Not sad about Sebastian. Not sad about anything. Loads of messages from friends re. Sebastian. I had long chat with PH this morning about the trip home and how amazing it is that we survived at all.
I have been miserable about turning 50 in three weeks but better to be turning 50 than turning in my grave.
It was such a tonic chatting with my darling PH, she has always been there for me. Always. Anyway, that’s just the way I need to start my day with a bit of loving validation. Suddenly I feel like I can cope with ANYTHING.
Held here in sunny LA aspic. Suspended in solid jelly. I can see out and they can see in but I’m waiting for the jelly to melt around me.
Last night’s dinner with friends was delicious. We played a few games of backgammon after. When John realized he wasn’t going to beat me he ran off leaving his wife to try her luck. Nope, she didn’t win.
My diet means that I can wear clothes I have not worn for a few years. Last night I wore a pair of crisply pressed silk Prada pants and my Comme cardi. Lovely.
From the 26th floor I stared out over LA as dusk fell. The car lights on Sunset Blvd snaking for miles East, white and red. A huge black cloud from the west hastening the night.
Really making an effort to get out of the house. I am not sitting indoors for 12 days. Interminably long days. Perhaps I should just take the car and drive across the USA? Actually, that isn’t such a bad idea.
I could stop off in Nashville and see Joan! How about it Joan?
Very exciting European prospects ahead. I am particularly looking forward to seeing my friends and walking the streets. July is always such a glorious month in London. Did I tell you that I ran into Orlando Bloom at breakfast the other day? Now, he is a sweetheart. Sat next to Alanis Morrisette at Cholada on PCH. That’s the extent of my starry life here in LA.
Sebastian Horsley my dear friend this past twenty five years has been found dead in his Soho apartment. Heroin overdose. Good God. How many more friends will I lose this year to the disease of addiction?
He struggled so hard to stay clean and sober. Endlessly failing, endlessly trying again. He had the sweetest soul.
Too many friends found dead on their own. A ghastly yet familiar story.
The truth is, he should have died years ago. He cheated death a million times. I will miss him but somehow this particular ending for Sebastian was inevitable.
From an earlier post:
Sebastian lives on Meard Street in Soho. On his front door are the words, THIS IS NOT A BROTHAL, THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES HERE which is total lie. There are always prostitutes there..in Sebastian’s bed.
Recently, I took a genuinely normal boy to meet Sebastian-my very sweet friend Chris Parker the TV actor from Eastenders. Chris is utterly charming. Previously I had taken him to The Colony in an attempt to delight him with a glimpse of an alternative London. My experiment failed. Chris thought that the Colony, the great beating bohemian heart of London was horrible. He didn’t like it. He looked scared. He was not interested in the art or the characters dressed in huge jewels or zoot suits. Those people in that tiny room shocked him, he was unaware of the history of that room. In that room the greatest art dramas had been played out, that Francis Bacon held court there, destroyed the confidence of his boyfriend publicly in that room. Go see the film: Love is the Devil if you want to know more about The Colony.
So, Chris and I are shopping in John Pearse on Meard Street. I bought a pink linen shirt. You know who John is? He made The Sargent Pepper uniforms for the Beatles. John owned a shop on the Kings Road called Granny Takes a Trip in the 1960′s. As we were on the same street, on the spur of the moment I wickedly decided to introduce cautious Chris to Sebastian. Chris is 5’10″. When Chris met Sebastian, 6’5″ tall wearing a lurid cerise tie, his raven black hair swept into a huge bouffant in his rooms in Soho, he was struck dumb.
Chris looked at the pictures of the crucifixion, the limbless woman and the sharks. He was visibly distressed when he saw the nails that been nailed into Sebastian’s hands during the crucifixion. He was appalled when I told him that Sebastian had fallen off the cross. Chris noticed the gun by Sebastian’s bed. “What is that for? Is it real? Why do you have it by your bed?” Sebastian, picking it up to show us the real bullets said, “I don’t believe in unprotected sex.”
In his own words:
“When I was young I thought the recipe for happiness was devastating good looks, a blazing talent and a colossal income. I was right. As for love? The rich think that the most important thing in life is love. The poor know it is money. It is the only thing poor people do know. Given that money is the root of all evil, they should be very virtuous. But they’re not. No, they just moan, groan and drone, looking for a loan. Why don’t they just get rid of such luxuries as food, clothing and shelter, and give us all some peace? Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessities. Fancy a fuck?”
