Categories
Hereford Queer Ross on Wye Walford

Rat King

The Empty Beehive

1.

The IHRA definition of anti-semitism has been weaponised. Adopted by those who scream any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. However, there is no IHRA definition for homophobia. Until there is an official definition… those of us who experience homophobia, casual or direct cannot call out the perpetrators with any assurance.

The reason there is no official definition of homophobia? Because if we ring fenced homophobia like some have ring fenced anti semitism most people would have to address their homophobia… making for a very uncomfortable time. If the definition of homophobia was as stringent as anti-semitism most everybody I know would qualify as a homophobe.

The reality is: There is no escaping from the stain of anti semitism in the Labour Party because the definition is inescapable.

I remain a non-compliant homosexual. Most gay men keep themselves to themselves. They have learned not to complain, they have coupled up in loveless mergers and they tell me I’m making an unnecessary fuss when I warn about the rise of the right and how our lives will be impacted. Tommy Robinson is not our friend. Religious people are not our friends. After the marriage equality win in the USA I cautioned lgbt people not to take their new freedoms for granted. They sneered at my pessimism. 6 years later I am proved sadly correct. Across the USA our rights are being eroded, even marriage equality has been challenged in some states.

I am the ‘other’. The one who will not back down, the one who may lose everything rather than bow to the wishes of the many. The man who would not take it any more. For years I ignored the homophobia I experienced until it became too violent or extreme. Some would say, ‘this isn’t about homophobia, this is about you’. Yet, the two are inextricable. I have been shaped by homophobia and those who attempt to shame me for being gay.

As a small boy I saw those around me hate gay men and I thought to myself: If they hate me for something I cannot change… I’ll give them every reason to hate me. So, I started a war against homophobes at first to protect myself, but as the years past and attitudes changed, I played those bastards for sport. Now, I habitually call out homophobia because it is my duty.

If I had been a gay man who towed the heterosexual line I may not have driven myself insane with casual homophobia. The nasty aside, the glaring look, the guys who violently demanded if I was looking at them, ‘what are you looking at?’ I wouldn’t have bothered reminding straight people at gay clubs how lucky they were to experience the sexual freedom they enjoyed in our lgbt spaces, a freedom I could never enjoy in straight clubs/bars etc. without risking my life

Quentin Crisp perfectly articulated how most gay men learn not to engage with strangers because they are frighted by the prospect of physical violence. Quentin told me in The Naked Civil Servant I should not directly look at anyone. I should not speak unless I am spoken to. Because he knew he risked certain death if he did. However, I refused to obey the rules. I looked at anyone. I told men they were beautiful when they deserved it. I refused to be bowed. I behaved like any other working class men behaved with woman… with men.

Straight people don’t get to tell me what is homophobic. Straight people need to check their privilege and think twice before they speak to me about homophobia. So, it is with some curiosity I now unfold before you a continuing drama at the land in Walford, Herefordshire where we are attempting to get planning permission to park the car. When I first went to Walford I knocked on the doors of the neighbours attempting to introduce myself, some were very friendly, others less so. It didn’t take long for them to google me and decide I wasn’t neighbour material. My gay story of contentious opposition did not suit them.

The man left… I lay in the flickering light of the mute television. I thought about rats, their tails entwined in some gruesome death. A rat king.

A rat king is a mischief of rats whose tails are bound together by one of several possibilities. Entangling material like hair or sticky substances. The number of rats joined together varies from a few to very many. They remain intertwined until death parts them.

The residents of Cherry Tree Lane, Walford came marching as one into the Parish Council meeting at Walford Church last Wednesday. Crippled by resentment these sour hill-dwelling homeowners, their tails entwined like rats, gummed together, furious, emotional. Whipped into a frenzy of hate by our neighbour at Foxwood House, Fran Blackwell. Dragging her gormless husband Andrew behind her. The same husband we threatened a ‘cease and desist’ for haranguing and insulting anyone we employ to work on our land.

Cherry Tree Lane

Andrew, who rather than enjoying the last of his foggy years, has to act as gate keeper at the end of the lane, defending what little they have. His onerous duty, his frail figure poorly wrapped in the bitter cold. Angular, tall and oblivious as only dementia can render a full grown man.

When we applied for planning… threats followed. I’m used to threats. I’m used to facing the angry mob. The police at early gay pride marches. The demonstration outside the theatre at the gay play. They hate you for speaking up for yourself. They expect you to bow to their heterosexual will. Some of the neighbours on Cherry Tree Lane are no different. So, when they threatened me with a gun… I’m not bowed. When they tie laminated notices on our fence… I laugh. When they put empty bee hives on the land I simply remove them. It’s like being on a tweedy episode of the Jeremy Kyle show.

Now the slut shaming neighbours sit behind me at the council meeting. John Lewis from the ugly 80’s house (ironically called Halcyon Days) his fat red face and waxed jacket fixing me with his best impression of an intimidating stare. He looks like a demented alcoholic. You know the ones… with huge noses. John owns John Lewis Fine Foods, his wife called her neighbours telling them she had no objection to our development, just an objection to me. I am going to report John Lewis to Companies House as unfit to run a company. Andrew Williams from Starry Way, Cherry Tree Lane (before I arrived in Walford) had an appalling reputation on the Hill. Well known as a nasty piece of work… he glances at me but cannot bring himself to look me in the eye. I’m told Andrew works as a state sponsored thug for some governmental GCHQ type organisation. Obviously a candidate for an asbergers diagnosis,  Andrew arrives at the meeting looking like a cartoon undertaker. He sits in his over tight black suit and tie, his neck bulging over a soiled white collar. He is accompanied by his smug wife.

Sitting beside pouting Andrew frail, ex-lawyer Phil Watters shakes with rage. His delicate wrists folded into his flaccid lap like an elderly dowager Duchess. Emaciated Phil and his plump, much older wife Pam live in The Rocks which they run as a dank bed and breakfast. You can see the interior of their dreary house on line. It looks like it might be a themed experience? For those who want to stay at a palliative care home. Maybe they keep a priest in their converted pig shed for guests who come to die slowly from either the Watter’s killer decor or their stultifying conversation? Receiving the last rights rather than a full english. Oh… the pig shed. Did the Watter’s get planning approval for their pig shed conversion into holiday accommodation? Or didn’t they?

Then there’s amazonian Janet Shaw-Crabtree (an affected double barrelled name), the red headed wife of Steve Crabtree, who works at the BBC and live in Greystone House, the local ‘big house’. My friend’s aunt once lived in Greystone House when it was called The Eyrie. Janet, really should know better, sitting at the back of the Parish Council meeting recording everything on her pink, rubber comedy phone.

Janet and Steve invited me into their home when I first visited Walford two years ago. Janet, after three large glasses of gin, asked, “Why can’t you live somewhere else?” We left the party prematurely on account of Janet’s halitosis. The kind of halitosis one can smell a yard from her rancid mouth. Maybe she has rotten gums from excessive gin drinking and hair dye?

At the Parish Council meeting angry Fran and Andrew are lost in the melee at the back of the narthex. Smelly Janet and cunty Fran are perfectly happy to have their phone and electricity cables on our land but could not bring themselves to have it re-routed onto theirs. Jan, Fran and Pam: tonight they look like women who are sure they’ve won the war. Knitting gleefully by the guillotine.

Pam Watters is a respected Airbnb super host, tonight with her rat gang she looks less than a gracious doyenne as described in her many Trip Adviser 4 star reviews, instead she sits pinched and puckered by her anorexic husband. My neighbour David Astwood from dreary Killara House is a slim, mouse man who may or may not be gay… sandwiched between Phil and Andrew, his glasses slipping off his tiny snout. I can hear him behind me grooming his whiskers. Like a Beatrix Potter rodent I’ve seen him pottering up the lane on his electric bicycle. Whenever David sees my representatives on the hill he demands to know who they are, tells them lies about me, advises them they shouldn’t work for me and then demands they google me. Well… Google this, David Astwood mouse man.

I look back at their pale, white faces patinated by veins of fury as it dawns upon them their trip to the beautiful medieval Walford church isn’t going to plan. Rather than putting a little effort into researching how the Parish Council meeting actually works or listening to Frank, the leader of the Parish Council, who explains carefully and in detail how the public get to speak at the beginning of the meeting about anything on the agenda. When the time came for public representation the hurd sat mute and incapable.

When it is my turn to speak (I am invited to present the reasons for our planning application) the rats at the back squirm and squawk realising they’d lost their opportunity to have their say. John Lewis… the entitled, fat faced man from Halcyon Days angrily told the leader of the meeting the rules needed changing after he was told to shut up.

“I’ve lived here for 38 years.” John Lewis screams.

“Yes, and my friends have owned this land for 60 years”, I parry.

“Change the rules!” John Lewis demands.

