It’s difficult for

me to talk about Private Lives because I almost know it by heart. I first read it as a teenager because Ayn Rand listed it as one of the few plays she liked, because the characters in it had ‘values.’ What she meant really was that Amanda and Elyot are smart and witty, and Victor and Sybil are not (Rand viewed the world as populated by ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’). I fell in love with the play and grew to love it more and more — I  saw Tammy Grimes and Brian Bedford as Amanda and Elyot once which was heaven. Alec MacCowen and Penelope Keith are not perfect for it; Keith shines in act three, but she is frankly not pretty enough and a bit too old. But for me, it’s kind of like the Bible, one keeps going back. The BBC version does have one great moment though. When Victor and Sybil start arguing at the end, we see Elyot and Amanda watching them, and falling in love with love all over again. Yes, they love to argue, Elyot and Amanda. And please forget about Elyot’s unfortunate line --  "certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs." Coward was the least misogynist playwright that ever lived, and Amanda is a feminist character, so put it all in context and shut up. 'But,' you say -- 'those words are hate!' Well at least you’re not an old homosexual like me — I used to get turned on by Eminem’s sketch about a gay man masturbating in a public toilet; it was totally homophobic, but I was (and still am) desperate for any morsel of representation God offers. Amanda is still modern, and a lot more independent than a lot of women today — because she is a desiring woman, something that many women are not willing to be. I don’t know why, as it would solve feminism. Yes the whole man/woman thing would be solved if straight men would just acknowledge that women desire. If men became the sex objects and women Diana the Huntress everything would be alright. But then, what do I know? I ran screaming out of the closet 40 years ago. So what makes Private Lives so perfect is that it perfectly describes the imperfectness of love. Elyot and Amanda love/hate each other, and that, Coward is clearly saying, is what love is. But the play is not didactic — because this is an intolerable problem; how can we endure hating the one we love? The error is that people treat Private Lives as a comedy. The BBC production does not. Like Shakespeare’s romances it’s funny and serious; whenever Elyot and Amanda feel truly alone and intimate they talk about death. What else do you talk about with the one you love? My lover and I talk about death all the time — but that’s partially because he’s in love with death, violence — and bloodshed and gore. I often have to say -- ‘Enough is enough! ’ and he will say: ‘But that’s reality — are you scared of reality?” And I’ll say "Yes frankly I am and I will have no more of it." When I first met my partner he put me through two tests. He worked at 7/24 Video at the corner of Church and Wellesley. I saw him there, and he was inescapably beautiful, and I kind of knew him (and I’d just quit Buddies), so I thought what have I got to lose? Here we are 22 years later. Anyway, he wouldn’t go on a date with me until I rented a porn movie about midget ladies having sex with men. For him, it was important that I pass this test; he had read my first novel apparently (Guilty is about scat; you can’t get any more vulgar than that) but he still didn’t believe that I wasn’t on some level a poseur; hence the midget movie. I watched it. My favourite moment was when all the little midget porn ladies woke up in the morning and the soundtrack was from Peer Gynt —'Hall of the Mountain King.' And they all rubbed their little eyes with their tiny hands, and struggled into their morning midget lingerie. It was cataclysmic. Then -- after we started dating -- the second test was that I had to watch Faces of Death. I don’t know if you are familiar with that movie, but it’s basically a series of real life executions, documentary footage of mass murders. Real stuff. At one point there is a scene where a lovely couple dines on monkey brains, and apparently the only way to eat monkey brains -- properly -- is to chain up a living monkey, cut the top of his head off -- and while he screams -- munch away! I'm not kidding. Anyway, I stopped watching after the monkey-brain-eating sequence, and said "I can’t watch this." I don’t know if he’s ever quite forgiven me — but apparently the fact that I even tried, I guess, put me in his good books. Now I am old and -- and he is older than he was before — and so death comes up, and he wants to talk about it endlessly, and all I can say is:  'I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather talk about death with  — than you.' Yes, we have had screaming matches that could rival anything Elyot and Amanda could come up with. When you have told somebody that you hate them more than anyone on earth and that they are vile sea creature with suction cups instead of a mouth, then and only then, can you properly claim to love them forever. I don’t recommend love; I have friends who say I'm lucky to be in love, but I’m not so sure. One can’t imagine — you see — the other one — the beloved — gone —and that’s what Elyot and Amanda talk about,  endlessly. Coward composed the play about -- and for -- Jeffrey Amherst. He was an Earl, and Coward wrote it on a boat just outside Hong Kong when he was 29, it probably took him a day or too. It was also a love letter to Gertie—  as he knew she was the only one to play it, and still to this day that’s true. I’ve heard the recording of her doing it, and no one could match her, ever. Coward sounds so stuffy and arch on the recording (he worked so hard to cover his homosexuality). However, one can imagine him, on a ship outside Hong Kong, waiting, breathlessly for the lovely Earl of Amherst to step out of the bath, adorned in only a flimsy towel. Did they fight like Amanda and Eiyot? I doubt it; Coward may never even have kissed Jeffrey, he probably just imagined what he might do to him -- in his mind. And when it comes down to it --  since we all die -- it's only the imagination that counts.

Let us out!

