C E N S O R E D

A Fire in My Belly from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

David Wojnarowicz died of Aids-related illnesses in 1992, at the age of 37. Once he was no more than a firebrand element of the cabal of East Village artists that sprung up around the downtown scene of 80s New York (revolving around such places as the Pyramid club and art spaces/abandoned cars/converted toilets such as Civilian Warfare and Fun Gallery, and through figures such as Gracie Mansions.

Keith Haring passed thru here. So did Kenny Scharf and Kiki Smith. Ru Paul started at the Pyramid Club, which is still there on Avenue A (last time I looked), though it is no longer much to write home about.

Wojnarowicz was catapulted into the public eye when his works provoked the wrath of careerist senator Jesse Helms, and the American Family Association. He keenly felt how people like him were being marginalised, victimised by the false moral prophets of the American right, left to die in hospitals and neglected by the corridors of power. These people didn't like his work, because, for once, it pointed an accusing finger at THEM, not the other way round. He became an impromptu spokesperson for the right to free expression in the face of enormous prejudice, and in the courts he won that particular battle.

Last week, the Smithsonian capitulated to pressure and removed the above video by Wojnarowicz, due to pressure by the Catholic League and Republican John Boehner, in the first (believe it or not) institutional retrospective of homosexual-themed art in America. Galleries across America and beyond are showing this work to the public, in angry response. Post it, share it, wherever you can.

http://warholfoundation.org/foundation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120905885.html?hpid=topnews
www.hideseek.org

What Would Virginia Woolf Think?

The Calamity of Masculinity 2008 by Colin Ginks, private collection

In 1928 Woolf imagined a young English man called Orlando born during the reign of Elizabeth I, who refused to grow old and thus engaged in various derring-do adventures across the centuries. Orlando toyed with sex and gender. He had an affair with a Russian princess, while still a man, and finally, as a woman, married a sea captain.

Buck was an American woman born in 1972. The future seemed glittery, and made of styrofoam. Men like this walked the future earth.



Buck Rogers in the 25th century liked taking off his shirt for the older man in leather.



Our Buck for many years was unhappy. She was a model, and a bleach blonde, but she drowned her sorrows in substance abuse.

Then it dawned on Buck that she should turn herself inside out. She wanted to be the bionic man. She could rebuild herself. And then she could have a job for life, as an adult fimmaker. She could own her own company, and be the dominatrix of her own destiny.

But Buck kept her femaleness, down there, for inside there is the soul, and a little golden key to the next life.

One day in 2008, Buck, now striding the streets of the earth and winning awards at the AVN awards like a colossus, bumps into Virginia Woolf on 5th Avenue in New York. HE compliments Woolf, and asks if that is her porn name. Woolf doesn't like this brave new world, and even throws up a little bit in her mouth at the sight of him.

Schwarzwald, The Movie You Can Dance To, a production of the Saint At Large,
My dayjob, NYC,  2005-2009.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.