LONGTIME NO SEE

I remember when I first saw 'Longtime Companion' at the movies. I hated it. I was in my very early twenties, idealistic and opinionated. I was living in Lisbon, in Europe, and I and my arty friends had tongues making nests in our cheeks. My friend hated the movie even more. I had never been to New York City, and this was not how I wanted to see it - this gilded ghetto cage of fading white moneyed faces, (so telling, the Fire Island scenes of the Pines house floating above the foliage, the real world blotted out and invisible below). This ain't no hip hop. This ain't no No Wave or even new wave. It was operatic dinner parties and hi energy fizzling out. Blacks and hispanics and rice queens were not invited to the last days of disco, even if they soundtracked it. "The Saint Disease" it was first called, and that is a history I came to understand through work and personal experience.

The fact it was about people dying, a tide of accumulating rot, swelling and gaining strength, rolling over the darkening sky on the beach was the most distasteful part. I failed to have a heart for this peculiar, more monied-than-thou ghetto, even as they died faster and more painfully than the rest of us outside of it.

The ghetto never died in New York. It did become more inclusive, these days all can rest there and go to high tea. The Pines, if anything, is more monied than ever. Aids never went away either - it took on different shapes, it became the perfect cross-dresser. I watched 'Longtime Companion' again last night and I forgave it, because there was nothing to forgive. These people did die, and it had to have been horrible. This is New York, and all the movie wanted to do was show them and honour them. They deserved to flicker across the silver screen, because now they are gone, all gone.

WATERBOARDING OVER DINNER

 

the table
was set for murder.
the conversation arched
its back and 
blew cigarette smoke
in the face
seated opposite.


He winced, wreathed in its blue. Stood up and opened a window and then got on with his food silently. The smoker curled his finger and placed tip on the cigarette's spine, watching.
Before the remaining guests had arrived, we deliberated what were the questions that should be verboten at a dinner party as gay as this one.
- That's easy. First, 'what do you do?'.
We vigorously agreed how crass that was. Then he laughed.
- And of course, 'are you a top or a bottom'?
The others arrived and we were all introduced. Our host had warned us to tone it down, as the others weren't so comfortable with such fooling around. Of course a cigarette was lit up over the main course and blown in their faces. Tongues locked into cheek.
Around the fireplace, one of the newcomers asked how long we had been together, Lennie and I.
- Almost nine years, I replied.
He frowned as if it were an impossibility. Then he asked, - so you're in an open relationship?
There, that's question number three, and it's one you should never, never ask a gay couple.
His friend, a sexy Italian astronomer poured into tight jeans that had been engineered to focus your gaze unswervingly on his butt, devoured me with his eyes. 

  
 


  

2013 I'M GONNA BE FAMOUS!

EVERYBODY DANCE (Happy 2013)(click here - don't worry, it ain't spam, more like corned beef)

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.

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.

i am this also

isto também sou eu / i am this also from Joao Galrao on Vimeo.

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.