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Monday, November 29, 2010

N E W Y O R K #1

Last Address from Ira Sachs on Vimeo.


I lived 5 years in NYC, and continued to work there a couple more while living in Norfolk, Virginia.
This short film by director Ira Sachs resonates with me like a keepsake. It shows a muffled, pensive city, a place of absence and lost life. I don't think, creatively, New York ever recovered fully, but all of us who pass thru the city are indelibly affected by its space and light and dark and intimacy, and inspired to become someone else, someone more alive than they've ever been.
Many of the artists and performers mentioned here are hotwired to my brain, part of a downtown scene that has been washed away on the tide.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Portugal, 1991

Almodovar - not the movie director - is a town in the south known for little except one dubious statistic: at the time of my visit it enjoyed the highest suicide rate in the land. It sits and shudders on an Alentejo plain, a haphazard blur of stucco, grey in the winter, infernal in the blistering summer.
My first boyfriend here came from Almodovar,though I met him New Year's Eve in a hole-in-the-wall bar in Lisbon. His name was Vitor and at the time I thought the world had to be a puzzle, so he fit magnificently.
Since he still lived with his mother and beady-eyed grandmother, when I visited his home town Vitor put me in a hostel. There he could visit me in the dead of night, climbing out the bedroom window and creeping along the deserted streets. Then, to avoid suspicion, he would return home before sunrise.
The last morning, a Sunday, I am beginning to stir, once again alone in my room. I hear a key click and turn in the lock. I know it is the owner. One thing you develop early on is your sixth sense, an intuitive, cannibalistic understanding of what men want from you. He bundles inside, and he is ashen, nervy. He comes over to the bed and starts to paw me. I softly push him away. He pulls off his clothes, in a fever, revealing his lumpen, pallid body beneath. He moves to the end of the bed, and masturbates himself. I watch, anchored there, till he comes. His expression is one of unresolved desires. When he's done, he dresses again, and leaves, barely a word spoken.
Years pass and Vitor is long-gone from my life, when one day we bump into each other again in Lisbon. "Oh," he says, "The owner of the hostel where you stayed passed away. it was last year." He dropped dead, all of a sudden. Natural causes. I nod. I remember, but I was a different person then, just a boy still. I had grown, whereas in Almodovar they distill. I was happy at least, to hear that one fat, gay man in Almodovar didn't commit suicide, like so many of them.

Abridged from my forthcoming selection of short stories and memoir. Comments welcome.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

FEEDBACK



Kim Gordon
supple-legged rock vixen
Dayglo bangle sex spangle
Gay me slay me
Can you? With your guitar knife carve me a new sex machine
Kool thing

Sunday, November 14, 2010

H I D D E N


Did you hear the one about the man of god?

Since gaining my ordination as a priest with the Universal Life Church, this old faggot will gladly officiate your wedding.

Thanks to photographer Paulo Madeira for his collaboration.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Welcome to the Dollhouse

LATONYA
Latonya is part Cherokee.
She is 6'2", so she is always asked if she is a model.
She is an executive for Black & Sassy Hair.
She is learning Chinese, for business.

KAYLIE
Kaylie hasn't talked to her parents for five years.
She doesn't like Sushi.
When she was out of work for a year, she turned tricks to pay the rent. She advertised in the Village Voice.
She now works in an animal hospice upstate and doesn't talk about her past to anyone.
She doesn't believe she will ever get married.

GABLE

Gable's father is a closeted business man, who sees his male lover on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Gable's mother dislikes the Mexicans that hang around downtown waiting for fruit-picking work.
Gable has s slight speech impediment.
The rest is a great unknown. She can already taste its dark.