You must let us out. This is too much. We can’t stand it anymore. And the CDC says people who have been vaccinated can sit in outdoor patios and have a drink, mask-less. The CDC says that it is safe to be outdoors. Why are there no patios open in Toronto? Why was Ford trying to close down playgrounds? What is going on? We are all going nuts with this f-n lockdown, and it is May and the sun is starting to shine and sunlight kills it — so how's about giving us a dose of sunlight? All my friends are turning into conspiracy theorists. Someone told me the other day that ‘THEY’ have raised the price of lumber and steel just so that no one will be able to build anything anymore. My conspiracy theorist friends are people whose small businesses have been destroyed while Walmart flourishes. Is it any wonder that they are  looney? Doesn’t anyone care about what’s happening to our minds as you ceaselessly protect  our bodies from an infection that seems to be killing hardly anyone? It’s important for me to say these things or I shall go mad. Not that I have any affection for the outdoors. Like Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare, I have always preferred the artificial over the natural. Shakespeare, contrary to popular opinion, did not hold nature in high esteem. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ — on top of being addressed to a boy, proceeds to go on about how the beauty of the boy is much better than the beauty of summer. And I would have to agree. Last night I was shooting a movie. I mean I was an actor, in a movie. It was like living again, briefly. But of course I was only playing a part. This wonderful woman (who shall remain nameless — because I don’t know if she wants her name all over my scurrilous blogs) asked me to play a cameo in her film, because she thinks I’m still a famous person. This I find fantastical, but I love to imagine it's true. In the movie I play a drunken faggot -- which is typecasting -- and I get to hurl a cup of soda at someone and yell ‘Go to hell!” This again, is also true to type. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was playing a version of myself — as I used to be — that is a social person, talking to people out of doors. At one point when I was chatting with the crew (more about the crew asap) I suddenly realised, this is chat with a stranger -- you haven’t done it in almost a year! “This is what it’s like to be at a party or a bar, you just talk off the top of your head, remember? About nothing and everything? See…you’re doing it, just keep doing it, yeah, it’s okay. “ It was very strange. But, oh, the crew! I spent all my time trying to figure out who the Best Boy was. In case you are too ignorant to know, the Best Boy is a ‘cinematic’ term (for those in the know) and I myself have made four films, so I am one of those (my films are all now lying at the bottom of a river) and ergo, I am in possession of obscure, esoteric, filmic knowledge. The Best Boy helps the cameraman with the lighting, and he is, technically speaking, his bitch. (I’m sorry. It’s totally inequitable and horrible that camera crews on films are almost always male, and hot, and there’s nothing, it seems, that can be done about that -- at least this film had a female director -- but I was thankful for sexism — at this moment — because the crew eye candy was better than an After Eight Wafer Thin Chocolate Mint!). Okay the relationship between a Best Boy and the cameraman (also called director of photography -- DOP) is very gay. On this film, this DOP was a gorgeous young, short, slim Brit with dark hair and eyes who likely had a dynamite body under his black clothes. The Best Boy was approximately twice his size and wearing a pair of the tightest skinny-jeans I had ever seen — and he was in proud possession of one of those butts you just want to sink your nose into. He kept bounding around — because that’s what a Best Boy does — and now and then his shirt would ride up and show his furry belly. I could have died. Honestly. And at one point he stood behind the DOP, and leaned on a car, and said to the DOP: “I’ll receive” -- and then laughed, and said -- “that is, whatever you’ve got, I’ll receive.” I almost came in my pants. The film I was in was not porn; but it seems like the crew was making their own. You see, the job of a Best Boy is to fulfill the cameraman’s every need by moving lights and gels etc., and he is at the cameraman’s beck and call, which, as I say, is very sexy. One of my friends, (we’ll call him Leith) played my boyfriend in the movie (his character’s name was 2nd Boyfriend; I don’t know why he had more lines that me, the 1st Boyfriend, but my lines were more ‘emotional’ so it is I who shall receive the rave reviews!) And at one point the Best Boy came and stood behind Leith. (This Best Boy was always standing behind people, what’s that about?) And he asked Leith if he minded that he might tap Leith on the shoulder, and Leith said: “Whatever…I have no boundaries!” Girlfriend! Can you believe it? I admonished Leith later for his slutty behaviour. Only one word for it: wanton! Earlier on, I had to keep Leith under control — as Leith said: “Should we ask the crew if they would like to have sex with an actress?” I said “No Leith, we should ask them if they would like to have sex with a star!” But I was only humouring him. Honestly Leith. I do believe you would have propositioned the entire crew if I hadn’t been there. We were filming in front of Filmore’s 'Gentleman’s Club' — which will be closing soon. All I can say is -- how very discouraging. At one point someone rode by on a bike and yelled “Don’t sit on any of the chairs in there — you’ll get AIDS!” This, sadly, is the world we live in now, a world where fear of illness has driven us far away from sitting on anything that is pleasurable. I held a birthday party at Filmore’s once — I dressed in drag and so did my boyfriend. My boyfriend was very proud that the strippers thought he was a real girl -- and that they, of course, had no such thoughts about me. I just don't think they'll ever get rid of Filmore’s, it will just move to the suburbs. You can try moving your desire to the suburbs but I doubt it will stay there. Someday, it's bound to gravitate to your 'nether regions' once again, and challenge your soul.

Present Laughter is

the gayest of Coward’s three masterpieces, which is probably why it never gets a decent production. There is one gay character in it (Roland Maule) and then there is the problem of Garry Essendine, the lead, an ageing actor — written for Coward (and which he played in ‘the 40s’, when he was in ‘his 40s’). Also there is the fact that the entire sensibility of the play is gay; which, in this case, means it’s quite honest about love, sex and human relationships in general -- and if played as it should be played, straight people might be unsettled. A couple of years ago there was a production at the Shaw Festival starring an actor (who shall remain nameless, for the following reason) who was known to be gay. He played the role effeminately. This inspired the Globe reviewer J. Kelly Nestruck to write a withering deconstruction of Noel Coward, saying that because Coward was gay he was unqualified to write a play about straight relationships; the problem with Present Laughter being that the heterosexual romantic relationship between Joanna and Garry was not 'well observed,' because the gay Noel Coward knew nothing about such goings-on. That’s what happens when you play Garry Essendine too gay. The alternative is what happens in this BBC production starring Donald Sinden — you play Garry too straight — and it’s not unlike playing Hamlet straight — because straight, to us, means stoic. Hamlet, of course, is a mess, as is Garry Essendine, ranting at one moment and wet with tears the next. So if the actor is resolute throughout -- the result is tedious. Donald Sinden is no Penelope Keith. I don’t know who Sinden is (though I have heard his name) and though he’s handsome enough and the right age he just doesn’t throw himself into Garry’s histrionics -- in fact he actually tends to throw them away. I did see one amazing Garry: Kevin Kline. The secret to playing Garry Essendine is the secret to playing Judith in Hay Fever, the actor must believe their own histrionics; the character is unable to separate fantasy from reality. This, as I hinted in the previous blog, is the essence of what makes us human. A pig knows the difference between a truffle and his nose, whereas humans might fool themselves into thinking a nose is a truffle and vice versa (though God knows why). Shakespeare captured the essence of this in the character of Bottom (he is so named because he is so deep) who during his presentation of Pyramus and Thisbee is afraid the audience might take his death for real. It is a concern, as we are all certifiably nuts. Now the reason Donald Sinden and all the other 'Garries' and 'Hamlets' don’t play up their melodramatics is because being emotional means being effeminate, because it's not just about getting angry (men are allowed to do that) but being vulnerable -- crying -- and being sad, lonely, abandoning oneself to a trivial emotion (ergo, being ‘gay’) — which Garry must do, but Donald Sinden never does. What this production does have--  to make up for this -- is Julian Fellowes as Roland Maule. Roland Maule is a young playwright who idolises Garry, oh let’s not mince words, he is in love with him (Garry at one point muses -- ‘I hope you don’t want to marry me!”). Yes, that’s right, I said Julian Fellowes (of Downton Abbey fame). I had no idea he was such a good actor; after viewing this performance it's hard to believe he's not gay. In 1981 when this was filmed he was only 30. He is magnificent as Roland Maule and receives applause on his first exit (this BBC production was a film of a live play). Roland Maule is too often played as silly, and very unfunny — it was done that way in The Shaw Festival production I saw ( it really was execrable) — which means you just dismiss him from the moment he appears. But Maule and Garry talk about Chekhov several times, and Maule is meant to be a Chekhovian character — tragic and all too human, but irascibly funny. Fellowes looks longingly at Garry and almost cries at one point, and when he says “I thought I’d successfully sublimated you” I could completely identify — the number of young men I tried to ‘sublimate’ — especially back when I was in the closet — are too numerous to mention. These days Maule would be a non-binary, woke victim -- shyly sporting nail polish, proud of his pronouns, but otherwise fading into the woodwork with  pitiable inconsequentialness -- despite his blue hair.  Pretentious losers like these are now having a heyday. But the reason audiences and critics avoid this play -- and directors direct it badly -- goes much deeper than the problematic sexualities of  two of the leading characters. The play is an homage to Coward’s inner circle — that is the actors, designers, and producers that were his friends and amours. Coward had a closely knit group of ‘professional friends’ who he loved very much and who loved him back. Many of them were lesbians (as Monica would be in this play, but instead she is in love with Garry). Coward was at the nexus of a British clique of arty lesbians, in fact Blithe Spirit was inspired by a weekend visit to the lesbian novelist Raclyffe Hall, who resided in Dover — and who was fond of trying to reach her ex-lover (with the help of her present one) in the spirit world. In Present Laughter, Coward successfully recreates his own menage in orbit around a central planet — Garry. They fall in and out of bed with each other, yet nevertheless continue to love each other deeply (in Present Laughter Garry sleeps with an actress, Coward in real life was, for a long time, having an affair with his manager, Jack Wilson). And this is the problem. Coward is married to Liz, Henry is married to Joanna — but they are all having sex with other people, and — though the characters now and then get in a hypocritical snit about it — Coward makes it clear that ultimately no one seems to mind, that though lust and obsession are brief -- and marriage long -- real human affection triumphs over all of these passing fancies. It is uncomfortable for people to see a play which is honest about the facts of life. This is why J. Kelly pretended that Coward didn’t know what he was talking about. Straight people must pretend that monogamy is the answer; I pity them -- always have -- but Coward knew better, that monogamy always loses — and love always wins.

