A renewed interest in me by younger men. What is this all about? Just as I thought I was on the gay slag heap I am suddenly enjoying a sexual renaissance as a daddy.
Apparently everybody wants his daddy and being a tall, shaved-head, masculine kinda gay I seem to fit this bill. NYC this last visit I was stunned by just how much interest I generated at the gym. These cute, younger men had not seen me on TV, did not know my back story…but wanted some daddy lovin’.
One will always be ‘hot’ if one remains confident.
Am I being fetishized? Lets’s hope so.
I am not complaining. It makes growing old and gay all that much better.
Look at the view! It’s a warm morning where I am. The sky is pale pink, the sea is almost blue. The rain this winter has caused every Ceanothus to bloom. Almost blue.
Not like the one I planted in my Whitstable garden which bloomed purple, fleshy flowers.
The garden here is now Fire Safe. They have cleared the brush and hoed the beds. The trees are almost fully in leaf. The tiny quail and their tinier babies search in the tilled soil for food. I don’t know what they eat.
Stephen, Kristian’s one time boy friend send me a collection of his writings that I have not had time to read yet. Kristian Digby. Where are you? I wish you were here. I wish you were alive.
I think that it may be Jean’s memorial today. I am not going. It would be hypocritical. We were once friends. I want to remember what it was like to be his friend. Sit quietly with the memory.
Too many deaths recently. Too many unnecessary deaths. Each time they tell me that someone else is dead I have to look at my own fingers and imagine them bone and parchment.
I want to find you that page in my diary when we were on Patmos, Phil and I, and we looked into the charnel house and saw the desiccated remains of…people. Tangled together, wearing their simple peasant garments.
I couldn’t sleep.
Phil splashed cologne around our bedroom. It soothed me.
It’s a beautiful day today. Best I concentrate on that?
I felt the shame. Shame is like scraping the meat off of the bone.
I am writing about one isolated man being saved by less isolated men. Was this past year such a waste? This was the year when obsession became my higher power.
Now I have a chance to know God once again.
Will I ever get home?
Here are the Patmos diary entries for August 1990.
I am with my darling Phillipa Heiman. We are staying in her parents beautiful summer home overlooking the Aegean.
We are lovers. We visit the charnel house.
Wednesday August 15th 1990 PATMOS
The masseur said that I should wear something loose. I opted for my frog boxers, Victoria Whitbread gave them to me, green frogs hopping all over my genitals. She poked and prodded and soothed, she twisted my arms and legs, her breasts pushed into my face, “I hope I’m not suffocating you.” She said.
Her fingers glanced over the end of my dick.
“Your lymphatic system is now working.” she declared as my stomach rumbled for more cold chicken. She told me that, like many people, I had been frightened as a child and had reacted with my right side. This reaction has begun a slow deterioration of the tissue in the areas seized and now they were completely ‘blocked’.
After a fag break she told me that I shouldn’t drink, that I should do Tai Chi and should have six more sessions costing a further 3000 drachma per session. Thank the lordy for new age medicine! The alternative society has got it made. I am rushing back to London to learn anything I can to lay a few letters after my name. D.P. Roy Alternative money-maker. A.M.M.
As a final booster she poked me with an electric prod. Very nice.
Philippa returned from a walk around the village, she had been to a church service which, from her description, sounded delightful. We ate what was to be my last unfettered meal. We stepped, after lunch, into the hot afternoon.
Through the alleys, to the monastery. My spirits were high. We faced the wind together, holding her breasts through her thin silk dress, letting her feel my stiffy on her thigh, she said that the monks would be shocked.
We found a fig tree and picked fresh figs, they tasted of nothing. We found a pear tree and the fruit tasted of nothing. We saw an English couple removing their shorts under a very unshadeful tree on top of a windy promontory. Like the middle of a motorway, next to the rubbish dump full of plastic – not rotting, away from Xora there were plastic bottles, scores of them, strewn over the brown grass.
The hot afternoon my spirits are still high. I’m making a lot of jokes at everybody’s expense – mostly Philippa’s. She’s enjoying it, her period has started so she’s happy again, woe betide me if I’d mentioned this as a contributing factor to the tears. The tears were so terrible to see. I am a broken man when I see my lover cry. I see my mother and grandmother and aunts Evelyn and Margaret in her tears and I am a broken man.
We walked on, she wanted to see the graveyard which you can see clearly from the window in the drawing-room. I am sitting opposite that window, all I have to do is to stand up and I can see the graveyard walls, a couple of white crosses, the blue iron gate and some white box out-houses.
We went the long way round, over prickling grass and clumps of brown dry plants and plastic bottles rolling around on the parched earth by the Meltemi which is a wind, a wind called the Meltemi.
We found the gate. Most of the graves were new, some had photographs of old people. One old man sitting on his chair outside the front door. He looked like a loved man. A candle burnt in a tiny marble and glass casket. An eternal flame.
The graves were made, in this concrete covered place, of tiny man holes. A ring pull on top. We looked inside an abandoned tomb. These were obviously used over and over we concluded. We thought that the bodies rested here for a bit, with the flame and the photographs and the plastic flowers and the crucifix. We concluded that they would be cremated and scattered over the Aegean or the terraced island.
Our spirits high, we looked into one of the empty tombs. Under the concrete. A hollow waiting for its fill. Maybe it would be Petula (our maid) with her twisted hair and apron. Her bare, dead legs under the stone. Petula, Petula compromised because we rearranged the cushions, the red, gold and orange ikat instead of pink delicate John Stefanidis print. We’ve made the home ours now Petula.
Old Petula can rearrange the cushions under here. Under the stone.
We made our way to another gate at the back of the graveyard. We balked at an old coffin laid beneath a tree, we saw that it was laminated maple, birdseye maple effect. A birdseye maple effect coffin to be transported from the village to the hole, there to be cremated and the little old man to be scattered into the Meltemi and over the sea. Not a bad end.
“Wait a minute,” Philippa says, “Let’s look through here.” I was on my way out, my spirits were high. I looked past the evergreen where she stood ahead of me. So beautiful! Her large smile and eyes sparkling out to me – all radiant and all mine. I don’t want her to go any further. I want to leave there and then, our spirits high, home to a plate of cold chicken and potatoes. Maybe our bed.
She turned into the other plot and I followed, ran ahead. Past a small, stone, white building, to a shack stacked high with coffins. Eww I said, how horrible, a shack full of coffins. I wanted to get out. I wanted to leave there and then.
“Look.” She said gaily, “Bones.”
I ran ahead to where she was pointing, I ran right up to what was undeniably a thigh bone sticking out of the ground.
“They’re human.” I said, my spirits no longer high, as high. Not hit rock bottom. Just a bone. We looked into a pit. An open hatch, like a cellar door straight into the ground. It was not just a bone, it was a whole man or woman with clothes on, maybe two men or two women or three, with their nylons still sticking to bits of dead flesh. With the sun on the white bone, the flesh torn away.
Fascinated, I looked into this death-bed, this corpse mine. Looked at the big bones, no sculls and it was occurring to us what the godforsaken truth was. There was no scattered ashes over the Aegean but this ossuary. We stepped back from the pit stuffed with bones and slippers and old nylons pulled over what was once a plump thigh. I retreated past the small white, stone building with steps that lead up to an open window.
“Look that room up there is full with these.”
I ran ahead, up the steps, my tee-shirt over my mouth. I didn’t even think about it, it was natural that I shouldn’t breathe the same air as the dead. I looked into my own hell. Through the open window into a huge room crammed with rubber shoes, cheap by any standard, the paper liners eaten by maggots. More arms and legs and ribs, all forked into this place.
Strewn into this terrible room.
I couldn’t leave it alone, I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t pull down the tee-shirt over my face and run away. I couldn’t be sure that these weren’t donkeys or dogs somehow tangled up with jumble, that my eyes didn’t deceive me I needed to see a skull.
I stepped up higher so I could see past the mound of bones and clothes and shoes full of maggots. I looked past all this and into the face that confirmed exactly what we already knew, what I had to see and wish I had never seen. My spirits drained out of me, my anal sphincter winking in fear, my feet wanting to run as fast as they could from this Byzantine holocaust.
Phillipa, still smiling and flirting and dancing around. Her belly just about to empty its bloody dead contents into her knickers. The old man sitting by his front door, Petula the maid, her hair all snaked up around her head with her old, thin fingers. Forked into that room. This heaving room, where flies and rats can come and live off of the dead.
We walked out of the graveyard, past the blue, wrought iron gate and into the hot alleys and the afternoon sun. We trailed back home, my spirits drained away. My mind working on the image of death. We could hear the bells calling the faithful to their pews, to the holy water, to the Festival of the Virgin whilst the tangled remains of granddad, children, motorbike accident victims all hugged one another unwittingly in that terrible room.
Back at the house I fell asleep on Phillipa’s stomach. When I woke up I tried to make light of what we had seen. We couldn’t. My mind working on that image of death. We had a rather bright dinner with the French. I couldn’t eat much, the meat festered in my mouth.
I could see the grave candles burning from the night terrace, comets burning over our heads, my feet burning inside my silk slippers. The twins arrived, showed us photographs, we drove into Skala.
Phillipa went to church, I went to the bar so I might forget.
I drank. Sprayed with champagne. It was our table that drank the most booze, our friends who danced the hardest, our friends who fell into the sea drunk and all the time my mind is working out that image of death.
Into the eyes of death, a death’s-head, not facing me. Leading me into further horrors.
Olivier the sickly twin and I had a long talk about his girlfriend, what he felt for her. How he became her. I gave him a big hug because he seemed to need it. He stroked my face, he told me that he didn’t need to be ‘superficial’ with me. He told me that I was a friend. Sometimes I didn’t understand him because he used a language that only a twin can understand. A description of one life as two people. They are an extra-ordinary couple.
I went home to Phillipa. We drank tea and then they left.
I got into bed and great waves of fear passed through me, my mind working on that image so that the bones started moving. The dead sat waiting beside the front door, sat in the fridge disguised as roast chicken, the maggots danced inside the rubber slippers, the nylons gnawed by fat rats.
Phillipa felt me cold sweating there in bed, listened to my fitful cries and sprinkled perfume on the mat and offered me kind conversation and squeezed into my back. I fell, finally into an unfettered sleep.
PS We met the rich Greeks who are building their ‘luxury’ home next to the graveyard.
“Fantastic views.” said she.
Can you imagine who empties those graves? The man we see in the street? Maybe the tall, mad man we see in Vagelis – the restaurant with the garden. Can you imagine seeing the graves being exhumed? The contents pitchforked into that place? The man couldn’t sell the plot.
“Fantastic views.”
Phillipa returns yearly to Patmos but I never did. The beautiful house was sold. Phillipa and I split up on the way home from Greece and when we arrived in London Amoury Blow picked us up from the airport. I was all over the press. Again. Front page of the Evening Standard.
Gary once introduced me to Mark Ruffalo. Mark wouldn’t remember me, Gary would.
Gary was one of the forward thinking guys who set up the ground breaking film production company InDigEnt. He was a really, really sweet man. No news as to how he died but I think, from what I can remember, he may have had a serious illness that he kept quiet about.
He was very discreet.
Crikey, so many deaths! I just diligently report them. It’s rewarding to find something nice to say about the recently departed like poor Wally in Whitstable.
In Jean’s case, it was quite hard. We hadn’t spoken for ages because we had a money issue that neither of us wanted to resolve. He was a terrible drain on his friends and family. Let’s put it this way: it was very hard for Jean to enjoy his gifted life without endlessly complaining or taking drugs.
People die. I just put on my bombazine shift and write the bleeding obituary.
Perhaps I should try writing my own?
I would entitle it: WEAK TEA or LOUD AND DIM or NOTHING REMARKABLE.
