We must have climbed the steep hill to Alexander Cockburn‘s Tower ten times a day, getting ready for Daisy’s first paying guests.
By the time we were finished it looked magnificent. Beating rugs like Victorian chamber maids. Oiling the redwood kitchen. Making beds with fresh white linen. Sweeping cobwebs off the windows.
Giving succor to the inner butler that lurks within.
Here is the sculpture that decorates the path:
Here are the fossilized fish that decorate the bathroom:
Here are random pictures I failed to publish earlier:
Whose idea was that? Even POTUS looked a little incredulous. Obviously I don’t have any problem with 3rd graders manning the barricades but… perhaps we can have kittens next time… or puppies… or fluffy yellow chicks… or a new born foal?
The gays are in Pride party overdrive.
Circuit parties, sex parties, pride events, bear parties, underwear parties, mourning parties, party parties.
When Joe and I lived in The Pines on Fire Island we went, over the years, to various high-octane, drug fueled, over lubricated, semi-naked circuit parties. Yet, however many drugs I took, however great my body was… I still felt alienated. I still experienced a strange, out-of-body disconnect from those men around me. You see, I remember thinking quite clearly that they… GOT IT… and I didn’t. I thought back then… they understand something more about homosexuality than I did… than I do.
Don’t get me wrong… I wasn’t looking down my nose at them. I wasn’t feeling superior. I would love to have connected with those men. Like I used to feel connected (high on E) in my mid twenties exploring London (straight) club land.
The same heaving mass that miraculously included me. Joyfully, willingly abandoning self, self consciousness terminal uniqueness and dancing as one with a thousand others. Trembling as one experienced rush after rush of the drug that over came every atom of my essential being.
That is what I felt then. This is what I feel now: To have ones life defined by gay circuit parties is simply revolting.
Some people prepare for weeks for Pride, in the gym, tanning, organizing parties, getting the right tickets for the right events. Making sure the drink and the drugs are pre-ordered. Leaving nothing to chance.
The last ‘pride’ parade I attended I saw a drunken man defecating in the street. It was not the enduring image of LGBTQ solidarity after which I was hankering.
There is a hideous disconnect between the civil rights we demand and the public face of ‘pride’.
A parade of semi naked gyrating narcissists.
How can anyone take that seriously?
Pride simply reinforces the difference between me and them: I do not drink or take drugs. I am not driven (compelled) by my homosexuality.
The parade terrifies me. Aesthetically.
The corporate floats lack ingenuity and wit. The rent boy/sex worker float lacks class. The thongs, the swagger, revealing the lie of Pride.
The near identical bodies in various hues. Searching, begging for tiny differences between each naked, muscular physique that may determine the uniqueness, the individuality of just one of these men.
Of course, I am excited to see so many out men. But they are all the same.
I look at them and, as much as I want to be, I am not attracted to them. I am not attracted to their essence… to their remarkable lack of ego.
The Pride parade is a celebration of sexuality. First and foremost.
And I, absurdly, want to fall in love.
You see, I proved it.
They wanted sex… and I didn’t. I wanted to fall in love… and they didn’t.
“I want to tell you how much I love you.” I whispered.
When I have sex. I tell them to say… I love you. It turns me on. ”Even if you don’t mean it.”
I was useless then and I am useless now to those gay men at those gay circuit parties because I didn’t want to have sex.
I wanted to fall in love.
I didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t and they knew it. They could see by the look in my eye that their sexuality terrified me, baffled me.
I wanted to fall in love.
That man I loved. After he came out… he told me about the sex he was having with many, many men. He was really good at meeting strange men and having sex with them.
His priorities shifted. When we were together and he was in the closet he told me he loved me, he was emotional… the moment he came out he threw his emotional interest in men away. In favour of sex.
I wanted to fall in love.
It was my fault. I had this sex genius at my disposal and couldn’t work out how to use what he was brilliant at.
When we made love I felt the same disconnect. Out of body. Away.
Pride is a tough word to have appended to any celebration because it means so many different things to so many different people.
That’s why I love the LGBTQ Mardi Gras in Sydney, it doesn’t have PRIDE in the title. Mardi Gras is everything you want it to be because Mardi Gras mean nothing to me. Means everything to me.
Mardi Gras implies celebration. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. Even though it eschews the word Pride, on the several occasions I attended… I felt really proud. Proud to be just like them. Just like you.
I looked for the similarities and not the differences at:
The silly Mardi Gras community events, the Mardi Gras parade, the film festival, the theatre festival, the LGBTQ city art tours… even the leather cruise… something I would never usually do seemed fun and interesting.
It was a gathering of the LGBTQ clan and made no mistake by calling itself something it isn’t.
The parade and the party. Mardi Gras was so different from London Pride.
London Pride in the 1980′s, was a sombre affair. Men and women. Simply being seen. It was originally held during the miserable months of the British year. Overcast skies. Rain.
London Pride has evolved from a bunch of angry gays and lesbians marching through Westminster (Margaret Thatcher’s back yard) denouncing the infamously homophobic Section 28 to right now and a profoundly different landscape for the LGBTQ community. We have enthusiastically embraced the Blair (credit where credits due) governments equality overhaul and the long overdue introduction of legal parity for all citizens of the UK regardless of gender.
London Pride is a deserved celebration… but it was earned.
It’s not my cup of tea. But it was earned.
If it isn’t your cup of tea… what is? What does this old queer want?
Well.
Somewhere between the seriousness of a civil rights march and the celebration of Mardi Gras is the parade I want to attend.
There’s a parade I want to join where all men and women are respected and nurtured regardless of age, sexuality and religion.
Let me know if you find that Parade because I’ll be there… to hold your hand.
I let the dogs out into the beautiful garden. The Little Dog caught and killed a large rat in the orchard. Dude tore it out of his mouth and shook it until its guts were all over his red fur.
They looked very pleased with their murderous selves.
Daisy and I huffed and puffed up the steep hill to The Tower.
Her father collaborated with local craftsman to build this beautiful space.
Originally built to disguise two ten thousand gallon tanks fed by spring water this tower can now be rented (click here) on Airbnb.
Alexander died less than a year ago. It is a strange and wonderful experience living in his comfortable home.
We have been exploring.
All weekend we dropped in at community events: private and public parties.
The Mattole River Restoration cookout and dance, a wonderful wedding anniversary party where they made their own Grappa in a copper still. A young cook from Oakland roasted pig and served it by an open fire under white canvas awnings.
The following day they called us to taste the gin they had just made in the same still.
Last night a local intellectual cooked us home-grown free range chicken and home-made pink grapefruit sorbet.
On Sunday morning we bought basil mayonnaise, catnip and tomato starts from the Petrolia Farmers Market.
Remote beaches backed up by steep cliffs and mountains.
King’s Peak reaches an elevation of 4,088 feet only three miles from the Pacific Ocean.
The King Range has risen 66 feet in the last 6,000 years due to the meeting of three tectonic plates: North American, Pacific, and Juan de Fuca, just off the white cap coast.
Its grey crumbly sandstone creating beaches of pristine, black sand.
On the beach we meet a few passers-by. We meet hikers who, by law, keep their food in locked plastic containers. Bear proof. The containers looked like the barrels atomic waste is stored in.
We needed cleaning supplies. We drive an hour to get them.
The road from Petrolia to the Victorian town of Ferndale is perhaps one of the most beautiful roads I have ever traveled.
Hogweed, ancient ferns and Douglas Fir.
Ferndale was founded by Danish settlers. The 19th century houses are really well-preserved. The history of the town inextricably linked to tinned salmon and logging, both of which have gone forever.
The trees cut down, the salmon extinct.
We saw two huge trucks loaded with old growth tree trunks but apparently they come from small ‘sustainable’ forests.
Daisy’s father said:
Start with the word “sustainable.” These days fund-raisers and grant-writers string it round each sentence like an adjectival fanny pack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it’s a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.
We stop in at the lumber yard to buy laminated boards for Daisy to paint. We are served by a fresh-faced youth.
I ask him if he’ll ever leave Ferndale. He says, he’s a small town boy. He doesn’t want to leave.
I drove from LA. Through San Francisco. The last 60 miles along perilous roads in the dark. Tarmac Roads that suddenly give out to treacherous gravel. Past the magnificent redwoods that even in the dark… are extraordinary.
I slept in a huge bed built on a wooden platform. I slept like a giant redwood log.
At night, I can hear the Mattole river moving quickly over tiny gray pebbles.
This morning we all… dogs too… swam in the cold clear water.
The perception amongst most Americans is that Bradley Manning should never have told us what was going on because he was breaking the law.
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
The perception of most Americans is that Bradley Manning is a traitor.
More so, I imagine, than the man who shot 17 Iraqi women and children as they lay sleeping in their beds.
If a journalist with a degree had uncovered this information I believe most Americans would be ok with that.
His expensive education would somehow allow him the privilege of exposing the wrongs of the nation.
We are shooting the messenger because the messenger is poor white trash… who the hell does he think he is?
That’s what I’m hearing. That’s what’s really going on here.
I congratulate Ellen. Finally, a voice for the queer poor heard over the screaming voices of the queer rich.
As the Great Recession continues in so much of the USA, ending workplace discrimination (especially for trans people) is essential.
Listen to me or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.
FLOTUS
Remember. As we strive for parity there will be those with equal and opposite views.
There will be violence.
There will be those who will kill an 18-year-old queer boy because they can.
African-Americans had to face nearly another century of lynchings before the Civil Rights Movement was powerful enough to push back strongly against violent racists.
The women’s movement of the 1920s, side-tracked for a generation until the 1960s, with so many needlessly broken lives and life expectations as a result.
Queer people are being attacked all over the world: Paris, Moscow, New York, London by increasingly emboldened haters.
As we demand equality in the workplace, the home and in the establishment these attacks will become more frequent.
We must, whether we like it or not, form a true LGBTQ alliance not only in name but in practice.
It is too late for fear to drive us into the shadows. We are out. We are visible.
We need to be more fearless and more visible.
LGBTQ.
This means YOU.
This means ME.
Reading about Clément Méric this morning, looking at his sweet, boyish profile… I began to question my own behavior.
I have, of late, let resentment toward the gays shape my own kind of homophobia.
For those of you who have read my blog these past couple of years the provenance of this loathing may seem understandable.
Today, I need to jettison those resentments.
If I truly believe in this fight… I have to accept those I detest as my queer brothers and sisters.
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when people hated on black people because they were black and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when nearly all top jobs in industry and government were taken by white men and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when a gay man was shot in the face in the middle of the most liberal city in the western world for being a faggot and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
A thousand years from now? Maybe that’s the kind of incremental change brown people, women and queer people expect?
