Tag: Sexuality

Categories
Gay Hollywood Love

Help Me

Banana and Walnut Loaf
Banana and Walnut Loaf

I wore a Helmet Lang jacket this evening that I have not worn for years.  It felt great.  I trotted off for dinner with my friend Dom and his sweet friends.

I was late.  As I walked over I ended up on the telephone with you know who.   I needed to break things off, or rather recalibrate my relationship with my dear New York friend.    Break things was what I tried not to do; he is already a broken man.   I failed.  I was heavy handed and abrupt.   In spite of my best intentions the seething resentment and obsession and mad thoughts spewed out of me because I couldn’t hold them inside for one minute longer.

The day ended thus.  I felt free for the first time in weeks.

The day began very badly.

This morning, after the 10-second earthquake, I stood naked in the middle of my sitting room sobbing like a baby because all I could think about was him and all I wanted to be rid of was the thought of him.  Our friendship has been so fucking overwhelming-watching him fall apart, pick himself up and be there for him without ever thinking what was best for me.

My fantasy was that a man twenty years younger than me who I met for the first time three short months ago would fall in love, move to LA and get a job in the film industry.  How INSANE is that?

I prayed, “Send me somebody who’s strong and somewhat sincere.”

The good news is that tonight, after our chat, I am feeling a little more like myself.  I have come clean with those I love and admit that I have been looking at pornography rabidly for the past week-as of old-so intense was the feeling.

Whenever I am feeling vulnerable I resort to my old friend-pornography.

Tomorrow I will try for one day of abstinence.  I will try to get through the night without looking at that heaving pile of stinking pink flesh claiming me with so many muscular arms.   For the past week I have stuffed my feelings with porn, cigarettes and food.

My flat is dirty, my clothes strewn over the floor.

This is a lesson in unmanageability, I am powerless over…well, fill in the fucking blank.

You see, I thought that I was falling in love but I was just held hostage by intensity.

The past three months have been wrought with emotion-watching someone I deeply care about tear himself and his life to pieces and being judged for doing so by people who fail to understand his predicament.

The point is-his problem is not my problem and I foolishly shouldered the entire burden of his life.

I have choices yet my choices diminish the moment I get obsessed-a hideous chain reaction then unfolds before me:  Obsession, resentment, anger.  When the pain becomes too much to bare, when I finally get angry enough to reclaim who I really am, then I feel shame for getting viciously angry-then remorseful for how I treated those I love.

My dearest friend I want to thank you for the privilege of watching you be brave.  For demonstrating how the truth can set you free.  Now, fly like a bird my darling.  Soar as high as your tiny wings will carry you.  Never settle for second best.  Don’t give yourself away to fools or liars.   From this moment on always tell the truth. Never tell people what you think they want to hear.  Be true to yourself.

Life is never without lessons to learn and I have learned a great deal during these three amazing months.

You know, my dear, we have our finest days to come but probably as great friends and not as fuck buddies.

And so to bed.  I am so tired.  So bloody tired.  I may even sleep tonight.  Let’s hope so shall we?

 

Enhanced by Zemanta
Categories
Gay Queer Rant

FULL DISCLOSURE

I was with a man last week, a friend of mine.  Married with two kids, good job, comfortable life.  The only fly in the ointment being his insatiable desire for other men.

He had always known that he was gay but fell in love with a beautiful woman.  He still loves her, loves his children and his comfortable life.  When I met him he was in pieces because he was about to tell his wife the truth about his other life.  The life he could no longer contain, compartmentalize.

You know, whether it is another man or another woman the deceit is just the same.  However, his wife, the woman he had been with for twenty years utterly trusted and loved him.  She described him as the center of her world.  Now, after therapy, he had decided to tell her the truth.

You know I am in two minds about FULL DISCLOSURE.  Depending on how it is handled it can be a great thing.  The truth, as we all know, tends to set you free-but at what price for the wife?  For the children?

Is it possible to love and cherish a woman yet have a secret gay life?  I have written on these pages that I believe that it is.  That men think differently about monogamy than women.  Judging by just how broken the man is he really loves his wife and finds his gay life unexplainable.

Of course we do not live in the 1950’s when society was less tolerant of homosexuality but we must not underestimate two things:  firstly, the desire for a regular life of marriage and children with a woman and secondly that the love that develops between a man and a woman regardless of orientation is still real.

The gay lifestyle is not exactly my cup of tea, the bars and clubs, the endless hooking up-found in urban gay life.  Gay men don’t do a very good job of advertising the better part of our lives.  Anyhow that’s another story.

I have loved women during my life and whilst I loved them I was not hankering after men.  The emotional commitment that I had was just as valid as that that I had with men.

Having sex with a man is far easier than telling a man ‘I love you’.

Sexuality and relationships are complicated and whilst some relationships do not fit the norm we should not discount the love that exists there.

My friend desperately loves his wife and children, their lives together have been rich and varied.  Has he been more dishonest than a man who cheated on his wife with other woman?