To be run in the Whitstable Times in the event of my death:
Surly Duncan Roy (65) found dead in his Swalecliffebed sitting room. Former Lord of The Lies refused medication for obvious mental illness and made unremarkable films. Campaigned for the Red Spider Cafe. He will not be missed.
I have not written a last will and testament so the fuckers can squabble over what is left. I may leave it all to that little girl or to a bat charity or Jake’s ex-girl friend. That would be funny.
Watched Oscars. Was James Franco stoned? No! He’s been sober for YEARS. He just looked a bit unprepared. I would have preferred if Social Network had won best film. It deserved to. The Kings Speech is constipated TV tosh. Tom Hooper is a director of no importance. Why does Colin Firth KEEP telling the world how important Tom Ford is to him and how he wouldn’t be receiving these awards without having met him? I thought that Firth had a rather long and distinguished career before meeting Ford? Are they or have they been…fucking?
It occurred to me why Portman trumped Benning…Portman has more mileage in her and will generate more cash for CAA. Poor Annette Bening so obviously deserved that Best Actress Academy Award but she’s an old mare and who writes great roles for old mares that Meryl Streep isn’t getting first refusal?
You can slag me off as much as you want but the truth is: I am mortally indiscreet so this is like shoving a red-hot poker up my ass and NOT in a good way.
After bleating this week about never going to have sex ever again well…an old comfort buddy called me yesterday morning and we lay in bed all afternoon kissing and stroking and showering together. Someone I have known for years. A sweet-natured Iranian man, 28..hairy chest. There’s a picture of him in the blog I think. Hidden.
It felt good to hold him in my arms. It was very comforting.
The back of his neck reminded me of you know who so I looked him in the eye.
We scoffed a late lunch overlooking the sea.
As we ate two drunk people started a fight. A bruised woman in her late 40′s and her madly attractive, much younger (20′s) blond, surfer boy friend. Both chestnut coloured from lazing all year on the beach. Her sun bleached hair tangled in dried blood from a recent brawl. She threw two large bottles of beer at his head. They smashed on the ground. Later we saw this odd, violent couple being arrested.
Spent the rest of the day wrestling back control of the computer from Max. His 13-year-old brain having got the best of his mum and dad’s good intentions. Taking control of the family internet. He was horrified by what I had done: limiting his internet usage to 3 hours a day, no iChat, no unfettered Facebook. Every time he wants to do anything dodgy the computer emails me and tells me all about it.
Whilst they were out 10-year-old Hannah and I cooked dinner. Moroccan influenced lamb balls. Assorted vegetables. Buttered rice.
Yesterday I met a man…we did what men do. He arrived at 8 and left at midnight. He had piercing blue eyes. I made him tell me, as part of our ‘role play’ that he loved me, that he was never going to leave me.
It really turned me on.
Tonight is my last night in London after a really eventful day. Started at 9am with Jess calling about our trip to Paris.
Multiple contractions of apprehension.
After a huge breakfast at Soho House I nipped over to Dover Street in Mayfair through the pouring rain to pick up my new APC pants..they are so yummy. Grey cashmere. Perfect for this miserable, cold weather.
On an impulse I popped into Oswald Boatang and bought a beautiful Stephen Jones hat. Reduced from $500 to $100. The assistant who sold it to me stood so close to me when I was trying it on…I could feel him. He was so beautiful I felt like touching his face.
He smelt so clean…scrubbed.
I didn’t touch him. I thanked him for being so attentive.
Finally..after literally years of deliberation…I stopped in at a tailor on Saville Row and started the process of having a coat made for next winter. That beautiful bespoke coat I have wanted all my life. A coat that I am designing with the tailor.
Loving London so much. I love that I know it so well and can afford to live a very comfortable life here.
I went to therapy at 1pm. Really great meeting. Met Matt Rowe at 2pm and had Jerusalem artichoke soup for lunch.
Have not seen Matt for yonks…he has had two kids and recently separated from his girl friend. He is best known for writing with his writing partner Biff all of the Spice Girls hits.
When I met him he was so young and so rich. It was Matt who threw the party we had at the Mercer New Years Eve 1999 with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman…Calvin Klein, Fran Leibowitz…etc etc.
We reminisced. We wondered how we got away with so much?
He has a great sense of humor…as does Charlie P.
Matt and I met Charlie Parsons at Tottenham Court Road and we all headed to High Barnet to meet with Konrad and see his work. He mixes his own semen into the paint. Huge studio in a disused artificial limb factory. Bought a very beautiful painting. Charlie bought two. Ate chocolate biscuits and drank hot tea.
The Little Dog ran around like a mad thing. Running all over the paintings and insanely trying to eat any paintbrush he could lay his paw on.
Schlepped back to town. Had a hot chocolate, fed the dog…went to bed.
New Years Eve ended up being more active than I planned.
After a leisurely dinner at home Carol, Marc and I drove to Herne Bay, the next village east along the Kent coast, and dropped in on my photographer friend Dylan Woolf who’d organized a huge NYE party with dinner and fireworks for a hundred or more local people.
Dylan’s sister Julia and her husband Sim (edited Shrek and Nanny McPhee) are old friends and have the most gorgeous house in LA. Julia is very funny so I hung out with her almost all of the evening. Delighted to see an old teacher of mine, Peter Latham (Julia and Dylan’s uncle) and his kids…great to spend time with all of them.
Rather amazingly I bumped into Easterly and Matt Cox who are Kent aristocrats and the cousins of my local nemesis Susanna Atkins. Not only were they rather incredibly at this party but, as it turns out, have just bought the pile opposite Dylan…the hugest architectural gem of a house, faced with flint, wide floor boards, elegant architrave, quirky crenellations and gothic mullions. It is a mesmerizing puzzle of a derelict house with Victorian additions to a Georgian frame. Huge potential and a million headaches.
Heavily pregnant Easterly is on her way to India for an adventure before the baby is born.
Great to see them..we snuck away and celebrated a quiet 12 o’clock in their vaulted, semi derelict, drawing-room away from the herd. They handed me a piece of Christmas cake that was so laced with rum I couldn’t eat it…and then quoted one line from my blog that always makes them laugh out loud when ever they say it: “Yum Fucking Yum!” (Haloooween)
Very Heartening.
It’s very English to live on a building site with two babies and one on the way whilst you are renovating an historic home. I totally admire their guts but wouldn’t expect anything less.
New Years Day has been, thus far, just as one would expect…eclectic.
My friend Georgina who owns the Copeland House B&B where Nicola stayed last week had staffing issues. She has been so incredibly kind to me since I arrived ferrying me to the hospital etc. so I gladly got up early to help her out of a tight spot this morning. I was in the kitchen at 8am peeling smoked salmon onto plates and filling the tea urn.
Georgina told me that her friend Pauline the barrister found the gay references in my blog ‘sickening’. A little bit of friendly advice Pauline…if you don’t like it..don’t read it…you homophobic cow. Next time I see you in the high street…walk the other way.
Two faced hag. You’d think with two faces she’d have learned how to put on make up?
After helping Georgina we headed off to Pamela Leung’s and her husband for a new years breakfast party. Pamela is an amazing, world-class ceramicist. I couldn’t help myself from buying a very beautiful sculpture to celebrate the new year and the sale of my Cindy Sherman which made three times what I paid for it.
Pamela’s work: mythic creatures, allegories, thick glazes, exquisitely modeled. Will take picture before I leave tomorrow.
After our wonderful breakfast (full english) we decided to drive to Margate to see David Chipperfield‘s new Turner Contemporary Gallery on the harbour. It is DISGUSTING. It looks at best like a supermarket at worst like a neo-brutalist nuclear power plant. Admittedly it isn’t finished but the scale, choice of materials are just so at odds with the landscape.
It is neither challenging nor audacious…it is simply a big glass blob that Chipperfield obviously asked his tea boy to design while he was doing something more prestigious.
We drank hot chocolate and ate perfect Victoria Sponge at The Mad Hatters on Love Lane. If you ever find yourself in Margate on a wet New Years Day…there’s no better way to spend it.
Fell asleep in the car on the way home with little dog on my lap and Alan Bennett on the Radio.
Hospital day yesterday. It was quick and efficient.
Nicola arrived from London on Tuesday and bought delicious, French macaroons.
We ate dinner at Wheelers (4 courses 65 GBP including a dozen native oysters) and she stayed in Georgina’s B&B in the same room/bed I stayed this July.
The following morning we bought her Wellington boots from the ancient shoe shop Wooley’s on the High Street and went for a long walk on the snowy beach. Met other very jovial dog owners and the little dog ran like a mad thing through the melting snow, his little pink paws skidding over the ice.
The woman in Wooley’s, incidentally, remembered fitting my school shoes when I was a boy. Wooley’s has been on Whitstable High Street for a hundred years next year. They asked if they could put my photograph in the window when they celebrate their centenary. I was honoured!
We walked to The Battery, Marilyn’s place on the beach..I described it in my blog the other day. On the way there, however, we peered through Janet Street-Porter‘s cottage window at her austere modern kitchen and her Gary Hume prints. I wouldn’t want to live there. It was so impersonal and the yellow walls were painted the wrong yellow.
The Battery looks a bit worse for wear. I may nip up there later today and take a picture of it for you so you can see what I am talking about.
If you hadn’t noticed I feel leagues better.
I decided to let myself off the hook. Become quite tearful when I write it down like that. It’s time to stop beating myself up. Give myself a break like they say in the Narcotics Anon literature.
I was chatting with a friend yesterday and I realized that I was finally out of the woods. It’s a decision. I have been waiting for a storm to pass rather than wash something down the drain.
My friend was telling me that he would find it hard to love again after his last failed romance, that he had been tossed aside…and I thought to myself, “Bugger that, life is far too short not to fall in love!” I come from a long line of men who can say proudly that they love another man. I love you is possibly the hardest thing one man can say to another. I am doubly proud that I have said it and I meant it.
Saying I love you is much harder than saying I want to fuck you.
All I have to do is find a man who can hear those words and value them.
So, today I tried not to engage with bad thoughts and old resentments. I thought out loud, come on LOVE you can show this old man that life is worth loving again. So, I’ve been feisty all day but not angry. I have been creative all day and not asleep.
I pulled out a couple of scripts. I made a couple of calls. I thought about finding a producer. I had a meeting with a woman I might do a property deal with.
If Elizabeth really had broken up with Arun a few months ago as she claims..why is she having clandestine meetings with Shane Warne in hotel rooms rather than in her Kensington house?
I wonder if Arun remembers my dire warning for him to run as fast as his little legs would carry him when Elizabeth introduced us. Much to his chagrain I sat him down like a good brother and told him that no good would come of knowing Elizabeth…only public shame.
That was when we were filming The Method in Romania when she was publicly toying with him to the amusement of her snotty friends and family.
I wanted to write a bunch of stuff about Elizabeth being a sex addict but I wrote a thousand words and then the computer crashed and it all vanished. I can’t be bothered to write it again.
I was reminiscing about the first time I met Elizabeth and she was laying on the floor of her sitting room…her legs apart, her lips pink and swollen.
I wonder if she remembers telling me about her whipping club in LA? How she loves to ‘take a man in hand’. I wonder if she dominates Shane? He looks like the sort of man who needs to be dominated, coerced, his power stripped from him by a woman, a good..strong woman like Elizabeth. And..of course, we never mention the lesbian interlude. Know about that? I do.
I hear that she was in San Lorenzo last week looking a bit worse for wear. Drunk.
I wonder who is looking after the kid?
The problem with Elizabeth is that she is a mere actress/celebrity when in fact she was born to be a high priestess or warrior princess, acolytes tugging at her skirt. Gladiators hand-picked from the forum to pleasure her.
