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Monkton Wyld to Whitstable

Dear Stephen,

It’s been months since we last spoke.  My harried exit from the USA only made our separation more dramatic.  Those last fraught days before Abby drove me over the border.  I had no time to explain, no time to say goodbye.  Of course, I saw your brother in Seville but he provided scant consolation.  I think about you often… and why not?   We saw each other frequently.  In lieu of our conversations I imagined your first experience of burning man.  I wonder with a wry, affectionate grin your house filling with even more bits and pieces. 

Toward the end of my time in the USA I think you knew just how miserable, trapped and disappointed I had become.  Increasingly overwhelmed by my hatred for almost everyone except you.  I wanted you to know just how relaxed I am here.  It’s not Nirvana but I can travel, I can speak English to those who understand and most of all?  The problems I encounter here I can deal with more than adequately.  I would rather the English disappoint me than strangers from another shore. 

The gays here do not confuse me with some character they’ve seen on TV.  And even tho I might say I don’t want to fall in love… it’s maybe because I don’t dare love possible.

I’ve no idea if we will ever meet again.  If we have anything more to say to each other but I wanted you to know how grateful I was.  We had a blast. I wanted you to know that I love you very much.

DPR

1.

lyme regis

My journey across Europe has been deliciously eventful.  However, these past few weeks in Dorset were perhaps the most scintillating… and British.

My time on the West Dorset/East Devon border bound by upper class British convention.  Rules of social engagement forged over hundreds of years by our ruling class… manners maketh the man.  Rules, before my stint in the USA, I adhered to (mostly) and challenged unsuccessfully. 

In the USA I learned a different social practice and without my daily dose of British self loathing I learned a very useful trick most Brits seem oblivious:  Self Esteem.  Consequently, revisiting the rules governing so much of our British social life has been a little disorienting because… I am Johnny Foreigner and the brits at play (and in the house of commons) behaving more like inchoate, chattering chimps than adroit conversationalist.

The British, upon meeting a stranger, like any un-evolved primate seek to assert themselves over the other and on rare occasions and only when deem appropriate… defer.  A British person, full ape… will never give in to money, power or prestige.  They’ll give up their seat on the british bus but only to those they assess are born to sit in it.

Socially, the Brits engage a very specific modus operandi.

Firstly, they establish the worth of the other.  They quickly seek to discover reasons for any shame he/she should feel for merely being alive:  At Monkton Wyld Court, Simon Fairlie’s obnoxious wife Gill Baron the imperious editor of The Land Magazine, rearing up on her hind legs, reminded me I had been expelled from Monkton Wyld School even though Gill conveniently forgets both she and her clochard husband were also expelled. 

Bette Bright, whilst grooming another female in the pack, wanted me to remember I had once pretended to be a Lord.  Another creepy petit bourgeois reptile told me I didn’t deserve my accent.  All of which would have once caused me to flinch when I lived in the UK.  After so long in the USA this British social venom fails to work as I carry more than enough antidote.

As it turns out, the critical gaze of a posh, British person is surprisingly easy to ignore.  The shaming swipe effortlessly parried.  The knowing laugh means nothing at all and hangs in the air like a fresh fart.  Their sly, snaggle toothed grin makes the posh Brit look like they have learning difficulties.  I was surprised by how often these rather crude techniques were used and how unsophisticated the most sophisticated Brit appears once you lift up his skirt and smell his unwashed cunt.

Bette Bright, married to singer and TV entertainer Suggs from the band Madness was the first Brit who wanted to remind me of my place.  The very notion of one’s place is so uniquely British.  As I was leaving a not so amusing Sunday lunch party in Whitstable with my friend Simon Martin, director of The Pallant Gallery, Bette sat bloated and over dressed, her fat cheeks once sweetly girlish now pock-marked and scribbled with red, broken veins.  She wore green, over-sized bakelite jewelry, a large bottom impeding her journey.

I had once been very friendly with her sister Alana who died of pancreatic cancer.  Attempting to make me uncomfortable she announced across the table, “Lord Anthony Rensdlesham, wasn’t it?”  I was momentarily stunned as I had no cause to be reminded of that particular adventure, not for twenty years or more.  Remember… I am not my story.  Perhaps the best and most enduring gift AA afforded me.  As Anthony Rendlesham had once been my name I was thrown into a different world.  A centuries old world of sophistication, Fortuny and… Falconetti.

