Tag: Spice Girls

Categories
Gay

Birthday Party

Robby left this morning.  I was really sad to see him go.

The indisputable zenith of my birthday party was Lady Rizo singing Lilac Wine.    Seventy people in the room, you could hear a pin drop.   Such a disparate group of people with a magical spell cast over them…as only Rizo can.

The day was perfect in every way.    Dee emerged from her room at The Standard and we ate a delicious lunch with Toby and the super cute Joe.  When he took his clothes off and dived into the pool everybody watched him in awe.  A man not a boy.  A man with a perfect body.

Joan met me mid afternoon and delivered my birthday gift.  A BEAUTIFUL pair of sunglasses I had been hankering after for six months.

We all returned to Dee’s room at The Standard.  I love this hotel.  The finishes and detailing throughout the hotel are ravishing, the amazing view of The Statue of Liberty peeking over the horizon.

Spent the afternoon with Joe.

The weather has been stunning here.  Walking the streets has been inspiring.

Soho House did an amazing job of organizing my birthday party.  The food was excellent; the staff were charming and helpful.  The room perfectly appointed.

As well as Lady Rizo my friends Joey and Chase also known as the Black Soft and Rob Roth performed.  Rizo stole the night.  She sang a brilliant and very funny mash-up of Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend and Wannabee.  With the writer of the Spice Girls classic in the room it was especially poignant.

People really made the effort.  Victoria Whitbread, Matt Rowe and Charlie Parsons flew from London and of course there were many, many gorgeous boys to look at.  I had exactly what I wanted.

This was the birthday party I should have had last year but traded for a miserable time with the crazed fan.

We ended up on the roof by the pool with yet another blue balling straight boy called Sean.  Soft skin, perfect body.   As we were sitting there I saw Dominique Lomas from Sydney!  Of all people.  She looked gorgeous.  Here in NYC writing a novel.  If only I had known!

So, we all sat there in the balmy night looking down at the Hudson.  Dreaming of Sean’s face in my lap.

Sean headed off with Dominique.  We were invited to young FJ’s house.  We walked the few blocks to his huge Soho loft, stuffed with amazing art belonging to the boy’s step-father..a renowned art historian and personal hero of mine.

Tom, Robby, me and the boys.

We had the beautiful boys to take their tops off and then we took pictures of them.  It was honest (sordid) fun.  Note the Lucian Freud beside them.

I was surrounded by love last night.  Surrounded by people who loved me.   Serenaded me.  Friends old and new.  People had traveled a very long way to see me and I felt finally rewarded for these past months of painful growing.

I am determined that these final months in America will mean something to me.  Determined that they will be happy, joyous and free.  The glimpse of the Statue of Liberty reminded me why I came here, have made it my home but also why I must ultimately move on.

Categories
art Auto Biography

Picture Perfect

I wanted to post a few pictures. I want to remind myself that it has all been an incredible journey.

I wanted to include this one because I have a man’s legs wrapped around my shoulders. He is called Chris Boot. He was in South Africa with Tilda Swinton. Tilda came to the dinner thrown for me at Sundance when AKA played there. She came with Jamie Johnson.

Boom Boom Boom (The Sublime) 1982 Peter Doig

 You can see half of the Peter Doig painting I bought at his St Martin’s degree show.  It hung in my Furlong Road, Islington sittingroom until I was arrested.  At which point Doig decided to snatch it back and I never saw it again. It is probably worth in excess of $1, 000, 000 now.

Matt Rowe and Marie Palmer, we met at the Mercer Hotel in NYC with Mel C from the Spice Girls.  Matt had been one half of the duo who wrote all of their best tunes. New Years Eve 1999, Mercer Hotel with Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Alan Cummings and Fran Leibowitz. A cool very night.  Matt is still a great friend.

I’ve written loads about Jay Jopling in this blog. This is the night he met my sister Jessica.

Justin Lee-Aliston was my best gay friend in Whitstable. He was the sweetest boy. He killed himself a few months after he was gay bashed in Camberwell South London.  Here he is in happier times with my friend Tracy at the Island Wall, Whitstable house.

Celia Lyttleton, I can’t remember where we met but she is a doll and this picture was taken at a fancy dress party at the artist Glynn Boyd Hart’s house during the 1980’s.

Celia introduced me to the artist Ana Corbero at her Albermarle St gallery. She in turn introduced me to Colin Cawdor , the Thane of Cawdor-Macbeth. Duncan and Macbeth in NYC, in a sprawling apartment in Williamsburg. Long before anybody else was living there.

Our view.

Colin and Anna. Now, Colin lives in the North of Scotland in his castle, a castle he had to wrestle from his step-mother. Ana lives in Spain with her husband. I remember that he dressed Ana in Azzadine Alaia-and the moths ate clean through her fur coat.

I’ll post some more soon.

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.

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