When will you fight for more? Why do you put up with the status quo?
Fight for marriage and all things are equal? No. Fight for white men to stop taking everything, determining the agenda and we might get somewhere.
A French octogenarian shoots himself in the face because he hates gay marriage. If he were American he would have massacred first then killed himself. I think that this scenario seems plausible.
I wouldn’t like to hang around in gay bars right now. Not with all these emboldened haters amongst us.
Thank God I don’t drink.
I am wearing my pink shoes. People understand what I am when they look at my feet.
I’m trying to jettison ’straight acting‘, I’m trying to abandon my invisibility but I know what that means. It means hostility from gay men and straight men.
I like it when they describe drag queens as fierce. That’s what I have spent life being: FIERCE. Of course, this has been perceived as angry or anti social or… can I explain something?
Anger is an emotion related to one’s psychological interpretation of having been offended, wronged, or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation.
Listen to this. I have been reasonably angry for a long time.
I was a kid and I knew I wanted to fall in love with and have sex with men (and women) but the man part of my desire was outlawed, derided.
I fell in love at school. I fell in love and explored men’s bodies.
I remember when I was 14 I was walking along the beach in Whitstable. I met a man. I lay on the sea wall with him. Furtive. Illegal. I never saw him again. I wonder about him.
They hated us for something we could not change. I ignored them. I parried the blows.
I lived in a dream world because living in that reality was simply too painful.
Margaret Thatcher didn’t want me and men and women like me… she didn’t want us to exist.
I’ll tell you what makes me angry: Brown people not getting a fair trial. A third of all black men in the USA are in jail. Women in the military being raped and sexually abused. Drag queens damning trans people. I am angry that some people are denied bail. I am angry that my lover left me when I found my tumor. I am angry with myself for falling in love with men who could never love me back. I am angry that the breast cancer gene is privately owned, that innocent brown people are still being held in captivity in Guantanamo Bay. I am angry that gay men think that marriage is the answer. I am angry that I grew up with an angry step father. I am angry that Monsanto kill bees. I am angry that my neighbors park in front of my gate so I can’t get in and out of my house. I am angry that two young girls are criminalized for falling in love. I am angry that most agents (realtors and talent) are sociopath. I am angry with gay men and straight men for over simplifying sexuality.
How do you live with that?
I set it aside. The anger. I find peace wherever I can. I pull weeds. I walk the dogs. I feed the fish.
I forgive them for their sexism, their murder, their bullying, their insistence that they WIN. At all costs. Like the bees. Winning the market means… killing the bees.
When I buy something at auction the others applaud. They congratulate me. They tell me that I have won. I didn’t win. I just paid the highest price. It’s not hard to do.
So. Today I am wearing my pink shoes. There you go. ’Nice shoes,’ they scoff.
Oh, I’m wearing them because I’m queer and I really want you to know. Because I exist somewhere between Liberace and Jason Collins but I’m still trying to work it out. Working out what kind of man I am.
I don’t think I’m alone.
Men make their own history but they do not make it as they choose.
Mark Carson was a black man and a gay man. He did not have the luxury of invisibility.
When he was shot in the head yesterday, he was already walking away from the man with a gun.
He was killed moments from where Joe and I lived on 13th Street in the West Village, NYC.
He went down fast.
This story is peculiarly American. It includes race, guns and queers.
The narrative is so familiar I am no longer shocked.
In London a white queer couple are walking home arm in arm. They are beaten to the ground.
We can kid ourselves that our ‘visibility’ has somehow made things better, that Glee and Will and Grace have improved LGBTQ functionality but frankly… that’s the lie we tell ourselves to get by.
To walk the streets.
Holding my lovers hand in the street is still an act of rebellion.
2.
The rate of HIV infection is still epidemic, around 45-50,000 new cases every year, 60% of those are gay or bisexual men.
AIDS education has not served to change the attitude in the general GBTQ population to bring those numbers down.
That is the cold hard truth.
No use dragging in references to children in Africa. The causes are preventable here amongst Americans.
The immune defense systems of many people are compromised and therefore vulnerable to deadly viruses such as the new strain of meningitis.
I fully support my GBTQ community, but I must also defend and uphold the bare truth: people in America want what they want when they want it.
They don’t care to understand that they are living off the principal instead of the interest.
3.
When Jake and I were in Paris we sat on the Terrace of the Hotel Mama Shelter. We were dining, holding hands and kissing.
During a tumultuous and difficult relationship it was a moment of tender kindness.
From a window high above where we were lounging a man called out: ”Pede!”
Jake didn’t speak French. He, thankfully, did not understand that we were being insulted. ”Faggot!”
I expected something to be thrown. A shot to ring out. My life felt threatened.
I wrapped my arms protectively around him. Just in case. I loved him so.
If you are queer. You know what I am talking about.
If you are black, a muslim… anything other than a straight white male. You know what I am talking about.
You know that feeling very well.
4.
They want to march the street tonight. They want to hold a vigil for Mark Carson. They want to fight back. But, what exactly are you fighting when you fight back?
The young men who want to hurt us, to kill us… are just doing what they understand: they are identifying the enemy and bringing it down.
To some they are patriots.
They are heroes from another age.
They do not understand our rarefied world because we have not done enough to explain it to them.
What do they know about us? We may seem like a grandiose secret society… like the Scientologists or The Masonic Order and like any other secret society… we pose a threat.
We have done nothing to make our position clear except demand to oppress by joining historically oppressive institutions: the military and marriage.
They may have every good reason to hate us because they think we have everything and they have nothing.
They think we are rich, successful, they think we are celebrities… or connected to celebrity.
In this TV Quick world they see us living a dream. Why? Because we have sold them this in an attempt to seem ‘normal’.
5.
Dinner at Nobu. What a mess. Had to concentrate solely on my dining companion and not get side tracked by huge black eyebrows drawn onto Botox faces, short men with pony tails and overly developed biceps.
The morbidly obese, trapped in their mid west homes, are lifting their fat fingers and tapping one key at a time… declaring their outrage.
But, the rest of you… the gays… Mike Jeffries is gay… what did you expect?
Jeffries made a fortune from Bruce Weber’s homoerotic (bordering on pedophilia) A&F ad campaigns and the gays kept their mouths firmly shut.
What did you think that Weimar Nazi imagery was all about?
Did you see those highly collectible A&F catalogues now owned by all my gay friends?
Who complained that there were no fat models, no wheelchair bound kids frolicking in Bear Pond?
Now that Mike Jeffries is old, his face scarred with reconstructive surgery his very common gay obsession with youth and beauty is suddenly in bad taste?
HUH?
Perhaps fat people should stop eating if they want to wear hideous A&F clothing.
As for the guy who gave the stuff to homeless people. WTF? Ha Ha Ha. Not funny or clever or LIBERAL.
7.
Why isn’t the LIBERACE movie being distributed in the USA?
Why can you see this movie in European cinemas and not here?
I am told that very powerful gays here in Hollywood scuppered it.
It was they who described it as ‘too gay’ (camp) and inappropriate for audiences in the USA who might think we were all like Liberace.
In this ghastly straight acting world… we don’t want straight people to get the wrong idea.
God forbid… sportsman might not want to come out of the closet and be heroes.
7.
Today, at Gjelina, we sat next to 3 good-looking, rich, straight Russian boys on vacation from Moscow.
We charmed them. They thought I was so funny and sweet.
As we left I drained the smile off my face. I touched one of them gently on the shoulder.
I said very seriously, “When you go home can you tell your President to stop killing the gays.”
They laughed. They thought I was joking. After all, I had three beautiful women friends for lunch.
“No, I mean it… it’s really got to stop and it’s up to you.”
They looked foolish and embarrassed and that was good because the last thing you need when you are a rich, white Russian on vacation in LA are liberals making fun of your country… your government and you.
Most gays wouldn’t have bothered. But that’s the way you change the world.
Let them know it’s not OK.
8.
The 14-year-old son of state Sen. Brian Hatfield has been charged with four counts of first-degree child rape and four counts of first-degree child molestation in Lewis County.
The boy is accused of assaulting an 11-year-old boy from November 2012 until Feb. 14 of this year, when the younger boy’s mother interrupted an incident.
According to the police report, the mother informed detectives Hatfield told her on several occasions that he was attempting to ‘enter his son into therapy’ and would also be contacting authorities in Lewis County.
The mother stated that she knows that this has ‘not occurred’.
Neither parent called authorities at that time of the alleged incident and the mother said she had not ‘witnessed any physical contact’ between the boys.
Her son informed her some contact had occurred, but the boy later told detectives he didn’t reveal the full extent of the ‘abuse’ at that time.
The two boys had no further contact after the February incident.
Was this the love affair I remember when I was 11?
Is this pubescent messing around or… rape?
Homo sex demonized by frightened parents?
There’s something so wrong about this story and it’s not the sex.
8.
Marriage equality would not have saved Mark Carson’s short life.
The cloak of equality he may have worn later on in life was not his to wear.
Joining the army may have paid for his education… but would not have saved his life.
Marriage equality would not get him to the hospital in time. It would not have paid the hospital bills if he had lived.
Marriage equality would not have stopped the deathly glances of those who disapprove or those who thought he might rob them because he was black.
I am praying that Mark Carson took the bullet intended for this old faggot.
Looking for God’s match for me. Well, I’m sorry but… it’s shit.
God (not my usual God) made it quite clear to me whilst I was scrolling obsessively through acres of men who look like pedophiliac geography teachers… he made it perfectly clear that a life of abstinent solitude was probably on the cards or (if I was really lucky) being violently murdered by a crazy sex therapist or… luckier… a hit man sent by some crazier ex.
Which brings me illogically to:
Bradley Manning. My hero. What can I say? This courageous young man has revealed not only international truths triggering the Arab Spring and a hasty retreat from Iraq by the USA… but the truth about American, white gay men.
Fuck me. What a bunch of crazy, right-wing cock suckers.
I mean… these gay white guys are voting Democrat, so they get their miserable marriage equality then… as soon as they do… they’ll jump ship and vote Republican… if they aren’t already.
Gay White Men won’t feel like they are part of any minority once they achieve parity with their straight white male colleagues.
Powerful white men famously loathe sharing the stage with immigrants, brown people, poor people, ugly people, fat people, trans… and women. Fuck them. Especially women. Their natural enemy.
‘They don’t mesh with MY lifestyle.’ he said. Yes, he really said that.
It fills me full of dread to imagine a world run by gay white men. But apparently, according to Elton John. It already is.
So Bradley, I had to draw a line in the sand.
