Not Gay. Queer. Thx.

Occasional unfinished notes on becoming Queer.

There’s a difference between gay and queer.  Just like there’s a difference between chocolate and carob.  It looks the same, and used the same but tastes completely different.

Queer: sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary

The older I get… the queerer I become.

I’m not even sure what it means.  But I’m sure that gay no longer describes what I am.

I am not a married drone operator living with my husband and three surrogate children who secretly wishes he could vote republican… and did… once… because nobody was watching.

Nope.  I’m not that and I’m not headed in that direction.

I remain teachable.  My wagon remains unhitched.

Listen, I’ve got a secret I want to share with you.  One I don’t think I’m meant to be sharing.  A secret that might very well discredit my public shift away from gay toward queer as my description of choice.

My description of me.

I feel so let down, betrayed, dishonoured by gay men.  Yes… you.

One day in early December this year I will write the genesis of my change.

This intellectual menopause.  This change.  This perestroika.

Remember:  from the very first play, to the very last film I have sought to make entertainment that re-examined, revealed, remade the gay experience.

I have won endless awards doing so.

My crowning moment was being nominated for a British Academy Award.

Betrayed:

I was used to being told by straight people that if I wanted a career I should stop telling gay stories.

I was not expecting this:  Gay people told me the same thing.  In fact, they (with vehemence)  told anyone talented and gay to live the lifestyle but don’t expect to tell stories about it.

They said,  ”You don’t want all your hard work… marginalized.”

They said, “You don’t want to miss out on the big bucks.  You don’t want to end up like Derek Jarman?  Do you?”

My heart sank.  That’s exactly what I wanted.  Back then.  When I relished telling people I was gay.

Derek Jarman.  He was the only film maker I thought worth aspiring too.  That’s how it was back then.  1985.

So, I found him.  Sought him out.

We met on The South Bank in the shadow of the Royal National Theatre.   Denys Lasdun‘s great, neo-brutalist monolith

We sat outside overlooking the Thames.  Gray clouds scudding over the greatest city in the whole world.

Gusts of cold grit blown over us.

He bought two cups of badly stewed tea served in thick Styrofoam cups.

I handed him the Caravaggio catalogue I had bought after seeing the show at the Met in NYC.

“How can I help?”  He asked.

I said, “I want to make a film.”  I was embarrassed.  I was star struck.

He said, “You will. But, you want my advice?  Remember this: Never take no for an answer.”

We talked about Tilda Swinton who nobody really knew back then.

He told me about a young tousled man he met in the street.  A builder.  The builder came up to him on Shaftesbury Avenue and said, “You’re that gay film maker, aren’t you.”

Well, he expected the worst.  It wouldn’t be the first time he had been beaten by a stranger but he looked him in the eye, straight in the eye and said, “Yes I am.”

Ten minutes later the beautiful young man was naked, towering over him.  Blowing a load.

That’s a queer story.  It’s not gay.  For a start, a gay wouldn’t have told the truth.

Secondly, a gay would have been too scared to take a big straight acting blue-collar worker back to his prissy apartment.

The gays.  God.  You were right.  It wasn’t worth it.  Making those plays, those movies.

Yet, I’m still here.  Sitting in my huge bed in California.

Good taste and tenacity will always make you enough money to enjoy a great life.  Where ever it may take you.

The gays betray each other.  They have no respect for themselves or each other.  Perhaps it was me?  Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations.  You know, mutual respect, support, honor?

I remain curious.  Even though I am sure of what I am.

P.S.  Tilda Swinton saw my film AKA at Sundance.

My agent threw a party for her and me in some crazy restaurant.

We talked a great deal about Derek that night.

He was right.  I never took no for an answer.

I begged and I borrowed and I stole to make a moment in my life that no one can ever take away from me.

Not even the gays.

Gay Voices

In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huffington Post yesterday there was another ‘outraged’ homo article about the Pentagon censuring  LGBT web sites like Towelroad but not ‘hate speak’ web sites Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter.

The Pentagon, like many large companies that control internet access, have deemed that LGBT sites are mostly inappropriate for work place viewing.

Why?  The gays scream.  Why do you censor us and not Rush Limbaugh?

A quick comparison.

Rush and Anne, although not my personal cup of tea, do not illustrate their ‘hate speak’ web sites with images of copulating straight people.

In hetero land hard core pornographic images are rightly limited to porn sites.

In homo land we are subjected to random pornographic illustrations (or advertising) on sites purportedly aimed at debating current queer affairs.  Images that I would not want to share with my co-workers.

Today, in the reputable queer news site Towelroad, well written articles about Bradley Manning run along side a pornographically illustrated story about the death of a gay porn star.

Interestingly, the porn star died of HIV related complications.

Something that supposedly doesn’t happen any more.

Even though every recent statistic sadly proves that HIV is on the meteoric rise in the bare back obsessed gay community… to say so out loud is deemed homophobic/selfloathing.

As for hate speak?  Have any of you read the hate filled rhetoric on most homo web sites… aimed mostly at other gay men?

As I have written many times:  queer men willingly take up the cudgels to beat and bully fellow queers where their supposed hetero persecutors dropped them.

BTW Gays…  a differing opinion is not hate speak.

The separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of The Huffington Post is filled with either outraged queens claiming homophobia or cooing doves describing a gay kiss on net work TV.

A reflection on the vapid, with us or agin us culture so many of you subscribe to.

As usual we refuse to look at our part in the problem. We claim:  They are doing it to us.  They are to blame.  We are blameless.  We do not deserve scrutiny or self-examination.

The Elmo guy is not a pedophile.  He’s a persecuted, misunderstood gay man hounded by the straight media.

In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huffington Post there is a story about an angry ex ‘gay for pay’ porn star who claims that the devil comes out of his ass.

Why?  Why is this story about straight insanity in the ‘gay voice’ section?  Surely it should be on the ‘crazy white hetero’ page along with all those crazy white, straight mass murderers.

By the way, I’ve never understood why it isn’t ok to be ‘separate but equal’, sometimes it’s just easier.

Like being a Hasidic Jew, I want to be separate so I can get on with my business and enjoy my culture without prying eyes.

Of course I need to be equal, however, so I don’t live in resentment.

As a charming postscript I wanted you to know that after my ‘i am not gay piece’ the other day, the gay and lesbian Legacy Project contacted me and as a result my films will not be burned by jack booted gay men… but all of my queer themed films will now be archived (with pride) at The Legacy Project.

As for the film I am currently making?  Let me tell you.  We have come a long way in 20 years.  A very long way.

When a black straight producer wants to make your white queer film… that’s what I’m talking about.

i am not gay

1.

Nope.  Not any more.

I AM NOT GAY.  I am OUT.

Unambiguous?

My New Years resolution: don’t call me gay.

I am The Other.  I am simply… Out.

I have resigned my gay membership.  I renounce the word GAY.

The Other is different from you.  He is neither superior nor inferior.

He is not alone.  He is out.

2.

Are you kidding?  I still like sex with men… but I’m not interested in being gay.

Do you understand what I’m saying… gays?  Yes you.  I’m talking to you.

I’M TALKING TO YOU!  Yes you, the gay in the bar, on the street, editing his Grindr profile.

Let’s face it.  This separation will work out just fine for both of us.

I loathe you and you hate me.

I know, amongst other things, what galls you… you (particularly) don’t like when men in their fifties own up to having a rich and varied sexuality:

I’ve been called a ‘dirty old man’ by more gays than I ever have by straights for wanting or having beautiful younger men in my bed.

The gays write it anonymously.  They post it all over the place, whenever they can.  As If I should be ashamed?

You, you who have cornered the market in nihilism, immorality, homogeneousness, bitchery, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, self-obsession… in fact anything with the self prefix… apart from self-awareness.

I am peeling off the parade.  I am letting the party wend its way elsewhere.

2. (a)

They told me at Triangle House in LA when we were making our documentary about older gay people:  they say that old gay people end up going back into the closet because… it can get ugly… it can get dangerous.

They say that gay men are more likely to end up homeless than in any other demographic… because they have no community.

You gays are the very worst at hating yourselves.  But you reserve more venom for the elderly homosexual than any other group.

It is a sickening idea to many young gays, that we (the elderly) exist.

Some young gay people believe that past 50 our penises shrink appropriately into our bodies.  Retract.

In old age we become like wrinkly Ken dolls with smooth, pink groins.

No longer a threat to anyone.

I thought that when I became old… I would start wearing women’s clothes.

Where do young gay men learn how to be dignified old gay men?

I learned from older men in AA how to be an older man.

The respect that AA old timers get, applauded for their contribution to the community of AA stands in stark contract to the respect that older gay people don’t get from younger gay people.

Unless, of course, they are famous… or comical freaks… or rich enough to buy the boys they used to get for free.

Young gay people don’t want to be reminded that the party comes to an end.

2 (b)

So, today…

I resign my membership.  I am no longer a true believer.  I’m handing back my awards, my medals, my history, my pride.

It’s yours not mine.  Take it.

I renounce: gay pride, gay film festivals, gay beaches, gay basketball, gay bars, the gay ghetto, the gay plague, gay marriage, gaybies, gaydar.com, gays in the military, gay cruises, cottaging, felching, gay news, gay voice, gay face, the gay sub section in the book/video store/Huffington Post.

So help me God!

I’m praying the gay away!

The terms of this divorce:

You can keep it all.  The gay plays I made, the gay films I directed, the gay art I painted/etched/sculpted.

Take everything I ever made in your honor.

If you don’t want it?  Burn it.

2 (c)

When I offered our award-winning film catalogue of gay films to The Legacy Project (the gay and lesbian film preservation project) based out of UCLA… the gays turned it down.

Even though AKA  had won the LA Outfest audience award and opened (and closed) many gay film festivals all over the world with all of my films.

The Legacy Project said no to the free gift.  They wanted me to disappear.

They don’t want any evidence that I existed.  As a man or an artist.

“He’s trouble.”  ”He’s angry.”  ”He’s a parasite.”

Gays!  Look at what you’ve become!

Examine, for just one goddamned gay second…. the mediocrity!  Your righteous indignation! Your mock elegance!

Being with you is like drowning in cold tea.

3.

I don’t drink or take drugs.  Tom blew weed into my face.   He put vodka into my virgin mary.  That’s how the gays bully one another.

Try wearing something unusual when your companions  just want to be invisible.

“Who does he think he is?”

Their artificially deepened voices.  The plaid shirt, the super hero tee.

The cloak of invisibility.

INVISIBLE.

Tom asked incredulously, “What are you wearing?”  A man who wears nothing but ugly jeans, ill-fitting t-shirts.

Tom has an ‘opinion’ about individuality:  He doesn’t believe in it.

These gays are terrified of being seen.  Gripped by the politics of invisibility.

At least that grotesque, lying freak I used to date… he and his boy friend have some sartorial audacity.

Even if it is TOTALLY misguided.

Who are these gays?  These invisigays?

Like Tom, they may appear normal:

4.

How can a gay man expect to age with dignity when nobody gay wants to age at all?

I saw it in LA… my destiny. If I chose to take it.

At first, Adam looked just like any other confident gay man claiming to be 48.

His gay parties are the talk of the town.  Richer than most of his friends, though not very well connected … not to the real gay power in LA.

I mean, David Geffen wouldn’t be seen dead at this piss elegant, graceless house in the Hollywood Hills.

Adam invented the heart valve.

At one of his parties (to his chagrin) I photographed every single one of his guests.

A snap shot of LA gay life.

He has never been elegant, he has never been a great beauty.  He will never be tall.

He is, however, manicured, botoxed, his teeth reinvented, his flawless skin, his demeanor… (that only great wealth lends you).

It was at that last raucous party I attended (as a plus one) I saw him upset (rattled)… why?

He looked like an old, vulnerable man.

“What happened?”  I asked the gays.

They told me imperiously (as if it were obvious) that the young, chiseled boy he imported from NYC just wanted him for his money.

Adam looked… beaten.  Crest fallen.  His frail hands shook, the delicate skin around his eyes failing.

The gays stood around helplessly as their host fell apart.  They stared into the plastic cups of vodka.  They played with their nipples.

The pimps and the whores waited silently by the sodden beer pong.

He turned the music off.  Finally, he threw everyone out.

They lined up on the steep drive.  A hideous parade of grotesquely young boys, graded online or in public bars for their sexual prowess, their social fallibility, their youth.

The man who invented the heart valve, it seems, suffered from a broken heart.

5.

Take the gay man who gave up his 160k surrogate child for adoption because she had a small birth defect on one of her legs.

Yes, you heard me.

When we interviewed the doctor who makes hundreds and thousands of gay dollars from the gayby industry… he told us that the gays want perfection.  Nothing less will do.

Take it all… this gay culture.  This gay community.  Take it.

Take the video of Bryan with 25 Bel Ami boys jacking off over him.

Moisturized with Czech sperm.

Or the man/boy with the huge cock who they pay to sleep with a hooker and unbeknownst to him… tape him.

This tribe of entitled, elitist gays clinging to gay marriage and their smart phones.

6.

I had lunch today with a 30-year-old man/boy who just came out.  ”Why did it take you so long, ” I ask, “To tell the truth?”  He said, “I didn’t… (he paused dramatically) …I mean I still don’t… I don’t want to be gay.”

“That’s ok,” I reassured him.  ”You can describe yourself however you want.”

When, as frightened teens, blooming… prepubescent boys… infants… when we understand that we want to fall in love and fuck and suck and slide into another man… what choices do we have?   To describe ourselves?

Gay is the only way.

And if you don’t know what you are.  The gays will tell you exactly what you are.

The gays are so prescriptive.

He’s gay, they claim conspiratorially.  They claim anyone ‘hot’ is gay.  They all know someone who had sex with Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman.

“He’s fucking his ‘assistant’.”

Oh Yes!  He’s had sex with a man… he’s gay.  He’s experimented… he’s gay.

Prescriptive.

6 (a)

Hollywood does not lend itself to morals.

CAA agent Kevin Huvane.  When you first meet him, he shakes your hand and pulls you toward him.   Trying to pull you off-balance.

The first time he met me… it worked (I was rocked) the second and third times I was prepared and we set to a gay tug of war, an argy bargy, him attempting to pull me and me attempting to pull him.

The fourth time I let him pull me onto him.  I crashed into him.  His tiny frame overwhelmed by 6′ 2″ me.  He landed in a heap beneath me.  ”Oh sorry,” I said.  ”You pulled me toward you.  I lost my balance.  Sorry… Kevin.”

He’ll put you on a ‘list’ they told me.  ”I’m on so many lists.” I murmured.  ”More lists than Cathy Griffin.”

7.

After claiming on the Dr. Drew show that I wanted to make healthy decisions about sex.  Somebody wrote to me or about me:  If Duncan Roy doesn’t like gay sex… he isn’t gay.

He wasn’t far from the truth.

At first, I was outraged by their attempts to isolate, malign and lambaste me.

They had tried for years.  Without success.  Every time they try… they fail.

This last time… the jail.  What the hell did they expect?  That I would buckle?

Those who throw rocks at me are seldom innocent of that which they accuse.

8.

The Gays, have become so… bourgeois.  Do you understand what that means?  Let me refresh your memory:

Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.

When I was young… gays like you knew their place.

They stayed in the closet.  I mean.  Coming out of the closet was brave!  Now anyone can do it and become a fucking hero.

9.

Gays… why are you killing yourselves?

You kill yourself because you can’t take a joke, because you can’t hold your liquor, because you can’t say no to crystal… because you don’t want to be gay.

I don’t remember young gay people killing themselves in the UK.

It gets better?

What gets better?

Better than death?

10.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when any oppressed group gets a bit of equality… but what will the USA gays do with their equality?

I’ll tell you.

They will make it even harder for the rest of us to be different.

There is a hideous conformity to which these young gays feel they must adhere.

Gay life in the USA.  A blushing desire for ‘straight acting’ has become a tsunami of heternoramativity.   The foundation on which this miserable gay monolith now stands.

Who are you?

A greek god, perfectly muscled, forever young… dressed to be ignored, as bland a personality as he can effect.

He is Peter Pan, he is Hercules, his personality as glittering as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Do you care about anything other than marriage equality?  No.

He eats what his parents eat.  He would vote republican if they could only find it in their neo con hearts to see that the gays are perfect conservatives.

So.  We are divorced.  I am no longer gay.  I’m OUT.  I’m out of here.  I’m out but I’m not gay.

Happy New Year!

Bitter Old Queen

When I first started going to gay bars in Britain in the late 70′s we drove (with those lucky enough to own cars) twenty miles to Margate, a larger town near my home in Whitstable.

Margate is famous for being the birth place of conceptual artist Tracy Emin.

Margate was a derelict, regency ex-holiday resort.  Butlins had closed, Pontins was on the way out.  British people wanted to go to Spain where sunshine could always be assured.

The sweeping, majestic Palladian mansions were being torn down or turned into multi occupancy dwellings for the unemployed.

The crowd at the gay bar, run by morbidly obese Shirley was divided in two groups.  Two distinct crowds:  older, local men who had stayed local and younger men and boys who were using bars like this to spring-board into a metropolitan gay world.

The older men were routinely described as ‘bitter old queens’ by the younger men and there was indeed something bitter and suspicious about these older men that intrigued my teenage self.

Always the contrarian I hung out with them rather my teen peers and learned about these older men, their lives and their failed ambitions.

Older provincial gays who had been mocked, beaten and subjugated.

In Britain Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1965.

To me those old queens seemed incredibly brave for staying loyal to their home town communities.

To my younger ‘friends’ these men were simply stuck or foolhardy for not moving to the big city where their gay dreams could come true, their gay lives could be lived fully, openly and without fear.

My interest in them proved fruitless.  They may have been older but they were not very wise, stripped of ambition by soul rotting low self-esteem.

They wanted to be like everyone else.

I wanted to be different.

They mocked me as they had been mocked, they chastised me as they had been chastised, they still do.

Those older gay men waiting for younger gay boys to emerge from the shadows.  Supping gin and tonics.  Bacardi and coke.

Hanging around the local ‘cottages’ (public restrooms) waiting for straight boys to unload.  Playing an endless game of cat and mouse with law enforcement.

“So and so was sent to prison for cottaging.”  So and so would emerge a year or so later, jaundiced, older looking.

It seemed to me that these men had every right to be bitter.  They had every right to harbor resentments against a cruel society that deemed them criminals even after they weren’t.

The swinging 60′s, the sexual revolution, the progressive explosion, the post war boom really only affected my generation who grasped hold of the bucking bronco and held on for dear life until, of course, AIDS came along in the 80′s and we were all thrown far, far away.

The AIDS pandemic.  Fear in men’s eyes.  Disco dancing queens learning to dance to a different tune.

If I had taken pictures of those old gay men in the late 70′s they would have looked defiant, like those pictures of native Americans by Edward Curtis.  They were fat and badly dressed, their teeth were rotten, they were working class, they were left behind.

So, it amuses me now when I am described thus:  A Bitter Old Queen.

The advent of gay marriage, the normalcy of children for gay men (if they can afford it), the regular inclusion of gay men in prime time TV shows.  All of these changes have heralded a new acceptance, a new normal, a new peace of mind for young gay men.

Or has it?  A new generation with a new set of fears and anxieties.  ”Will I ever earn enough to buy a surrogate child?”  ”Am I pretty/handsome enough?”  ”Should I be totally hairless?”  ”Is my penis big enough?”   “Am I ‘straight acting’?  Will I get married?

A generation of gay men comparing and despairing.

What of us?  My generation?  Those of us who survived the great epidemic.  It seems that many gay men still feel left behind.

Shamed.

Last week I met a 55-year-old man who told me he was recently diagnosed with HIV even though he had, he assured me, never indulged in risky behavior.

He told me that older gay men were being revealed to be HIV positive because of a latent strain of HIV that only makes itself apparent after the age of 50.

A strain that has been there all the time, undetected.

I was shocked.  Perhaps I hadn’t dodged the bullet after all.

The man way lying.  I researched the claim.  There was nothing.  I asked my friends on Facebook if they had heard of this anomoly.  They had not.  They scoffed at the idea.

No, I reasoned, this man is a well-respected gay advocate.   As it turns out you can be a well-respected, well liked gay advocate and not be at peace with your HIV status.

Being gay for many men remains a hard task.

If I ever think of my ex boyfriend I still wonder what is was that kept him in the closet for so long.  Even now, after the revolution.  Why he created and maintained such an illusion? Risking his girlfriends health?  Lying to his family?

