Categories
Alcoholics Anonymous art NYC Queer

Tanja Grunert Gallerist

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The rain, interminable. Cats and dogs. Great lakes puddle over the marshy back land.   Ominous clouds scud over the Hudson Valley.  Tom the gardener ploughs trenches down hill, unplugging the dams. Thirty years of fallen oak leaves dredged from soggy trench and damned culvert.  Branches thrown over the fence into the once vacant lot by lazy neighbours, removed. A scribble of dead bramble, removed. Now, on the northern perimeter, a pile of rotting vegetation – we might have burned on November 5th if we lived somewhere sensible.

However.

“There’ll be no bonfires in the village.” She said. The woman at the Mayor’s office. So. No wood smoke drifting over sparkling, frosty fields, no Guy Fawkes. No baked potatoes wrapped in scalding tin foil found amongst the dying embers.

I call friends in Los Angeles, they ask smugly if I’m prepared for the winter. They have no idea. Windows, insulation, boiler… thick curtains thankfully saved from other draughty, Victorian mansions. The winter months do not scare me. Come winter, come freeze the air, let the first snow fall.

How many pairs of gloves will I lose this year?

I am happy in Tivoli, so are the dogs. They chase squirrels, rabbits and deer.

The Little Dog has been skunked twice. Good God! The second time I took him to the vet, where they washed him with some magical solution.   Better than being savaged by coyote or bitten by a rattlesnake… I suppose, cheaper to remedy. He’s such a brave, curious, foolhardy Little Dog.

Dude hasn’t been skunked once, he hangs back from anything mildly threatening. He learned to climb the steep stair in the new house, laboring one step at a time he finds us in bed then dances on two legs until I fetch him up.

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I drive my old Mercedes into Hudson once a week. It’s a lovely town to visit but I hated living there. I hated it.  Frighteningly, I can’t remember the name of the road where I lived. Let me remember. Bellview, Fairview… PROSPECT!  Prospect Avenue, Hudson, NY.

So many irrelevant details scrubbed from the hard drive.  I will never forget that house.  That vile, ‘English Tudor’ house on the optimistically named Prospect Avenue. Overlooking the hospital; and a busy, dirty road.  The worst place (by far) I ever lived. Badly designed, badly renovated, so badly insulated: incapable of keeping heat in the winter or cool in the summer.

The house was haunted, not by angry ghosts moving things around or waiting in the corner… but melancholy, lonely women, dragging themselves up and down the stairs.  Most evident, the ghost of an elderly school teacher who spent twenty years peering from the sitting room window, equally scaring and delighting passing school children like a Halloween ghoul.

The house attracts lonely women.

Tanja Grunert, the current owner,  is the last of a long line.

So, I dedicate this blog post to her. To lonely Tanja whose life is more treacherous than a Hudson pavement in mid January.

The night I met Tanja she was wearing a huge black and white fur coat.  Like a skunk.

IMG_9720A short, stocky woman, she wears baggy jeans and tailored jackets. Her cropped, gray/mauve hair… cut hard around her masculine, pudgy face.   A smear of red lipstick, the only evidence she might be a heterosexual woman.

The night we met (by accident over steaming bowls of Asian broth) I should have run away.

Sadly, I have never had the resolve to run from a catastrophe.  As the towers came down I ran toward them.  There is something immediately alluring about Tanja, something fascinating.  From the moment we met I was hooked.  Some people are.  I’ll not be the first and I won’t be the last.  She crafted a first class art world career from a scintillating  first impression.

That night Tanja focused her all on me, seducing and melting… gasping and fluttering, roaring her huge laugh.  After dinner she invited us to the house… that house.

Much later I understood the only time she threw back her head, roaring that infectious laugh, was used as part of a sinister, well rehearsed routine.  A carefully constructed formula.

We discovered we had many people in common, Jay Jopling, Samia Saouma and Benedict Taschen.

She told me how beautiful I was. Told me I was her ‘type’. I was clear about my sexuality, “I am a gay man.” I said, as she coquettishly batted her eyelashes, grabbed hold of my hand, inviting us back to her cold, empty house. “Oh I’m so sorry.” She bows deeply into every apology. She is a committed apologist. “English is my second language.”  During our cohabitation I must have heard her say a million times, “Excuse me if I don’t understand.”