Whitstable, that’s where we grew up. The High Street, a shingle beach, abandoned oyster beds, abandoned boat yards.
I knew I wanted to make something. I never knew quite what. Writing, knitting, print-making, drawing, theatre, acting, fashion. Good… but never good enough. Wanting to be included but unwilling to participate. Confident to be part of what was going on but seldom sure. Always there, never present.
Had I been allowed, as planned, to go to St Martin’s College of Art to study fashion I would have become a fashion designer. I still have note books crammed with crude fashion drawings and swatches of hideous fabric made when I was 8 years old. Each ‘season’ I would design a new collection and between ‘collections’ I would write and illustrate articles about the history of fashion.
An avid fashion commentator who had unwelcome, prepubescent opinions about everything. My damning critique of Princess Anne’s ‘boring’ ivory duchess satin wedding dress in 1973 irritated my short-tempered, royalist Grandmother. “Look at those ghastly sleeves…”
I was an industrious child. At boarding school I excelled.
When I wasn’t busily designing imaginary runway collections I worked hard remaking my life, a life I could control. A life reimagined included: a 30 page illustrated story about a happy family of mice. A precocious teenager at boarding school I spent months writing and rewriting rambling plays about unrequited love with other boys.
Theatre! I must make theatre. The lights, the tension, the smell of the theatre. The warmth and silence of the audience, laughter erupting around me, muffled crying from the red velvet stalls.
Oddly, I had absolutely no great passion for film or television. Of course, I had seen many films but it wasn’t a world that piqued my interest. I had a fondness for black and white Hollywood films from the 1940’s (particularly musicals) that I would either watch on the television on my own or walk up Whitstable High Street to the cavernous Oxford Cinema.
I was inspired. Stealing an idea for my ‘new collection’, a sleeve or muff. I watched the credits roll: costume designer Edith Head… Funny Face. Adrian, who designed the costumes for The Wizard of Oz.
I’m 12 years old. I discover Marilyn Monroe without ever knowing she is already an established gay icon. The following year I insist that my parents buy me Norman Mailer’s illustrated biography for Christmas.
Theatre and fashion people referenced film but nobody I knew would ever have thought about making one.
The years after I left Shotton Hall School in 1976, before I went to prison in 1983 were culturally the richest of my life. I scraped into Medway College of Art and Design with one ‘O’ level. I befriended punk rocker Billy Childish. I learned how to etch and screen print and draw. Punk was determining music fashion and graphics but scarcely impacted the institutionalized, established, sewn up world of British contemporary art. Britain would have to wait until 1989 until Michael Clark, Tilda Swinton and Leigh Bowery performed in the Anthony d’Offay Gallery.
Whilst at Medway, I saw a very ordinary man wearing a badly cut suit his tie askew commuting from London to Thanet holding a copy of The Sex Pistol‘s single God Save The Queen and nearly fainted in fear. I was wearing a pair of my mother’s bottle green woolen tights. I wonder what he must have thought about me? He alighted at Rainham.
Unable to study fashion at St Martin’s College as my garrulous stepfather refused to let me. I had to get a job. The job I was offered, selling clothes at Yves Saint Laurent on Bond Street, London became the beginning of what would turn out to be a great, although misguided, adventure. An adventure that would shape the rest of my life.
I met Lady Clare Rendlesham and within a few months I was in Paris pretending to be her son.
Clare Rendlesham and others
Along with changing my identity, in Paris I threw myself head long into the very accommodating worlds of fashion, performance art and theatre.
The land of sublime artifice.
During the pret-a-porter I would run with my friends through the streets of Paris from show to show. Although my time in Paris seems less, in retrospect, about theatre and more about fashion and art, I was introduced to Robert Wilson and members of his company, traveled to Holland to see Lucinda Childs in Dance with music by Phillip Glass and travelled more to see beautiful work by Pina Bausch.
Pina Bausch died this year.
I was one of the first people in Paris to wear a Walkman. I think I may still own that original item. Some rich friend of a rich friend left it at my place. He had bought it from Tokyo where he’d been modeling and never asked for it back. Suddenly I had my very own soundtrack. My life scored by Super Tramp. The optimistic opening bars of Take The Long Way Home soaring over the controversial rebuilding of Les Halles that seems only recently to have settled into its surroundings. Music altered my perception of where I was and how I experienced it. Paris was never so beautiful.