Then I wonder if we are all illusionist?

How easy is it in 2012 to tell the truth about being gay?

There seem to me like there are so many dirty little secrets that we hold onto.  That we continue to live shame based lives… even the youngsters, even when there is no reason to hide?

I wondered what we were striving for?  To join the military, to get married…

I got to thinking about David Petraeus resigning because he had an extra marital affair.  Adultery is illegal in the military but would those rules apply to serving gay men?  Would we, once married, be held to those same strict hetero rules?  Is this what we want?

Today I posted something about Israel.  Like most Europeans I find myself erring toward the support of the Palestinians.  I find the Israeli treatment of these falsely imprisoned people abhorrent and ironic.

What is the difference I ask myself between The Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza?

My American gay friends react with comments like:  all muslims are terrorists.

Just like I was told when I was a child that all homosexuals are pedophiles.

Those older, less educated, less principled, men were from a different time.  Embittered by circumstance, godless, hopeless.  Drowning their sorrows in great vats of beer, their greasy faced pushed against the window of life without ever joining in.

“No kissing at the bar, dear.”     Shirley would tell her clientele.  ”No kissing at the bar.”

HIV Negative

This morning Robby picked me up from the house and drove me to Van Nuys.

Court day.

The handsome deputy in the court room gives me a cheery wave, the clerk courteously holds open the door and even the wicked witch looks softer… more agreeable.

She’s only doing her job. I can’t be too hard on her.

After our short stint in the court we had coffee with my lawyer who is, it turns out, covered in tattoos.

Robby then drove me into Hollywood to the Gay and Lesbian Center where I waited in line for my annual HIV test.

Since 1984 I have been regularly tested for HIV. Since I was Robby’s age.

It has always been a fearful time for me. I’m sure it is for everyone.

I was given the wrong diagnosis in my mid thirties. A confused New York nurse told me I was HIV positive. For three weeks I thought I had it. Until I fled to London and the doctor told me I was perfectly ok.

In those days an HIV positive result meant certain death. The kind of death that included cancerous lesions inside and out. Opportunistic diseases caught from potted plants, cats and canaries. Dramatic weight loss and the most painful end.

Now, of course, HIV just means being wedded to big pharma for the rest of your life, a huge liver and for most people… a new closet to live in.

It occurred to me, as I sat waiting for my result, how I would tell you all if I had contracted HIV.

I live a public life. I am sure that the shame I have heard others talk and write about would envelop me too.

But, as I sat there I decided to tweet the fact that I was there and what I was waiting for. I gave myself no option but to come out and tell you… if I was HIV positive. I knew it wouldn’t be like telling you I had cancer.

I asked the counsellor what would happen if I was HIV Positive? He gave me the medical facts. It didn’t seem that bad. But we all know: it’s not the medical implications… it’s the social implication that packs the negative punch.

In the gay community there is huge prejudice around HIV and AIDS. The frank discussion we need to have about HIV is not being had.

After he read the result I looked obviously shocked. I really did not expect to be negative. In fact, I rather thought I might be seriously ill.

“Why?” He asked.

Because, and it grieves me to tell you this but after JB and I saw each other that last time… I had no way of drowning my fury so I trawled the internet and transformed from the ‘curious top’ to the ‘pig bottom’.

The pig bottom who wants to be fed. I think you know what I mean.

“Just cum in me.” I said. They were very eager to please.

“It was a suicide bid. The only one I knew would work. I hated him so much…”

“Did you hate him? Or you?” The counsellor asked kindly.

I smiled wryly. “I’m still HIV negative.”

“You dodged the bullet.”

You see, I have never been like most gay men… craving sex many times a day. I have never visited a bath house or a cruising park. I rarely meet the men I speak with on-line. I am not like you. I tried it once… not so long ago and it made me feel sick.

This week Paris Hilton was caught squealing at her friend’s Grindr. She’s right to be appalled. AIDS has taught us nothing.

Pre bug chasing… I didn’t want to have sex with someone I didn’t know. It kept me negative. I wasn’t about to be shamed into having sex with anyone.

When I was a kid, men would invite me into their homes. The mere acceptance of a cup of tea somehow meant agreeing to full on butt sex.

They try to shame you. Get angry with you… but I fought back. Fuck off. I’m leaving. It saved my life.

Now the youngsters who get HIV are similarly shamed. My friend told me (he’s 24) that a guy he really wanted told him they had to fuck ‘raw’ (unprotected)… when my friend protested his amour said, “What? Don’t you believe me? I’m HIV negative.”

He wasn’t. Now… nor is my friend.

Are we kidding ourselves when we say that we are having protected sex?

There’s outrage because Paris Hilton is disgusted by Grindr. She’s right. We should all be disgusted. My women friends say, “There should be a Grindr for straight people.”

I tell them that a usual Grindr introduction consists of one word: Hung? Then: Clean? Then: Dick Pic?

Women are usually appalled when I tell them the way gay men cut to the chase.

I’m happy that I am HIV negative. I’m happier that my death wish has been thwarted. I’m happier still that all that hate and self hate came to nothing.

Writing my film has had a wonderfully cathartic effect on me. He is just a distant memory.

Even though I see him daily on the page he now exists as I want him to. Suffer and thrive the way I want him to… without ever having to suffer myself.

Today… today was a good day to be HIV negative.

The Gays

The gays. Oh God. It’s enough to make you homophobic.

I don’t mean you dear. Not you.

This post is all about children, real or imagined.

Since Obama’s toothless benediction, the gays have become emboldened.

However, this spurt of new confidence has not translated into any sort of useful direct action or changed the argument in any important way.

All that has happened?

The gays decided to take on the owner of Chick-Fil-E because he doesn’t agree with marriage equality.

Good God. All they managed to do was make that guy a whole heap wealthier. Thanks gays.

I hadn’t heard of Chick-Fil-E before the fuss now all I want to do is sample their factory farmed chicken sandwiches.

Damn you gays!

That’s not true. I’m not going there any time soon to eat anything.

Meanwhile, Elton is on vacation with David and his kid… and David and Neil and the twins… all wearing matching white cruise wear. Each surrogate kid costing $160k. A fleet of nannies back on the boat.

Elton laments that his kid will never know his mother. He’s quite right. Erasing mothers from the picture… is just wrong.

Amongst the gays I notice a new theme emerging, something that used to be hinted at, implicit… but recently… in polite circles… made explicit… there is amongst a broad swathe of the gays I meet… an appalling misogyny.

“I don’t hate women, some of my best friends are women.” they say (without irony) when challenged.

Those who have surrogate kids grumble that the women who sold their eggs or carried the child might want something more than the money. They might want to ‘see’ the child. They might want a relationship with the child.

They would prefer that the baby not see the mother at all, that the baby be delivered from vagina to the hands that paid for the baby, like a UPS parcel.

Apparently it’s now possible to take the DNA from two men and create a child without any genetic material from a woman. I was told this frightening news triumphantly by a gay man the other day.

“You would still need a womb.” he told me sadly. “But it’s only a matter of time before that (a womb) can be replaced too.”

I was uncharacteristically speechless.

Is erasing the mother from the picture just wrong or am I being old-fashioned?

I met gay Ian, a young CAA agent manque.

“I suppose that’s the benefit of being gay… no women.”

A perfect world for Ian: married, baby, no women.

He, ‘Didn’t see the point..” of women. “Women are our natural enemy.” He giggled.

“Are you single?” I asked him. He looked appalled. My question implied that I might want more than a conversation.

I reassured him that I tended to fuck people my own height.

His modern, bourgeoise anxieties included: he would never be able to afford a surrogate child.

That he would never meet a perfect man and marry him.

His friend Zach chimed in helpfully, “Surrogate kids are only 8 grand in India.” No problems with permits he assured us and the women can’t find you.

The gayby industry is being outsourced.

The vitriol spewed over me (as usual) in the Data Lounge is worth noting.

Writhing with xenophobic zeal these queens who hate me seem to hate me for all the things us gays are meant to aspire: beautiful men, money and uniqueness. Ill informed opinions about my house etc. can be ignored.

I feel sorry for the young gay guy who wanted to celebrate me then ended up apologizing for all the nastiness.

Those resentful old poofs who hate me? Well, you’ll have to try little bit harder. As you simper at home writing anonymous shit about me… I’m out and about having a great time.

Thank you very much.

Remember, after ten years a resentment has more to do with the person harbouring it than the intended recipient. Get over yourselves.

Of course, some resentments are fresh and well deserved.

My ex has every reason to loathe me and I wouldn’t expect anything else. I made his life hell after we split up and increasingly, every day in fact, I wish I could put that genie back in the bottle.

P.S. Do I think I’m better than most people? Nope. Do I look down at you from a lofty place judging you? Would I want anyone else’s life? Nope. I don’t envy anyone… ever. I really love my life… good and bad.

And finally, something more to celebrate.

As I’ve written before, I saw those amazing pics of the ex bf with his current beau. They looked great.

They are unashamedly gay.

I applaud his apotheosis.

It is time for us all to jettison the mantle of straight acting, embrace our gayness in what ever form that takes.

That ex of mine has come a very long way since I first met him, from the artificially deep voice, the bad clothes and heterosexual relationship (he even berated my occasional gay flourishes) to dating a man who skips around his closet in 6 inch heels.

Some of my friends who viewed the style u like vid wondered how a man like that could call himself a jock… well my dears, he can call himself anything he likes.

When you have really loved someone and they fuck you over… however long it takes, the aim must always be to forgive and forget.

Loving him gave me a great deal of pleasure and pain but it was something.

We sure had something. And, when they ask me what that something was I can look them in the eye and say, with all honesty, that it was nothing they would want… but it suited me just fine.

However an impossible fantasy it was.

He was like an imprisoned child back then, in desperate need of parole. Boxed in by lies and deception. He became my child, my gay child.

Like every daddy I wanted the best for him.

When I didn’t know where he was, I worried about him… like a child.

Now I know that he is happy… I am happy.

Wasn’t that always my intention? To make him happy, however he wanted it?

What transpired was completely at odds with what I first wanted… Because I fell in love.

I tried not to… but I couldn’t help it.

I let myself fall like an olympic diver into a magnificent pool of crystal clear love.

Sadly, I hit the bottom of the pool and bashed my brains out.

Nonce

1.

I taught the inmates at MCJ the meaning of the word nonce.

It was funny. Didn’t sound like it does when people use it at home.

It really is the worst word you could imagine calling someone. Much worse than the word cunt.

Mind you, an insult is all in the delivery.

2.

A young man wrote to me yesterday.

He told me that he was gay, lived in Arkansas. An Iranian Jew. His mother tells him that gays are sick, should be in mental hospitals.

He sits there watching her. He knows that he will never ever tell her the truth.

Perhaps, he said, he should trick a girl into being with him. So…he won’t end up alone.

Sound familiar?

Now, that’s a closet.

3.

I am struck by how many young men I meet are fascinated by English men with beards.

So, I asked him. He said, “Have you seen the film The Weekend?”

I smiled and quietly thanked Andrew Haigh under my breath.

4.

God and the devil. In league with both of them…to make art.

5.

Read the Hollywood Reporter. “I was crazy for many years.” says Oliver Stone.

Which artist isn’t?

6.

I am happy. Not blissfully…but at ease with myself.

Andy Gipson Kills Gays for Jesus

Dear Andy Gipson Mississippi state Rep. (R),

Apparently, on Facebook recently, you posted a note advocating the murder, slaughter, deaths of homosexuals after (black) President Obama had some personal feelings about gay marriage.

Well, I wholeheartedly support your ‘put homosexuals to death’ position…you know…kill a gay for Jesus. Yay. You’ve got my support.

However, I support you on one condition. You can kill any one of us..as long as you can look us in the eye and kill us with your bare hands. Your hands around our throats. For Jesus.

You know, like vegetarians who urge carnivores to try killing their own meat before they eat another burger.

I mean, it’s one thing to say something terrible like that Andy but it’s another doing it…isn’t it?

I’ve posted some pictures of some gay people and their friends below for you to imagine shooting or gassing.

I saw you with your kids. You’re obviously a good dad. I mean…apart from wanting to commit genocide.

Have you seen pictures of the gestapo on their days off? Holding their kids in their arms?

I noticed too that you dress your kids in army uniforms. Are you training them to kill gays?

I was in a pub once called the Admiral Duncan in London that was bombed by a man like you who wanted to kill gays. He killed as many heterosexuals as he killed homosexuals. He went to prison for a very long time.

Will it make you happy or sad when you squeeze the life out of your first gay?

Andy!!! God forbid! Have you ever thought your children might be homosexual? What will you do when your children want to come out? When your children ‘come out’ will you enjoy killing them?

How will you feel? Taking their lives for Jesus? I thought you people were pro-life?

Apparently, at the concentration camps in Germany (during the last great state sanctioned homocleansing) where large numbers of gays and lesbians were murdered…the guards tortured us before butchering us.

Could you imagine doing that?

Do you ever have thoughts like that?

How exactly do you want to kill us? I mean, there are millions of us…in God’s great plan…he sure fucked things up.

Disposing of all that gay meat and bones may very well increase the deficit you despise so much.

I’ve given your problem of eradicating us gays a great deal of thought.

It occurs to a simple-minded man like me that however many of us you kill we will return.

Every generation you straight people manage to make more gay people.

If, for instance, you could determine when we were fetus that we might be gay…would you offer free abortions to women…NOOOO!!!! No abortions. Nothing FREE!!! The deficit!!

OH…yes…we’re probably evidence of the devil’s work? Is that right? But, I can eat garlic and sprinkle holy water on my forehead without turning to dust or the water burning my skin.

I must admit that I’ve thought about murdering some of my exes and if you could start…when the day comes…and you get permission to murder us…can you murder my ex first? I mean, before me. So I can see it happen maybe? Then you can turn the gun on me.

Have you ever considered just murdering gay people for fun? You seem like you might enjoy it.

Thank God Jesus has people like you to help him at difficult times like this.

I thought ‘thou shalt not kill‘ was a commandment but you people seem to make this bible stuff up as you go along.

Do you think you could help me go straight, stop hankering after a mouthful of cock?

I may renounce my gayness and come join your congregation. Come and live at your house. Ex gay. I’m too old to be gay anyway.

No. I’m not doing that. I’m a butt fucking gay. Too old to be ashamed of who I am. Too old.

I live in California. If you are ever here and feel like killing me for being gay…or any other reason…just let me know.

Facebook me.

And just in case you didn’t think it could get any worse:

The charming words of Charlie Worley, another gay killing pastor.

 

Fame Whore

Power and prestige can be just as intoxicating for those who are powerful and prestigious as for those who seek them out…or chance upon them.

Infamy can have the same mesmerizing effect. Mass murderers, on their way to the electric chair, marry formally reasonable women.

The mother/father killler Menendez brothers, still get proposals of marriage from star struck suiters.

I have seen gown adults buckle before the very famous and the not so very famous.

The youth of Hollywood, like so many generations before them, have been levied.

Sexual expediency is a price silently adhered to any deal.

I don’t need to tell you Marilyn‘s story…do I?

It’s quaint! It’s so old fashioned…it’s happening today.

Somehow everybody knows that if you are going to go the distance in this town you better go the distance with whomever has the power in this town.

Many people masquerade as powerful and do very well thank you very much. Taking advantage of those who are want to trust them.

Gays are particularly vulnerable.

It’s best, they are told, for a life as an actor…to stay in the closet.

The closet protects and it taketh away.

To be a young, beautiful gay man arriving in Hollywood for the first time has a million, unforeseen drawbacks that seem, to the uninitiated, like wonderful gifts.

Noticed by rich and powerful men (when you have lived your life in relative obscurity) perverts the course of any fate you might believe in.

There are plenty of fate healers.

Look at him.

Picked from a legion of other boys. He feels special at last.

Boys who would not normally indulge in the crepe flesh of the elderly become their most ardent moisturizer.

Especially for a young gay man who may have been deeply closeted, living in the jet black shadow of toxic shame.

Never realizing his own beauty. His own worth.

Ignorant to the attention he receives as he walks innocently down the street.

Like Dorian Gray, shown for the first time how gorgeous he is…becomes immediately vain and arrogant.

Throws off his mantle of quiet humility and becomes addicted to the adoration of others.

Watching my gay brethren in Hollywood flocking to the shrine of the generously rewarded can be a sickening sight.

Young boys arrive uninvited from small towns in far off states armed with copies of US weekly.

Sitting in the Chateau Marmont hoping for a glimpse of Josh Hartnett or Lindsay Lohan.

Hoping to make everything better, validate and soothe away the pain of a miserable and isolated childhood.

Unless those boys are fabulously gifted, educated or similarly bequeathed the last of their youth is stolen from them by the unscrupulous.

Their talents go unnoticed. Their dreams unfulfilled, their virginity discarded to the most affluent.

Another notch in the bed post.

Get them drunk or worse.

People say, let them make their own mistakes.

It’s very hard to do.

So, the fame whores and the star fuckers line up…pig pink, shaved and waxed for the jovial grandees who take turns like so many commissioned shop assistants on the floor of the biggest meat market in the whole damned universe.

Brothers, Sisters, Mothers and Fathers

Spent the greater part of yesterday removing redundant blog entries from this blog.  Bloody hell, what a waste of time.

It was frankly embarrassing re-reading all that shit.  All that fury, that indignation I had for him.  It was just so embittered and…not very well written.  Beware the curse of resentment!

From 11am-3pm I sat with a journalist discussing my ongoing legal story.  They are sending a photographer.  It’s a cover story.  The last time I had this much interest from the press I was making movies.  Now I am doing something for the greater good, I have been handed an oppertunity to help others and I am grasping hold of it.  Nothing will unseat me from doing the right thing.

I left something of myself in the jail. I left that Duncan who deserved no respect.

Do you understand that darling? Do you remember when I was serious, contained?  You found it so attractive?

Everything from my old life, pre jail has become irrelevant.  The artifice, the indulgence, the decadence…it was a worthless occupation.  Chasing infamy?  Even the places I used to visit daily are of no interest to me.  The people I know there, the people I knew…caught up in their own peculiar madness, their preoccupation with power and prestige.

I remind myself to be truthful, to be kind.

The people I have been meeting since leaving the jail, the activists, the lawyers, the human rights advocates…I am humbled by their brilliance, their focus, their dedication.

Lastly, as I was sitting with the fiercely intelligent man who interviewed me yesterday I remembered something about the jail that impressed me.  Something peculiar to the gay dorm, peculiar to that community of trans and gay men.

On the streets, elder trans women ’adopt’ younger trans girls as their daughter.  These  relationships were strengthened in the dorm, references to ‘my mother’ or ‘my father’ baffled me.  At first.

Family connections emerged, not bound by blood but by commitment.   Young gay men needing advice, support, succor and council turning to those they respected.  Adopting one another as mother and daughter.  Father and son. Letting those about them know that familial ties now existed, that they were to be honored.

My son is fighting.  My daughter wants a dress. My mother has had bad news.  My father’s husband is being released.

As we ate together at night.  These ‘families’ helped each other practically:  feeding each other, sharing the loaves and the fishes.  Sharing the support, the love, the strength, the gossip.   That which may not have existed from real parents, from blood brothers, from those who we take for granted…from whom we were born.

Many young black men from Compton, Watts and Inglewood had spent their formative years co-opted into gangs.  The Bluds and the Crips.

Their coping skills would horrify you, you my dear readers…but kept them alive.  Murder, guns, retaliation, fighting to the death were common for most of the young black men I met.  Frequent.

On top of all that, against that barbaric backdrop they had to deal with coming out.

More of this later.

Let’s Make A Movie

Sat at home with the twins watching the Oscar coverage.  It was wonderful to see The Artist grab all of the best awards.  It was wonderful watching Plummer accept his Oscar with such elegance and dignity.

It was even more moving to see that little Producer of The Artist grab the Oscar for the best film.  That lone French Producer fit himself into the history of Motion Pictures, nodding to his predecessors…his heroes.

Of course I sat there and wondered if I would ever make another movie.  There is nothing stopping me…except me.

The script I sent out just before I was arrested had some great feed back.  I reread it yesterday afternoon.  It has to be sharpened…but it’s good.

The stage play comes first, and the documentary…and the trial.

Life is filling up!  It’s not ending!  It’s just beginning.

