Regardless of why I decided to get involved with Derek or The ‘A’ List I’m glad I did. Our pretend boyfriend scam…it was fun. Even though I have been portrayed as a smelly old man.
Pretending to be his boyfriend was absurd. A joke. I don’t know if that comes across on the show? That we were faking it?
Occasionally I throw myself back into being ‘gay’. I don’t have a very gay life on this mountain. Most queens are totally appalled that I live here, so isolated, away from the urban gay idyl.
Tom calls it my Shangri-La. Some men love it and for those I hold a special place in my heart. They get it. The dream of self-sufficiency, off the grid, chickens and home-grown vegetables.
When I pull off my country clothes (albeit RRL) and slide into something leaner I am dressed for the city. Whether it is WeHo or Chelsea, Soho or The Marais I am there to be seen, acknowledged and play that peculiar game of being ‘gay’.
I can live two distinct lives, maybe more?
In England my snooty friends called me a chameleon, meaning to insult me.
Surely being able to change ones color to blend in…is rather good? To adapt and change as the situation requires.
In England, my England I learned to speak with a different accent, merely to be heard.
I am a cock sucking homosexual but I wonder if others see it that way? What kind of gay am I?
Perhaps my lack of interest in sex makes me less gay, less human?
Remember when I was on Sex Rehab and admitted that the sex I had with men was traumatic? People wrote to me and told me that I wasn’t gay. “If Duncan Roy doesn’t want gay sex, he isn’t gay.”
They tried to throw me out of the gay club…for having an opinion.
Meeting the cast of the ‘A’ List was memorable because they have become, in their own way, icons. For good or for bad. I met most of them just once. At least three of them have admitted drug and alcohol problems.
I really liked Austin and his husband Jake who I could very easily imagine seeing here or in London. They are good people. I like Austin’s authenticity.
The worst of the bunch has to be…Derek. As you will see tonight (if you can be bothered) I enjoy ribbing him on camera. I used stock lines, old jokes that an overly sensitive American queen did not find very funny.
When the food arrives I say, “That looks like something that came out of your nose.” That’s funny isn’t it? I used it before and my friends laughed.
We hung out a few times but really, his lack of sophistication, curiosity and insight were wonders to behold. He seems so incomplete. Derek’s consumption of alcohol masking a sadness at his core…like so many untreated addicts. A problem that a huge number of gays share but have no intention of resolving.
Derek has no business to be anywhere but where he was born. Like so many gay men he has been forced into New York by small-town prejudice and an insatiable desire for cock.
A bland, mid-western bag of meat and bones.
He had no truck with history, our history, any history…he knew nothing of the city where he lives, of commerce, politics or God. Eking out an existence with appearances at provincial gay clubs and gay pride.
Derek lives every moment in the moment, no awareness of where he had come from and no interest in where he is going.
Did he read Eckhart Tolle? I’m kidding.
The power of now and only now and God forbid that you make me consider anything other than right now.
I am without context. I am without past or future.
Damn! This Queen needs a drink!
He is the antithesis of everything the other was.
I looked at Derek as one might a monkey in the zoo. The gay zoo. Trapped like a miserable, half naked gogo boy in his techno cage. Evidence of his genus. The sub species of gay to which we must all aspire.
Cocktails with orange slices perched on the rim.
Moisturized, combed, overly tanned. The shrill laughter and meaningless conversation hurt my ears.
I can’t imagine what the viewers of the ‘A’ List will make of me but…we’ll see. I am old. I am not Peter Pan. I have a beard. I live on a mountain. I have no sexual traction…time has eroded my usefulness to the gays.
It was an adventure into a life I have only the barest knowledge. A sociological exercise. Ripping open the wasp’s nest.
I hung out at bars and in clubs. I questioned who I was and the choices I have made.
When I was approached I politely declined. When they spilled their drinks on me I didn’t say a word.
