The dawn. Oyster pink. The santa ana blows. All night. Fires burn onto the PCH. Miles from here. Red flag warning. The strawberries are burning. That’s what they say.
The house shook, the dogs startled. In the morning I see that a tree gently fell over.
Could it be possible that I am writing fiction? The devil is in the detail.
It’s the question du jour.
Am I telling the truth? Did the tree really fall?
The inside of my mouth is burning. ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily.’ he said.
Yes.
I can.
He lay quietly in my bed. Tangled in the white linen sheets.
Yesterday or twenty years ago? Or… never?
The maid remade the bed. She sews buttons onto my coat. You know, the buttons that nobody ever keeps.
‘Why do you push everyone who cares about you away?’ he asks.
You don’t care about me. You’re just keeping your enemy closer. Do you think I’m a fool?
There ain’t no fool like an old fool.
I used to write these words for you. Even when I wasn’t allowed. I would let you know. Even if you didn’t care. Now, I don’t care. Out there. Dressed. Undressed. On your back. Grunting like a pig.
There was a moment when I knew that everything would be ok. Don’t ask me how. Don’t ask me why.
The dawn chorus. There was stag on the drive. We looked at each other. His antlers sprayed, pale gray flock. I knew what he was up to.
Eating my tomatoes.
I didn’t close the gate.
It’s my fault.
2.
The boy at the expensive coffee shop. He told me that I was a sinner. “It’s OK”, he reassured me. “We are all sinners. Your sin is no worse than my sin.”
Is that what I have to believe from the crazy Christian at the coffee shop? I am, therefore I sin?
3.
They don’t give a damn. The gays. They’ll be voting Republican as soon as the Democrats get them what they want.
Tom said, even though he doesn’t have any female friends, that Islam ‘refuses to grow up’. Modernize. He uses women as an example.
“They wear sheets.” He mocks.
Yet, the Hasidic women not a mile from where he lives cannot grow their own hair, forced to wear modest clothing.
He is blind to all of that.
The sublimation of women by some Christians, some Muslims and some Jews… yes. He can’t make the connection.
He said, “All Muslims should be killed.” That’s what he said.
Yet, he goes to China where they stun the Falun Gong like pigs and harvest their organs while they are still alive. Yes, they do.
He doesn’t have any female friends because they don’t ‘mesh with his lifestyle’.
They inhabit a world where only the mercenary survive.
They have no interest in the beautiful world around you unless it can be used to make more money.
They think conservation is for losers.
They will mine every last piece of coal, sell every last drop of oil, catch every fish, chop every tree without consideration for you or your children.
They have scant regard for other humans unless they have achieved what they define as success: huge amounts of money and power.
They believe in slavery.
In their dark world you will be enslaved with huge personal debt as soon as it is reasonable to impose it upon you.
So obese you’ll be unable to defend yourself, or run fast enough from crazed, gun-toting children high on prescription meds.
You will have no option but to eat cheap gmo food that causes rampant obesity in you and your family.
Your local school will be stripped of funds so your children remain uneducated and unable to intelligently question their plan.
They will teach your kids, when they can get away with it, the debunking of a thousand years of empirical scientific evidence in favor of ridged adherence to the bible.
You will fear being sick and die long before you are expected because of the appalling health care system that they proudly tell the world is the very best.
Finally, you will live in toxic shame inspired by Christian‘morality’.
If you ‘fail’ the system by becoming unemployed they will demonize you, your peers will accuse you of laziness. You will be encouraged to blame brown people for your misfortune.
Ryan and Romney will achieve their aim by frightening the oppressed proletariat with dishonest bogey men: the deficit, the end of the traditional family and foreign terrorism.
They will succeed as other tyrants have before them.
The people are simply too fatigued to fight their lies and mythology.
Complicated and realistic solutions have been long abandoned in favor of easy and inchoate sound bites.
I had a dream last night that I was fucking Paul Ryan. After I ejaculated I pulled my cock out of his ass… but it was no longer a penis…. It was a crucifix… Covered in blood shit and cum.
Finally, I rather like the new, gamine Miley Cyrus. A world apart from the generic valley girl she once was. What the hell is all the fuss? Proof (if you needed it) that people don’t really like celebrating individuality. Preferring the homogenous mass.
The dog sleeps by my side, I worry that I might roll on him in the night and kill him. Or, in a dream, I dismember him then wake up and he is dismembered.
As a very young child I worried that I had torn a dress to pieces that belonged to my mother.
I convinced myself that I had stolen the dress from her wardrobe, torn the dress, trying to make it fit me.
The shame of shredding it lived with me for decades. One day, some time in my 40’s, I confessed to her. I told her what I had done. She laughed, the dress had been her sisters, she had returned the dress.
