Eating cheese and pastrami with lashings of piccalilli smeared over the top. The inside of my mouth is burning. My lips are burning with desire. Not really. My lips are just bored. I am waiting for the mail to arrive so I can walk to bank and get on with the day.
I just scaled Mount Runyon with Sherpa Lil Dog, we saw two gorgeous yeti and had to: Alert! Avert! Affirm! It’s simply no good for me to gaze longingly at the perfectly honed abs of my fellow Runyon climbers.
Yesterday I realized, after chatting with a friend of mine with HIV that the average drug company will make over $2, 000, 000 out of a single person with HIV during their life time. Where is the incentive for those drug companies to educategay men about staying negative? Anyway, I am fast realizing that the sexual health education that gay men need is nothing to do with safe sex and everything to do with self-love.
The drug companies have no compassion for gay men, no desire to educate an underclass with no real rights, who are despised by most Christian bigots and have so little respect for themselves that they routinely get infected with HIV and become another $2, 000, 000 meal ticket for big pharma.
Pharmaceutical executives must be rubbing their hands in glee when another gay man converts from positive to negative.
This has to stop. We must start educating the next generation of gay men to love themselves enough to make good sexual health choices.
I got to thinking about my friend Amanda and how we recently hit a bit of a rock. I think deep down, even though she has gay men around her to dress her, she really has no respect for gay men. For many people we are clowns who have no right to complain or behave as anything other than grotesque queens. We are, to her, useless absurdities. Her notion that it is somehow ridiculous for us to have children, for us to have politics, opinions, etc. She’s not alone; I think many people are outraged by all of that and more.
Whatever I may have written about gaybies in the past I now see gay men having children as a delicious act of rebellion. It confronts homophobia head on.
Breakups are never usually times to relish but this breakup has been very good to me.
This is exactly the time in my life to take action and find a new perspective.
I took action by finding my peers in gay AA who might, in turn, shed some light on my relationship with the other.
In the scheme of things I was just an inconsequential blip in his life and I would be kidding myself if I thought differently.
I certainly could not compare with his other enduring relationships. Anyhow, we seem to be communicating like friends and I am largely over what he may or may not be doing-though sitting here alone writing causes me a certain doleful curiosity.
Let me tell you about the past few days.
On Saturday I went to the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills to see the Andreas Gursky show with my friend Dom. We ate lunch at the Montage-he had the steak tartar and I, the charcouterie.
The Gursky show was good but uninspiring. Huge photographs framed in monstrous oak frames. Big forgettable pictures…that’s all.
Huge photographs of the insides of neutrino splitting machines buried miles under Japan and filled with super purified water. Satellite images of the great oceans. It was all spectacle and no substance.
After our gallery visit I bought a pair of very baggy white trousers in some outlet store. Gucci $48.
We popped into the new Missoni on Rodeo designed by my once boyfriend Patrick Kinmonth. The outside is PERFECT, like a huge basket, woven metal softening the corner of Rodeo and Little Santa Monica.
The inside, however, is a bit of a mess.
I suppose the concept is the shopper wanders down a grand boulevard with variously sized vitrine to grab ones attention. It was too theatrical.
The men’s area, the woman’s area, the home store etc. It doesn’t work, it’s a mess. The interior finishes are very beautiful but the layout left too much to be desired.
Again, the outside is exquisite.
I could tell you very wonderful stories about Patrick but I will save them for another day.
The last time I saw Patrick Kinmonth he was reclining on a velvet sofa at the Chateau Marmont with Mario Testino.
He drawled that I could have been so much more than I was. He is, after all, a very grand queen; something I long abandoned aspiring to be but glad that I had the chance to meet.
For a few glorious months at the age of 21 he totally indulged me.
Sadly, I didn’t really fall for him. I fell in love with his impeccable style.
Actually, he may very well be the Diana Vreeland of our age. That plaudit might have been reserved for Hamish Bowles but Hamish doesn’t dress well enough or take enough care with his appearance.
Saturday night we celebrated Josh’s continuing testicular cancer treatment. Every one of his friend brought ball-shaped hors d’œuvre to commiserate his recent loss and the chemo that began today.
He is an incredibly brave 29-year-old and described his cancer as an ‘inconvenience’. I have huge respect for that young man.
GLADD awards and party on Saturday night that I was not invited to. Odd really as I was the only out gay man in recovery ever on a Dr Drew show. I am definitely not pretty enough for GLADD.
I suppose that this was the Velvet Mafia’s way of expressing their disapproval. The sex addict message is not one the gays are eager to hear.
