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Saturday, December 1, 2012

YET ANOTHER



Yet another ripple, yet another icy tremor, yet another child abuse scandal seeping out through the cracks and dirtying fingers grubby with news print.

I grew up on the edge of countryside. This was the 1970s. There were great rolling hills and brooks thick with snaggling weed. Days were spent far, far away from home, breathless, cheeks flushed. Me and my pals, me often alone. Skinny and weak me, except for my uranium mind. Electric pylons fizzed overhead against the slate skies of winter. I was gone for hours, there was no time out there, no clock murmuring, no caw of the phone.

That uranium mind had unspeakable thoughts. It stripped my teachers naked. There was Mr Harris, the slacker mangod of Religious Education, moustached and grand, and he filled a tight speedo. That I saw in the swimming pool. I imagined him with Mr LeTissier laid out on the floor, eager to touch, but I couldn't figure out how they would do that. What came next? Couldn't say. Mr Laker, gym teacher, stripped with us boys once. I saw his penis, I did. I was squinting nervously, head bowed. It was fat in a bed of lush orange hair. He never touched us, he never lusted over us - at least, he never touched skinny, stupid me with the uranium brain. And my memory begins its fail from here on, the names no more than a brittle echo, but in the hot school summer there was he, the deputy head, who stripped his shirt off proudly, like Brits do at the merest threat of sun. I stared, in fleeting fast gasps and wished I could touch those perfect nipples, through his chest hair and snake down to his belly. Maybe if I dare, down down down. Envelop me, you. But no, of course it wasn't gonna happen. Funny how I still remember how exquisite his nipples were, and with such distraction available on the computer screen! They were the best nipples in the world ever. Fact. And when he moved on from our school, Mary my classmate sent a request to Radio One to the Breakfast Show. Dave Lee Travis actually played it. He's in big trouble now, right, that Mr Travis? Grubby and in the news. Mary asked for Chicago: "If You Leave Me Now", for our deputy head. He came in the classroom that morning and she blushed and we laughed. Later she said she used to hang at his apartment all the time.

When I was a kid all I had was hills far as the eye could see, with no one hurtling across them except me. I hated my childhood, its dazzling interior and my radioactive imagination. Kids today have so much though. They are bombarded with stimulation I never got. Perhaps unfairly, to me they can seem harsh, and ugly inside. They enjoy a world I never got, but it seems they're trapped. Maybe it's that which conditions them. They have to be a phone call away. They cannot stray beyond the perimeter of their front yard. Everyone is a potential predator. The world tells them to love their childhood, because that's as good as it gets, and they want to believe it, which sucks the innocence out of them in the noir of vampiric dreams. These kids, grounded and catty, are nothing like I was. At their age, I ran and I ran, believing things had to be better than this one day, and they were.


Saturday, November 3, 2012

THE PROBLEM WITH SINGLE MOTHERS


It caught my eye on Facebook, that great sloppy soup of idle chitchat and self-absorption. It wasn't intended for my eyes, though it was written by someone I knew, and once knew intimately. I read it, scrolling down the corner of the screen. It stayed with me. And then the poison behind the words began to grow, ulcerous.
It was a comment about benefit cheats. This person was saying, single women were deliberately getting themselves pregnant so they could get free houses and other handouts. They were no better than leeches.

Like I say, I used to know this person. I guess if we are now Facebook friends, then we still do. We have both changed,  but I was always aware, behind the libertarian lurked a reactionary soul. It was a product of his upbringing, and a product of his innate sense of superiority. It was perhaps a class thing.

There are many that spend endless hours cultivating their hatred for others, be it immigrants, be it people of color, be it genders. Don't be surprised if a gay man is among them. I've known more than a few. I can only think, a part of them inside must be cancerous, or dead. These people aren't worthy of our attention, even if they crowd our airwaves and buzz in our brain louder than our friends do sometimes.