The woolen crepe feel of it, the silk lining, the dark blue flowers lifted like brocade on the darker blue surface. The dream, the scissors, the cutting, trying to make it fit….me.
It was a dream.
You know that every word I write is being read by the police, by the brunette DA? By the ‘victim’s’ lawyers? They trawl this blog for evidence. Did I just prove how ‘dark and creepy’ I really am?
In another dream the DA is wearing suspenders and a bra, panties (crotchless) a wet gash, slipping herself onto her much older husband’s giant cock. She glances at the bible that sits primly on the bedside table and kicks it off. Her ankle bracelet (an anniversary gift) catches the light, her Christian name written in gold.
Her children are sleeping in another room. Oblivious.
These are the dreams I didn’t have in jail. I could not dream.
Another marathon press session yesterday. This time a fearless woman made it up the mountain. Blond, slim, attractive. I asked her who would play her in the movie of her life. Jodi Foster. Good choice.
I often wonder, when I am having an out-of-body experience, out of my life for a moment experience…what the hell is happening?
A four-hour interview. After she left I fell into bed and slept deeply until Kevin arrived. He chauffeured me into Venice, for dinner with Anna at Axe (where I once made a beautiful boy wear agent provocateur underwear and blow me in the bathroom…) We ate everything on the menu: the flat bread and the crab and the boiled beef with polenta. Anna drank a bottle of wonderful white wine, I envied her so much. I wanted to taste it. To feel the effect of the wine on my body and mind. To take a few hours off.
When the sun sets, the nights are chilly, cold enough for a scarf.
After dinner a Mormon arrived from the internet. We could not keep our hands off of each other. I slipped my hands up under his coat onto his warm belly. I kissed him on his lips. He smiled coyly. 28 years in the closet, 28 years yearning for this. Yes, he was the Mormon boy you see dressed in a suit wearing a badge, looking like a talent agent.
He’s out there experimenting, meeting men, feeling his way into a gay life.
At home we fell into bed and I found myself giving into him, becoming uncharacteristically submissive. He came three times. He didn’t lose his erection in between. I couldn’t stop kissing him. I made him mark my neck. I made him bite me.
Sucking the spit out of his mouth. The cum out of his cock.
The twins arrived home at 2.30am. He had long gone.
The silent house. I lay in bed and listened to my breath fill my lungs. Enjoying the sensation of being alive. A sensation I have had often since I left the jail. I have been so alive since they shat me out of the MCJ. Walk through that door and you’ll be free.
The jail has restored my faith in humanity? You wanted to know how so?
Because I met men in there, undeserving black men, paying the price with dignity. Because it made me re-evaluate everything.
(He brought me a bunch of hyacinths, the pungent fragrance fills the room.)
I have met extraordinary men and women since I left the jail. Men and women who restored my faith in America. The USA. Brilliant, humblingly brilliant minds working to free the men I knew (and men like them) from a barbaric life in an American jail.
This is the Newtonian ‘equal and opposite’ reaction to the life I had before I passed imperceptibly into my dotage, my serious…third life.
The people I am meeting, the places I am visiting are so startlingly different from the life you thought I aspired. I find myself in dingy offices down town. Understanding obscure laws. Recasting myself. Relishing the next interview. I am useful at last. I am useful to them. Useful for changing laws, illegal protocols…and people are listening. I am being heard…it feels good.
You see what they did to Julian Assange? They will try to do that to me. They will discredit me. They will try. Scurrilously, meticulously, evidentially. They will tell you that I can’t be trusted. When the moment…that moment we have all been waiting for, the moment before the curtain rises, when the audience hushed, the lights have dimmed.
If gay marriage had been an option when I was young would I have made different sorts of decisions?
Would I have behaved differently?
Would I have looked for a serious relationship with another man to whom I would have proposed, married and had children..rather than leaping from one man to another…exhausting each and every one of them?
If that narrative had been on offer, as it is now, would I have married Joe or Matt or the beautiful Dane?
Joe and I were as good as married but it was a marriage of convenience.
If I had believed that a commitment between men was possible or respected or had some kind of future, perhaps I wouldn’t have wasted other opportunities. I may have stuck around.
When I was a young man I felt hopeless, convinced that this strange love was simply…pointless. That to say ‘I love you’ to another man…meant nothing, could never mean what it meant when I loved a woman.
But you’re gay! Did she know? This woman.
One woman in particular.
When I fell in love with PH, it was a surprise to everyone…me included. She was so beautiful. She was so beautiful and she wanted me. There are very few things I do not write about here. She is one of them. Our relationship that spanned half a decade.
After years of enjoying a gay life I saw the world renewed. I looked into her eyes and I never wanted to forget her face. Every time I left the house I would memorize an indelible snapshot of her.