It was a lie.  I knew from the beginning she understood everything very well. Yet, I chose to ignore her lies. I chose to ignore, that cold winter, her lies, her homophobia, her racism, her alcoholism and her delusion.

Tanja is an alcoholic.  She is the kind of binging alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink in the morning she doesn’t have a drinking problem…. but she drinks in the morning. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that because she doesn’t drink alone she isn’t an alcoholic… yet, she drinks alone. She is the kind of alcoholic who convinces herself that she isn’t an alcoholic because she doesn’t black out and wet the bed…

She drank wine by the bottle, chain-smoked cigarettes; listened to opera so loudly on her record player that good conversation became impossible. Drowning in Wagner, drowning not waving, into misery.

That night, my first visit to her house, she lit a fire in the huge, totally empty sitting room.  Her husband was gone. He had taken flight that summer. Taking with him the money (his fathers) and the possibility.  She told him: “You cannot come to the house in Hudson.” He said, “You can’t have money to furnish it.”

I said: “You have an empty house and I have furniture.”  She said “Yes!” immediately.

Listen for a moment. Stand back.  Re-read my offer and tell me what could possibly go wrong?

Obviously it was terrible mistake. Half measures avail us nothing. I had no right making a deal with this devil. She started texting and calling all day and all night.  She would introduce me to her friends as her boyfriend or her husband.  She’d tell everyone who would listen that she loved me.  I was living in the East Village. We had dinner in the city. Tanja tried making me pay for her expensive wine habit… I refused.

Instead, I moved in.

So began a slow, interminably slow, head on collision. Two cold, stubborn alcoholics buckling, catastrophically into one another.   I spent nearly a year at the house, firstly because I was entranced… then the doors began to slam behind me. The furniture arrived and she took what she wanted from my things. “Each thing more beautiful than the last.” She cooed.

My Gary Hume disappeared.

Because she is an unapologetic racist she made me hide my African art because black people do not interest her. They make her ‘think of slavery’. They ‘make me sad’.  “I would never sleep with a black man.”

She buys five tickets for the Bjork concert but can’t find anyone to come with us.  Finally she invites people who barely know her.  They say, “I don’t know her at all.” At the will call she’s told very clearly that her tickets are being exchanged for better tickets.  Tanja starts screaming. Screaming at everyone.  Kicking the theatre.  I stand back and watch her disgusting spectacle.  I take the tickets, tell her to shut the fuck up, lead her into the theatre.  We take our excellent seats at the front of the theatre.

Shocked by her behavior we walk in silence back to the car after the event, unable to discuss Bjork like normal people.  Like the normal people around us, happy and grateful to have seen Bjork.  Her tantrums, her temper, her screaming, her crying fits of righteous outrage and indignation became so regular I learned to ignore them.

The winter was long and hard and cold.  Minus 23 degrees.  Unheard of upstate New York.  I found myself held hostage by the masculine German woman in the unfriendly house.

She refused to fill the oil tanks. The house froze.  The pipes burst.  The tiles fall from the bathroom walls. I fill the oil tanks myself, ferrying 10 gallon cans from a filling station five miles away.

The chaos, her unmanagability became easier when the sun began to shine.

Spring came suddenly this year.  The original deal she reneged.  She wanted money.  Always desperate for cash.  Another good idea blown into a million pieces. I handed it over.

Her grasping, fat fingers.  Her solid, bruised, Teutonic arms quaffing wine, passing out, laying naked on her bed until she leaks yellow stinking piss all over herself.   Naked on her bed, not sleeping but unconscious. Laying like the dead waiting for the autopsy, naked on her back.   Acres of white flesh.   “We are always naked.” “We always talk to ourselves.” “We only eat from Fish and Game.”

She tells everyone that an important publisher has commissioned an auto-biography. She says that the money will come.

“We only write in the kitchen.”

“We hate mood lighting.”

She spends hours under the harsh light at the kitchen table tapping on her keyboard, claiming to write a book some grand publisher might (or might not) have commissioned. She says she’s researching but she’s on the internet trying to fill the consuming void her younger husband left when he scarpered last June.  Filling the gaping, suppurating wound with Internet dates on match.com, okcupid and other… less salubrious sites. She shows me a thousand pictures of penis she has been sent.