It was during this time in 1978, as a willowy teenager, I chanced upon Fred Hughes at John Jermyn’s Rue de Bellechasse home. That beautifully, wonderfully decorated house… rococo monkeys fucking on the drawing-room walls painted by Harry Gromelion and acres of Fortuny silk.
Fred had been, the year I met him, diagnosed with MS and had become nihilistic and surly.
“When Fred got sick, he had to go to the American Hospital, and I decorated his room. I went to visit him, and brought pictures he liked, from his house and flowers…” Julian Schnabel
Fred, so reviled, cut a sad and lonely path through his own life ending up incapacitated and angry. At the end, surrounded in his Lexington Avenue home by the most beautiful things, nothing could placate him. His terrible Texan mother moved in to help, firing his loyal assistant. We never saw him again.
When I met Fred he had slicked back black hair and tailored suits, he lived in an apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi and was, to a provincial teenager, incredibly glamorous… a true dandy.
“It was I who found Fred Hughes his Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where Warhol would stay.” Pierre Berger
He liked me because he thought I was a British aristocrat. He was a terrible snob. Later, when he knew the truth, he would laugh and mock the moment we met and feign outrage. He only ever called me Anthony.
Fred took me to New York, bought me Vetiver and appropriate underwear, gave me drugs at Studio 54, lent me shirts that belonged to Farouk, the last King of Egypt. He wrapped me up in linen sheets and laughed at my jokes. Fred introduced me to Yves St-Laurent and his muse LouLou de la Falaise, Baron Eric De Rothschild, flame haired owner of Egoiste magazine Nicole Wisniak. I sat entranced by these people. Wearing clothes Fred had bought for me, a brand new name. Sloughing off the past… a past for which I had no need.
Perhaps we understood each other because we had both abandoned our past for a far more thrilling present. After his death he was described as ‘a consummate liar, social climber, and a bespoke SOB who grew to total ghoulishness because of his connection to Andy Warhol.’
Isn’t everyone a social climber of some kind… and why the hell not? It’s galling to have Fred’s memory so maligned. From what I saw he managed or rather… baby sat Andy Warhol, pulling him out of relative poverty, protecting him from the unworthiest.
Was that a lie? I really don’t have a clue. As a teenager I thought he was just swell.
It is so sad to see him like this, stricken with MS:
This photograph is amusing. Tim Hunt, Princess Anne of Bavaria, Me and Alexis de Toqueville at Anne’s apartment in Paris. Like so many beautiful young men from that time, Alexis would die of AIDS. Hid family refused to acknowledge his life as a gay man and his death as a gay man.
Samia Saouma’s Gallery (another social hub as great galleries tend to be) I was introduced to the work of The Baron de Meyer, Man Ray and Joseph Kosuth. I followed the crowd and applauded the sparse and mannered work of Robert Wilson. We saw I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating and Death Destruction and Detroit.
In Paris I learned about artists and their power and prestige. Most of these men and women, invited to Europe during the late 70’s early 80’s, were American. Flooding the world with new ideas; polemical and challenging.
What happened to the arts? Even though British theatre seems to have maintained it’s edge, British art has become increasingly bland and decorative. Says nothing of the war or the bloody peace.
Paris was just how Paris is meant to be: an education for a young man.
Before we leave Paris there was one sublime moment. It was a moment. We all need them. Romantic. I had been invited to the house of some elderly Duke. On an orange velvet wall hung a huge sunset by Turner. Surrounded by furniture, a light supper served in front of it. This is how art should be enjoyed. Domestically.
Turner
Returning to England I was given the telephone number of Erica Bolton by The Princess Anne of Bavaria. I met Erica at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London, where she worked as a publicist. My great love affair with the theatre began in earnest.
David Gothard Riverside Studios
Erica Bolton, in turn, introduced me to a community of successful writers and directors. Men and women who inspired me to make my own theatre, my own films, my own art.
I listened and learned.
Erica sneaks me into the theatre to see Kantor’s sold out show Wielopole, Wielopole. I sit in the Gods looking down at syphilitic soldiers marching, wax figures strapped to the living, a monochrome set with Kantor in the middle of it all tweaking his memories and watching sadly as the dead come back to life.
It was triumphant, breathtaking theatre and in sharp contrast to the very British, academic work of Peter Gill (Cherry Orchard) who I met that year (1978) and his then assistant David Levaux the now hugely respected Broadway director.
There were so many exciting people to hang out with at The Riverside like the precocious Hanif Kureishi fresh from his triumphant stint at The Royal Court.