Poor Elizabeth! She’s the straight equivalent of a gay ‘power bottom’.
Elizabeth! Go and sort yourself out at Sex Rehab. You are one of us! You control every straight man within sniffing distance with your pussy perfume, the intoxicating scent of your vagina.
Oh, I have seen it with my own eyes warrior princess!
Until you get yourself a kingdom I’m afraid it might be rehab for you dear.
On an entirely different note…do you like my new socks?
I am sitting at my architect friend Keith’s house in the most unlikely location – Deptford. An unruly, charmless, largely destroyed by Nazi bombs area of South East London. His tiny terraced house a laboratory for the work that has defined his career.
After 10 years of messing about with the house…it is finally finished.
We drove to Shoreditch for another wander around the back streets and do a little Christmas shopping. The shops are heaving with customers. There is NO evidence of a recession here. I bought a huge Christmas pudding from St John’s and some great socks. Everything else that we wanted to buy, like a sweater in All Saints, was irritatingly sold out.
We had lunch at Shoreditch House where I bumped into Robert. I knew I would. Very handsome.
Ate gorgeous traditional Sunday roast beef. Dog in a bag under the table.
Last night Carol and I walked to our local labour politician’s Christmas party. It is amazing how they, like so many local Whitstable people, read this blog. I am delighted! Our host and his wife are good, old-fashioned socialists..the sort McCarthy and now Sarah Palin HATES.
Surely I couldn’t possibly be surrounded by so many devilishly intelligent left wingers who were, like me, excited by the wholly unexpected political reinvigoration of the young we saw last week in London? This, after so many years of inertia from our traditionally vocal students.
We salute you British students and urge you to continue to daub, poke, shout..etc. I give you permission to make this government as uncomfortable as you possibly can.
Apparently the mad, bad Duchess of Cornwall was ‘poked with a stick’ by a demonstrator. It was positively revolutionary! Tim’s great friend David Gilmour‘s son was photographed hanging off the cenotaph (our national war memorial) great! Polly and David are very embarrassed, the son, apparently…isn’t.
The Duchess of Cornwall poked with a stick..like something dead in the road.
What else have I been up to? Good God…the most beautiful man in Wheelers last night. A cabby from Essex. 29 years old, navy blue eyes and the reddest lips. I resisted taking his number but I know for sure that once a path is crossed it will cross again. He was beautiful. We chatted on Whitstable High Street and you know when a man looks directly into your eyes…you know that feeling.
What else? Went to local farmer’s market and bought a shoulder of goat for dinner this week.
Keith, when we got home this evening, gave me a pot of Medlar jelly that he made with fruit he found at a friends country house..it had a wonderful taste. Another strange coincidence ? Only this week I learned what a medlar was. Now I have a pot of it.
We ate stilton and delicious Christmas cake made by his boy friend of six years.
Driving to Paris tomorrow to get rid of car as the hospital treatment kicks in on Tuesday. Can’t say that I am looking forward to it but hey ho.
I love Shoreditch too. I love Soho. I love rioting students.
I love (particularly) the paint splattered Rolls that the parasite Prince Charles and the hag Camilla were caught in the other day by the ‘off with their heads’ militant protestors. hahaah.
I am really loving being home.
It has settled something in me. I am no longer so angry. I am calm.
After my fuck session (which will do me for some time I might add) I wandered happily all over Shoreditch.
I stopped in at a number of cool looking shops: like the funky Japanese run clothes shop that sold padded linen overwear, the odd man’s pop up shop that sold Swedish soldiers head-gear and ‘vintage’ socks.
A shop that sells second-hand mens socks. Eww.
I dropped into White Cube and resisted calling Jay.
The show was spectacularly lame. The entire space devoted to a 37 year old artist called Rachel Kneebone.
Lamentations 2010 is the name of the downstairs show.
Huge white porcelain tangled/mangled/reconstituted genitals on huge marble plinths set against slate grey walls..beautifully lit. The usual soulless, inchoate nonsense you might expect to find in White Cube.
They reminded one..obviously of the Chapman brothers and their obsession with the dark, chaotic imagery of the unconscious.
Jay is already showing new artists who cannibalize existing White Cube artists.
Apparently Kneebone is expressing the ‘trauma of death, loss and grief’ and shown differently these works might very well have achieved her aim but so elegantly displayed they had the guts knocked right out of them.
I went upstairs to see the rest of the show but was told to leave as I had the dog with me.
I wasn’t leaving the Little Dog outside so I left.
I wandered around. I met a man in the street who offered to blow me but I hadn’t showered that morning after a night of sex… I declined more for his benefit.
I found a wonderful shop called Labour and Wait which can be found at:
This charming store is really worth a visit. I thought, when I found the 1940′s lilac, enameled milk-boiling pot pictured below: Oooh, I thought, my friend Marilyn Phipps would like this.
As if by magic..who did I bump into today?
Marilyn Phipps!
Marilyn has the most wonderful home in Seasalter called The Battery.
The Battery, a nineteenth-century naval building, is a huge, bright blue, wooden house that sits right on the Whitstable beach and faces onto a 120ft secluded sea-front.
The Battery is a shrine to Forties ‘utility’. The kitchen was put in during the Forties when the house was used as a holiday retreat for disadvantaged children.
Marilyn has carried on the Forties theme throughout the house. The two huge wooden doors between the dining room and kitchen were made in the Forties for Ramsgate post office. The kitchen walls are lined with teapots, sugar shakers, vinegar jars, and salt cellars.
A huge kitchen clock was bought locally and the chunky table was already there.
The Battery can be incredibly hard to keep warm. Marilyn solved that problem by installing an enormous wood-burner for the dining room. She painted it midnight blue, making it more abstract sculpture than functional heater…she calls it The Beast.
The Battery has a fascinating history, and features in the book Wooden Houses. It was built as two big wooden sheds at the end of the nineteenth century. The first housed two cannons, the second was a drill hall for sailors, and during WW1 it was a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.
Marilyn still get’s people visiting who remember it from their childhood holidays in the Forties, saying they had the happiest time of their life here.
Wait! Did I tell you that they found a strangled woman in the room I was staying in at Soho House NYC? I can’t wait to stay there again.
Spent the past couple of days in London. Stayed at Dean Street Town House which is just perfect. Perfectly well-appointed. Huge rooms, pale pink curtains, heavily interlined. A wonderful shower and a great coffee-making facility. Delicious, hand-made biscuits. The little dog and I luxuriated in acres of white linen and huge, fluffy pillows.
This morning I walked to Oxford Street through Golden Square. Lovely to be home in London. Lovely. I was stopped by a beautiful, blue-eyed youth who wanted to talk about the little dog.
The beautiful youth not withstanding the streets are unusually crammed with ugly British people Christmas shopping. Big faces on bald heads. Prematurely middle age. Marching up and down Oxford Street clutching at grim paper bags and their final straw. Pasty, miserable, bespectacled boats.
Boat race=face.
The damp streets. The gray sky. Oh this is my darling England.
Stopped in at a pop up gallery on Berwick Street and bought:
By Christian Brett.
I thought in the circumstances..very appropriate!
Anyway, if you are interested in this and other work go to:
As a free gift, comes with every purchase, they gave me an original art work by Banksy….a brown paper bag with a Marks and Spencer type logo that reads ‘Marks and Stencils’ and is already selling on eBay for ninety quid.
Had a long chat with the curator Sam (knows Wendy Asher) who felt that the whole STREET ART movement had been suspended in aspic for the past decade and I think that he may very well have hit the nail on the head. He didn’t feel as if he had ‘grown up’ that things had remained static, unevolved, complacent.
My own contemporary art world gripe: how come so few artists have anything relevant to say about world altering current events like Iraq? For instance? Who is making work about that?
Most conceptual, contemporary art is so bloody insular, self obsessed and BOURGOISE. The entitled, bloated Tracy Emin (for instance) has become unashamedly bourgoise and so, I am sad to say, are the rest of the YBA wankers.
Why make work about a corrupt war when I can tell you all about my vagina/blood/self?
The art of ME. I am all I ever think about…etc.
It’s Jay’s fault. He loves a good title and a decorative flourish. Jay Jopling has never been interested in political art and that, my friends, is very sad.
I mentioned Joseph Kosuth to Sam the pop up shop curator as an example of an artist who might have an opinion about the war and the bloody peace.
The ‘value’ of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.
Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation. It has also been called Idea art, Post-Object art, and Dematerialized art because it often assumes the form of a proposition (i.e., a document of the artist’s thinking) or a photographic document of an event. Conceptual art practices emerged at a time when the authority of the art institution and the preciousness of the unique aesthetic object were being widely challenged by artists and critics.
Conceptual artists interrogated the possibilities of art-as-idea or art-as-knowledge, and to those ends explored linguistic, mathematical, and process-oriented dimensions of thought and aesthetics, as well as invisible systems, structures, and processes.
Artists such as Joseph Kosuth and members of the Art & Language group wrote theoretical essays that questioned the ways in which art has conventionally acquired meaning. In some cases such texts served as the art works themselves.
Dinner with Nicola and Chris on Saturday night. Lovely. We ate oysters, game pie and vegetables. Ended up flirting with a cute doorman with footballers thighs in some club on Dean Street. He was ‘straight’ so I walked away. Damn.
This evening I met Charlie at a huge ‘A’ gay Christmas event. It was great fun and I met loads of people. Lovely (sexy, charming, witty and down-to-earth) Dutch/Kiwi man and his friend but the BEST was a gallerist/singer songwriter called Robert Diament who I could totally FALL for. I kissed him goodnight.
Out sexy gay man with a brain. Huh? How did that happen?
Well, it’s not going to happen In the cold light of this sober day (Monday morning) he’s far too young and until my heart is mended…I really can’t imagine letting anyone near me.
Drove back to Whitstable with Alma who is very funny and we giggled for miles.
Anyway, as I have said before..after letting you know my initial impressions of someone ‘special’ I won’t be writing about them again. Can you tell that I am having a nice time? That I am happy? Can you? I am safe and warm (house is a bit chilly) and enveloped by love?
I forgot to mention yesterday…I bought a hat at Kokon to Zai. It is rather splendid.
Totally trapped in Whitstable! So many old friends to be trapped in the town with. Lovely seeing everyone. Had tea in Wheelers with Anita and Michael. Adam and I drank more tea and ate mince pies by the fire at Carol’s house. Saw Tim at Tea and Times where Ronnie came a’visiting and I caught up on all the local gossip.
Ronnie showed us pictures on his phone of a dead polar bear.
Meant to be in London today dealing with Jake’s iPod fiasco but God dumped a trillion tons of snow on Kent so we are all stranded. Hurrah!
The Little Dog just LOVES the snow as you can see from these pictures.
Dog on Beach
►
I am rather hoping that I get stranded here for Christmas!
By the way, did I ever mention to you that whilst I was in the police cell that miserable day in July Jake met a man from Manhunt and sex with him. That was supportive wasn’t it?
A very old friend returned my call yesterday. I had no idea that he was here in California and not in London. It really lifted my spirits. I could stop writing right there. My spirits are lifted. At peace. The comfort of listening to the voice of a man who had known me and loved me through thick and thin. I am greedy to hear him again. He is within 100 miles of me. I need to see him. I need to spend time with him.
I was so unwilling to let him love me when we were together. My loss.
When are we ready to accept love? I wasn’t ready to accept love for very many years. I did not understand how love between men worked. It terrified and confused me. My old friend loved me very much but I didn’t know what that meant. I suppose that Jake must have felt the same way. My loving him was confusing and scary. How do men love each other? How do I say I love you to another man?
When I have fallen in love with women the very act of saying I love you is said with ease, after all..every song on the radio, every poem about romantic love seems written about the love that exists between men and women.