Still, it got under my skin like, admittedly, the things he does are wont to do. Firstly, I tried to imagine his conception of the female body. How he must hate it! - to imagine women farming themselves out, sluts spreading their legs with scant regard for their welfare and for that of their newborns. All, perhaps, because they were common. And poor. All for financial gain. Then I remembered, this person once persuaded a lawyer to sign over property deeds to him, for a little uninhabited pied-a-terre in a swanky end of town he had his eye on. He paid nothing for the pleasure, and the council spent tens of thousands of euros of taxpayers' money doing it up for him. It's his little getaway. He hops on a plane whenever he likes. He feels he's earned it. In fact, the eleven years we were intimate I don't remember him paying a single cent of tax on his earnings. He always loathed paperwork.

And then I remembered, this person was in denial, up to the day his immune system finally crashed and he had to be rushed to hospital. He suffered excruciating pain. It must have been awful. In fact, he is a virtual cocktail of costly meds to keep his viral count down. He is not living in the country where he was born - he couldn't wait to get rid of that undesirable passport - so I wonder which state health system is providing him with his drugs. Of course he should have them - no one should be left to fend for themselves, right? That's the purpose of our system, to help those with Aids and single mothers. He really should have tested sooner though, but he was afraid. Fear is a constant of our lives. But then, I imagine how many others also became infected, because of that denial. Only he will know, if he wants to think about it, but I doubt that he does.

It was a miracle, that somehow he didn't infect me too.

Gay men have their girl friends, their fag hags, call them what you will. But girls, perhaps you should be aware, as with a gleam in their eye they tell you about their latest exploits, that you are nothing but the perfect cypher for their narcissism. That as you laugh with them at their jokes, that really in their hearts your bodies may disgust them, and that when your backs are turned, they might call you whores on Facebook.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

i am this also



LINK TO ARTICLE IN dezanove.pt (PORTUGUESE)

I am an artist, a reality I still often find difficult to believe. The fact that I sit there, slumped dejectedly over a blank canvas (or whatever my chosen media might be that moment), and try and sell these doodles for monetary value still bewilders me to this day.

I won't deny it's fun though. And in some ways, I find getting to my public as interesting as the work itself. Selling a potentially explosive idea to as many people I can seems so positively audacious and powerful! That's why, for me, the parties and arty, wily shenanigans I have been involved with over the years, CUE VIDEO, initially in New York City, via Virginia, lately in Lisbon, where there is a tangible whiff of creative excitement in the air, seem as legitimate as any pretty picture I may paint.

Curating an entire exhibition of (wince) queer art seems like the ultimate confidence trick to me. I imagined no one would want it, least of all the artists I approached. Well, there are 17 of us, just in the first go round, some pretty damn well-known, so at the very least a lot of alcohol will get consumed the opening night.

I hope to begin commenting on the individuals' work as we go along here.




Friday, May 18, 2012

THE AMERICAN




Some years ago, I dated an American. It wasn't one of my best ideas. This was before I went to America and discovered other Americans, whose simplicity and generosity knew no bounds. No, this was one of those Americans who expected their dates to come fully-formed, waving Y2Ks in front of them. Money was a game he could afford to play. After some months flaying about he broke up with me, citing my lack of a viable financial future as a major cause of concern. Yes, he worked in finance, for a multinational that had to have an office in every country in the world and would then proceed to scoff at their weedy financial muscle.

I was hurt, but imagined he was right. It wasn't my best of times, I'll admit. I swallowed my hurt and soldiered on. I cultivated his friendship; after all, he seemed to know better than me. A year or maybe two passed, and by then I had done the unimaginable and moved to New York! The American came to visit, and in the course of a long, blurry evening, I finally realised he was a balls-to-the-wall alcoholic. He got me more drunk than I'd ever been, and he was drunker still. He could barely stand, so I had to hail us a cab home. He was a mess - I suppose I'd just seen it so often I never really noticed when we were together.

Next day, he was sleeping it off in my roommate's bed at our digs in Brooklyn. I didn't see him till late, so late in fact that if he didn't hurry, he would miss the flight to Chicago to see his fucking Episcopalian pastor of a father. When I finally caught him, he was trying to slink out unnoticed. He informed me with a smirk that he had wet the bed, so I needed to clean up. Plane to catch, see ya.