I asked her why she wanted to remind me of something I had lived 40 years ago.  What was her aim?  If her aim was to shame me… she had failed.  I wondered out loud why a straight, white, affluent woman was trying to shame a gay person of color.

“How rude! ” She said.

“White fragility, white heterosexual fragility.”  I replied.

She looked perplexed by my comment.  “I have lots of gay friends.”

“And you learned nothing from them? Bette Bright, gay men know a great deal about reinvention… so odd you’ve not had that conversation.  Didn’t you reinvent yourself Bette?”

I continued with vigor.

“Yes.  Of course you did.  You were born plain Anne Martin.  Dull Anne.  Well, dear, what’s good for the gander… is good for this goose.  You may call me Lord Anthony Rendlesham.”

I swept out of the party.  Leaving her spluttering into her summer pudding.

A theme emerged forcibly throughout the rest of my journey.  I asked my friend the Weymouth born artist Graham Snow if he too experienced homophobia amongst the affluent, the ruling class, the petit bourgeois.  He blurted out a list of ghastly things he puts up with.  He is quite the most lonely person I have ever met, made more lonely by his so-called ‘friends’ who do not want the best for him. 

Like Lucy Ferry making disparaging remarks about Lee McQueen’s rough east end boyfriends.  Those woman kept that boy lonely.  They used him, like Graham is used by unscrupulous heterosexuals.  Graham, born in the 40’s, was shielded from the true horror of the most virulent hatred of the gays by his friendship with extraordinary men… like David Hockney and John Schlesinger.  He has thick, thick skin after enduring years of glancing blows from the casual homophobe.

Homophobia is real and crippling and we dare not talk about it just in case it makes us vulnerable.  A British aristocrat loves to mine another’s vulnerability.  Reminding you he is whiter, more well-bred, more heterosexual and closer to the crown than YOU.

Perhaps I’m looking for trouble. Perhaps I’m too sensitive.  Perhaps the blonde, female fitness instructor who has coffee at Dave’s Deli in Whitstable is not a homophobe but just doesn’t like me.  There seems nothing worse to a recent Whitstable resident than these words:  I was born here.

I am not an easy gay, I am not the kind of gay man who ignores a casual homophobic aside.  If ‘Woodsy’ the window cleaner wonders why I am in Whitstable and doesn’t like it… maybe he’s scared I know a little too much about his past.

After a rather grueling tour via Swanage of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast with Graham Snow, he took me to the home of some very English sub aristocrats for dinner.  Writer Jason Goodwin, son of Jocasta Innes and his very Nigella Lawson type wife.  Their house was a typical English country affectation.  A  Christopher Gibbs pastiche thrown together with no money.  Piles of rotting books, sagging sofas and a smokey fireplace.  Their dogs were aggressive and needy, they want to sit on your lap then bite your hand.  The food was overcooked, the conversation tepid… I sat opposite our host and a charming Italian woman Anna Orsini from the British Fashion Council and an Oxford don who loathed Jeremy Corbyn and still believed in slavery.

A forlorn, bald man sat beside the don, Matthew Rice whose wife Emma Bridgewater had recently and very abruptly left him. She had not mentioned him, he wailed, on Desert Island Disks.  Apparently it is sexist to ask if she is menopausal. Now she has gone (she is not coming back) perhaps Mr Rice should bite the gay bullet.  I mean… he can’t possibly be straight.  Can he?  Years of stenciling fowl onto earthenware might betray something of the fey in a man.

During the second course (roast lamb) shop keeper and Poundbury apologist Ben Pentreath arrived. A very British, gay handful.  His simpering, tongue tied husband in tow… brutally eclipsed by Ben’s scintillating, room filling persona.  Ben excused himself… they had been to another party.  The dull husband threw Katie a huge bunch of vulgar dahlias. Ben had stories to tell and took charge of the table as best he could.  He mocked his boss Prince Charles with an uninspired impersonation.  Our host and hostess gasped and giggled like naughty Victorian children enthralled by a Zoetrope, tittering at everything the clown queen regaled.

Ben and his pretty husband live in a parsonage not far from Jason and Katie.  The house has been ‘published’.  They show me pictures in a magazine of Ben’s equally annoying interior.  Stuck in a grim place where a potager is still essential and an escritoire ‘sublime’.  More stuff.  Acres of stuff.  Rooms full of stuff.  Stuff Poundbury bought.  Stuff set against emerald walls, set against raspberry blancmange, more and more, lustre ware, vulgar dahlias… bunches and bunches of them.