When Elton or George Michael sang about love and disguised that they were singing about men I felt betrayed. Tell me what it feels like to fall in love with another man. To lose them. To reflect on that separation. Sing that song. Read that poem.
No wonder our popular culture has sunk into a world of miserable hook ups.
I met someone else from off-line. He brought me toys for the dogs. This morning the cow and the bear lay abandoned on the carpet.
Like children have been playing here.
Eric popped by. Other people came in the morning. I was grumpy because my leg hurt. Had massage which seemed to help. Realised that I have not been touched with any kindness since Jake. To be touched. When my Mother stayed I offered to get her a massage but she balked. She said that she didn’t like the idea of a stranger touching her.
Eric asked how I was doing. How am I dealing with the Jake thing? Well, I think about him occasionally..when the masseur was working on my back. Thoughts shifting between loving and loathing. I allowed him into my very soul. It’s hard to wash away this particular stain.
So, when the old friend called, my old love..it reminded me that we can all heal. We heal, that time is the greatest distance between two people. That one day no vestige of him will remain.
I thought about Jake when the man arrived bearing gifts. That he would have had sex with the man but I could not. Part of me wanted to prove that I could. I wanted to leap on him and do what was expected of me but I could not. I simply can’t have sex with strangers. I can’t. To know someone is my aim. He stayed for a couple of hours chatting and by the time he was about to leave I felt that in some small way I knew him. The very act of leaving made him attractive to me.
Everything seems ruined by Jake. The joy, the enthusiasm, the monumental optimism that I used to begin my day.
After Eric left I watched make-over shows and cooking competitions. I did not go out and meet friends as I had agreed. Every night this week there have been invitations. Every single night. I could have hobbled out last night but I did not…favouring this perfect isolation.
I am going to hang pictures. One picture that has stubbornly refused to find a place to hang.
Late night call from another addict..struggling with his life. I am so glad he called. It gave purpose to another day.
Of all the men I have loved I seldom see any of them. To hear the voice of my old love within 100 miles of where I am…well…it is possible to forgive. To love and be loved by those you never thought you would love again. It is possible. I know it.
As for my tiny black maggot? I can’t leave here until I know that everything is OK. I don’t want to lose everything. I need to go home. I need to get this sorted but I just can’t until I know that nothing is going to go wrong here.
Now, all I have to do is pack up remaining items and move out of LA. Then it’s the dog orientated trip home flying via Paris to London.
There I will have my operation and hope that it hasn’t spread.
You know that I like to tell you the truth here on these pages. Well, I want to share that I found being in NYC really miserable. Why? I was anxious that I might bump into him even though I had texted him telling him that I would be there and to avoid where I live and SHNYC.
Even so, I felt terrible and dreaded dread dreaded bumping into him.
I dread the small claims case in October too. I dread seeing him. I wish that these painful feelings would just go away. I wish he had never contacted me. Why did he fucking contact me?
Manhunt date number 3 was good fun.
A giant of a man turned up…it turned out that we had friends in common. We talked about Jake.
It’s funny that even though he had been through a similar experience with a man his immediate response was to chastise me for getting involved with someone who was BLATANTLY unready to be gotten involved with.
Yet, as I have found out..we ALL seem to make really bad choices in love. My straight men friends routinely describe the females they get involved with as insane. The women I know describe the men they get involved with as douche bags. People make mistakes in love.
It is very hard to control a yearning heart.
I am just so angry with myself that, a. I believed him. b. fell in love. c. took him home.
Why the hell didn’t he tell his friends that he was gay rather than me? Why? Somehow my TV confession spurred him on to confess..yet, as I pointed out to manhunt date number 3..I am NOT a TV character..I am a man. I am profoundly UNLIKE the way they edited me on TV.
This is ripping me apart. It is just so unfair that I let some crazy fan into my life who wanted me to be like I was on TV and I…fucking IDIOT..fell in love with him.
I was on Dan’s lap top today checking a friend’s Facebook page and there he was making some Camille Paglia comment. His new profile picture was weird. Mugs and fruit. His hair was all flat and he looked thin.
I know that sooner or later this mess will pass. That I will start to forget.
You may think me mad but really what you are reading is the real and daily trial of being an addict. That I can have all at the same time huge compassion for him and a consummate loathing.
There was a moment is Sanary sur Mer in France where he was sitting at the end of a jetty looking at the sunset. I slipped quietly away. He was thinking about her. He was sad.
Thankfully there is still one sacred place I didn’t take him. It remains mine. Unseen by crazy fan eyes.
I pray every day for the obsession to be lifted but I guess it will vanish in God’s time and not mine.
It sure is odd living in Malibu again. As if the past 18 months in Hollywood just never happened. It has been raining and chilly all day today. The gardeners came yesterday. 8 of them buzzing around the property dealing with the last 18 months worth of growth. Today they returned to attack the larger trees and make them fire proof. Lets face it though..there are no fires imminent. This year has been British damp. Poor little dog is shivering on the sofa.
12 people for lunch yesterday. I flayed a chicken and cooked it with rosemary and lemons from the garden.
A great bunch. Lots of love. Surrounded by a great deal of unconditional love and conversation. JAR and me are about the same age and have trodden the same path for many, many years but only really met here in LA. She is possibly one of the most gorgeous women in the world. Beautiful on the outside and equally beautiful on the inside.
It was a wonderful welcome back to Malibu. Tomorrow night I am having dinner with Jenny A at SHLA. She just drove from Mexico en route to London. I am trying to fill my days with old friends. They seem to more than adequately fill the void.
I am going to Palm Springs this weekend to a gay sober convention. Meetings, meetings meetings. Trying to connect with my tribe. Then, rather annoyingly I have to go to NYC. I am REALLY not looking forward to that.
When one can peek through at the various secret paths and vistas this place becomes magical. You know, don’t you that I am putting the house on the market? I am SURE it’s going to be impossible to sell but hey, let’s try shall we?
If I can get everything here and sell the house I will then try selling everything IN the house. I wanna get out of here with one small bag of treasure and the Little Dog.
Travel light from now on. Too much stuff. Far too much STUFF. Inside and outside my head.
The best part of that insightful comment I received the other day was the advice about getting strong around my health and finances. I really have to deal with shit in those areas.
My back aches. My balls ache. My head hurts. My fingers are dry. My tummy is swollen. My eyes are sore.
Yet, I am going in the right direction. I really DO try and make a better life for myself. I am not going to drink and take drugs but sometimes I think it would be a whole heap easier. I bet I could meet a drug fucked loser in twenty seconds if I towed the line..went to gym, took drugs, drank at bars.
I went too far this time. Vile beyond description. Going quietly insane here. Not so quietly. Very publicly insane. Somebody wrote to me imploring me to get help. I don’t really know how. The feelings are so overwhelming. This has nothing to do with anyone currently in my life or recently out of it. I was reading over my blog pre January and it’s like reading a different person. I have become madder than the maddest man in madland. Totally unhinged.
You can read what he/she said at the end of the DEAD WEIGHT blog. For some odd reason it cut through everything and made sense. I took notice. 8.43pm on Monday night I am taking notice. I dread the morning when the fear sets in. The fear and loathing.
You have to believe me I am battling with terrible demons at dawn. Lost and empty.
Trying to juggle everything so I can get back to London and go to hospital. Perhaps it’s just time to let the balls fall where they may and leave.
What he/she said about Jennie and the big dog was accurate. I make myself vulnerable and then I punish those about me who see it.
Listen, I’m not trying to excuse myself. Today there are no excuses for my behaviour.
I’m just trying to work it out. Trying to navigate my way back to sanity.
There is no therapist. I just have to accept what is happening and go home. It’s time..but I’ve said that a million times. It’s time to buy goats or leave a situation or..well..there are millions of examples of just how I say I want to do something then I never do it.
Rather flagellate him I flagellate myself. This wasn’t how it was before. I can read the difference between me then and me now.
I would really like to cry but I can’t. Too many tears shed for nothing.
It’s amazing that in less than three weeks I will be celebrating a sobriety birthday. Huh. Perhaps I should just say I have one day.
The pain in my balls and back is getting worse but I think that this might just be in my head.
What would it mean if I just took one drink? If I could drown these terrible feelings of loathing (and self loathing) I am overcome by?
As I was stacking boxes for my move I found a whole heap of diaries from the 1980′s. The first day to day diary I kept was in 1982 and that was primarily because life had become so exciting.
We open the first book on this day September 5th, 1982. I am 22 years old.
I am in Greece, on the island of Spetses staying with Sir John and Lady Russell. I am still, at this time, Lord Rendlesham and have flown from Paris to Athens with an older nobleman called Guy de la Bedoyere of whom I had tired.
It was Guy’s Turner that I had marveled in Paris a few days earlier and whose butler, much to my horror, had washed in a washing machine my new Crolla ties.
The magazine Harper’s Bazzar had published the pictures of my infamous birthday party thrown for me by Scott Crolla at the Almeida Theatre. Word was just reaching me in Greece that people were not at all happy. Not at all.
If you click on the diary pages you can read the original entries.
I am in love with a beautiful Swiss boy called Robert and it is he that I wave goodbye to at the beginning of the entry.
The following year September 1983 there is no diary entry until I am released from prison on the 18th November.
September 1984 I am in rehearsal for Pornography: a Spectacle at the ICA in London. There are huge articles about us all in Time Out, The Face and a now defunct London mag called City Limits. I am living in Balham with a girl called Victoria. By day I am in a play about gay pornography and by night I sleep with what was effectively my girlfriend. So was the complexity of my life. ”Every gesture must be full and complete.” says Neil. Neil Bartlett, director of the show. During these days he and I began to fall out. Irrevocably as it turned out. When we left each other in Toronto months later after our North American tour we would never speak again.
September 1985 I am writing whilst stuck in a tunnel under the alps on a train from Paris to Venice. My and Ivan Cratwright’s great adventure to Venice. Staying, en route with Fred Hughes in Paris.
The diary for 1986 was missing but now found. I will transcribe the entry. I am yet again in another heterosexual relationship with a woman called Louise. Why?
“Oh dear, I am in The General Trading Company off Sloan Square – Louise by my side. Firstly I did not expect the Bahamian bombshell to come back to Whitstable to see me. I rather thought that she might have given me a miss.
Yesterday before Louise arrived my pinks from Kingstone (?) Cottage arrived, they came to me in a brown cardboard box wrapped in local newspaper. I planted them carefully, laying a foundation of stones for good drainage and surrounded the root system with peat. Maria helped out the best she could but spent the best part of yesterday drawing on the beach. The day before that too she had worked hard on minimalist drawings incorporating the seascape – noticeably the foreshore and the horizon, terribly witty references to dead fish – (?) a family with prawn.
Ivan (Cartwright), we collected him from Whitstable station – Korda (Marshall) and I, he was in such a good frame of mind . He prattled on about being arrested for car thieving and told a remarkable story about having been picked up on Park Lane (London) dressed only in a full length pink, synthetic fur coat, cowboy boots and a micro polka dot bikini! He was picked up by a vast black men in a Buick.
Korda was completely freaked out by Ivan and as soon as he had the opportunity – left. However, Ivan enchanted both Rachel (Whiteread) and (?) with his wit and intelligence. We left for the pub far too late. Ivan was wearing a pair of black cotton stockings, a black tee-shirt and short black sweat pants all topped off with this platinum blond hair and that face which as you know contorts like nobodies business.
We all slept late and woke early, that’s why when big bertha arrived (Louise) I was knackered. We took off for a long adventurous but utterly fruitless journey to a closed park. We did go to Beech House (Hospital School in Chartham) I remembered yet again the horror of being taken there when I was a child – I remember that it was in that place that my life changed direction and I began to fight, so it was rather apt that I went there – my life again on the edge of a potential nightmare. India, 8th October 10.15 – 9 months. It rings in my ears.
