Categories
Queer

Two Women From Manchester

On the Phone

As the elderly gray-haired gays tittle-tattle at Joe’s Coffee shop on Commercial Street, making snide comments about those they like and those they don’t… like so many teenage girls, bullying, name calling and whispering. The lesbians remain dignified and polite.  They say good morning or make easy conversation. They comment on the weather or ones choice of croissant in such a way that improves the quality of the day.

Not all lesbian are like this of course but my experience here in Provincetown is irrefutable.

We chanced upon a lesbian memorial at Herring Cove a few nights ago, a memorial for a woman who died last October.  There were photographs of her set around the fire on sticks.  I sat with her wife of 30 years and she reminisced.  She told me their story.  I wondered how she would cope on her own.

“Oh, you get used to it.”  She said.

I didn’t believe her.  Dude sat on her lap.  She loved Dude and Dude loved her.  We ate her Red Velvet gluten free cup cake and sprayed ourselves with insect repellent.

Memorial

Last night I stopped for a slice of pizza with Brent and Derek, my crime fighting buddies.

Derek

We’d had a long day, I was up at 5am.  I’d spent an hour or so on the phone with lawyers.  I spent time answering emails.  I filled in forms and scanned them.   I made time to have a pair of sandals made here:

Sandle Workshop

Like most days I walked the dogs in the graveyard with Benoit.  I walked the dogs on the beach.  I walked the dogs to Joe’s coffee shop.  I walked the dogs to the West End and back east again.  Dude is still fat.  The Little Dog is lithe and eager.

Dude in a Grave

I found a beautiful dusky gray/mauve tamarisk at Captain Jack’s Wharf.

Tamarisk

Brent and I poked our noses into John Derian’s home/shop.  His little shop of curiosities.  He sells French glass cloche and rattan and decoupage.  Who buys decoupage?  Everyone apparently.

I ordered the slice of Pizza and sat with Derek.  It was delicious.  As I was leaving, I heard a Northern English accent.  Two elderly women from Manchester… eating the largest pizza I have ever seen.  They looked embarrassed.

They said, “This is too big for us, d’you want some?”

I overcame my English reserve and sat with them and ate their pizza.   They were retired PE teachers from Bolton.  They had lived together the past 15 years.  They had a small house and garden and took the bus into central Manchester which, they assured me, was very safe and had loads to do.

I wanted to know what they were doing with their retirement.

They said they went to concerts and the theatre and sat outside ‘weather permitting’ enjoying Manchester’s ‘cafe society’.  They rode their bikes and looked after their cats.  Mostly they travelled, this year they had been to The Galapagos and seen the giant tortoise and snorkel with penguins, they had taken a safari in Africa and showered out doors under the stars.  They had visited a brother in Sydney and driven to Melbourne along the coast, like I had with that beautiful boy… all those years ago.

I found myself talking about getting older.

Old people aren’t the same as when I was growing up.” I wondered.  “Yes,” they said, “Not the same at all.”

“They retired and spent time just waiting to die.” I said.  “Yes.” They nodded in unison.

I told them about my grandmother who was widowed when she was in her 50’s and at that very moment became an old lady.  Cut her hair short, permed it and let it whiten.   She died when she was 96.  I didn’t cry.  My mother did, she sobbed like I sobbed when the big dog was killed.  She was inconsolable, as was I about my dog.

I thought a great deal about my grandmother, chatting with these dear old lesbians.  I wondered how she could have lived so long feeling so miserable, stuck in one town, complaining about this and that… isolated from all her daughters (how can a mother hate her own daughters?) other than my mother.  I remembered just how much she didn’t want to die.  She was terrified.  I wondered if my uncle Norman killed her.  There was little love lost between them and he was with her at the end.  She would have been too weak to fight.

We said our goodbyes and good nights.  I’m sure I’ll bump into them again.  I hope I do.  I wish I was an old lady.