When we were in love every record played on the radio meant something. Holding hands in the street and never once a strangers savage glance…my love blossomed. Without the withering contempt of strangers my love blossomed.
Do you know what I mean? Whenever I held a man in my arms in a public place I felt the withering contempt of others. Have you ever felt that? It soured me. What other people thought.
The artist, Marc Quinn said to me when he saw me and Phil together, “I knew you weren’t gay.”
That was then. This is now.
Before he and I stopped speaking he told me that he had met a man in Central Park and kissed them. They held him in their arms. He told so many lies yet somehow this lie was forgivable. He told me that it had happened before I met him…but I knew from the look on his face how new and exhilarating it had been.
An experience that he wanted to share but was too afraid of hurting me.
Well, we may never know how it might have been if I had the luxury of marrying a man.
Time has past, now I am too old to fall in love and make a man my husband.
Darling PH, even though we are estranged at the moment because of what happened last summer with him. I want you to know that had you not been in my life I would never have experienced a brimming heart.
You trusted me and nurtured me and protected me and loved me unconditionally.
Watching my young gay friends emerge into the light, they have a different sort of gay life on offer.
During the past 50 years life for gay men has changed radically. When I was born homosexuality was still a criminal offence. So, I was lucky to have grown up without my sexuality outlawed.
This generation of gay men are freer than any generation before them. I salute the work we did to make a more equitable life for them.
Occasionally I am pissed that the young don’t recognise the sacrifices we made..but I am also aware that I seldom give a thought to those who fought for me to live a free and abundant gay life.
As much as I hate to remind you, these rights and freedoms could be taken away just as easily as they were given. We must not take our good fortune for granted. There are dark forces at work against us.
It’s election time! Here they go again, debating my future, my expendable rights. Using their disdain for our lives to get votes. Championing gay hate to ‘motivate their base’.
Listen to what they say about us. The cruel rhetoric they use.
I am tired of being the liberal hot potato thrown around at times of national debate/election.
Gay marriage, gays in the military, hate crimes, equality.
And finally mr/mrs republican candidate…what do you think of the gays? Is this the kind of America we want to call our home? We want our country back from the niggers and the faggots!
We are once again the devil’s proof of an evil, liberal America, a decadent America, a democratic America that Jesus would never sanction.
Apparently, like abortion, we must be outlawed.
I am sick of having my nature, my rights, my existence used by others in some heartless polemic.
Read my lips: My rights are non-negotiable, un-repealable….mine to keep.
If you vote Democrat I am not proof positive of a better America. If you are Republican I am not responsible for every natural disaster. I am just what I always was…alive. Doing what I always did…living. Hoping like I always will…that you leave me and my sexuality alone.
Some woman on FB reassured me that Jesus loved me but hated my sin. The sin of homosexuality. The Jesus I was taught about on Sunday mornings in St Alphage church Whitstable never really hated anyone.
All he wanted was a fair and equitable life for us all.
I had no idea yesterday was Friday. I thought it was Wednesday. That’s how disorienting the mountain can be.
I have been trapping squirrels. Peanut butter and Weetabix. My secret weapon. The little dog at my side. Spent the rest of the day under the deck clearing dead leaves.
Dinner with friends. Crappy Cafe Habana. The rudest waitress on the planet.
Cold mist over the mountain. The weather is totally fucked up.
Apparently The ‘A’ List is very amusing. Ian had an advance screener. I probably don’t come off very well. Never mind. I am, according to Ian…referred to as ‘smelly’. Watch the show on Logo, Monday night. More will be revealed.
Because you love me (huh?) an anonymous ‘friend’ out there decided to send a recent picture of Jake.
Please don’t do it. As you are well aware, it just inflames the situation.
I don’t want to see him or hear anything about him. I am at peace with him. Want the best for him.
I forgave him for writing that horrible email, for lying to me. His lies, in retrospect, were perfectly understandable. He was in a terrible situation. I forgive you for being selfish and insensitive….for doing what perhaps all your non-sober friends would think perfectly reasonable.
I forgive you for wanting me to be something I never was. I forgive you because you didn’t know.
What is my part in all of this? When everyone around me was warning not to get involved I ignored you all. I ignored John. I ignored Mr. P. I ignored Dr. D and my therapist Jill. Instead of going to meetings and connecting with dependable friends I sank into my addiction. Acting out with a straight identified man.
Regardless of what he morphed into…he was not mine to love. It is indeed very alluring to be told that you are loved but I am old enough, experienced enough to have seen it for what it was. I chose not to.
I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger. I’m sorry for bruising you inside and out. I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop myself from loving you. I’m sorry that I was insensitive and selfish. I’m sorry for shouting. I’m sorry I lied. Most of all, I was wrong to have waged this war against you, not least because I have done myself irreparable damage.