Pioneering David Gothard, the artistic director, the genius at the very heart of the Riverside Studios. Responsible for bringing Tadeusz Kantor, Miro, Shuji Tereyama and many others not only to Hammersmith but to the UK. Night after night we sat in the canteen drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I loved every moment.
In 1979 I made my way to Paris to see Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord. To Paris by boat and train to see Brook’s Conference of the Birds. The raw brick walls and magnificent arches quite unlike any other performance space. I can’t remember where I stayed that night. I was in heaven. I remember the Persian rugs on the floor, the chirping of the cast as they imitated different birds..a chorus… the dawn chorus.
I wanted to make theatre so badly. When I finally got around to it I made just one good work The Host. The other works (as it turned out) a preamble for my later film making and really not that good.
In 1981 I moved into a small flat in Furlong Road, Islington. The home of director Michael Darlow. The flat came with a job: nanny to their wayward 13-year-old adopted son. Wandering the streets I discovered the derelict Almeida Theatre where I would end up having my 22nd Birthday thrown by designer Scott Crolla. Furniture Designer Tom Dixon was our doorman. William Burroughs came.
‘Come Dressed at Duncan Roy’ the invitation demanded.
Here are Kadir Guirey and Tom Dixon in their band Funkapolitan…
The Almeida Theatre, bought and renovated (Bouffe de Nord style) by Lebanese born Pierre Audi. I managed, by chance, to witness the birth of an institution. Even when derelict, Pierre used the space as a theatre. Amongst many, early notable Almeida productions I saw A Dybbuk For Two People with Bruce Myers and in 1982, at Saint James’s Church, Chillingworth Road at the Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music, John Cage at 70. Stunning.
Early 1983 I was arrested and imprisoned for running up a huge bill on my credit card. I spent the next ten months starved of theatre and art but found another altogether unexpected beauty.
I was 23. Prison, as I have said before, was beautiful.
People like Erica bid their adieu and I would never really see them again.
1983, months after I left Wormwood Scrubbs Prison I answered an advertisement in Time Out Magazine. Neil Bartlett was looking for performers to open his show PORNOGRAPHY, a Spectacle at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was a gruelling process, one I found particularly hard to get to grips with. Acting, as you may know, requires the performer to be real and at this time in my life I really had no idea how to do that at all.
As with my appearance in the ‘A’ list thirty years later, people mocked my decision to be in a gay play about sex and sexuality. Life is for the experience… isn’t it? One grand adventure after another.
Theatre
Pornography: A Spectacle. 1983/84 Actor
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 6 city UK tour, Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto, Canada
Devised with Ivan Cartwright, Neil Bartlett and Robin Whitmore
Robin, Ivan and Duncan in ‘Pornography, a Spectacle’
“Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert
The Critic by Sheridan: 1984 Actor – Mr. Puff
Edinburgh Festival
The Host: 1987 Writer/Director
Institute of Contemporary Art London and National Review of Live Art Glasgow with Georgia Byng and Tatiana Strauss
October Gallery
Bad Baby: 1989 Writer/Director
The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent, Hen and Chickens Theatre, Islington North London
Using a cast of local Kent performers this play examined issues of child abuse using Beatrix Campbell’s Unofficial Secrets as the basis of the text.
Marrianne Fearnside in Bad Baby
The Baron in the Trees: 1990 Writer/Director
Adapted from the Italo Calvino novel of the same name for The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent
Copper’s Bottom: 1991 Writer/Director
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, starring Aiden Shaw
Call me Susan: 1993 Co-writer
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Festival Fringe;
Call Me Susan explored issues surrounding prostitution across Europe. A dramatized discussion between two prostitutes interspersed with real-life recorded testimonies and pictures of prostitutes working in six European cities.
Oscar Wilde enjoyed the extravagant promises of the Victorian Age, capturing the imagination of London’s aesthetic elite. However, beyond the enlightened few, everything about the man provoked consternation to the prudish, hypocritical Victorians—from the green carnation in his buttonhole to his sensational novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Like his suits, Wilde, a tireless self-promoter and purveyor of the unforgettable bon mot, was exquisitely tailored. While young, he was best dressed in bold plaid, plus fours, starched shirts with high, tight collars or gabardine suits cut short above the hip. Wilde traded his own slender, youthful visage (French
pleated hair and Cupid lips) for a bloated middle age rife with extravagant capes and voluminous fur-lined coats.
