I should have called this post: Pre-Existing Condition.
I have always been embarrassed by my piles. Hemorrhoids. I have always had them. Ever since I can remember. Thank God I was never a bottom.
Whilst the rest of the world looks on in horror at the inevitable nuclear meltdown in northern Japan, the brutal attacks on protestors by the Bahrainian police force, the Libyan civil war I spent this evening with a complete stranger from the internet who arrived at my home with a bag of groceries and cooked me dinner.
Whilst he did that: I fainted. Very, very Jayne Eyre of me.
The upshot being that I badly bruised my back on the fucking chair Michael Temple made for me. The chair looks nice but it’s a FUCKING DEATH TRAP.
That’s what we do in LA. Strangers come to our mountain top mansions and prepare Penne Carbonara. I served coffee in delicate Sevres coffee cups. The dog was FREAKED OUT when I fell over. He ran away from me when I tried to placate him.
This morning Charles left in his neat black suit and freshly pressed shirt and tie. He looked so sweet. I had film stuff to do after he left. After a few film related conversations on the telephone I walked to the PCH. All the way there and all the way back. He chased many ground squirrels.
I sold some art.
This afternoon I watched Sophia Coppola‘s film Somewhere. I really enjoyed it. The language and locations of our Hollywood lives. Too many afternoons floating on the pool, too many hasty hook ups. Too many facile conversations. Too many text messages from people who either want to fuck you or fuck you over. Not enough substance. Set against a back drop of elegant hotels with fancy toys to play with.
I once lived in the Chateau Marmont for a month. I moved there when the mountain burned. I have spent many hours there making new friends.
I remain isolated.
Most of us are isolated here. However successful we are or we are not. However many parties we are/are not attending, however ‘connected’ we are.
Sitting around.
Waiting for a great idea.
So now the next great idea has come upon me and I have convinced others to work with to make a dream come true. Suddenly this town makes sense.
Los Angeles, oh you strange and terrible place.
The christian twins are coming to stay. The beautiful, twenty-year-old twins are coming to live with me at the house, live at the house whilst I am in NYC. When they return from Utah. My born again beauties.
I ate the pasta/caprese salad/garlic bread and he left soon after we finished our coffee to my strange, secluded mountain top life.
A renewed interest in me by younger men. What is this all about? Just as I thought I was on the gay slag heap I am suddenly enjoying a sexual renaissance as a daddy.
Apparently everybody wants his daddy and being a tall, shaved-head, masculine kinda gay I seem to fit this bill. NYC this last visit I was stunned by just how much interest I generated at the gym. These cute, younger men had not seen me on TV, did not know my back story…but wanted some daddy lovin’.
One will always be ‘hot’ if one remains confident.
Am I being fetishized? Lets’s hope so.
I am not complaining. It makes growing old and gay all that much better.
…which was how somebody found the blog yesterday. Nothing worse than a tranny with buyers remorse.
Golden Angel Head
Resting my lap top on my ball. Did I learn nothing? I can feel it burn my thighs.
NYC. Why so secretive? Secret love? Maybe. Secret litigation. YES! Not so secret. Secret parties after the Armory? Well…of course. Secret drama at my favourite places? Definitely. Secret film stars at NYU. Secret fuck buddies who don’t want to wear condoms.
Secrets…and I am on the verge of giving birth to this huge secret shit.
A love affair? maybe.
Walking the dog as usual. Selling art. Not selling art. Fuck!
Met up with a gay friend who is just so pissed at Obama and the HRC and can’t imagine how things are going to change for him and his lover. How are things going to change?
It’s only a matter of time.
Don’t give up. Read this:
Speech Michael Moore delivered at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011
America is not broke.
Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.
Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.
I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here’s what I learned: Money doesn’t grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventers, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don’t pay their fair share of taxes, the state can’t function. The schools can’t produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in revenue. And the population ended up suffering because they reduced their taxes, reduced our jobs and took wealth out of the system, removing it from circulation.
The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. It’s part of the Big Lie. It’s one of the three biggest lies of the decade: America/Wisconsin is broke, Iraq has WMD, the Packers can’t win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.
The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. LOTS. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn’t work, they’ve got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:
1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day – this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart — because you — yes, you, too! — might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone, don’t rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.
2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it’s Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin’ awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. “Here! Take our money! We don’t care. We’ll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!”
The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).
Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant know as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone tells us America is broke and broken. It’s just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!
So how do we get this? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.
Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois — whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn’t have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn’t be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more – something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job — their $19,000 a year job. That’s how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilots flying people here to Madison. But he’s stopped trying to get better pay. All he asks is that he doesn’t have to sleep in his car between shifts at O’Hare airport. That’s how despicably low we have sunk. The wealthy couldn’t be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They wanted to take away his sleep. They wanted to demean and dehumanize him. After all, he’s just another slob.