I was wrong.
I was weak.
I fell for him…as many will.
You are a beautiful, sexy, romantic, intelligent man. Above all…you are curious. If you are not already, you will make someone very happy, very proud. You will make some equally honorable man a great husband, you will be a good father.
I wanted you for myself. In a different narrative that wouldn’t be so bad. But you had just come out, bravely left one life to make something brand new. I should have been a support, a conduit.
I hope one day you will find it in your heart to forgive. I don’t need to know that you have.
My Whitstable mash up…I was his age when I made that video and it reminded me of what sort of man I was. Unprepared. I was unprepared and willful.
I imagine that he is out there doing his best to be honest. Living in New York, working every day.
Connecting to his new gay life.
I hope he marvels at his good fortune: his new gay life. The opportunities it affords. With marriage and babies and freedom…it’s a great time in New York to be a gay man.
Both Zach and Dan told me that I should stop writing about Jake. Zach told me that it made me sound weak. Well, that maybe. Weak or not, it’s time to move on.
At some point soon I have to remove (yet again) any reference to him from this blog. Any photograph, his name etc. It just has to be. Not because I am being forced but because it is the right thing to do. As if it never happened. As if we never happened.
This blog and his name written here ties him to me as much as I have strapped myself to him like a suicide bomb.
So, Adieu my friend.
I am writing this at The Country Mart in Malibu waiting for Karim as he stands in line for our lunch.
He is off to Patmos, Paris, Antibes and Athens for the rest of the summer. Places I love.
Some of those places we visited. I will cherish those memories. I will overlook the problems. I will keep quiet now about what we loved most because only we know.
It’s sunny today and that might very well describe my disposition. We are sitting in the blazing sun eating breakfast. The dog senses that we might be going to the beach. He is jumping around, happy. He, like me, seems a great deal lighter.
Less at the mercy of my dark side.
Another very social, busy yesterday. Began with waking up next to Alex. Walked the dog. My 12am meeting at NYU, sat down next to super cute Danish boy who I ended up spending time with later. The topic was: obsession, the relief of. It made me laugh out loud. To complicate matters who was sitting in the room? JP, one of my great old loves/obsessions and someone I had not seen for 12 years.
He said, “Hello mate…” and gave me a huge hug.
After the meeting JP and I meandered down 10th street. We asked after our respective families, marveled at how we are both going to be on the island this summer. It was a God send. To meet someone with whom one has been seriously involved and now feels nothing. At least JP has not lost his looks. He looked strong. He is as tall as me and suits his stature.
I did not arrange to meet him again. To see him and smile was enough.
He said, “Are you still fighting the world?”
One day, after many years have past, The Penguin and I will bump into each other and the same will be true. Resentments and history turned to dust. We still have our September court appearance to get through. I kinda wish I hadn’t chosen that option. I should have just agreed to the terms. What was I thinking?
On FB looking at my friend Rose’s comments. I like what she posts from The Guardian and The Independent. She has a sensible view of life. She is a socialist, she believes that her principles are correct and proper. As you do, I found myself looking at her party pictures and there she was, one of many middle-aged lesbians dancing with all the lights on.
I thought rather uncharitably that even though she has good principles would I want to be her? The answer is, obviously, no. Would I aspire to be her? No.
We all have our own crosses to bear, our own opinions, mistakes, passions and ultimately death.
For months and months I have thought that death was a better option than living this miserable, unresolved life. Without much effort I am alive once again…so, I better get on with some living.
Dashed home (after a two hour steam) to get changed and meet Zach and his boyfriend Alex for dinner. Delicious pork chop at Back 40 on Avenue B. Conversation lively. Gawker party immediately after (met, kissed and fondled super cute blond) then Lady Rizo’s Rapture Eve event at Joe’s Pub.
Zack, Alex, Dan and the Danish Beauty sat in the VIP area with some moody dykes and Baz Luhrmann. Stephen joined us and everybody wanted his take on our Family Court Extravaganza which has very quickly become another mythic Duncan Roy adventure. Starring the poison dwarf, his unremarkable parents and a chorus of black and latino battered wives.
Rizo’s performance was sublime. A Nina Simone tribute. Divinely sophisticated. Less camp. Gorgeous. Her Kurt Weille moment was so beautiful it was almost beyond description.
The audience went wild…ecstatic.
Back to Gawker party where Zach got into a huge fight with another guest about a psychic. An altercation ensued and Zach called the host’s best friend ‘Swamp Trash’ so we threw our metaphorical scarves over our shoulders and left the building.
Walked to Bedlam for a last glass of club soda. I ditched the crew and walked home alone. Anonymous amongst the throng of drunken, late night revellers.