As we drove to London yesterday Louise and (?) wrote that evening’s narrative. For she as an eye for the ironic. Firstly we locked ourselves out of Louise’s car and house then we saw the corpse of a man freshly killed, his legs crossed at the ankles, in the road. His clothing partially hidden under a green waterproof police modesty blanket. All of us knew that ambulances take only the living to be mended as best they can. Death has no care. I wondered about his family. The pulse stopped and the narrative ending for him. We drove slowly. Later the image of the corpse quietened me and made me listen.
Louise is my strength whom I do not deserve. Late last night I felt truly happy and secure. That’s enough isn’t it? Enough for a man who rarely lives safely, who is destined to become a lonely old man with personality problems.”
September 1987 I am a patient in the Henderson Hospital in Sutton Surrey where I spent the majority of that year. I had a breakdown after a particularly bad bout of Hep B. The Jay who would be fetching me from hospital is, of course, Jay Jopling.
For some odd reason I did not keep a complete diary in 1988. I am not fully well from my breakdown but have decided to go to New York to see Ana Corbero and Colin Cawdor. Paul Benny the artist was also staying in the huge apartment. An entire floor of a converted girls school just over the Williamsburg Bridge.
There is no entry for these dates in 1989.
1990, my thirtieth year. Living in Chelsea with Phillipa having what looks like a rather glamorous time.
1991 Coppers Bottom has opened at Sadler’s Wells. Karen, the lead actress is threatening to walk. I am now living with Anthony H. in South London.
1992 Tim and I are laughing about Damien Hirst not winning the Turner Prize that he seemed so certain to win. I rather cruelly called Jay and told him how sorry I was whilst sniggering with Tim.
Not long before I get sober. Just another 5 years.
After 1992 I kept a journal less and less. I began every year enthusiastically writing everyday like I do now in the blog but by July had lost interest or life was simply too overwhelming.
We used to giggle together in Quaker meetings and she and her wonderful family became the mainstay of my adolescence.
For her, I will always have a place in my heart.
She called me today from Oxford, where she lives, and we chatted for an hour or so about our lives.
It was so reassuring to hear the voice of an old friend who, even though we have only dipped periodically in and out of each others lives, as the decades passed we maintained a life long love for each other.
It was wonderful to catch up and maybe she will come visit me here in LA.
As you are aware I have still not made any definite plans to deal with the lumpy ball tumor situation.
I have been avoiding doing anything about it.
The emotions I have been going through with Jake seem to take my mind off the critical decisions I have to make.
The bottom line is this: I must go to London and sort it out.
I can’t afford to begin the surgery here and so have no option but to go home. As soon as I move out of my place I can think clearly about taking the next step.
I reread JB’s letter this morning and feel a little less angry with him. He is not a monster, more like a confused kid.
I have to learn to be more compassionate. I have to learn to forgive. I MUST remember that he has been through a great deal. Anyway, I did as he asked and removed all mention of his last name and occupation. It was kinda cruel to have done it in the first place.
I have had an online tantrum and now it’s time to try to put the pieces of the smashed vase back together and hope that we can go our separate ways without derision, scorn or hatred.
I have said and written things that although true were insensitive and unkind. He is just a regular guy with a broken heart. He wasn’t to know that being friends was the last thing I could ever imagining happening after we stopped being lovers.
Resentment, shame and fear (as usual) shape my relationship to the rest of the world.
This morning I tried to be of service to another recovering addict. It made me feel a great deal better about my own situation.
I really, really loved and cared for that timid man. He was quite unlike anyone I have ever loved before. Everyone that met him was delighted that I had found such a normal, sweet man. I think that we had, when we weren’t fighting the best time. We laughed a great deal. We shared a number of the same interests and in a perfect world where two unencumbered men could come together, unfettered and unaligned we could have made something work out.
It is not a perfect world. It is an imperfect world riven with complications and aberrations.
It seems that only the very few get to share their lives with those they love without catastrophic problems. I wish I could be one of those people but I am not, I will never be, I can never be.
That is why I committed to being single. To being alone. To relish and respect a single life.
I am a single man who will not hanker after my own death… because being single is perceived by so many as a crime against humanity.
You know what I’m doing? I’m going out! Started the evening feeling sorry myself. Fuck that.
I sent an SOS to Amanda that I may or may not need. But most of all, I am not going to be beaten by 5mm of something black on my balls. It’s not a death sentence. It’s black on the scan. I wonder what color it is in real life?
I’m listening to very loud music.
Old fashioned shit. I know. But I’m allowed to. I don’t have to answer to anybody.
I bought Jasper Conran‘s beautiful book Country. Packed with so many beautiful images. Try looking at THAT on a fucking kindle.
I cleaned the apartment. I sorted my papers. I totally forgot that I had to call the police station in London to deal with the iPod incident. Never mind. I would rather be in a cell than have this maggot growing inside me. It’s all relative. I read Michael’s brilliant script. After I finish writing this I will take the little dog to see the cats on Cherokee so he can squeal like a pig with excitement. Cat! Cat!
I have to submit my HLN idea. I received a lovely text message from an old lover in NYC who is eager to get together..balls or no balls.
Meeting Seb at SHLA at 11pm. Fuck this sitting around shit. I need solution! have I LEARNED nothing from all those years sitting in church halls and masonic lodges reading the recipe of the 12 steps?
Take action my friends! Get out of that shit relationship. Don’t be bowed by illness! Eat! If you feel lonely get out onto the streets! Don’t give in to the furies. TAKE ACTION.
December 21st, 2009-August 12th, 2010
Jake has been in my life..for months…for most of it was an acting out dream come true.
Oh I WILLINGLY gave up my sexual sober time.
We talked almost every day. Why trash those precious few months? For the time being I will celebrate the time we spent together. Although, sooner or later it will just feel…embarrassing.
In the long run it will mean far more to him than it will to me, Try as he might he will never be able to unstitch me from his story. I am, after all, the one who tore him out of the closet and in so doing rescued that poor girl from just one more day of deceit and lies.
I said to him on February 9th:
All I know is as the years pass this will weigh heavier on your mind and every time you look at J your girlfriend/wife/mother of your child you will know that there is a fundamental deceit.
If it is not me or the Hungarian it will be another man..and another and the outcome will always be the same.
One day you will meet a perfect man and then you will resent her, begin to hate her because it is not him…
I am the FUCKING HERO. Beautifully written…don’t you think?
And for all you guys and gals who have been shat on..here is a shitty, campy song for you to remind yourself that we can all laugh at how stupid we have been:
We say that to each other in the UK all the time. It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just the way we check in with each other. I check in with you and you check in with me. Even if I am not OK I thank you for asking.
When I taught him, the companion, what it meant he played at asking me if I was OK but the effect was still the same. I felt good, checked in with, placated.
Americans, when you ask them if they are OK, worry that something looks wrong with them. It worries them, disrupts their day.
So, don’t ask an American if he/she is OK unless you think that there is something wrong. You’ll do more harm than good.
It’s Monday morning. I have just been to therapy.
The weekend was a delicious blend of fun, laughter and me feeling better than I have for 8 months. I am just so happy. Happy doesn’t necessarily mean well-behaved. I have been delightfully rude.
Ivan Massow is in town, such an unpleasant man who was the ‘source’ in the Caroline Roux article about me for the Guardian. The source who was too scared to be openly vicious about me. Anyway, there he was yesterday having lunch, slimeing all over my straight friend Ben. Who in their right mind gave that man the ICA to run? WHO in their right mind thought he should stand as Mayor of London? Crazy!
Anyway, supposedly he is sober so I am trying not to hate him too much.
Thankfully he is losing his looks.
Saturday spent nearly all day in Malibu. Lunch in the Lumber Yard with Jon Aubry. I went to bed early Saturday night.
Breakfast on Sunday with Will and his dog Rocco. Stephen popped by at about 11 and then lunch with Sharon Swart. Delightful. She attended a flower arranging class and brought to lunch a huge bouquet of roses and hydrangea.
Sunday night Michael and I went to a party in Silverlake. There was a performance piece for us to watch. Three 10 minute sections of a larger work about a man accused of burning down his house and killing his daughters. The first part was indecipherable. The second and third part, although messy, were much better and had good, strong ideas. The director asked what I thought..so I told him. Bad idea. Nobody wants to hear the truth.
We were meant to meet Jamie Lee Curtis after that party but we did not.
Taka came by late on Sunday. He is a funny one. Editor, Japanese..chatty.
Oh, before I forget..the new Malibu renters arrived on Saturday and are very happy in the house. They are the SWEETEST people from the UK who loved the house the moment they stepped through the door and from whom I have not heard since..no news is GREAT news as far as renters are concerned.
I made a ‘to do’ list for Monday that includes all the boring stuff I have been putting off for weeks but essential if I am going to stay on top of things.
I went to therapy on Saturday morning and shared my good news. My only worry about therapy is that I am surrounded by so many miserable, desperate men.
It’s now Monday morning and I am positioned at my ‘desk’ at SHLA. Papers and briefcase open and ready for action. My list of things ‘to do’ is already half eaten. THICK lines scored through the things already done.
Listen, I have no idea why I am so happy but one thing is for sure..it has nothing to do with anyone else. In fact, I was briefly annoyed by the actions of the other last night but after a few seconds ceased to be. There was a time in the very recent past when the other could ruin my entire evening by being snippy. Not anymore.
Whenever one has a meaningful relationship one tends to ignore when things don’t add up. Denial gluing disparate parts of one story into something believable.
I am not annoyed with him..a little disappointed in me.
Disappointed that I have been so desperate to make our relationship work. Just writing that down makes me feel sick. That I would have done anything to make another man love, want and care for me. For the past 8 months I have devoted my time, energy, love and money to a stranger who bust his way into my life after seeing me on TV. It is a testament to my own low self-esteem just how much I was prepared to ignore in order to feel loved.
I am grateful that I fell in love and really got to know a man, be seen by another man.You may think that I have been foolish but in fact the last few months have been some of the best of my whole life. I miss him. I do. But what I miss doesn’t really exist. I miss being cared about, thought about, fantasized about, included and lastly, but most importantly, I miss being loved.
Every decision I made these past few months has been inspired by my love for him. Consequently I now have to make decisions based on my needs, my desires and my career.
I have vowed not to work out our stuff here in my blog so I won’t.
All you, my readers, need to know is that I am ok..are you ok?
My friend Sebastian’s father was my father’s very best friend. When Sebastian first met me he knew exactly who I was.
My father was his hero. His description of Kuros almost perfectly matches how I have heard myself described. He cut quite a dash, he was impeccably dressed and when he entered a room people took notice, he could also be very, very bad-tempered.
Not many people have very nice things to say about my father. My mother, his business colleagues, some of my brothers and sisters and their mothers all of them seem a little too ready to condemn him yet, strangely, I am not. Even though he wanted nothing to do with me and treated my Mother very badly I am still willing to forgive him. It is touching that he had such a profoundly positive effect on Sebastian.
We are without doubt very similar in temperament but unlike when I die…when he died he died very, very rich.
He was without doubt a colourful/controversial figure.
Sebastian’s father owned a restaurant in London where my father met all of his wives. I still don’t know a great deal about him but I know for sure that his second wife disappeared one night with her children never to see him again. I know that his third wife had a terrible time with his temper and cavorting. I know that he loved backgammon and opium. I have been told, although these might be myths, that he was thrown out of a second floor window by the notorious gangster Kray twins causing him to have a life long limp? That he wrapped a sports car around a lamp-post severely damaging his eye? That he was implicated in a massive robbery but never formally charged?