Hay Fever is

one of the finest comedies ever written -- if not the finest comedy of all. Coward wrote it in a day or two, apparently --when he was 21. He had been staying at a country home just outside of New York City, with Hartley Manners and his wife Laurette Taylor. That Judith Bliss — the crazy, melodramatic, aging actress in Hay Fever — is based on Laurette Taylor, is a  little known but fascinating tidbit of thespian lore. Laurette Taylor was one of the finest actresses in the American theatre — in fact she is reported by all who saw her perform to have fundamentally changed the face of the art. She created the role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, and was, apparently the ‘Marlon Brando ‘of her time (Williams characters had a way of calling up a certain kind of brutal realism from the actors in his plays). Taylor was never in a movie (I found one of her old screen tests somewhere online; it now seems to have disappeared, or is only ‘play for pay’). According to actor Martin Landau (who died at the ripe old age of 89 in 2017) Taylor was so real onstage that it appeared she had just walked off the street and wandered onto the set. In ‘real life’ — whatever she could stand of it — she was often drunk. Judith Bliss (the character in Hay Fever that Coward based upon Taylor)  is the very opposite of of a ‘realistic’ actress — at least if the acting she does when she breaks into a speech from one of her theatrical hits during the course of the play, is any clue. So, somehow, Coward found his inspiration for the over-the-top Judith Bliss in the most naturalistic actress to ever grace the American stage. No doubt he considered the play a trifle. It presented a conundrum for actress Marie Tempest (the first Judith Bliss) who couldn’t get her head around its lack of epigrams. Coward too was terrified by the new, innovative comedy he had invented. Wilde and Maugham were masters at wielding the epigram; actors regaled their audiences with paradoxes — or in the case of Maugham, with weighty, pithy, and balanced pronouncements. Coward’s comedy was, for it’s time, remarkable conversational (though it may seem somewhat mannered to us now). In fact some patrons who saw Coward and Lawrence in Private Lives thought that they were a real life couple improvising on stage. Coward’s genius is related to Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare, too, wrote romances that are both funny and touching — and Shakespeare’s work is replete with wordplay — so much wordplay, that at times it befuddles us. Coward’s wordplay is more modern but no less unbridled —  and "they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton” as Viola suggests in 12th Night. Characters in Coward's plays not only play with language but analyze it. ’And so,’ the critics ask —  ‘where is the drama?’ But Coward’s masterpieces don’t need much action (much to the chagrin of Aristotelians), for the tension is between the words -- as in Hay Fever where 10 minutes of the second act is caught up trying to exactly understand the meaning of the word ‘winsome.’ But there is more than that going on in Hay Fever; it has a big theme, a Shakespearean theme, one that Coward returned to in his two other masterpieces — Private Lives and Present Laughter — and that theme is  very much related to Laurette Taylor and the whole notion of realism. Where does reality end, and fantasy begin? And what if fantasy is more tempting than reality —or worse still, what if we would rather not live in the ‘real world’ at all? And what if, for some reason, we feel we can’t? Shakespeare was obsessed with this issue; this may be why there is now a Noel Coward Theatre at the RSC. The fact that Coward is still dismissed as lightweight is just homophobia mixed with the blind, stupid worship of didacticism (very much a disease now). You can’t wittle a play by Coward or Shakespeare down to a moral or political imperative. And Coward seems to enjoy watching his characters brazenly flout authority and objective morality. As many have pointed out, Coward’s leading characters are the idle rich who quite often display no visible means of support, who are not very ‘nice,’ and  exist in a kind of fantasyland where only words and love and — of course — banter, matter. In Private Lives when Amanda worries people might disapprove of their affair, Elyot says they are still married “according to the Catholics… Catholics don't recognise divorce.” Morality is merely and relatively pragmatic -- and frankly, so are pretty much any ideas about anything. What is not pragmatic about Coward's characters —  but instead transcendent  -- is their addiction to illusion (and, allusion). At the end of Hay Fever's second act everybody falls in love with someone they’re not supposed to, and Judith turns a somewhat awkward situation into a terrifying melodrama -- one which becomes very real to the spectators (i.e. the houseguests). Ultimately we are not sure (as we are not sure with Gary Essendine in Present Laughter) what reality actually consists of for Judith Bliss. Her son Simon says at one point that they all ‘play along with mother’s fantasies.' After all, father is a novelist and mother is an actress -- and the children seem pretty detached from daily life -- so all it takes is for a member of the family to ask ‘Is this a game?” to send them all off into a performance of Loves Whirlwind,  a very bad play with great lines for Judith. She plays it all to the hilt, until we wish it was the truth. The one very profound idea in this play is that we are all quite capable of believing lies, and in fact prefer them to 'the real.' Watching Penelope Keith (The Good Life) as Judith Bliss, alternatively swoon, regard herself in the mirror, and switch from one dream universe to another, allowed me to live for moment during COVID-19. I guarantee that for those few moments my world was just as authentic as yours might ever be. If you disagree, I will show you mine -- and you can show me yours. And as always, the truth will come with that nakedness.

