Tag: Gay

Categories
Queer

Not Gay. Queer. Thx.

Int 2

Occasional unfinished notes on becoming Queer.

There’s a difference between gay and queer.  Just like there’s a difference between chocolate and carob.  It looks the same, and used the same but tastes completely different.

Queer: sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary

The older I get… the queerer I become.

I’m not even sure what it means.  But I’m sure that gay no longer describes what I am.

I am not a married drone operator living with my husband and three surrogate children who secretly wishes he could vote republican… and did… once… because nobody was watching.

Nope.  I’m not that and I’m not headed in that direction.

I remain teachable.  My wagon remains unhitched.

Listen, I’ve got a secret I want to share with you.  One I don’t think I’m meant to be sharing.  A secret that might very well discredit my public shift away from gay toward queer as my description of choice.

My description of me.

I feel so let down, betrayed, dishonoured by gay men.  Yes… you.

One day in early December this year I will write the genesis of my change.

This intellectual menopause.  This change.  This perestroika.

Remember:  from the very first play, to the very last film I have sought to make entertainment that re-examined, revealed, remade the gay experience.

I have won endless awards doing so.

My crowning moment was being nominated for a British Academy Award.

Betrayed:

I was used to being told by straight people that if I wanted a career I should stop telling gay stories.

I was not expecting this:  Gay people told me the same thing.  In fact, they (with vehemence)  told anyone talented and gay to live the lifestyle but don’t expect to tell stories about it.

They said,  “You don’t want all your hard work… marginalized.”

They said, “You don’t want to miss out on the big bucks.  You don’t want to end up like Derek Jarman?  Do you?”

My heart sank.  That’s exactly what I wanted.  Back then.  When I relished telling people I was gay.

Derek Jarman.  He was the only film maker I thought worth aspiring too.  That’s how it was back then.  1985.

So, I found him.  Sought him out.

We met on The South Bank in the shadow of the Royal National Theatre.   Denys Lasdun‘s great, neo-brutalist monolith

We sat outside overlooking the Thames.  Gray clouds scudding over the greatest city in the whole world.

Gusts of cold grit blown over us.

He bought two cups of badly stewed tea served in thick Styrofoam cups.

I handed him the Caravaggio catalogue I had bought after seeing the show at the Met in NYC.

“How can I help?”  He asked.

I said, “I want to make a film.”  I was embarrassed.  I was star struck.

He said, “You will. But, you want my advice?  Remember this: Never take no for an answer.”

We talked about Tilda Swinton who nobody really knew back then.

He told me about a young tousled man he met in the street.  A builder.  The builder came up to him on Shaftesbury Avenue and said, “You’re that gay film maker, aren’t you.”

Well, he expected the worst.  It wouldn’t be the first time he had been beaten by a stranger but he looked him in the eye, straight in the eye and said, “Yes I am.”

Ten minutes later the beautiful young man was naked, towering over him.  Blowing a load.

That’s a queer story.  It’s not gay.  For a start, a gay wouldn’t have told the truth.

Secondly, a gay would have been too scared to take a big straight acting blue-collar worker back to his prissy apartment.

The gays.  God.  You were right.  It wasn’t worth it.  Making those plays, those movies.

Yet, I’m still here.  Sitting in my huge bed in California.

Good taste and tenacity will always make you enough money to enjoy a great life.  Where ever it may take you.

The gays betray each other.  They have no respect for themselves or each other.  Perhaps it was me?  Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations.  You know, mutual respect, support, honor?

I remain curious.  Even though I am sure of what I am.

P.S.  Tilda Swinton saw my film AKA at Sundance.

My agent threw a party for her and me in some crazy restaurant.

We talked a great deal about Derek that night.

He was right.  I never took no for an answer.

I begged and I borrowed and I stole to make a moment in my life that no one can ever take away from me.

Not even the gays.

Categories
Hollywood

Fame Whore

Power and prestige can be just as intoxicating for those who are powerful and prestigious as for those who seek them out…or chance upon them.

Infamy can have the same mesmerizing effect. Mass murderers, on their way to the electric chair, marry formally reasonable women.

The mother/father killler Menendez brothers, still get proposals of marriage from star struck suiters.

I have seen gown adults buckle before the very famous and the not so very famous.

The youth of Hollywood, like so many generations before them, have been levied.

Sexual expediency is a price silently adhered to any deal.

I don’t need to tell you Marilyn‘s story…do I?

It’s quaint! It’s so old fashioned…it’s happening today.

Somehow everybody knows that if you are going to go the distance in this town you better go the distance with whomever has the power in this town.