He certainly owned a restaurant and an antique shop and his big break came when he met a profligate Saudi Prince who bought everything my father could lay his hands on and sold to the Prince at exorbitant prices.
Isn’t it odd that whilst he owned an antique shop in London (only feet away from where I would one day live with JBC) I was trawling through the antique/junk shops in Whitstable and Canterbury. That his restaurant was only a block away from where I would settle with Phil. That we may very well have passed each other in the street and never known who one another was.
I met a man on the train to Shrewsbury I was convinced was my father.
He was not my father.
I felt as if I were not allowed to ask Sebastian questions about my father, as if the topic were still off-limits, disallowed, forbidden. There is still a huge amount of shame surrounding his name. As if even the barest mention of him a terrible catastrophe would somehow happen.
Yet, there is nothing more I need to know about him. I know that I am his son, that we are cut from the same cloth and that it scares me to hear about him because in some way I am forced to accept my own flaws/defects/shortcomings.
That, my friends, is incredibly uncomfortable.
My father died in 1998 of pancreatic cancer. I never met him although I feel as I have. A protracted and messy financial battle ensued after his death. There are all sorts of stories about who stole what from whom but my four younger siblings seemed to do OK. He left at least 8 children behind, two ex-wives (did he ever bother getting a divorce from any of them?) and a widow.
It was a pleasure discussing him with Sebastian because Sebastian has fond memories and…I believe him.
The South of France is my kind of South and my kind of France.
After a delayed, bumpy, listless, sanguine (huh), laconic train-ride to Marseille with little to eat other than the ham and cheese I bought at Monoprix we finally arrived on the Riviera at 2 in the morning.
Of course the taxi driver tried to charge us 20 Euros for a 6-euro trip but I refused point-blank to give in to his extortion.
Marseille is the oldest city in France.
The Hotel Tonic, accommodation that Eric very kindly found for us, was directly on the Vieux Port, which, unsurprisingly, was less romantic than I remembered it when we – Richard Green and I – visited here 20 years ago.
At 3am bawdy groups of handsome Arabs sit around the harbor, some wearing dejellaba, gesticulating and smoking.
We walked the dog then fell into two tiny beds and fell fast asleep.
The first part of the first day was incredibly frustrating.
Our plan to rent a car and drive to Nice was scuppered by Hertz et al who said they had no cars. They told us gravely that there were in fact no cars to hire in the entire region!
After the preceding days of London drama we fell into an immediate funk. Being forced to stay an extra night in Marseille, getting on each other’s nerves. When we finally returned to the Hotel Tonic I slumped into the elevator and told him that I wanted to go home.
Tired and demoralized after all that had happened in London, unable to rent a car, sleeping in a miserable room, not hearing from the people we were meant to be staying with in St Tropez..
As it turned out it was really the best thing that could have happened.
Circumstance has a rather wonderful way of shape shifting.
Firstly, the good people of the Hotel Tonic upgraded us from our tiny room to a huge room in the attic with a majestic bathroom.
Once there we set about trying to rent a car on-line and immediately did so. The car paid for, as was a train from Nice to Paris on Thursday, we could relax for the first time in 48 hours. I unpacked my suitcase, had a long shower and washed the little dog.
Once settled, we decided to walk up the steep hill to the Notre-Dame de la Garde, the church with the huge golden angel on it overlooking all Marseille.
On our way there we explored the tiny, cobbled streets, leaving the tourists at the port, having my hat blow off my head many times in the refreshing gusts of wind that grew stronger as we climbed the hill.
It occurred to me, once we got there, that my climbing Runyon and praying was obviously a very human spiritual solution. Climbing clears the mind, exhausts the body and once at the top one is somehow prepared to pray.
There was a beautiful boy leaving the church when we arrived, pulling his shirt off for the decent. He had fluffy black hair and perfect disk like nipples. We were both entranced. Walking on either side of him two older men complimenting his perfect body. There was something utterly erotic yet innocent about all three of them.
Dogs not allowed in the church I briefly sat on my own and prayed for serenity.
On the way down the hill we chanced upon and made a reservation at the Passarelle on the rue du Plan Fourmiguier, a small yet intriguing looking restaurant tucked behind the Radisson Hotel on the Vieux Port.
I knew immediately that the Passerelle would make us both very happy. With blue and white awnings over the decked al fresco tables and chairs it all looked reassuringly authentic. As if to prove my point a very chic woman was cooking in the kitchen and took our reservation.
We discovered, quite by chance, a famous bakery called Four des Navettes on the rue Sainte that has sold scented loaves and hard, rose smelling/tasting bread sticks since 1781. I bought the hard sticks of byzantine ecclesiastical ‘bread’ and a sugary ‘brioche’ that was, in fact, a huge doughnut. The bread sticks were disappointing…like eating deodorant.
After a well-deserved nap we dressed for dinner and walked the half-mile back to the Passerelle and ate the most delicious food in the most perfect circumstance. I started with the salad of jambon Palme, melon, mozzarella, rocket and basil sprinkled with toasted seeds. After my salad, a tagine of lamb and couscous (I hate the word garnished) but it was indeed garnished with a delicious stewed pear. He ate grilled Loupe and ratatouille.
Unable to choose between the four deserts we ordered three of them. Yogurt with honey, chocolate tart and fruit salad.
During the dinner there was a children’s fashion show, ten very sweet infants paraded, hand in hand in the most charming crocodile showing off very pretty, beautifully made dresses.
After eating every last mouthful we sat under the awning chatting for a very long time. Drinking coffee and smoking aromatic French cigarettes. The walk back to the hotel, past throngs of happy, drunk holidaymakers was a rather wonderful way to end what promised to be a rather miserable day.
We spent a very long time making love that night. It was perfect. Offering his ass to me. Cumming in his mouth.
The following morning we woke late, fled to the station collected our car; kangaroo hopped (stick shift) back to the Hotel Tonic where he manhandled the luggage into the tiny Ka and off we went.
Weaving our way East along the coast we discovered La Ciotat a small tourist town where we saw yet another beautiful man with a perfect smile and even more perfect body/nipples than the man on the steps leading from the church.
There were beaches and beaches covered with equally beautiful, tanned men…we gazed out of the car longingly. Gay men on vacation in the South of France looking at beautiful men. What could be more normal than that?
Interestingly and appropriately for us La Ciotat was the home to the first publicly projected movie by the Lumiere Brothers.
After a few hours of driving we settled into Sanary Sur Mer, a simple town that transformed at 7pm into a huge craft market and fete. In the Victorian bandstand a French rock band sang very spirited covers of amongst many, many others Maroon 5, The Band and Santana.
I upset the kebab shop man by buying kebab meat for the dog. The kebab man was a rude, nasty piece of work and I delighted in feeding the little dog his dinner even though the traveling companion ate half of it before the little thing had a chance.
We ate dinner in a small restaurant near the town center called (I can’t remember sorry). We started with the Moule Marinere then had the freshly caught grilled Tuna. He had the Paella, which had rabbit and chicken and huge prawns in it.
Two glasses of Rose for him only cost three euros. This made him very happy as he is incredibly careful about money.
Walked around the port back to our hotel and fell into a deep and immediate sleep.
Woke up at 11.30 this morning. That is LATE for me. Me! Me who is usually up so early. Anyway, we were going back to Whitstable today but I ended up spending the better part of my day at ChelseaPolice Station.
Why?
You may well ask.
A drama unfolded at the house that included a cast of unruly, drunk children a lost iPod touch and me trying to enforce an adolescent exit strategy. I mean, getting 5 unwelcome 15-year-old kids out of the house whilst Phil was at her Dad’s. Anyway, it all ended up with me being arrested and taken to the police station and then being let go.
The short story is this: I accused them of stealing an iPod touch. They accused me of spitting at them, which is a total lie, but it had to be investigated. So, I got cuffed and dragged to the police station.
Of course, our accusations were ignored. Impossible to substantiate.
Firstly, can I tell you how utterly charming the policemen were in the station. The Desk Sergeant, the constables, the detective..all utterly considerate and thoughtful and even though I had to spend an hour in a cell it really did not matter. Even the cell was clean, the toilet flushed and someone had stenciled a note for a drug ‘help line’ on the ceiling.
Much has changed since I was arrested 30 years ago.
Fingerprints are scanned, mug shots digital and every time I had to sign my name it was on a pad like you would find in a bank. Of course there were the usual host of nutter types being held there but sadly, since the mental hospitals were closed down the police and prison service are used to hold the insane until they can be reclaimed by the broken mental health system.
The detective who interviewed me was really good looking. Big blue eyes.
Now I just feel ghastly. I felt like crying in the station. How could this have happened? That kind of sad moment. In fact..I did shed a tear when the nice detective was interviewing me. Had odd feeling of shame telling him that I was gay.
I felt like I was defending our honor against those kids. They were HORRIBLE.
I am going to Victoria Station to help Jake and the Little dog who went off to Whitstable for the day.
Yesterday began with breakfast of cakes and coffee at Maison Bertaud on Greek Street with Tania who showed off her occasional gallery – very crowded with nondescript paintings by Noel Fielding.
The great find at the show was the animated video art piece tucked in the back of the cellar and REALLY worth checking out or indeed buying.
We had lunch at Patisserie Valerie and looked at the parade of boys and freaks.
Yesterday evening took taxi from Chelsea to Serpentine Gallery Pavilion opening at the behest of architect Tom Croft. Saw many people from the past who all seemed delighted to see me. The pavilion, designed by Jean Nouvel, was very red and surrounded by soggy turf. There was some consternation about his eligibility – apparently the point of this yearly event is to commission emerging architects not those in the twilight of their career.
We were invited to Richard Rogers house after the Serpantine event but I really couldn’t be bothered so we caught the bus back to Soho where we met Matt who pushed us into a cab and over the river to Vauxhall.
Toured sad, empty Vauxhall gay bars ending up in Balans back on Old Compton St eating DISGUSTING burger. I am going to pop in there after I have written this and complain about how bad it all was.
This morning I sat in BlueBird with, of all people, Manolo Blahnik who is looking very doddery and frail. He has a stick and his hair is all awry. Within the space of just one month Manolo and Christian Louboutin! These two great..the greatest grandees of ladies shoes. Christian is, of course, the young buck.
I have been away from London for the best part of a decade. My contemporaries all look a bit worse for wear. Worn out. Thank God I have been sober for so long!
Spoke to Tim briefly today. He admitted to having had botox. He looks amazing. Amazing.
On the bus to Soho I met Juanita Carberry who was a child in Africa at the time of the Happy Valley murder. She wrote a book called Child of the Happy Valley. Holly Aird played her in the film adaptation. So, I know Holly and Issie’s grandfather was the murderer…weird eh? What is even odder..Lavinia, Issie’s sister stayed at the house last night.
Lunch at Soho house with Sharon Marshall who is getting married in less than 8 weeks and is all of a quiver about flowers, bridesmaids dresses and who will photograph the event.
I left LA last week (July 2nd) though it actually feels like months ago, so much has happened. I flew into JFK with bags and dog and chaos. He was waiting for me and whisked me off to a beautiful house set in perfect woodland and rolling lawns.
We ate and walked and talked. I never tire of listening to him. We have done our fair share of soul-searching these past few months and now it is time to have a few laughs. I know that at the back of his mind he worries, that he is not truly free.
I loved the countryside and delightful clapboard houses on the border of New York and Connecticut.
In distant, very white upstate town Katonah there were two very black gay men from the Caribbean eating a light lunch. They were the only black people for miles around.
Two days later we were in a taxi back to JFK and onto one of Air France’s spectacular Airbus A380. The huge plane was almost empty! Deciding to fly on July 4th was a great idea. Taking off over a million 4th July firework parties. Fireworks exploding all around us.