After dinner I sank uncomfortably into the sofa, consumed by horse hair and damp feathers.  Ben wanted to introduce me to the ‘most perfect’ man.

“I have the most perfect man for you!”

Announcing to the room I needed a boyfriend.  I told him to google me.  I couldn’t imagine he would want to introduce me to anyone after he had read everything there is to read about me…

“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said.

Jason sat beside me. Looking intently.  He asked why I didn’t want a boyfriend.  I told him a little of my story.  Unpacking the bags.  I mentioned coming out at 13, he asked dismissively why it was so important to ‘come out’.

“Ask your best friend Ben,” I said.  Ben balked.

Ben ditched the resting bitch face and looked quite real, momentarily.  He told Jason he was 27 when he came out, when he told his brother he was gay his brother reacted very negatively.  Jason was shocked.  I realized these two men who claim to be best friends don’t know each other… at all.

Jason Goodwin, enjoying his casual homophobia, sneered at my sadness for all the men I knew who died of AIDS, questioning my PTSD.  Jason sneered harder when I told him how the lgbt community must still fight for equality and wondered why I let cruel Section 28 affect me.  Jason, like so many men of his class, thought us impudent for wanting more.  Now he sits in the front row of his gay best friend’s wedding.  As for Ben Pentreith, what fight did he put up?  He let the rest of us do the heavy lifting.  At his wedding he scarcely gave a thought to the men who sacrificed so much for his happy day.

As a deliciously uncomfortable postscript I made Ben describe how gay hook up apps like Grindr and Scruff  work to the assembled crew of stodgy heterosexuals.  It was gleefully entertaining. “Scruff?” They repeated disdainfully.  They wrinkled their noses, fanning away the imagined smell of the word.

2.

I met a man I had brief crush upon,  He was blond and sensitive and sturdy.  I didn’t make a move.  I think I would have fallen in love.  I bought him a bottle of gin.

Monkton Wyld.  I was staying in the house of a retired Dr and his Christian wife.  They were touring Australia and New Zealand.  The Monkton Wyld rectory was filled with opaque plastic boxes containing a life of habitual collecting.  Bits and pieces.  Scraps of fabric, knitting needles, tapestry.   Every room has a sofa, even the dining room.  The Christian wife does not want to live anywhere other than the huge house in the country where she keeps her charming husband hostage.  He wants to live in Australia near his adored kids.  They’ve brought a little slice of Surrey to the vail of Monkton Wyld.  Tennis courts, over planted herbaceous borders, a rockery and sweeping lawns.  Their staircase and landing is painted a delightful jade color but she doesn’t like it. She wants to paint it, he doesn’t want to spend £3000.  She is unhappy.  They are unhappy.

They left the house.  Went away for 6 weeks.  When they returned she had read all about me on the internet.  I could see from her pinched lips, her sallow… indirect look.  Too much of a coward to look me in the face and tell me what she really thought.  Her Christianity didn’t allow her to approve of gay men.  Even though she has a bisexual daughter.  So she dressed up her disapproval with a shocking number of complaints about my stay at their house.  The water pump had stopped working and would cost them £1,800 to put right.  Some of the plants in the greenhouse had died.  There was dog shit in the herbaceous borders.  I had bought the wrong cat food.

There is a field at the bottom of their garden the local disliked farmer wants to sell.  I hope someone buys the field and builds a big beautiful house in that field souring their perfect view.  Perhaps I will.

Whilst in Dorset I took a little road trip 50 miles North to see Rachel Campbell-Johnston who was once the lover and friend of Sebastian Horsley.  She is the art critic for the London Times.  The final weeks of my drug use was spent with her and Sebastian.  I specifically remember her vomiting out of a black cab on Kensington High St after doing reams of cocaine in 1997.  The taxi driver looked so disappointed.

“What’s a pretty girl like you behaving like this.” he said.

Well, Rachel made millions from property investments (selling an old shed in Kensal Rise to Bella Freud) and bought an austere house near South Molton on Exmoor.  She lives there with her daughter Katya, her mother, lurchers and two funny goats.  Her marriage to my friend Jayne’s husband, Willy spectacularly failed.  Their friends forced to take sides.

“Don’t talk about it!”  She demanded.