Noel Coward wrote

The Vortex in 1924, the same year he wrote Hay Fever. I just watched The Vortex on YouTube with Margaret Leighton —who is marvelously competent, but not amazing; she’s no Gertie Lawrence -- but then again her character Florence is no Amanda Prynne. I am setting myself the task of watching old BBC productions of Noel Coward plays on YouTube. I did my doctoral thesis on Coward. No one cares, of course. I worked on that damn thing for five years with a publisher -- Wilfred Laurier University Press -- and was unceremoniously dumped by them for no apparent reason. Obviously they detested me and/or my book. I have no problem trashing them as they were beastly to me (to use a Noel Coward word). I worked with some woman endlessly, disemboweling my thesis for her, I did everything but have it drawn and quartered by horses at her bidding, I just wanted that thing published. Her most consistent criticism was that I loved Coward too much. This was not ‘scholarly.’ Well, I spent every chapter writing critically, but sometimes at the end of each I would let myself go and start rattling on about how brilliant he was. No, she wouldn’t have it.  Well, anyway, the central concept of  my thesis was ‘the queer feminine’ a term borrowed from one of my advisors Michael Cobb. I owe him that. I owe Alexander Leggatt ‘Pinter.’  I’ll never forget walking into his office for the usual scholarly advice and having him say — much like the older businessman to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: ‘plastics’ -- “I have one word for you — Pinter.” He was right  and I devoted a whole chapter to Coward and Pinter. Anyway, I’m not saying my thesis was perfect --  and  I went on to apply the concept of the queer feminine to Shakespeare, which I’ve been doing for roughly the last 15 years. Get that bee out of your bonnet -- that doesn’t mean Shakespeare was gay—but it does mean I’m obsessed with a certain style of writing —over-figured, lush rhetoric -- so weighty with wordplay that it sometimes gets on your nerves. Speaking of nerves, 'nerves' are the central issue in The Vortex. Nicky Lanacaster (what a name for a grown man!) has just come home from the war, and  he is quite 'nervy.' In the BBC version  Richard Warwick plays Nicky. He is just lovely in every way (Franco Zeffirelli stuffed him into a codpiece for Romeo and Juliet -- very wise). But one must imagine Noel Coward in the role. He wrote it for himself (he was only 24 at the time) so he could become a big star -- and he did. The play was a ‘success du scandal’ which is undoubtedly what Coward intended, that is, to be talked about. It’s not a particularly good play, in fact it’s pretty much as good as its models — the later plays of Somerset Maugham, and the Oscar Wilde melodramas. The scandal  is that the young nervy Nicky is a coke addict, and that his mother has traumatized him by falling in love with men his age and ignoring him. But what’s really going on in the play is incest, it’s one of those things that everyone knows about a play like this -- but no one ever talks about. It’s all very 'Gertrude and Hamlet.' Leighton is still gorgeous at 47; so when she is crying in bed, and he climbs in with her and hugs her, it is deliciously inappropriate. I can identify  because I was in love with my mother — but I didn’t want to kill my father, I just wanted to kill her (that’s what separates homosexuals from heterosexuals, psychologically — see Deleuze and Guarrari). In the final act Leighton mainly cries, which she does very well, but I bet the original Florence (Lilian Breaithwaite) — did not cry all the time. I’m sure the young Coward was as brittle as a shaft of hay in the part. Speaking of which, Coward wrote Hay Fever and The Vortex at the same time hoping one of them would be a hit; he wasn’t sure which one it wuld be. The Vortex won, but interestingly — and this is part of Coward’s genius — he didn’t follow it up with other similar plays (or he did, once or twice, but failed miserably). He knew which side his bread was buttered on: wit. You can see a little bit of Coward the homosexual -- and also the influence of Oscar Wilde -- in Pawnie, a gay character in The Vortex who appears early on, and then disappears (as all gay characters did before AIDS, AIDS became a dramaturgical device that made it more convenient to excise them). Pawnie is quite funny, and the actor playing him resembles Coward in visage and tone. Pawnie enters and immediately comments on the decor — placing him as the Oscar Wilde simulacrum: “Oh God, look at this lampshade!” Coward detests Pawnie, just as he detested his own sexuality (he told Gertrude Lawrence that -- though he was attracted to boys -- he would never ‘do those awful things they do with each other.’ He never 'came out,' formally, saying near the end, something like -- “I’d rather not, after all, there is some nice old lady in Newmarket-On-Thyme who does not yet know"). So immediately after the lamp comment, Coward exposes Wilde (and Pawnie) as gay-as-the-day, when Pawnie spies a photo and asks: “Who’s this ahh…boy?” Pawnie's obsessions are aesthetics and the male form; he is a copy of the villainous  leading character in The Green Bay Tree (a homophobic melodrama — one of the first ever gay plays — produced in London and on Broadway in 1931-- Lawrence Olivier was in it -- it was a play that Coward had some hand in producing). I don’t blame Coward — though he went on to write a parody of Wildean closet cases in the song 'We All Wear A Green Carnation' (in Cavalcade), and he would continue to lampoon gay characters, and psychiatry, all the things that threatened him. He did write one gay play -- which I think I will watch on BBC -- called Song at Twilight, and it’s good in the way The Vortex is good, which means not good enough. It’s intended as a critique of Somerset Maugham. Maugham, when very old, submitted to being injected with bull’s testicles — fashionable at the time -- and didn’t look a day over sixty when he was 90. It was disconcerting to this friends, as he had lost his mind, but not his face. More to come….