In his revisionist biography of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, Neil Bartlett describes how Wilde became a huge man with a penchant for young, willowy boys. He was an intriguing mass of contradictions: The love letters he sent to his wife, Constance, are as beautiful as the letters he sent to the dark-hearted “Bosie,” his lover. The innocent stories he wrote for his beloved children were a counterpoint to the pornographic tales he created from his forays into London’s dank underworld.
The pornography attributed to Wilde in the British Library, under the pseudonym “Teleny,” reveals his sado-pedophilic fantasies. Young boys figure highly in these violent, disturbing texts. The virginal youths are deflowered by older, cruel men, their innocence torn from them.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is the reworking of these same themes that lead Wilde to his pessimistic and wholly modern conclusions about our shared horror of the loss of youth and how we might reclaim it.
When casting for a perfect Dorian, I was not interested in hiring a great beauty, but rather, a young boy. After all, beauty is subjective, youth indisputable.
For the movie’s Dorian Gray, it was imperative that our actor, David Gallagher, look effortlessly chic. David is very much the stick-thin look of right now and Dior Homme (as reinvented by our costume designer, Hedi Slimane). Dressing the literary youth icon of our age was a perfect solution for us and Dior: Slimane set his homoerotic boy-man aesthetic against the new Puritanism of American mainstream culture.
It is Lord Henry Wotton who appeals to the youthful Dorian Gray and speaks for the moisturized 40-plus generation, when he says to Dorian: “I wish that I could change places with you. To get back my youth; I’d do anything in the world. You are the type that the age is searching for and is afraid that it has already found. The world has always worshipped you—and it always will.”
If Wilde’s sensational sodomy trial had happened today, would the acclaimed wit have ended up in prison? Given that we find it hard to throw celebrities in jail, perhaps not. But Wilde’s predilection for sex with underage boys? I am sure that his hard drive would have been littered with unsavory images of children.
Once in prison, Wilde was given a thin gray cotton shirt and pants. Issey Miyake—or Kim Jong Il—might have gotten a kick out of this minimal Bauhaus look, but Wilde loathed it and woefully described his prison uniform in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A couple of years later, he was dead. (“It’s either me or the wallpaper.”) But as hard as I look, I cannot discover what he was buried in. Except, of course, shame.
This article was edited by Black Book for whom the piece was originally written. It has been pointed out to me that Hedi lent us the clothes for Dorian rather than designing them for the film. I have also been asked what happened to the film. How did it do? Well, in my own estimation it did OK. It closed the London Lesbian and Gay film Festival, opened the Miami G&L film festival and opened the New York G&L film festival amongst others. It had a small life and then vanished.
The day started out badly and after getting a great deal better ended with a bang…quite literally.
A friend called me a ‘drama queen’ after reading this morning’s blog. Thanks friend. The fact is: I was sick with a migraine, the first real one I had ever had. Nausea, blinding headache and dizziness. Silly me, I decided the best way to solve that particular problem (after writing my blog) was to drive 30 miles to Gold’s Gym and work out with my friend David. Bad idea. Hillary met me after the gym to eat lunch at the French Market in Venice. Bad idea. My reasoning was that if I could just behave as normal everything would get better.
I am sure that my migraine was actually a combination of stress, high blood pressure and depression. It followed soon after some particularly loaded conversations. After I posted my blog the comments came thick and fast. You guys were all so sweet to support and love me. The reason I write this blog? Because you are all there to read it. To understand, to reach out, to condone and condemn in equal measures.
After lunch I went back to bed and slept deeply. The phone woke me three hours later… my friends from England arrived in LA but decided to stay elsewhere. I can’t say I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t in any mood for 10 days sharing my life with English people. Laying in bed feeling so sick, the bathroom floor unwashed.
Woke up to an email from a disgruntled Malibu renter and his blousey girlfriend/fuck buddy. I knew that we would have some sort of disagreement about the return of the damage deposit. When he left the house he left it in a terrible state: broken coffee pot and coffee cups, 5 huge red wine stains on the carpet. Thankfully Jerome was with me when I checked over the house and the moron was forced to admit what he had done.
They were the sorts of tenants who couldn’t do anything for themselves and were constantly summoning me to look at things they could have fixed… like the stove top they locked by accident. As usual it is the cheap skate tenants who nickel and dime that seem to cause the most problems. On the first occasion I was asked to go to the house the tenant was so drunk he couldn’t stand up. I should have chucked him and his lady friend out there and then. I was embarrassed for him.