After eight years, I came back to Europe fully-charged. And today it's my 44th birthday! Shit! Times have certainly changed. I see many, whose once-untouchable surety is looking pretty shabby. These past twelve months were no picnic for me either. I got sick, real sick with pneumonia, and my mum died. That was a wrench. Still, I dug in my heels. And actually, I'm one of the few who can say I'm doing pretty good. I'm firing on all cylinders - no need to go into details. I see so many my age who look like the life has been sucked out of them by circumstances out of their control. But my ideas have never stopped. Never.

So, the American. Not long after the bedwetting, there was another incident which really was TOO MUCH and I told him to take a hike. I finally said to him, why am I allowing myself to be taken down by a closeted alcoholic bedwetter with Aids? Ouch. Because he's financially viable? The American will never lose his job; he's too high up to fall, it is said. Others will be sacrificed before he. He now moves and shakes in London, but occasionally surfaces here. I ignore his stares. Then I think, you know, I should be more grateful. For the night he really lost it in front of me, and showed me the little baby in the Big I Am, was the night I stumbled drunkenly into Lennie, my eventual life partner. I have never forgotten the cab ride back over the Williamsburg Bridge, city glittering, window rolled down and that night city air. Lennie was American too, and the sweetest, sexiest soul you could ever hope to meet.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

I KNOW HOW TO GET TOM CRUISE THAT OSCAR


Tom, in the role of a lifetime, is an old man in a rest home who develops a touching, bittersweet relationship with a beautiful male orderly played by Chris Pine, or some other square-jawed Hollywood wannabe. The big reveal is that Tom in the movie was a child runaway from the midwest who ends up a male hustler in New York just before the Aids epidemic hits. Poignant tragedy ensues. Welling strings. Tom effortlessly plays eighteen and eighty-ish and is Oscar-bound. In the poignant final coda, Chris lets old Tom go down on him (once old Tom removes his dentures). Gus Van Sant or Ang Lee directs. Reese Witherspoon plays matron.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

DISCO REVOLUTION

Discodromo - Mercurio from GoldNSour on Vimeo.



I WAITED TWENTY PLUS YEARS FOR THE SECOND GAY DISCO REVOLUTION, and I'm hoping HERE IT COMES.

(Warning: this video is only suitable for the fleet of foot, and the GAY of HEART, BODY & SOUL)

Who?

Veiled in playful secrecy, the rhetoric of Discaire Records would have you believe that the label is controlled by a cult-like group of shadowy subversives. In truth, Discaire is a "homophonic," forward-thinking brotherhood of four like-minded gay men from New York, London, and San Francisco.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Q U E A S Y

I woke up this morning next to my husband feeling uneasy. I sat up in bed and contemplated the source of this malaise. After all, I shouldn't have any more to worry about than your average western citizen in 2012 - job security, financial crisis, perhaps H5N1... But I'm secure, and loved, by my man, and by friends gay and straight.

But no, there is a reason for me to feel threatened, because apparently I am the threat. I throw a party in Lisbon called Pink!, and the accompanying Facebook page is quite the hot ticket. I won't deny we get a little saucy there, but it is a closed group after all and only consenting, mature adults who are in the group can see it. It's actually really cool, homosexual imagery of the arty, balls-to-the-wall variety, faits divers, culture. It makes us feel alive! AND I KEEP GETTING SHUT DOWN. I desperately seek an alternative, where I'm not OFFENSIVE TO PEOPLE WHO CAN'T EVEN SEE ME, BUT STILL HATE ME NONETHELESS. But that alternative DOES NOT EXIST. I need Facebook, apparently.

Like I need cancer.

In the wake of the THIRD shutdown, in which I lost all my friends (if I don't see them online, do they actually exist?), people came to me with stories of how art imagery on their wall - WTF even religious imagery - was removed.

Now this. I guess I feel like Rihanna. (Please click on Andy and Candy, thank you. And fuck you very much.)



Oh, and the Pink Page on Facebook is here. Join the fun, why don't you?