I’ve been watching Robby grow up.  Watching him inhabit his new skin.  I’ve been thinking about him and you know who…but not obsessively.  Trying to work out what went wrong, why I reacted so badly and for so long.

You know, it’s obvious that I am a very bad gay.  I don’t fit it.  I don’t like them and they don’t like me.  God, I really tried.  I tried being gay here in LA, in NYC, I tried being in gay AA.  What a waste of time.

So, I wondered what it was that JB had that I didn’t have, that Robby has that I don’t have.  Well, they just seemed to fit in effortlessly.  JB met people and had dinner with them, sex with them, he is a likable fellow, largely uncomplicated (on the surface), doesn’t want to cause trouble.

I am none of those things.  He fitted in immediately, he just did.  And when he fitted in I had no place in his life, there was no room for a misfit like me.

So it is with Robby as he makes his way, meeting people this unwitting Malibu dad doesn’t think appropriate for him…but that boy has to make his own mistakes and I am not his dad.  I am here to help, not to judge.

Perhaps I am indeed how JB described me.  Perhaps his assessment was just too accurate.

He will make some man so incredibly happy!  They both will.

Hey!  I’ve seen you smiling, it’s a lovely picture.  You look so happy, happier than when I knew you darling.  Of course, you were tormented then.  Tormented by guilt, by indecision…now look at you, staring into the camera.  Do you love him?  I hope you do.

You know, don’t you, that we would never have met as out gay men.   I would have passed you by and you would have thought me absurd.  Just like they do.

I know that I’m not meant to think about you…but I do!  I think hopeful thoughts.  I know that you’ll be happy.  Forever.  I am so relieved that the fury is over.

You don’t need to be scared of me darling.

I am fighting bigger battles.  Fighting for others.

Did I ever tell you that I was sorry?  Perhaps I didn’t mean it back then.  Just hollow words.

It must have been very scary for you all.  It was scary for me.  Well, it’s all over now.  All over.

It Gets Better? Better Than Death?

Yesterday a pair of young film makers turned up at the apartment to work with me on their well written but unfocused script.

The man was leaving as they arrived.

They said, “Wow, he’s gorgeous.  Where do you meet men like that?”

Not in clubs or bars, not grindr or Manhunt.  I meet men like that as we pass in the street.  He said, “You looked mean.”  I am…I suppose.  I do.  Keep the fuck away from me.

Anyway, the film makers sat down and we talked about their script.  It was revealed, during our conversation, that one of these young men had recently found out that he was HIV+.

This is the third time I have heard this story, or one like it this past month.  His sex partner had not told him the truth about his HIV status before he agreed to have unsafe sex.

He had been lied to.

I was shaking with rage.

Like J risked J’s life when he was fucking HIV+ artist Pal S behind her back, like X had been lied to…these innocent folk had made bad decisions based on the lies they were told.

On each occasion the liar had tried to make it the victim’s fault.

” You shouldn’t have believed me.”

“You must have realized.”

“I can’t talk about this right now, you are complicating my life.”

“What kind of straight man doesn’t play sports?”

He is 25 years old.  A young man dealing with a huge problem.  He told me that he feels like he has ‘gone back into the closet’, that ‘no one could possibly love him’, that he is ‘damaged goods’.

“How do you feel about the guy who infected you?”  I asked.

“He’s evil.” he replied.

“Misguided?”  I suggested.

No, I told myself, not misguided.  I knew he was right.  Deliberately infecting or risking the lives of others…is simply evil.

My phone rang, I made a plan to see a friend the following morning.  

The boys looked at me askance. What?  I said.  ”I’ve never seen anyone make an arrangement like that on the phone.  We text each other.”  I felt suddenly dislocated from life.  How come I didn’t know?

The kid with HIV is now at the mercy of the pharmaceutical companies who stand to take millions of dollars from him as he tries to stay healthy.

The same companies who promote their products in our gay publications… paying top dollar to do so.

Look at the pictures.  Strapping, healthy boys living with HIV.

Big Pharma shaping this generations attitude toward HIV as a manageable/livable with disease… just like diabetes!

Turn your back on health education, embrace ignorance and a life shackled to Big Pharma.  Enslaved at 25.  My heart bled.

“I never knew anyone who died of AIDS.” he said.

When this young man was being bullied at school for being gay he may very well have been reassured by the biggest deception of all:  It Gets Better.  Dan Savage‘s message of false hope.

It is another gay lie.

We don’t treat each other very well.  We don’t talk about not treating each other very well.

They stop bullying us…we start where they left off.

If they don’t damage you…we will…with my lies and infected sperm.

It’s not getting better for the young man I met yesterday.  It’s getting a whole heap worse.  Straight bullies didn’t lie and infect him with HIV.  Gay men did.

Gay men lied to three of my friends…confirming that it is not just an HIV epidemic, it is an epidemic of lies, betrayal and life threatening denial.

Uneducated, shamed, arrogant, drug fucked gay men with no principles.

Just like Jake.

The only reason I have to come back to NYC so frequently is to meet Jake in court.  Prolonging the inevitable.

Forced, yet again, to indulge his tantrums, his ego, his selfishness.

Without me in his life to define him as the victim…what is he left with?  Without me and his appearances in court…he returns to the mundane fixtures and fittings of the life that was…if one can call it a life?

Yet, when I am here in NYC, I make the most of it.  Happily wiling away the days, finishing my novel, seeing movies, hanging with my buddies, walking the dog, enjoying the humid nights tangled in your arms.

When he left this morning we both said, almost in unison, ‘I don’t do goodbyes’.   I don’t.  He had his bicycle over one shoulder, he didn’t look back.  I can still smell him on my fingers.

I will have a shower when I get back to LA.

The Way We Were

19 Years Old

If gay marriage had been an option when I was young would I have made different sorts of decisions?

Would I have behaved differently?

Would I have looked for a serious relationship with another man to whom I would have proposed, married and had children..rather than leaping from one man to another…exhausting each and every one of them?

If that narrative had been on offer, as it is now, would I have married Joe or Matt or the beautiful Dane?

Joe and I were as good as married but it was a marriage of convenience.

If I had believed that a commitment between men was possible or respected or had some kind of future, perhaps I wouldn’t have wasted other opportunities.  I may have stuck around.

Did I even trust the love that dare not speak its name?  The legitimacy of love between men?

When I hear a man say, ‘I love you’ it turns me on.

Tell me that you love me.

I will make love to you.  Be part of you.

When I was a young man I felt hopeless, convinced that this strange love was simply…pointless. That to say ‘I love you’ to another man…meant nothing, could never mean what it meant when I loved a woman.

But you’re gay!  Did she know?  This woman.

One woman in particular.

When I fell in love with PH, it was a surprise to everyone…me included. She was so beautiful. She was so beautiful and she wanted me. There are very few things I do not write about here. She is one of them. Our relationship that spanned half a decade.

After years of enjoying a gay life I saw the world renewed. I looked into her eyes and I never wanted to forget her face. Every time I left the house I would memorize an indelible snapshot of her.

When we were in love every record played on the radio meant something. Holding hands in the street and never once a strangers savage glance…my love blossomed. Without the withering contempt of strangers my love blossomed.

Do you know what I mean? Whenever I held a man in my arms in a public place I felt the withering contempt of others. Have you ever felt that? It soured me. What other people thought.

Biracial couples know what I mean.

The artist, Marc Quinn said to me when he saw me and Phil together, “I knew you weren’t gay.”

That was then. This is now.

Before he and I stopped speaking he told me that he had met a man in Central Park and kissed them. They held him in their arms. He told so many lies yet somehow this lie was forgivable. He told me that it had happened before I met him…but I knew from the look on his face how new and exhilarating it had been.

An experience that he wanted to share but was too afraid of hurting me.

Well, we may never know how it might have been if I had the luxury of marrying a man.

Time has past, now I am too old to fall in love and make a man my husband.

Darling PH, even though we are estranged at the moment because of what happened last summer with him.  I want you to know that had you not been in my life I would never have experienced a brimming heart.

You trusted me and nurtured me and protected me and loved me unconditionally.

Watching my young gay friends emerge into the light, they have a different sort of gay life on offer.

During the past 50 years life for gay men has changed radically. When I was born homosexuality was still a criminal offence. So, I was lucky to have grown up without my sexuality outlawed.

This generation of gay men are freer than any generation before them. I salute the work we did to make a more equitable life for them.

Occasionally I am pissed that the young don’t recognise the sacrifices we made..but I am also aware that I seldom give a thought to those who fought for me to live a free and abundant gay life.

As much as I hate to remind you, these rights and freedoms could be taken away just as easily as they were given. We must not take our good fortune for granted. There are dark forces at work against us.

It’s election time!  Here they go again, debating my future, my expendable rights.  Using their disdain for our lives to get votes.  Championing gay hate to ‘motivate their base’.

Listen to what they say about us.  The cruel rhetoric they use.

I am tired of being the liberal hot potato thrown around at times of national debate/election.

Gay marriage, gays in the military, hate crimes, equality.

And finally mr/mrs republican candidate…what do you think of the gays?  Is this the kind of America we want to call our home?   We want our country back from the niggers and the faggots!

We are once again the devil’s proof of an evil, liberal America, a decadent America, a democratic America that Jesus would never sanction.

Apparently, like abortion, we must be outlawed.

I am sick of having my nature, my rights, my existence used by others in some heartless polemic.

Read my lips:  My rights are non-negotiable, un-repealable….mine to keep.

If you vote Democrat I am not proof positive of a better America. If you are Republican I am not responsible for every natural disaster.  I am just what I always was…alive. Doing what I always did…living. Hoping like I always will…that you leave me and my sexuality alone.

Some woman on FB reassured me that Jesus loved me but hated my sin.  The sin of homosexuality.  The Jesus I was taught about on Sunday mornings in St Alphage church Whitstable never really hated anyone.

All he wanted was a fair and equitable life for us all.

CNN Today

I thought you might wanna see this:

BTW, for those of you who have recently started reading this blog and want to catch up with the Jake B/Duncan Roy ‘relationship’  fiasco….

Here is a quick recap:

I was a patient on Dr. Drew‘s Sex Rehab which aired on VH1.  I admitted that I found straight men desirable and re-traumatized myself with straight cock.

After the show aired I had many straight men contact me with a view to having sex with them.

They were rebuffed.

Jake contacted me via Facebook, he presented himself as straight.  He lived with his girlfriend of 7.5 years.  He told me he was a literary agent, interested in publishing my blog  (he wasn’t the only one) we met and became friends and I agreed that he rep me.

After getting to know each other and working together Jake then revealed that he was gay.  Not straight or bi but full on gay.  He sent me pictures of his penis and ass.  He told me that he loved me.  I was confused and greatly attracted.  I was flattered.

I lived in LA…he lived in NYC.  He skyped a great deal.

I genuinely thought that he would leave his girlfriend for me.  That’s what he said.  I made it PERFECTLY CLEAR that I wanted nothing to do with him if he did not tell his girlfriend Jessie the truth…in fact, I forced him to tell her that he was gay.

He was petrified that I would out him.

He finally told her the truth.  She, quite rightly, threw him out of their house.

He then started a sexual odyssey that did not include me…even though he called every day and accepted an expensive vacation to the South of France.

So, whoever it is (we can guess) that continues to send anonymous notes insinuating that I am somehow responsible for the Jake situation…go fuck yourself.  Jake is fully responsible for not just ruining his ex girlfriends life by lying to her for the past 7.5 years but also busting his way into mine.

I insisted that he tell the truth.

I could just dump our entire email correspondence on here if you are interested in the chronology?

Duncan Roy The ‘A’ List

Regardless of why I decided to get involved with Derek or The ‘A’ List I’m glad I did.  Our pretend boyfriend scam…it was fun.  Even though I have been portrayed as a smelly old man.

Pretending to be his boyfriend was absurd.   A joke.  I don’t know if that comes across on the show?  That we were faking it?

Occasionally I throw myself back into being ‘gay’.  I don’t have a very gay life on this mountain.  Most queens are totally appalled that I live here, so isolated, away from the urban gay idyl.

Tom calls it my Shangri-La.   Some men love it and for those I hold a special place in my heart.  They get it.  The dream of self-sufficiency, off the grid, chickens and home-grown vegetables.

When I pull off my country clothes (albeit RRL) and slide into something leaner I am dressed for the city.  Whether it is WeHo or Chelsea, Soho or The Marais I am there to be seen, acknowledged and play that peculiar game of being ‘gay’.

I can live two distinct lives, maybe more?

In England my snooty friends called me a chameleon, meaning to insult me.

Surely being able to change ones color to blend in…is rather good?  To adapt and change as the situation requires.

In England, my England I learned to speak with a different accent, merely to be heard.

I am a cock sucking homosexual but I wonder if others see it that way?  What kind of gay am I?

Perhaps my lack of interest in sex makes me less gay, less human?

Remember when I was on Sex Rehab and admitted that the sex I had with men was traumatic?   People wrote to me and told me that I wasn’t gay.  ”If Duncan Roy doesn’t want gay sex, he isn’t gay.”

They tried to throw me out of the gay club…for having an opinion.

Meeting the cast of the ‘A’ List was memorable because they have become, in their own way, icons.  For good or for bad.  I met most of them just once. At least three of them have admitted drug and alcohol problems.

I really liked Austin and his husband Jake who I could very easily imagine seeing here or in London.  They are good people.  I like Austin’s authenticity.

The worst of the bunch has to be…Derek.  As you will see tonight (if you can be bothered) I enjoy ribbing him on camera.  I used stock lines, old jokes that an overly sensitive American queen did not find very funny.

When the food arrives I say, “That looks like something that came out of your nose.”  That’s funny isn’t it?  I used it before and my friends laughed.

We hung out a few times but really, his lack of sophistication, curiosity and insight were wonders to behold.  He seems so incomplete.  Derek’s consumption of alcohol masking a sadness at his core…like so many untreated addicts.  A problem that a huge number of gays share but have no intention of resolving.

Derek has no business to be anywhere but where he was born.  Like so many gay men he has been forced into New York by small-town prejudice and an insatiable desire for cock.

A bland, mid-western bag of meat and bones.

He had no truck with history, our history, any history…he knew nothing of the city where he lives, of commerce, politics or God.   Eking out an existence with appearances at provincial gay clubs and gay pride.

Derek lives every moment in the moment, no awareness of where he had come from and no interest in where he is going.

Did he read Eckhart Tolle?  I’m kidding.

The power of now and only now and God forbid that you make me consider anything other than right now.

I am without context.  I am without past or future.

Damn!  This Queen needs a drink!

He is the antithesis of everything the other was.

I looked at Derek as one might a monkey in the zoo.  The gay zoo.  Trapped like a miserable, half naked gogo boy in his techno cage.   Evidence of his genus.  The sub species of gay to which we must all aspire.

Cocktails with orange slices perched on the rim.

Moisturized, combed, overly tanned.  The shrill laughter and meaningless conversation hurt my ears.

I can’t imagine what the viewers of the ‘A’ List will make of me but…we’ll see.  I am old.  I am not Peter Pan.  I have a beard.  I live on a mountain.  I have no sexual traction…time has eroded my usefulness to the gays.

It was an adventure into a life I have only the barest knowledge.  A sociological exercise.  Ripping open the wasp’s nest.

I hung out at bars and in clubs.  I questioned who I was and the choices I have made.

When I was approached I politely declined.  When they spilled their drinks on me I didn’t say a word.

Am I Weak?

I had no idea yesterday was Friday. I thought it was Wednesday. That’s how disorienting the mountain can be.

I have been trapping squirrels. Peanut butter and Weetabix. My secret weapon. The little dog at my side. Spent the rest of the day under the deck clearing dead leaves.

Paid water bill in Malibu, picked up some milk.

Dinner with friends. Crappy Cafe Habana. The rudest waitress on the planet.

Cold mist over the mountain. The weather is totally fucked up.

Apparently The ‘A’ List is very amusing.  Ian had an advance screener.  I probably don’t come off very well.  Never mind.  I am, according to Ian…referred to as ‘smelly’.   Watch the show on Logo, Monday night.  More will be revealed.

Because you love me (huh?) an anonymous ‘friend’ out there decided to send a recent picture of Jake.

Please don’t do it. As you are well aware, it just inflames the situation.

I don’t want to see him or hear anything about him.  I am at peace with him. Want the best for him.

I forgave him for writing that horrible email, for lying to me.  His lies, in retrospect, were perfectly understandable.  He was in a terrible situation.  I forgive you for being selfish and insensitive….for doing what perhaps all your non-sober friends would think perfectly reasonable.

I forgive you for wanting me to be something I never was.  I forgive you because you didn’t know.

What is my part in all of this? When everyone around me was warning not to get involved I ignored you all. I ignored John. I ignored Mr. P. I ignored Dr. D and my therapist Jill.  Instead of going to meetings and connecting with dependable friends I sank into my addiction. Acting out with a straight identified man.

Regardless of what he morphed into…he was not mine to love.  It is indeed very alluring to be told that you are loved but I am old enough, experienced enough to have seen it for what it was.  I chose not to.

I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger. I’m sorry for bruising you inside and out. I’m sorry that I couldn’t stop myself from loving you. I’m sorry that I was insensitive and selfish. I’m sorry for shouting.  I’m sorry I lied.  Most of all, I was wrong to have waged this war against you, not least because I have done myself irreparable damage.

I was wrong.

I was weak.

I fell for him…as many will.

You are a beautiful, sexy, romantic, intelligent man. Above all…you are curious.  If you are not already, you will make someone very happy, very proud.  You will make some equally honorable man a great husband, you will be a good father.

I wanted you for myself. In a different narrative that wouldn’t be so bad. But you had just come out, bravely left one life to make something brand new.   I should have been a support, a conduit.

Peace comes from acceptance and forgiveness.

I hope one day you will find it in your heart to forgive.  I don’t need to know that you have.

My Whitstable mash up…I was his age when I made that video and it reminded me of what sort of man I was. Unprepared. I was unprepared and willful.

I imagine that he is out there doing his best to be honest. Living in New York, working every day.

Connecting to his new gay life.

I hope he marvels at his good fortune: his new gay life. The opportunities it affords. With marriage and babies and freedom…it’s a great time in New York to be a gay man.

Both Zach and Dan told me that I should stop writing about Jake.  Zach told me that it made me sound weak.  Well, that maybe.  Weak or not, it’s time to move on.

At some point soon I have to remove (yet again) any reference to him from this blog. Any photograph, his name etc. It just has to be.  Not because I am being forced but because it is the right thing to do.  As if it never happened. As if we never happened.

This blog and his name written here ties him to me as much as I have strapped myself to him like a suicide bomb.

So, Adieu my friend.

I am writing this at The Country Mart in Malibu waiting for Karim as he stands in line for our lunch.

He is off to Patmos, Paris, Antibes and Athens for the rest of the summer. Places I love.

Some of those places we visited.  I will cherish those memories.  I will overlook the problems.  I will keep quiet now about what we loved most because only we know.

The Scarlet Empress

My 500th Blog!

Such delight and disdain it has caused.  Such heartache and joy!   Thanks readers.  Thanks.

Duncan x

There’s almost too much going on inside and outside of my head.

Firstly, the garden.  Every day for the past few weeks I have worked in the garden.  Pulling tons (literally) of weeds and leaves out of the flower beds.  Reclaiming the paths.  Defending the vegetables from the gophers and rabbits.

I have planted Datura and Hibiscus.   Salvia, basil, onions, beans and tomatoes.

A bumper crop of plums this year!

For the first time in 4 years I managed to get to them before the birds.

Have hooked up a pump to the spring water reservoir.  It’s located at the bottom of the garden, now watering parts of the estate I can’t usually justify irrigating with expensive, potable water.

The previous owner built the two huge tanks.  Until last week I just hadn’t gotten around to buying the small, inexpensive pump.  Absurd isn’t it?

Having this free supply of water means that I can clear part of the garden and lay turf which in any other situation would be immoral, irresponsible.

Everything in a tropical garden has spikes or thorns or needles.  My hands are cut to ribbons.  Robbie has been here twice this week helping me and his arms and legs, poor thing, are shredded too.

Dinner last night with Anna and Jeff at Nobu in Malibu.

Apparently I was mentioned in passing by Derek in the ‘A’ List last night.  I can’t imagine that I will escape lightly from this situation.  I am perfectly sure my posing as the ‘Mister Big’ will make me the laughing-stock of Gay New York.

Whatever.