The first part of the journey was not without drama as we managed to get delayed for 3 hours by a bomb scare at JFK. The entire airport emptied out just minutes before we were about to fly. We were herded outside and sat around smoking cigarettes and drinking water. After a couple of hours in the sun we stampeded back into the building directly onto our planes and landed in France 6 hours later.
It is delicious to be back in Europe. Away from the tangled life I have left behind in the USA. Once in Paris we checked into Mama Shelter in the 20th, seconds from the cemetery Pere Lachaise. We loved it!
Although I smuggled the dog into the hotel-actually we had no need as dogs, we later found out, are allowed. The food and service were excellent. The only vaguely irritating thing was the Internet wi-fi connection which was linked to their rather modern but baffling Apple TV. Apart from finding it impossible to get on-line their sophisticated interconnected system meant that the TV remote would also remotely control our lap tops..hmmm.
It is so easy to concentrate on what is wrong in life or in others without noticing how beautiful things are. The staff at the hotel were gorgeous and we drooled over them everyday.
First day of Couture shows in Paris. We had lunch with William Stoddart at Hotel d’Amour near Pigalle. Gosh that area has changed so much! When I lived there with Claire Sant it was ghastly. Last week it was wonderful. The weather has been gorgeous everywhere we have been.
The beautiful Edouard joined us afterwards for coffee. We had dinner with him the night before and 6 others at Italian restaurant. Very pretty German model who was obviously rooting for Germany in the World Cup..she was tall and womanly and intelligent. We talked France’s ignominious exit from the competition and sneered at the British teams pathetic attempt to get into the last 8.
Three days in Paris followed by a train ride to Calais and a ferry to Dover after a short taxi ride home to Whitstable we were sitting on the beach eating venison burgers and the travelling companion couldn’t believe how beautiful it all was and complained that I had underplayed how Whitstable really is.
Today there are warnings that old people may overheat. We are going to take a train to London.
I am sitting writing this from my room overlooking the sea in Georgina’s home in Whitstable. It was my birthday yesterday. The day started well enough with coffee at Dave’s deli catching up on gossip and drinking his perfect latte. I left the companion in bed. He is not really a morning person. We met my mother for lunch at Wheelers where Mark Stubbs the chef there continues to surpass himself-this time with delicately spiced soft shell crab.
I really had no desire to see anyone other than who was at that table. I am certainly not interested in tangoing in front of 500 people like an eastern European gypsy. My mum and Georgina bonded over their hatred of Asylum Seekers. My mother pointed out that some asylum seekers were pretending to be gay so that they could stay in the country. If it’s not the Mexican’s it’s the Eastern Europeans..there always someone to blame for never having enough.
I thought that the fear of others getting something for nothing was an American phenomena but no! It’s British too.
After lunch Adam took my picture as part of his photographic Whitstable project and his lovely mum cut my hair. We sat in their lush garden drinking lemonade and lusting after his gorgeous, recently tattooed, diver brother. After the pictures were taken we walked the couple of miles home up the beach. I have never been so happy.
When we got home the companion had a drama unfold which he needed to deal with. When he finally tore himself away from the Internet we sat in the garden and ate dinner with Georgina. We ate huge organic pork chops that I managed to burn on the bbq. After dinner we sat outside the Neptune pub with Barry and other drunksters. The dog was tired and lay on the beach and fell asleep. The night was balmy and the sea lapped lazily over the shingle.
This morning I woke at 6am and walked the dog up to the harbor. He loves it here. The Greens who own the Oyster Company scrawl unfortunate notes on black boards all over their property. Don’t do this and don’t do that. Those black boards used to be charming now they just look vicious.
Some people like to get their own way..I am one of them. When you finally meet your match, as I seem to, it can be less than comfortable. I am trying to be sensitive to the needs of others but I am a stubborn old fool.
As for him..the traveling companion..he’s finding his feet and I am finding mine.
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 had long chat with PH this morning about the trip home and how amazing it is that we have survived at all.
I have been miserable about turning 50 in three weeks but better to be turning 50 than turning in my grave.
It was such a tonic chatting with my darling PH, she has always been there for me. Always. Anyway, that’s just the way I need to start my day with a bit of loving validation. Suddenly I feel like I can cope with ANYTHING.
Held here in sunny aspic LA. Suspended in solid jelly, I can see out and they can see in but I am waiting for the jelly to melt around me.
Last night’s dinner with friends was delicious. We played a few games of backgammon after. When John realized he wasn’t going to beat me he ran off leaving his wife to try her luck. Nope, she didn’t win.
My diet means that I can wear clothes I have not worn for a few years. Last night I wore a pair of crisply pressed silk Prada pants and my Comme cardi. Lovely.
From the 26th floor of Soho House I stared out over LA as dusk fell. The car lights on Sunset Blvd snaking for miles East, white and red. A huge black cloud from the west hastening the night.
Really making an effort to get out of the house. I am not sitting indoors for 12 days. Interminably long days. Perhaps I should just take the car and drive across the USA? Actually, that isn’t such a bad idea.
I could stop off in Nashville and see Joan! How about it Joan?
Very exciting European prospects ahead. I am particularly looking forward to seeing my friends and walking the streets. July is always such a glorious month in London.
Did I tell you that I ran into Orlando Bloom at breakfast the other day? Now, he is a sweetheart. Sat next to Alanis Morrisette at Cholada on PCH. That’s the extent of my starry life here in LA.
Sebastian Horsley my dear friend this past twenty five years has been found dead in his Soho apartment. Heroin overdose. Good God. How many more friends will I lose this year to the disease of addiction?
He struggled so hard to stay clean and sober. Endlessly failing, endlessly trying again. He had the sweetest soul.
Hopefully I will be in London for the funeral.
Too many friends found dead on their own. A ghastly yet familiar story.
The truth is, he should have died years ago. He cheated death a million times. I will miss him but somehow this ending for Sebastian was almost inevitable.
From an earlier post:
Sebastian lives on Meard Street in Soho. On his front door are the words, THIS IS NOT A BROTHAL, THERE ARE NO PROSTITUTES HERE which is total lie. There are always prostitutes there..in Sebastian’s bed.
Recently, I took a genuinely normal boy to meet Sebastian-my very sweet friend Chris Parker the TV actor from Eastenders. Chris is utterly charming. Previously I had taken him to The Colony in an attempt to delight him with a glimpse of an alternative London. My experiment failed. Chris thought that the Colony, the great beating bohemian heart of London was horrible. He didn’t like it. He looked scared. He was not interested in the art or the characters dressed in huge jewels or zoot suits. Those people in that tiny room shocked him, he was unaware of the history of that room. In that room the greatest art dramas had been played out, that Francis Bacon held court there, destroyed the confidence of his boyfriend publicly in that room. Go see the film: Love is the Devil if you want to know more about The Colony.
So, Chris and I are shopping in John Pearse on Meard Street. I bought a pink linen shirt. You know who John is? He made The Sargent Pepper uniforms for the Beatles. John owned a shop on the Kings Road called Granny Takes a Trip in the 1960′s. As we were on the same street, on the spur of the moment I wickedly decided to introduce cautious Chris to Sebastian. Chris is 5’10″. When Chris met Sebastian, 6’5″ tall wearing a lurid cerise tie, his raven black hair swept into a huge bouffant in his rooms in Soho, he was struck dumb.
Chris looked at the pictures of the crucifixion, the limbless woman and the sharks. He was visibly distressed when he saw the nails that been nailed into Sebastian’s hands during the crucifixion. He was appalled when I told him that Sebastian had fallen off the cross. Chris noticed the gun by Sebastian’s bed. “What is that for? Is it real? Why do you have it by your bed?” Sebastian, picking it up to show us the real bullets said, “I don’t believe in unprotected sex.”
In his own words:
“When I was young I thought the recipe for happiness was devastating good looks, a blazing talent and a colossal income. I was right. As for love? The rich think that the most important thing in life is love. The poor know it is money. It is the only thing poor people do know. Given that money is the root of all evil, they should be very virtuous. But they’re not. No, they just moan, groan and drone, looking for a loan. Why don’t they just get rid of such luxuries as food, clothing and shelter, and give us all some peace? Give me the luxuries of life and I will dispense with the necessities. Fancy a fuck?”
Wanting to be included but unwilling to participate. Confident to be part of what was going on but seldom sure.
Always there, never present.
Had I been allowed, as planned, to go to St Martin’s College of Art to study fashion I would have become a fashion designer.
I still have note books crammed with crude fashion drawings and swatches of hideous fabric made when I was 8 years old.
Each ‘season’ I would design a new collection and between ‘collections’ I would write and illustrate articles about the history of fashion.
An avid fashion commentator who had unwelcome, precocious, prepubescent opinions about everything.
My damning critique of Princess Anne’s ‘boring’ ivory duchess satin wedding dress in 1973 irritated my short tempered, royalist Grandmother. ”Look at those ghastly sleeves…”
I was an industrious child. At boarding school I excelled.
When I wasn’t busily designing imaginary runway collections I worked hard remaking my life, a life I could control.
A life reimagined included: a 30 page illustrated story about a happy family of mice.
As a pretentious teenager at boarding school I spent months writing rambling plays about unrequited love with other boys.
The lights, the tension, the smell of the theatre. The warmth and silence of the audience, laughter erupting around me, muffled crying from the red velvet stalls.
Oddly, I had absolutely no great passion for film or television. Of course, I had seen many films but it wasn’t a world that piqued my interest.
I had a fondness for black and white Hollywood films from the 1940′s (particularly musicals) that I would either watch on the television on my own or walk up Whitstable High Street to the cavernous Oxford Cinema.
I was inspired. Stealing an idea for my ‘new collection’, a sleeve or muff.
I watched the credits roll: costume designer Edith Head…Funny Face. Adrian, who designed the costumes for The Wizard of Oz.
I’m 12, I discover Marilyn Monroe without ever knowing she is a gay icon. The following year I insist that my parents buy me Norman Mailer’s illustrated biography for Christmas.
Theatre and fashion people referenced film but nobody I knew would ever have thought about making one.
The years after I left Shotton Hall School in 1976, before I went to prison in 1983 were culturally the richest of my life.
I scraped into Medway College of Art and Design with one ‘O’ level and met and befriended the extraordinary Billy Childish. I learned how to etch and screen print and draw.
Punk was determining fashion, graphics and music but scarcely impacted the institutionalised, established, sewn up world of British contemporary art.
Whilst at Medway, I saw a very ordinary man wearing a badly cut suit commuting from London holding a copy of The Sex Pistol‘s single God Save The Queen and nearly fainted in fear.
I was wearing a pair of my mothers bottle green woolen tights. I wonder what he must have thought about me? He alighted at Rainham.
Devastatingly I was not allowed to study fashion at St Martin’s College as my garrulous stepfather refused to let me.
I had to get a job.
The job I was offered, selling clothes at Yves Saint Laurent on Bond Street, London became the beginning of what would turn out to be a great, although misguided, adventure. An adventure that would shape the rest of my life.
I met Lady Clare Rendlesham and within a few months I was in Paris pretending to be her son.
Clare Rendlesham and others
Apart from changing my identity in Paris I threw myself into the very accommodating worlds of fashion, performance art and theatre.
The land of sublime artifice.
During the pret a porter I would run with my friends through the streets of Paris from show to show. Although my time in Paris seems less, in retrospect, about theatre and more about fashion and art, I was introduced to Robert Wilson and members of his company, traveled to Holland to see Lucinda Childs in Dance with music by Phillip Glass and travelled more to see beautiful work by Pina Bausch.
Pina Bausch died this year.
I was one of the first people in Paris to wear a Walkman. I think I may still own that original item.