Her less sexually ambitious female friends think she is a pioneer. This old queen knows she is a lonely, sleazy woman on the cusp of suicide.   In and out of Belleview. Unable to accept the truth.   Popping pills. She is poor, illegal and single.

Gay men seldom share the cache of penis we’ve been sent on line. Maybe the largest or the smallest. Maybe the most beautiful. She indiscriminately shows me every one. She wants me to know she is still relevant, that her menopause hadn’t knocked her through a hoop. (Like Samia before her.) But her boast falls on deaf ears. I look at her poker faced, disguising the pity I have for her.

There’s a young art dealer in town with a cool gallery, I buy art, he delivers the art to the house. He knows who she is. Curious to see where Tanja lives, he is surprised that the house is so clean. He expects to see a mountain of empty bottles. He tells me that she owes everyone money, him included.

“There’s a joke art dealers tell each other. They laugh about how long they’ve been in the art business. They say, I’ve been selling art so long… I remember when Tanja Grunert was hot.”

I reserved the most sympathy for her children who instinctively knew how selfish, self-obsessed and self pitying she and her ex husband are.   Both so eager to flee from her, like the men she meets on-line. A French man meets with her and tells me “Within a few minutes of phone conversation she offers to lick my ass.” to be his toilet. When he meets with her he says he could not fuck her because fucking her would be like “Fucking grandma.”

After meeting him she text messages twenty times an hour. She sobs, howls… when it becomes apparent that he is not interested in her. She wrings her hands and bangs her head into the wall, she blames everyone for her distress.

She meets another man and calls at 1am to ask where they can find a woman for some three way. I terminate the call.

Her teenage daughter watches as every man her mother meets on the internet lets her down. Steals what little she has left.  She has learned to keep quiet. She is biding her time, waiting for the day she can turn her back on them all.

Tanja boasts that during her second pregnancy with the girl she was high on cocaine, drunk on alcohol every day for the first trimester.

Her insufferable, precocious, entitled, blue-eyed son lives with us for the summer. He leaves chaos and mountains of trash infested, after a few hot days, with maggots. He said, “You are the room mate, you must clean up after me.” I refuse.


I video the mess and send it to his mother. He is now at an expensive college in SF exploring his homosexuality, thankfully a long way from his gentle, yielding girlfriend who was often heard plaintively asking the teenager why he needed to hurt her to express his love.

The boy barely conceals his contempt for the girl. Like his mother, like his father, like his grandmother. Generational dysfunction.  Violence. Violent to others, violent to herself, Tanja told me her husband would beat her in the bedroom.  Not because he loved her… because he hated her.  The provenance of the son’s fledgling misogyny evident for all to see.

The son drinks until he passes out.  Naked on his bed.  His father drinks himself into a black out… she wets the bed. I could smell the piss before I saw it.

Her son wants to stay with me at the hotel.  I cling to the edge of the bed.  As far as I can from his yearning adolescence.  Tanja wants to know why he is so interested in me.

For all of her gay friends, she is an unapologetic homophobe. She makes sneering jokes about ‘Your side’ and ‘Your people’ she tells me that I am ‘No use’ to her.  They are not jokes, they are evidence of her deep-seated homophobic resentment. For all the extraordinary gay men she surrounds herself, delighting them with her drama… she hates gay men. We are good for loans and art purchases. We loyally turn up at the hospital every time she half-heartedly overdoses.

When I brought that beautiful boy Spencer home, she asked if he was my boyfriend, then slandered me in German.  My school boy German catches every word.

Gay men know this: we all know that those determined to kill themselves rarely fail. The rest, like Tanja, merely crave the attention: cosseted in hospital beds, prescribed medicine, given the benefit of the doubt.

The gays around her provide the Greek entertainment.  The chorus.  Picking up the pieces.

At dawn, when she finally let me sleep. Before she falls into her bed, Tanja became sexually abusive. When we are on our own, if I’m the only person in the house she focuses her sexual violence on me.  Keeping me awake until dawn, drinking and smoking. Trying to touch me.

When, at the end, I mention that she is sexually harassing me and I could sue her… she smiles a smile only a torturer could have smiled and I saw very clearly into her rotten, stinking soul. She looked like the devil. I saw the devil smile. I will never forget that smile, for it was quite unlike anything I had seen before.

In the morning, by way of apology, she reminds me again that her mother had abused her. That she had hidden from the Nazis by living in a box under a mill, like a fairy-tale troll. After the war her mother had children and beat them. This was the excuse she gave for abusing me.