The light is beautiful here today.  The sea is sparkling.  I want for nothing.  Happily looking over the Atlantic, the Cape swinging around me teaming with life.  Lobsters, basking sharks, oysters, cod and herring.  I had fish and chips for lunch yesterday.

Here are my finished sandals:

New Sandals

 

Categories
Queer

The Problem With Pride

FDF 3

President Obama has third graders announce LGBTQ pride month at the White House.  Whose idea was that?  Even POTUS looked a little incredulous.  Obviously I don’t have any problem with 3rd graders manning the barricades but… perhaps we can have kittens next time… or puppies… or fluffy yellow chicks… or a new born foal?

The gays are in Pride party overdrive.  Circuit parties, sex parties, pride events, bear parties, underwear parties, mourning parties, party parties.

When Joe and I lived in The Pines on Fire Island we went, over the years, to various high-octane, drug fueled, over lubricated, semi-naked circuit parties.  Yet, however many drugs I took, however great my body was… I still felt alienated.  I still experienced a strange, out-of-body disconnect from those men around me.  You see, I remember thinking quite clearly that they… GOT IT… and I didn’t.  I thought back then… they understand something more about homosexuality than I did… than I do.

Don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t looking down my nose at them.  I wasn’t feeling superior.  I would love to have connected with those men.  Like I used to feel connected (high on E) in my mid twenties exploring London (straight) club land.  The same heaving mass that miraculously included me.  Joyfully, willingly abandoning self, self consciousness terminal uniqueness and dancing as one with a thousand others.

That is what I felt then.  This is what I feel now:  To have ones life defined by gay circuit parties is simply revolting.

Some people prepare for weeks for Pride, in the gym, tanning, organizing parties, getting the right tickets for the right events.  Making sure the drink and the drugs are pre-ordered.  Leaving nothing to chance.  The last ‘pride’ parade I attended I saw a drunken man defecating in the street. It was not the enduring image of LGBTQ solidarity after which I was hankering.

There is a hideous disconnect between the civil rights we demand and the public face of ‘pride’.  A parade of semi naked gyrating narcissists.  How can anyone take that seriously?  Pride simply reinforces the difference between me and them:  I do not drink or take drugs.  I am not driven (compelled) by my homosexuality.

The parade terrifies me.  Aesthetically.  The corporate floats lack ingenuity and wit.  The rent boy/sex worker float lacks class.  The thongs, the swagger, revealing the lie of Pride.  The near identical bodies in various hues.  Searching, begging for tiny differences between each naked, muscular physique that may determine the uniqueness, the individuality of just one of these men.  Of course, I am excited to see so many out men.  But they are all the same.  I look at them and, as much as I want to be, I am not attracted to them.  I am not attracted to their essence… to their remarkable lack of ego.

The Pride parade is a celebration of sexuality.  First and foremost.  And I, absurdly, want to fall in love.  You see, I proved it.  They wanted sex… and I didn’t.   I wanted to fall in love… and they didn’t.

“I want to tell you how much I love you.”  I whispered.

When I have sex.  I tell them to say… I love you.  It turns me on.  “Even if you don’t mean it.”  I was useless then and I am useless now to those gay men at those gay circuit parties because I didn’t want to have sex.  I wanted to fall in love.  I didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t and they knew it.  They could see by the look in my eye that their sexuality terrified me, baffled me.  I wanted to fall in love.

That man I loved.  After he came out… he told me about the sex he was having with many, many men.  He was really good at meeting strange men and having sex with them.  His priorities shifted.  When we were together and he was in the closet he told me he loved me, he was emotional… the moment he came out he threw his emotional interest in men away.  In favour of sex.  I wanted to fall in love.

It was my fault.  I had this sex genius at my disposal and couldn’t work out how to use what he was brilliant at.  When we made love I felt the same disconnect.  Out of body.  Away.

Pride is a tough word to have appended to any celebration because it means so many different things to so many different people.  That’s why I love the LGBTQ Mardi Gras in Sydney, it doesn’t have PRIDE  in the title.  Mardi Gras is everything you want it to be because Mardi Gras mean nothing to me.  Means everything to me.