Of course, that’s what entitled people like him…. do. The white middle class change the rules to suit themselves when they are too stupid to do a little basic research. Overcome with white privilege and false courage David Astwood the trembling mouse man timidly calls me a liar. Squeaking from the back, raising his skinny fist.

I am used to dealing with the mob. During the meeting I speak confidently and directly to the council members. Most of them are local land owners, fully aware of the trials of gaining planning permission and more significantly… nibyism. The land owners looked piteously at the serried ranks of home owners come to bully me with their thinly disguised homophobia. The application passed without objection. I looked back at Phil Watters the ex solicitor whose lips had now turned blue with rage and… I smiled. I smiled a big, gay smile.

Scott Low is one of the planning enforcement officers from Hereford County Council. Sadly, he has not remained impartial or correctly informed during his investigation of this simple matter. He has allowed himself to be bullied by forces beyond his control. He has confused and muddied what he himself described when we first met as a simple ‘permitted development’.

Last September I called Hereford Council letting them know I intended stabilising our barn on Cherry Tree Lane and reinstate access. Preempting complaints from the neighbours I wanted written confirmation from the council before I started work. I left several messages and emailed the planning department many times but had no luck reaching the duty planning officer. I left one final message before the contractor turned up, making clear I had tried making contact and I would start work on the barn that afternoon. I let them know I would interpret their silence as a tacit agreement: I would stabilise the barn and reinstate access to the land.

Finally, Adam Lewis the duty planning officer called me and agreed I could get on with what I wanted without any planning approval. I asked him to write to me which he did, giving me permission and making clear what I could and couldn’t do. At no time did he say I needed planning permission to reinstate access to the land. He did not mention ‘permitted development’ nor did he mention I would require planning permission to get onto our land or stabilise the barn.

After work began on Cherry Tree Lane Fran Blackwell and others called Scott Low demanding he stop us from working on our land. Scott appeared on site with a big scowl on his face. He told us to stop work which we did immediately. I was advised to apply for retrospective planning permission so employed planning consultant Bernard Eacock to draw up the appropriate plans and make the appropriate application.

Then it became apparent Scott Low was pressured to make my life as difficult as he could. Scott Low insisted we get an ecological survey then retracted his demand. Scott Low demanded our tree surgeon stop work at the site then admitted he did not have the power to request this. I met with Balfour Beatty whose predecessors had resurfaced Cherry Tree Lane six years ago and begrudgingly accepted responsibility for a step up to our land. Balfour Beatty let me know they had no objection to the work I’d carried out yet somehow Scott Low managed to find a highway objection.

We received 19 objections to our proposed access to the land at Cherry Tree Lane from local residents. All of whom have had at least one planning application passed without any objection and some… like Phil and Pam Watters may not have bothered with a planning application at all and just built what they wanted. In their whiney objections the neighbours complained about traffic… yet the Watters are allowed to run a very busy bed and breakfast increasing traffic on the lane by 50% a week.

Standing on our hardcore with Kevin, the Balfour Beatty site manager, one of the neighbours (he looked like I always imagined Eddy Grundy from The Archers) stopped his filthy car and told me I wasn’t welcome on the lane and I should bugger off. We laughed. “God,” Kevin said, “what do they put in the water up here?”

Hereford Council, colluding with the hysterical residents, did not redact personal or inappropriate remarks from the posted online objections. In effect Hereford Council are colluding with gun toting homophobes.

I left Walford Church and drove back to the hotel in Ross. After a short while in the bar with my friends I lay on a huge white bed. I checked the gay dating apps on my phone and soon had a local man riding me like an eager yearling. Enjoying the sweat and rough kisses of yet another closeted brick layer. I didn’t ask his name, his thick arms and thighs burying me in this new flesh I found, burying me enough to erase the faces of those nimby fools at the Walford Parish Council meeting. Enough to transport me far, far away.

The following day Phil Watters, the frail ex solicitor told his next door neighbour he risked getting hurt if he continued supporting my planning application. The same neigbour was forced off the road by Andrew Williams, made to scramble for his life. He was frightened Andrew would kill his dog. The neighbour lodged a complaint with the police. PC Ashley North from West Mercia Police advised the neighbour, ‘things get heated’ when there are planning disagreements. PC North also investigated the homophobic invective and the threats of gun violence.

2.

I returned last year from the USA with a renewed passion for equality. I was interested to know what it was like for gay people in Whitstable. The town of my birth and formative years. There are plenty of out gay couples and singles in Whitstable, Ed and Scott for instance. The guys who own Fred and Ginger builders who seem single handedly responsible for architect lite additions to ugly semis all over town. Their taste is lamentable and obvious… anyone who owns ubiquitous Tom Dixon lighting needs to think twice about their taste level. I think you know what I mean.

Like many gay men they do ok, because they ‘don’t want trouble’ they want others to challenge the status quo and merely enjoy the consequence of difficult people like me making it better for people like them. So, I started looking for examples of homophobia as and when I experienced them.

a) A young man made an appointment with me who wants to go into the film industry. He cancelled at the last moment. He was warned off because I was gay.

That is homophobia.

b) Zana Gradus, the rich owner of systems technology, is a remarkable women but let’s face it… when she tells me I am the kind of man she wants to meet then looks annoyed and tells me that being gay… is a waste.

That is homophobia.

c) When Nikki Billington the owner of JoJo’s Restaurant (arrested for people smuggling) tells her friends she doesn’t believe I am gay and adds a whole cache of equally vile invective from her homophobic canon including a list of resentments she has carried around for twenty years.

That is homophobia.

d) When Nick Batchelor screams he doesn’t ‘give a fuck’ what people do in bed… when I share my experience of being gay adding, ‘you can fuck animals for all I care.’

That is homophobia.

They ask about my work in the film industry, they ask if if they have ever heard of my films? I tell them I made LGBTQ films for niche audiences. They ask me if I ever make normal films.

That is homophobia.

But of course, Nikki and Zana, Nick and the Bulls Hill neighbours can’t be homophobic because they know gays. Ha! That tired old trope wheeled out to pink-wash ingrained homophobia.

My gay history is their homophobic playground and because I, like all lgbt… have had to construct my own definition of homophobia rather than have the IHRA do it for me… all of the above can get away with what they want. I have called the police but the police are really incapable of doing anything.

White heterosexual privilege is beyond question. Most people don’t mean to be stupid or homophobic, they don’t consider themselves cruel. The majority aren’t… they are simply careless, thoughtless, inconsiderate. Yet, some know exactly what they are doing, they expect to shame, malign and diminish me and get away with it. Don’t get me wrong, people like Ed and Scott the gay builders are just as liable as anyone else. In an environment when people like me pull up people like them, fragile white people have everything to lose. Consequently they coalesce around extreme politics and rise up against anyone not like them.

I can’t imagine things getting any better on Cherry Tree Lane, not any time soon. Perhaps I will indeed end up with a bullet in my head. Let’s see how far they’ll go to protect themselves from the other.

Categories
Dogs Gay Health Margate Queer Tivoli NY

Appendix

Last Monday, adding to my general health woes, I woke at 2am with a strange and persistent pain in my upper belly.  Pains I assumed were something to do with the polyps they removed from my colon during a colonoscopy the previous week or maybe the MRI the day before establishing the size of a tumour on my remaining adrenal gland.

On Monday at 9am I had a meeting in Canterbury with a mental health professional.  I left the house in Whitstable at 7.30am.  I couldn’t find a way of alleviating the discomfort.  I sat on the loo.  I sat in the car an hour early for my appointment, pain overwhelming me.  I called the NHS help line.  I was advised to take paracetamol and call my doctor in a day if things hadn’t improved.

An hour later I was on my back in an ambulance, a morphine drip in my arm.  A mid line, not a cannula, they couldn’t find a vein.  My blood pressure slumped.  Three hours later, after vomiting a pint of yellow bile, I was taken into theatre, the anaesthetic a welcome relief.  Not just for the immediate pain but all the pain, anguish and discomfort I had suffered this past year.  I sank into the big black and just before I drifted away I thought to myself, perhaps for the first time ever, I wouldn’t mind if I never woke up.

I did not care about anything I previously cared about.  I did not care about the welfare of the Little Dog.  I did not care about my property.  I wanted at that moment to slip away on a gurney in a grim Margate hospital.   Margate on my death certificate.  That was that.

I woke up in the Cheerful Sparrow, a ward of six men.  All of them dishevelled, jaundiced, overweight.   The man to my left entertaining a family of obese relatives.  His eleven year old daughter the size of a small car.  Her young face perched on a ledge of processed lard.  To my right, a packet of ochre liquid stapled to his huge belly, a gruff male antagonized an ancient desiccated traveller laying opposite us.  Confused by vascular dementia he called out in the night.  Calling for long dead relatives.  Calling for his dog.