It’s Anderson Cooper, Elton John, David Geffen, the HRC and any guests at a typical Hollywood pool party over there… and it’s me you and the brown people over here.
Bradley, in the USA the gays want to ignore you, demonize you, forget you.
The rest of the world thinks about you every day, rotting in that jail. They agree with me. They think you’re the bees knees.
Bradley, you won’t believe this but, yesterday Vivienne Westwood wore a laminated photograph of you pinned to her lilac, silk gown at the Metropolitan Fashion Ball.
Perhaps the gays might take you more seriously now?
I doubt it.
I’m really sorry that our community has let you down.
Apparently what you did… isn’t gay enough.
“What does Bradley Manning and his treason have to do with being gay?” That’s what they say Bradley.
You just ain’t the right flavor. And, of course, they (elite gay snobs) know you only joined the military in the first place to get a free education.
You ended up educating the whole world.
“You should have known better. You shouldn’t have broken the rules.”
That’s what the rich, white, gay men say.
Bradley, they were going to include you in the 2013 San Francisco Pride event. Did you hear about that? They were going to honour you.
But they lost their nerve after the rich, white gays persuaded the poor, black lesbian who runs the event that you were just a common thief.
There are well researched articles about you and what happened at San Francisco Pride. Bradley’s inclusion and outrageous exclusion.
After it happened I had to defriend over 250 affluent gay white men on Facebook. Yes, I did.
I felt like a Jew waking up out of a blackout at the Nazi Christmas party. Or a Muslim at the NRA National Convention. Or a Christian in the back room of a gay bar.
I had to make a big decision. I had to weigh up: the differences versus the similarities and… the similarities between me and the gays were negligible.
I had to redefine myself.
Bradley, for you… I am not gay.
I will have nothing more to do with them. Because of you.
Thanks for that Bradley. I owe you a club soda some time.
But, that’s only half the story. I’ve been feeling very uncomfortable in my gay skin for a very long time.
It all began with that smile he gave me in the family court waiting area 3 years ago. He was with his dad.
That arrogant grin. You see… he thought he’d won the war.
Americans always think they have to win.
It was shocking because, until that moment, I’d only ever seen his ersatz humility. I did not recognize him any more.
But, I knew the smile. I’d seen it before… on the entitled faces of rich, white gay men.
Oh God. I thought. That’s who you are. That’s what you’ve been hiding.
The pain I felt around the gays. The revulsion I felt at the gay charity events, gay AA, gay white men, gays en masse.
The smell of them began to make me nauseous.
Perhaps, I thought, it might just be self hate? Internalized homophobia?
Just like I thought my gall stones were indigestion… it was the wrong self-diagnosis.
I am surrounded by millions of gay zombies. In the perpetual search for fresh meat.
Zombies forcing other gays, gays with unnatural ideas to think like them.
Bradley, President Obama is on the TV right now… warming up his audience with a few self-deprecating quips.
The gays love him. They don’t care if they’re being used to shield what’s really going on.
Hey America! Look at this dancing gay who wants to get married… look… over here! Look over here whilst we torture these Muslims and spray the world with bee killing Round-Up.
If you ever get out of that prison… you’ll find a very different gay America. Oh yes.
But don’t expect a heroes welcome from the gays. It ain’t happening.
Their ‘heroes’ are prescribed by good looking GLAAD president Herndon Graddick and his ilk. Heroes? A GLAAD ‘hero’ is anyone who comes out of the closet or a celebrity who says publicly that they like gay people.
Herndon Graddick? Consider the source.
You know what, Bradley? The last time I saw Herndon (fascist star-fucker) he was sobbing in a gay AA meeting because he can’t stop doing meth.
The time before that I saw Herndon he was at gay traitor Ken Mehlman’s drinks party with his forked tongue shoved so far up Ken’s ass what he pulled out was scarcely chewed.
Bradley, you were very brave.
Most of the gays I know in LA and NYC are the kind of men who stayed close to the teacher at school because they lived in fear.
Fear has shaped their lives.
They are scared of you. They used to be scared of radical homosexual Peter Tatchell. Before Elton brought him in from the cold.
Bradley, you didn’t come from an affluent family, you’re not a great looker. You might not even be a man… that’s what they say.
But who ever you are, you are my hero. You made me rethink, reshape my life. Redefine myself as queer rather than gay… and I thank you for that… again. Because without you… things might have remained confusing for me.
But now… they’re not.
The story of S.F. Pride versus Bradley Manning and S.F. Pride versus the activist community of San Francisco is an ugly one that illumines the maggoty underside of assimilationist politics and policies. In the quest for straight acceptance that has propelled the LGBT community headlong into the arms of two of the most historically repressive institutions, marriage and the military, dissent has become anathema. The values of ads that used to pepper the personals in queer newspapers and magazines “seeking straight-looking, straight-acting, no fats, no fems” have become internalized within the community. The controversy over Manning highlights what has happened in the juggernaut move toward equality — there’s no room for outliers. Either you are a Lisa Williams-style straight-acting, straight-looking martinet with no temper for dissent or you are like the people who signed the complaint — activists all — who recognize that our queer story is not going to be told simply through marriage equality and being able to enlist openly in the military. Marriage and military equality are important, but they aren’t our only issues. Manning took the actions he did because of his outrage over DADT, which was still in effect throughout his deployment. But he also acted like so many patriots have over our nation’s history — out of loyalty to American democracy. Manning thought the government was lying to the people. So he told them the truth.
VICTORIA A. BROWNWORTH is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist who has won the NLGJA and Society of Professional Journalists Awards for her series on LGBT issues. She is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including the award-winning Too Queer: Essays From a Radical Life. She lives in Philadelphia. Find her on Twitter at @VABOX.
Meeting you once. That was enough. I don’t need any more chaos in my life. That’s what a moment with you was. Whoever you are. Was that your real name? Did I tell you my real name. Isn’t that the point?
A community of liars, reinventing themselves for a wet, dark moment under the covers.
That’s what they don’t want you to know. So many lies they tell. They want you to believe we just are like you. We are just like you behind the elegant front door.
The bronze gargoyle.
No women to temper our worst excesses.
Dawn.
Again.
Those yellow, silk satin curtains were bought for me by Jean Paul Gaultier on Nothing Hill the day after the IRA blew up the City of London. They are pretty threadbare at the edges.
I don’t care.
He picked me up at the Market Tavern in Vauxhall. He sent the bar man over with a pint. Paid for. Caught my attention. I had no intention of kissing him. Making love to him. Instead I took him to the crater in the City of London where the Irish Republican Army had blown up the streets.
We took a cab to Notting Hill and bought those yellow silk curtains.
Certain that no one would believe the story. Still very drunk. A pall over my forehead. We sat in Tim’s kitchen so I could, at a later date, prove that we had been there. I sat my god daughter on my lap. My jeans must have stunk of beer and cigarettes and sweat.
I think he was probably into fisting.
I can feel it. You are falling in love with me but I’m not interested. I can’t pretend. I can’t love you back. You may as well back away from the beloved. As you know, there’s a viper beneath the skin. Your weakness disgusts me. Those eyes looking up at me expecting so much more. Those big brown eyes offending me. I imagine pushing you down the stairs.
Visitors: from England. My home town. I think you forget that my home town will always be there. Always. The softer landing. Regardless what you do to me. What you take from me. How you silence me. The months are passing quickly.
If you send me home. My mouth is wide open. A siren. From Whitstable.
Oh, Whitstable. I am coming home.
Leaving behind these savages. I would rather face my demons there.
Savages, blowing up there own people. Blaming the boys. The muslim boys. Demonizing islam.
It’s a drill… wait… no it’s not. There is a third bomb… wait no there isn’t. We’re looking for a dark skinned man… wait… actually two white ones. We need help identifying them… wait we’ve had one of them on a list for years and we know where he lives. Ok, we found them but we killed one… no wait his brother killed him… wait… no he didn’t. We captured the other one after a firefight but he shot himself… wait… he didn’t have a gun.
Savages, without opera. Savages, white and clean. Chained to their guns and their christianity. The lies they tell: the deficit. The heroes they claim. The heroes they abandon.
The gays are picking out their black shirts, their golden hair and musculature.
Being in jail radicalized me. Hanging with the Trans hookers. No longer gay. This queer, with other queers. Behind the women and men of colour, of indeterminate physicality. Liberty leading the people.
There is so much outraged. Outrage! A line has to be drawn. Robby, my darling ally. Now he is Dustin Lance Black‘s boyfriend, well… he had to be jettisoned. The trophy boyfriend.
I really loved him. Like a son.
There he is with the gays (black and white) at the White House. Looking uncomfortable. His hair slicked back. His beautiful flaxen hair.
Meanwhile his ‘husband’ Lance Black, is a grand marshall/special guest star/nazi youth at San Francisco Pride. The same organisation that abandoned Bradley Manning last week. Turned their back on a world hero in favor of an illusionist.
Lance is a man who writes about history rather than participates in it.
A bunch of Iraq gay vets (murderers/terrorists) took it upon themselves to complain and the corporate Pride org buckled.
It was a sad day. A terrible, sad day.
One day films will be made about Bradley Manning and we will wonder, with a degree of homo incredulity, how Lance Black and the organizers of SanFrancisco Pride found themselves on the wrong side of history.
Hairless, blond Lance with his hairless, limp, blond husband.
So the argument rages. Is Bradley manning a hero? It seems that if he is… not many gay people agree. He broke the law they caw!
Well, did he? Whistle blowing (as it turns out) is an honorable, protected act.
Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7 pertaining to Classifications Prohibitions and Limitations clearly states that:
In no case shall information be classified… in order to: conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency… or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.
Thus, what Bradley Manning did when he disclosed cables that revealed extreme corruption and major breaches of diplomatic goodwill was, in fact, quite honorable, and he deserves protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act.
My friend Robby is part of a homosexual elite. Able to shape and destroy lives.
The bitter and resentful gays turning on their own. They daren’t turn on straight people. Why? They still want to be straight.
Meanwhile a black man comes out and the gay, white elite are thrilled. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends. It’s embarrassing that they have no black friends on Facebook.
Thank God! A black man, playing basket ball. He’s making it seem so comfortable.
Fuck HRC. Fuck GLAAD.
I am understanding now. Who those gays are. They never wanted to put up their hand and tell the world they were different. I did. They wanted to be teachers pet. I didn’t. They wanted to be perfect. Nope, not me.
Their only act of bravery is telling the world they are gay.