Elyotto, the young

creator/performer of the new pop hit Sugar Crash is only 17. He had to ask his mother if it was okay to swear in the video. He appears to be angry. About something. The imagery is violent, there is blood, and when he is not walking the empty COVID-19 streets he’s talking about ripping part of his brain out, and self-hatred, and his bong. The song is to some degree about addiction — but because of the canny title, he could of course be speaking of his addiction to candy. But we know better. With the mounting death toll from opioids it is clear that meth is the unmentionable subtext  — and if it isn’t, it should be, as that’s the way addicted teens will take it. The single has been labelled ‘hyperpop’ which means precisely nothing, it certainly looks/sounds like any pop hit released in the last 20 years, only perhaps catchier. Elyotto’s vid is a response to  COVID-19 isolation. Wow, on the one hand I’m amazed that anyone is actually speaking about their frustration with COVID-19. This reminds me of condoms. Early on during AIDS some Public Health Dimwit came up with the brilliant idea that condoms were ‘fun’ and ‘sexy,’ and there were videos of pretty girls shoving bananas down their throats that then emerged, magically, ‘condom protected.’ This was appealing because most penises are not quite as big as bananas — even when erect — and then the lovely allusion to bendy penises, which no one talks about. (Penises that bend down, slide into your throat with remarkable ease — I’m sure you already know that.)But the sexy girls and their bananas were to no avail; condoms are not fun, never will be, and the kindergarten condescension that inevitably accompanies such infantile jabberwocky was insulting to anyone who had ever had sex with a penis — bendy or not. What is most torturous about COVID-19 is that we are expected to enjoy it, and complaining about lockdowns is a thought crime, we are not only trapped in the prison of our homes — many of us with abusive significant others, and children now crazy from lack of stimulation — but we have to pretend to like it, because after all, ‘we’re all in this together.’ The truth is very different; what COVID-19 has done is rip us apart — beyond the illness is the crippling isolation that has birthed QAnon, mass opioid deaths, and the insane polarisation that comes from a computer telling you that you are right all the time. But I don’t wish to leave the subject of the young. Could you get it into you silly heads that when I talk about the cultural effects of COVID-19 lockdowns the assumption is not that I am against lockdowns (although I certainly am) but that they are bad for us, period. Could we just admit that? I worry most about the very old and the very young. Life is a bowl of cherries when you are between the ages of 30-60 — you’ve got a job, and love affairs and/or marriage, and kids, and before you know it you’re old. But to those under 30, and over 60, every moment is precious. And contrary to what you may have heard you are only young once, that is, when you are actually young in years. You can act young when you are old, but it’s not the same; you don’t have the young body or energy or drive — never mind the sheer newness of everything — that initial thrilling discovery of who you are and what you want. I am particularly sensitive to this issue as I lost about 17 years of my life to homophobia; I was in the closet from age 12 to age 29. That  screws you up forever. It was all fine and good for me to come out and start acting like a teenager at a late age — 30— (which is what a lot of gay men do) but it was not the same, and half the time I was just acting like an numskull at 30 because I skipped acting like a numskull at 18. (I still am quite ridiculous.) That’s because it’s not right to miss out on your youth. I never had a ‘first kiss’ at 14 (or I did, with a girl who I didn’t want to kiss) and that left a huge aporia — it’s a giant hole like the ones you find in a Mark Rothko painting (Rothko’s paintings look silly on your computer but when you are standing in front of one at a gallery you are afraid you will fall in). What has been taken from these teenagers during this year of COVID-19 is irreplaceable; it is cruel of us to pretend that it’s been good for them, or fun, or redeeming.  But the discomfort I have with Elyotto’s video — though I am happy there is some sort of response from ‘the youth’ — is that it’s certainly not angry or violent enough. Elyotto is winsome, thin, and wears big sweaters, he looks vulnerable and is not quite handsome, and his eyebrows are painted way too heavily. He’s probably gay, but in this day you can say you are non-binary until you are blue in the face and people will believe you’re not gay, because they don’t want you to be gay, because being gay is still the worst thing in the world. I’m not saying Elyotto is gay, of course -- if he was it would be great -- only that the song is just a bit too twee and innocent for my liking. I worry that this COVID-19 response manifests itself as victimisation and helplessness; and a wallowing in drugs to boot. I myself am now completely obliterated on weekends, hastening my own death, and I have aged so much in this past year that at the moment I can barely walk. I’ve ‘barely-been-able-to-walk-from-arthritis' before, it will likely pass, but all I can think of is that the COVID-19 nightmare will be over and I won’t be able to get out of bed. But I will always have this writing — just as poor whining Elyotto has his music, though it frightens me that he had to ask his mother about swearing. What youth needs is real revolt, real anger, none of this candy crash pap. I remember sit-ins, and kids getting shot at Kent State, and having sex in public, and marching to overthrow the government. I remember real violence— that is the SDS, and bombs and guns. Depression, as any therapist will tell you, is just repressed anger, so for God's sake kids, don’t kill anybody or yourself —or obliterate yourself with drugs — just please cause some real trouble. Gee whiz somebody needs to, before we all die of boredom and ‘the pipe.’

