Categories
Health Immigration Rant

Fuck You Paul Ryan

20120816-191405.jpg

“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”

Oscar Wilde

Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are dark side muppets.

They inhabit a world where only the mercenary survive.

They have no interest in the beautiful world around you unless it can be used to make more money.

They think conservation is for losers.

They will mine every last piece of coal, sell every last drop of oil, catch every fish, chop every tree without consideration for you or your children.

They have scant regard for other humans unless they have achieved what they define as success: huge amounts of money and power.

They believe in slavery.

In their dark world you will be enslaved with huge personal debt as soon as it is reasonable to impose it upon you.

So obese you’ll be unable to defend yourself, or run fast enough from crazed, gun-toting children high on prescription meds.

You will have no option but to eat cheap gmo food that causes rampant obesity in you and your family.

Your local school will be stripped of funds so your children remain uneducated and unable to intelligently question their plan.

They will teach your kids, when they can get away with it, the debunking of a thousand years of empirical scientific evidence in favor of ridged adherence to the bible.

You will fear being sick and die long before you are expected because of the appalling health care system that they proudly tell the world is the very best.

Finally, you will live in toxic shame inspired by Christian‘morality’.

If you ‘fail’ the system by becoming unemployed they will demonize you, your peers will accuse you of laziness. You will be encouraged to blame brown people for your misfortune.

Ryan and Romney will achieve their aim by frightening the oppressed proletariat with dishonest bogey men: the deficit, the end of the traditional family and foreign terrorism.

They will succeed as other tyrants have before them.

The people are simply too fatigued to fight their lies and mythology.

Complicated and realistic solutions have been long abandoned in favor of easy and inchoate sound bites.

I had a dream last night that I was fucking Paul Ryan.  After I ejaculated I pulled my cock out of his ass… but it was no longer a penis…. It was a crucifix… Covered in blood shit and cum.

Finally, I rather like the new, gamine Miley Cyrus. A world apart from the generic valley girl she once was. What the hell is all the fuss? Proof (if you needed it) that people don’t really like celebrating individuality. Preferring the homogenous mass.

Categories
art Fashion Film Gay Hollywood Money

The Picture of Dorian Gray

So, here it is.  Up and running.

My controversial, contemporary retelling of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Lippincott version of  The Picture of Dorian Gray.

I really hope you enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq13aF5EQMA

Categories
Malibu

Spring

We picked lemons and grapefruits and cleaned out the plunge pool.  We cooked dinner.  We walked on the beach.  I wrote more of my film.  I met another DOP.  I wrote more of my novel.  I am presently writing a thousand words a day.  More if I count this and the film.  We planted a tree and swept the paths.  The days are full up with life and laughter.

The twins are incredibly funny and kind.  Their Mother called me yesterday and thanked me for looking after them.  It’s a treat to do so.  They are honest.  They give more than they take.

I don’t want to go back to NYC so perhaps I won’t.  There’s nothing there for me other than sadness.   Disaster.   Therapist Jill gets back this week and hopefully I can get myself into some sort of rehab by the beginning of May.   It’s the only way I can imagine dealing with everything that has happened.   The pain and the resentment.

I can start again.

He was wearing the jacket that I picked out for him in the most recent picture I have.  Staring at a near empty pint of beer.  I hope he chokes on that fucking beer.  I hope that every time he pulls on his jacket he thinks of me and London and APC and how much I tried to help him.  What lengths I was prepared to go to make his new gay life better.

You see?  When you let a liar into your life what havoc they cause?  What pain and suffering they inflict?  Oh get over it I hear you say…but I am not like that.  I can carry around a resentment for years.   Some relationships take years to get over.  Especially when you know in your heart that you will never love like you loved, feel what you feel, be what you were with the man who you loved…ever again.  Even if he was a liar, even if he is impossible to forgive.  Even if I want so badly to put things right and be at peace with the world.

The twins are off out to Santa Monica.  They are leaving me here to write and ponder.

Life cheats us with shadows.   We ask it for pleasure and it gives it to us with bitterness and disappointments in it’s train.  Oscar Wilde.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w_szN3uuIY&feature=related]

Categories
Gay

Oscar Wilde

Duncan Roy and Wendy Asher

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.

Categories
Gay Hollywood Love Rant

Pornography: A Spectacle

It was an early morning yesterday.  I was up before the dawn.  And I really have enjoyed my stay. But I must be moving on.