When they, rather amazingly, asked to come back to the house I made it so prohibitively expensive… I knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it. The letter I received from them was littered with quotes from this blog. Well, blog on this bitch! I was in no mood to deal with bullshit, no mood to be lied to or manipulated and certainly no mood to deal with a woman (not on the contract) the renter had confided in me he couldn’t wait to see the back of.
My anger toward these nasty, cheap people had the affect of shaking my headache and forcing me out of the house.
I walked briskly down Sunset. I had my hair buzzed and beard trimmed at a barbers on Ivar and began looking for appropriate BEAR WEAR as I now intend, whilst I am in NYC, to attend the Urban Bear Weekend which will be fun-exploiting my tiny celebrity for a bunch of hairy bears and their bear cub boy toys. A friend of mine suggested the Urban Bear idea as a kind of joke but it looks like a great deal of fun. This may be my future!
Now all I need is a cub to drag around by the belt loop.
Anyway, by the time I got home it was time to get dressed and head to WeHo for dinner with Spencer my very intelligentBritish friend. Over beef burgers and fries trying to understand the cultural DNA of the average citizen of the USA. My new theory? That the ‘puritan chromosome’ is not nearly as dominant or as influential in the American genome than the ‘wild-frontier chromosome’. That the majority of people who live in the USA came from simple European ancestors who, for their freedom, had to combat rattle snakes, bears, hostile climate, native Americans as well as their brutal own. The threat, real or imagined was always there.
Suspicious and mistrusting by nature these people believe that government is good for only two things PRISONS and THE MILITARY. White settlers distrust Obama, discrediting his empathy.
After dinner Spencer and I wandered around WeHo and met a couple of handsome cops. Handsome but dull. We wandered aimlessly back to the car and outside the Abbey some young man threw a can of vile smelling alcohol at me from a yellow school bus yelling homophobic rhetoric. The full can hit me squarely in the chest. I can still feel where it hit me on the sternum. At first in shock, I grew increasingly angry, then I buried the anger under a seething fury, quietly determined that ‘they’ can’t hurt me, that they can’t hurt me any more.
‘Drama Queen’ that I am I sank into a pit of man hating quick sand. I hated the entire crew of my Wednesday morning therapy meeting with their frat house homophobia, their cheating ways co-signed by a dodgy ‘therapist’. These men miserably attempt to patch up their sham marriages to avoid alimony and see their kids whilst yearning after mistresses, transexuals and sophomoric freedoms.
Nothing. Nothing to say, write or comment on. In my own head. Do you know that feeling? When life is so overwhelming? I could not sleep last night. Perhaps it was the cheese again. Must stop eating cheese before bedtime.
It is easy to look over ones life and just remember the things one has lost rather than what one has found.
I am going to New York this weekend. Staying on 10th street again. Comfortable.
It seems like for the past few months I have made one bad decision after another. If only I could tear myself away from the self-loathing. To love myself enough to give the man I see occasionally in the mirror..a break. Do you think that is possible?
I just made a huge pot of black coffee and drank it all. Friends arriving from London today. Dinner with Toby last night. Saw Please Give with Katherine Keener. It was a lovely film. Very New York, very sad. I shed a tear at the end.
Did I ever tell you that for a short time I was friendly with Katherine Keener? She has a lovely house in Santa Monica, beautifully decorated with really well-chosen furniture. She has the most amazing taste.
I tell you what is happening in my head. I feel as if I am in some terrible competition. A competition that I can never win because it’s not my game. I am not like ‘them’ so I can’t win. I feel very unsafe. Not like I was going to die because that would be easy. To know for sure the time and place of ones own death.
Unsafe, because I want something so badly knowing that it can never ever happen. That something is not a person or a thing or a place but the peace of mind that has eluded me for so long. I have learned that nothing can fix me. Nothing can make it better. Maybe a more complete relationship with God but to have that relationship with God I must remove the lead cap I am wearing that keeps me in the dark.
I sat in a room yesterday morning with 70 men who all looked so fucking miserable. Every man in there just trying to make sense of what and who he was. today, I have no idea what the answer is.
To wake up with no answers is a terrible thing.
The little dog is sleeping. He is waiting for me to pull on my pants and take him for a long walk. I used to think that if I could just keep on going, keep the momentum then everything would be ok but I have nothing to look forward to right now.
I thought about Whitstable today. I miss you so much! The shallow lazy sea, the honey coloured shingle, buying espresso from Dave’s deli, walking the little dog on Duncan Downs. I wondered, like I do occasionally, if I could ever live there again.