Astonishing. These absurd gay men screaming about how Bradley Manning broke the law. We who were born criminals… born gay, who every time we kissed or made love also broke the law. Would you have suggested abstinence until the laws magically changed? Did we deserve to go to jail for being gay, after all… we knew the consequences? Who do you think broke the law on your behalf to fight police and break windows at Stonewall? Sadly. it turns out, not many gay men. They were hiding in the back of the bar whilst the trannies broke the law. The gays are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst honorable men like Bradley Manning fight important battles against iniquity and injustice. By dissing Manning you merely collude with, support the illegal actions of the US military. Make your choice, but remember those of us who fought on your behalf once upon a time did so without regard for the law. Bradley Manning may or may not have broken laws. Without doubt, his actions helped liberate millions and hastened a US military withdrawal from Iraq. You must honor him.
Let’s face it. It wasn’t gay men fighting the police and breaking windows the day Judy died. The gays were hiding in the back of the bar or running away. Terrified of breaking the law. Terrified. They are still hiding in the back of the bar whilst others do their fighting for them.
One day, there will be men owning up to not wanting to be gay, staying in the closet because… they will say… ‘I’m not like that… look at what the gays have become…’
This week I purged myself of white, elite gay ‘friends’ on Facebook and I wished I knew… what I could do next.
Roger Ebert died. He wrote to me recently urging me to write more. I have no idea why.
The house in Malibu is filled with my things again and the garden, this beautiful spring, overwhelms me.
Moving back in gave me the opportunity to start editing once again. I threw out three huge boxes of old clothes. Cashmere, labels, everything loved for a moment back then. Helmut, Yves, Issy, Comme des Garcons… boxy shirts from another era, trousers that I can (after my op) still get into but have lost interest in.
I kept all the Helmut Lang couture. It’s just too special.
I feel myself floating over the surface of my life.
The road trip across the USA was spectacular. Chicago, Denver, The Rockies, Utah and Vegas. Just me and the dogs and a car full of art and luggage. I met lovely people and saw cities I had only ever heard of.
I never went over the speed limit.
The operation to have my gall bladder removed was painful but since having the surgery I feel wonderful.
I didn’t realize how much pain I was living with. How the pain made me grumpy, listless and intolerant.
Now, without that girdle of pain, without the imminent GB attacks… I feel perfectly happy. Peaceful.
I can concentrate. perhaps that’s why I need to write?
During the past few months so much has happened. Things I can tell you and things I can’t.
Yet, after the moment passes, I can’t be bothered to write it down.
Editing the huge amount of stuff I own to a few essential pieces. Taking my old stuff to vintage stores, consignment stores and auction houses has been cathartic and profitable. Who knew things were so valuable?
But more than that. It feels like I am winding down. Not is a morbid way.
With less stuff and less girth (since the op I lost a great deal of weight) I feel not only lighter but more agile, more energy to do important things (for me) more time to devote to others, causes, delights.
As you know, those who know me, I like my decisions to be made for me. I LIKED my decisions to be made for me.
Recently I have taken control of the reigns. Less at the mercy of Duncan Roy. Do you know what I’m talking about?
The definite seasons on the east coast. The passing days, changing. Slowly.
Each day has a brand new identity. New light. Color.
The bland, endless Los Angeles summer has finally come to an end. After 8 long years. I am heading home.
I wear my long, grey cashmere coat (Hermes) and fur hat (Dior).
I pull on my knee-length, woolen socks and my heavy boots.
I am going to therapy… daily. I am finally addressing the issues I have been ignoring this past year. You know, those pesky medical issues.
Strangely, without warning… even though we share the same streets. I never see him. Nor do I wish to conjure him, manifest him, make him appear… I had lunch with one of his co-workers the other day, a youngster (we met at an AA meeting) who wanted his job.
It was funny being at the same table as someone who works in close proximity to him. Their opinion.
They knew the story. An urban myth that they delighted in fact checking.
Oh well.
Of course there’s loads going on (Film/House/Social) but somehow I don’t have the energy to write it.
I take pictures and let that suffice.
2.
I found a picture of Joe. He’s obsessively going to the gym. A man mountain. In his late 60′s now.
I scarcely ever think about him. Isn’t that odd? To have no thoughts about someone who was once the center of your world.
I have resigned my gay membership. I renounce the word GAY.
The Other is different from you. He is neither superior nor inferior.
He is not alone. He is out.
2.
Are you kidding? I still like sex with men… but I’m not interested in being gay.
Do you understand what I’m saying… gays? Yes you. I’m talking to you.
I’M TALKING TO YOU! Yes you, the gay in the bar, on the street, editing his Grindr profile.
Let’s face it. This separation will work out just fine for both of us.
I loathe you and you hate me.
I know, amongst other things, what galls you… you (particularly) don’t like when men in their fifties own up to having a rich and varied sexuality:
I’ve been called a ‘dirty old man’ by more gays than I ever have by straights for wanting or having beautiful younger men in my bed.
The gays write it anonymously. They post it all over the place, whenever they can. As If I should be ashamed?
You, you who have cornered the market in nihilism, immorality, homogeneousness, bitchery, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, self-obsession… in fact anything with the self prefix… apart from self-awareness.
I am peeling off the parade. I am letting the party wend its way elsewhere.
2. (a)
They told me at Triangle House in LA when we were making our documentary about older gay people: they say that old gay people end up going back into the closet because… it can get ugly… it can get dangerous.
They say that gay men are more likely to end up homeless than in any other demographic… because they have no community.
You gays are the very worst at hating yourselves. But you reserve more venom for the elderly homosexual than any other group.
It is a sickening idea to many young gays, that we (the elderly) exist.
Some young gay people believe that past 50 our penises shrink appropriately into our bodies. Retract.
In old age we become like wrinkly Ken dolls with smooth, pink groins.
No longer a threat to anyone.
I thought that when I became old… I would start wearing women’s clothes.
Where do young gay men learn how to be dignified old gay men?
I learned from older men in AA how to be an older man.
The respect that AA old timers get, applauded for their contribution to the community of AA stands in stark contract to the respect that older gay people don’t get from younger gay people.
Unless, of course, they are famous… or comical freaks… or rich enough to buy the boys they used to get for free.
Young gay people don’t want to be reminded that the party comes to an end.
2 (b)
So, today…
I resign my membership. I am no longer a true believer. I’m handing back my awards, my medals, my history, my pride.
It’s yours not mine. Take it.
I renounce: gay pride, gay film festivals, gay beaches, gay basketball, gay bars, the gay ghetto, the gay plague, gay marriage, gaybies, gaydar.com, gays in the military, gay cruises, cottaging, felching, gay news, gay voice, gay face, the gay sub section in the book/video store/Huffington Post.
You can keep it all. The gay plays I made, the gay films I directed, the gay art I painted/etched/sculpted.
Take everything I ever made in your honor.
If you don’t want it? Burn it.
2 (c)
When I offered our award-winning film catalogue of gay films to The Legacy Project (the gay and lesbian film preservation project) based out of UCLA… the gays turned it down.
Even though AKA had won the LA Outfest audience award and opened (and closed) many gay film festivals all over the world with all of my films.
The Legacy Project said no to the free gift. They wanted me to disappear.
They don’t want any evidence that I existed. As a man or an artist.
“He’s trouble.” ”He’s angry.” ”He’s a parasite.”
Gays! Look at what you’ve become!
Examine, for just one goddamned gay second…. the mediocrity! Your righteous indignation! Your mock elegance!
Being with you is like drowning in cold tea.
3.
I don’t drink or take drugs. Tom blew weed into my face. He put vodka into my virgin mary. That’s how the gays bully one another.
Try wearing something unusual when your companions just want to be invisible.
“Who does he think he is?”
Their artificially deepened voices. The plaid shirt, the super hero tee.
The cloak of invisibility.
INVISIBLE.
Tom asked incredulously, “What are you wearing?” A man who wears nothing but ugly jeans, ill-fitting t-shirts.
Tom has an ‘opinion’ about individuality: He doesn’t believe in it.
These gays are terrified of being seen. Gripped by the politics of invisibility.
At least that grotesque, lying freak I used to date… he and his boy friend have some sartorial audacity.
Even if it is TOTALLY misguided.
Who are these gays? These invisigays?
Like Tom, they may appear normal:
4.
How can a gay man expect to age with dignity when nobody gay wants to age at all?
I saw it in LA… my destiny. If I chose to take it.
At first, Adam looked just like any other confident gay man claiming to be 48.
His gay parties are the talk of the town. Richer than most of his friends, though not very well connected … not to the real gay power in LA.
At one of his parties (to his chagrin) I photographed every single one of his guests.
A snap shot of LA gay life.
He has never been elegant, he has never been a great beauty. He will never be tall.
He is, however, manicured, botoxed, his teeth reinvented, his flawless skin, his demeanor… (that only great wealth lends you).
It was at that last raucous party I attended (as a plus one) I saw him upset (rattled)… why?
He looked like an old, vulnerable man.
“What happened?” I asked the gays.
They told me imperiously (as if it were obvious) that the young, chiseled boy he imported from NYC just wanted him for his money.
Adam looked… beaten. Crest fallen. His frail hands shook, the delicate skin around his eyes failing.
The gays stood around helplessly as their host fell apart. They stared into the plastic cups of vodka. They played with their nipples.
The pimps and the whores waited silently by the sodden beer pong.
He turned the music off. Finally, he threw everyone out.
They lined up on the steep drive. A hideous parade of grotesquely young boys, graded online or in public bars for their sexual prowess, their social fallibility, their youth.
The man who invented the heart valve, it seems, suffered from a broken heart.
5.
Take the gay man who gave up his 160k surrogate child for adoption because she had a small birth defect on one of her legs.
Yes, you heard me.
When we interviewed the doctor who makes hundreds and thousands of gay dollars from the gayby industry… he told us that the gays want perfection. Nothing less will do.
Take it all… this gay culture. This gay community. Take it.
Take the video of Bryan with 25 Bel Ami boys jacking off over him.
Or the man/boy with the huge cock who they pay to sleep with a hooker and unbeknownst to him… tape him.
This tribe of entitled, elitist gays clinging to gay marriage and their smart phones.
6.
I had lunch today with a 30-year-old man/boy who just came out. ”Why did it take you so long, ” I ask, “To tell the truth?” He said, “I didn’t… (he paused dramatically) …I mean I still don’t… I don’t want to be gay.”
“That’s ok,” I reassured him. ”You can describe yourself however you want.”
When, as frightened teens, blooming… prepubescent boys… infants… when we understand that we want to fall in love and fuck and suck and slide into another man… what choices do we have? To describe ourselves?
Gay is the only way.
And if you don’t know what you are. The gays will tell you exactly what you are.
The gays are so prescriptive.