I had totally forgotten she married Willy Nickerson, now she wants me to forget all over again. We reminisced about Whitstable.  The Peter Cushing House.  She attempted to shame me by wondering if I owned the house in Whitstable, or did it belong to someone else?

“No, it was mine.” I smiled, her icy stare not altering the temperature one jot.

“I didn’t own the house in Adam and Eve Mews.”  I added, “That was my boyfriend’s.”

“Your dogs are so fucking ugly.” She said.

As if on cue one of her lurchers grabbed a huge leg of pork from the kitchen table and ran off with it.  Rachel sprinted after the dog and returned with the mangled joint.  She put it in the oven.  “That’s what country folk do.”  She said.

She remembered visiting me in Whitstable with Sebastian, Tricia and Paul Simonon from The Clash.  She pointed at the bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

“We own these vineyards.”

I looked at her. Carefully.  Wondering if she would ever grow up and make sense of what it might mean to be a wife and mother. She had failed so spectacularly at both.

The following day we sat with Laura and Peter Carew who I found myself liking a great deal.  I reminded them I had been nominated for an academy award and gone to Sundance and opened many film festivals all over the world, which is far more than most of the wannabees we hung out with who told you they would… but never did.

“Look at his dogs,” Rachel spewed,”They are so fucking ugly.”

Although the Carew’s house is jammed with stuff like the houses of all these country people it is welcoming and warm.  Lunch, a couple of chops and some salad.  It suits Laura very much to have staff and land.  Sheep and cattle.  She’s only a decade from living on Exmoor full-time.  Giving in to the lure of headscarves, tweed skirts, lambing, and driving a Landrover full tilt over the sodden moor.

I didn’t drive home the night I left Exmoor.  I hanker for the sea.  For Lyme Regis.

I was happy to see it. Lyme will always remind me of my first great love: Gerard Falconetti, grand son of Renee Jeanne. He played Meryl Streep’s real-time lover in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  He was my lover and friend, he was also the first man I knew during those heady times to die of AIDS.  When the doctors told him he would die of that cruel and terrible disease he threw himself from the roof of the Tour Montparnasse.

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Gay Hollywood Los Angeles Queer Tivoli NY

Golden Globes 2017

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It’s the morning after the Golden Globe awards.  I don’t have a hangover but I do have a severe headache.  Ahead of my rant, the first order of the day?  Congratulate Barry Jenkins who brilliantly won the best drama golden globe for his exquisite film, Moonlight.  By awarding this black/queer film best drama the HFPA have thrown down a gauntlet to Hollywood.  They are daring The Academy to address its crippling lack of diversity.  I predict that Moonlight will go on collecting nominations and awards (will win SAG, Spirit Awards) but can it win Academy Awards?  Here lies the rub.  The only two bankable commodities in this little film are Jenkins and Harris who are both Hollywood gold.

The liberal, Hollywood talent elite are trilling about Meryl Streep.  They forget the less liberal Hollywood majority booed Michael Moore after receiving his Bowling for Columbine Oscar and using the academy podium to remind us of President Bush’s fictitious reasons for invading Iraq in his brilliant and oft quoted ‘fictitious times’ speech.  President Obama of course, perpetuated those fictions but did it by stamping out dissent and whistle blowing within the United States.  Snowden, Assange, Manning.  My heroes.

The real money in Hollywood is behind Trump… the power.  The talent can make art out of outrage and in turn make billions of $ for the white Hollywood establishment.   I can’t imagine former friend and UTA boss Jeremy Zimmer is anything other than thrilled by the prospect of a Trump presidency, salivating over the kind of big money he’s going to make these next four to eight years.

I wonder who reps Barry Jenkins?  I can tell you one thing.  He won’t have a black agent or manager at one of the leading agencies or management companies… because there aren’t any.  Until there are black faces repping big money at the agencies, black faces producing movies or living on Carbon Beach in Malibu or heading up the teamsters union…  Hollywood will be as is it always has: racist.  A white industry where predominantly white men control the money.  It is not a place where your dreams will come true, it is a place where old white men will decide which of their dreams will come true using your talent.

It’s simply not good enough to call Trump names at award shows. Yeah he’s a prick, yeah he’s hollow, yes he’s predictable. Are we gonna repeat ourselves every day? Expecting a different outcome? Let’s call him what he is: Donald Trump is the most powerful white supremacist in the world. Riding an international wave of fascism. Your president is a white supremacist.