Mardi Gras implies celebration.  It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.  Even though it eschews the word Pride, on the several occasions I attended… I felt really proud.  Proud to be just like them.  Just like you.  I looked for the similarities and not the differences at:  The silly Mardi Gras community events, the Mardi Gras parade, the film festival, the theatre festival, the LGBTQ city art tours… even the leather cruise… something I would never usually do seemed fun and interesting.

It was a gathering of the LGBTQ clan and made no mistake by calling itself something it isn’t.  The parade and the party.  Mardi Gras was so different from London Pride.  London Pride in the 1980’s, was a sombre affair.  Men and women.  Simply being seen.  It was originally held during the miserable months of the British year.  Overcast skies.  Rain.

London Pride has evolved from a bunch of angry gays and lesbians marching through Westminster (Margaret Thatcher’s back yard) denouncing the infamously homophobic Section 28 to right now and a profoundly different landscape for the LGBTQ community.  We have enthusiastically embraced the Blair (credit where credit’s due) government’s equality overhaul and the introduction of legal parity for all citizens of the UK regardless of gender.

London Pride is a deserved celebration… but it was earned.  It’s not my cup of tea.  But it was earned.  If it isn’t your cup of tea… what is?  What does this old queer want?

Well.

Somewhere between the seriousness of a civil rights march and the celebration of Mardi Gras there is a parade I want to attend.   There’s a parade I want to join where all men and women are respected and nurtured regardless of age, sexuality and religion.  Let me know if you find that Parade because I’ll be there… to hold your hand.

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Categories
Auto Biography

To Melbourne with Nick

Categories
Travel

Sydney/Melbourne 2006

 

Categories
Auto Biography Travel

Sydney Girls

Categories
art Gay Photography

Sydney NSW 2002

Categories
art Gay Photography

Sydney NSW 2007

Categories
Hollywood

Cathy Griffin

Early to bed after an exhausting day of brush clearance.

We hired four, sturdy day labourers from outside the Malibu courthouse.  Moved a ton of dry leaves and branches from the end of the drive.  Now I am obsessed with making that part of the garden beautiful.

Mulching the trees there have made them glorious this year.  The cherimoya, the Mexican Guava, the Mango…all flourishing after the wet winter and mild summer.   This morning the sun is shining.  No marine layer.

It’s going to be a hot one.

Yesterday I had lunch with Cathy Griffin…the writer not the comedienne.   Ha!  Gotcha!  We went to Geoffrey’s.  The restaurant staff, obviously expecting Cathy Griffin the comedienne, looked a little disappointed.

I saw Matthew Perry having lunch with a friend.  He looks terrible.  We used to be close.  I have a soft spot for Matthew.

Anyway, Cathy co-authored the auto-biography of legendary Hollywood hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff.

Sydney dressed Marilyn Monroe‘s hair all through her life, creating those iconic looks…and after she passed, he dressed her hair one final time.

He was the last but one person to speak with the legend before she died.

He told Cathy that Marilyn was miserable that night because Bobby Kennedy had dumped her.  Isn’t that odd that I know Max Kennedy, Bobby’s son?  My friend’s father was, apart from being cruelly assassinated and a political visionary, at the heart of one of the worlds most shattering Hollywood scandles..ever.

I have never had the guts to ask him about it.

Anyway, Sydney never wanted anyone to know he was gay…or a jew.  Is that self hate or realistic in 1950’s America?   I guess it was all about self-preservation in those days.

A tormented soul, devoted himself to the women he worked with…Crawford, Taylor, Monroe etc.  Lived in penury with a Brazilian gigolo.  He sure has a great story.   A little like Truman Capote and his ‘swans’, placing himself at the heart of their dramas then spilling the beans.

There are those of us who adore women, love being surrounded by women…I call myself emotionally heterosexual.  So much easier to love and be loved by women.

I wonder…perhaps there’s a steamy, sexy Hollywood film idea tucked in this story?