The weather in Malibu is perfect.  Hot as hell in the sun but a delicious sea breeze blowing onshore.

The crows are hunting chicks.  They bombard the trees. Tiny dead chicks on the paths.  So sad.

I took the picture at the head of the post last weekend at the Piette’s.   Their house is soooo depressing.  Even though it’s located on the lake and the twins are living there now.  It’s so dark inside at night.  Gloomy.

You know what?  I should be getting on with something else.  I should be leaping all over my novel.  I should be writing the film.  You know what it’s about don’t you?

Two gay men want a baby but end up with an old man instead.

This was one of the videos Charlie and I shot when we were researching our film.

Trans Alexis, The Scarlet Empress, must be in her 80′s.  She was at Triangle House, a home for elderly gays and lesbians in Hollywood.  Getting old is a pain in the ass for everyone but elderly gays seem to find it particularly difficult.  Most of the men and women at Triangle House have endured homelessness.  Old age, as they say, is not for the faint hearted.

Lesbians, apparently, don’t seem to end up so isolated but gay men do.  Lesbians are often dialed into an extended family of other lesbians and are less ageist.

Anyway, I’ll write more about Alexis and our film which maybe should be a documentary.

I don’t know.

The elder gays we met were really quite wonderful.  The gay men we met who had surrogate children or were going through the surrogacy process were less wonderful.  Downright awful in fact.

Robby is on his way over to help me in the garden.

Is Toby right?  Do I live in the past?  Am I addicted to what was rather than what is or what could be?  Fuck.  Maybe he’s right?

Amy Winehouse is dead.  It comes as no surprise.  She was an out of control drug addict and alcoholic.  She dies alone.  She died an addict.  I am sorry for her family.  It is always the family that has to pick up the pieces and go on living.  Amy did not choose life.  She sneered at the prospect.  She thought she could get away with a dance with death.  She failed.

I will remember her like this:

Teen Wolf

Tyler Posey The Teen Wolf Star and Lil'Kevin Iwashina

Hollywood.  Nice to be back for a few days.  Even nicer to drag myself out of Malibu and up the 10 Freeway to Toby Wilkin’s birthday party.

Miles came with me.  Robby was stuck at work…and sick.

I wore a very chic black suit and tee-shirt with a picture of a scantily clad woman on it.  Hair much longer than it has been for weeks and sporting a fuller beard.

The little dog loves Toby.  He jumps around on his back legs whenever he sees him.

Many beautiful, interesting boys.  Two girls.

Jeff Davis writer of MTV’s new Teen Wolf series told me that he insisted the gay character in his very promising new show be played by an out gay man.

That was brave, or perhaps reckless in Hollywood?  I have no idea.

I applaud Jeff’s audacity.

Maybe things really are a’changing?

Had longest chat with rich gay about US equality politics.  Of course I remember his name but it wouldn’t be polite to mention it.  Even though I told him that I would blog about the party I don’t think he thought I would blog about him in particular.

He is as passionate as I am about gay equality though his solution seems very different to mine.

We agreed that both HRC and GLAAD  are getting it wrong.  But where as I think change needs to start with an aggressive ad campaign that positively validates us, our love and our history…his strategy boiled down to making lawyers richer by changing things judicially.

I suggested that men like him and David Geffen and women like Ellen should publicly stop paying their taxes until they have equal billing..he balked.

I urged him to ‘take the bullet’ if he truly believes in equality.  I reminded him that there were men and women in Yemen this very night risking their lives for freedom, equality and democracy.

I didn’t necessarily agree with his point of view but tried (unusually) to look for the similarities rather than the differences.  I was feeling, shall we say, diplomatic.

Another Ken Mehlman apologist.   Apparently, even though our Ken has been a very bad gay he can help us by getting Republicans to speak out for gay marriage.  Oh gawd.  That argument is nearly as convincing as trickle down economics.

My new friend was a firm believer that all things gay are good and we should not under any circumstance be questioned or challenged.

He seemed perplexed when I suggested that by keeping our own side of the street clean we might attract rather than promote people to our cause.  We seldom ever look at our own behaviour, morals or lack of them.

He told me rather imperiously that he did not have any friends with drug or alcohol abuse issues.  Forgetting of course that his good friend Elton has been sober for many years after many more years of a torturous drug and alcohol problem.

He had not read or even heard of The Velvet Rage.

We parted on good terms.

One young queen kept hounding The Little Dog.  The Little Dog took offence and tried to bite him.   Oh how we laughed.

Generally very good party even though I missed the sausages.

Almost the entire Teen Wolf cast in attendance.

Bumped into my very old friend Tom D who scarcely recognised me.  I must look very old.  He claimed it was the beard.  He has become a hugely successful and incredibly well-respected producer.  We hugged a lot and agreed to meet very soon.

The beautiful Dane and I are going on an adventure.   Watch this space.

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Gay Idyl

The first time Joe ever took me to Fire Island Pines I was immediately convinced that something I had always hankered existed: a place where gay men and women of all ages could live together, experience life together and express themselves without shame.

I have heard from black friends who traveled to Africa for the first time that they experienced a sense of truly understanding how it might be to live an unfettered life.

There are exceptions.

I have just finished reading A Black Man Confronts Africa.

From 1991 to 1994, Keith Richburg was based in Nairobi as the Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post. He traveled throughout Africa, from Rwanda to Zaire, witnessing and reporting on wars, famines, mass murders, and the complexity and corruption of African politics.

Unlike many black Americans who romanticize Africa, Richburg looks back on his time there and concludes that he is simply an American, not an African-American. This is a powerful, hard-hitting book, filled with anguished soul-searching as Richburg makes his way toward that uncomfortable conclusion.

I am a gay (adopted) American.   I do not belong.  The laws of the land preclude me from being truly equal.  The streets are periodically mine but not consistently.  Really?  I thought things had changed for the gays?  Strangely, post Will and Grace things have not changed.  I urge any one of you (gay or straight) who think things may have changed for gay people in contemporary USA (and I have said this many times over):  Try holding your same sex friends hand in a street anywhere other than NYC or LA.

See what happens.

Returning to Fire Island this summer for the first time in a decade I am excited to see how things have evolved since I lived there and if the idyl I first experienced still exists.

The beautiful beach, the beautiful boys, the sunset and sunrise…no cars.   Dinner prepared by groups of men who sit down together and share.  Share being the operative word.  What ever share you may have in the house you are renting…doing things collectively is the modus operandi.

Have I idealized my memory of this slim sand bank set at the edge of the Atlantic?  Have, within a decade, my memories been burnished?

I wonder.

Firstly, finding a house to rent has been quite hard.  I guess my demands are not normal by gay Fire Island Pines standards.  When searching for a house I made it quite clear to the realtor that I am sober.  I do not drink and I do not take drugs.  I told him that I was not interested in the big gay beach parties (drug festivals).  That I am going there to write.

Almost every house that I looked at was a ‘party’ house.  Almost every person I spoke to told me that they wanted to have fun…read that as excessive drinking, drug taking and sexual unmanageability.

Having a sober person around might mean curtailing the ‘fun’.

I have heard that The Pines has become quite trashy.  I have heard that they have ruined the ambiance.

The über gays have long since deserted The Pines for The Hamptons.  Aping upper-class American straight people rather than investing in the peculiarities of The Pines.

What is it that draws me back there?  What is it that I loved so much?

Well, Joe and I had a wonderful time together in our pretty little house.  It was the nexus of gay culture and me.  For the first time in my life I saw both old and young gay people going about their business (during the day) just like common people.  Fetching their shopping on small, red carts.  Dressing up, holding hands, not dressing up…alone.

For the first time in my life I felt as if I owned the space around me, that I could not be judged in this place.

Until I got there I believed those things to be true but I had been kidding myself.

Just getting there from Manhattan was an adventure.  The car to Sayville.  The ferry ride from Sayville to the island,  the palpable excitement of the passengers.  The great piles of supplies and dogs and suitcases.

Thank you Joe for taking me there.

The first man I saw when I scrambled down the gang-plank was an elderly man with a stick walking slowly along the board walk.  It delighted me.  ”Is everyone gay here Joe?”  I thought to myself that there was indeed a place where I could be free when I was his age.  I knew even then in my late 20′s that being old and gay was going to be difficult.  My premonition has come to pass.  Being old and gay is going to be horrible from what we found out when researching The Scarlett Empress.

Unless, of course you have a spare $160, 000 to buy a surrogate child who might look after you.

I had thought about going back to Whitstable in my dotage but not even Whitstable holds much allure to me.  Being the old gay man in town…I have seen the way we are treated.

When I arrived at The Pines I understood how life might play out.  The options.  I looked around and even though the bars were full of very drunk gays (I was one of them) the look on their faces was different.  They looked relaxed, they looked happy.

We went to gay bingo, we involved ourselves with the gay fire department.  We had opinions about dune reclamation.  We walked barefoot to the beach and watched the beautiful naked men play ball and walk their dogs.  We paid for limousines from JFK for our friends and delighted them with our house, our gay lives.

Our routine rarely altered.  Watching the sunset, hanging out on the dock to see who would get off the ferry.  Buying expensive food at The Pines Pantry…the store was just like any store but crammed with fancy queens buying $100 steaks.

When I got sober the AA meetings were quite small on Fire Island…now they are huge.

I really have no idea what it will be like to live out there once again for the summer.

I am excited at the prospect.

Of course there are other places where one might feel free, where YOU might feel free.  Perhaps you have already found your very own utopia elsewhere.

The Fire Island Pines experience is short-lived.  In September this utopia is disassembled.  The grand houses are shuttered, the store closes, the ferry comes but once a day.

There are other places for us to go.  Unless we vanish.  Those of us who look kindly upon our strange ‘culture’ can find our tribe elsewhere.

Not until I got to San Francisco did I have that sense of belonging once again.  Where the streets were mine.  The neighborhoods belonged to us.  Where fear and shame were banished.

Like Keith Richburg I am aware of the anthropological problems but still happy to have experienced the adventure.   Let me for a moment love it all without criticism, let me love what we have carved out for ourselves both good and bad and celebrate our difference.  Celebrate.

Suddenly Inspired…

…to write a film. But, guess what’s getting in the way? YOU GUESSED IT! The lieing twat of Westchester. That was something else he sneered at. My film making. “Oooh,” he chided, “It’s shot on tape.” Yeah, fuck face..shot on tape..went to Sundance nominated for a British Academy award. He really tried to undermine my confidence. Sneery cock whore that he is…

Ok, relapse! That’s what happens. I remember just how ‘ironic’ he is about anyone who tried to achieve anything..like kids or films. I wonder if he can communicate at all with the artists he is meant to represent when he is so desperate to be one himself.

He did make a sort of film. A high school parody. He thought it was HILARIOUS.

How will he ever encourage the best out of his clients? Unless he is getting fucked by them of course.

Wanna know something funny? He loved reading my blog when I was writing shit about other people. It’s a bit uncomfortable now tho isn’t it JB?

Hahhaha.

RENTER ALERT!!!

OK, yesterday, when I got back to the apartment in Hollywood (almost finished packing) there was a vicious note from Viken Douzdjian’s two-bit lawyer demanding his money back for the rental. Viken is a surgeon from Portland Oregon who rented the house for 7 people for $250 a night. He arrived and left immediately because the ‘TV was too small.’ and ‘There was a stain on the carpet.’ Let me remind you again Viken..that’s why it’s $250 a night rather $2, 500 a night like the guy next door or $25, 000 a night like the houses on the PCH. This surgeon from Portland told me to alter a cheque that he had misprinted then recalls the cheque! What a fucking twat. Then..get this..he tells me that he can’t stay in the house of a homosexual.

This surgeon better not be cutting you open if you are gay..cause he hates us gays!

Thank God I keep every email..including the one where he tells me to alter the cheque. Read the fucking contract dick-wad surgeon, homophobic, LIAR.

Viken Douzdjian is a homo hating, rental con-man who can’t seem to read the contract he signed. He joins the Renter’s From Hell Hall of SHAME.

Viken..let me introduce you to Irene Brown from Maud Place Hawaii and Dave Stewart from who gives a shit ville. Dave did the ‘we are Christians and can’t stay in your house’ bullshit.

“There’s PORNOGRAPHY in your house.”  they squealed like pigs after finding some funny postcards in a draw..without nudity I might add . Actually, I thought Dave was gay when I met him. My gaydar went off like an Amazonian dawn chorus. Mrs Dave probably put him through Christian gay-boy rehabilitation…so they could have those ugly kids.

Fuck Christians.

All of you.

Oh yeah, and when I spoke to Viken’s moronic lawyer I tried to make a point about Jews and Gays in the concentration camps and why homophobia should not be colluded with in the same way we have no truck with anti-Semitism.

He thought I was being an anti-semite..not realizing of course that JB is a Jew, my sponsor is a Jew..and so was my GRANDFATHER.

Fucking idiot.

I am in NYC. Alive..although maybe dying…here for fashion week. Hope I don’t bump into the lying fuck face.

What a Waste

I always assume that anyone I meet is gay, the same way straight people assume (unless a flaming queen) every man they meet is straight.  Consequently most straight men I meet are perplexed at the sort of small talk I make with them.  Last week for instance someone mentioned that he was meeting his fiance and I said, “He’s a lucky guy to be marrying you.” This caused him to nearly drop his wine glass.  He spluttered nervously that he was straight.  “Oh!” I said as he dabbed at dribbled wine over his jacket.  “What a waste.”

Now, I am NOT the sort of man who thinks every man I meet is gay but I must always assume that he is until told otherwise.  It’s the only way these men are going to learn how to be inclusive.

Another funny example: two men having lunch with their small dog.  As they were leaving I asked them about their dog and mentioned how, in my opinion, a dog really improves a relationship…were they thinking about having children?  They looked increasingly horrified as they realised that I thought that they were a couple.  They said, “Oh, we’re not gay.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We’re straight.”

The reaction always amuses me.  Men are still insulted by the insinuation that they might be gay.   Pathetic.

Update on Irene the mad woman from Hawaii.  Last night she informed me that she had called the Lost Hills Police Department reporting me as a terrorist.  I am assuming because my father was Persian?  Anyway, so far Homeland Security have not interviewed me about this and I imagine that they won’t be any time soon.

Why doesn’t she just go to small claims court?

Anyway, she is reporting me to the IRS, the California Governor etc. etc.  To Irene I am a regular Bernie Madoff.

The bottom line:  even if I wanted to benevolently return the money she says is owed to her she has caused such internet havoc and destruction I simply can’t.  I am not going to.  She thinks that her internet attacks on me are somehow going to force my hand.  What she simply cannot comprehend is the following fact about me:  I do not care about my ‘reputation’.  As I mentioned to her last night during one of her frenzied email bombardments the worst has already been said about me, nothing that she says is either new or bothers me.

Finally, last night, her gay friend sent me an odious email mocking my cancer scare.   All for $800?  They want me dead for $800?

Great morning at therapy today.  Wonderful.  I am in very good spirits.  mainly because I don’t have a blood sucking fame whore at my tit sucking the life out of me.  Oh, it’s 4pm on the east coast, he is probably already stoned, on web cam showing off his only asset.

The most annoying thing about Jake is that before meeting him that cold January afternoon in the East Village I had a meeting with agent David Vigliano who was really interested in working with me.  Jake called him Vig the pig.

I have a GREAT idea.  Irene you should call him, perhaps he’ll offer you and your friend a book deal.

Never assume men are straight until they tell you categorically that they are.

It just isn’t worth it.

Sebastian Horsley Funeral

1983, the year I met Sebastian

Is it possible to believe in God and still take drugs and drink?  Is it possible to believe in God and sleep with hookers?  Is any of this possible?  Obviously it is.

Sebastian will be buried on Thursday, July 1st 2010.   There’ll be a horse-drawn cortege from Meard Street to St James’s Piccadilly where the service will be held.   Stephen Fry will be speaking,  as are others.  Stephen very kindly offered to say a few words on my behalf.

Rachel Campbell-Johnstone wrote to me yesterday inviting me to the funeral, she said,  “We are mountaineers roped together heading for the summit of beauty.”   She warned us that the funeral will be filmed.

Remember, I was 23 when I met Sebastian.  That was 27 years ago.  He was still a teenager working for Jimmy Boyle in Edinburgh.   Our show, Pornography, a spectacle, invited by the Richard Demarco Gallery would play in Jimmy’s cold performance space where Sebastian and I met for the first time.

I would later work for the Demarco Gallery and meet Joseph Beuys, the greatest conceptual artist of our age.   There was a fascinating dialogue between Beuys and Boyle..then styled one of the most dangerous men in the United Kingdom.

The dialogue was initiated by Richard Demarco whilst Jimmy Boyle was serving a sentence of life imprisonment in Barlinnie Prison for murder.  Beuys went on hunger strike because of Jimmy Boyle’s removal from the Special Unit, Barlinnie to Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison where he was no longer able to continue making art.

Sebastian claimed in his book Dandy in the Underworld that he was sleeping with Jimmy and I have no reason to doubt him.  I would have too if I had had my chance.  There was something wildly attractive to me about ex cons and hard men and dangerous criminals.  Remember I had been in prison the year before I met Sebastian and developed a nasty habit for sex with brutal straight men.

If anybody was going to fuck me he was going to be a man who deserved me.    He was going to be a man who knew what he wanted and how to take it.

My cell mate Tommy Cowling, married with two children from Hoxton, East London was the most beautiful man who ever lived.  When the lights went out in our cell he said, “I’m asleep now, you can do what you want to me.”  For nine long months we did exactly that, everything we wanted when the lights were out.   He could make me cum by just rubbing his stubble over my soft face.

Perhaps this is another reason why I spurned the soppy men that I met in gay bars and gay clubs?  Perhaps this is why I would rather have my head buried in a squaddies (soldiers) groin, the smell of wet pussy on his cock than a nice boy from The Abbey.  Prison spoiled more than my reputation.   It proved, if any proof were needed, that straight men with furious urges, hard and hairy bodies and urgent desires were far more interesting than living in the half-light of shameful, gay London, Paris or New York.

This is all a matter of taste of course.  My desires cannot be compared to yours.

Yesterday something a little untoward happened.  At Anna’s birthday party she rolled me a fag and it had a few crumbs of weed in it.   I was as high as a kite for a good few hours.  Everything was totally wonderful.  I had that gorgeous feeling of euphoria and masterful abandon.  I hadn’t felt that feeling for nigh on 14 years.  I demanded to speak to Jake because I wanted to know how the experience of me being high would affect what I thought of him.

He was complaining that it was late and he wanted to go to sleep…he was blithering on about how people might think he was some sort of man whore if I compared his experience of being gay with men who died of AIDS in the 1980′s.   Obviously, I didn’t mean that.  I was trying to be nice.

Fuck it!  Go and be a man whore.  All of you!   Go and be whores.  It doesn’t matter to me.  I was sucking squaddie cock and getting fucked in the back of cars by East End builders.  LUSH.  I didn’t wait around to have a gay life.  I emerged from the womb searching for the most perfect penis to suckle on.

Anyway, as I did not deliberately get high I am not going to reset my sobriety time.  I still believe in God but I’m not going to be so fucking pious.

I will miss you Sebastian Horsley.

Gay Pride?

Today the sea in the Gulf of Mexico is burning. Added to the slick of heavy crude oil toxic, jet-black smoke polluting the air we breathe.   The azure, pristine water marred with acrid plumes of shit colored oil.  The marshlands and beaches painted brown, the life there dying because we refuse to doubt our dependence on oil.  It is officially one of the worst man-made environmental disasters ever.

Yet, the massed people of the United States, indeed the world, politely ignored it.  Until now.  Blame is being apportioned, asses are being kicked yet today I will fill my truck with gas and think nothing of it.  I am complicit; I am responsible yet I do nothing.   Nothing.

It is maybe just the analogy I need to explain the human disaster caused by religious based homophobia that causes pain and suffering to those who live in it’s shadow.

Frankly, I don’t give daily thought to the fact that I am part of a community that is routinely demonized just as I choose to forget that hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spew into the sea.  I have learned to live side by side a huge number of people encouraged to hate me and people just like me because of the way we were born and the sexual preferences we have.

Politically I have sat motionless on the sidelines whilst living in the USA.  I have not demonstrated like I did in London, I have not written to my representative in Congress expressing my outrage at how my rights are diminished or devalued.   I put up with things just the way they are because I feel powerless, that I am just one man with one lone voice against the angry mob.