As I’ve asked a million times before, are you willing to put your life on the line to fight fascism? Are you willing to demonstrate, be interned or tortured or imprisoned? Sooner or later Facebook rants and memes just won’t cut it. History proves that when things get nasty the people do as they are told. However brave they say they are before the black shirts arrive. It’s my guess that you’ll put up with it too. You’ll go on the one million woman march… then they’ll round-up the South Americans in California and what will you do?  Then they’ll go after lgbt rights… and what will you do? They’ll outlaw abortion. What will you do? They’ll shoot to kill and fill the prisons with any and every black man who looks scary and what will you do? Tweet?

You’ll tweet about it.

2.

I’m very slowly going blind.  Foolishly, after many years of  not looking carefully at my plate, I started wearing my glasses when I eat.  Oh My God, revolting!  Gelatinous sauces oozing from the edge of beef and chicken.  Seeds baked into bread.  Glazes and jus and creamed potato sprinkled with chives.  I want to vomit, overwhelmed by the detail, the slightest movement as you press down onto the burger and my lunch becomes a suppurating sore discharging blood, guacamole and mayonnaise.  I am captivated by gravy as it seeps under and drips around roast pork.   Nauseated, I have to take my glasses off.  On Saturday night we had pasta with sea urchin butter and caviar at Fish and Game in Hudson.  Although delicious, I couldn’t fully enjoy it until it was just a blur on my plate otherwise, it was a mesmerizing… awful experience.

3.

The dogs know it is bitterly cold this morning.  Minus 13.  They are under the covers.  Hidden away.  Unlike England which is cold, wet, dark and raw thankfully it is bright and cold here upstate making the day less of a chore.  Our store, Tivoli General is open and there are AA meetings in Hudson.

I stayed in bed, too distracted by pain.  The infection in my jaw getting worse.

The third Monday of January is notorious for suicide.  This third Monday in January will be no different.  A mass suicide event will take place in the USA and nobody will say a word.

Did you know I fell out with Stephen Fry a year or so ago?   I had the audacity to mention the freedoms and privilege a celebrity enjoys.  Celebrities HATE when you discuss their fame.  Or in his case… his twitter feed.  We then had an email fight about God and the existence of God.   I asked him if he realised almost all of his sober friends have a god in their life.  He reluctantly accepted that spirituality may be very loosely beneficial for some people but that’s that.  There’s a connection (if you can be bothered to work it out) between his reluctance to discuss celebrity and his eagerness to dismiss a certain kind of God.   “Stephen, you don’t have to believe in God,”  I said.  “As long as you know you’re not God.”

He said rather ominously, “Be very careful.”

Not being very careful, I asked, “So if you don’t belive in God… who do you cry out to every time you try killing yourself?”

That was it.  No more Stephen Fry.

 

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Gay

Let’s Make A Movie

Sat at home with the twins watching the Oscar coverage.  It was wonderful to see The Artist grab all of the best awards.  It was wonderful watching Plummer accept his Oscar with such elegance and dignity.

It was even more moving to see that little Producer of The Artist grab the Oscar for the best film.  That lone French Producer fit himself into the history of Motion Pictures, nodding to his predecessors…his heroes.

Of course I sat there and wondered if I would ever make another movie.  There is nothing stopping me…except me. The script I sent out just before I was arrested had some great feed back.  I reread it yesterday afternoon.  It has to be sharpened…but it’s good.  The stage play comes first, and the documentary…and the trial.

Life is filling up!  It’s not ending!  It’s just beginning.

I’ve been watching Robby grow up.  Watching him inhabit his new skin.  I’ve been thinking about him and you know who…but not obsessively.  Trying to work out what went wrong, why I reacted so badly and for so long.  You know, it’s obvious that I am a very bad gay.  I don’t fit it.  I don’t like them and they don’t like me.  God, I really tried.  I tried being gay here in LA, in NYC, I tried being in gay AA.  What a waste of time.

So, I wondered what it was that JB had that I didn’t have, that Robby has that I don’t have.  Well, they just seemed to fit in effortlessly.  JB met people and had dinner with them, sex with them, he is a likable fellow, largely uncomplicated (on the surface), doesn’t want to cause trouble. I am none of those things.  He fitted in immediately, he just did.  And when he fitted in I had no place in his life, there was no room for a misfit like me.

So it is with Robby as he makes his way, meeting people this unwitting Malibu dad doesn’t think appropriate for him…but that boy has to make his own mistakes and I am not his dad.  I am here to help, not to judge.