The same excuse. Again and again.

Excuses: excuses not to pay her artists, why the house would freeze and the pipes would burst.  Excused for not having insurance when Sandy hit Manhattan and filled her Chelsea gallery with raw sewage. Excuses for not paying her taxes, for not bothering to renew her visa.  Excuses why she never made a better job of killing herself. Excuses and apologies. One after another. A crocodile of dead infants snaking their way to hell.

After my painful pancreas operation, drowsy on meds she made me drive to the bank, fetch her $3000 and then punches me when I burst into tears. She apologizes immediately; she tells me that she was abused by her mother.   It’s too late. The summer is coming to an end. I hate her with such vigor. I hate being near her, I hate her voice, her smell, her proximity.

We drive back to the gallery where an angry artist is waiting for cash. Arms crossed.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand.”  She pleads with the angry artist.

At the end of August I empty the house of my possessions and I am free. 8 months of hell finally comes to an end.  I move to Tivoli.

Even after I am gone she demands money.  I have learned not to respond or engage.  A good lesson in restraint of pen and tongue.

Categories
Death Fantasy Fashion Gay Money NYC prison Queer

Trans Ambition

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In the jail I was enveloped by the trans community.  They showed me the way.  Black trans women.  They were not entitled white girls, passing themselves off on the street like women born women. They were black trans women subject to everything a black women suffers (and more) on the streets of racist USA.  These women are considered worthless, trash, undignified.  I related to these people.  They taught me more than I had learned for decades.

This winter I will be wearing couture suits.  A jacket and skirt. Based on a Charles James classic.  I found a brilliant couturier to make them, one in dark green tweed and another in aubergine silk velvet.  They are interchangeable.  Deliberately,  I get four outfits for the cost of two.  A lady has to look after her pennies.

My hope?  To look like a lesbian geography teacher from an exclusive private girls school. I rather think I’m going to look like the chef from Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson-Wright.  I have no desire to look feminine.  Butch lesbians are far more attractive to me than pretty girls.  If I ever had a sex change I am sure to be a lesbian.

Without the power of the penis I am a free man.

I have, these past couple of years since I left the jail, submerged myself in trans culture.  My silly film about Jake became an audacious film about a trans woman and the men who chase her.  My desire to reprimand my ex became a beautiful treatise on my own trans curiosity.  One thing is certain.  If I am true to this path I will never leave the big city.  I will never live in Whitstable.

There is something about rotting pears on the pavement, wasps feeding on the smashed fruit that transports me to my hometown of Whitstable.  There is something about the occasional warm day in October when I hanker for my home.

Last week I had a serious meeting about a play.  I have not written a play or thought about the theatre for years.  This is an exciting  possibility once again.  I have no desire to direct.  NONE.  Write… yes.  Direct… no.

I met a young trans person yesterday.

There is a chasm between gay men and trans people.  My friend Our Lady J disputes this but my other less glamorous, non performing blue-collar trans buddies tell horrible stories of gay people and their rudeness and transphobia.  Bluntly, why should a gay man be interested in a trans woman?  Gay men sleep with men… not women.  However, out of their trans costumes some young working class non theatrical trans m to f are berated and insulted when they tell gay men what they are into.

If you are a young trans person where do you go to meet empathetic straight men?  Many young, transitioning straight men misguidedly think they can meet men through gay dating apps like Grindr.  They make their trans position clear.

He said, “I tell them I want to dress as a woman when I meet them, that it’s only going to work if I am dressed as a girl.  They tell me it’s not ok.  They let me wear panties but won’t tolerate anything else.”

I am taking him on a date this week.  He’s excited to wear a dress and paint his nails.  He says, “There are two of me, straight me wants to meet trans me and fall in love.”  That was very beautiful.

I met another white gay man in NYC, an undergrad at NYU, who condescendingly lectured me about trans culture.  He vehemently posited that any man who wears a skirt is transgender, that make up on a man is transgender, that drag is indisputably transgender.  That the word transvestite was like saying nigger or faggot.   He told me he wants to help his trans brothers and sisters at his university.  What help will he be?   I couldn’t be bothered to fight.  We had sex and I threw him out of my room.