And that, my friends, is Corporate America’s fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement — a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don’t understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. “Why are they all standing out there in the cold? I mean there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!
“There’s something happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you…?”
America ain’t broke! The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it’s one person, one vote, and it’s the thing the rich hate most about America — because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!
Spent yesterday, all day, sorting our film structure.
It’s so much fun working with CP. He makes me laugh all day.
His ideas are strong and sensible. He thinks in a way that I can understand.
We worked methodically through the original treatment, exploring each element.
Who are these men? Who are we dealing with? Where do they live? How did they get there? The structure, the logic and the sensibility. By the end of the day I really felt as I knew exactly what was happening and why.
Where as I was trying to make these characters more like me he was, quite rightly, identifying the sort of men who would actually make the life we were creating for them.
Our approach to structure is very different (I think in acts and timing) but we end up finding common ground. This is perhaps the most grown up working relationship I have ever had. I am willing to share, defer, negotiate. Why? Because I trust him.
He knows that I am not convinced by own ability in some spheres. I know that the project, like any film, is bigger than me and therefore, as a director, must agree to be replaced if I am not the right man.
Directing the film is not my aim. The film is my aim.
We still don’t have a working title but that is the least of our concerns. The idea is strong enough to be transportable. We flip-flopped between England and America.
By the end of the day we were both totally exhausted but I felt so happy that we were well on our way to being able to present a coherent idea to our writer..when we finally choose him/her.
As I sink myself further into this project the less interested I am by past concerns. The more I invest in making art (a life beyond myself) the more complete I feel.
I tell you what I love about our working relationship: he understands that when I am passionate I am not being angry. He is not sensitive. He sees that the ideas I believe in I will fight to keep but not every idea is worth keeping. He will not lecture me about my ‘attitude’ or how ‘difficult’ I am because he understands the rough and tumble of this highly charged creative process.
Over dinner we discussed his remarkable achievements. I felt really humbled by his success.
We have lumped all of our agent meetings into one day.
The second time I met Vidal it was with Stephen Fry when Stephen was here in LA writing his book.
On both occasions I had to share him with many others.
On this occasion Charlie Parsons and I had him all to ourselves.
Gore looks very frail. He looks like a child. Sitting in his wheelchair, his clothes hanging off his slight frame. His eyes still blaze, his smile..when he smiles…lighting up his whole face. He looks ever so slightly like Monty Burns. He remains mesmerizing.
He is still king of the brilliant bon mot.
Charlie arrived from London and checked into his hotel.
My good buddy is here in LA so we get to spend a great deal of time together. He is such fun and very gently mocks how seriously I take myself.
We sat with Gore at his dining room table in his beautiful Spanish revival house (for sale) in the Hollywood Hills riveted to his take on contemporary America.
Sitting with his assistant and his realtor Delphine. He offered us white wine but we opted (obviously) for water.
Gore recently sold his home in Italy so the house is crammed not only with thousands of books piled in every room but also an extraordinary collection of renaissance art.
A ginger cat with huge eyes lay on his bed.
We sat in the dining room chatting, covering a great deal of ground in a very short amount of time.
We discussed his dancing carp, we discussed the errant Charlie Sheen who he had once played a corrupt senator opposite in The Shadow Conspiracy.
He laughed at how he was always asked to play corrupt senators.
We discuss Sarah Palin . He impersonates Palin brilliantly reducing us to fits of giggles. He described her as ‘un-American’, he laments her lack of intelligence.
We discuss pre-war Germany and how the catastrophic economic situation here perfectly mirrors the situation there; creating a moment in time when a person like Palin can grab the attention of the people and make them feel as if she alone can provide simple answers for difficult problems.
Like any snobby intellectual he scorns the stupid whenever he can. He laments how Obama has been stopped by the vicious right from achieving anything esteemable.
Yet, Obama’s people were also described as ‘stupid’.
Next week he will be with Gorbachev. He holds Gorbachev in very high regard.
Not only is Gore Vidal a remarkable man, he is a remarkable gay man. Inspiring me to understand the old, old gay man in my film and who he might be.
Such a wonderful history. Belligerent, surly, glamorous.
When we left the house we sat quietly in the car making sense of this extraordinary moment.
Gore Vidal, embittered by this contemporary America. He is saddened that corruption is rife.
Like anyone with a big brain he wants to understand how this could have happened to such a great country.
He mentioned my pet American peeve, that Americans boast continually that they are the very best at everything in all the world.
That they have the best police, firemen, soldiers, scientists, schools, healthcare, healthcare delivery… the list is as long as you want to make it.