At 5pm the following day Robin arrived in his Range Rover, driving me home to Whitstable.  I slipped into his gracious car, black leather and reclining seats, protected from the smell of rotting cabbage Thanet seems unable to shake.  Wearing imaginary dark glasses and a velvet wrap, feeling like Grace Kelly after the horrors of the Cheerful Sparrow Ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Margate.

Three days later my possessions arrived from the USA by hauler Bishop’s Move.  As one might imagine… this was neither as simple nor as stress free as I wanted.  However, it was one step further away from Tivoli NY and for that I am truly grateful.  Bishop’s Move have a lot to answer for but we are just beginning to literally and figuratively unpack their disaster.

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This past week, since my body waged war on me, I’ve been shown such kindness from friends I’ve known all my life.  Cared for, fed by, driven to, held.  I don’t need to remind you but if this had happened in the USA I would have been presented with a huge bill when I left the hospital and then my kindly Tivoli neighbours would have picked the pearls off my decaying body.

Which reminds me of the day my forty-something Tivoli neighbour Christopher Murphy (Village of Tivoli Trustee) fell off his bike directly in front of my house whilst performing stunts for his adolescent sons.  Falling badly onto boiling hot tarmac where he lay until I found him.  His hatred of gay people (or me) so profound he would not let me help him off the hot street. Schadenfreude prevailed.  I looked down at him squirming like an injured possum until his equally sour wife arrived to help his sorry ass.

Categories
Fashion Gay Queer

Lucy Ferry

IMG_1452

Lucy Ferry killed herself.  A shot-gun in an Irish village.  Her ‘beloved’ dogs present.  Her death opening the door to a whole world of grief.  In drawing rooms all over London, Palladian homes in the West Country, cottages in Norfolk… pearls were clutched, brows furrowed.

The moment I heard the terrible news I called Simon Finch. We gasped in horror.  Oh no.  No.  There was nothing more to say.  Lucy Ferry/Birley née Helmore was dead.

I met Lucy with Isabella Blow.  Mischievous Isabella, she’d say, “Lucy only married Bryan to save the Helmore family house.”  By the time I met Lucy she was already separated from Bryan.  We had tea often at that saved Kensington home.  A short walk from where I lived on Adam and Eve Mews. “Oh, hello.”  She looked a little confused.  As if my visit had slipped her mind, as if life were happening to her rather than being fully present.  That sweet smile.

Sometimes the younger of her four boys were in the house, rattling around upstairs, but we sat on our own.  She didn’t have to be Lucy Ferry with me.  She was just another addict talking it through.  Another bozo on the bus… as they used to say at AA/NA meetings in Hudson NY.  Just one addict helping another, working the steps.  Even so, she was never a great believer in God… but I bet she called out for him just before she pulled the trigger.

We had dinner at Floriana on Beauchamp Place, pretending to be a couple, mainly her idea to annoy Bryan.  Hosted by Tatler, 19 Mar 2003.  The Evening Standard wrote a vile and libellous take down of yours truly after the prank.  Gratifyingly, the writer of the piece (Deborah Orr told me) died painfully and suddenly a few months later.   I wasn’t moved by his death, nobody remembers his name… as people remember and are moved by Lucy.

Isabella read the piece in the Standard, refusing to understand the humour.  She summoned me to Prada on Bond St. I met her in the dressing room, pulling a jewelled frock over flesh-colored, boned underwear.  She screamed, “What were you thinking? Lucy would never have a relationship with someone like YOU!”

“Issy! You were there. You knew it was a prank!”

“It wasn’t very funny.” She gasped as the sales associate zipped her into the gown.

The dinner at Floriana was thrown for Lee McQueen.  Michael Portillo and Isabella Blow sat either side of me.  Prince Michael of Greece opposite.  Lucy was setting me up with Lee but we weren’t interested.  We were interested in Lucy.  If only gay boys had Lucy’s charm and spunk.  4 years later Isabella would drink poison and die, a year after that… Lee would hang himself.

This week Bella Freud, Jasper Conran, Patrick Kinmonth amongst so many others posted sad obituaries on Instagram.  Conran, a picture of Lucy from his wedding.  Kinmonth, a tiny dead bird by Craigie Aitchison.  All of them wailing plaintively about their friend Lucy.

craigie-aitchison-dead-bird-ii

Why didn’t she call?  Why was she on her own?  Where were her friends?  Her husband and children?  Was she going to meetings?  Did she have people who could help her live, make the decision to live?  Obviously not.

Every addict wants to die sooner than God planned.  It is a decision none want taking from us.  The needle in the arm, the bottom of the glass, the cold gun.

Hamish Bowles’ piece in Vogue was mawkish and badly written. Painting pretty Lucy shaped pictures of a woman Hamish scarcely understood other than her frocks, hats and shoes.  Of course, he didn’t ask why?  Nobody is asking why.  Is that too impertinent when you expect someone you know well to grow old?  She would have made a very, very grand old lady.  Rasping, funny and chic.

It’s a bit late,  posting pretty black and white pictures of her on social media, Hamish.

Two weeks ago I managed to track her down.  She was a little frosty, we hadn’t spoken for years.  She asked if I was sober.  We giggled about her brother Ed living it large at The Chateau Marmont in LA where I last saw him.  We recalled the Floriana scam and the subsequent outrage.  She wanted to know if I was in love.  I told her about Jake and our disastrous relationship… I told her how overwhelming love can be.  Crippling.  I asked about her husband.  There was a long, painful silence.  She suddenly seemed wistful and bored.  We made tentative plans to meet when she returned from her doomed vacation.

She wondered if I had ever received the green fur hat.  Of course I had.  Apparently, she had never received my written thanks.

Did she stop believing?  Run out of dreams?  Her children, dogs and husband could not convince her life was worth living.  Did she stop loving dressing up, entertaining, preparing lavish dinners, being center of attention?  Perhaps she saw the folly of her ways?  Couldn’t align her feelings with the facts?  Maybe she was drinking and convinced herself suicide a glamorous conclusion?  God only knows.

I have lost more friends/acquaintances to suicide than any other disease these past 50 years.  Suicide.  Touching the lives of almost everyone I know.  He lay on the tracks, he loaded the syringe, he hung himself from the banister, she jumped from the bridge, she blew her brains out in Ireland.   They found him dead in the car park, Boxing Day.  He was badly decomposed.  He stole pills from the hospital.  I knew all these people.

Bye bye Lucy.

Categories
politics Queer Whitstable

Rosie Duffield MP

Little Dog

Yesterday I met Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury and Whitstable.  She was half an hour late for our appointment.  Her train was late.  The taxi wasn’t where they expected it to be.  She runs into the meeting berating the train and the tube.  Rosie is a slight, blond woman who, against all the odds beat long time conservative MP Julian Brazier with a slim 186 majority in a constituency that never had a Labour MP since voting began.

I congratulated her, “You must be very grateful to Jeremy Corbyn,” I said.

Rosie smiled, she seemed baffled when people told her on the stump they were voting for Jeremy and not her.  “I heard that all the time,”  she said.  I pressed her to admit it was Jeremy who had energised the Labour vote in a traditionally conservative area but she was reluctant to agree Jeremy Corbyn was the reason she had her seat in parliament.  I asked her if she was a ‘blairite’, she replied candidly, “I owe everything to Tony Blair.”

She whispered conspiratorially, “Jeremy’s nearly 70, you know.”  As if telling a 58-year-old it’s all over for someone who is 69,  all over for Jeremy Corbyn.  I was beginning to understand who Rosie Duffield is and where her allegiances lay.  I looked carefully into her eyes.  “We need someone younger.”  she says.

I wanted to meet Rosie Duffield to find out if she was adequately representing her LGBT constituents.  So, I started our meeting by asking Rosie if she had ever heard of Rudolf Brazda.  She hadn’t.  Rudolf, the last holocaust survivor to wear a pink triangle, held at Buchenwald.  I asked if she knew what a pink triangle signified.  She nodded her head cautiously as if she were searching for a memory.  I explained who Rudolf was and how his and other LGBT inmates were remembered in oral histories archived at the New York Holocaust museum.

Their stories are desperate,  they tell how badly they were treated by both inmates and guards.  Beaten, murdered by guards and inmates.  Treated like pedophiles are treated in prisons today.  I told her how, when the camps were liberated, the gay men were not set free but taken to prison by British and American liberators.  These gay men, I reminded her, are my family of origin.  Murdered in the concentration camps by both nazis and fellow inmates.

Rosie shifts in her seat uncomfortably.

I let her know my own history of dealing with homophobia in Whitstable, the daubing of homophobic slurs on my house, bricks through the windows and more recently being verbally assaulted by a homophobic public house land lady.   Rosie seemed genuinely pained by my description.  Rosie and her manager offered to speak to Jonathan Neame about the homophobia in his pubs.  I accepted their offer graciously.