He’s gay, they claim conspiratorially. They claim anyone ‘hot’ is gay. They all know someone who had sex with Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman.
“He’s fucking his ‘assistant’.”
Oh Yes! He’s had sex with a man… he’s gay. He’s experimented… he’s gay.
Prescriptive.
6 (a)
Hollywood does not lend itself to morals.
CAA agent Kevin Huvane. When you first meet him, he shakes your hand and pulls you toward him. Trying to pull you off-balance.
The first time he met me… it worked (I was rocked) the second and third times I was prepared and we set to a gay tug of war, an argy bargy, him attempting to pull me and me attempting to pull him.
The fourth time I let him pull me onto him. I crashed into him. His tiny frame overwhelmed by 6′ 2″ me. He landed in a heap beneath me. ”Oh sorry,” I said. ”You pulled me toward you. I lost my balance. Sorry… Kevin.”
He’ll put you on a ‘list’ they told me. ”I’m on so many lists.” I murmured. ”More lists than Cathy Griffin.”
7.
After claiming on the Dr. Drew show that I wanted to make healthy decisions about sex. Somebody wrote to me or about me: If Duncan Roy doesn’t like gay sex… he isn’t gay.
He wasn’t far from the truth.
At first, I was outraged by their attempts to isolate, malign and lambaste me.
They had tried for years. Without success. Every time they try… they fail.
This last time… the jail. What the hell did they expect? That I would buckle?
Those who throw rocks at me are seldom innocent of that which they accuse.
8.
The Gays, have become so… bourgeois. Do you understand what that means? Let me refresh your memory:
Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.
When I was young… gays like you knew their place.
They stayed in the closet. I mean. Coming out of the closet was brave! Now anyone can do it and become a fucking hero.
9.
Gays… why are you killing yourselves?
You kill yourself because you can’t take a joke, because you can’t hold your liquor, because you can’t say no to crystal… because you don’t want to be gay.
I don’t remember young gay people killing themselves in the UK.
It gets better?
What gets better?
Better than death?
10.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled when any oppressed group gets a bit of equality… but what will the USA gays do with their equality?
I’ll tell you.
They will make it even harder for the rest of us to be different.
There is a hideous conformity to which these young gays feel they must adhere.
Gay life in the USA. A blushing desire for ‘straight acting’ has become a tsunami of heternoramativity. The foundation on which this miserable gay monolith now stands.
Who are you?
A greek god, perfectly muscled, forever young… dressed to be ignored, as bland a personality as he can effect.
He is Peter Pan, he is Hercules, his personality as glittering as the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
Do you care about anything other than marriage equality? No.
He eats what his parents eat. He would vote republican if they could only find it in their neo con hearts to see that the gays are perfect conservatives.
So. We are divorced. I am no longer gay. I’m OUT. I’m out of here. I’m out but I’m not gay.
New Harris tweed trousers. They are so thick and keep the cold wind from whipping around my legs.
I had two very different experiences on Friday.
1.
The first, an unfortunate spat on Facebook with a Canadian writer called Michael Rowe.
I think you know, those of you who read this regularly, that I struggle with marriage as the means by which gay and straight people find parity.
That marriage in of itself doesn’t seem to work for many of the people who sign up for it… so why do so many men and women in the LGBQ community want it so badly?
Is it just because they want the ‘benefits’?
I thought about it a great deal this week.
For those of us gay men and women who are now in our early fifties marriage was never an option. I never hankered after it, nor cared to think about it.
I read this in a British newspaper.
British MPs are planning to create an “exception” in marriage law for same-sex couples and will not alter the definition of adultery.
Either they don’t take us seriously or we don’t take us seriously?
Perhaps gay marriage is indeed separate from straight marriage because we can’t be trusted with monogamy?
Those I respect seem to value marriage equality… so I have been posting thoughts and feelings on my Facebook page.
I am perturbed by how many angry responses I get whenever I write about my marriage equality concerns.
If marriage equality was all we needed or wanted are we selling ourself short? Are we like any cultural minority that lives side by side the majority needing to be tolerated rather than nurtured? Do we need to be understood? Do they need to learn our language? Or, like Hasidic Jews do we evolve separately once we are ‘equal’. Somehow this is not attractive to me.
This question incensed Michael Rowe.
Where are you getting “all we needed or wanted” from? It’s a basic right. That’s not “tolerance,” that’s equality and strength.
The conversation continued privately.
Talking to Michael was like talking to a Zionist. Realizing that his problem with what I was saying was more about me than the conversation I decided to tread carefully. He is the sort of man who believes that any gay who comes out of the closet is an unqualified hero.
I’m not an intellectual, nor am I particularly bright… but I am willing to listen… and I am desperate to understand why I am so conflicted about marriage equality.
Because, I think, it doesn’t seem like equality at all.
So, why am I bothering to fight for something I simply don’t believe in?
It feels like another way to join another elite gang. A gang that will, if given half the chance, bully you mercilessly.
I’ve seen straight women do this. Brag about their married status to their unmarried friends. Causing those unmarried women to burst into tears when they are far enough away from their persecutor.
I asked Michael what he thought marriage would do to our gay culture. I said, I really want to understand your position.
Not sure what there is to “understand.” Until there is no foundation of complete legal equality for LGBT people, the rest of it, worrying about “our culture,” is frosting with no cake. That’s my position.
Our gay culture is very important to me. Even if it is on a separate page, in it’s own section at the book shop or the video store or on Netflix. I enjoy the separation. You see, I’m not very interested in what straight people make of me or the culture that has sprung up around me.
What will marriage equality do to the gay community?
How will these huge changes affect us and our behavior toward other gay man and women.
If a gay man tells his straight friend that he is getting married will his straight friend feel a flush of envy?
I asked if Michael felt ‘more equal’ than his American friends? He said:
Of course I do. I have approximately 300 more rights than American gay couples whose relationships are not legally recognized, rights that have financial and legal implications.
And no, I don’t feel sorry for gay couples who aren’t married by their choice, but I do feel sorry for those who don’t have that choice.
I don’t think that screaming about how proud you are not to be married carries a lot of weight when that right isn’t even on the table.
Like employment protection. Or do you also feel that a law that protects LGBT Americans from being fired also hurts “our culture?”
Oh dear, Michael was watching the NRA press conference at the time so his irritation may be excused.
He is, as you know, a very important Huffington Post blogger.
A ‘gay voice’. In the separate but equal ‘gay voice’ section of the Huff Post.
There is a great deal in this last quote that may make you wince… as I winced.
I come from England where Tony Blair gave Waheed Ali carte blanche to equalize the lives of hetero and homo sexual people.
I remember eating lunch in Malibu with Waheed who explained to me how the legislation was written.
He explained that the word Marriage may have been attractive to some but perhaps a little too divisive. They chose civil unions as the way forward.
Total equality (excluding the word marriage) was a great incremental step in the right direction and one that the majority of my gay friends in long-term relationships were happy to embrace.
Michael is not so sure.
“Civil unions” aren’t marriage, and they’re not equality.
He continued inaccurately:
They weren’t “chosen,” they were all they could get because no one would allow them to be married, with full marriage equality, including the rights of citizenship for spouses.
Just to be perfectly clear: the British do have rights for citizenship for spouses and UNMARRIED partners.
Now, that’s what I’m talking about.
After many years of legal parity, the British gays… from a position of strength are asking for the word marriage and asking a very conservative government to boot. They are certain to succeed.
Civil Union may be the best incremental baby step on offer?
What are the incremental baby steps that seem to get American gays no closer to federal recognition of same-sex marriage?
Married Michael Rowe is very proud of his life.
He has achieved what his parents probably wanted for him all through his childhood. The dream of a heteronormative existence.
The rest of the conversation disintegrated into name calling. He called me tiresome, I ended up calling him a cunt and he blocked me on FB and that was that.
If I were in my early thirties I might think that this is a golden age for gay men and lesbians. That I could enjoy a fully ‘out’ existence, meet the man of my dreams, marry him, buy some surrogate children and live happily ever after.
That is a perfectly lovely dream to have.
But I am still in two minds. Shouldn’t we all be fighting for something more than marriage, that marriage should not allow those who are to have so much more than those who are not?
This is not equality.
Some married gay men (like Michael) are already behaving like my mother and grandmother behaved toward their spinster/old maid/barren friends. Looking down their married noses.
Do I feel cheated out of different sort of gay life? If I had grown up around gay men getting married would I have thought differently about the men I dated and the future we could have had?
I have, undoubtedly, missed the man/man marriage boat. Joe and I talked about it briefly.
When I was growing up the thought of marriage (one man to another) was simply not a consideration. Like an orthodox jew would never think about eating bacon. I didn’t really think anything of not being married.
Being brought up in a small town where the majority of my straight peers had children but no marriage… marriage seemed Victorian and absurd. The people who were getting married were not… cool. They were… boring.
My straight friends who remained unmarried with many children did very well for themselves. They ran successful businesses. Their children went to great universities. They struggled and excelled equally along side those children who came from married families and broken homes.
There really was no difference between them and any other child.
The emphasis on family values seems to have gripped the gays as firmly as the straights.
What ever family means we don’t want to be left out of the explanation.
We all have a family of sorts. Some have blood relatives, others have an extended family of strangers.
Obviously, I have invested in the latter and have never been let down.
Which brings me to the final part of my blog today.
2.
Sitting with the dogs on Franklin outside my coffee shop of choice I met a young Rabbi.
Charming, Cambridge educated and very enthusiastic.
He invited me to Shabbat the following Friday night.
I had, of course, enjoyed many a Friday night with the Cohen’s in LA. David, his wife and their 6 children. 40 people for pot luck dinner around a huge table on the lawn then talking about world events with a talking stick. It was perfect.
This Shabbat was very different.
There were several rabbinical students. I arrived mid prayer. For an hour we prayed.
The most exquisite boy with the most beautiful voice (and a baby) sang something on his own before the others joined in. When he started singing I began to cry.
They prayed and sang (they sang in Hebrew) and faced East, my rabbi friend was particularly enthusiastic. I sat beside him and he kept apologizing for everything, as if it were a trial for me to be there… when in fact it was beautiful.
I sat there thinking about the gays. After my run in with Michael.
I wondered if they would have confused my thoughts about how beautiful the singer was with wanting to fuck him. That most of my gay friends wouldn’t have just enjoyed him, they would have wanted to fuck him. ”He’s hot…”
We ate a huge dinner. We washed our hands ritually. After the dinner and conversations with truly wonderful people (I avoided talking Palestine) we sat together for more prayers and a fascinating chat about the Torah.
The young rabbinical students and scholars discussed in a really modern and interesting way what I had been taught was the Old Testament.