Perhaps I am indeed how JB described me.  Perhaps his assessment was just too accurate.  He will make some man so incredibly happy!  They both will.

Hey!  I’ve seen you smiling, it’s a lovely picture.  You look so happy, happier than when I knew you darling.  Of course, you were tormented then.  Tormented by guilt, by indecision…now look at you, staring into the camera.  Do you love him?  I hope you do.

You know, don’t you, that we would never have met as out gay men.   I would have passed you by and you would have thought me absurd.  Just like they do.  I know that I’m not meant to think about you…but I do!  I think hopeful thoughts.  I know that you’ll be happy.  Forever.  I am so relieved that the fury is over.

You don’t need to be scared of me darling.  I am fighting bigger battles.  Fighting for others.

Did I ever tell you that I was sorry?  Perhaps I didn’t mean it back then.  Just hollow words.

It must have been very scary for you all.  It was scary for me.  Well, it’s all over now.  All over.

Categories
art Fashion Gay prison

Outcasts Always Mourn

Gerard Falconetti looking like Robby

Sunday morning, children all over the bed.  Asking questions.  They want to know everything.  Inquisitive little things.  The sun is bright and warm.  My hostess is making blueberry pancakes and coffee.

Lily, their youngest, had dreams about heaven and hell.  Hell had something to do with a supermarket.  She said, “There were people in hell who shouldn’t have been there.” Which was a very astute observation for a 9 year old girl.

She’s Jewish, Jews don’t believe in heaven or hell.

The Little Dog is confused.  He’s a one man dog.  He’s been with J and J these past few months so his loyalty, understandably, shifted.  We are re-orientating him.  He slept with me last night.  Hung out at the house yesterday.  He lay on his bed as we toiled in the garden.

Robby and I spent the day doing errands.  I have my phone!  The garden is tidy!  The house is returned to normal!  The art is back on the walls!  Lost things have been found! There is food in the fridge!  The dog is happy!

Saw Safe House at the Malibu cinema with Robby, bumped into AA folk.  The film was ok but had one huge and unforgivable plot flaw.

Before the film we wandered down Cross Creek.  Wondering at the night.  The cold, damp breeze on my face.

Robby is the only person I tell everything.  He has seen me vulnerable and survived.  Not like Jennie and the others.  No room!  No room!

Last night we watched September IssueAnna Wintour really is an extraordinary woman.  She is also incredibly generous.  You know, don’t you, that she lent us her NYC house when we made Dorian Gray.  Hamish, I wish we had seen more of him.  I remember meeting Grace with Patrick Kinmonth when they worked at Vogue in  London and again, rather obscurely at a house in North Wales  years later.  She stole the show.

God, Andre Leon Talley is such a twat.  The least interesting character in the film…just because he tries so hard to be fabulous.  Inauthentic.  I knew him when I lived in Paris, we met at Karl Lagerfeld‘s house when Karl lived on the Rue de la Universite in the early 80’s.  Gerard Falconetti and I stopped by unannounced.

Falconetti’s brilliant grandmother Maria played Jean d’Arc in The Passion when she was 19 years old.

For some reason I remember touching Andre’s face, his skin was cold and soft.  Like an old handbag.

Gerard was 11 years older than me, so incredibly handsome.  A wonderful lover.  In 1981 Gerard played Meryl Streep‘s boyfriend in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

In 1984 Gerard found out that he had AIDS and threw himself off the Tour Montparnasse.

Gerard was a generous, extraordinary friend.  He played Montserrat Caballe singing Tosca when I was sick with flu, he lifted my spirits with delicate macaroons from Carette.   He showed me the Paris I would later show those who have never been. The secret places we all need to know when we discover a city for the first time.

I have, somewhere, a note Karl sent Gerard referencing his grandmother.

That was then this is now…

I have a million things to do.  A great deal of catching up and making good.

I promised to write about being arrested.  Well, I will…but after conversations yesterday with my journalist brethren I’ll let them do the reporting and I’ll take a rest.  There’s still so much to tell you.

As you may know this entire being arrested thang was to do with this very blog.   What can or cannot be said.

Meanwhile on another part of the internet…you simply have to check out what is being said about me by identifiable enemies: an ex-employee calling me a sadist,  a gross individual from Province Town who attempted to malign me last summer,  some cretin accusing me of killing my own dog…these people are wrought with life affecting, overwhelming resentment.  It is so extreme it makes me laugh.