I wondered what Rosie Duffield’s definition of homophobia was?  She mumbled she didn’t have one.  I wondered why?  Why hadn’t The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defined homophobia like they defined anti-Semitism?  After all, we were there too.  We… the LGBT community stood behind those terrible chain link fences walking with the dead and dying.  Where was our definition of homophobia?  A definition the party could work with?

Religion is a choice, sexuality is not.

I asked her if she thought Jeremy Corbyn was anti semitic and a racist.

Rosie wanted me to know her fiancé is black, that she couldn’t possibly understand what it is like to be black, gay or jewish.  She had to accept as the truth from her jewish friends if they were convinced Jeremy was anti-Semitic… she had no option but to believe them.  I asked if she was ’empathetically challenged’?  She became angry and told me she would ask me to leave if I spoke to her like that.  She told me I was being rude.

“You mean… rude like Margaret Hodge was to Jeremy Corbyn?”  Rosie told me she was a ‘Very good friend of Margaret Hodge’.  I asked Rosie if I had called her a fucking homophobe would she ask me to leave the office.  She told me Margaret Hodge had every right to shout at Jeremy because she was a jewish woman who had lost family in the holocaust.

I reminded her again.  My family of origin also perished in the holocaust.  Gay men without children, abandoned by their family for being gay.  Who could possibly claim these men (sex perverts) as their relatives?  It is incumbent upon men like me, willing to claim men like Rudolf as my own family, wrought from the history of lgbt oppression.

I asked again, “Where is the IHRA definition of homophobia?”

The definition of Anti Semitism has become the stick by which people like Margaret Hodge and her friend Rosie Duffield beat Jeremy Corbyn.  Yet, as a gay man, when I want answers about her understanding of homophobia Rosie tells me her definition of homophobia is ‘common sense’.

Religion is a choice. Sexuality is not.

Rosie stumbled into admitting she was Roman Catholic.  “A church riven by homophobia,” I say.  “Religious people are not my friends Rosie, they have delivered a history of violent rebuke against LGBT people.  Refusing to recognise our most basic human rights.”  What are you going to do about the pockets of homophobia in the Anglican Church?   You are, after all, the MP who represents the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Religious people are not our friends.  Jews.  Christians.  Muslims.  There are still passages in the Torah, Bible and Koran demanding death for practicing gay men.  Why haven’t these passages been removed?  When will Jews, Christians and Muslims remove passages from the Torah Bible and Koran that incite violence toward LGBT people? Legitimizing LGBT intolerance? When would she call for homophobia to be erased in all religions.

Rosie looked aghast.

The problem with Rosie?  She’s a delightful, simple person.  Her politics are scarcely evolved.  Rosie isn’t ‘woke’.  She probably didn’t expect to win her seat.  Her understanding of her LGBT constituents is scant.  It’s not her fault, she doesn’t ‘get’ how important historically the Labour Party was to LGBT people during the hostile 1960’s – 1980’s because she can’t imagine walking a mile in our shoes.

The meeting ended.  A nervous looking latino man waiting in the lobby wanted to talk about Brexit.  He was sitting with his daughter.  I set off into the searing heat.

On the way home to Whitstable I felt shaken and slightly bullied.  I’d experienced only a fraction of what is currently tearing at the heart of the Parliamentary Labour Party.  Rosie is our existential threat.  She exemplifies how Tony Blair snatched control from working people and handed power to a few entitled white folk.

Rosie has an agenda shared by many of her Blairite colleagues: to unseat Jeremy Corbyn.  For those of us who believe passionately in Corbyn’s inclusive vision for our country it was inconsiderate of her to say she had no clue what the lives of gay, black or jewish people could be because she wasn’t black, jewish or gay.

I wondered how Rosie could possibly see past her white, christian heterosexuality to represent any minority?  Me?  The anxious latino man?  The truth is, Rosie is not motivated to represent her constituents.  Rosie is not interested in the lives of her constituents.  Rosie is obsessed with regime change.  She spends her time berating and bullying Jeremy Corbyn.  She has no interest in me or indeed real instances of homophobia she is instead obsessed with politicised examples of anti-Semitism.

In 40 years I had never bothered to meet my Member of Parliament, then Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of The Labour Party.  Even though I voted for Thatcher in ’78 and Blair in 1997 I never joined a political party.  I have since joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn.  The Labour Party is the biggest political party in Europe because of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour Party needs MP’s who represent not only its 800,000 voting members but the millions of disaffected Britons who believe in radical change… sadly, for the constituents of Whitstable and Canterbury Rosie Duffield isn’t one of them.

Categories
Gay Queer Whitstable

Margate

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Another morning at the hospital.  Another biopsy on another lump. I’m quite sweaty today.  My arms hurt.  The arthritis in my neck makes my arms painful, numb and tingling.  The pain increases when I cough, sneeze or strain.

After the consultant I drove to Margate where I met Jonathan Viner who has famously bought the huge Margate Print Works, partially selling to Tracey Emin and others.  We ate a light lunch at David Liddicot‘s cafe on Union Row.  Jonathan rather sweetly paid for lunch, (£20).  Of course we discussed both projects.  He is unsurprisingly proprietorial about Margate.  Viner, I suppose, rediscovered it and put his money where his mouth is.

He very kindly walked me around the last remaining part of the huge building still unsold.  The cavernous concrete space ripe for something magnificent.  We discussed Brexit, we discussed moving to Kent, we chatted briefly about Jay.  He is obviously quite competitive but not in an overwhelming, American way.  I told Jonathan I’d met the ghastly Margate based architect Sam Causer who has all the charm of untreated sewage.

We discussed terrible Margate landlords who want too much for their properties and he was eager to remind me I didn’t own anything in Margate… yet.  I replied gently that if my idea fell through it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  I learned from buying at auction… there’s always something else, next time.  It’s not healthy to obsess about things.  It can get you into trouble.  God has a plan.  I just have to listen out for it.

I’ve been going to London meetings.  NA meetings.  It baffles me how people stay clean.  But of course… they don’t.  The real addicts die.  NA, divorced from Bill’s radical idea of a spiritual solution, is utterly worthless.  I am irritated by NA in the UK, the group therapy, feelings laid bare.  I was sharing step solution in a Chelsea meeting last week and a young woman in the meeting told me I shouldn’t talk about the steps because she found it ‘triggering’.

Meanwhile Chip, my friend in NYC, who worked a solid NA programme overdoses and dies.  He was a splendid, handsome father of one.  Divorced from God there was no other destiny for him.  Jail.  Institutions.  Death.

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The Whitstable Biennial opened this week.  Consequently there is ‘art’ everywhere: in beech huts, coffee shops, fishmongers, gardens, St Alphage church on the high street.  The art is pretty dull but the buzz around town is great.  I found two gorgeous bronze figures tucked away in a shed by sculptor Mark Fuller who is without doubt a bloody genius.  £80.

If my arms work I may go to Canterbury Pride this evening.

Ivan Cartwright visited me last weekend.  We had lunch at Dave Brown’s then drove to Margate.  He had never been.  He was very impressed.  Lunch with M&J at well reviewed Angela’s in Margate on Wednesday.  I ate Turbot and some odd tasting greens.

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Met in Soho last week with a gentleman who wants to buy my art collection, then a brief but good catch up with my producer.  I bumped into Johnny and Julian outside Maison Bertaux.  We drank a little coffee and I scoffed a large Mont Blanc, you know the one… with mashed up marrons glacés, meringue and cream.

I travelled from Whitstable to London on the train.  It was exactly the same time to get up there as it was 40 years ago.  It’s perfectly fine.  The bus from Victoria to Piccadilly Circus was wonderful. Swinging past the Wellington Arch, on the upper deck, very little traffic.  The trees around Green Park and Park Lane have matured beautifully.  Apsley house now looks like it’s sitting in the countryside rather than a concrete island.  I fell in love with London all over again.  Who wouldn’t?

After lunch I took the Piccadilly line to Gloucester Place and had tea with Christophe. He looks wonderfully relaxed after his hip operation.  Pain shows in the face, you know.  Without the pain he looks marvellous.  “Everybody says the same,” he smiled.

There was a coach from Faversham to Whitstable after 11pm but so what?  A drunk man on the bus was recounting his recent arrest for knocking someone out.  I had no problem with the railway.  I had no problem with the buses and the tube.  I’ve had no problems with the NHS.  I just wish the pins and needles would stop.