Even though conversion parties, bug chasing and crystal meth are discussed at length amongst the young gay men I know. Perhaps this is only a myth? A meth myth? It is much easier for the gay community to concentrate on attacks from the outside than focus on the damage we do to ourselves.
Dane
On Sunday I met Gore Vidal again (the last time was with Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich during Dennis’s run for President) he described the sad state of the USA, describing it as rotten and then said (rather surprisingly) that he would like his bones buried in France and not, as he has always said, beside his lover in Washington.
I wonder if he was just being dramatic. It was lovely to see him… even though he is beyond frail.
Others at the party included the divine Ben Barns who played the other Dorian Gray, he told me how disappointed by the film he was.
Quite right! Not nearly as interesting as our deeply flawed Dorian. Eric Mc Cormack, Rufus Sewell and Michael Sheen all friends from different places and all at Stephen’s party. I had a wonderful time.
So nice to be included by someone who the British might describe as a National Treasure.
Stephen is, of course, the most gracious of all hosts. The food was excellent, the Pellegrino..well there’s not much more I can’t tell you about Pellegrino.
I took my friend Dane who looked a bit like Tarzan. He was wearing a tiny black vest… nipples like peanuts.
Met a British director called Toby and after Stephen’s we decided to hit WeHo where I met a whole host of adoring sex rehab fans but regardless of their drunken attempts to get into my boxer briefs-I slept alone.
It is simply too soon to start meeting folk again-especially after the feast of affection, love and intimacy I have gorged myself on this past few months.
If I miss anything about dear old HIM I miss that I will never kiss him again, that he will never nestle in my arms and sleep as lovers do. Hey ho, that’s going to be a hard one to replicate any time soon.
I was with a man last week, a friend of mine. Married with two kids, good job, comfortable life. The only fly in the ointment being his insatiable desire for other men.
He had always known that he was gay but fell in love with a beautiful woman. He still loves her, loves his children and his comfortable life. When I met him he was in pieces because he was about to tell his wife the truth about his other life. The life he could no longer contain, compartmentalize.
You know, whether it is another man or another woman the deceit is just the same. However, his wife, the woman he had been with for twenty years utterly trusted and loved him. She described him as the center of her world. Now, after therapy, he had decided to tell her the truth.
You know I am in two minds about FULL DISCLOSURE. Depending on how it is handled it can be a great thing. The truth, as we all know, tends to set you free-but at what price for the wife? For the children?
Is it possible to love and cherish a woman yet have a secret gay life? I have written on these pages that I believe that it is. That men think differently about monogamy than women. Judging by just how broken the man is he really loves his wife and finds his gay life unexplainable.
Of course we do not live in the 1950’s when society was less tolerant of homosexuality but we must not underestimate two things: firstly, the desire for a regular life of marriage and children with a woman and secondly that the love that develops between a man and a woman regardless of orientation is still real.
The gay lifestyle is not exactly my cup of tea, the bars and clubs, the endless hooking up-found in urban gay life. Gay men don’t do a very good job of advertising the better part of our lives. Anyhow that’s another story.
I have loved women during my life and whilst I loved them I was not hankering after men. The emotional commitment that I had was just as valid as that that I had with men.
Having sex with a man is far easier than telling a man ‘I love you’.
Sexuality and relationships are complicated and whilst some relationships do not fit the norm we should not discount the love that exists there.
My friend desperately loves his wife and children, their lives together have been rich and varied. Has he been more dishonest than a man who cheated on his wife with other woman?
Can a man still love his wife and have sexual relations with other men? My friend tells me that he can and does. Just like Darwin who believed both in God and evolution. When asked how this was possible to believe in God and his theory of evolution he replied ‘because I do’.
I rather like the Victorian model where gay men married and had children and had affairs with men on the side. This may not suit the out and prouds or the uber hetero but may suit some people an the middle of the Kinsey spectrum. We are not all one thing or the other until we say we are. We are not gay until we say we are. When we say that we love someone why should this not be believed just because our sexuality is more complicated or in the words of Derek Jarman less ‘common’.
I have loved many women and whilst I have always been honest about my interest in men they seemed to not care as long as they were or felt loved. Women have a huge capacity for love, for tolerance and forgiveness.
Eating cheese and pastrami with lashings of piccalilli smeared over the top. The inside of my mouth is burning. My lips are burning with desire. Not really. My lips are just bored. I am waiting for the mail to arrive so I can walk to bank and get on with the day.