Since I embraced this new path I have come to love my body.  No longer interested in what metropolitan gay men think I should look like to enjoy a full life.   I have been watching endless documentaries.   Paris is Burning versus Candy Darling.  The concerns of the former oblivious to the latter.

I am looking forward to wearing my new suit in the big city.  I’m excited.

Today transvestite (self described) artist, honored by Queen Elizabeth and the British Government, Grayson Perry writes brilliantly in the New Statesman about default man.  Read it here.

Categories
art Dogs Gay Love NYC Photography

New Museum/Mercer Hotel 2013

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Categories
Death Gay NYC Queer Travel

Upstate Interiors

Lunch

Before I start.  Before I show you more pretty pictures.

(I am loyal to those I love.)

I have something to say.

Something that needs capitalized.

I want to remind you that ARTISTS WILL PREVAIL.  Unfalteringly.  However or how often they are plagued by false accusation or malicious slur.  However their friends are forced to defend them.   Everything gets added to the pot.

The older, the more immune one becomes.   I hear it all.   Before… it made me crazy.  Now I am inured.   Eventually those who dare say it are forced to face me.  Try stopping me.

These plebeians.  No, no, no.

I was house hunting this weekend upstate.   Looking at pretty interiors.  Imagining cottage gardens.  The full, fleshy petals of pale pink peony around the house.   Imagining blackberries and apple.  Dahlia in the autumn.

Categories
Queer

Road Trip: LA to NYC and Back Again.

I’m trying to write everything down but somehow the past few weeks have blurred into one long delicious adventure.

NYC and back again in the car.

Let me remember.

I drove east through death valley and this was the temperature:

Death Valley 118 Degrees

I drove through Utah during the day which was very wise.  Utah is very beautiful.  Devastatingly beautiful.

Emery Utah 2

You see.  I can’t find the words.

I stopped in Des Moines and enjoyed the state building and the wonderful contemporary sculpture park given to the community by John and Mary Pappajohn, a Des Moines venture capitalist and his wife.

I met a young hair dresser with blue hair.

Capital Building Des Moines

18 Year Old Des Moines Hairdresser

I stopped in Chicago and met a huge football player.

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I spent the 4th July in Chicago. The Fireworks terrified Dude, my little brown dog.

July 4th Boys

I arrived in NYC.  Just in time for the horrible heat wave.

It was so hot I had to leave the dogs inside the apartment during the day or risk them dying of heat exhaustion.

I sat uncomfortably in AA meetings.

I stayed on the upper west side.  A block from Central Park.

Central Park

We walked every day off leash at dawn around the Great Lawn.  We saw beautiful young men exercising.  We, being me and the dogs.

I explored Red Hook and saw a band at Dustin Yellin‘s place called Guerilla Toss.

Guerilla Toss

I met a beautiful man in the street and kissed him.

Sparky

Why was I there?

I had gone east to reclaim my gayness after months of feeling like an ex-gay.   Hanging onto the word queer as the only way to describe my isolation from the gays.

New York.

I spent my birthday at the cloisters with Richy.

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I read from my blog at a Lower East Side gallery and they paid me for doing so.

I met more interesting people on the street.

Michael 2

I helped a friend edit his movie.

Then, unable to stand the searing heat a moment longer, I drove to Sayville taking the first ferry to Fire Island.  The Pines.

I rented a small house on Cedar Walk but didn’t spend any time there at all.

From the moment I arrived I had one extraordinary experience after another.

Pines Domestic Life

I met cool people,  and coveted their things.

Beautiful FIP crockery

I was invited into their homes and onto their yachts, I met their friends and ate their food.  I returned their hospitality by paying for them as and when they would let me.

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I walked to Cherry Grove where I had breakfast with John Walters.

I had dinner with Andy Tobias…

Andy Tobias

… in my favorite Fire Island Pines home.

My Favorite FIP House

Duncan Roy

I met a gang of charming gay men from NYC who were kind and considerate.

I spent time with all of them in the city once I returned.

This one is called Jon.

John Stevens Naked

As I let myself fall into the gay Fire Island days I began to remember how much fun being gay is.  Even if I was sober and a little bit older.

I walked the beach.

Fire Island Pines Beach

I had a huge old man crush on this beautiful boy:

Ian

Who worked here:

FIP Barman

I saw Justin Bond.

Justin Bond an Joan Fontein

I looked in at the house where we lived for so many years.