Categories
Dogs Gay Health Queer

Fake Woke

2018

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I have found writing this blog almost impossible these past few months.  Impossible to write the first line.  I could say,  ‘Margate, I’m obsessed with you.’ Or, ‘The lilacs fill the air with a sweet and heavy scent.’  I could tell you some unrelated facts, like I reported some fool to the police for a vile hate crime.   Or, I have my own cup at the deli or… I’m so tired I can scarcely get through the day.  My body failing, spinning out of control, my voice slurring, my head aching, my memory shot to pieces.

I wrote my will.  I left everything to one person.  I’m glad it’s done.

The Little Dog shivers then ravenously eats.  He has a chewable heart pill at morning and dusk. He sleeps close to my leg.  I spend too much time looking at my phone.  Dude smells pungent… sweet and sour.  I bathed him today.  The water was cold.  It wasn’t Malibu grooming.  Even though we have hot, sunny days it hardly compares to California.  He looks forlornly up at me.  His perky ears all bent and fragile.

The Ross on Wye project is frustrating yet rewarding.  I should have ignored the neighbours and just gotten on with the project.  An exercise in Little England.  Foolishly thought I should reach out to them, reach out to the fearful white people who live on the hill.  The sort of people who believe everything they read on the internet.   The sort of people who believe Jeremy Corbyn can’t win an election.

I’m living in a country where the press has all but given up telling the truth.  Lies splashed over the broadsheets.  The BBC, once believed unquestionably, now feeds off the rotting carcass of what was its esteemed impartiality.  The stench is difficult to ignore.

Fake anti-Semitism and other cruel lies beset the leader of the Labour Party.  Right wing jews weaponizing anti-Semitism before the local elections now gone quiet.  And all the while I wonder why so many hate telling the truth about LGBT people in the concentration camps.  It’s a most cruel kind of holocaust denial.  They deny our truth.

Rudolf Brazda died in 2011.  We was the last man alive to have worn the pink triangle.  The pink triangle was the crude badge gay men were forced to wear in the concentration camps differentiating us from other inmates.  Visible from long distances the pink triangle was used as target practice by the Nazis.  LGBT inmates, considered sex criminals, were also murdered by their fellow jewish inmates.  LGBT people experienced terrible persecution from the jews in the camps.

Why?

Remember these two facts (seldom admitted by Zionists) about our LGBT history.

Firstly, when we arrived at the concentration camps, LGBT people were considered nonces, disgusting sex offenders and treated as pedophiles are treated today in jails all over the world… like useless scum.  Secondly, when the camps were liberated by the American and the British armed forces LGBT, inmates were not allowed to leave.  They were taken from the camps directly to jail.  

According to German LGBT scholar Rüdiger Lautmann gay prisoners in the camp were abused and tormented not only by guards but also by other prisoners. “There was a hierarchy, from strongest to weakest,” Pierre explains. “There was no doubt that the weakest in the camps were the homosexuals, all the way on the bottom.”

When I mentioned these facts last Holocaust Memorial Day my jewish friends were outraged.  They hate being reminded of these pertinent truths.  They are deeply offended when gay people remind the world of our history of persecution.

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Another month has passed since I last wrote.

Since then part of The Goods Shed in Canterbury burned down, my friend Susanna valiantly opening the doors and serving food the day after.  M and B have gone to France leaving me alone in their house.  I have filled the fridge with food.  My trips to the hospital are frequent but manageable.  The Margate project inches toward completion, the Ross house stalls then splutters into gear.

My routine is unshakable.  I sit with the others outside the Deli on Harbour Street but only when the bitter tradesman have gone to toil.  I walk the dogs on West Beech then feed them raw chicken and a little kibble.  I spend a lot of time with PG and her grown up children.  Last weekend we explored the magnificent gardens at Great Dixter then ate ice cream in Hastings.   Every so often I drive on my own to Ross and look at the land, the undergrowth is relentless and desperate to once again consume the old stone threshing barn even the neighbours didn’t know existed.

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Occasionally I dip into my old LA life and endure meetings in London with producers.  Rather surprisingly I’ve been asked to direct a movie in January.  We will see how that pans out.  My mind is open to failure and success… if they support me I might very well make a good job of it.   We sit on the roof of that club in Shoreditch and watch trim 30 something male executives dip in and out of the swimming pool.  Their bodies glistening, perfectly groomed.

After a few weeks of being home in Whitstable my relations with old friends, grown frail by distance and insecurity, have strengthened and renewed.  Yet, I was recently forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth.   Even though I lived and worked in the USA for well over a decade and made friends with those immediately in my orbit… I never cared for any of them. Most of them were simply there.  I didn’t care for their well-being.  Nobody really cares for their neighbour in the USA.  Not like we do for the folk I have known nearly 60 years.  I really care about Sue at The Tea Rooms and Ronnie saving me from a parking ticket.  I love walking to The Battery and drinking tea with Marilyn and John.  I am passionate about Marianne, Bob and their children.  We sat beside the cherry tree remembering their son Richard who vanished from the Dover/Calais ferry and is presumed dead.

Whoever it is, however fractious they are… whatever they may have said in the past, I feel a love for them that was absent from my life in the USA.   I am so grateful for all of them.  I am grateful for their love and their hate because that’s what LIFE is all about… a life lived fully and squarely on life’s terms.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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art NYC Photography

Prospect Park

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Alcoholics Anonymous Dogs Gay Immigration NYC Poem Queer Tivoli NY Whitstable

London Fields

Undetectable: A Gay Poem 2012/2018

by Duncan Roy

Don’t let climate change ruin your gay wedding.

Nor fear of deportation or student loans.  Don’t let the government shut down beleaguer your special day.

Nor think of drones killing gay men on foreign shores. Not in my name.

Dream my dear, of the $160,000 surrogate baby you really can’t afford. White eggs and spermatozoa Amex paid for.

Grown in a poor brown woman whose name attorneys erased.  She’ll never be known to the unborn child.

Goldman bonus spent on more Botox. Calm your troubled brow with restylane.  Fill the lines they put there with relentless bullying and casual homophobia.

You weren’t looking for love.  A painted finger nail emoji on your Tinder profile, hoping for a merger and acquisition.  Perfect in the Pines.  Helping him fuck another guy. Guiding him into the gaping hole like a stallion. Prepped and raw. Bare back monkey.

Hung?

Fun?

Can Accom.

Marrying a fellow American now, you need not stress, ICE officers will not be your groomsman.  Not today.

Thank Jesus Christ Almighty,

Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act is no more.

They can not stop you, nor turn you from the hospital as your husband lays dying from a lethal Fentanyl overdose. Undetectable. No longer woke.

Found in the sauna, wearing his combat boots, multiply penetrated, cream pied, still bound and dripping, eyes open, calling out another man’s name, swaying gently in the black polyester sling.

Enjoying your honeymoon in the leather bars of Berlin.

1.

They are deporting thousands of undocumented workers in the USA. Friends and family disappear. The cranberry bogs remain un-harvested. The schools stricken by grieving children. Police officers didn’t think it would be this way.  They couldn’t put a face to the men and women Trump wanted to deport. Simple, honest people caught up in the merciless trawl. They didn’t realise their friends were breaking the law. They didn’t understand the depth of hatred their fellow citizens harboured for brown and black people.

2.

Hackney.  East London finally puts paid to the ridiculous notion I can leave my car unlocked without being burgled.  Yes.  I am that man.  Regardless of the stolen cash, life in East London is inspiring. Like the first time you visit deep Brooklyn, you understand who millennials are and what they prioritize. Bushwick, going there with Paris McGarry and her boyfriend Tom. The streets were buzzin, the restaurants overflowing, the music bursting out of every window over the cobbled streets. Huge lofts once filed with machinery now house tech aspirants and what, I think, is the difference? Intellectual rather than mechanical industry.

Hackney has exactly the same energy.  Fit, bearded men cycling through the park discussing crypto currency on their cell phones.  They look insane, talking to themselves, eyes fixed on the road, avoiding my dogs who are inexplicably drawn to cycle paths. I feel alive here, which is odd as I am facing death head on right now.  I am optimistic even though I feel the curtain closing about me, taking my final bow.  I sit in Shorditch House all day drinking water and coffee and eating sour jelly candy.  I buy boots in APC and wonder why.  I mean, I don’t need anything.  I am rootless, I am free.

3.

Going to NA meetings all over the East End.  I am drawn to the drama I suppose.  I meet cool people and when they read about me are less eager to judge my life, my exploits whilst American addicts damn you forever.  You lose your grip once and Americans watch with glee as you fall from the side of the building.  Falling like a crazy base jumper.  You took a risk… it didn’t pay off.  Your fingers slip from the polished marble. The English addict is less determined to make you pay.