Many people masquerade as powerful and do very well thank you very much. Taking advantage of those who are want to trust them.

Gays are particularly vulnerable.

It’s best, they are told, for a life as an actor…to stay in the closet.

The closet protects and it taketh away.

To be a young, beautiful gay man arriving in Hollywood for the first time has a million, unforeseen drawbacks that seem, to the uninitiated, like wonderful gifts.

Noticed by rich and powerful men (when you have lived your life in relative obscurity) perverts the course of any fate you might believe in.

There are plenty of fate healers.

Look at him.

Picked from a legion of other boys. He feels special at last.

Boys who would not normally indulge in the crepe flesh of the elderly become their most ardent moisturizer.

Especially for a young gay man who may have been deeply closeted, living in the jet black shadow of toxic shame.

Never realizing his own beauty. His own worth.

Ignorant to the attention he receives as he walks innocently down the street.

Like Dorian Gray, shown for the first time how gorgeous he is…becomes immediately vain and arrogant.

Throws off his mantle of quiet humility and becomes addicted to the adoration of others.

Watching my gay brethren in Hollywood flocking to the shrine of the generously rewarded can be a sickening sight.

Young boys arrive uninvited from small towns in far off states armed with copies of US weekly.

Sitting in the Chateau Marmont hoping for a glimpse of Josh Hartnett or Lindsay Lohan.

Hoping to make everything better, validate and soothe away the pain of a miserable and isolated childhood.

Unless those boys are fabulously gifted, educated or similarly bequeathed the last of their youth is stolen from them by the unscrupulous.

Their talents go unnoticed. Their dreams unfulfilled, their virginity discarded to the most affluent.

Another notch in the bed post.

Get them drunk or worse.

People say, let them make their own mistakes.

It’s very hard to do.

So, the fame whores and the star fuckers line up…pig pink, shaved and waxed for the jovial grandees who take turns like so many commissioned shop assistants on the floor of the biggest meat market in the whole damned universe.

Categories
prison

Brothers, Sisters, Mothers and Fathers

Spent the greater part of yesterday removing redundant blog entries from this blog.  Bloody hell, what a waste of time.

It was frankly embarrassing re-reading all that shit.  All that fury, that indignation I had for him.  It was just so embittered and…not very well written.  Beware the curse of resentment!

From 11am-3pm I sat with a journalist discussing my ongoing legal story.  They are sending a photographer.  It’s a cover story.  The last time I had this much interest from the press I was making movies.  Now I am doing something for the greater good, I have been handed an oppertunity to help others and I am grasping hold of it.  Nothing will unseat me from doing the right thing.

I left something of myself in the jail. I left that Duncan who deserved no respect.

Do you understand that darling? Do you remember when I was serious, contained?  You found it so attractive?

Everything from my old life, pre jail has become irrelevant.  The artifice, the indulgence, the decadence…it was a worthless occupation.  Chasing infamy?  Even the places I used to visit daily are of no interest to me.  The people I know there, the people I knew…caught up in their own peculiar madness, their preoccupation with power and prestige.

I remind myself to be truthful, to be kind.

The people I have been meeting since leaving the jail, the activists, the lawyers, the human rights advocates…I am humbled by their brilliance, their focus, their dedication.

Lastly, as I was sitting with the fiercely intelligent man who interviewed me yesterday I remembered something about the jail that impressed me.  Something peculiar to the gay dorm, peculiar to that community of trans and gay men.

On the streets, elder trans women ‘adopt’ younger trans girls as their daughter.  These  relationships were strengthened in the dorm, references to ‘my mother’ or ‘my father’ baffled me.  At first.

Family connections emerged, not bound by blood but by commitment.   Young gay men needing advice, support, succor and council turning to those they respected.  Adopting one another as mother and daughter.  Father and son. Letting those about them know that familial ties now existed, that they were to be honored.

My son is fighting.  My daughter wants a dress. My mother has had bad news.  My father’s husband is being released.

As we ate together at night.  These ‘families’ helped each other practically:  feeding each other, sharing the loaves and the fishes.  Sharing the support, the love, the strength, the gossip.   That which may not have existed from real parents, from blood brothers, from those who we take for granted…from whom we were born.

Many young black men from Compton, Watts and Inglewood had spent their formative years co-opted into gangs.  The Bluds and the Crips.

Their coping skills would horrify you, you my dear readers…but kept them alive.  Murder, guns, retaliation, fighting to the death were common for most of the young black men I met.  Frequent.

On top of all that, against that barbaric backdrop they had to deal with coming out.