Jacob, Joseph and the blessing of the Pharaoh:
My years have been few and difficult.
They talked about other things.
A young man with thick, raven black hair told us he had just visited Sandy Hook. To offer ‘solace’.
At first I was irritated by the apparent intrusion, it seemed so arrogant.
I was wrong.
He explained that the town was packed with people from all over the world. That he had witnessed a funeral of one of the murdered children and the parents of the dead child were holding up signs in the car that said, very simply: ”THANK YOU.”
I found him after dinner and thanked him for reminding me that it’s easy to let other people do the difficult tasks.
If Sandy Hook had been an isolated incident then I might have felt differently but Sandy Hook is part of a macabre American theme and we must all, collectively… own it.
It is our responsibility.
That young Jewish man and his five friends had taken responsibility and travelled to Sandy Hook.
By doing so, they had a spiritual awakening. They were thanked by the parents of dead infants.
They understood (unlike those of us who did not go) something more about America, about bravery, about priority, about consequence.
The two parts of my day could not have been more different. The childish spat with an entitled gay man and the spiritual warmth of new family offered me by a group of heterosexual strangers.
Inclusion versus exclusion.
Last night Lady Rizo and I had dinner with Winston Churchill’s granddaughter. I was not the only gay at the dinner for 50. I avoided the other gays.
Then, I meet a woman who KNOWS all about my film. I mean, she knows the story like an urban myth. But it’s not a myth. It’s the sad truth.
“Oh, I know this story,” she said. Her eyes sparkling with anticipation. ”I think he’s my friend on Facebook. Yes, look…” she pulls out her smart phone and there he is. I push the phone away. I shouldn’t be looking at that.
“What was he thinking?” she roars with laughter.
Women love my film. It confirms everything they think they know about men. The injustice of men.
Dead five-year olds. 20 of them.
The children are shot dead by a crazed, entitled white boy. The little bodies buried this week. Lined up against the wall and executed. You know they didn’t have a clue. You know they did as they were told.
I thought about the little dog facing the lethal injection.
A horrific pendant: ten Afghan children are splattered into the mud by a drone.
Somehow their little brown faces are missing from the media. Somehow the little white children in Connecticut are worth more.
This week has been all about mental illness and guns. The mild wet weather. The poem. The fiscal cliff. Obama. That’s PRESIDENT Obama to you.
We asked you to vote for him, now he’s letting us down all over again. Surprise, fucking surprise.
I saw a man being mugged on the 5 train. Into Manhattan, a stealthy, tall, nimble black man rips an iPhone 4s out of an asian man’s hands leaving him with his ear phones on his head. The rest of us sat amazed.
The white people urged him to call the police but he said, “I’m already late for work.”
I’m buying a parker. It’s lined with blood-red shearling. Like the monkey they found in Ikea.
Dinner in the neighborhood, dinner at the Mercer Kitchen with Courtney, dinner at the Standard Grill with Brock.
Dinner with Cristina who I have not seen for 30 years on the floor of her palatial Upper East Side home. It was as if all those 30 years just melted away. That we were friends again from last week. Funny, compelling, brilliant, beautiful Cristina.
Dinner with new gay AA friends in cheap diners.
Dinner at Mary’s Fish Camp with Benoit. We stop at Boxers (gay bar) on the way home. There’s nothing for us. Benoit peels off leaving me on the street and as I wait for the green light a handsome green eyed man says hello.
At first I wonder why. Why is this stunningly handsome 27-year-old man saying hello to me.
Then we’re in Barracuda kissing each other.
I’m wearing that huge fur hat.
I can’t kiss him any more. I can’t suck any more spit out of his mouth. I can’t look into his green eyes.
I am so overwhelmed by him I walk through the rain until I am soaked to the skin. Wondering how it happens? Wondering how it ends up like this?
All the way home I’m humming Nature Boy to myself.
On the way back to Malibu I stopped in at one of those coffee-house chains. I sat nursing a cup of hot black brew.
I sat quietly. I am wearing my black pantaloons (Miu Miu), a Stetson, raspberry colored hand knitted socks with sky blue trim.
I sat listening to a bunch of affluent white men in their 50′s and 60′s dressed in motor cycling leathers, complaining about President Obama.
They were rudely spouting one ill-informed cliché after another, rudely condemning: green solutions, ‘cripple’ access around Santa Monica, the ‘fiscal cliff’ etc.
These same men defend Israel. Even though this week Israel and the USA find themselves horribly isolated on the world stage.
The old white men are stuck in another age, another time… baffled by a changing world… still unable to comprehend how Mitt Romney lost the election they were convinced he’d win.
I wanted to ask them questions but I knew nothing they had to say would tell me anything I didn’t already know.
Their fears laid bare: Black leaders, electric cars, marriage equality.
“They’ll all cry that they voted for him.” they convinced each other.
I felt like I was on the winning side. Their Schadenfreude didn’t feel dangerous… it felt old-fashioned.
On the way home I listened to something on NPR about a group called LA Jews for Peace.
A group of Jewish Americans committed to peace in the Middle East through a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and opposition to American militarism, imperialism, and exceptionalism.
Their spokesman bemoaned America’s UN vote against Palestine.
America, like the old white men at the coffee shop, seems unable to comprehend or adapt to the changing world.
What the white men at the coffee shop don’t seem to acknowledge: they have more in common with their President than they seem to realize. I mean… Obama is only half black, raised by white folks… cup half full lads? Surely?
Obama owns his whiteness in the Whitehouse and flays his blackness on the stump.
Barry Goodman (old white jew), unfriended me on FB the day the UN recognized the Palestinians right to statehood.
Just nine nations voted against the Palestinian Authority’s upgrade to nonvoting observer state status, which passed the General Assembly 138-9, with 41 abstentions.
Voting “No” on Thursday were Israel, the United States and Canada, joined by the Czech Republic, Panama and several Pacific island nations: Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru and Palau. The Pacific nations typically support the U.S. and Israel at the U.N. on key General Assembly resolutions.
In the face of this terrific news self hating jews like Barry Goodman reacted like spoiled, entitled children.
In a unanimous resolution passed Sunday, Israel’s Cabinet said it would not negotiate on the basis of the General Assembly’s recognition of a state of Palestine in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip.
“The unilateral step taken by the Palestinians at the United Nations violates peace agreements,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained, justifying Israel’s rejection of the U.N. vote.
Astoundingly, he bleated:
“The only way to Palestinian statehood and peace is through direct negotiations with Israel.”
Then he told the rest of the non compliant world he was going to hold onto money that was owed to the Palestinians and build all over their shit.
2.
I don’t trust any of the gay men I meet in LA. Industry men.
Bryan. WTF?
I had lunch with one of Bryan’s boy toys yesterday, the second in one week. I met a technician Bryan works with, Bryan says, “I don’t want to direct movies, I want someone else to direct them and I critique their results.”
After I started defending the Palestinians during the Israeli bombardment Guy S (second rate Bryan sycophant) tells me that they all hate me. That’s like music to my ears.
I call Tom. Tom denies what I already know to be the truth.
They know, they all know that sooner or later I’m going to write everything down.
Hollywood Babylon style.
It’s just a matter of time.
3.
December 2nd 2013. Just you wait Henry Higgins, just you wait.
As my gay friends, blindly devoted to President Obama, danced with joy at the news that gay marriage was being approved by popular vote in three states… the first of its kind, that an ‘out’ lesbian had been elected to the US senate and that ‘their guy’ was going back to the White House… I shifted uncomfortably in my bed.
In May, after years of unconvincingly claiming that his (Obama’s) view on gay marriage was “evolving”, it miraculously matured five months before an election as support from gay and lesbian voters and young people – who are far more likely to support marriage equality – appeared to be softening. A month later he halted the deportation of thousands of young undocumented immigrants with an executive order.
He could have done either one at any time.
The Guardian
As the results came in I watched my Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr feeds explode.
Lance Black told us that he was crying so hard with gratitude for the people of Maine, so blinded by tears he could scarcely post his thanks on Facebook.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” he wept.
I kept thinking: Republicans want your money, Democrats want your hope. What’s worse?
All night I knew that I was witnessing something sickeningly dishonest, as ersatz as the twin towers crumbling seem to conspiracy theorists.
I wondered again and again about the relative values of my gay brethren.
You see, I couldn’t stop thinking about just one gay man.
I was plagued with the young face of Bradley Manning who presently sits in jail, a victim of Obama’s rarely mentioned dark side.
Since July 2010 he has been kept naked and in solitary confinement. According to his family he is going slowly insane.
Manning, you may remember, had blown the whistle on American war crimes in Iraq. He posted videos, unleashed a torrent of classified information to Wikileaks… his fury knew no bounds.
He had every reason to be angry. He related to the wholesale cruelty and injustice being perpetrated on the Iraqi people.
Manning’s had a crippling history of emotional abuse, neglect, bullying and abandonment .
As a teenager he was taken to the UK by his British mother. At school in Wales he became the target of bullying because he was the only American. The students would imitate his accent, and they apparently abandoned him once during a camping trip. His aunt told The Washington Post: “He woke up, and all the tents around him were gone. They left while he was sleeping.” He was also targeted for being effeminate.
As an adult he had one of two choices, he could take it out on himself like so many gay men and kill himself… or he could take it out on those who gave him the most pain.
He was rightly furious at how he was being personally treated by the military… facing his own demons as well as the worlds.
Every day he bore witness to atrocities against the Iraqi people, (the very people he was apparently trying to protect) and the atrocity of institutionalized homophobia.
Some soldiers, driven mad by war, punish Iraqis. A soldier walks into a village on his own and kills innocent men, women and children. Some take it out on each other, a soldier rapes or damages or kills a colleague. We know these stories. They are legion.
Bradley Manning knew the truth had to be revealed.
It was the largest set of restricted documents ever leaked to the public.
The Wikipedia page for Manning has a great deal of unsubstantiated detail describing his ‘true nature’, over turning tables, punching women in the face, carving words into a chair.
Meanwhile, the heteronormative lesbian (Tammy Baldwin), looking like Laura Bush in her puce, slubbed silk jacket was on her way to the Senate. Hailed by the gays (even the ones who have no lesbian or even women friends) as the great Sappho answer to the LGBT political conundrum, applauding as she goes down on the neo-liberal pussy… rainbow bunting festoons her office.
Is Tammy Baldwin our LGBT hero? Will the people of Maine win a GLAAD award like the people of Europe won the Nobel Peace Prize?
Bradley Manning is a true hero, a gay hero, a young man of conscience… yet he has been all but abandoned by the gay community.