Part of me wants to be there but most of me is perfectly as ease with where I am right now.
If I went back what would I be returning to?
It’s a great place to visit but maybe it’s never going to be my home. Maybe it never was.
Walking to Mayfair. Sweet-scented drawing rooms, thick carpet and polished silver. Oh God. I know why I am thinking about this! I am dreading being left on my own on Tuesday evening when the man/boy leaves for Italy.
I want to travel too! Paris, Sydney, Whitstable or New York where do I go next? If I go what am I running away from? I’ll tell you what: a great, gaping God shaped hole.
18th Century boy/man was up until 2.30 last night pottering around, tidying, making a mother’s day card and finally fell into bed exhausted. We had dinner at Axe on Abbott Kinney. I ate the farmer’s plate with prosciutto. This morning we toured the Santa Monica Farmers Market and bought fresh almonds and pale pink hydrangea and delicate budded peonies.
He reminds me of Patrick Kinmonth, the same sensibilities and creativity. He is so tall and elegant, so curious about everything, which can all at once excite and tire. It is good to live again with someone on my arm that has such an extraordinary zest for life. He wants me to teach him how to sew. I would love to do that, pass on a few of the many skills I have that were meant for some unborn child in an imaginary family.
I wish that I hadn’t killed the snake but I was scared that it would bite the little dog then where would I be? John watched the video of me killing it and looked delighted at the very manliness of my snake murder. I should have been more proud but I wasn’t. I value life, even the life of a dangerous snake or the rat I killed the previous week.
Josh, my sober A gay friend and I toured Barney’s yesterday. Trying on expensive clothing neither of us would ever buy. Bumped into a friend of Charlies who was wearing cut off denim shorts, a sleeveless tee, a man bag and Jackie O sunglasses. What a fucking STATE. Also bumped into my friend Jody who has recently had two surrogate daughters-the $250,000 a pop kind. I asked, like I would my straight friends, if he is signing them up for pre-school. He spat back that he had no intention of sending them to pre-school as their nanny had them on the Einstein system for infant learning. He said that he wanted to control who came into their lives as he had no intention of letting them socialize with other kids as they might pick up bad habits. Now tell me if that doesn’t sound unhealthy? Child as project. Lot’s of my gay friends have chosen this route when they become parents. However, this is not peculiar to gay men, I know straight parents who do this too. In my opinion it can only lead to disappointment and resentment.
I thought about my mother and where she might be this overcast mother’s day. I wondered if my brothers had brought her flowers or sent her a card. I did not. Then I thought about Kristian’s mother who seems to loathe the idea of his friends getting together to celebrate his life and I wondered how she could be so bitter about this simple act of remembrance?
I pay scant regard to my creative life. My desire to create comes in huge waves that crash inconsequentially and leave me feeling tired and unfinished. Why can’t I seem to finish anything? My novel remains unfinished, my film too-as for everything else? I don’t know.
As his departure looms so do the morbid thoughts.
I find myself thinking about the NYC man and grieve for what was and what is lost, broken or as dead as the headless rattlesnake. I am all at once in celebration for what I have and desolation for what was and how that affected me. Man/Boy asked if I was on the rebound last night which I strenuously denied. But, of course, there is some truth to his accusation. John cautioned me yesterday about euphoric recall, the yearning for an acting out partner rather than the fully fledged, present young man who I now have.
I have no reason or right to have wanted more from NYC man. As I have said before I was an inconsequential blip in his life. It’s hard to own that. Yet, in a way, it has made me a stronger man for what I have now. I look at this new man and love him and care about him with new eyes. The eyes of a man who has loved and lost but is lucky to have loved at all.
As for my sobriety, I am sober! I have that to be grateful for. Gratitude is key!
Have to write for the Good Men Project. I am going to write about how to be a man when other men don’t recognize the sort of man you were born to be: A quest for validation.
I need something from you. I need closure. Don’t take this the wrong way. Moving at the wrong pace. I love you but…
You told me that you could not give me what I wanted-but I think you misjudged what I wanted. What I wanted more than anything was that we could do all the things we said we wanted to do when we weren’t in a position to do them. We had some really great ideas about what it meant to be together, time together, excitement together, exploration together.
You said you would fly to see me if only you could, then when you could..you couldn’t.