Grey Gardens FIP

And I met more men.

Blue Eyes

I spent time on my own.  I found an abandoned cock ring on the board walk.

Abandoned Cock Ring

I walked miles of boardwalks with the dogs who came home covered in tiny ticks.

Boardwalk Fire Island Pines

I finally met a beautiful man who left for India but lives in Paris who stole my head/heart.

I was so god damned happy.

The morning after the Pines Party I prepared to leave.

The Morning after the Pines Party

After ten days I took the ferry, then another ferry to Provincetown.

Provincetown Beach

I rented a small apartment on the beach and met more men.

Beautiful Man

I hung with my friend Benoit Denizet Lewis but the sparkle that used to exist between us has gone.

Benoit Denizet Lewis

We explored the graveyard.  We found Norman Mailer’s grave and a pretty headstone with a small dog carved into it.

Dog Grave

I ate a great deal but didn’t put on any weight as I walked so many miles every day.

I found this beautiful ceramic mirror frame:

Owl Mirror Frame Provincetown

I met more men.

Bulgarian Boat Boy

Eventually I drove back to New York and stayed with friends.  This is their view:

NYC View

I partied with Jeremy Kost…

…and his friend.

I had dinner with Dan at Mary’s Fish Camp.

Dan Hyman

I had dinner with Thom at my club on the roof by the pool:

Thom

I wore this chic watch:

Rolex

We worked on my film.

Franck in the office

Then, after another week in the city I took the car all the way home again.

I met a hitch hiker who travelled all the way to California.  His name is Albert.

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I stayed in The Lincoln Hotel in Chicago.

Bartender

Christian

I stayed in Denver.

Zach

I stayed in Utah.

We drove from Cedar City to LA in half a day.

We drove up the mountain in Malibu, up the drive and finally slept in our own bed.

It has been misty and cool.

Malibu Marine Layer

Categories
NYC Photography

Humid Days

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Categories
politics Queer Rant

Clément Méric: We Cry For You

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It is a black day for the international LGBTQ community.

Clément Méric is as good as dead.  His brilliant, 18-year-old queer brain mangled by right-wing thugs on the streets of Paris.

He is presently kept alive by a tangle of opalescent tubes.

In Russia activists are targeted by government sponsored bullies.

In London intellectuals are beaten to the ground by members of the EDL.

In NYC a black man is shot in the face and killed.

Trans people are murdered every day all over the world, often without investigation.

Have you heard?  There is, amongst the general population, a perceived inevitability about LGBTQ equality.

Some amongst us are becoming complacent.  Bloated on the success we think we have.

Basking in the support we think we get from the President.  In fact we are silenced by him.

His words over deeds have silenced us.

We must speak up.  Continue to challenge. Continue to be seen.

We must not shirk our responsibility to queer martyrs like Clément Méric.

Speak up. Heckle.

ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Actis only now being widely discussed after the petulant FLOTUS was confronted by GetEQUAL queer activist Ellen Sturtz.

I congratulate Ellen.  Finally, a voice for the queer poor heard over the screaming voices of the queer rich.

As the Great Recession continues in so much of the USA, ending workplace discrimination (especially for trans people) is essential.

Listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.

FLOTUS

Remember.  As we strive for parity there will be those with equal and opposite views.

There will be violence.

There will be those who will kill an 18-year-old queer boy because they can.

African-Americans had to face nearly another century of lynchings before the Civil Rights Movement was powerful enough to push back strongly against violent racists.

The women’s movement of the 1920s, side-tracked for a generation until the 1960s, with so many needlessly broken lives and life expectations as a result.

Queer people are being attacked all over the world: Paris, Moscow, New York, London by increasingly emboldened haters.

As we demand equality in the workplace, the home and in the establishment these attacks will become more frequent.

We must, whether we like it or not, form a true LGBTQ alliance not only in name but in practice.

It is too late for fear to drive us into the shadows. We are out. We are visible.

We need to be more fearless and more visible.

LGBTQ.

This means YOU.

This means ME.

Reading about Clément Méric this morning, looking at his sweet, boyish profile… I began to question my own behavior.

I have, of late, let resentment toward the gays shape my own kind of homophobia.

For those of you who have read my blog these past couple of years the provenance of this loathing may seem understandable.

Today, I need to jettison those resentments.