Sexual anorexia is a term used to describe a loss of “appetite” for romantic-sexual interaction but can be better defined as a fear of intimacy to the point that the person has severe anxiety surrounding sex with emotional content.

4am, Saturday morning.  It is almost impossible to sleep.  My lover is in town.  My sleep schedule rearranged as I learn all over again to share my bed.

We have been in and out of bed all weekend and whilst it is reassuring to have this oversexed lil monkey crawling all over me I end up thinking far too much-both good and bad.  The bad thoughts: wanting to escape, trying to remember old conquests, those perfect pornographic moments that always get me off.  The good thoughts: fully engaging with newly learned sexual behaviors/insights.   It is delightful to be mainly present during the sex.  Now, when I say sex what are you thinking?   The sex I have is, I am sure, nothing like most people.

When Bill Maher condemns sex addicts I doubt that he understands that most men who consider themselves sex addicts are not having the sort of sex that he is having.  They are not meeting, fucking, cumming and leaving.  Many men identify as sex addicts but the men I identify most with are actually porn addicts who seldom leave their apartments or Internet addicts on hook up sites with multiple on-line personalities.  These men exist apart from the Tiger Woods variety of sex addicts: men who hook up with women or other men whilst wives and children sleep oblivious at home.

Bill Maher’s limited understanding of sex addiction and general scoffing negates those of us who work daily in order not to retraumatize ourselves.  Bill Maher is certainly not recreating moments of childhood fear; he is not replicating perfect porno moments nor dealing with erectile dysfunction.

Tiger Woods may be a serial cheater but his story is the exception rather than the rule.  Those of us who compulsively masturbate seldom get to meet anyone at all regardless of our engaging personalities.  Addicted to the soothing effect of ejaculation, the calming thoughtless moments just after we shoot our dwindling load.

1983.   I answered an ad in Time Out for gay performers who wanted to make a play with Neil Bartlett for the Institute of Contemporary Art about pornography.  Drawing on historical texts, Diaries of a Marianne  (attributed to Oscar Wilde) for instance, we all at once celebrated and condemned the production, consumption and effects of pornography.  In one scene we compared the fantasy of pornography with the reality of our own sex lives.

After our 10 city tour in the UK and Canada I went home and never gave the polemic we were positing another thought, yet had I… my life would have turned out very differently.

How has gay pornography influenced my thinking, my relationships, my life?

Pornography has ruined my sexual expectations.   Pornography: where men together do not tenderly hold each other, look into each other’s eyes, do not cry gently, do not laugh out loud, and do not ‘fail’ with half hard cocks.    The perfect bodies, sexual performance and youth of most gay porn stars are impossible acts to follow.

Yet, the moment I get into bed with a man I try to emulate what I see in pornography.   My stance is both dominant and aggressive, my voice lowers, I am uncharacteristically clumsy, and my kisses are full lipped.  I have no idea what the end point of any sexual encounter is because I have so rarely ejaculated with another human being.  I am rarely even in the same room because I am off in fantasy.  I am rarely hard.

My lover is sexually submissive so what good am I to him if I am so full of fear that my cock does not get hard?  That at the back of my mind I know my darling pornography waits to own me the moment he is gone?  How many men cheat on their wives/boyfriends with pornography?

The past few days of sexual activity have been perhaps the best of my life because I am at least in the same room as the man I have elected to sleep with.  I am authentic, present, calm and honest.  I tell him the truth.  Perhaps too much talking but frankly I would rather talk than be absent.    There has been a great deal of consolation since he arrived.  There has been a remarkable kindness.  I no longer objectify him nor resent him simply because he sees who and what I am.

With the truth comes vulnerability, certainly never evident in pornography unless it’s a ‘mans first time’ with another man.  Then the gay for pay virgin simply looks confused or humbled by desire.   I have wasted so many years to pornography, so many wasted opportunities, so much lost love.

Men have humiliated me.  I have, in turn, humiliated men.   I have defined myself by my inability rather than my gifts.  I have invested in my defects rather than my talent.

I am trying to have a few wonderful moments before my lover leaves LA and God knows if I will ever see him again.   Of this I am sure: we got to know each other before we lay together.  This meant that I had no shame when he finally held me in his arms.  That I felt comfortable enough to let him know what was going on with me when I could not perform as perhaps he wanted me to perform.   That we continue to laugh and cry and feel comfortable doing so.

I only have until Friday and I am going to make the most of it-before he returns to his own war zone and I to mine.