More of this later.

Categories
Rant

The Scarlet Empress

My 500th Blog!

Such delight and disdain it has caused.  Such heartache and joy!   Thanks readers.  Thanks.

Duncan x

There’s almost too much going on inside and outside of my head.

Firstly, the garden.  Every day for the past few weeks I have worked in the garden.  Pulling tons (literally) of weeds and leaves out of the flower beds.  Reclaiming the paths.  Defending the vegetables from the gophers and rabbits.

I have planted Datura and Hibiscus.   Salvia, basil, onions, beans and tomatoes.

A bumper crop of plums this year!

For the first time in 4 years I managed to get to them before the birds.

Have hooked up a pump to the spring water reservoir.  It’s located at the bottom of the garden, now watering parts of the estate I can’t usually justify irrigating with expensive, potable water.

The previous owner built the two huge tanks.  Until last week I just hadn’t gotten around to buying the small, inexpensive pump.  Absurd isn’t it?

Having this free supply of water means that I can clear part of the garden and lay turf which in any other situation would be immoral, irresponsible.

Everything in a tropical garden has spikes or thorns or needles.  My hands are cut to ribbons.  Robbie has been here twice this week helping me and his arms and legs, poor thing, are shredded too.

Dinner last night with Anna and Jeff at Nobu in Malibu.

Apparently I was mentioned in passing by Derek in the ‘A’ List last night.  I can’t imagine that I will escape lightly from this situation.  I am perfectly sure my posing as the ‘Mister Big’ will make me the laughing-stock of Gay New York.

Whatever.

The weather in Malibu is perfect.  Hot as hell in the sun but a delicious sea breeze blowing onshore.

The crows are hunting chicks.  They bombard the trees. Tiny dead chicks on the paths.  So sad.

I took the picture at the head of the post last weekend at the Piette’s.   Their house is soooo depressing.  Even though it’s located on the lake and the twins are living there now.  It’s so dark inside at night.  Gloomy.

You know what?  I should be getting on with something else.  I should be leaping all over my novel.  I should be writing the film.  You know what it’s about don’t you?

Two gay men want a baby but end up with an old man instead.

This was one of the videos Charlie and I shot when we were researching our film.

Trans Alexis, The Scarlet Empress, must be in her 80’s.  She was at Triangle House, a home for elderly gays and lesbians in Hollywood.  Getting old is a pain in the ass for everyone but elderly gays seem to find it particularly difficult.  Most of the men and women at Triangle House have endured homelessness.  Old age, as they say, is not for the faint hearted.

Lesbians, apparently, don’t seem to end up so isolated but gay men do.  Lesbians are often dialed into an extended family of other lesbians and are less ageist.

Anyway, I’ll write more about Alexis and our film which maybe should be a documentary.

I don’t know.

The elder gays we met were really quite wonderful.  The gay men we met who had surrogate children or were going through the surrogacy process were less wonderful.  Downright awful in fact.

Robby is on his way over to help me in the garden.

Is Toby right?  Do I live in the past?  Am I addicted to what was rather than what is or what could be?  Fuck.  Maybe he’s right?

Amy Winehouse is dead.  It comes as no surprise.  She was an out of control drug addict and alcoholic.  She dies alone.  She died an addict.  I am sorry for her family.  It is always the family that has to pick up the pieces and go on living.  Amy did not choose life.  She sneered at the prospect.  She thought she could get away with a dance with death.  She failed.

I will remember her like this:

Categories
art Rant

Suddenly Inspired…

…to write a film. But, guess what’s getting in the way? YOU GUESSED IT! The lieing twat of Westchester. That was something else he sneered at. My film making. “Oooh,” he chided, “It’s shot on tape.” Yeah, fuck face..shot on tape..went to Sundance nominated for a British Academy award. He really tried to undermine my confidence. Sneery cock whore that he is…

Ok, relapse! That’s what happens. I remember just how ‘ironic’ he is about anyone who tried to achieve anything..like kids or films. I wonder if he can communicate at all with the artists he is meant to represent when he is so desperate to be one himself.

He did make a sort of film. A high school parody. He thought it was HILARIOUS.

How will he ever encourage the best out of his clients? Unless he is getting fucked by them of course.

Wanna know something funny? He loved reading my blog when I was writing shit about other people. It’s a bit uncomfortable now tho isn’t it JB?

Hahhaha.

RENTER ALERT!!!