If I truly believe in this fight… I have to accept those I detest as my queer brothers and sisters.

Categories
art Fashion Film Gay Hollywood

Fuck you Konstantine Kakanias

Cocksucking Fame Whore

Continuing my occasional ‘Fuck you’ series of LA essays I nominate the ‘award winning’ illustrator and elderly Greek queen Konstantine Kakanias as my latest Fuck You.

Konstantine threw a party last night at Soho House.

Who put the kaka into Kakanias?  This guy has tried it all.  Artist, writer, illustrator, jewellery designer.   B’jesus with this much talent this homo should be a household name!  He’s tried so hard to be something but for poor old Koni, nothing seems to stick.  He’s  just a socialite with a great talent for persuading other socialites to take him seriously.

You know, I have known the rancid Konstantine for many, many years.  We first met with Manolis Mavrakis and Fred Hughes in New York in the early 80’s.  Fred loathed him.  Manolis laughed at him.  Koni painted my portrait then tried to have sex with me.  I declined.  He was smelly and creepy.  I left the portrait on the easel.

We periodically bump into each other all over the world.  Much to his chagrin and my infinite amusement.  It was he I referred to as Nona Summer’s vile Greek escort last week.  Konstantine attracts the WORST sort of people.  Nona, Peter Dunham, Justin Kern, Alex Hitz etc.

As his last incarnation he was calling himself an artist.   He had a laughably sophomoric show at The Light Box Gallery in LA before it closed down.  Kimberly Light (heiress) rues the day she ever let this cretin have his own show at her gallery.  He was the only artist who did not sell at the Angel Food project auction at CAA several years ago.  That’s how seriously the art elite take him.  Look for his work in the collections of important collectors and you will not find his name.  His work is absurd.

Yet, within that sub-world of dodgy socialites and rich kids looking for a purpose he has carved himself a ‘career’.   Some how he persuaded Swarovski to manufacture his designs.  Silly rings, “Inspired by Byzantine royal jewels.”  He brays.  Did they sell?  They were a total disaster and can now be found on the Swarovski website knocked down to a fraction of their original price.

Last night Konstantine was up to his old tricks.  Konstantine is now a film maker.  He has made a ‘film’ and to launch this seven minute animated masterpiece he assembled LA’s elite…  including ‘designer’ Justin Kern and his pretty side kick Stephanie Danan for whom the ‘film’ was commissioned and QVC favorite… fried chicken go to guy and Coca Cola heiress Alex Hitz and a gaggle of loafer wearing euro trash.

“They’re very collaborative people and they’re really creative. They like playing with other creative people and that’s where it all crosses over,” Indeed, Danan and Kern enlisted the efforts of friends like Tatiana von Furstenberg (heiress), “They’re not in a singular mind-set and they can pull from other mediums.”

I walked in and immediately saw twenty people I knew well enough to kiss and twenty people I knew well enough to ignore.  I waved at Konstantine… he flew out of his chair…

“Who invited you…”  he trembled.  His voice deserting its usual treble… escalating into a Maria Callas soprano.   Alex Hitz who I kissed lavishly (after all he had paid for a wonderful dinner at the Sunset Tower) said, “This is Konstantin’s party.”

“I know,” I said, “And I am the wicked fairy.”

Alex shrank into the shadows.  I turned to face the outraged Greek.  Like his country… in debt and struggling to save face.    He held out his fingers like 10 wands and told me to get out.  I left, greeting people on the way out with smiles and kisses.  Clo Perrin (heiress) looking gorgeous in white silk jersey.

Justin Kern waved.  Justin is proof that there is life after modeling… just.

“I’ll be writing about this!”  I grinned cheerily!

Before I left one of the guests, a beautiful young Parisian laughed, “Darling, what a waste of time.  You didn’t miss a thing.   Poor Konstantine.”

Dinner at Laurel Hardware with a cute jew.    Great kisser.

Categories
Fashion Gay Love

Your Life Now

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New York. May 2012

There you are. Finally. For all to see.  Like bumping into you in the street. That’s how it felt.  But you were where we met…virtually…on the internet.

Peony, the rain, the winsome songs.

If we had bumped into each other in the street, I think I would have felt the same. I left the page with a sweet smile on my face. I felt proud of you. I know how exciting life must be for you.  And if I had bumped into you in the street and you had told me that you were in love…inevitably you wanted me to know that you were in love and inevitably I crumbled.