Nowadays I am resigned, whenever I am with men who do not know that I am gay and say things that are blatantly offensive, to keep my mouth shut.    I do not blame myself for their views but as I grow older I am less likely to defend my community or myself.  It simply isn’t worth it.  I am tired of being the uppity gay.

I am exhausted by confronting inequity and hate in my life and I am scared.  Scared that I will not be able to fully defend myself against their physical abuse.

My entire career as an artist has been to serve the gay community.  My plays and films aimed at men like me.  I have been hugely admired (and reviled) as a filmmaker but even my gay friends do not respect that I describe myself as a ‘gay filmmaker’ a gay man who makes films for and about our community.  They muse that I could have done so much better for myself if I had abandoned my principles.  If I had gone ‘mainstream’.

All I ever wanted to be was a gay artist who uses the language and locations of our gay lives.  I am proud to have done so.  I am proud to have served my community thus.

I wonder how much damage we do ourselves in the way that we choose to be seen?  How can we expect those who loathe us to accept us when we do so little to let them know who we are?

What is my part in the public relation disaster that still prevents fellow citizens from owning and celebrating my existence?  What am I doing in my community to help those angry people understand who I am?   How can I expect the mainstream to accept my demands for equality when I essentially live in a hermetically sealed ghetto?

How can I expect my gay fellow travelers to start reaching into their pockets and paying for a PR campaign that somehow celebrates our diversity when all we are seen to want is the right to fuck?

Call me old-fashioned but the love I have for another man always felt far more subversive than the act of fucking.

How do you say ‘I love you’ to another man?  What does it mean when two men say that they love each other?  Having sex with a man is easy-isn’t it?   That’s why we all do it as often as we do..don’t we?  But to say ‘I love you’ to another man is perhaps the most shameful phrase I ever uttered.   My tongue, swelling in my mouth, choking me..rather than say those three tiny words to another man.

I love you.  I love you.  I love you.

What I know for sure about love between men is that others condemn the sanctity of that love.  That I still feel a vague embarrassment when I am seen to hold another man’s hand in the street.

We, as a community, do not promote ourselves as hopeless romantics but as half-naked sex maniacs.  By doing so we have become unwitting witnesses for the prosecution.   By publicly sexualizing everything we do we devalue what we have.  On Facebook the majority of my gay friends are shirtless in their profile pictures.  When questioned why he was bearing his chest in his Facebook profile picture one erudite gay friend said that he was ‘proud’ of his body and wanted to show it off.  It seems like a simple enough answer but is this what gay pride has boiled down to, our very own hard-fought perestroika reduced to this?

It seems so..undignified.

In West Hollywood there is a large poster on Santa Monica Blvd for a gay removal company; two half-naked men carry a small box grinning broadly.  At the premiere LA gay bar The Abbey there is another huge poster celebrating it’s twentieth year.  Three massively built and tattooed men, one of them mixing a martini on the rock hard abs of another; their naked truncated bodies engaged in what may be fellatio.

It was past this very poster out walking one evening last week when I had a full beer can thrown at me that very narrowly missed my head and landed squarely on my chest.  The accompanying homophobic insults are not worth repeating.

I hated the smell of beer on my clothes and the pain in my heart but I hated that poster far more.  It’s as useful as a picture of happy, smiling Jews counting dollar bills outside the Jewish Community Center.

The way we choose to be seen is the way we will be perceived.  I am told constantly that there are thousands of gay men who do not go to gay bars, who live happy lives in monogamous relationships who work quietly and steadfastly beyond the glitz of the gay ghetto but, amazingly, I have never met those men.  I don’t know what they look like.  I have never seen them, been introduced to them.  If I have never met those men then those who misunderstand us certainly never have.

The acrid smoke and crude oil are coming ashore; it destroys almost everything in its path.   If we do nothing perhaps nature will deal with it, break it up over thousands of years so I don’t have to think about it.  But, irritatingly, I am not that kind of man.   I worry about the herons and the oysters and the dolphins.   I am outraged by the incompetence and greed, just like I am every time my community is attacked because we do so little to let them know who we are, what we are, how we are.

Really Gay

What kind of man is a gay man?

My newly out friend is delighted that other men don’t realize he is gay.

Isn’t that just the same as being in the closet?

Driving to Hollywood last week Andrew said, “That was a really gay hand gesture..”

I said, “That’s because I AM really gay.”

Gwen, when she saw my white cashmere scarf said, “That scarf makes you look really gay.”

Once again I replied, “That’s because I am really gay.”

In the same way that I have a range of sexual possibilities open to me, I also have an evolved behavioral panoply.  I can be as masculine or as effeminate as I want to be..I am, after all, not playing the role of being a gay man.  I am a gay man..and occasionally I will be aggressive and dominant (traditionally masculine) or on other occasions when I am having a laugh I can prance around my place in imaginary heels lip synching to Lady Gaga.

I can be anything I want as long as I am authentic.  I am not going to affect a deeper voice, a darker personality, limited hand and eye brow movements simply so other men will not realize that I am gay!  It’s exhausting to lie like that.

Whatever I am, I am not striving to be, as Iago said,  not what I am.    Authenticity is key.  I didn’t come out of the closet to start pretending all over again, to start fooling my gay brethren.  To fool their gaydar.  I came out to be who I am.  Not what you want me to be or feel shame about my feminine hand gestures, my flamboyant scarves.  I don’t believe in shame!

FUCK SHAME!

If you think fooling other gay men is where it’s at then you are only fooling yourself.

Equally, gay men who think they are wonderful at divining who is gay are in fact utterly useless at figuring out who is gay because everyone can do gay stuff..I mean..man on man stuff.  Casting a spell like a bad fairy is not ‘gaydar’.  The prisons are chock full of men fucking men who are not gay.

On the whole gay men flag their gayness depending on the tribe that they belong to.

This is exactly why I have stuck with straight identified men..it’s just another tribe of men who fuck men.

Mainstream gay culture,  just like the straight mainstream, is not to my liking.  Frankly, my dears, the mainstream bores me to tears!  Normal+Common=Get Me Out Of Here.

Mainstream Gay Culture:  Ripped bodies shown off in tight tee shirts, tribal posturing, childish Peter Pan excitement, arrested development, intensity over intimacy,  endless flirting and sexing up of every single situation.  What are those huge muscles for?  Pumped up like Greek warriors for no good reason.  All form and no function.  It’s just drag dear!  Those boys can’t fight to save their lives!

If you are coming out today or thinking about it..just remember that you have hidden your true nature for a long, long time.  You may not really have a clue who you are.  All I urge you to do, as best you can, is be true to yourself.

I am in a foul mood, trying to overcome this ghastly malaise that has beset me.

Drug Companies Profit From Gay Self-Hate

Eating cheese and pastrami with lashings of piccalilli smeared over the top.  The inside of my mouth is burning.  My lips are burning with desire.  Not really.  My lips are just bored.  I am waiting for the mail to arrive so I can walk to bank and get on with the day.

I just scaled Mount Runyon with Sherpa Lil Dog, we saw two gorgeous yeti and had to: Alert! Avert! Affirm!    It’s simply no good for me to gaze longingly at the perfectly honed abs of my fellow Runyon climbers.

Yesterday I realized, after chatting with a friend of mine with HIV that the average drug company will make over $2, 000, 000 out of a single person with HIV during their life time.  Where is the incentive for those drug companies to educate gay men about staying negative?   Anyway, I am fast realizing that the sexual health education that gay men need is nothing to do with safe sex and everything to do with self-love.

The drug companies have no compassion for gay men, no desire to educate an underclass with no real rights, who are despised by most Christian bigots and have so little respect for themselves that they routinely get infected with HIV and become another $2, 000, 000 meal ticket for big pharma.

Pharmaceutical executives must be rubbing their hands in glee when another gay man converts from positive to negative.

This has to stop.  We must start educating the next generation of gay men to love themselves enough to make good sexual health choices.

I got to thinking about my friend Amanda and how we recently hit a bit of a rock.  I think deep down, even though she has gay men around her to dress her, she really has no respect for gay men. For many people we are clowns who have no right to complain or behave as anything other than grotesque queens.   We are, to her, useless absurdities.   Her notion that it is somehow ridiculous for us to have children, for us to have politics, opinions, etc.  She’s not alone; I think many people are outraged by all of that and more.

Whatever I may have written about gaybies in the past I now see gay men having children as a delicious act of rebellion.  It confronts homophobia head on.

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.

Love/Sex Addiction

So, I meet this guy.  He’s age appropriate, he’s sober, he has a great sense of humor and we CONNECT.  I mean..we connect intellectually.  After a few hours I kinda know that (if I wanted to) I could really make this work, that he could easily be the one.  We spend a couple of days together, we eat dinner, we get closer.  It feels GREAT.

So, if everything is so fucking PERFECT why does meeting this special someone make me feel so damned vulnerable?

Let’s try again.

So, I meet this guy, he’s cute and funny and sober.  We connect immediately and I can’t stop thinking about the future.  No..DUNCAN ROY..stop thinking!  Stay here and now.  Be present.  Isn’t that what you wanted all along?  To fall in love?  But, like loving the little dog I am suddenly bound and gagged like Houdini.  I begin to talk myself out of a beautiful time.  I can no longer move freely.  I tell myself that I can..I can be easily wounded.

When the big dog was killed I called my mother and cried.  Later, I felt sick that I’d called her.  I felt so embarrassed.  I called my MOTHER sobbing.  My Mother hates dogs.  What sort of person calls the most hard-hearted person in their life expecting sympathy?  I felt like a FOOL.  Who would I call if this went wrong?  My Mother can’t take a love affair between two men seriously!  Say, for arguments sake, I fell in love with this man..what would happen if he left me?  YOU SEE!   I am already writing the final, tragic chapter.

What happens when I fall in love?  I am as fragile as a Ming vase.   I want to stare into their eyes, kiss their lips.   I want him right here right now.  I want to be we.  I want to be a line in a popular love song.  I don’t want to raise goats on my OWN.

The worst of being an addict is that I can so easily transmute from sex to love addiction.

Today’s big GRIPE:

Why do so many gay men around my age have topless pictures of themselves on Facebook?    Let me tell you.

Most gay men suffer from Peter Pan syndrome.  Forever teenagers, these identical looking men-beards, tats and manscaped pubes seem unable or unwilling to grow up.  They behave like pre-pubescent boys, screaming around the world in half naked gangs looking for the next big cock.

I used to care that these men had no respect for monogamy but now I can’t be bothered what they do or don’t respect.

When we are not objectifying each other we encourage others to objectify us.  We demand objectification.  Gay men are in a constant state of sexual red alert.  We advertise our bodies rather than our minds, constantly comparing our pecs our lats etc.

Let me tell you lads-this is why nobody takes us seriously when we want them to.   If you want equality, put your shirts on.

Start taking yourselves seriously and grow the fuck up.

What about the guys who don’t want to take their shirts off?  The guys who don’t spend hours in the gym?  Are we expected to compare and despair?  No, prepare to be ignored lads.  Prepare to be marginalized.

This is exactly why we will never have any kind of political leader.  Remember Harvey Milk?  I mean, who would vote for Milk now?  His teeth are bad, he isn’t in the gym 24/7.  Who would want to fuck that queen?  Our message has been lost amongst the lotions, hair dyes, gym clothes, and food fads that really motivate the community.

There is a terrible fascism that pervades the ‘gay community’, racism, and ageism-it’s all there.  Sadly, due to our ingrained sense of entitlement, there is little or no regard for the similarities-only the differences.  Which means, that when the chips are down, we are never ready to fight together for our common good.

Funny thing happened after an AA meeting last night.  A gay bloke was squirting hand sanitizer over himself and others after having shaken a stranger’s hand-the same guy who had been describing shoving his tongue up some random ass the night before.

Yay!  Vote no on ‘Prop 8’.

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Goodbye Tim!

I met Tim Willis on Sloane Street, London 25 years ago.  He was with his then girlfriend Isabella Delves-Broughton.  I don’t remember meeting him that day.

He does.

I remember the first conversation Tim and I had was at Celia and Andrew Lyttleton’s frescoed apartment in Ladbroke Grove.

I remember showing him the invitations I had just had printed for my play The Host starring Lady Georgia Byng who would later become Mrs. Danny Chadwick and after that Mrs. Marc Quinn.  She is now probably best known for writing the Molly Moon children books.

Tim was unimpressed with the invitations.

I was prolific in those days, writing, making plays, living my life between London and Whitstable.

Tim was strangely nonjudgmental for one of the new elite who were making names for themselves during that time in London.

Remember, I was only a couple of years out of prison for a huge, unpaid credit card debt.

The story behind that debt had, the day I was sentenced, appeared in every British newspaper.  Christened: Lord of The Lies by the News of The World Sunday tabloid that title, unlike the one I had assumed, tended to stick.

Pretending to be Lord Anthony Rendlesham was the defining moment in my young life.   It set me on an unintended course the night I told that 4-word lie to the man I told it.  I wonder what happened to him?  Dermot Verchoyle-Campbell.

By the time I met Tim I was just ordinary (as the press loved to call me) Duncan Roy but he didn’t seem to mind how ordinary I was.   We were both social misfits.  The others came from good pedigrees and were gearing up to take their places in the British social stratosphere.   Their roles already defined.

Unusual for a heterosexual he was socially mobile.  Flexible.  The girl he was with that day on Sloane St went on to become Mrs. Detmar Blow and invigorate the world of British fashion.  Today her legacy, after a tragic suicide, is still evident as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Stephen Jones and Phillip Treacy are testament.

Although homosexuality offers the same kind of social flexibility (as I found when I told my big lie), I was wholly disinterested in the ‘gay lifestyle’ on offer at that time in London.

I knew a few other ubergays but we were frosty with each other as all of us wanted to be the only gay pet around.  Mario Testino, Patrick Kinmonth, Johnny Shand-Kydd were three other ‘about town’ gays but, as I said, they were all pretty disinterested in me.

I had had a brief affair with Patrick when I was Lord Rendlesham.

I discovered Peter Doig’s degree show at St Martin’s Art School and bought one of Doig’s paintings that Peter then stole from my house whilst I was in prison.

Craigie Aitcheson the minimalist painter of crucifixes and Bedlinton Terriers accused Patrick of handing me over to the police when they were looking for me.  He squealed, “Look, there’s the man who handed his gay lover over to the police.”

I had, of course, explored everything gay in London but it simply never inspired me enough to keep me going back.

Tim was really the first person I met whom I could share my wonderment with.  One was encouraged, when in a huge and ancient houses, to take everything for granted but with Tim I could behave like a tourist.  Ooing and arring about what we discovered there.

A few years later after Jay Jopling discovered Damien and the new British artists all of our lives would change irrevocably.  We would no longer be living in someone else’s shoes, delighted by other older peoples choices, and would ride the British New Wave.

Meeting Kay Saatchi the other day at Amanda’s I now have a far more complete picture of what was going on when I knew Jay Jopling.  I certainly remember Jay telling me about meeting Charles Saatchi.  That Charles had discussed the possibility of running the Saatchi gallery on Boundary Road and how Jay had scoffed (to us) at that idea.

At the moment that Charles was offering Jay a job, Jay had other plans, he knew, and said as much, that Charles would ultimately work for HIM.    I am, and have always been, in awe of Jay’s balls.  Who wouldn’t have accepted to work for Charles?  Only a man with massive ambition knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how to get it.

It was at this time that Jay would bring a harem of girlfriends to my tiny cottage on Island Wall in Whitstable.  But that was all to end the day he met Maia Norman with whom he would fall deeply in love.

Visits to Whitstable became rare as they ensconced themselves in his house on Shakespeare Road in Brixton.   The last memorable Jay visit was with Danny Moynihan, Louise Jackson and Maia.  We would take ecstasy, drive to a ghastly local gay bar and dance to Pink Cadillac.

I think we may very well have had a rather wonderful orgy that night but Maia and Jay ended up alone as he was loathed to share her.  The events of the next few years proved deeply unsettling.  Maia would leave Jay for Damien and break his heart.

Jay submerged himself in the international art world, making huge amounts of money, marrying a girl he did not love and ending up in locations he loathed.

The last time I sat alone with him he told me how incredibly bored he was seeing the same faces day after day, the same gossip, same conversation and hankered after a the life he had at the edge of the world.

I will never, ever not love Jay.  He was the one who looked out for me when I had my stint in hospital and collected me when I was discharged.  He, for the longest time, was an occasional lover if no other pretty blond girl was available.  He was an inspiration to a legion of young artists and remains so, something they all aspire to: a show at one of his many galleries.

I watched from the sidelines as he and Lily Allen publicly shattered the vestiges of his marriage.

The truth is, I couldn’t bear Sam Taylor Wood because she wasn’t Maia.  It wasn’t her fault; she’s a perfectly nice girl.  Not a very good artist.

So goodbye Tim, have a safe flight back to London.  You make me remember the life we shared with this extraordinary cast of characters.  I miss you when you are gone.  You are a good friend.

GAYBIES

Earlier this year, the LGBT/Queer Community violently protested outside the Mormon Temple on Santa Monica Blvd after it was revealed that the LDS had paid for damning, dishonest advertisement that scared the general public into voting against gay marriage in the state of California.

People felt compelled to march on the streets. It was a heartening sight. Bringing the city and traffic of LA to a roiling standstill.

Governments are filled with fear when people march on the streets. It is very effective.

Weeks after the event, hope that a young, fearless leader would emerge from the attacks on the LDS did not materialize.

Another missed opportunity to parley genuine outrage into political leverage.

The gay community lacks any kind of secular leadership. The politics of invisibility reign. Sadly, the invisigays determine the political landscape and are as unwavering and intransigent as any Born Again.

Ridgid, dogmatic…blind to other possibilities. Hung up on the notion that if gays can get married, have babies and retire behind a white picket fence THEY might not notice we exist.

President Obama has left the door wide open if the gay community wants to accept Civil Union as the way forward but the invisigays have set their sights on Marriage and nothing less will do. The invisigays arm themselves with the lackluster ‘separate but equal’ argument against civil union. They hook their marriage cart to hate crimes and refuse to engage with any other argument for change.

As dozens of young gay men and women, inspired maybe by Dustin Lance Black’s film about Harvey MILK, leave their communities…escaping from people like Rick Warren (and Christians like him) flock into their local big cities in search of cherubic Dustin Lance Black (and boys like him) what can they expect?

They can expect gay bars and nightclubs and happy hours and gyms and free condoms and? And what else? A gay church maybe? What If they are looking for political leadership where do they look? If they are looking for moral guidance or evidence of who came before them or what battles were fought..what can they expect to hear?

Currently LA invisigay aspirational thinking is this: Abandon negative ideas and anger, keep your abs hard and after a few well placed naked pool parties, learn to ape straight culture by buying a baby.

Max Muchnick, creator of Will and Grace is very rich and ‘married’ to attractive lawyer Erik Hyman and as well-connected as any gays can be in Hollywood. Max recently penned an article for the Huffington Post about his motherless daughters. Children made thus: eggs from appropriate donor (white women can charge more for their eggs), womb donor, sperm from either or both of the gay couple = a $300,000 baby and Mother/women erased permanently, effortlessly from the picture.

Max complains that at LAX he had to explain to a security guard that his daughters had no mother. No mother? The security guard asked politely. How did the babies..happen? Max is outraged. Isn’t it evident to you that my husband and I are GAY.

There are pictures of Max and Eric awkwardly holding their babies in the LA Times. ‘There is no mother.’ Max boasts. Therefore, no hope of either of those little girls understanding where they came from or what kind of woman could rent room in their womb or sell their eggs. No one to explain how that could have happened. Would Eric and Max want their own girls to sell their eggs and wombs or be written out of their grandchild’s history?

Other gay men with motherless children explain patiently to me that because their children will be so loved they will not have to ask such uncomfortable questions like: WHERE’S MOMMY?

Gay men are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to create ‘families’ regardless of the outcome. The marriage/baby aping of straight society smacks of the’ politics of invisibility’. If we get married, have children ‘they’ might not realize we are here, ‘they’ will have to treat us ‘normally’.

What are we meant to aspire to in 2009? What are we teaching the next generation of gay men and women?