I’m celebrating my

antibodies tonight, we’re having another party. Yes, I was vaccinated two weeks ago and the antibodies to COVID-19 are raging in my blood. I can’t catch it — that’s impossible —and I can’t pass it on. This is the truth. I know because I have a doctor friend who told me. Apparently the Public Health equivocation is this: they are afraid that if they tell people that they are free to mingle — un-infectious and un-infectable — apres vaccination, this will create a segregated society in which the vaccinated are given certain rights that the un-vaccinated are not. Well, first of all, that’s going to happen anyway. But a much more important issue is the way Public Health treats us — with condescension, as if we were children. Well, we are. I get it. But you have no right to treat us that way; the whole premise of democracy is you treat people as if they are not stupid animals, even if they are. Of course these manipulations get Public Health in big trouble because vaccines were supposed to be the end of COVID-19, and now instead we are being told: ’Wait a minute, one in five million people might have a side effect, so watch out!” And — “Oh yes, mutations and variations might might outsmart the vaccines, so you still have to wear a mask." Right. People don’t like that. But again, that’s not the real problem, the real problem is not just that people don’t like being condescended or lied to, but that Public Health should be telling us the truth. They are not artists; it is not their job to mystify or dwell in precious, allusive obscurity. Their mission should be to give us ‘just the facts ma’am,' which they do not. And I speak not only of their manipulations. Also (some woman on CNN said this months ago,  and then they wouldn’t let her on again -- or that’s my suspicion) Public Health does not only withhold information from us, but they offer us information, willy-nilly, we should not under any circumstances be privy to. When Public Health is doing their job in the Public Health offices (do they all have funny teeth like Theresa Tam? Are they generally unwashed? I suspect so, all those late nights, worrying….) they are allowed to, and very much should practice the ‘There’s always a chance that….’ ethic. In other words, they must consider even the remotest, minutest possibility that certain awful things might happen. This they need to do in order to institute effective public health measures. But they don't need to and shouldn't in fact tell us everything. We don’t need to know (for instance) about vaccinations, that 1 in 5 million women between the ages of 30 and 50 might die of a blood clot from Astra-Zeneca. That may be a fact, but it is actually misinformation, because we will misinterpret it, and blow it out of proportion. What I'm saying may seem contradictory; but it's fundamentally not.  Public Health must not condescend to us, but on the other hand they must not give us irrelevant information that will be of no use to us, 'information' that just gets the media all hysterical. Have you heard anything on the news lately except blood clots blood clots BLOOD CLOTS!!!!? Anyway, I’m sorry I can’t invite you to the little party tonight celebrating my antibodies. The theme of my ‘antibody party’ will be — you guessed it —that if you are a beautiful man you might try pressing your gorgeous hunky body against mine, as I am now un-infectious and un-infectable. I think I’m horny; I’m not sure because I’m so incredibly old that it’s hard to tell. Last night I had a drink with a friend and his paramour — I was quite jealous about this young prince from Brazil -- who was just my type. The Brazilian’s name was Kyle  —which does not in any shape or form sound Brazliian — but he did. Kyle had no accent, but there was definitely a type of cultural difference going on that I could learn from. He was from Sao Paulo, which is to me, amazing, as my understanding is this: Sao Paulo is one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the world — but Kyle opened my eyes to the fact that it isn’t so bad to live there. Nevertheless he is here, which says something. Kyle was wearing a hat that said BRAD, which I found charming. Only to find out that the BRAD hat was a ‘brand’ he had been trying to market recently. That immediately aroused me sexually. The word BRAD that is.  I would buy something that was sold under the BRAD brand, because BRAD to me is just hot, especially when followed by 'Pitt.' (I’ll never forget seeing him in his first movie — Thelma and Louise. He, of course, removed his clothes lickety-split, and we wanted to lick him immediately while he was doing the splits.) Speaking of which, Kyle was wearing artfully ripped jeans, and he kept rubbing his naked knees (something akin to Aladdin’s lamp?). And I did just happen to notice -- because I have a sharp eye for these things -- that he had magnificent thighs. I kept looking at his thighs, tightly encased by his jeans, and it did occur to me that they would be stupendous, as thighs go, and all I could think of was how wonderful it would be if Kyle were to sit on my face. “Sit on my face, and tell me that you love me!” is a song by Monty Python. I m not as fond of the ‘tell me that you love me’ part -- I find that intimidating. But I have always adored having certain people — and only certain ones — sit on my face. Kyle would be one such person. I am hoping therefore, tonight, that some face sitting happens -- before or after -- my party. No one has sat on my face in -- like — well,  months — at least since last summer — and it’s definitely a significant component in my sexual bag of tricks. Please join me in praying that I get laid at my antibody party tonight  -- that someone takes the hint, and presses his lovely (young?) body against mine -- or a certain part of his lovely young body, against my mouth. Sorry this blog has been so pornographic (no, I’m not). Blame it on COVID-19. Or on doctors not telling us the truth. The truth is so complicated -- of course -- and deeper than any doctor can ever imagine, and terribly difficult to communicate, for each and everyone one of us. But you, Theresa Tam, must -- in a very different manner than myself -- at least, try.

So a mouse

ate my crackers today. I got up at precisely 6:45 a.m. to eat them. I had been anticipating them all night; I dreamed about those crackers! But I opened the cupboard door and the plastic package I had carefully sealed with rubber bands was almost empty, and the rubber bands had been chewed through. My go-to was anger at my boyfriend — but then I realised that — though he is a very very odd fellow — it was unlikely he chewed through those rubber bands. So the day started badly.  (Please remember that my favourite cheese crackers are called Cheez-Its, there are no others like them, they are made by ‘Sunshine’ and only recently became available in Canada, and if you want to send me some, do. I won’t tell you my address but if you have my email you can email me, and I will give you my home address I promise.) Last night I watched The White Crow — a movie about Rudolf Nureyev, This movie is alluring, because of course, the guy playing Nureyev is hot, and is glimpsed ‘pretty-much, naked' at least once, and of course he sleeps with a lot of hot young men (and some women — this was annoying -- I’m sure it’s a fact that Nureyev slept with a woman or two -- but why do we have to see it? The next thing you know they’ll be claiming he was bisexual!). I always tell the story about the time I almost slept with Nureyev at the baths (The Romans)—I’ve told it about 1000 times. Suffice it to say I didn’t, but I could have. (So there.) Anyway the movie is pretty hypnotizing because of all the male buttoxess on display — in and out of tights — but also due to Ralph Fiennes lovely performance as Nureyev’s favourite acting teacher (Fiennes also directed the excellent script by David Hare). And then there was Nureyev’s dilemma, which was that he wanted to get out of Russia. I realized though, after awhile, that I was getting far too involved in the movie emotionally. I mean, I’m not trapped in Russia, am I? But then again. The last scene  — at the Paris airport — was so riveting— ‘Just tell them you want asylum Rudi. But you have to approach them — they won’t approach you.’ And the Russians are trying to grab him back, but he does finally escape to Paris. So I identified, because I do live in Soviet Russia now, that is all writers do, ever since the ‘woke folk’ decided that certain language is violence. Hate speech was the thin edge of the wedge. I never liked the concept of hate speech. What are we to do with Patti Smith’s fab song ‘Rock 'N Roll N-word?’ I guess we have to throw it in the garbage, now eh? And this is after years of me owning the word 'faggot' and calling myself that quite proudly.  It’s tragic to see the death of what I call ‘reverse appropriation,’’ taking back a term of abuse and anointing as our own. The problem with hate speech is that no language or thought should be illegal, period. I can see censoring children’s books but that’s about it. However I think children should stop reading children’s books at age 12. There should be no such thing as ‘teen’ literature. If you’ve got hair on your 'you-know-what' then man-up (or woman-up) and start reading the tough stuff, I suggest Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to start (though I’ve never been able to read the damn thing, so maybe it will put you off pornography -- which is what the puritans want, anyway). No. Adults should be able to read anything, or say anything, they like. If somebody kills somebody because that person is a trans person, what difference does it make? (Please don’t take that sentence out of context.) What I mean by that is -- they should go to jail for killing someone, period, it doesn’t matter the reason they did it, unless they are mentally ill. Then they had no reason and should be acquitted. If anyone has a reason for killing someone then they should be locked up, period. And what if the killer says: ‘I didn’t kill them because they were trans but because they were an odious person?” Why disbelieve the killer? What do you know about what goes on inside the brain of a twisted, evil, skunk who would kill anyone, for any so-called, blasted reason? And the problem with hate speech is that it -- like beauty -- is in the eye of the beholder. One man’s hate speech is another man’s poetry. As a writer I am appalled by any attempt to limit anyone’s vocabulary; we need words, all of them — no matter how disgusting or offensive — so we can somehow make sense of this crazy world. But the concept of  ‘hate speech’ was a step away from ‘words as violence.’ When I was ‘exorcised’ from Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Evalyn Parry kept telling me I had a responsibility to the people who read my blog because I had ‘hurt’ them. Go away, Evalyn! (Thank Heaven, she did!) No writer is responsible for the responses of the reading or viewing public. If we thought we were responsible for the effects of our work we wouldn’t write. How could we? People are nuts, and great poetry is polysemous (which means it has many meanings). And if you are a good poet, or novelist, or playwright, no single meaning can be extracted from your work anyway. The concept of speech as violence is equivalent to book burning, and will kill poetry, okay? Which brings me again to why I found Rudi’s dilemma so compelling — because every time I write these days, I write in fear. I am afraid. In fact I am afraid now. I am afraid I have ‘gone too far’ and will finally be permanently cancelled in one way or another. That’s a good thing probably, I mean it’s probably good for my writing; I have no doubt Rudi was a better dancer because he was terrified that the Russians would take 'the dance' away from him. Oppression/repression invites urgency and adds desperation, and if you create desperately you may, in my view, create something a little closer to the truth. (Whatever that is.) So yes, yes, truth be told, every word I write may be my last word, but that’s okay, because a writer should write like that anyway, and, with that in mind, I say goodbye. It was nice knowing you. If I am banned, please remember that when I dressed in drag, I really wanted to look attractive —it was an accident when I did not. And remember I tried to write, not wisely, but too well. (But it didn’t quite work.)