I am indeed that cliché you despised so badly. 😉

I called Robby and he listened. I called Joan and we looked into your life and we all agreed that it was swell.

So…

The end of the film needs rewriting.  All the world can see your love. Ironic huh? Now you know how I felt when I wanted to publicly celebrate what we once had, when I wrote about us.

There you are, together…pressed together. In love.  You looked great. Your hair well cut, your pants the right length.  Your boy friend looks extraordinary and familiar. Celine is a great brand.  I know you didn’t put that Tumblr page up for me but you knew I would see it. You knew I’d have an opinion.

It was a perfect way to let me know.

If we hadn’t ended things so badly and we’d met in the street…I would have hugged you. I would have thanked you. I would have smiled gently. I may have shed a tear.  I loved you very much…you know that. But, we knew what we had was fleeting…needed to happen for you to set yourself free, free for this relationship that you celebrate so publicly today.

The metamorphosis is complete and you have emerged fully into the world…a beautiful young man capable of great love and glamor…and your underwear was chic as all hell.

I know that you will make something amazing one day…something I would have never guessed.  A film or a book or a room or a garden. You are capable of all those things.

Of course I still love you. But not like that.  This is all I ever wanted, to know you are happy and to share your happiness

By publishing your life so publicly I am relieved…even though I cried, I cried because you were there on the street telling me what I needed to know.

That you are happy and in love and…of course…beautifully dressed.

PS I bought the book.

Categories
Rant

Taking Care of Business

Yesterday was unquestionably productive.

The morning spent in airless, 19th floor, mid-town offices.  Obama in town, the city still snagged with traffic.  The sidewalks choked with Ahmadinejad protestors and Palestinian hating zionists.

My foot feels much better.  Walking normally until Midday then it swells a little and I have to rest.

Fleas on the dog, Petco remedy.

Read script by new, young writer.  Charming boys.  Flawed script.

Met Zach for dinner on 10th Street then art event on Lower East Side.  Seemed to have a William Burroughs theme.  The curator was super cute.  I mean…fucking gorgeous.

You know that Burroughs came to my 21st birthday party?  Did I ever mention that?  He arrived with Princess Selima Guirey a descendant of Genghis Khan.  I think both Scott Crolla and I were kind of amazed.

After a very spirited performance by a well endowed, naked man covered in glitter I stood on the street in the humid night chatting with an incredibly knowledgeable boy wearing an out sized base-ball cap who invited me to a Courtney Love party.  I didn’t go.

We quite randomly discussed Herbert Huncke who I had seen read poetry on St Mark’s Place in that church there with Richard Gere who, for a short time, was an acquaintance of mine.  I don’t think many people know this but Gere supported Huncke in his latter years.   He died in 1996.

If you don’t know Huncke…google him.  It’s worth your time to get acquainted with the man known as the ‘Mayor of 42nd Street’.

I first met the very young and very beautiful Richard Gere with Christina Monet-Palaci in Paris when I was Lord Rendlesham.  Lady Jane Wellesley reintroduced me to him several years later in the late 80’s whilst making the ill-fated Baron in The Trees with Marc Warren.

Gere is a huge Italo Calvino fan so we had lots to talk about.   Ah, those were the days.

I wonder if Tim remembers us having dinner at his house with Jane and Jean Paul Gautier?

Have you read City of Quartz by Mike Davis?   We discussed that too, on the hot New York street, late last night.

I left the dog with Z and T and their huge black pit bulls.  The Little Dog loves their bitch Lucy.

Home by midnight.  Asleep by one, up at 6.30am.

Next week I am in LA for The Pacific Standard Time art event and Art Platform inaugural fair.

As for my novel?  My novel has shape shifted from a dark, murderous, self-conscious meander into a funny, adroit tale of kidnap and mayhem.  It’s not high art but it is very readable.

Finally, DADT was repealed.  For the small number of people this affects directly…I congratulate you.

This morning the web is alive with video images of Republican Presidential candidates berating Commader in Chief Obama for liberating gay service men and women from keeping secrets.

The right-wing audience revealing their gay hate by booing a gay soldier, screaming with joy when the repugnant candidates promised reinstatement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Obama has finally left New York.  This morning the traffic is once again traveling freely up 8th Avenue.