At a West Hollywood party recently a invisigay father made a pass at me. It set me to wondering if his marriage meant anything at all-a marriage that others had fought so hard to get. Newly married, surrogate babies on the way and making a pass at a comparative stranger. When I put this to him he was visibly shaken. He told me that he felt bad, that I was making him feel bad. Worse, I said, than having had sex with me then going home to his newborn? He said, well, straight people do it. I laughed. What kind of straight people do we want to be? The kind that cheats or stays loyal? The kind that blows his family apart with infidelity, or the sort who honors the vows of his marriage? Do we, in fact, just want all the trappings of marriage and babies and behave like we always did?

December 15th 2006 – May 17th 2007

Vogue Pics Styled by Issie Blow

Ian Drew

Notes on a Scandal

Yesterday, in the hotel dining room, there were a sweet couple who are visiting Toronto for the weekend to get married. One was a very young, very tall, strapping jock and the other a much older, smaller, Jewish man who did the talking for the both of them. An odd couple. A pair that I would never even had pegged for a successful date let alone as lovers or as married but there you go, they were obviously very happy and excited by the prospect of their ‘big day’.

After an hour of quite baldly intrusive questioning I determined that they were getting married for all the ‘right’ reasons. They loved each other. They were committed to each other. They wanted to celebrate their union in the company of their friends and family. They were not concerned to have retirement/health/tax benefits. This is Canada so that is already part of the deal. In the USA the gays who bay for marriage seem to think only of what it means to them fiscally.

Why is it that US gay political figures have not advanced the rights of gay people in any meaningful way during the past 20 years where as we in the UK (with our deliciously out gay, joint toting cabinet ministers) and Canada, South Africa, Australia and across Europe gays have equal rights? The tactics used by American gays are obviously not working.

My gripe, ultimately, is with the gays and not the withholding ‘straight’ majority. The majority are just that: THE MAJORITY. Using the gay marriage stick to beat the straight donkey just makes the old mule stubborn and refuse to budge.

Gay activists must make many lawyers across the US very rich indeed. Demanding things from the entrenched. Making headway then having it all taken away. You can get married, you can’t get married. The wailing of the gays. Stop asking to get married because you are doing it for all the wrong reasons. AND you are pissing them off or worse delighting them every time they flick their tails and repeal your meagre reforms. I know that it may seem an odd question but given that you can’t and wont be able to any time soon in any way that equalizes your financial/inheritance situation. Why do you even want to get married? I want to know. The Toronto boys would have been perfectly happy with a get together on the beach with their family. All they wanted the world to know was that they were in love.

My concern for gays in the US is that they just want to be like ‘everyone else’ that they refuse to acknowledge their obvious difference and embrace and celebrate it. The middle class gays that determine the gay agenda are committed to the politics of invisibility. They want the right to get married not because they love each other GOD FORBID but because they want to be just like them (straights). Gays want to get married, have children, and live in elegant houses just like them. Sit on the school board just like them. The middle class gays with heterosexual aspirations want the trappings of the lives their parents had, the comfort and middle class normalcy and when they get it genuinely believe that the OTHERS might not realizes that there is any difference between them and us.

Huh?

There is a huge difference, no matter how much we hide in fear from their reproachful eyes. We are different. However much we love ‘straight acting‘ ’100% masculine’ we will always be evident in the way we walk, talk, dress, play-it is time to acknowledge that we are the ‘other’. In accepting who we are we can then stop demanding from the majority that they respect us. Nurture us. Give us permission to be just like them.

I have no intention of being anything other than what I am, I will not pretend to be more like them so that they can tolerate me, or worse ignore me because I have made such a great job of pretending a life that they have prescribed.

I have made a choice to live in a ‘free’ society. I have made a choice to commit to the freedoms of the USA. Yet, from my meager bluff overlooking the sea I don’t think that many people in the US are free at all. How can you be free when you live in fear? When you weigh so much that your ass can scarcely fit into a car, when you cannot identify the flora and fauna around you?

As I tour the US and the world with Dorian I listen to the way gay artists make work-although most gay artists are only eager to talk about money-and I am fascinated by how little new drama for this huge audience is being made. Where as once we were thrilled to have our stories told, the language and locations of gay life revealed-now we are perfectly satisfied to see ourselves on Desperate Housewives. Yet, ironically, mainstream gay and lesbian product is being made but it is not allowed at gay and lesbian film festivals. Gay and lesbian film festivals are not allowed to show Notes on a Scandal or Transamerica because the distributors of these films don’t want to be ‘pigeon holed’ as if amazingly they cannot embrace both kinds of audience. As if showing these films to gay audiences will some how devalue their product? This is unbridled homophobia and we colluded with it. We have little or no respect for our own culture so whilst the distributors get away with willful homophobia then gay film makers are not going to show or make work for gay audiences because they understandably feel that their work will not be taken seriously by those who hold the purse strings.

When gays devalue their own culture when deferring to the mainstream they become a lot dumber in the process. We have traded our rich culture for the mindless thump of our clubs and bars, spend our money on drugs and alcohol yet if prodded pretend that we are just like them, no difference at all. The similarities between Quentin Crisps 1940′s London and present day USA are startling. The attitude of gay men that by being different we ruin it for the rest is all too common.

I see men my age at bars in West Hollywood at the big cock contest, or men older and more powerful than me who will only sleep with straight guys. What have we become? I almost want to buy a wig and paint my nails, after all, drag in its purest form has always been an effective act of aggression.

3:04 AM

May 17, 2007 – Thursday

Isabella Blow

There is a large John Lautner house out on the PCH for sale,  it will cost who ever buys it 33 million dollars. At night it looks like it has been carved in amber.

I am in Toronto, here for the gay film festival. I am staying in a bed and breakfast that was once a very grand house. Dorian is the opening night film and I can’t get out of bed. I can’t move out of my room. I am ‘on line’ to various friends. Various websites. Looking, my eyes getting very tired.

Jay Jopling and Issie Blow

Death:

Isabella Blow killed herself. She drank weed killer, paraquat, and took 3 days to die. Her husband’s father did the same. Her grandfather committed suicide too. She was an occasional friend to me. When I made The Baron in The Trees she oversaw extra ordinary pictures of me for Vogue. The week before she died she visited with Philippa in Langton St with her sister Lavinia. The last time I saw Isabella she was at a party Lucy Ferry threw with Si Newhouse at Lucy’s home in Kensington. She was with some Argentinean man who looked like a second-rate gigolo. I don’t remember her for her hats. I remember going to Hilles to see her and Detmar and Amory with Philippa and my friend Justin from Whitstable who was a simple lad who also committed suicide a few years later after he was set upon by homophobes in Camberwell. Isabella took him under her wing, realizing that he was totally out of his depth and said,” You know what you need young man-a pork pie!” and dragged him in his car to the village and bought him a HUGE pork pie.

I have one very funny picture of Isabella and Jay Jopling in my photo album. He looks bemused and she looks like an alien in mourning. He looks young.

You know that she was Tim Willis’s girlfriend for years but left him for Detmar Blow. I called her the night before she was to marry Detmar to ask why she was marrying him and she said, “I’m not marrying a man, I’m marrying a house.” Which was true. I used that line in AKA.

KB wrote yesterday:

Vogue Pics Styled by Issie Blow

‘Sorry, darling Duncan, missed all the excitement around Dorian – though I saw Mrs. Merton last week, who mentioned she’d seen you. Issie’s funeral yesterday. Amazing send-off with horse-drawn hearse (very beautiful – though I forgot to remind Detmar that she had wanted a glass coffin a la Snow White!) from Glos Cathedral. kept remembering their wedding there and was sad, but service was rather uplifting and Rupe Everett gave a very good address. Detmar did a good wake at Hilles afterwards and I saw lots of old friends.’

I met Issie when I was twenty-four. She was seeing Tim Willis in those days and they had just moved into Tim’s apartment in Notting Hill. Tim Willis married Joanna and then I became the God Father to their child. Issie could not have children. There was some shenanigans about Hilles and children and how Detmar’s mother wanted her daughter (can’t remember her name) who married Crusty Levinson (who was married to Philippa’s sister Francine) and their children to have the house. In aristocratic circles to lose out on the big house is a DISASTER. She indeed married the house but it was stolen from her.

Good-bye Isabella Delves Broughton nee Blow.

Since I last wrote my blog I have moved to Malibu and now sit high above the sea on a small bluff. Everybody visits so I am not alone. I am in Toronto unable to leave my room and I miss it terribly-my house. The very light traffic outside my hotel room woke me at 5am.

I moved from Whitstable finally-just as the peonies were about to bloom, ants on their sticky buds. I have not really stopped grieving my Whitstable loss but will do when my stuff gets to Malibu. In some ways I wish that the whole lot would sink in the Atlantic. But that might mean that people would get hurt which I don’t want.

Dinners during the past month included: Birthday dinner for and with John Dewis and Kevin West where I met the utterly adorable Elliot Hundley. Opening of Dan Flavin show at LACMA. New age baby shower on Mulholland with babies spirit guide who had been ‘communing with foetus’ and wanted us all to celebrate that the baby was looking forward to being born, to be made flesh. Derek Frost and Jeremy invited me to dinner in Pimlico when I traveled to London for premiere of Dorian. Dorian, up on the big screen in Leicester Square. How did it feel? Not great. I love the film but others were not so kind. People who get it-get it. The others are the others and perhaps they are right. Even so, this experience is more exciting than AKA, which was only great when it got to Outfest. Then that soured when the onslaught happened and I was unprepared for them, for when they love something and you don’t believe it.

Melanie threw a dinner for me with Mickey Wolfson and others came too. My new best friend Wendy A had lunch in Malibu with her and Barry Levinson and others.

Seeing a great deal of Joe who made moving effortless and wonderful. In fact he is making my life all that much nicer by being good to me.

I gave my brother Martin my Porsche, which seemed to delight him. I gave my fridge to Babs and Tony. I took down all the curtains and deconstructed the house. I said goodbye to every one of my plants. I felt like such a traitor for leaving them behind. Tim came by with Jo and Sibbley. He brought gypsy tart and we ate it at Babs house with hot tea.

When I returned from my final month is Whitstable Dom collected me from the airport and when I got back to the new place Joe was in the new kitchen cooking dinner. The new garden is a huge undertaking. Thankfully I have discovered a nursery that is closing down on the PCH and is selling everything very cheaply. Yesterday I bought an 8 foot cactus and planted it.

Bought Euphorbia and aloes and agaves.

I listen to the coyote at night howling and chattering and eating baby deer. I am eager to see a rattlesnake. I saw a mountain lion. A raccoon got into my car and ate skittles. A Blue Jay raided the humming-bird nest and stole all the baby humming birds. Trevor stopped by and heated the Jacuzzi and we lay in it with Eyal the Israeli boy who is dark and mysterious.

So much more has happened but I can’t remember or don’t want to remember. I had a great time in Miami and lay by the pool at the Raleigh with VD and CZ. I am as brown as a nut and looking forward to great wrinkles on my face.

10:10 AM

April 9, 2007 – Monday

Flint

Whitstable. April.

I walked from my house on Wavecrest to Janet Street-Porter’s house half a mile away toward Seasalter. She has attached an ugly wooden fence to the sea wall since the coastal defense agency raised the height of the beach.

I only saw two dogs. The beach is much brighter than it was. They spent last summer trucking tons of new stone onto the old beach filling the gaps between the new wooden groins. They used a whole forest of timber, I wondered if it came from a sustainable forest.

From the train the new beach looks beautiful but the new stones are mostly flint like a Deal or Dover beach rather than a Whitstable beach. The stones on a Whitstable beach are small, treacle and honey colored pebbles. These flint rocks are huge and difficult to walk on. This has caused much consternation to the dog walkers and weekend strollers. People collect the larger flint pieces and stack them up for others to see. The spring tide had obviously been very high as there was a ribbon of black, dry seaweed swept onto the new pale shore.

I walked back into town and bought a free range corn-fed chicken that I am going to cook for Cathy and Rufus. I stopped in at Wheelers and drained a cup of tea. Mark Stubbs the genius chef arrived, as I was half way through my cupper. I sat in the parlor at the back and finished my tea and flicked through the Whitstable Times. Mark Stubbs is the chef at Wheelers and I have known him and his delightful family since he was a teenager. I have seen him evolve into a fine chef. He understands how to take risks with flavor, he knows how to set something onto a plate and make it look delicious. He is a master because he cares.

Most of the shops on the High Street were closed, as it is bank holiday Monday. I had promised Cathy that I would make bread and butter pudding as per Arabella Boxer’s recipe. It requires that I use stale French bread. Thankfully Dave was in the deli and gave me a heap of stale brioche so I will use that instead. My God, what a change! When I first started making bread and butter pudding 15 years ago it was impossible to buy a vanilla pod on the High Street let alone stale brioche from a friend.

I felt sad in bed last night. I kept thinking about Danny. I am a long way away from my LA AA. I received e-mail from one of the morning gang, urging me to come home. It cheered me up tremendously.

I have no idea if I will be moving into my Malibu house when I get back as I have heard nothing from Kelly. I may just stick around in London. I have everything I need here.

The house next door has been renovated so mine looks spectacular. I got used to living next door to a derelict house. I am almost pleased that I am staying. The plot at the end of the garden has been cleared and looks like the building work is well underway. It is good to be grateful for the world around you. I try to and see the best in everything. However, when I get ill I tend to have a very bleak outlook. Jet lag, a cold and a long way from an AA meeting made me feel despondent.

I wish that I had my Premiere tonight I would feel like I could rise to the challenge.

After a few years in the USA with their can do attitude I am dumbfounded by the petty attitude of the British. The ones I know-but mostly I don’t. They say sneeringly, “Oh you art directed your own film.” As a sort of put down. Why should this be? Of course I want to art direct my film. I would shoot it and edit it too if I could. Last week, my head full of cold I was in no mood to defend my film. This week I am.

2:45 AM

April 8, 2007 – Sunday

Finally

Whitstable,Kent.
Wavecrest B&B

I am sitting on the balcony overlooking the pale gray/blue sea. I have been in England for a couple of weeks but have still not overcome my jet lag. Part of me seems absent without leave. I slept in a bed on the plane from LA. It was very odd. I decided to open the B&B for Easter. I hung the freshly painted sign and made the beds with new linen and made a trip to Somerfields to get bacon and eggs. This morning I cooked the eggs and bacon for my guests. They were a nice couple from Stratford; they worked for Carlsberg-good folk from the Midlands. She ate a bacon sandwich but he ate the full English and I was pleased as they left too much on their plates yesterday.

A bee is trapped in my bedroom and keeps bashing its face into the glass. The front of the house is gleaming white as after the guests paid me I took a mop bucket full of soapy water and a stepladder and washed the ship lap. I used a dishcloth on the boards but in fact I should have mopped the front of the house but this idea only just occurred to me.

Rather a lot happened since I last wrote my blog.

So, as I am back in Whitstable with no real plan to return to LA I shall start my walking and writing routine once again. There are no 7am AA meetings here. There are no mountains. I began smoking again three weeks ago. Have stopped this past three days.

The Oscars, lets start with them. They were very dull this year. I spent the few days before the big day and the day after with Todd Eborly the Vanity Fair photographer. Todd very kindly dragged me willingly from one obscure party to the next. We originally met at Eugenio’s house at some function although I may have met him with Samia at Art Basel in Miami. I think we met this time at the Robert Wilson after show party. Amazingly, ever since I had my run in with the ghastly Doug Christmas I bump into him everywhere and it was at the Ace Gallery that Robert had his show. I first met Robert Wilson in Paris when I was 19 years old. He didn’t remember me but we discussed Philippe Chemin and his girlfriend (now his wife) Robin who apparently are still together.

It was because of them that I (apparently) fell out with Samia all those years ago-a resentment that the old ferret had held onto for 25 years. After ten years a resentment has more to do with the person who bears it than the person it is about. Anyway, Robert asked me what I thought about his show and as I had not seen it I made some clever, nondescript remark that amused Todd. Met Darrel Hannah and a bunch of über gays. Doug Christmas and I looked at one another suspiciously across Eugenio’s huge drawing room-past the Twombley and the Warhol’s.

Two days later Ronnie Sassoon, Todd and I watched a huge Jeff Koons, green metal elephant craned high into the blue LA sky reflecting the palm trees and dropped into place in Eugenio’s newly landscaped garden whilst his maid fed us Mexican food and the curator of his collection danced like a demented pixie in the street in a black satin Balenciaga rain coat and fedora. It was bright but bitterly cold. Ronnie and I wrapped ourselves in cream cashmere blankets.

Eugenio has bought a bunch of bronze spiders that look like they are by Louise Bourgeois but in fact are just tat. When I asked Richard Squire at our lunch with Joe Townly and that sweet lesbian he hangs out with why Eugenio would buy such rubbish Richard replied that it was really none of my business as Eugenio was, “Richer than God.” Joe and I, to this day, laugh about his answer.

Soho House opened in LA for their usual Oscar fortnight in a huge house quite close to where Eugenio lives. Ate lunch there with Ronnie and Todd. Given much free stuff. The night before Oscar night snogged Sharon there again. Met Amy Berg who was nominated for an Oscar for her documentary about child abuse. Met Hillary the real producer of Children of Men who was furious that her picture had been ignored by the Hollywood establishment. She dashed furiously about Soho House followed by three assistants who trailed miserably in her wake.

The Diane von Furstenberg/Barry Diller party at their sprawling Bel Air estate was very pleasant. I met Paul Allen and Shirley MacLean. I ate lunch with David Hockney and discussed the camera obscura. Helen Mirren was adorable and I was happy to have had the chance to meet her. I flirted a great deal with a realtor called Chris from Malibu and have met him twice since then. Dennis Hopper and I reminisced about Romania. He had just seen Coppola’s new film-an art film. Dennis was deliciously confused. Rupert Murdoch, David Geffen and other powerful men as well as the prerequisite fashion crowd who were horrendous. Tamara Mellon and her fat, gay, best friend who is some how related to Joan Collins sat with her ex husband. Oswald Botang was there with his bunch. There were a few film stars and a cute waiter as well as some delicious boy from Sydney. Todd and I stayed till the end. I will prob never go to that party again so I was determined to squeeze every moment out of it. Paris and Stavros were also at Barry’s garden party dressed in almost middle-aged, sensible clothing, they looked like a perfectly normal young couple.

Paris Hilton Birthday with Todd Eborle

However, at Paris Hilton’s birthday party the following night at her ugly little house she transformed into PARIS! the celebrity with crop top and trashy hair. I am convinced that she has two homes, one for trashy Paris and one for chic Paris. Her birthday party was only worthwhile as one got to gaze longingly at Stavros who is not only incredibly beautiful but also the most charming man alive. Paris’s trashy house is full of portraits of her and terrible people but Todd, John Dewis and I had our pictures taken by a company who make 3d laminated fridge magnates. We spent more time in the valet parking than the party.

Spent the Oscar awards at Dede Gardener’s (runs Brad Pitts production company) and her husband’s beautiful house in Hollywood. As the ceremony unfolded there was much talk about Brad Gray and Brad Pitt and their involvement with Scorsese’s The Departed. All too convoluted to explain here. Their child is adorable and her house is packed with great stuff and marvelous art. Great vintage wallpaper in the bathroom-huge silver cranes dance against a pale blue landscape.

I spent time at Soho House and did not go to the Chateau Marmont.

Very sweetly Damien (Hirst) invited me to his show at Larry Gagosian’s and the party afterwards at the Bar Marmont. There was a very odd moment when I found myself with Damien and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I didn’t say much. We just kissed and that was it.

Spent a good amount of time with Maia, Damien’s wife. She was wearing a white pleated leather dress by Jil Sander.

I met my friend Justin the model at the after party and we headed over to Eugenio’s when we tired of Damien’s crowd.

Met Lynn Wyatt and a bunch of elderly, stick thin socialites at some gay rich boys Hollywood house. Dominick Dunne and others there. Fried chicken-apparently he cooked the food himself. Todd took wonderful photograph of Lynn Wyatt by portrait of Betsy Bloomingdale.

Ronnie commissioned Todd to take pictures of the Singleton House by Neutre, which she has restored. It was very beautiful but I am afraid not nearly as beautiful as her own house, which is so stunning, I cannot begin to describe it. It was so beautiful it made me cry. Actually, the Singleton House is ruined. I cannot beat around the bush and as much as I love Ronnie she has ruined that house with sunken bars and huge non descript rooms. There, I wrote it.

