going to fly in 2016.

There’s no one group of voters to blame for the ascendency of narcissistic President Trump, so we must stop blaming the working poor for this distressing state of affairs.  We must stop blocking them and de-friending them and berating them on social media.  Fact: white working class men were joined by white women and brown people and LGBT folk to elect Trump.

Clinton supporters who didn’t want radical change lazily blame white male ignorance.  My friends assure me poor white people have been hoodwinked by Trump.  They smugly remind me the white working class were voting against their ‘own interests’.

Were they? Were poor white men hoodwinked by President Trump?   No.  They knew exactly what they wanted. 

Voting against ones own interests is an elitist construct. It assumes the poor have interests and the lives lived by the poor are interesting enough for the poor to protect. Due to the banking crisis the poor have been left with nothing. They have no hope, no happiness, no health care and diminishing prospects.   Nobody spoke better to the nihilistic poor than Trump who said: I’m going to punish those who ignore you, who look down at you… those who confused you with trans rest rooms; the affluent gays… no longer second class perverts. The angry blacks and First Nation people who remind you of your cruel heart. The women who emasculate you with feminism and equal wages.

When was America great? America was great when white men were allowed unfettered dreams of greatness as others suffered some indignity at their hands. This election had nothing to do with Obama-care, nothing to do with food stamps or undocumented workers… this election had everything to do with self-esteem and unrealistic expectations. White male self-esteem and expectations. 

My friends balked when Trump promised to stop manufacturing from leaving the USA, how could anyone believe such nonsence?  Nobody.  It’s perfectly obvious to the white working class the jobs aren’t coming back and even if by some Trump miracle they did?  The working poor know they wouldn’t get those jobs. They know jobs have been mechanised.  They know a high school education excludes them from those jobs.  What’s more they have no doubt the rich will get richer and lower corporation tax will further enrich the few… but at least they won’t have to question their own white supremacy.  White men, voting Trump, are throwing themselves off the cliff into the abyss because they ran out of choices. Voting for Trump is poor white suicide, an honorable death, a samurai falling on his sword.

Poor white men have nothing and will certainly lose what little they have but Trump restores their white dignity before they die. If we fail to empathize with those who elected President Trump the pendulum will swing further to the right and our sticks and stones will not save us from full-blown fascism.

Categories
Gay Queer Tivoli NY

A Glass of Red Wine Please

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I fell down the stairs.  My teeth are falling out.  I want a glass of red wine.

Ask me why I’m here in Tivoli.  Everyone asks.  They never asked how I made Malibu my home.  It never occurs to ask why they are here… or there.  People wash up where they wash up.  They stick where they get stuck.  I’ll tell you again, when I drove over the little bridge, I saw the Bard students on their stoops playing guitars and smoking.  When we sat in the sun on the terrace at The Hotel Tivoli that first afternoon eating almond cookies and cappuccino, I thought… I could live here.  It’s a long way from Malibu.

My neighbours invite me into their homes.  I’m not shy, I know all of my neighbours on North Road.  Some of them are difficult, most of them are not.  There’s the cantankerous woman with the Indian husband who said she would never allow me to build my house.  She lives in an elegant, converted church with a pretty campanile and an obelisk dedicated to those who lost their lives during the slave holders rebellion.  Her gang of Mexican gardeners work all year maintaining the blue stone paths, an avenue of oak trees and perfect lawns.  Number 14, to my right, the considerate garden designer and her good husband, they were first… inviting me to crawl into their Japanese tea house for a formal Japanese tea ceremony.  She whisks the hot green tea.  We admire the satsuma ware.

An older gay couple live opposite my ramshackle house.  They collect classic cars.  Last summer one of them told me quietly and sadly about his lover of many years who died in his arms just here on the drive.  We looked silently into the inky black tar as he remembered his dearly beloved.  The neighbours don’t know the gay men who live opposite my house or what tragedy happened there.  They were very discreet… until the Trump/Pence yard sign appeared.

Lydia and the ex-mayor Tom, shortly after I moved to the village, invited me to walk the coppice, to a brook at the end of the property.  Tom must be 80 years old but climbs all over his painted lady like a monkey.  They spend the winter in Florida.  Their dog Charlie escapes every night to ransack my trash.  Tom and Lydia share Charlie with Marion, a friendly Tivolian who lives immediately to my right.  She smokes as much as I want to and calls me Pumpkin, she tends 20 house cats and an elderly relative.

Bob the artist, whose work I’ve never seen, cycles two blocks into the village to buy beer.  His slim wife looks overwhelmed, fragile.  One house North.  Occasionally I hear her delicate laugh drifting over the lawn.  The cook, the thief his wife and their lover, the grumpy deaf man who valiantly scoops his disabled girlfriend in and out of their car.