Yet, elsewhere people live longer, are better educated, live safely etc. Gore mocked American grandiosity.
He said, “I don’t know many Swedish boys who are desperate to become American, look at the people who do…”
At one point Vidal started talking about the end of slavery, how the blacks were deliberately uneducated by the whites and if they showed any desire for an education, for reading and writing, he said that they were “Taken out and shot.”
I remember a Chris Rock skit when he imagines what that must have felt like, to disguise ones intelligence for fear of ones life.
Now we are all slaves with no real need to be educated.
Do American white folk still resent an educated black man? Is that what he was trying to say? Was this why, when he was elected, people here kept on telling me that Obama would be assassinated?
I drove home listening to NPR but I couldn’t listen to anything other than the conversation we had just had with this frail old man.
When he dies something of old America, good America will die with him.
My darling God Children give me so much pleasure. Here is a glimpse of them. They have moved to Lake Malibu which is just PERFECT.
Loads going on in SoCal…but just H’wood shit. On HLN again tonight with my valued opinions about Charlie Sheen. SAG awards…blah blah. Aleksa won with her Boardwalk Empire colleagues. She texted me after…so excited. I am so proud of her.
This gay male ain’t impressed. Like everything Obama does the goodwill gets lost in the detail.
I am not holding my breath for better treatment for gays in the military.
Of course DADT was absurd but repealing it does nothing when you get to thinking about the real and immediate problem for gay men and women in the USA: The Christian Right hates us (along with the devout Muslim and the Orthodox Jew) and would like us to self destruct in a cloud of holy vapor.
With the advent of fascist Palin and her ilk…who intellectuals love to laugh at as the German intellectuals did at Hitler…laws like this can be very easily repealed. For Goodness sake, they are already discussing separate dorms for gays!
Now, let’s start talking about the real issue: legal parity, matrimonial parity and stop gawping over the death of a ridiculous law that affected a tiny number of men and women compared to DOMA which affects us all.
There’s something else, something I always forget to write:
The gays and the lesbians ain’t going anywhere.
We ain’t asking and you ain’t telling.
You murderous, repellent christian/muslim/jewish folks can kill every black man, every white man, every asian, every jew, every muslim, every christian, every aboriginal…but as long as there are humans on the earth we will be there too.
Get used to it! Get fucking used to it!
We are your children and your grand children. You can hunt us down and kill every one of us but tomorrow another gay will be born.
It is God’s Will you crazy Christian/Muslim/Jewish Cunts..it’s God’s fucking will.
As for the gays…
Parity, unity and now.
Get off your fat, lazy, complacent asses gay America and start breaking windows until you achieve equality. Stop relying on bloated lawyers to fight unwinnable cases. Do SOMETHING!!! Do it NOW!!!
I know you won’t. There’s a boy you’ve seen on Manhunt..a martini waiting for you at the bar…weights to lift at the gym.
I live in the USA. I am appalled by the lack of political initiative that gay people take or are engaged in.
Frankly this DADT repeal is small cheese. American gay and lesbian equality is leagues behind the rest of the developed world because they refuse to engage in direct action. They refuse to seen to have an opinion…refuse to fight in any meaningful way and, just as Obama attempted to engage with the Christian right with his ill fated consensus politics..reaching out to his adversary, the gays have their agenda prescribed by their homophobic enemies rather than doing what government hates most: insurrection.
Governments hate their own people on the street demanding to be heard.
Gay men especially still live in a great deal of fear.
Look at the way radical British gay human rights activist Peter Tatchell fought hard and visibly for all to see, worked in tandem with Stonewall lobby type groups and allowed the oppressed a voice in the streets.
In America we are regularly stoned, beaten, insulted and killed. It is time to fight back, it is time to be heard and a smidgeon of compassion is simply not good enough.
We must be the first generation ever where the option to freely migrate has become almost impossible.
Humans have always fought for their freedom; whether religious, political, racial. Finding themselves and their ideas in conflict with the majority, no longer able to live with their fellow man or persecuted and driven from their homes.
In recent times the minority were able to emigrate, find sympathetic others or start their own like-minded group in fresh pasture or foreign lands.
Sadly this is no longer achievable…singularly maybe as a political refugee but no like-minded group can move as one and find virgin territory to freely express their differences.
Migration has always been key to human success and innovation. Stifling this primal desire to up sticks and move is patently detrimental to the human race.
We are tribal by nature and proudly so. Most are happy with the tribe they were born into.
By fixing communities in one place the negative effects are plain to see. Dissatisfaction reigns.
I have never been a proponent of integration. I am a loner but my adopted tribe, the gay tribe, has enthusiastically created comfortable ghettos where they feel safe and valued. The same can be said of Asian communities in Northern England, Hasidic communities in Brooklyn, Posh people in Gloucestershire etc.