This is the

last you will hear of N.C. Hunter. His name has been forever erased from theatrical history. He was destroyed by critic Kenneth Tynan, who did away with him — it seems — with some relish, and his usual flair, and in one lethal swipe. I don’t so much blame Tynan, though his review of Hunter’s A Touch of the Sun was infamous for it’s lack of generosity, citing “the vacuity of the author's attitude towards life.” Hunter was guilty of nothing except being old at a time when being young was all that mattered. I don’t so much blame Kenneth Tynan as I do John Osborne, for they were oo-conspirators in the 1950s — heterosexist assholes (if I may be so bold) who plotted and planned to rid London's ‘West End’ of homosexual influence. The pretense was that they would create a new kind of theatre; indeed — they did — as they wished to see fine theatre written by homosexuals replaced by bad theatre written by heterosexuals. Of course they faced no opposition. Osborne and Tynan got rid of not only N.C. Hunter, but also Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward, and the producer Binkie Beaumont (one can’t helping loving him just for his name). These 4 were thought to be a ‘gay theatre mafia’ (Osborne is quite frank about this in his letters) and indeed they were, but this was no reason to destroy them, as in this iteration 'mafia' just means ‘special interest group,’ and indeed the four men had a kind of unwritten pact to pursue a certain kind of theatre, even though they were not particularly friends.  Yes of course, Coward’s powers as a writer had waned by the 50s, but it was Hunter and Rattigan’s heyday. And it was Osborne who started the ‘angry young man’ movement in theatre with his horrifying ‘Look Back in Anger,’ and who would not rest until the ‘gay theatre mafia’ was extinguished. I don’t suggest you read Look Back in Anger, as it is a shitty play. The only redeeming thing  is Jimmy Porter’s speeches: they have a certain unhinged violence, but are, sadly, lousy with didacticism. In other words Jimmy’s preaching at those who were at the time -- most decidedly not the converted -- is what made the work so-called 'revolutionary.' But if you analyse Osborne's play it is simply a misogynist misreading of A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams gorgeous play was written 9 years earlier, which means that Osborne had time to concoct his sexist retort. Look Back in Anger is essentially Streetcar from Stanley’s point of view. Alison is a Blanche-like, upper-class lady who falls for the sexy, gritty, angry, young, working class Jimmy. He verbally abuses her and eventually does so, physically, too — and utilizes his climactic final speech to justify it. Tennessee Williams had the genius to pit the body and soul against each other (welcome to my life!) --  in the form of Stanley and Blanche -- and then have them fight it out, in a rape, only to leave the audience's judgement suspended (but Blanche really wins, because Williams’ play is fundamentally not didactic; we are seduced by her poetry, and poetry is all that matters). Jimmy in Look Back in Anger -- though somewhat more eloquent than his fellow characters -- is no poet, mainly because he is hectoring us and lecturing us with the author's point of view. I doubt you will ever see a revival of Look Back in Anger, at least not in this 'Post-#Metoo' era. But N.C. Hunter’s A Picture of Autumn has just been released to the Mint Theatre website --

 https://minttheater.org/ 

-- and quite honestly it is worth, well two hours of your COVID-19 lockdown time Yes, it’s a play about old people, set in an old house, and all they do, really is talk. And yes they are rich, highly educated, and upper class, steeped in privilege (sorry). But Hunter’s work is eminently Chekhovian and utterly gorgeous. It may take awhile to grow on you, but what Kenneth Tynan called ‘vacuity’ is actually depth. How could he be so stupid as to confuse the two? But Tynan was only stupid in believing that one had to come out of a play humming it’s moral lesson. A Picture of Autumn is replete with accidentally poignant images, musings, paradoxes, and laughter at human failing, and yes it is to some degree about ageing and death. It offers no resolution; it merely sits in a very sad and funny place, which -- if you think about it -- is where we all sit, really, right now, and ultimately, forever. A Picture of Autumn knows ageing and death are inevitable and quite unpleasant, and it doesn’t offer any way out. There is — in other words — no vaccine. It’s amusing to watch people imagine they have a way out, to fantasize that death is ubiquitous but extinguishable, we will never 'go gentle into that goodnight' because if we follow COVID-19 guidelines, we may avoid night altogether. It’s pleasing that the end of COVID-19 is so near, of course, but one feels the end will forever be just around the corner, and one is never sure if one really wants to chomp on that limp carrot being dangled at the end of that mangy string. The stasis that N.C. Hunter offers is inevitably human, it's something we perennially fight to get out of, but there is no escape. So why would you want to see such a hopeless play? I don’t know how to tell you this, but hope is a panacea; there is no hope, we are all going to die. There is no heaven either, there are only these bodies, which you find, as you grow older, have nothing to do with what lives — so briefly — inside them. As I drag these half dead old legs of mine about I am perpetually astounded by the complete and utter lack of a relationship between the physical body and the human soul. How can my mind be so alive and my body be so dead? But that's the way it goes, existentially speaking, and this life will gradually leave behind a hollow shell, and though I took solace recently in reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis for the very first time, I am absolutely not reassured by the possibility of someday returning as a rock, a flower or a rhesus monkey. The only transformation is this. I have created it for you here -- this fantasy of a cranky old man, who is only a very small part of who I am — you’ll never know me, you’ll only know this. This is a mystery, I am am mystery, you are a mystery, and the biggest mystery of all is art. I didn’t want to say goodbye to the characters in N.C. Hunters play. A Picture of Autumn. No, they are still here. They never actually lived; or did they? But they will not die, because my imagination says so.