However, NA is not very productive in London.  The people may be kind but the programme stinks. Swimming around in their own shit. NA isn’t group therapy.  Nobody cares about your feelings. Addicts repeat their using tragedies again and again day after day.  They have no solution, grasping hold of their pain, reliving the insanity, indulgently spewing over anyone who will listen. They attend endless meetings 90/90 but will not work the 12 steps.  Of course, after a few months, they relapse then after another spectacular ‘rock-bottom’ claw their way back into the rooms… continuing the cycle of despair.  I keep reminding myself not to slip back into bad habits.  No catastrophic thinking, no indulgence.  No. No. No.

4.

I’m in Climpson’s the local coffee shop trying to write a treatment.  Broadway Market. I know the fishmonger and the book seller. The baristas know my name. I’m writing a gay Fatal Attraction. Crazy older lady meets younger gay guy at AA meeting, she’s a hoarder, he takes pity on her, cleans her house, helps her with her life, she lends him money and falls in love with him… then tries to destroy him when he refuses her advances.  It’s waiting to be written. This story, this slice of life upstate.  Donna, you crazy witch! I took Donna to a gay party, she wasn’t impressed when I talked to the other guys.  I took her to Abby Rockefeller’s farm.  She wasn’t impressed when I talked to other women.  I felt her eyes boring into me. We left.

5.

The dull thud returns, at the base of my sternum.  The pain wraps around my body from my stomach to the base of my back.  The acid reflux, overwhelming tiredness and irritability.  I had more tests.  There are problems that need resolved but the doctors are too damn eager to slice into me.  I already had my gall bladder and an isolated tumor on my adrenal gland removed.

The doctor is thorough and uncompromising.  I revisit all the horrors of pancreatic cancer.  I look at potential remedies, of which there are few.  The very worst scenario is called the Whipple procedure which is also known as a pancreaticoduodenectomy, a complex operation to remove the head of the pancreas, the first part of the small intestine (duodenum), the gallbladder and the bile duct.

They say to me: these symptoms are found in women. They say, it may be malignant, it may be benign, it may be somewhere in between.  The diagnosis isn’t good enough.  It’s too damn vague.  I lay on my bed after our long walk and fall into a deep sleep.  I breathe deeply, clearing my mind of everything I think I know.  I remind myself of the solution, the literature.  I say, what will be will be.  Divorcing myself from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.

During the day I face indecision. I may not correctly determine which course of action to take. I ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision.  I relax, I don’t struggle. I’m surprised by how often the right answer comes after practicing these principles in all my affairs.

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Fantasy Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer

Gays: In The Age of Consent. Mario Testino and Bruce Weber.

Mario Testino was a friend of ours.  He had a studio in an abandoned hospital on Soho Square.  Scott Crolla, Georgina Godley… and others were frequent guests.  My boy friend in 1981 was Mario’s long time friend and collaborator Patrick Kinmonth.

Patrick lived in a tiny apartment in Holland Park, deliberately disheveled, dusty yet filled with beautiful object.  The place was brutally cold in the winter and a furnace in the summer.  Patrick, according to the artist Craigie Aitchison dobbed me in to the police when they were looking for me to ask questions about my credit card and why I hadn’t paid the bill.  It was Patrick who lent me money to buy my Peter Doig and it was Patrick who encouraged me to make art.  He was a vicious snob, exquisitely beautiful and at that time worked for Vogue magazine.  He amused us all by mimicking Mario’s Peruvian lilt.   Patrick is a deft impersonator.  The problem with Patrick?  Nothing ever came of his own talent.  He lives with the painfully shy food photographer Tessa Traeger in the West Country.  He designs opera sets for out-of-the-way operas but never became the great anything everyone thought he might become.

The last time I saw Mario and Patrick we were in LA at The Chateau Marmont.  I was having dinner in the garden they were having a party in the lounge with a bunch of gorgeous boy/men models.  I sat beside Patrick for a moment but I didn’t stay long.  He scolded me.  I made amends for some indiscretion and I left.  Mario looked at me disdainfully.  Patrick enjoys being on Mario’s winning team.  He wrote the forward to Mario’s book and he styles the most interesting shoots.  Neither of them wanted me hanging around.  You’ve seen pictures of young girls on a yacht wearing bikinis, oggled by old men… this was Mario’s gay equivalent.  I’d already ruined things by talking to him and Patrick, bathed in Mario’s reflected glory, wanted me gone.  He looked down his aquiline nose and told me I could have made so much more of myself.  Yeah, I thought… if you hadn’t worked with the establishment to destroy me.   I probably could.

You know why old men put young girls on yachts?  You’d think… so the girls can’t escape.  No, it’s so their old men friends can’t join the party.  I returned to my dinner in the garden.  Soon I saw Mario, Peter Pan like… screaming and laughing down the stairs with his crew.  Patrick lagging behind like a heavy train on an old dress.

I’ve never blogged about Mario.  Now, within the context of the salacious revelations and accusations leading to his spectacular firing from the Conde Nast creative family I revisit my association with him.  Let me say immediately,  I didn’t know anything untoward was happening.  I had never heard anything.  The towel series he shot with models were obviously designed to get the model naked and to legitimize Mario’s pervy intentions but I never heard from models who worked with him they felt uncomfortable.

Many of those same models who worked with Mario were not so discreet about their working relationship with Bruce Weber.  For over a decade or more I heard story after story from young men who had worked with Bruce and the discomfort they felt being ‘relaxed’ with his hands on their bodies, the ‘breathing exercise’ or asked to take off their shorts when they were alone with Bruce.  I heard again and again about the notorious ‘private archive’ for which Bruce said he wanted their naked picture.  I heard how he tantalized young men with lucrative campaigns and the promise of a life beyond their wildest dreams.  I heard how he set models against each other, how within minutes of the private naked shots… would change his mind about the campaign promise he’d made, playing with them, manipulating them.

Yet, it seems, many models were perfectly happy to have their bodies used by Bruce.  Yesterday I spoke to a male super model I know in NYC.  Last year, after a few drinks, he described in detail how Bruce molested him, removed his underwear and had taken pictures of him naked.  I asked if he was willing to come forward, speak publicly.  He told me I should be ashamed of myself for suggesting he told tales on Bruce.  Thus we understand how Bruce, inspiring loyalty in others, groomed them for sexual molestation.

I’ve had my run ins with Bruce over the years.  I asked him to take the Dorian Gray portrait.  He curtly suggested that I wasn’t the sort of person he could do business with.  Oh… how the tables have turned.

Sunday.  I had a late lunch in Hackney with a young gay artist.  We talked about Mario and Bruce.  He asked the difference between flirtation and harassment.  He was worried his flirtation might be misconstrued.  How would he know?  Of course, one asks ones self: why doesn’t he know?  He’s a bright lad but his white male privilege is so ingrained he cannot differentiate between the two.  He asked if the men now making the complaints were somehow complicit.  Many gay men make excuses for Bruce and Mario habitually devaluing our lives by suggesting the men who agree to work or consort with us are somehow suspect, complicit.  We remain baffled by the notion of consent.  They knew what they were getting themselves into.

“Consent, that’s for straight people?  Women?  Isn’t it?”  He looks confused.

We talk about the abuse of power between men (beyond top and bottom although that too) and how our anti social behaviour and lack of morality has been largely ignored by heterosexual society firstly before equality, because straight people found it distasteful and didn’t really care. Then, after equality straight people were too embarrassed or confused to question how we lived in case they were accused of homophobia or insensitivity.  Recent gay celebrity scandals have shocked many of our straight allies, realizing they don’t know anything much about their gay friends at all.  Like rats we live discreet and cautious lives just a few feet from theirs, scurrying from one assignation to another.

We’ve done a great job blending in. For many years the only evidence we existed was when the police arrested, tried and sent us to jail for being gay. Cottaging. Tricking. Dressing up. Without occasional mention in the newspapers our gay lives would remain completely invisible.  I broke the law simply by being alive and sexually active. Straight acting wasn’t a fetish, it was strategic and could save you from a beating or death. Ironically, this parallel life served many of us very well.  As a young British gay man I enjoyed social mobility, sexual freedom and access to extraordinary financial opportunities my straight peers could only dream of.  Yet, I paid the price for all of those benefits by surrendering my moral imperative.

Paris Hilton is maligned in the press for saying gay men on gay hook up apps are ‘disgusting’.  Which, after being sent 50 or so asshole pics this week… one might be inclined to agree.

With equality comes responsibility.  Some fought hard to enjoy marriage equality.  We fought hard in the UK to have homophobic laws like section 28 overturned.  In the UK these laws were ratified in Parliament and are hard to revoke.  We are tentatively exploring a new moral landscape.  Morals defined by heterosexuals, most gay men are unprepared for these changes and how this shift toward ‘normalcy’ may affect our lives.  Simply, our lifestyle compared with that of the average heterosexual may not bear scrutiny post Weinstein and Mario, Bryan, Bruce and Kevin may just be the very tip of the iceberg.