OK, yesterday, when I got back to the apartment in Hollywood (almost finished packing) there was a vicious note from Viken Douzdjian’s two-bit lawyer demanding his money back for the rental. Viken is a surgeon from Portland Oregon who rented the house for 7 people for $250 a night. He arrived and left immediately because the ‘TV was too small.’ and ‘There was a stain on the carpet.’ Let me remind you again Viken..that’s why it’s $250 a night rather $2, 500 a night like the guy next door or $25, 000 a night like the houses on the PCH. This surgeon from Portland told me to alter a cheque that he had misprinted then recalls the cheque! What a fucking twat. Then..get this..he tells me that he can’t stay in the house of a homosexual.

This surgeon better not be cutting you open if you are gay..cause he hates us gays!

Thank God I keep every email..including the one where he tells me to alter the cheque. Read the fucking contract dick-wad surgeon, homophobic, LIAR.

Viken Douzdjian is a homo hating, rental con-man who can’t seem to read the contract he signed. He joins the Renter’s From Hell Hall of SHAME.

Viken..let me introduce you to Irene Brown from Maud Place Hawaii and Dave Stewart from who gives a shit ville. Dave did the ‘we are Christians and can’t stay in your house’ bullshit.

“There’s PORNOGRAPHY in your house.”  they squealed like pigs after finding some funny postcards in a draw..without nudity I might add . Actually, I thought Dave was gay when I met him. My gaydar went off like an Amazonian dawn chorus. Mrs Dave probably put him through Christian gay-boy rehabilitation…so they could have those ugly kids.

Fuck Christians.

All of you.

Oh yeah, and when I spoke to Viken’s moronic lawyer I tried to make a point about Jews and Gays in the concentration camps and why homophobia should not be colluded with in the same way we have no truck with anti-Semitism.

He thought I was being an anti-semite..not realizing of course that JB is a Jew, my sponsor is a Jew..and so was my GRANDFATHER.

Fucking idiot.

I am in NYC. Alive..although maybe dying…here for fashion week. Hope I don’t bump into the lying fuck face.

Categories
Rehab

What a Waste

I always assume that anyone I meet is gay, the same way straight people assume (unless a flaming queen) every man they meet is straight.  Consequently most straight men I meet are perplexed at the sort of small talk I make with them.  Last week for instance someone mentioned that he was meeting his fiance and I said, “He’s a lucky guy to be marrying you.” This caused him to nearly drop his wine glass.  He spluttered nervously that he was straight.  “Oh!” I said as he dabbed at dribbled wine over his jacket.  “What a waste.”

Now, I am NOT the sort of man who thinks every man I meet is gay but I must always assume that he is until told otherwise.  It’s the only way these men are going to learn how to be inclusive.

Another funny example: two men having lunch with their small dog.  As they were leaving I asked them about their dog and mentioned how, in my opinion, a dog really improves a relationship…were they thinking about having children?  They looked increasingly horrified as they realised that I thought that they were a couple.  They said, “Oh, we’re not gay.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We’re straight.”

The reaction always amuses me.  Men are still insulted by the insinuation that they might be gay.   Pathetic.

Update on Irene the mad woman from Hawaii.  Last night she informed me that she had called the Lost Hills Police Department reporting me as a terrorist.  I am assuming because my father was Persian?  Anyway, so far Homeland Security have not interviewed me about this and I imagine that they won’t be any time soon.

Why doesn’t she just go to small claims court?

Anyway, she is reporting me to the IRS, the California Governor etc. etc.  To Irene I am a regular Bernie Madoff.

The bottom line:  even if I wanted to benevolently return the money she says is owed to her she has caused such internet havoc and destruction I simply can’t.  I am not going to.  She thinks that her internet attacks on me are somehow going to force my hand.  What she simply cannot comprehend is the following fact about me:  I do not care about my ‘reputation’.  As I mentioned to her last night during one of her frenzied email bombardments the worst has already been said about me, nothing that she says is either new or bothers me.

Finally, last night, her gay friend sent me an odious email mocking my cancer scare.   All for $800?  They want me dead for $800?

Great morning at therapy today.  Wonderful.  I am in very good spirits.  mainly because I don’t have a blood sucking fame whore at my tit sucking the life out of me.  Oh, it’s 4pm on the east coast, he is probably already stoned, on web cam showing off his only asset.

The most annoying thing about Jake is that before meeting him that cold January afternoon in the East Village I had a meeting with agent David Vigliano who was really interested in working with me.  Jake called him Vig the pig.

I have a GREAT idea.  Irene you should call him, perhaps he’ll offer you and your friend a book deal.

Never assume men are straight until they tell you categorically that they are.

It just isn’t worth it.