My film premiered in London to a bunch of sour faced gays and lesbians and five baby celebrities-the Geldof children and some band front man. This is exactly what happened to AKA. Sneered at by UK gays. If I had been a Mexican or Japanese they would have loved it but as I am home-grown I tolerated their pursed lips and arched eyebrows.

I couldn’t care less about them. Two days previous my good friend and occasional lover Danny Ross was killed on an LA freeway so all I could really think about was his sweet face. That night I erased his number from my Blackberry. I was numb. Stayed with Sharon Marshall in Brixton. The girly self-help book that she is writing with Tara PT strewn over the dining room table.

I have stayed numb ever since I heard about Danny. His death has made me angry and despondent. Nothing really matters.

Since I have been home my cousin Caroline came to visit me, her huge, sad Irish eyes and long fingers in my kitchen. She wanted me to remove any mention I made about her father in my blog but I refused. Nothing will make me censor the truth in these pages.

I bumped into my brother Martin; I walked The Kings Road with Joe. Phil and I could not sleep so we sat up into the night drinking tea and giggling.

I have lost a bunch of weight and last night a man I know from London drove here and stayed over. It was a fruitless exchange. My head was with Danny on the freeway, thinking about his body smashed to pieces on the cold hard road. I thought about his smile and delicate kisses. I could not stop thinking about how much I wished I had made time for him the day before I left LA but instead I was finishing a film for a bunch of piss elegant, precious gays who did not deserve my time.

I know that Dorian is flawed, like an unfinished work of art. It is art. I know it.

I know that my film is sort of broken to pieces but I love it. I know what I have to do to fix it but I can’t. It’s too late. I am angry about the death of my friend.

9:29 AM

February 2, 2007 – Friday

Kevin Zegers

I am back in LA. Feels like I am back at work/school/LA. Various pre-Oscar dramas unfolding, Hollywood intrigue playing itself out in front of me. I am not as invested as I was last year. Last year I was at the center of it all with Sharon to see how it worked. It was utterly exhausting. I will not be going to the parties this year. I may pop into the Soho House rented mansion. Anyhow, I am just not interested in the films they have in competition this year.

Went with Kevin Zegers to Hyde. He is a sweet thing. Interesting listening to his take on the making of Trans America. He is Canadian. Liked him a great deal. At the Golden Globes last year Brad Pitt said to him, ‘Trans America is your Thelma and Louise.’ Which is a pretty damned cool thing to hear. Kevin stole Trans America from David Gallagher. David lost TA and made DG instead.

Up on the Canyon this morning it was very cold. It has been really cold here. I like it. There were very few people there, fewer dogs. The guys that tend the path were using a very noisy machine, a ‘low blower’ they said, and that is what it does-very loudly. It blows dust all over the place. What about using a broom?

So, I thought about how lazy we all were and how much I hate the TV remote control and how it was the best and worst invention of the past fifty years. I thought about those ‘home entertainment’ rooms that folk have here and how many remote controls these people have lined up in front of them desperate to be entertained. Last week I invited a friend to my home and he was amazed that I don’t own a television set. American TV depresses me. It makes me miserable. The commercials are grueling, relentless and mind altering. The content is formulaic baby food. When I live in NYC I lay on the sofa when I can’t sleep and watch the Home Shopping Network because there are no commercials and the content is exactly what it is-selling. The Home Shopping Network is authentic, amusing, dramatic, reality TV at its very best. I love it. Occasionally I am tempted, like an alien from another planet, to pick up the phone and buy something. Austrian Art Glass or a cover all powder that gives a translucent glaze to any skin in any tone. I listen to the rehearsed testimonials and I am transported.

Jean Perramon

Jean and I drove in his Mazeratti to Malibu and the mountains around there. As the sun began to set, low in the winter sky, the grassy hillocks at the base of the mountains were covered in silver grass that looked like fur. We had gone to look at a beautiful modernist house perched on 15 acres of land on the top of a huge mountain that is For Sale and we were tempted to pool our resources and buy it. The air was bitter. Remember it had been snowing in Malibu only two weeks previously.

Had lunch with Amanda Ross who invited me to Laurie Simmons event at The Billy Wilder Cinema at The Hammer. It was an ‘art’ film. Meryl Streep can sing! There was much applauding the work but I must be honest, I do not understand why Laurie Simmons feels that an obscure art film needs a conventional narrative. I don’t get it. Laurie’s film was shot by Ed Lachman who had introduced me to Brian Jackson the Dorian DP. She had worked with Mathew Weinstein who I had a brief affair with when he lived in London 20 years ago. He was so gorgeous then. I had dinner with Merle Ginsberg at Red Pearl Café after the film. Met Amanda’s rather handsome fiancé.

Had meeting with my agent at Urth Café flushed from his trip to Sundance.

Back at school, getting on with shit. Every moment of every day, in every situation in LA we work toward our filmmaking goal. Every relationship and situation unfolding in front of us like so many jewels, sifting out the paste from the diamonds.

10:09 AM

January 28, 2007 – Sunday

FIGHTING IS MY GENIUS

I seem to have fought all of my life with people, places and things yet I perceive myself as having a placid soul. For as long as I can remember it was inequity, in all its manifestations, that caused me to become furiously angry. As an infant I knew instinctively that the way my stepfather treated my mother was wrong and caused us all the loss of dignity. I fought hard against him even though his cruelty was more than any match for a small boy. I knew that the way my Uncle Norman beat his wife was wrong and caused her to lose her baby but nobody seemed to do anything about it. The desperate screams of women were familiar to me when I was a boy. My brothers may scoff at this description of our shared history but sometimes I think that they may have lived in a dream of our childhood where their father was some how absolved of his brutality simply because of their blood relationship with him. Because they were his children the beatings they received were not as unjust as mine?

Even though we had a tough time at home it is good to remember that only sixty years before I was born in Whitstable there were still child prostitutes in Victorian London that a man could buy and take to padded rooms in Wimpole Street and kill. We were, my brothers and I, lucky children of the post war, 1960′s modern world and all of the promises of the age were just revealing themselves to the men and women of my parents generation.

When I was born my shamed mother and I were hidden away from society yet only ten years later life in Britain had changed so radically that my ‘behavioral problems’ had been identified and I was taken to child psychiatrists, sent to hospitals etc. so that my maladjustment might be healed with group therapy and words. The massive head injuries that I received in a car accident when I was 5 would nowadays be factored into understanding my erratic behavior and vile temper but this was simply overlooked.

Like so many men I have tried, all my life, to make sense of myself. To have the luxury of sitting comfortably in my own skin. Ten years ago, after a life of therapy, hospitals, transactional analysis, cognitive therapy, prison encounter groups, sweat lodges, reike, traveling etc., after a life of talking it through and telling my fucking story over and over so that sooner or later the truth of my mad bad head would be magically revealed I ended up in a beautiful house in Kensington on my own snorting coke first thing in the morning knowing for sure that things were not meant to be like this.

By the time that morning came around I was unable to leave the house due to paranoid delusions and periodically black liquid flooded out of my nose at the most inappropriate moments, at dinner in Quo Vadis for instance. Ten years ago I self-medicated with hard drugs and alcohol and even used to attend sessions with my expensive psychiatrist high on coke.

I then began my sober journey.

It became apparent that the question I so badly needed answered by so many therapists I did not know how to frame. I knew that I was a mess, that my life was in ruins, that I was somehow responsible but the fundamental question remained. The question that I needed answered through out my adult life was this: How come I hated my stepfather so much yet became so much like him? How come I had scant regard for those around me when I was so plagued with the terrors of inequity? How come I thought nothing of screaming at those who were only trying to do their best? How come?

The answers are not always palatable, even to me.

The reality is that I do not live a good-hearted world of benevolent people eager to do the very best for one another or even themselves. The skills of hard heartedness that my stepfather taught me are skills I needed to embrace rather than heal with therapies.

Recently I have begun to thank my stepfather for making my skin thick enough to fight for what I believe in or take the hard knocks and learn how to box with precision. I do not tolerate being beaten by those who give me pains or lawyers who give you bad, self-serving advice or untrained, untested co-workers who expect an opportunity but give very little in return. Married women who want you to fuck them yet blame you when you do. Straight boys who put out but hate you for exploiting their desires.

I can thank my step-father for teaching me not to be led by the nose or having overwhelming capitalist fantasies. I don’t want a big house. I have never wanted a big house. All I have ever desired is one room with a perfect view. What else could I possibly want? What is ENOUGH for one man?

At Anthony’s house this week he asked me what he needed to do to make a low-budget film. ‘How did you do it?” If I have been asked once I have been asked a million times. How do you do it? As if there were a private door from a previously hidden corridor that they may not have noticed behind which the secret of making a low-budget feature film lay. Usually I am polite when I am asked this question and try to help who ever is asking delude themselves that they will make feature films. For part of the truth is this: If you are asking me this question it is unlikely that you will ever make a film. If you are looking for a softer, easier path then you will never make a film. The secret door does not exist.

The truth of how I continue, against the odds, to make films is: I am a GENIUS.

I am a GENIUS because: I get off my ass, I write the script, I raise money, persuade people to work and then I force the film into the world. I do not feel fear and when problems arise I deal with them creatively and in a way that benefits the final product. When the film is made I call my friends in the press and get them to write about it and then I sell it all by myself. That is how I do it and if I need to do it this way then so be it. I never answer questions about budget because it’s personal. When people ask me how big my budget is I tell them that it is 8 inches long and quite thick. Asking about a person’s budget is more personal than how big his cock is. Don’t ask. Nobody ever tells you the truth.

I am a GENIUS because I am making films and you are not. Do gallery owners get asked endlessly how to open a gallery or novelists asked endlessly how to write a novel? I have no idea. When I made theatre nobody ever asked me what they needed to know, what great secret I had that they needed to know to make theatre.

I am a GENIUS because when I make a film I can’t take no for an answer and for that I am truly grateful to my beastly step-father and Derek Jarman who gave me that piece of advice long before I even contemplated making films.

I am a GENIUS because even if I had to make a film using my mobile phone I would do it.

Remember the other great and terrible truth about film-making: Nobody wants to make your film.

Nobody.

Even if you are really, really famous and well-connected and a marvelous director nobody wants to make your film.

The only films worth making are the ones that you are passionate about.

So, I am a BAFTA nominated, award-winning GENIUS and so is everyone else who gets off their ass and makes a film.

I have only one person to thank for this: My step-father who taught me to never back down, to take it on the chin and ultimately not be afraid and keep on fighting. He taught me to think beyond what was expected of me and anticipate problems way ahead of anyone else. He taught me to ignore what people say about me, the lies they tell, whether it is Oscar or Joe or anyone else. Perhaps that is why I never really found it hard to forgive him and never forgave my simpering Mother.

I have wasted most of my life trying NOT to be like my stepfather David Roy when all along I needed to follow in his footsteps and embrace every single thing he ever beat into me as the living truth.

10:08 AM

January 24, 2007 – Wednesday

The Queen

I killed a mosquito this morning. I slapped it against the wall with a pair of yesterday’s underpants. It exploded all over the place with my fresh red blood, blood it had just sucked out of my foot. I am sitting in the Book Kitchen waiting for Zoë, Anita and Teddy so that I can order my poached eggs. Last night Zoë’s landlord’s Ross and Renata cooked us dinner and their highly entertaining children (Dom 6 and Nick 10) amused us with made up jokes and mayhem.

I spent the afternoon with Anthony S in his rather nice Woollarha house watching The Corporation, which is a very long documentary essay about the history, excesses and fight against capitalism. Susan Sarandon’s voice was very irritating. I was moved by the description of the Bolivian water riots. Decided to make some changes in life when I got back to UK-am already not leaving too much of a foot print but could be leaving less. Anthony’s gruff, rich, stepfather arrived in the middle of the film and Anthony turned it off as if we were watching pornography. We continued watching only after he had left the room. After the film we ate sweet things in Jones The Grocers then I drove home.

Two weeks ago I saw Steven Frear’s film The Queen. I didn’t really want to see it because I find anything to do with Diana very, very disturbing and, like Brokeback Mountain, did not want to risk bawling my eyes out. Anyway, I had to see it as I am a BAFTA voter and take my voting very seriously. The experience turned out not to be as painful as I thought. Helen Mirren was great but I really wouldn’t expect anything less. She is an English Character actress who has worked with really outstanding people-Peter Brook for instance. Pretending is what our actors do best. Pretending to be Tony Blair and The Queen shouldn’t be that hard with a voice coach and a good wig. In fact I thought that Mirren’s range within her role of The Queen was rather limited, she spent the entire film pulling one face, a perplexed look of gentle concern. Like she was gazing into the middle distance desperate for answers. Do people really think that HRH is like this? Do they think that HRH is a sweet, benign little old lady? Do they think that Cherie Blair provided fish fingers and comic relief to her husband and children and is capable of feeble thinking as written by Peter Morgan? Did he forget that she is one of the most highly regarded Barristers in the UK?

This my HRH The Queen evidence:

I saw her once at Smith’s Lawn shortly after I left prison and could see her suspenders quite clearly through her boucle skirt. I saw her on TV crying when Blair took away her yacht Brittania. She did not cry when the rest of her people were crying at the death of Diana.

Strangely, some years ago I was invited to a gruesome, Conservative Party Dinner and Dance held at the cavernous Kings Hall in Herne Bay. I sat next to the ex Mayor of Canterbury. I can’t remember his name but he was a kind, small old man of simple taste and brain. I asked him if he had ever met the Queen. To my amazement he told me this story about HRH The Queen.

In his Mayoral capacity he had to greet the Queen upon her arrival in Canterbury with the Lord Lieutenant of Kent and sit in the car with HRH and Prince Philip for the duration of an official engagement. It was a freezing cold, winters day and The Queen arrived by Royal train at Canterbury Station for some Christian event at the Cathedral she is, after all, the head of the Anglican Church-nothing between her and God. The train arrived late and one of the equerries or Ladies in Waiting sprinted over to the Mayor and his party giving him the heads up that HRH was in a filthy mood as she hates being late for anything. A few moments later a very grumpy HRH got off the train, leapt into her car refusing to stop to speak to wheel chair bound constituents who had been waiting in the cold and wet for hours. The Mayor begged her to stop for a moment to speak with her subjects. “Do we have to?” She moaned. At the Cathedral she met the Arch Bishop performed her function then the worthies retired with her to the Arch Bishop’s home. At this point the Mayor had to present HRH with a book as a present from the people of Canterbury. When he handed it to her she said, “Not another book!” Dismayed the Mayor, a very simple man, said, “It’s a very valuable book Ma’me.” The Queen looks at Prince Philip and says, “Oh valuable is it? That’s good, we’ll sell it when we lose all our money.” The Queen and Prince Philip then have a fit of laughter at their ‘joke’.

The mayor was neither impressed with the behaviour or attitude of The Queen or her notoriously rude husband.

I met Paul Keating (ex Prime Minister of Australia) this week. He has the most famous HRH story of them all. The back touching. The faux pas. International outrage. He was pottering around at his house. Paul Keating is definitely one of my heroes.

Katherine Phillips, my occasional friend, had lunch with HRH in Scotland but was thrown off the table for having a cold, “Has that girl got a cold?” HRH said. Now, I don’t know if this last story is true but worth retelling anyway.

So, I saw Frear’s movie The Queen and I thought that the Royals came off rather well. What really happened at Balmoral may very well have been a lot less calm and openly hostile to the memory of our Princess Diana. The Princess, which The Establishment worked so tirelessly for us to love in their gruesome soap opera was dead. When she died I will never forget how they wheeled out those old, bitter Queens to defend the Monarch, St John Steevas and that hump-backed monster historian who has the history show on TV and The Moral Maze. It all makes me feel sick. Yet, do I subscribe to The Establishment, The Corporation or The People?

When Diana was killed in the car accident and the flowers started piling up outside Kensington Palace Princess Alexandra sneered at them wondering if the poor had better things to do with their money than spend it on the memory of Diana.

Like The Corporation The Monarchy will go to any lengths to protect its power. So, The Princess is killed in a tragic accident. Within hours The Establishment seeks to disable our memory of her and refocus us on the good works and youth of The Two Young Princes Harry and William. It takes time but finally we embrace them once again. We do so eagerly, as we are told to do. But as hard as I want to forget I will never forget that morning when I woke up and, like so many people, believed that I lived in a country that had assassinated it’s ‘people’s princess’ regardless of whether it was true or not.

5:35 PM

Last Days

Book Café, Surrey Hills, Sydney

It is raining today. Hard. The streets are flooded. Rain drops loudly on the tin roofs. Nobody complains about the weather because of the drought. This morning, like every morning for the past week, I have ordered poached eggs and bacon.

I spent the early part of the morning at the dentist having a crown replaced that fell off in the 101 Cafe in LA 6 weeks ago. I did not feel the needle go in. My nose is still numb from the anesthetic and I am concerned that stuff is hanging out of it because that’s how it feels. I have to go back tomorrow to have the last of the mercury fillings removed and replaced with white porcelain. Finally getting rid of all those ugly, unnecessary fillings British National Health Service dentists made us suffer just for an extra tenner a pop. That’s what they were being paid by the government to fill our teeth. Taking perfectly fine teeth drilling them and filling them with mercury. I have been traumatized by British dentists just like so many 40 something men and women. Consequently, my poor gentle Australian dentist has to deal with me in his office sweating and squirming and swearing at him.

As the end of my Australian trip approaches I must tell you all that I have had a lovely, relaxing time. I left my hotel on Oxford Street and stayed with my friend Zoë Wane. Together we have traversed the city from one huge house to another. When we weren’t enjoying the many mansions of her rich friends we sat in the Cricketers Arms that Zoë’s brother runs where we sat with Vito who looks like Bart Simpson all grown up (see pics) and Jack who looks like Castro and her twin friends Teddy and Larry. Last week, Anita, Teddy’s girlfriend cooked a Malay feast at her home which was so delicious I thought that nothing I would ever eat again would ever compare to what she served at her table that night. Zoë and I ate at Fratelli in Potts Point with Zoë’s friend Ben Brady and endless coffee shops in all the Eastern Suburbs with various combinations of the above.

Last night Ben’s girlfriend Jasmine and her mother prepared Persian food and we sat and ate on their balcony discussing Lebanon and Iran and watching forked lightning dance over the sea.

I had dinner with my friend Vassilli Kalliman who took me to his brand new gallery and introduced me to the wonderful work of Sally Smart and David Griggs. We ate at Bird Cow Fish on Crown St., which was very satisfying. I saw Sophie Mears and Anthony Sissian and swam with them at Bondi they told me that they had been living three blocks from me in LA. I walked around Coogee bay with Kate Fisher and we sat fully clothed on the rocks being sprayed by huge waves. I ate pasta on the lawn of the Darling’s beautiful home in Bellvue Hill with their son Daniel and his gorgeous South African girlfriend.

My dear old friend Charles Wilson, the furniture designer, and I ate dinner at his house and whilst trying to assemble his very chic candelabra I spilt a huge mug of coffee over my white trousers. Ken Neal took me to one of many dinners I had at Fish Face on the Darlinghurst Road. I ate the sashimi on every occasion, had everything on the menu once and the fish curry twice.

I saw Jess Cook who prepared a lunch time avocado salad for me to eat in her loft. I saw Rose who took me to a one nighter at the Flinders Arms called Health Club. I tanned on various beaches and had occasional tangled phone calls with people in other countries. Saw Dreamgirls and hated it. Saw Babel and respected it. Saw Marie Antoinette and loathed it but remembered what it was like to shoot AKA in Versailles. I finished the first draft of my new Untitled LA Project and I wrote a gratitude list every day and sent it to my AA sponsor.

I slept alone and often wondered about someone I had left behind in NYC-you know who you are. I thought about Sharon and developed a nasty resentment against Samia who has not returned my e-mails despite the fact that at this time last year she was so obsessed with me that she flew uninvited to LA and behaved toward me like Glen Close in that bunny boiling film. As usual I got all the blame.

Unsatisfyingly bumped into Oscar H at Fiveways who was all snipes and false promises and Peter S at The Bayswater Brasserie who was frankly annoying although I enjoyed seeing his brother Charles and his charming uncle.

I will miss the friendship, the food, the beauty, the vista and most of all I will miss who I become when I am here. The man I allow myself to be. Calm, kind and full of hope. I will try to carry all of this good me back to LA and The Oscars and to Baja Mexico where I started blogging last year and where this year I am meeting Phil H to watch the whales migrate at the beginning of February. Thousands of them.