Some rich friend of a rich friend left it at my place and never asked for it back. Suddenly I had my very own soundtrack. My life scored by Super Tramp. The optimistic opening bars of Take The Long Way Home soaring over the controversial rebuilding of Les Halles that seems only recently to have settled into its surroundings. Music altered my perception of where I was and how I experienced it. Paris was never so beautiful.
It was during this time in 1978 that, as a willowy teenager, I chanced upon Fred Hughes at John Jermyn’s Rue de Bellechasse home. That beautifully, wonderfully decorated house..rococo monkeys and Fortuny silk.
Fred had been, the year I met him, diagnosed with MS and had become nihilistic and surly.
“When Fred got sick, he had to go to the American Hospital, and I decorated his room. I went to visit him, and brought pictures he liked, from his house and flowers, and decorated his room…” Julian Schnabel
Perhaps because of MS Fred, so reviled, cut a sad and lonely path through his own life ending up incapacitated, angry and alone. At the end, surrounded in his Lexington Avenue home by the most beautiful things, nothing could placate him.
When I met Fred he had slicked back black hair and tailored suits, he lived in an apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi and was, to a provincial teenager, incredibly glamorous..a true dandy.
“It was I who found Fred Hughes his Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where Warhol would stay.” Pierre Berger
He probably only liked me because I told him I was Lord Rendlesham but later, when he knew the truth, he would laugh and mock the moment we met and feign outrage.
Fred took me to New York, bought me Vetiver and appropriate underwear, gave me drugs at Studio 54, lent me shirts that belonged to Farouk, the last King of Egypt, wrapped me up in linen sheets and laughed at my jokes.
Fred introduced me to Yves St-Laurent and his muse LouLou de la Falaise, Baron Eric De Rothschild, flame haired owner of Egoiste magazine Nicole Wisniak. I sat entranced by these people. Wearing clothes Fred had bought for me, a name that was not mine…casting off a past I had no need for.
Perhaps we understood each other because we had both abandoned our past for a far more thrilling present.
Latterly, he was described as ‘a consummate liar, social climber, and a bespoke SOB who grew to total ghoulishness because of his connection to Andy Warhol.’
Who cares? Isn’t everyone a social climber of some kind and why the hell not? It is galling to have Fred’s memory so maligned. From what I saw and heard he managed or rather..baby sat Andy Warhol, pulling him out of relative poverty, protecting him from unworthies.
Unless that was a lie? I really don’t have a clue. As a teenager I thought he was just swell.
It is so sad to him like this, stricken with MS:
This photograph is amusing. Tim Hunt, Princess Anne of Bavaria, Me and Alexis de Toqueville at Anne’s apartment in Paris.
Samia Saouma’s Gallery (another social hub as galleries tend to be) I was introduced to the work of The Baron de Meyer, Man Ray and Joseph Kosuth. I followed the crowd and applauded the sparse and mannered work of Robert Wilson. We saw I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating and Death Destruction and Detroit.
In Paris I learned about artists and their power and prestige. Most of these men and women, invited to Europe during the late 70′s early 80′s, were American. Flooding the world with new ideas; polemical and challenging.
What happened to the arts? Even though British theatre seems to have maintained it’s edge, British art has become increasingly bland and decorative. Says nothing of the war or the bloody peace.
Paris was just how Paris is meant to be: an education for a young man.
Before we leave Paris there was one sublime moment. It was a moment. We all need them. Romantic. I had been invited to the house of some elderly Duke. On an orange velvet wall hung a huge sunset by Turner. Surrounded by furniture, a light supper served in front of it. This is how art should be enjoyed. Domestically.
Turner
Returning to England I was given the telephone number of Erica Bolton by The Princess Anne of Bavaria. I met Erica at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London, where she worked as a publicist. My great love affair with the theatre began in earnest.
David Gothard Riverside Studios
Erica Bolton, in turn, introduced me to a community of successful writers and directors. Men and women who inspired me to make my own theatre, my own films, my own art.
I listened and learned.
Erica sneaks me into the theatre to see Kantor’s sold out show Wielopole, Wielopole. I sit in the Gods looking down at syphilitic soldiers marching, wax figures strapped to the living, a monochrome set with Kantor in the middle of it all tweaking his memories and watching sadly as the dead come back to life.
It was triumphant, breathtaking theatre and in sharp contrast to the very British, academic work of Peter Gill (Cherry Orchard) who I met that year (1978) and his then assistant David Levaux the now hugely respected Broadway director.
There were so many exciting people to hang out with at The Riverside like the precocious Hanif Kureishi fresh from his triumphant stint at The Royal Court.
Pioneering David Gothard, the artistic director, the genius at the very heart of the Riverside Studios. Responsible for bringing Tadeusz Kantor, Miro, Shuji Tereyama and many others not only to Hammersmith but to the UK.
Night after night we sat in the canteen drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. I loved every moment.
In 1979 I made my way to Paris to see Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord. The unplastered walls and magnificent arches quite unlike any other performance space. To Paris by boat and train to see Brook’s Conference of the Birds. I can’t remember where I stayed that night. I was in heaven. I remember the Persian rugs on the floor, the chirping of the cast as they imitated different birds..a chorus..the dawn chorus.
I wanted to make theatre so badly. When I finally got around to it I made just one good work The Host. The other works (as it turned out) a preamble for my later film making and really not that good.
In 1981 I moved into a small flat in Furlong Road, Islington. The home of director Michael Darlow. The flat came with a job: nanny to their wayward 13-year-old adopted son.
Wandering the streets I discovered the derelict Almeida Theatre where I would end up having my 22nd Birthday thrown by designer Scott Crolla. Furniture Designer Tom Dixon was our doorman. William Burroughs came.
‘Come Dressed at Duncan Roy’ the invitation demanded.
Here are Kadir Guirey and Tom Dixon in their band Funkapolitan…
The Almeida Theatre, bought and renovated (Bouffe de Nord style) by Lebanese born Pierre Audi. I managed, by chance, to witness the birth of an institution. Even when derelict, Pierre still used the space as a theatre. Amongst many, early notable Almeida productions I saw A Dybbuk For Two People with Bruce Myers and in 1982, at Saint James’s Church, Chillingworth Road at the Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music, John Cage at 70. Stunning.
Early 1983 I was arrested and imprisoned for running up a huge bill on my credit card. I spent the next ten months starved of theatre and art but found another altogether unexpected beauty.
I was 23. Prison, as I have said before, was beautiful.
People like Erica bid their adieu and I would never really see them again.
1983, months after I left Wormwood Scrubbs Prison I answered an advertisement in Time Out Magazine. Neil Bartlett was looking for performers to open his show PORNOGRAPHY, a Spectacle at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
It was a gruelling process, one that I found hard to get to grips with.
Acting, as you may know, requires the performer to be real and by this time in my life I really had no idea how to do that at all.
As with my appearance in the ‘A’ list thirty years later, people mocked my decision to be in a gay play about sex and sexuality. Life is for the experience..isn’t it? For one grand adventure after another.
Theatre
Pornography: A Spectacle. 1983/84 Actor
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 6 city UK tour, Poor Alex Theatre, Toronto, Canada
Devised with Ivan Cartwright, Neil Bartlett and Robin Whitmore
Robin, Ivan and Duncan in ‘Pornography, a Spectacle’
“Pornography is quite wonderful, outrageous, intentionally shocking — but with real human beings stepping through the sensationalism at regular intervals to speak between the screams of cliché in normal conversational tones about who they are and how they really feel. The recurrent theme is one of intense pornographic description, which the actors suddenly stop, pause, and say, “of course that was merely a quotation,” or “but it really wasn’t like that.” Sky Gilbert
The Critic by Sheridan: 1984 Actor – Mr. Puff
Edinburgh Festival
The Host: 1987 Writer/Director
Institute of Contemporary Art London and National Review of Live Art Glasgow with Georgia Byng and Tatiana Strauss
October Gallery
Bad Baby: 1989 Writer/Director
The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent, Hen and Chickens Theatre, Islington North London
Using a cast of local Kent performers this play examined issues of child abuse using Beatrix Campbell’s Unofficial Secrets as the basis of the text.
Marrianne Fearnside in Bad Baby
The Baron in the Trees: 1990 Writer/Director
Adapted from the Italo Calvino novel of the same name for The Penny Theatre, Canterbury, Kent
Copper’s Bottom: 1991 Writer/Director
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, starring Aiden Shaw
Call me Susan: 1993 Co-writer
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh; Edinburgh Festival Fringe;
Call Me Susan explored issues surrounding prostitution across Europe. A dramatised discussion between two prostitutes interspersed with real-life recorded testimonies and pictures of prostitutes working in six European cities.
Oscar Wilde enjoyed the extravagant promises of the Victorian Age, capturing the imagination of London’s aesthetic elite. However, beyond the enlightened few, everything about the man provoked consternation to the prudish, hypocritical Victorians—from the green carnation in his buttonhole to his sensational novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Like his suits, Wilde, a tireless self-promoter and purveyor of the unforgettable bon mot, was exquisitely tailored. While young, he was best dressed in bold plaid, plus fours, starched shirts with high, tight collars or gabardine suits cut short above the hip. Wilde traded his own slender, youthful visage (French
pleated hair and Cupid lips) for a bloated middle age rife with extravagant capes and voluminous fur-lined coats.
In his revisionist biography of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?, Neil Bartlett describes how Wilde became a huge man with a penchant for young, willowy boys. He was an intriguing mass of contradictions: The love letters he sent to his wife, Constance, are as beautiful as the letters he sent to the dark-hearted “Bosie,” his lover. The innocent stories he wrote for his beloved children were a counterpoint to the pornographic tales he created from his forays into London’s dank underworld.
The pornography attributed to Wilde in the British Library, under the pseudonym “Teleny,” reveals his sado-pedophilic fantasies. Young boys figure highly in these violent, disturbing texts. The virginal youths are deflowered by older, cruel men, their innocence torn from them.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is the reworking of these same themes that lead Wilde to his pessimistic and wholly modern conclusions about our shared horror of the loss of youth and how we might reclaim it.
When casting for a perfect Dorian, I was not interested in hiring a great beauty, but rather, a young boy. After all, beauty is subjective, youth indisputable.
For the movie’s Dorian Gray, it was imperative that our actor, David Gallagher, look effortlessly chic. David is very much the stick-thin look of right now and Dior Homme (as reinvented by our costume designer, Hedi Slimane). Dressing the literary youth icon of our age was a perfect solution for us and Dior: Slimane set his homoerotic boy-man aesthetic against the new Puritanism of American mainstream culture.
It is Lord Henry Wotton who appeals to the youthful Dorian Gray and speaks for the moisturized 40-plus generation, when he says to Dorian: “I wish that I could change places with you. To get back my youth; I’d do anything in the world. You are the type that the age is searching for and is afraid that it has already found. The world has always worshipped you—and it always will.”
If Wilde’s sensational sodomy trial had happened today, would the acclaimed wit have ended up in prison? Given that we find it hard to throw celebrities in jail, perhaps not. But Wilde’s predilection for sex with underage boys? I am sure that his hard drive would have been littered with unsavory images of children.
Once in prison, Wilde was given a thin gray cotton shirt and pants. Issey Miyake—or Kim Jong Il—might have gotten a kick out of this minimal Bauhaus look, but Wilde loathed it and woefully described his prison uniform in the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol. A couple of years later, he was dead. (“It’s either me or the wallpaper.”) But as hard as I look, I cannot discover what he was buried in. Except, of course, shame.
This article was edited by Black Book for whom the piece was originally written. It has been pointed out to me that Hedi lent us the clothes for Dorian rather than designing them for the film. I have also been asked what happened to the film. How did it do? Well, in my own estimation it did OK. It closed the London Lesbian and Gay film Festival, opened the Miami G&L film festival and opened the New York G&L film festival amongst others. It had a small life and then vanished.