You may have become less free rather than more free, less brave rather than more brave and complain all the time about your lot without ever taking action to improve it. Darling Lamb Head: get a job you love and a place to live and make yourself available. Stop wallowing in self-pity and false promises. How long is this charade going to last where you pretend not to be having a life because you don’t want to be found out?
I am afraid of the huge difference between us. You see, I am not scared of all that life has to offer! When I was your age, at the merest hint of an invitation I would have been on that plane, that boat, that train, I would have been in Paris and London and Rome! You put all the reasons why NOT to before the reasons why you should.
If it had been me I would have come home triumphant! Armed with stories I would have told my grandchildren.
Darling, I need you to not call me when you are lonely and make cooing noises that just makes me love you all over again. I need you to set me free from the hope that we could ever be anything other than friends. If that!
It simply isn’t fair or considerate-in fact it is down right cruel because I cannot call you when I am feeling lonely not least because you are not very good at being compassionate. I don’t think we should see each other at all until we have got ourselves settled with other people.
I am going to meet this guy tomorrow and I am going to take him to dinner and then I am going to ask him if he will come to Paris with me. You had your chance and all you could say like a willful, petulant child is NO!
I think we really did exhaust things this time. We really may have pushed the right button. Please, please lets hope we did.
So, as a delicious post script to the man I loved:
You know, the days we spent in NYC together were some of the best I ever spent with anyone..ever. Lamb Head, you never let me write about that. You kept me silent. I wasn’t allowed to describe the joy, the love and the kindness. Never allowed to describe our tender kisses just in case it hurt other people. Our perfect moments sullied by your fear of what others might think. Like holding hands in the street. I can’t hold your hand in the street because I can’t bear the thought of the disapproving glances. No wonder your mother thinks so badly of me because I never get to write the beautiful things..because you told me not to. So, I want you to know that we had beautiful time. I had a beautiful time with your son. That he is capable of great love. He knows how to love a man. He knows how to make a man happy.
Just as it is meant to be.
The last thing he said this evening was that he didn’t make the huge changes in his life to be with me but that, I’m afraid, is the lie he tells himself. He left the other for a relationship with men, not this man, not me, but with men and we must honour him for that, for it was his bravest hour.
We are tired of the conflict, tired of the unresolved feelings that causes so much distress on this roiling sea of emotion. We must say goodbye now-help me. Help me say goodbye.
On my way back to the United Kingdom. Even though it is to deal with very bad situation at home. Includes a long journey so I can travel with the little dog: New York, Paris, Calais, Dover, Whitstable! One month before I leave-will arrive there May 30th. I am excited. I will stay there for three months-one of the many benefits of not having a career!
Anyway, a great deal to sort out. Nothing much to write or worry about today.
An odd and contradictory day began with my Saturday morning breakfast buddies. They were all so fractious! I ate a three cheese pizza with prosciutto. It was delicious.
The night before was spent chatting with the other who was drunk and emotional. Today I invited him to come with me to London but the ‘pressure’ was just too much. Apparently it is hard to just be friends when we are still awash with uncharted feelings.
The truth is I am just not as involved as I was. I am ACTIVELY seeking other men to fall in love with. An invitation is an invitation and that’s that. Whereas before I would find his indifference and hesitation devastating asking many times if he would change his mind-this time there will be no repeat invitation.
Jennie moved out of her apartment here in Hollywood and in with her west side boyfriend.
I received some bad, bad news yesterday whilst on my way home from Malibu and it took a whole 24 hours to process what to do next-waiting for the next intuitive thought. Bad news bottom line: the little dog and I will be making our way to London and Paris for longer than I expected. Perhaps for three months. Perhaps it means making my movie there rather than here. Perhaps it’s all for the best. Anyway, I can’t write the detail because the devil is in the detail.
Today, I attended two fundraisers and was asked on two dates. I declined-kindly declined.
I discovered that my heart was still taken by the attentions of folk who live elsewhere and even though I have no intention of rekindling any sort of relationship or entertaining the idea of a relationship ever again with the folk who live elsewhere (and even though I am actively searching to have a relationship with a man who might live on my very street) it would be unfair to anyone who is interested in me to get involved whilst there are unresolved and deeply held complex feelings.
Everyone is a little bit discombobulated at the moment. A li’l bit prone to rudeness. A fat red haired woman trod on the little dog with such force that he screamed and emptied his anal glands all over a very posh shop.
I had a lovely dinner with Jane in WeHo then wandered home, throngs of young people with big smiles on their faces weaving up Sunset Boulevard.