Where are his GLAAD awards? His rainbow bunting? His gay applause?
Don’t weep for the people of Maine for voting on something that shouldn’t even have been on the ballot. Weep for Bradley Manning who sits in a cell today for showing all of you the crimes being committed in your name.
2.
According to the New York Times, preparing President Obama for his first Presidential debate against Mitt Romney proved an impossible task for even his most trusted advisors.
David Axelrod, a senior strategist, told a surly Mr. Obama that he seemed distracted, but the President shrugged him off. “I’ll be there on game day,” he said. “I’m a game day player.”
As it turned out the President was not a ‘game day player’, famously caught off guard by Romney’s meticulous debate preparation he crashed and burned leaving many of his most ardent supporters wondering why they were supporting him at all.
There’s something horribly revealing about this story. It betrays exactly who Barack Obama is.
Aloof, dismissive and far more confident in his own ability than he should be.
For those who have performed on stage can confirm, no amount of rehearsal is long enough for any performance. The dress rehearsal is imperative, it is at the dress rehearsal where all catastrophic mistakes will be made, never to be made again.
To have no rehearsal, no dress rehearsal, to stand on stage without any rehearsal whatsoever is arrogant at best, monumentally dumb at worst.
Arrogance may be Obama’s defining character defect. More details reveal the President to be an even less sympathetic character.
Two startling facts:
He has never entertained either President Carter nor Clinton at the White House and complains frequently about being under valued.
“Stories abound of big donors who stopped giving as much or working as hard because Obama never reached out, either with a Clinton-esque warm bath of attention or Romney-esque weekend love fests and Israeli-style jaunts; of celebrities who gave concerts for his campaigns and never received thank-you notes or even his full attention during the performance; of public servants upset because they knocked themselves out at the president’s request and never got a pat on the back.”
There is an obvious lack of sophistication about the first couple that no amount of Jason Woo, Simon Doonan table settings or fancy interior decoration will ever mask.
Obama’s arrogance, his ego maniacal obsession with his own success would be worth something if he had some huge scheme, some Housman type plan, some Churchillian grandiosity, some Napoleonic zeal but all his arrogance boils down to… well, a miserable compromise.
Many liberals were annoyed during the first Obama term that Bush-era strong-arm tactics (including the ubiquitous executive order) were not used… even as the President was bullied relentlessly by house Republicans after he lost control of Congress.
After the ‘shellacking’ he continue his obsequious placating of the far right of the Republican party. Rather than insist on defending his oft lauded centrist position he crawled ignominiously further right to placate his foes.
The most annoying leitmotif of President Obama’s last four years, a recurring theme… must be his constant reference to himself as The President because if he didn’t remind you who he was… you might forget.
“I’m the president.” he tells anyone who will listen. “I’m the President!” he smiles, like JayZ might tell you he had sold more tracks on iTunes than any other artist since the Beatles.
And if that sounds vaguely racist, I remind you again what Don Lemons told me about The President, “Obama is the kind of black man who looks scared of white people.”
There’s something to be said for this analysis.
Not wanting to prepare for the Presidential debate reveals Obama’s fear of the very men the rest of us want to see him stand up against: The Good ol’ Boys.
The very same men who are at this moment witnessing the end of their white America, the very same white men who could not believe America would elect a black President twice.
The man they had humiliated with obstructionist politics, like tripping the nigger on the side-walk… just because they could.
His fear of white people coupled with the pitiful jokes, the self-deprecating bon mot.
“I was too polite.” he offered up after the first debate.
It caused radical friends to throw up their hands in fury.
Barry Obama, against all the Republican odds, is President re-elect. It is up to him to start taking those who elected him seriously and not for granted. It is up to us to drag this weedy President firmly into the 21st Century.
Americans, it seems, are baying for a modern America.
The cabal of white (Republican looking) social engineers who stand behind Obama (Tim Geithner et al) , using their half-black, amiable front man as a shield behind which they steal the money…. well, they need to wake up.
There are too many vocal opponents to the wholesale compromise that defined Obama’s first term.
Those who supported Obama the second time around are delivering a firm rebuke. They want stuff.
The white men who have been controlling Obama, offering false hope to the Latinos and the gays to motivate their base… have opened Pandora’s box… yet the evil in the box seems poisonous only to the Republicans… for the rest of us it is the liberal air we breath.
3.
A Gay Poem
by Duncan Roy 2012
Don’t let climate change ruin your gay wedding.
Don’t let staff shortages due to deportation destroy your special day.
Try not to think about drone attacks on foreign shores.
Concentrate on the $160k baby you can’t really afford, grown in the woman whose name will never be known to the unborn child.
You’re spending your bonus money on Botox and patching your 25 years old lined forehead with restylane.
Thank God you’re marrying a fellow american or ICE officers might be your groomsman.
Thank God you can get married, you’ll never be turned away from the hospital as your husband lies dying of a meth overdose.
They found him in the sauna, multiply penetrated, cream pied, still dripping, swaying gently in a sling still wearing his military boots…
I arrived early at the ACLU office down town. I met with my lawyers. I watched the 30 or so cameras being set up from TV stations all over the USA.
Jennie Pasquarella spoke first. A more eloquent speaker one could not hope to listen to. A more brilliant lawyer one could not hope to meet.
Like all of the lawyers who work for the ACLU she is motivated by fairness for all.
She said:
The principle of bail is something so fundamental, that you shouldn’t be held until you’re found guilty.
I waited my turn.
I listened again to this startling fact: The Immigration Department is mandated to deport 400, 000 people a year from the USA.
This fact alone never ceases to shock and amaze me. The implications, I’m sure, are not lost on any of you.
The last time I faced a barrage of press like that I was at the Sundance Film Festival. It was all about me.
Yesterday I was representing thousands of the disenfranchised, the oppressed and the wrongly imprisoned.
In light of Jerry Brown’s veto of the Trust Act and set against the back drop of a recent, damning report documenting violence and abuse in The Men’s County Jail, this case could not be more relevant.
Sheriff Lee Baca has been effectively told that he is incapable of running a jail by the board of supervisors.
Humiliatingly the Supervisors, not the Sheriff, will find someone more competent to run the jail.
Within minutes of the end of our press conference the Sheriff’s representative disputed the charge that the Sheriff’s Department has denied bail to anyone because of ICE holds.
“If you are able to post bail — say it’s $10,000 — and you’re an immigrant from wherever. With or without an ICE hold, we accept that,” said the spokeswoman, Nicole Nishida.
An outright LIE.
A report by prison expert James Austin cites data from Baca’s office indicating that at least 20,000 Los Angeles County inmates, nearly all of them Latino males, were subjected to ICE holds in 2011.
Latino males arrested, held in the MCJ, forced to accept spurious guilty pleas and deported equals: ethnic cleansing.
Nobody cares about them. Nobody gives a damn about undocumented workers. They are treated like animals. Even by my most (so-called) progressive friends.
Latinos spending their lives doing jobs white people don’t want to do, refuse to do in SoCal. They are the real victims of the economic catastrophe.
During the good times, we turn a blind eye to these men and women working at our behest for minimal wages.
When things get bad they are thrown out like yesterdays trash, rounded up like cattle to satisfy immigration deportation quotas.
It’s the same everywhere, when things get tough: blame the immigrants.
I heard my own mother blame Eastern Europeans for ‘taking our jobs’ back at home in Britain.
The Spanish-speaking press asked me: “Do you think Lee Baca is anti-immigrant?”
“You mean, do I think Lee Baca is a racist?” I replied. ”Well, he is just part of the racist problem in the USA but he gets to be the executioner.”
In a country where most people are enslaved by debt, lack of education, obesity, religious/corporate ideology and hubris it is very easy to forget about ones own enslavement and think nothing of enslaving and demonizing others.
The primary reason I would never vote (if I could) for a second Obama term, regardless of his so-called pro gay marriage smokescreen (designed largely to melt liberal hearts) is his appalling deportation record.
The Obama administration’s deportation policies, which rely on cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, have already been challenged in California.
Legislation that would have prohibited sheriffs and police departments from enforcing ICE holds in most cases was, as I have already written, vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month.
Barrack Obama has deported more people from the USA than any other President in this country’s history.
It goes without saying that the Gay media and my local Malibu newspaper will totally ignore this story. I am neither pretty enough nor non-controversial for either to cover the story.
Even though it may be of interest to both communities.
Most gay men are unaware that if they fell in love with a non-American their state marriage certificate or their Foreign marriage certificate would mean absolutely nothing to the Federal Immigration Department.
Their husband/wife would risk deportation.
The gay men I know think that deportation happens to other people… you know… brown people. Not people like us.
Those same gay men run the gay media.
Scott McPherson from The Advocate told me recently that he totally supported The President’s immigration policy and (after I explained to him what a drone was and who was being killed by them) he told me he had no interest in who drones were killing.
All Scott wants is marriage equality. Apparently, only for Americans to marry other Americans.
You might think that Malibu is a liberal, open-minded place…. with all those rich über gays living down there on the beach… but I have endured more homophobia in Malibu than even my small home town village of Whitstable in Kent where one might expect the crushingly narrow-minded.
My Armenian neighbor was so vile about me and my young gay renter, her invective so shocking… it almost took my breath away.
So. It has begun.
Where the runes fall… is none of my business.
Somehow the very act of laying ones self bare, open to all sorts of scrutiny, is a relief.
Regardless of the outcome, I am very happy to be of service to those who can least help themselves.
The bill, which was the antithesis of Arizona’sSB 1070, would have helped stop racial profiling and restore trust and transparency between California’s communities and law enforcement officials.
While the outcome of the fight is disappointing, I am thankful for activists who appealed to Governor Brown by signing thousands of petitions then making hundreds of calls to his office urging him to sign the bill.
Adam Luna, is the Political Director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrants rights organization wanted to share this message:
“While it was a bitter disappointment to see the governor veto the TRUST Act, I wanted to let you know how much your activism and solidarity made a real difference.
11,300 petition signatures (more than any other organization!), which were hand-delivered in Sacramento, hundreds of phone calls — it was amazing.”
Those of us in the immigration reform movement know that this is not a fight which is going to be won overnight and the governor said that he’s open to making a deal next year because he knows that you, and we, won’t rest until the fight is won.
While Governor Brown’s failure of leadership on this issue is disheartening, the campaign for fair and sensible immigration policies will go on.
Next week I will be announcing my very own action against the secure communities protocol that incarnated me and thousands of people like me.
A few months ago a young, gay Australian man here legally in the USA on a tourist visa was arrested for peeing in public (a sex crime felony in the state of California) and held in the Men’s Country Jail until he agreed to be deported.