Can a man still love his wife and have sexual relations with other men?  My friend tells me that he can and does.  Just like Darwin who believed both in God and evolution.  When asked how this was possible to believe in God and his theory of evolution he replied ‘because I do’.

I rather like the Victorian model where gay men married and had children and had affairs with men on the side.  This may not suit the out and prouds or the uber hetero but may suit some people an the middle of the Kinsey spectrum.  We are not all one thing or the other until we say we are.  We are not gay until we say we are.  When we say that we love someone why should this not be believed just because our sexuality is more complicated or in the words of Derek Jarman less ‘common’.

I have loved many women and whilst I have always been honest about my interest in men they seemed to not care as long as they were or felt loved.  Women have a huge capacity for love, for tolerance and forgiveness.

Categories
Death Rehab

Wake Up!

Kristian’s death has affected me more than I might admit.   Rather foolishly I had a picture of him on my phone that lit up every time somebody called.  I deleted it today-I was making myself sadder than I needed to be.

Found myself looking at pornography last night-late-trying to soothe myself-trying to throw a warm blanket over my feelings.   It didn’t work.  I still woke up this morning overwhelmed with fear.  I wrote to John:

5am.  Waking up in huge amounts of fear.  Crushing, overwhelming fear. Think I may have come to the end of the line. Cannot go on.  Making bad decisions.  Can’t face anything.  Financial ruin facing me.  Nowhere to run to.   Don’t trust anyone. Obsessed.  Looked at porn this morning to try to sooth me-did not work.  Nothing works.  Do not see any more life ahead of me.

As dawn broke over the mountain I expected those particular ghouls to vanish, yet, those pesky demons lingered all day-like they were waiting patiently to claim me.

My father died when he was 53.

Found myself looking at pornography..

Now, that sounds like it happened to me rather than me searching around for that perfect porn moment.  Porn is like research, it’s scholarly, frustrating, intense.

Feeling desperately sad.  Not sobbing like when the Darling Big Dog was killed.

Cannot listen to Kate Bush or Soft Cell (remember listening with him) but rather strangely listening to the Spice Girls, which softens the edges-like having a wank.

Throwing the towel in.  “Goodbye my friend.”  Remember when we were best friends with Matt Rowe who wrote all those huge number one hits?    “Goodbye my friend.”   Remember New Years Eve at The Mercer Hotel in NYC with Melanie Sporty Spice and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman?  Odd mixture that night?  What a night.

So I’m chatting with a friend about his childhood and he tells me that his father was sent to prison when he was 11 years old.  The only way he knew how to deal with the shame was to lie to his classmates.  He knew where his father was but told his friends that his father was on a business trip-he told lies because the truth was far too complicated.  Gosh, I related to that.  Lying to make life easier:  My father is on a business trip.  Telling palatable childish lies leading to a life of fantasy, pornography, disconnection.

It took me so long to let the truth set me free.  Now I try so hard to tell the truth.  Lyle brought word from England that I had a terrible temper.  Oh yes, I remember that.  My temper was a daily occurrence for so long.  Before I went to Sex Rehab I really had no idea why I was so angry-after sex rehab I fully understood why I was angry and the mechanism that controlled it.  So, to all that I shouted at and screamed at and made cry-I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.

Sorry to repeat myself but..

When Kristian died suddenly a door opened into a world I considered closed to me.   I had considered suicide for as long as I can remember but never seriously.  Death, after all, is a very long time.  Suddenly there are enough fun people in the after life that I might have a good time.  Giggle with.   I am not scared of death-I was just scared of being bored when I got there-now with Kristian dead-death seems like a realistic option.  Holding the door open for me.

I am looking for clues for what might keep me alive?  What can I believe in?

This morning I heard John talking about being asleep and how much of the time I have been asleep.  I fall asleep when I first meet some one-a deep sleep.  I always thought that it was because I felt comfortable but now I see that it was to escape intimacy or worse that something might happen to me.

Moths in my clothes, little dog pawing at me…home sick for Whitstable, for Battersea Park..can we walk there together you and I?

Selling art-legitimate source of misery?  My friends didn’t want to buy my art.  They want to buy art from a legitimate source.  Funny.

Lying.  It’s a choice.  To tell the truth or lie?  It seems obvious doesn’t it?   Well, these muddled days, as Michael Moore reminded us when he picked up his Oscar, are ‘Lying times’.  Within a relationship there are all kinds of lies but I don’t want to tell HIM lies.  I just want him to know the truth.

The silence in the Malibu Mountains, the thudding base from the music playing in the apartment above my Hollywood apartment.   Both the silence and the interminable base making my head ache.   My head aches.

The questions that haunt me:  How could he have taken such a risk?   How can he be calling me to join him there and why am I listening?

One day I will write about FULL DISCLOSURE-a most unsavory practice.

I love you MR DARLING NYC-you are keeping me alive,  your love and your perfect smile are keeping the worst of these terrible demons from driving me to the gates of hell.

Enhanced by Zemanta
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.