Where we are trapped together in unhealthy union fights between opposing tribes become not only more frequent but also more relevant. Forced to share increasingly limited space, integration and multiculturalism become the buzz words for panicked community leaders and governments all over the developed world.
Remember the Rwanda genocide? It is no coincidence that before the genocide Rwanda had more humans per square meter than any other place on the planet.
There was no more room. Nowhere to run.
One tribe hacked the other tribe to death. It is what we do.
In Thomas Hardy‘s desperate last novel Jude the Obscure, there is a small boy nick named by his Father, ‘Young Father Time’ an anxious little thing who murders his siblings then commits suicide upon hearing that his Mother is worried at how they might all be fed.
He hangs himself with this tragic note pinned to his vest: “Because we are too many.”
Genocide may be a valuable part of the human story. It maybe a very healthy part of our story, as unpalatable as that may sound.
If we are unable to migrate we are unable to evolve. Our ideas become increasingly inward looking, we become prone to mysticism, religion and superstition.
At this moment in the history of man we are all, unfortunately, Native Americans forced into reservations, like Inuits and aboriginals obliged to accept the limitations of an over crowded and over regulated world.
Bedouins, gypsies, nomads no more.
I have always felt separate from everyone. Separated by class and circumstance, by wit and intelligence, by impatience and sobriety.
My tribe of one has found his place in acres of rolling scrub overlooking the Pacific. The tribe of Me walks safely in my own home town.
Joe and I would go get dinner (usually steak) and very drunk in the Ear Bar on Spring Street.
Originally called the Bear bar..renamed when the B fell off. One of the oldest existing taverns in the United States and one of the few existing examples of Federal architecture in New York.
I have wanted to get very drunk these past few nights. I have wanted to blot out everything in my fucking pea brain with a huge amount of wine and beer.
Marc bought a bottle of Montepulciano to drink with the pheasant. It smelt divine.
Woke up feeling so sad.
I am in Whitstable until Thursday then I have to get up and make a move. Must go stately home hopping. Must see the insides of huge and beautiful homes smelling of nutmeg and fir. Must sit by roaring fires. Must flay myself socially once again.
I am so disappointed. So sad. even though I know he isn’t sometimes I think I can hear him calling out to me in the night and I wake up and I think I can’t ignore him..he might need me.
Everything is just fine in Los Angeles CA. Ashley called yesterday after her jaunt with Christina Aguilera’s husband in Miami. I can’t wait to see her, speak with her properly about everything.
Up and down on this fucking roller coaster. Up and down.
Absurdly expensive, mildly uncomfortable but distinguished all the same.
After my very fun night in London I stayed in bed this morning much longer than usual. There were no messages for me on my American cell, no frantic emails.
Alma and I cooked a leisurely breakfast then we drove to Canterbury so that we might buy presents for her family.
Once in Canterbury (surprisingly packed with good looking young men) we ate Panini, found free wi-fi, met a beautiful man in the Zara store called Alex (huge and blond) and another one at the till who resembled Jake Gyllenhaal. When I told him who he looked like he asked who that was…ah..charming.
“I hope that’s a compliment.” He grinned.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “It is.”
We shall return to Zara.
I mentioned to Alma that we might get verbally assaulted because of my shoes.
As we were walking through the Dane John Gardens a bunch of unruly youths screamed, “Why you wearing pink shoes, mate?” I screamed back, “Because I’m a fucking poof, why d’you think? You fucking idiots!”
The screamer then became the object of derision. His mates thought it very funny that I had given as good as I had gotten.
Very satisfying. Wear pink shoes, expect a reaction.
As I have written before, I am unphased by being seen to be gay. I am an out gay man. I refuse to be shamed by a bunch of foolish youths. This is as close as I can get to being a drag queen as my suburban taste will allow.
Wearing anything outside of London that determines who or what I am will solicit comment. Don’t tell me that ‘things have changed’ for gay men, that it’s easier to be gay nowadays. From where I’m standing nothing much has changed at all.
The pistol remains primed night and day.
You know, when Jake and I were in Paris we were sitting on the terrace at the back of our hotel, Mama Shelter. We were kissing. I was kissing him. As I was kissing him I heard a man call out, “Pédé!”
I looked up at the apartments above. I didn’t tell Jake that we had been gay bashed. I didn’t want to spoil his moment.
That was when I wanted everything to be perfect for him, when I would have moved a mountain…
P.D. n.m. pédéraste (pédé); homosexual, gay
Carol cooked pheasant tonight with Brussel sprouts and swede. Good GOD that was delicious.
Going up to London tomorrow for more fun and games.
Still no word from the oncologist. No news=Good news.