Baying for blood.  Send him back to jail!  Throw away the key!  If only, in some way, they could find a way of getting me locked up for ever…the death sentence even?

I am chuckling to myself.

Chris Lewis of Sydney Australia thinks I want your sympathy.  If I looked like Chris Lewis I would want your sympathy.  Even when he was young he was ugly.  You know very well that I report as I see…as truthfully as I am able.  It is my unalienable right to do so.  I don’t want sympathy.  I need your support.  Those of you who have stood by me, my God!  I never expected such amazing gifts.

Marilyn Monroe, of all people, said that for every fan excited to see her there were 10 enemies waiting to bring her down.   Being hated is an occupational hazard for those of us who do not live in the shadows.  If you think what people write about me is outrageous…try being Rachal Maddow.

Somebody called from the jail yesterday, he is as well as can be expected.  How quickly one forgets. Yet…you know me.  The lure of the uniform…the smell of ruminating men…ransacked sexual fantasies.

Do you know what a Nonce is?  It’s a slang word for a child molester.  I taught the men in my dorm at Men’s County Jail this very English word.  By the time I left they were calling each other Nonce, it was quite inappropriate…but very funny.

By the way, I didn’t get any Christmas cards whilst I was at the jail, I thought you didn’t care!  I now know that many of you sent cards and letters of support.  Apparently, they were all returned as having inappropriate content.  What were you sending me?

One’s body is weakened by three months of inactivity.  Working in the garden was exhausting yesterday.

Thank God for Robby.

As I lay here, at what ever time during that constant night…the ghosts of Wilde and Cocteau, Rimbaud and Verlaine come to me.  The fragrant, aromatic smoke he blows to me through the tiny hove carved between cells.  The great poet cries, “Hard labour!”  And all…for love.

A famous passage from the Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

The line is a nod to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, when Bassanio asks, “Do all men kill the things they do not love?”

A passage from the poem was chosen as the epitaph on Wilde’s tomb.

And alien tears will fill for him,
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

Categories
Death

LOUD AND DIM

Gary Winick (Tadpole 2002) died.  He was 49-years-old.

Gary once introduced me to Mark Ruffalo.  Mark wouldn’t remember me, Gary would.

Gary was one of the forward thinking guys who set up the ground breaking film production company InDigEnt.  He was a really, really sweet man.  No news as to how he died but I think, from what I can remember, he may have had a serious illness that he kept quiet about.

He was very discreet.

Crikey, so many deaths!  I just diligently report them.  It’s rewarding to find something nice to say about the recently departed like poor Wally in Whitstable.

In Jean’s case, it was quite hard.  We hadn’t spoken for ages because we had a money issue that neither of us wanted to resolve.  He was a terrible drain on his friends and family.  Let’s put it this way: it was very hard for Jean to enjoy his gifted life without endlessly complaining or taking drugs.

People die.  I just put on my bombazine shift and write the bleeding obituary.

Perhaps I should try writing my own?

I would entitle it:  WEAK TEA  or  LOUD AND DIM or NOTHING REMARKABLE.

To be run in the Whitstable Times in the event of my death:

Surly Duncan Roy (65) found dead in his Swalecliffe bed sitting room.  Former Lord of The Lies refused medication for obvious mental illness and made unremarkable films.   Campaigned for the Red Spider Cafe.  He will not be missed.

I have not written a last will and testament so the fuckers can squabble over what is left.   I may leave it all to that little girl or to a bat charity or Jake’s ex-girl friend.  That would be funny.

Watched Oscars.  Was James Franco stoned?  No!  He’s been sober for YEARS.  He just looked a bit unprepared.  I would have preferred if Social Network had won best film.  It deserved to.  The Kings Speech is constipated TV tosh.   Tom Hooper is a director of no importance.  Why does Colin Firth KEEP telling the world how important Tom Ford is to him and how he wouldn’t be receiving these awards without having met him?  I thought that Firth had a rather long and distinguished career before meeting Ford?  Are they or have they been…fucking?

It occurred to me why Portman trumped Benning…Portman has more mileage in her and will generate more cash for CAA.  Poor Annette Bening so obviously deserved that Best Actress Academy Award but she’s an old mare and who writes great roles for old mares that Meryl Streep isn’t getting first refusal?

Clip Clop Annette.