Entitled, affluent gay white men are especially morally impoverished.  Many still live secret, compartmentalized and shameful lives blighted by addiction, alcoholism and mental illness.  To many straight people we may seem carefree, highly entertaining, a cause to celebrate ‘gay pride’ and drink rainbow cocktails… but, on our own with our second screens we indulge less salubrious, secret lives using hook up apps as the portal, through which many enter a dark and disgusting world of chem sex, lies, cheating and despair.

They say,  everyone lies on-line.  We live in lying times.  Acceptable lies are now morally ring fenced.  The lies most gay men tell before they come out are perfectly… acceptable.  A habit we are loathed to break.  Most gay men are addicted to lying.  Only yesterday I met a closeted 25-year-old gay man.  I asked him why he was in the closet?  He described the same feelings of shame and despair I felt nearly 40 years ago.  Some things never seem to change… however much I am told, ‘it doesn’t matter, nobody cares’.  I explained to him why he needs to come out of the closet.  He needs to stop lying.  The more he lies the less respect he will have for the truth.  As I mentioned in my previous blog gay men get into nasty habits around the truth and the sooner we embrace the truth the less damage is done to our morality and our integrity.

The last time I saw  Mario he was skipping like a teenager down the stairs at The Chateau Marmont surrounded by beautiful teens.  Like Peter Pan, a 60-year-old man unable to face the truth about his failing body and his failing ability to make good decisions.  He could not stop himself grabbing them by the pussy.  He is the same as Trump.  Made of the same stuff.  Gripped by power, fame and entitlement he understood himself to be unassailable.  Nothing would ever bring him down… his legacy would glitter in perpetuity.  The dream maker, the fantasist, the story-teller… the liar.  Conjuring a universe of beauty, Mario forsook a life of loving relationships for an abuse of power.

Anna Wintour, who I confronted publicly about her reticence to stand up to Weber, made this statement last week.

Today, allegations have been made against Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, stories that have been hard to hear and heartbreaking to confront. Both are personal friends of mine who have made extraordinary contributions to Vogue and many other titles at Condé Nast over the years, and both have issued objections or denials to what has emerged. I believe strongly in the value of remorse and forgiveness, but I take the allegations very seriously, and we at Condé Nast have decided to put our working relationship with both photographers on hold for the foreseeable future.

Of course Anna Wintour is torn, it is hard to align what she hears and what she knows of her friends Mario and Bruce.  She is rightfully appalled, but thankfully for her she doesn’t know the half of it… she merely glimpsed, briefly through the portal and into the dark heart of every gay man I know.

Categories
Christmas Dogs Queer Rant Whitstable

Frances Roy/Spark and the Whitstable Trolls

There is something lost and broken about a small town.  Not on its surface.  Beneath, where the new working class flex what little muscle it has.  Withered by austerity and the banking crisis, lifting their weary faces and skinny fists toward the last of the watery sunlight.

Whitstable has always attracted freaks and frauds.  Crooks and drifters.  Before the gang of yummy mummies arrived with their plantation shutters, gumming up local stores with giant strollers… gangsters sat in Wheelers back room making deals.  Far enough from London, close enough to get home for their tea.

Life is evenly divided between Whitstable my home town and the world I created elsewhere.  You know, in the newspapers and on TV.  To come home is a mixed blessing.  My estranged brothers and frail mother have become litigants rather than family as I sue for my part in David’s will.

Even though Whitstable is a very small town one can totally miss seeing someone for decades.  Yet, with very little effort, I saw my mother on the street.  She looked animated, mid conversation with other mothers, presumably after dropping my nephew Oscar Roy at school.  Frances Roy, Frances Spark, Fran.  I don’t know what she calls herself nowadays. I walked closer, I tapped her on the shoulder… she turned to face me.  I was shocked by how badly she has aged.  The face I once adored is now smeared over her large skull, her features drawn, jowls and ear lobes drooping like melting tallow.

I was momentarily pleased to see her.  I felt protective once again.  I wanted to reassure her things were going to work out.  I thought the violent abuse we received from David would somehow bond us forever. Sadly, she has never been anything other than utterly selfish. She may have once but now she no longer wants the best for me. I am a stranger to her.

Unplanned pregnancy, shame and derision have shaped who she is today.  She learned nothing from her own story.  She never made amends.  She was never proud or encouraging of any of her children.  The older we got the less interest she showed. She had no ambition, no desire, no love.

I used to make excuses for her.  I’d tell therapists, “The nuns at the mother and baby home made her life miserable.”  I explained to psychologists, “Her father was cruel, her mother insensitive.”  “It was a different time.”  “When she looks at me I reminded her of him.”  I said.  And all the while, unbeknownst to her, the world was changing.  She told the doctor at the hospital, when I later read the notes, she was ashamed of me being so obviously gay… a gay child.  The sight of me flouncing around upset David.

They tried to shut me down.  The harder they tried the harder I fought back.  They tried to cure me with anti psychotic drugs.  They gave an 11-year-old gay child, badly abused at home… anti psychotic drugs.

I protected her from what others might say.  I melted when she cried.  She used her tears to avoid the truth.  Any difficult subject… she would cry.  One day I told her the crying wasn’t working.  I wasn’t going to cry with her anymore.  She stopped crying.  She didn’t do it again.  My mother does not deserve my protection. Sooner or later we are all owed the truth.

I was 22, I had a show in the West End.  She didn’t take the train, she didn’t see the play.  She couldn’t be anything other than embarrassed, four gay men talking about our gay lives.  She didn’t see me at the Edinburgh Festival, she didn’t see me.  She had excuses.

The next show, The Host performed in the Oyster Company great hall, my mother came with her sister Margaret and giggled in the back row ruining it for other people.  She didn’t come to the ICA or Sadler’s Wells, she didn’t come to The Hen and Chickens.  I don’t think she said a word when I won my place at a prestigious film school.  To this day and to the best of my knowledge she has never seen any of my films.

I’ve never written about her in this blog, explored who she is or was. I never once described her casual homophobia.  I wanted to believe she was a better person than she actually is.  A better person than me.  But she wasn’t… she accused my boyfriends of being gold diggers, made gay slurs about AIDS and ‘disgusting gay diseases’.  She failed to ask about my relationships, my work and my life.  When Joe and I bought a Porsche I was excited to show her.

She looked at it and said, “You ponce.”

That is the sort of woman she is.  Yet, when she was homeless I let her have one of our homes… even though she was the one who walked out on David… taking nothing.  Like so many women, she left it behind.  She walked out on my inheritance.

I have loyally hidden her true nature.  In the film AKA I did not reveal she colluded with my abusive father.  I continually let her off the hook.

When she called to tell me my brothers had been sent to prison, she blamed the police, she blamed everyone but them. My brother Martin Roy sends an abusive note to my lawyer.  I do not read it.  He storms into the solicitor’s office and demands to see him.

Whitstable High Street.  She’s nicely dressed.  I tap her on the shoulder and say hello.  She looks shocked.  She looked beaten.  She holds onto her friend, she links arms… as if I am going to be rip her away from them.  I ask if we can have coffee.  She shakes her head and looks like she might cry.  “I don’t want to talk to him.” The other mothers try encouraging her to have coffee with me.  They advise her to talk it through but my Mother dare not do that because she has been lying so long… she knows if she accepts a coffee it is time to tell the truth.

Her friends say, “She speaks so highly of you.”

“Really?” I reply.  “She scarcely speaks to me at all.”

I ask them if my mother Frances Roy mentioned to them she did not tell me my father was dying of cancer, she did not tell me he had died and then concealed his funeral from us all.  She grips hold of the other woman frantic, terrified.  Her brain racing for a solution.  Fear.  I return to the car.  She runs up the street as fast as her 73-year-old legs can carry her.

2.

New Years Eve we sat in a small group in his sitting room.  Whitstable people.  An MBE, an artist, the celebrity gardener, the Michelin star chef, the academy award nominee and a couple of imported diplomats… friends of our host.  He is wearing a djellaba.  Black linen, a rust colored silk shawl and Saudi slippers.  At midnight we toast the new year and hug.  I check insta and snap chat.  They are toasting in an ice palace in Reykjavik and the Sydney opera house.  Sam Taylor Johnston posts random snaps of black men preparing her dinner and black men entertaining them with dancing.

The following day, New Years Day… we reconvene at Windy Corner Stores.  At another table I see a man whose name I no longer remember, he has piercing blue eyes, he’s in a local band.  I stare at him.  He knows who I am.  Like looking into the eyes of ones captor.  Throughout my childhood this blue-eyed man mercilessly bullied me using gay slurs.  I thought to myself, should I say something?  He knows me.  He knows what he did. I say nothing.  I just stare.

A few days later I post this on the Overheard in Whitstable… Anything Goes, Facebook page.