3:47 AM

January 10, 2007

Rap

Zoe Wane Sydney

The Book Kitchen, Surrey Hills, Poached eggs.

I have found a new walk to walk every morning. Bronte to Bondi along the coastal path. Up at 6.30 I wake poor Zoë and drag her out of bed, drive to Bronte and we walk. God damn, such beauty we pass in nature and human form. “You missed that one.” Zoë said this morning as some perfect being sprinted past us and out of sight. And such is the nature of my addictive personality I want to run back and catch a glimpse of what ever I had missed. We mostly both walk quietly, however, lost in our own thoughts. Gazing out to sea. It always looks so inviting even though there were warnings of bad currents at Bronte. The air is wet and piquant with sea spray that dries the moment it touches our faces. I love my morning walk, all my thoughts are collected there. I don’t have the same sort of meditative experience that I have on Runyon Canyon but quite frankly I am never so full of loathing and resentment here as I am in LA. Here I am calm and fearless. Perhaps my renewed vigor in AA has caused me to be less furious. Perhaps I just feel safer and why shouldn’t I? Anyhow, what ever it is, I am losing weight, being calm, tanned and start the day with a new kind of optimism. I passed three dogs on the path. This is not a dog culture. No tiny house bound, constipated dog children to negotiate, no screamers, no dust.

What will be will be.

We were going to Bronte yesterday to swim with Teddy and Anita but ended up at Nelson’s Park which is a harbor beach packed with Greek families swimming within the confines of the shark net. We swam beyond the net risking being eaten by great whites. Met Eugenie who used to go out with Oscar and had a brief flirtation with one of the Grimaldi boys and a bunch of Zoë’s very thin chums who were being perved over by men who sat like vultures at the periphery of the group. The girls are so thin most of them look like boys. No wonder thin women feel they need breast augmentation. I swam with Teddy and James in the warm water then we went for a precarious rock climb along the shore. I am not a sprightly as I once was and lagged behind these 22-year-old boys who scampered over the rocks like lizards. On the way back we discussed how a lobster sheds its shell. They did not believe that a lobster could shed its entire shell and sit soft and vulnerable on the ocean bed whilst it waited for its new exoskeleton to harden up. This odd knowledge comes from me hanging around the kitchen at Wheelers listening to Delia, who, by the way I miss terribly. When we all got home and verified the disputed lobster information on the Internet I won a $5 wager.

On the way to the beach a small, old woman was trapped in the drive of her huge Vaucluse home by a selfish person who had parked in front of her gate. We commiserated with her and wondered who could have possibly done such a thing. I told her it was probably the muslims which she agreed with without a seconds thought. It would seem that Muslims and global warming account for all most every bad thing that happens nowadays.

Anita cooked dinner for us all at her Mother’s house and then we drove to Hyde Park barracks to listen to Hip Hop, which was all part of the Sydney Festival. Ugly Duckling were the headliners and of course we found ourselves back stage with the politest most unthreatening rappers you ever did meet. I entertained them with my meeting Jay Zee in New York and The Game in LA stories which dumb found people who know about rap. Anyway, Zoë knew the guys who were on before Ugly Ducking who are the sweetest, blue-eyed, public school boys who rap about how nasty stale muesli is and his mum asking him to tidy his room. Very sweet. The white, middle class audience bobbed around half-heartedly. White rap is not as authoritative as black rap. You simply don’t feel that thump in the chest that you do when you hear black rapper men shouting at you. We went to the gaslight after the concert and bid farewell to James who flew to London this morning. I did not envy him flying back to London. Not one bit.

5:22 PM

January 7, 2007 – Sunday

Oscar Humphries

FRUIT BATS

It is cloudy again today but deliciously warm and humid.

Most of my days here in Sydney are spent doing what I came here to do: write. I write in the mornings. I get up at 6am. I spend a good hour messing around on the internet. Read mail, the news: BBC, Huffington Post, look at messages left for me on various web sites. I write my required AA lists then my private diary. I leave the room to write my film (75 pages so far) and this occasional blog at a deli on Victoria Street where I am in love with the boy who serves coffee (flat white). As we all know it is impossible to buy a bad coffee in Sydney. I get back to the hotel room and check the Dorian Gray web site stats. We are getting a huge volume of hits from France where David Gallagher is a TV star. I mean over 2000 hits a day, which is phenomenal for an unpublicized site.

On occasions I don’t write at all and just explore the streets of Sydney either on my own or with my friend Ben. On Sunday morning Ben, Jake (the artist) and I found a cafe in Erskinville and ate chicken salad, drank delicious coffee and I poured Demerara sugar straight from the bowl on the table into the palm of my hand and ate it like a child. We sat there for hours discussing Australian art whilst tropical rain fell torrentially onto the streets. A uniformed policeman and his female mate came into the cafe to escape the rain, he was so beautiful I asked him if he was a stripper.

I walk despite my poor burned hip which is horribly painful. I have bought books and food but little else. I am training myself to follow a pre-planned path and not get way laid by beauty. I have only seen one must have item: a modernist carved marble lamp in my friend Ken’s shop in Darlinghurst.

Cooked dinner last night at Zoë’s house. Huge frizze salad with boiled egg, lardons, walnuts and chopped freshly cooked asparagus. We bought some delicious salami and mozzarella and Turkish bread, which we all tore apart and devoured the moment we sat down. Baklava for pudding with guava juice. Ben, Zoë, Rose, Teddy, Larry, Jack, Jack’s girlfriend and another girl all no more than 22 years old. Very Sydney, so much fun.

Zoë is renting a beautiful basement in Surrey Hills and has invited me to move in tomorrow so I rented a car and am suddenly FREE! Whenever I get here I am trapped by old habits. I never really move from Sydney yet there I was washing my smalls in the hotel laundry waiting for the dryer to dry and I started looking at a map of Australia. I knew immediately that if I did not take advantage of this opportunity I never would. I am going to drive into the desert, the red heart of Australia. I have only ever explored New South Wales and parts of Victoria. I have been to Nyngen, Forbes (Charles Wilson’s beautiful country house), Melbourne, Tilba and Condoblin where I travelled with Georgina and Oscar Humphries who wrote very offensively about the Australian country tradition of the Batchelor and Spinsters ball. I took millions of pictures that ended up in a sunday magazine and an exhibition of Australian reportage.

Back in tedious LA things have been going a pace. Before I left Hollywood I realized that I had been the victim of a terrible fraud and so had to deal with it. The worst thing about knowing that things are ‘not right’ when you are naturally paranoid is sorting the fact from the fear based fiction. I had to write a difficult letter. The truth, and nothing but the truth. It took a week to write the bloody thing. That said, when it was done I felt a whole heap better. Lawyers in these circumstances are not your best friends. When I fought my ‘divorce’ in court I did it on my own and as honestly as any one can in the circumstances. The courtroom and the truth are not, one quickly realizes, synonymous. Even after I had written the letter my index finger hovered dangerously over the return key for a good few days. I just kept praying for guidance and asking God and my few trusted friends what they thought of what I was doing.

I hate having to fight fairly yet when I fight unfairly I end up loathing myself. In a world which seems rigged against most of us most of the time this primitive side of my nature becomes essential. The courage to change the things I can, it’s tough to be courageous. It’s hard to turn up in a city with nothing and make a film from scratch. It’s tough to do things in an unusual and challenging way. For all of producer Brad W’s defects of character he taught me to pick my battles wisely.

I pressed the button and off it went for only God to determine the outcome.

I have been thinking a great deal about Tracy Emin-what a great artist she has become. I saw a photograph of a sculpture that reminded me of the roller coaster at Dreamland in Margate and of course that is exactly what it was. A scaled down naive sculpture of the roller coaster at Dreamland. It was so wonderfully evocative. Tracy and I both come from Kent, villages that are not so far away from one another and we are about the same age. She was the girlfriend of Billy Childish who I was at art school with and very close friends with. It was because of Billy, I suppose, that I was suspicious of the authenticity of her work but let’s face it: if she was ever influenced by Billy Childish as he loudly claims she has well and truly flown his coop. When she makes work away from the mirror she excels. Building the Whitstable beach hut in the Saatchi gallery for instance was a stroke of genius. I loved her helter skelter tatlin tower at White Cube and now I love her roller coaster. I remember the experience of Dreamland so well. The coconut matting to slide down the helter skelter. The clockwork ticking of the roller coaster, the abrupt ending and the fearful screams. I loved it, as did she. Tracy has evolved into a bone fide arts star. One of the best of British.

I cannot tell you how much I love being sober, how much I love my sobriety and how I am loving writing the most thorough and grueling step one. Sometimes I feel so ‘here’ that it’s as if all my skin has been removed and I experience the world as a raw unborn thing.

Every night I watch the bats in the sky, huge fruit bats flying haphazardly in the twilight. Streams of them, black flapping chattering to each other all the way home.

7:56 PM

January 6, 2007 – Saturday

Sydney. lay on Bondi beach yesterday with Charles, Anthony and Sophie. Had dinner at Lotus with Cameron and Zoe. Decided to go to bed early. Burned my hip in the sun. I am happy. Not really worrying. Drifting aimlessly when I am not writing or walking or going to AA meetings. I am bored with my hotel so am going to move. I may hire a car tomorrow and drive down the coast. I will. I think that I will.

The script is coming along very nicely. It is better than I expected. Works well.

Decided definitively that I am going back to London to live as soon as I can.

When I walk the streets I am inspired, alive, able.

4:46 PM

December 28, 2006 – Thursday

Sydney

Sydney New South Wales Australia

I am back in the southern hemisphere, arriving on the chilliest day of the summer. It was a relief, however, not to step into sub tropical Sydney. A delicious wind cooled the usually sweltering mid summer city. I left my lap top in the taxi but it was returned to me. At night I noticed how hot the stone buildings were, that my skin was already mildly burned. I managed to deal with the jet lag in two days. This morning I woke at a very respectable 7am.

Since I arrived in Sydney I have eaten three times at the new Tropicana (chicken salad) now finally at home back in its original place on Victoria Street. I have eaten flourless orange cake at the new Dov also on Victoria Street and tasted their delicious, home-made, sticky nougat loaded with candied cherries and almonds. I saw Ursula and Kate who now part own Dov with Matt Onions. I walked the streets to see what else has changed. I walked so hard that my calves hurt. I joined the gym, and worked my chest and shoulders. I found NA meetings and AA meetings and caught a cab to Bondi Junction and met Ben and drank more juice at The Tropicana.

I visited the dentist and had my teeth cleaned. I made further appointments to have a small filling in a tooth on my upper jaw and replace a broken veneer.

I listened to the varied bird song and realized what I missed so much in LA but for all my bitching and complaining how LA had reconnected me with AA, a connection I hadn’t felt for years and years. I bought a phone and got myself a new phone number. I smelt the sweet lush blooms on the trees on the street and listened to the mewing of the birds that sound like crying babies. I looked out for familiar faces and found them. I looked at the bald black-headed egrets in Hyde Park; I gazed at the huge bronze sculpture of Queen Victoria. I was just too damned excited. I have not seen the huge fruit bats migrating from Centennial Park but I am sure that I will.

I walked to Kings Cross, Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Woolloomooloo. I began walking up Oxford Street to Paddington but decided to do that some other time. I realized that the lower gay part of Oxford Street was now filthy dirty and far too many toothless drug addicts asked for spare change. For every fit, beautiful Sydney boy/girl there was a scrawny homeless addict to remind one where one might have ended up or might yet.

Surprisingly Sydney does not feel as optimistic as it once did. It feels like an anxious place to be compared with the ebullience I felt here a few years ago. Apparently, according to friends, China is making some parts of Australia fabulously rich but not here. Buying minerals, feeding the great 21st Century Chinese expansion.

I have no expectations for New Years Eve. What ever happens, happens. May go to bed, may watch the fireworks.

I have written 21 pages of my new script and I am falling over myself to complete it. It flows out of me like a torrent. It always happens like this here in Sydney Australia, in the Southern Hemisphere. I find my voice. It was here at this table that I wrote Dorian, it is here that I am writing Untitled LA Project and already a new world exists on the page. What could be more exciting than that?

1:23 AM

December 19, 2006 – Tuesday

Deal or no Deal

I am still in bed with what has developed into a hideous chesty cough. I should never have gone to my AA meeting last night or had dinner at Ago even though I love risotto and had truffle shaved all over it.

As I lay in my large bed my mind drifted from this illness to the first time I remember being in hospital when I got my scull crushed in a car accident when I was 5 years old. The next time I ended up in hospital was when I was 13 years old for being a nuisance at school. I thought that I might spend some time this morning writing about that. I remember playing canasta with Edna, hiding the drugs they gave me in my ear so that I did not have to take them, St Augustins, Pandora with the flakey teeth and the morgue. I thought that I might write about my being hospitalized when I was 25 in Sutton at the Hendserson Hospital and describe Sarah who killed herself and the blood in her room and knitting during group therapy but I have decided that I am going to write about that some other time.

Instead, I am going to write about people who read this blog and try to use it against me. Who contact friends and organizations with disinformation, who try to derail my film and me. For it came to pass this morning that I was sent a whole heap of e-mails from people I had worked with who are dissatisfied with me, who are working tirelessly against me and my film.

The more damage these people cause, the less likely I am inclined to get the film out of the box and try to raise money to finish it. The less likely I am able to attract an investor. As you may know, if you have been diligently reading this blog, I am about to start making a movie in the UK. Some of you naughty minx seem to be under the misapprehension from you’re e-mails that you can do damage to me. If I lived in the scum you call you’re lives then no doubt you could indeed hurt me badly. But I do not.

Nothing you can do to me will ever stop me being creative or living a wonderful life. Nothing you can do to me can take away my sobriety, which is more important to me than any fucking film or any one of you.

I have passed these e-mails to my lawyer and any further attempts to scupper our film will be met with fierce counter measures. You are not the only ones who can make life very difficult. I urge you to consider this: You do not hurt me when you do these things you merely hurt the people who genuinely want to benefit from making art. the DP, the actors etc. By reducing the value of the film you merely stop yourselves from getting the money you are rightly owed under the agreement of your deferment deal. You do not and cannot hurt me. You merely hurt yourselves and the others that are owed money.

I urge you to work with me to deal with this problem as best we can.

11:09 PM

December 17, 2006 – Sunday

Dreams

Last night I dreamt that it snowed in Los Angeles. The snow glinting in the sun, melting fast, too fast to fetch my camera. The snow held on longer in the valleys in the deep shadow. It was an exciting dream.

I have been very ill in bed with my cold. I am too ill to leave the apartment, too ill to call anyone. Dom came over yesterday but I no longer trust him and eyed him suspiciously over the matzoh ball soup he very kindly delivered me. He is so crazed with love for Joe it is embarrassing and frankly, tragic. Joe is just as bad using poor Dom to fill his time before he does the decent thing and goes back home to England to do something sensible. Dom genuinely believes that he can be Joe’s boy friend.

By yesterday, full of phlegm, I had had just about enough of being here. I craved my little cottage and the brown Whitstable sea. I craved The Tudor Tea Rooms, Wheelers and The Whistle Stop. I craved Mother’s pride and Marmite. I craved poached eggs. I craved anything that wasn’t me here and now. It was apparent that nothing I could do was going to change any component part of what I am suffering.

Joe the mountain scientologist visited me and showed me his new bicycle helmet. Merritt swung by and set up the printer that had been sitting in it’s box since it was bought weeks ago. Devon brought more soup as did Aleksa’s mother Sabrina who made a wonderful, soothing concoction of limes, cayenne pepper and hot water.

Being ill here reminds me of this time last year when I ended up in Cedars (hospital) with that terrible leaking spine. The devastating head ache, unable to speak, to stand up. Then being saved by and staying with David and Hunter. Meeting Hilary. The way the doctor fixed it with that blood patch. I refused the anesthetic. Laying there begging that the pain be taken from me. I thought that I was going mad. I thought that I was having a nervous break down and all along spinal fluid was draining out of me. Just like George Clooney.

Phil left text messages. Cheered me up. She will never make it here-maybe in February for Mexico and the whales.

It was cold when I woke this morning; there was a bite in the air. I cannot stay in bed all day. I can’t do it. I have to do SOMETHING productive. Make lists. Write.

Apparently, if you threw a cat onto a 15th century funeral pyre the cat represented the devil. When I was a child I had a recurring nightmare that I had thrown a kitten into a fire.

9:07 AM

December 15, 2006 – Friday

December LA. I have just returned from NYC. Whilst I was there Will Self walked (for the press) from Kennedy Airport to his Downtown hotel. He is here in the USA to promote his new book. It will be just as bad as all of the recent others. I can just imagine him striding pompously along the LIE puffing on his pipe baffling the accompanying journalist from the NY Times with a whole lot of long words. He is truly the Gerard Manly-Hopkins of our age.

It is not perhaps the time to admit this but whenever he used to visit me in Whitstable I was always terrified that he would break something. He would change a shitty baby on a white bed or open oysters directly on wood causing great scratches in the wooden kitchen counters. One night I had Janet Street-Porter, Will Self, Deborah Orr and Jay Jopling around that tiny zinc dining table in my Whitstable kitchen. They are all HUGE people in stature and ego. Deborah used to be huge laterally which caused everybody I know to think that she was extraordinarily fecund. You just have to imagine Will Self and you start using words like fecund. Will is a sweet man but he uses his celebrity to ensnare then his verbosity to crush too many willing victims. What ever may or may not happen to Will and I, I am glad that we have been friends.

Time is the greatest distance between two people.

From a distance one quickly sees the people one has known for who they are and forgive them their defects of character. Janet is a cold fish, a snob to boot but her eccentricity is what makes me proud to be British. At dinner Deborah asked Janet why she had never had children. It was a question only Deborah could have ever asked Janet. Janet told us that one of her husbands had had a child who died. She said that she never wanted to suffer the pain she saw him endure. It was really very touching.

Deborah Orr. I never really trusted her or her incessant moaning. She is undoubtedly a genius, more so than her husband. Her intellect is a thing of great beauty. I would much prefer to hear her spout than her moribund husband. She endlessly reminds anyone who will listen that she comes from Govan, a very rough part of Glasgow. When Deborah and I met Lulu at Jay’s house one night I made Deborah tell Lulu where she came from and Lulu made a grand whooping noise and brushed her fingers against her nose to indicate how POSH it was. Lulu grew up in the Gorbals, which used to be a total shit hole.

Anyway, enough of the aptly named Self’s.

I walked the Canyon at 7am this morning. It was so pretty but my heart was heavy. I cannot imagine living here after I get back from Australia. I will do a few months of Dorian then it is time to get on and go back to Whitstable. I expect to be there by June. I listened to the same sort of conversations on my way up that I heard when I left, two frumpy women in badly fitting sweats complaining about some one who had wronged them. On the way down two executives were discussing powerful studio men. They were in awe.

I have done my stint, paid my dues to LA. I have stayed sober in LA. LA has been an interesting home for me but as I have said before it is like living in Whitstable, yet there in no allure. LA is a small town with small people. Self important, heartless and occasionally very, very cruel. The squabbles are no different or important from those I might hear in The Duke of Cumberland. The fights I witness in Hollywood are as vicious as any I have seen outside the kebab shop on Whitstable High Street.

Thankfully my shrewd investments may make this year my most profitable yet my ‘profit’ of course would scarcely pay for the mixers at one of Jay’s parties!

I am on the edge of something here in LA. On the edge of a continent or on the edge of my own life? I cannot continue this journey without a serious moment of reflection yet wherever I settle I am at the mercy of my own madness. My life has been all about shopping and fucking yet with none of the irony that this may suggest.

Somebody once asked me if I had ever been proud of anything in my life. I can honestly say that I am proud of every achievement I have ever made. Every play, film, dinner, room, article, sobriety, garden, blog. I am proud of all these things because I have had to do such terrible battle with myself to get anything done. The worst part of ME has always been my most terrible adversary. There is no one else to blame. I used to blame my stepfather but whatever seeds he sowed I have propagated. Every day I wonder who will get the best part of my day, that Duncan Roy or this Duncan Roy.

Finally, whilst in NY I contacted very old friends. A Whitstable friend and someone I had not spoken to for seven years. It was such a relief to call him. I was walking in what used to be the shadow of the twin towers. I suddenly remembered his telephone number and like a spell, a long forgotten spell I dialed the number and listened to his voice. It was wonderful.

Today I counted 27 dogs on Runyon Canyon.

9:20 AM