Then, in the last of the Victorian houses on our side of the street, there’s Phyllis and Lee.  She paints huge canvases of naked men and women.  We went to Rhinecliff library on Saturday night and she told us the story of her life. She’s not scared of desire or her sexuality.  She celebrates love and lust.

The current mayor, Joel wonders what I’m doing in Phyllis’s house eating noodles.  He wonders why I’m here in Tivoli.  I bake Phyllis and Lee a banana loaf.  Joel looks at me suspiciously, we have no reason to be friends.  I see him often at the pub, he hugged me there the night Trump was elected.  He sat with us briefly at the Tivoli summer party and ate the free hot dogs.  He and the Deputy Mayor Emily have a plan for Tivoli that won’t include Bard students or noisy pubs or late night buses.  Even though Joel was a Bard student… once.

There are sober people in the village.  I mean… AA people.  The disgraced doctor, the chef and the celebrity bar man.  There’s the obese sex pest who I see at AA meetings but never admits he drinks every day.  He poked me in the chest outside The Lost Sock laundromat and told me I was the devil.

There are people in Tivoli who should be sober:  the newly married couple with rosy cheeks and big breasts who excel at the pub quiz.  They aren’t dangerous.  The woman who knocked over the fire hydrant is very dangerous, the same woman… the same night, she took the wing off another car before driving into the side of the pub… escaping without charge and boasting about it the following day.

There are a couple of women in the village who might do well to forgo alcohol.   Swollen faces, bruised and bloodied.  Small town drunks.

I’ve devoted 20 years of my life to AA.  I am writing about the quasi-religious cult I’ve devoted my life to, again.  The people I’ve met there are, on the whole, totally insane.  I’m very attracted in an Almodovar kind of way to the crazy house wives, the heroin addicted aristocrats, the failed pop stars and grateful accountants who kneel every morning and thank God for another day.   I love their stories, listening to the moment when they were born again.

Tonight as I sit nursing my damaged ankle I thought I might write about how much I would like a large glass of red wine.  Montepulciano.  I wonder what it would do to me or who I would become.  I wonder if I could forget sobriety for just one goddamned moment, take a day off.   Will everything I learned in AA just vanish the moment I drink?  Will God forsake me?  Of course not.  Why do I have to be an expert in abstinence?  What’s that all about?  Why is my success, my only real success measured in days sober?

A woman I know just drowned herself in a bottle of wine.  She’d been lying to everyone about not drinking and I thought to myself… so what.  Have a drink.  Have a fucking drink.  And then I listened to Sade and she was singing ‘Sweetest Taboo’ and I remember laying on Whitstable beach with Matt and we were in love and drinking white wine.  I felt nostalgic for something I had given up and replaced in equal measure with a bunch of crazy… sad people and their sad and crazy stories all because I thought I was going to die.

I have things to tell you, but those stories can wait.  Tales of obsession and ordinary madness.  Tales of greed and random cruelty.  I could tell you about the interior decorator who visited last weekend and his dull, rich white friend I endured lunch with.  I could tell you more about the woman who fell in love with me and couldn’t and wouldn’t take no for an answer.  I could tell you about rotting jaws, falling down the stairs and handcuffs.

I’ll tell you next time.

Categories
architecture art Queer

Steven Holl/Jim Hodges

The Ex of In House in Rhinebeck is an experimental guest house developed directly from the ongoing Explorations of “IN” project at Steven Holl Architects.

 

Jim Hodges, Gladstone Gallery NYC 2016.  I Dreamed a World and Called it Love

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Categories
Queer

Faris Al-Shathir

Faris Al-Shathir is a gay Iraqi ‘professional squatter’.  I’ve no idea what that means but Faris warranted a full-page in the New York Times describing his honed introduction skills.   I met Faris on Fire Island a couple of years ago.  He was hosting an art event, raising cash for queer artists to live and work on Fire Island.  Faris is witty, charming and bright.  I follow him on Facebook.   This week he posted this on his feed:

I connected with someone on a dating app recently. We were chatting for a few days, until he asked me where my name was from. I told him my parents were from Iraq. The next time I logged on he had blocked me. I would love to say this is the first time this has happened, but the sad truth is that it happens all the time. I don’t talk a lot about my race, but given the current political climate, I feel more and more challenged. I’m in a unique place, I have blue eyes and I am an Arab. My ethnicity is ambiguous. I understand what white privilege feels like, what it feels like to be treated like a normal human being and be given every opportunity for life and love. But my last name is Al-Shathir and to many people that is scary or disgusting. I also know what it is like to not be given a fair chance bc of my ethnicity. I know what it feels like to be on the other side, the side that isn’t fortunate enough to live in privilege every day just because of the color of their skin.
Lately, one of my biggest frustrations has been that so many people don’t seem to understand that that privilege exists. They lack empathy. They don’t comprehend that it’s a horrible reality and completely unfair. Nobody should be treated differently bc of their ethnic origin, race, or color (or gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation, etc. for that matter). We should live in a society where we are all given equal opportunity. If you are one of the many people who feel complacent about this or feels like it’s not an issue, you are wrong. If you’ve learned to succeed even under these circumstances, that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. If you feel like it’s not going to get worse, you are wrong. The future president of our country was elected after making numerous public statements threatening, insulting and demoralizing minorities, muslims, women, people with disabilities, the list goes on and on. Over 60 million Americans voted for Trump, supporting his words and actions. He has normalized hate, empowering a scary and powerful population.
So yes, I am scared for the future. I ask all of my friends to not be complacent. We must stand for what is right.

I replied:

Faris, gay men are not great examples of empathy toward each other or other groups. I met you on Fire Island in a largely affluent, young, white environment. Try being sober and gay. Try owning the natural body you have and being gay. Try having different opinions about Prep. If you do not fit in you are treated like a pariah. There’s no room for individuality unless prescribed by Ru Paul.  The two gay men who live opposite me upstate voted for Trump. Our community is increasingly right-wing. As for racism. ‘No blacks, no Asians, no fems or fats’. Perhaps a gay dating app is not the best place to look for empathy.

Faris didn’t ‘like’ my comment.

Do I think he was blocked for being Arab.  No, I don’t.  The gays will fuck anything.  I’m sure who ever blocked him didn’t want a conversation.  Although there’s something a little whiney and naive about the post… not getting laid opened the flood gates for Faris.  He had an epiphany.  A moment of clarity.  He understood (what so many of us already understood) that white people control the outcome.  That white gay men are no different.  That Middle Eastern people and particularly muslims are currently getting the blame for all the evils in the world.  I make sure men I meet on apps know I’m Middle Eastern from the outset and my experience on the hook up apps as an out Iranian is very positive.  If you consider being objectified and fetishized by white guys… very positive.

If Faris believes he was blocked for being Middle Eastern try being a young black man blocked ahead of any conversation simply for having a black face.  My young black friend DP just returned from his first trip to London, I asked how it was visiting a city where racism in the gay community has been largely eradicated. He said, “My Grindr blew up!”  Meaning of course…  white men SAW him and contacted him and didn’t ignore him because he is black.

My friend Adam arrived upstate recently, addicted to Grindr he jumped on the app and immediately started blocking… it made me feel sick.  Sick that Adam might be missing out on someone somewhere simply because were not photogenic or rather… Grindrgenic.  I once blocked a severely disabled man on Grindr because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him his disability was going to be difficult for me to deal with.   I’ve ignored chubby men, older men and trans.  I’ve lectured men about their bad pics in the age of instagram filters.  Sadly, our on-line community has evolved into a series of photographs that may or may not grab the attention of the next viewer.   A few words then a parade of cock shots and gaping anus.

Many gay men are waking up to a new reality.  Faris is not alone.  Gay men have enjoyed a great deal of privilege these past few years. After Trump’s shock election the gays are suddenly aware they might become second-class citizens once again.   Faris, like many gay men, are feeling vulnerable.  They are beginning to understand how older men like me lived our lives before we fought and won equality… for people like Faris.   He berates the community for their lack of empathy, their ignorance of ‘privilege’.  He uses the most un american of terms: unfair.  It’s unfair that white men don’t understand the concept of white privilege.  We can assume from this clumsy post… Faris, like many gay men, is waking up.  Faris is taking baby steps toward becoming… radicalized.

Many of us already feel like second class citizens… within the gay community.   Those of us who are older, who don’t fanatically go to the gym or Soul Cycle or Barry’s Boot Camp.  Try being gay and sober or simply expect more from our fellow gay travellers.   Long ago I began to loathe those monstrous gays who took our tenuous rights and equality for granted.  Long before Trump ever threw his hat into the ring.  After Trump’s win… I am beset by Schadenfreude.   I had written endlessly that our rights, our very existence should not be used by left or right to prove a point.  Allowing ourselves to be co-opted by the left as evidence of a better society could turn out very badly for us.  It has.

During the election I warned my gay male friends not to be complacent (it’s a little late to warn about complacency Faris) and expect President Trump.  They ignored my warning, they insulted my judgement and accused me of ignoring the polls.  They were wedded to their skewed logic that Hillary would win because Trump was unelectable.   But mostly they were wedded to the idea that gay life was a bull market and could only get better.