Returning to Whitstable has been a positive experience. However, I’ve seen a few people around town who were openly and violently homophobic to me as I was growing up. I have never been ashamed of being gay and those who resorted to homophobia were the kind who resented ‘openly gay’ men, us who refused to be cowed by their hate. These people may now explain away their homophobia as a cultural phenomena but as with historical child abuse, historical homophobia must be answered to. Attitudes may have changed but the effects of homophobia should be acknowledged. If I see anyone in the town who was homophobic in my past I will remind them of their past cruelty. Most gay men in their 50’s either forsook marriage or children or waited until late in life. We lived through an aids epidemic. Whilst that was happening graffiti was written on the side of my house in island wall, it said: aids available here. LGBT people do not have to hide who we are and who we love. The privileged white men I have confronted so far claim they are the victim because I had the audacity to remind them of their hate. The homophobe, the racist, the misogynist is not the victim. Those who peddle hate must own it and make amends.

Of course, this note punctured Whitstable’s fragile, dark heart. I am harangued and homophobicly abused.  Along side the homophobic abuse, energetic white people assure me nobody cares anymore if you are black, gay, fat… etc.   As long as you keep quiet about it.  If you complain… these illogicals demand you pipe down.  It is still typical for white heterosexual people to shut down gay people who have the audacity to share their negative experience and challenge homophobia.

Of course, being a public figure I am used to the abuse.  I have never been compliant.

I was most interested to hear from one commentator, Kris Howell. The rest: feckless female trolls, thin-lipped and spray tanned, their dyed hair in lank bangs.  When I returned fire with equally vile invective they became outraged, like prodding a termites nest.  The little termites ran around screaming.

For my amusement I suggested to one morbidly obese woman she may be in receipt of benefits.  An excellent way to upset an oik.  I found a picture of her wedding, her huge pink body wrapped up in acres of synthetic fabric. Her husband, pallid and inert.  She told me she owned three cars.  ‘You think I’d be on benefits with £70,000 worth of cars in front of my house.”  It brought into sharp contrast just how different their world is from mine.  I looked at my watch and smiled.

Kris Howell, better known as Les (ironically he also changed his name) caught my interest because once reeled in said exactly what I expected to hear.  He wanted me to know he had bullied me not because I am gay… but because I am me.

He refused to differentiate between the two.  As if the two could be separated.

Compliant homosexuals put up with being picked on, bullied, imprisoned and generally kicked around.  They learn how to be invisible.  Those of us who refuse to go quietly are branded difficult, hated for not keeping quiet.  Other gay men who play the game as prescribed by straight white people are just as offended when a fellow gay rocks the boat.  As the trolls railed and raged over my post the local gay hairdresser pinned his colors to their mast not realizing he had been co-opted into a seething pit of homophobes.

Les Howell refused, despite reasoned argument, to grasp that being gay had defined me, and I have good reason to be angry and better reason to fight back.  How did a ten-year old me deal with being repeatedly called pooftah and bleached nigger at school?  I was keenly aware of both racism and homophobia.  We were taught by the vicar of St Alphage that the black boy sitting naked before Christ was a savage and would not know how to use a toilet.  My uncle Norman confirmed this by pointing at black children, reminding me they were filthy savages.

Remember, even though homosexuality had been decriminalized by Woolfenden in 1965 gay men were still being arrested for consensual sex well into the 1980’s.  I was born a criminal and I had every reason to be angry but that anger, as the years passed, turned me into something I would have preferred not to have been.

Yet, as Les Howell spewed his vitriol, so full of hate… like most enraged fools, he lost his grasp on reason.  It was perfectly ok to remind the world of a man’s indiscretions he said, but not his triumphs.  He told me he was law-abiding but balked when I reminded him both his friends Stuart and Martin Roy had been in prison for worse crimes than spending money on a credit card.

Like most fascists his argument have nothing to do with logic and what he may or may not think of me… and everything to do with who he is and the resentments he carries.  Hate, like water, will find its level.  It will seep into everything and rot where ever it remains.

He wanted me to know I was a liar.  He said, “You were a liar before you went to prison and you’ve never learned your lesson.”  I wondered what the lesson should be? And I thought, you know, lying is a particularly gay thing.  I called Stephen Fry and we talked about gays and lying.  The genesis of our fantastical lives.  He had also gone to prison.  He had stolen credit cards from other people, I had merely run up a huge bill on my own credit card.  The difference?  He would still have gone to prison in 2018, I would not.

Why do gay men lie?  We lie to save ourselves.  We lie until we come out of the closet.  The longer we are in the closet the more we lie, the easier it becomes, there is no longer a taboo.  The truth is negotiable.

The following day the trolls were chattering on-line like agitated chimps.  Upset ’cause I had removed the thread.  “Has he tagged you?”  The wannabe silver back asks the girl with thin lips.  He is holding up his metaphorical pool cue reminding everyone he won the argument.  He won the fight.  They talked cryptically about rinsing and reeling people in and unicorns.  The woman in the synthetic wedding dress said she was sick of being maligned (my word not hers).  A couple of them private messaged me in the hope I would re-engage.

Anything Goes’ on this Facebook site simply means: trolls and their dumb friends get to spew hate at anyone they feel they can bully and misinterpret, using xenophobia, misogyny, racism and homophobia as their weapons of choice. Their lives do not bear scrutiny.  They are neither patriots nor evolved. They hide behind fake accounts because their truth is unbearable. They lie yet cannot bear anything but the truth in others, they insult but cannot stand being insulted.

They are kids in the school toilet.  Writing notes and passing them around, scrawling over pictures, insulting who they believe are more vulnerable.

Dealing with the mass market can be very revealing. The British general public, like the woman in the white synthetic dress, are presently emboldened by Brexit.

3.

The following day I had tea with Barry Green at his hotel, The Continental.  His son Richard was my best friend in the 80’s.  We talked about Brexit.  He told me he was a keen leaver and I asked him why.  I’ve always respected Barry.  I want somebody I respect to convince me Brexit is good for the country.  I want to be wrong about Brexit.  Barry Green was the second successful business owner, Susanna Atkins at The Goods Shed in Canterbury was the first, who came out to me as a stalwart brexiteer.

Actually George Wilson, our local Scottish millionaire, was the third but we didn’t get past talking planning permission.

I am fascinated by their Brexit.  How it works for them? Susanna’s family (sons and cousins) had to bring in the harvest last year because they couldn’t get anyone to work on their farm.  Susanna thought it was great, she suggested we all bring in the harvest.  As it was, long ago.  I could not imagine the sickly woman in the synthetic wedding dress on her knees in the fields.  She might have a word or two to say about that when the local aristo land owner requisitions her, dragging her screaming from her smart phone, from Celebrity Big Brother on her giant flat screen… to pick asparagus for the 1%.

Barry told me he voted Brexit… he assured me not because of immigration (he is married to an Eastern European) but because of the common agricultural and fisheries policy.  Ok, I said, so who is going to write the new agricultural and fisheries policy for the UK?  Barry didn’t know what sort of policy or quota we would have after Brexit because he thought we might not have one at all.

“Do you think a free-for-all out at sea will work fine for our fisherman and fish stocks?”  I inquired.

Both Susanna and Barry think the country will be best served by an army of artisans, baking bread, catching fish and selling our surplus to who ever wants to buy it.  They believe their small-scale business model can be translated into something the whole country will adopt, setting the country free from the rest of the world.  They crave autonomy, they crave sovereignty.  They resent the rules, they want to catch what ever they want when they want it and bugger the cod stocks.  They know what is best for the people if only we can return to simpler, less complicated ways.  Bringing in the harvest with a new peasant class and take what we want from the sea as we need it.

Profit now, conservation later.  They believe in the Dunkirk spirit.  They believe the English will overcome adversity.  An adversity we created for ourselves…  we now delight in overcoming.  Meanwhile the EU are preparing a no deal Brexit while our government prepare for nothing.  Hurtling toward an arbitrary date when we fall gently off the cliff.

Barry Green sat on the brown leather Chesterfield whilst we chewed over the past.  I congratulated him his success.  He told me I was the kind of person who could have done anything.  I remind him, I’ve done more than most.

“Those houses you sold are worth £3 million pounds now.”

“But I wouldn’t have had any adventure, Barry.”

He remembered the play we performed in the Oyster Company, the summer of 1985.  “The red knickers.” He chuckled. “Tatiana’s red knickers.”

“Do you remember the vase of blue Corn Flowers?”

“Yes,” he marveled.

I’m not going to explain.  You had to be there.

4.

The dogs curled up on the sofa.  They ate cheese.  They are still sleeping.  It’s midday.  They don’t have to worry about the pig and the dog we shared our time with these past few weeks in Barnes.  We are going to walk in the rain.  We are going to meet him, feel his soft skin under his coat.  Just like the old days.  Kissing in the street.

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