I love that scene in the movie where the old friend of the recently departed dresses her hair, gossiping, remembering their adventures…even though she is dead.  I love that scene.

Anyway, check out Sydney’s work.  Google him.

The food at Geoffrey’s was better than I remember it.  Much better.  Had the lobster salad.

Categories
Hollywood Malibu

The Bus

My calves ache.  Why?

As an experiment I took the bus from Malibu to Hollywood.

It was much easier than one imagined.  I walked off the mountain, leaving the dog in the house.  I walked the long way down the steep Las Flores Canyon in the blazing midday sun causing blisters and bruising on both feet.

At the bottom of the hill there’s a very convenient bus stop.

On the way there the bus was crammed with migrant workers and mental patients.  By the way, even mental patients have smart phones that they check compulsively every ten seconds.

What could they be possibly checking?

I liked the ride along the PCH…looking out to sea, watching cormorants bombing the waves and dolphins making their way west.  Everything looked very pretty and southofranceafied.

On the way back, the bus was full of homeless people keeping out of the unusually evening cold.  Bad move.  The air conditioning made it colder inside than outside the bus.

On both trips I met a few disgruntled European tourists who were shocked by the patchy public transportation: how long everything took and general lack of information, schedules etc.

Had I not used my iPhone travel app I’m sure I would have gotten very lost.  Maybe that’s what the the mental patients were checking…their route.

Surprisingly I still have a huge amount of shame around taking the bus in LA.  Nowhere else do I feel it.  Anywhere else it’s just the way things are.

Getting back to Malibu later that evening was miserable so I aborted the mission and caught a cab from Sunset and PCH waiting in a smelly fish restaurant called Gladstone’s until a jolly Georgian cabby picked me up.  $30.

On the way home two large dogs dashed across the PCH.  They were not killed but I don’t know how they survived.  They survived the mad dash.  Thank God.  The cabby started shouting incoherently at the owner in Russian and English.

“Fuck you!”  He screamed.  “Fucker!”

As he dropped me off he said, “You can never depend on a man but a dog will never let you down.”

I spent yesterday morning in the garden, planning to hang this huge bronze lantern I found on the street.  I need a sturdy chain and a butchers hook.

Capitalizing on my confidence surge I arranged to see my Important Producer Friend.  It worked out really well.  Before I leave LA/USA for good I have to achieve more than a couple of reality TV shows and a revenge novel…oh, and a beautiful garden.

Perhaps I’m being a little hard on myself.

Anyway, after a few moments of timidity I burst into the pitch with passion and verve.  He wants to help.  He is able to help.  Real power in an illusory town.  I felt safe.

Whilst I was with him it was easy to identify what has been missing these last two years.

Let’s look at the facts: I can write an interesting script, develop a great idea, direct a compelling movie.  Sell it, promote it, open film festivals worldwide.  I can really do that.  I’ve done that with all but one of my films.

Because I’ve had the wind punched out of me I just couldn’t find the huge strength required to force the film off of the page and into the world.  Perhaps I can?  Now I have the energy and focus.

Walking down the mountain to the PCH rather than staying at home and weeding the garden…well, that’s the advice I would have given a good friend.  Get off your ass and do the deal.

The miserable veil, today…for the past few days has lifted.  Let’s see if it will last.

Watching that evocative twenty year old video enthused and invigorated me.  I remembered just how much I have to be proud of.  At the time I was making theatre, living an idyllic, simple life in Whitstable.  Just returned from six months in Sydney, about to go to Film School, hanging with cool people, making love to beautiful men and mostly very happy.

My early thirties were great fun.

I think that’s obvious from those images.

I wondered what it would take to get back to that place.  That happy place?  Well, I have to think seriously about this blog.  Because of you know who I kept this thing alive and by doing so I kept my connection with him alive.  Like a daily letter to him.

It’s hard to imagine not writing this blog.  It’s hard to let go.

The personal details that I pump daily into the world must stop.  I have to get serious.  This blog has become a destructive addiction, just like everything else I do compulsively.

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.