The more the right talk about, manifest socialism… the more the people will investigate. A self-fulfilling prophesy. The ill-judged Romney 47% remark seems to have hit a chord.
What sort of chord?
What does this random remark mean to those currently unemployed, underwater, disenfranchised?
In Europe the people are storming the palace. Austerity for what? Debt, deficit, bankers… as explosive as any Molotov cocktail to a modern European .
What is this debt? To whom do we owe the money? How did we get there in the first place? And why should we pay it back?
Unfortunately, if you rely on network nightly news programs for your information about the economy, you are likely to be misinformed about the main causes of the current deficit: in order of importance, the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 34 percent of the 2010 deficit and 28 percent of the 2011 deficit can be attributed to the economic downturn.
The Bush tax cuts dwarf all other policy changes, costing the country an estimated $375 billion this year, or 24 percent of the deficit.
Newsweek: “the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years.” Forty percent of the tax cuts’ benefits went to people earning over $500,000.
With cumulative spending of over $1.2 trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the post-9/11 military escalation rounds out the list of top deficit culprits at 14 percent. (The cost could reach up to $4 trillion, including future veterans’ expenses.)
The news media under report or simply ignore the truth about the deficit instead concentrating on entitlements as the main culprit for the obscene debt.
The myth of the deficit is perpetuated by both parties, Republican and Democrat. It is very unlikely that the truth will ever be revealed by either Democratic incumbent or Republican Nominee.
If Obama wins in November he will have to re-calibrate his Presidency. He’ll have nothing to lose.
He may do what the loyal people of the USA have held onto both good and bad about their friendly President… that he is in fact the ultimate dog in the manger… an unchecked liberal, a gay loving entitlement loving…. muslim socialist… ready to launch the USA into the groovy 21st Century?
I’m not holding out much hope… but hey. I hope I’m wrong.
They inhabit a world where only the mercenary survive.
They have no interest in the beautiful world around you unless it can be used to make more money.
They think conservation is for losers.
They will mine every last piece of coal, sell every last drop of oil, catch every fish, chop every tree without consideration for you or your children.
They have scant regard for other humans unless they have achieved what they define as success: huge amounts of money and power.
They believe in slavery.
In their dark world you will be enslaved with huge personal debt as soon as it is reasonable to impose it upon you.
So obese you’ll be unable to defend yourself, or run fast enough from crazed, gun-toting children high on prescription meds.
You will have no option but to eat cheap gmo food that causes rampant obesity in you and your family.
Your local school will be stripped of funds so your children remain uneducated and unable to intelligently question their plan.
They will teach your kids, when they can get away with it, the debunking of a thousand years of empirical scientific evidence in favor of ridged adherence to the bible.
You will fear being sick and die long before you are expected because of the appalling health care system that they proudly tell the world is the very best.
Finally, you will live in toxic shame inspired by Christian‘morality’.
If you ‘fail’ the system by becoming unemployed they will demonize you, your peers will accuse you of laziness. You will be encouraged to blame brown people for your misfortune.
Ryan and Romney will achieve their aim by frightening the oppressed proletariat with dishonest bogey men: the deficit, the end of the traditional family and foreign terrorism.
They will succeed as other tyrants have before them.
The people are simply too fatigued to fight their lies and mythology.
Complicated and realistic solutions have been long abandoned in favor of easy and inchoate sound bites.
I had a dream last night that I was fucking Paul Ryan. After I ejaculated I pulled my cock out of his ass… but it was no longer a penis…. It was a crucifix… Covered in blood shit and cum.
Finally, I rather like the new, gamine Miley Cyrus. A world apart from the generic valley girl she once was. What the hell is all the fuss? Proof (if you needed it) that people don’t really like celebrating individuality. Preferring the homogenous mass.
The TRUST Act passed the Senate last Thursday by a 21-13 vote.
Senator Lieu voted in support.
Now, the bill will need a concurrent vote from the Assembly (the first version of the bill passed the Assembly last year, so another vote is needed given that the bill was amended this year), and then it will head to the Governor’s desk.
I set out at 6am for the Men’s County Jail to see my friend Jeremy who is presently residing in dorm 5200.
Jeremy is a good-looking white man in his mid-thirties. A meth head with a penchant for transsexuals.
He has two kids in Utah. He used to manage an ihop.
He is the kind of character I couldn’t invent from a movie I couldn’t write. A charming man with anger issues.
Like most inmates he is pre-occupied with his own case, another miserable drug dealer hauled off the streets.
We spoke for thirty minutes, I left $50 for him to eat well and I drove home.
The deputies who processed us into the jail were very pleasant, polite.
2.
Yesterday we drove to Redondo Beach where we met with Democratic State Senator Lieu.
The second State Senator I have met this month. He has a strange constituency, ranging from progressive liberals in the Venice area to hard-core Odinists in Orange County.
We sat in the sparse office with his Harvard educated interns. They were polite but they didn’t offer us water or coffee.
Our successful visit last month to Senator Calderon lead to his decision to co-sponsor the Trust Act.
The bill then passed the Senate Public Safety Committee and is now headed towards the Senate Floor .
The Trust Act will make what happened to me less likely to happen to others. It may liberate the 3000 un-convicted men and women currently held on ICE holds in California.
The Trust Act will demand that ICE follows its own guidelines, its own rules.
It is essential that Senator Lieu support this bill.
Lieu is an interesting man.
In his Redondo office there is a huge studio photograph of Lieu and his family lounging on a white, fluffy rug. He is wearing a dress shirt but no tie.
He has been a vociferous supporter of the LGBT community, especially the transsexual population for whom he reserves special respect.
I sat with Kristine Chong from The Californian Immigrants Policy Center and three other Immigrant rights specialists… including a day labourer from Mexico in the Senator’s dingy ‘conference’ room.
Lieu’s people wore badly cut suits. We all began to sweat in the un air-conditioned office.
Antonio, the day laborer, spoke very movingly about the catastrophic effect ICE and the Secure Communities protocol are having on the immigrant population. Families broken apart, 5000 American children made orphans, their mothers and fathers deported.
Immigrants are routinely forced to sign deportation papers or threatened with months held in privately owned immigration camps, camps that are currently costing the people of California 6 million dollars a year
The situation is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
This state has enjoyed, for many years, low-cost manual labour on which their false economy was based. Now, these undocumented migrants are being rounded up like animals. Targeted on the streets, in their cars, in their homes.
ICE have to deport 400, 000 people a year to fulfill a federal government quota.
Even President Obama’s announcement last week supporting The Dream Act didn’t stop three ‘Dreamers’ being deported yesterday.
I told my story. I told them what they must have heard many times out of Latino mouths. Spanish speakers, their accents somehow devaluing what they have to say.
Listen to me. Listen to my clipped British accent. Listen to me eloquently tell my story. Pay attention to the dramatic pauses.
It is always very shocking for them (especially the starched, ivy league interns) that an affluent white person could have got caught up in the immigration net.
They bowed their heads in shame.
After 45 minutes our meeting is over.
They tell us that Lieu’s support on the Senate floor cannot be assured, he has to pamper to the right-wing element of his constituency. They say: Lieu, in the past, has been threatened physically for supporting immigrants rights. He received death threats.
Pampering to the right? I ask incredulously. Pampering to the right will keep this state poor, our children uneducated, the prisons full and gay men like me… unmarried and childless.
Be brave, I urge him, and do the right thing.
As we are leaving we pass another group of men and women patiently waiting their turn to be heard. They could have been Odinists for all I know, demanding that Lieu hunt down every illegal immigrant in California and throw away the key.
Today we were the guests of Molly and John Chester at Apricot Lane Farm, Moorpark CA.
Molly is a former personal chef and John a former film director.
Now, tucked away in their bucolic idyl, away from the madding crowd, devoted to the creation of a bio-dynamic 150 acre farm set in rolling countryside 45 minutes from Santa Monica.
Woke up early. Wanted to get the daub onto the stove. It’d been marinating all night.
Then, something about the process, the action of stirring the pot, as it began to simmer…broke something in me. Like I was having a rare moment of clarity, sanity…and I felt a terrible guilt for the way I had treated…not him…but his parents…drawing them into our drama. Collateral damage.
I wanted to write to them and tell them how sorry I was.
They were innocent.
Then I found that Avadon picture of Ginsberg and his long-term lover Orlovsky. And I thought about them ‘long-term’ and what they were thinking, or not thinking when they kissed for the camera.
I thought about the way they, we…I…describe what we have as long term.
Long term insists that we take what they had seriously. Ginsberg had not just met some man on the street and taken him into the studio. He had made some sort of commitment. Long term.
And I thought that marriage would be just that…long term. That our beards would grow long together. That I would never ever tire of looking at you. Kissing you.
Then I remember that I am here in LA. You send me a picture of Washington Square. It’s all I need right now. A picture.
The whole house smells of beef in red wine, fresh herbs, fresh garlic.
I had lunch with Robby on Monday. We ate a lamb burger at Gjelina. I drank ginger and mint italian soda.
He has been having a wonderful time. Earning masses of cash, loving his man and roaming with his homies. Yes, I wrote that.
On Wednesday I met a friend for lunch, a lunch that didn’t end until 3am. He is 23, he lied about his age. He told me he was older. A masculine dilettante.
We had lunch in Venice, tea in Beverly Hills, an odd party at The Sunset Tower (gays and girls), then dinner at Red Medicine on Wilshire.
Have you heard of Red Medicine? It’s that restaurant, Jordan Kahn’s place…that everyone is talking about.
We ordered far too much. Each baffling plate arrived covered in flowers or Dadaist condiment.
We ate: DUNGENESS CRAB / passion fruit, brown butter, black garlic, Vietnamese crepe, hearts of palm $32
We ate: HEIRLOOM RICE PORRIDGE / egg yolk, hazelnuts, ginseng, echire butter $17 and added Santa Barbara uni for a further $20.
We ate: BEEF TARTARE / water lettuce, water chestnut, nuoc leo, chlorophyll, peanut $15
We ate: AMBERJACK / red seaweed, buttermilk, lotus root, tapioca, succulents $16
Then, after dinner, we lay in the back of his SUV by the beach and kissed each other until my face was raw, my heart was racing, my legs were trembling. I was so completely overwhelmed that I could not drive for ne’er a mile before I had to stop and beg a cigarette from a passer-by.
He is beautiful. He gnawed at my neck until I could not bear it any more.
So, that’s what love looks like in a warm climate. For a moment. Not long-term. Not to be taken seriously. Just a moment. I have trained myself not to yearn for more.
So, the daub will cook for four more hours until it is tender. We will eat it with home-made noodles.