You gotta have

friends, or so Bette Midler said. I do agree, especially now. I gave up for awhile, I don’t know about you. I realise now that it all had to do with my mother. (What doesn’t?) I was going through this ‘I think I should just stop contacting people’ phase. The justification was: I’m bothering them, so many of them are depressed, or busy (with what, tell me what, exactly — now?) . And I couldn’t take the rejection anymore. Then I thought of my history with ‘friends’ — that is, that I’ve never had enough. And that's because I basically hate people. No, I do. I loathe them, generally, even though there are very specific and resounding exceptions. I don’t want all people to die, it’s not that type of misanthropy, it’s just that I would rather they were all a crowd at a bar or a party ,and I could drift through them aimlessly, flirt, and randomly impress— and finally observe them, drunkenly, from a corner. That’s the kind of narcissist I am. However I must be entertained, and I enjoy entertaining back. I know, it’s a tall order. That’s why I enjoy actors. But actors, (don’t tell them) are scary to have as friends. (Are they telling the truth? And how do you break the news that those collagen shots are just getting a bit much?).  What I’m trying to say is — if I always had trouble making friends it’s not only because I am a pretty appalling individual, but because I don’t really like people that much, so I deserve what I (don’t) get. But I’ve always wanted to have friends and counted them (I know an alarming habit) as in, how many friends do I have now? When my mother had finally descended into the bleary old deluded drunk that she became, she said ‘You’re so lucky to have so many friends.” And I was so f-in annoyed with her. I mean did she think friends fall from heaven? The sad little collection of comrades I had collected, separating the wheat from the chaff,  that is, the Sky Gilbert flatterers looking to get somewhere -- from the people who really liked me  — well it was hard work getting that crew together. I tried to explain to my mother once that  you have to work your ass off to get friends, and work even harder to keep them. And lo and behold, you do have to actually listen (my worst thing). Listening would have been beyond her. What I figured out today (my therapist helped) is that I learned from my mother that I was a 'star,' and that I shouldn’t ever have to beg people to be my friends. My mother (in case if haven’t mentioned it) was gorgeous (unlike me) and a narcissist (very much like me) -- and a misanthrope too. She detested people, though she was very funny about them. We would go out with ‘friends’ but the real treat was — coming home with Mom and ripping them apart afterwards. She was completely caustic, and evil, and unforgiving. We had so much fun. And of course she and I were always fabulous, and the rest of the world was execrable (unbearable!). Anyway, my mother assumed that most men would fall in love with her or at least want to screw her (and she was quite right) and that she was so smart and fascinating that everyone would covet her friendship (which was not so true). I learned from her that under no circumstances should I ever ever put myself in the position of needing people. Needing people was demeaning, according to her. I should be above that. Well -- as my therapist always reminds me--  my mother ended up a very sad, lonely, old woman. And I don’t want to become her penis-bearing equivalent. I will say this: I take Metamucil because of my mother. I know this is gross to talk about, but she wouldn’t take Metamucil or go to a gym. (She called me once and she said — “In order to get into that gym you have to walk up two flights of stairs — No, I mean I'm sorry, are they kidding?!!?”) And after she died, I don’t know who told me this — probably my sister because she was much more attentive than I to my mother’s medical issues —  when she died my mother’s intestines were hard as a rock. Why did I find it necessary to tell you that, as that anecdote is not charming and will certainly not get me any friends? So I can talk about my friends here because none of them (except two very sweet guys I know, hi, G and H!) read this. In fact I will talk about the people who I am really angry at now. Ex friends. First. One guy. I hate him now; I met him in November at an outdoor patio and he went on about how wonderful I was, so I emailed him and we hung out together naked now and then (no sex, but I was willing to try it out) and then he dropped me like a hot potato, and will not return my emails. Well good riddance I say. And then a very old friend who is very dear to me has just stopped communicating as of six months ago. And I used to talk to her every day? Where are you? Are you dead? (I know you’re not.)  According to sources on the ground you're happy reading books and drinking wine swaddled in a comforter. I’m friggin' mad though. So anyway, those are the lousy ex-friends. The rest of them I just adore, but so many of them are not seeing me for whatever reason. I refuse to take it personally, after all this is f-in COVD-19 and we’re being told daily that our noses will fall of and our genitals will erupt in sores if we so much as graze an unwashed surface with our un-gloved hands. Can you blame people for staying home? I promise I will never turn into my mother. (I’ve promised this before.) I’m not going to be a gorgeous, arrogant bitch like her, and demand that friends come to me. I’ve just emailed  several friends saying actual true things like ‘I miss you’ which my therapist assures me is okay to say to someone (I absolutely don’t want to pressure anybody). Well it’s important to remember that ‘no man is an island’ to quote John Donne. Listen, I have to tell you — I've got a new ‘zoom’ friend— he’ lives in Spain — and he believes that John Donne was Thomas Nashe AND Edmund Spenser. I know, no one cares about such Early English Ephemera except me. And Donne was Shakespeare’s pupil!  That’s the part that interests me — because Donne is the only poet besides Shakespeare that ever appealed to me from that era. Well that little tidbit of irrelevant scholarship is not going to get me any friends. But as my therapist says, I shall go with the flow, and be myself. And not be my mother. Wish me luck!

I didn’t used

to like science. I stopped taking science in grade 9, along with math and gym (I guess that explains a lot). Anyway COVD-19 has alerted me to the wonders of science. Science has all the answers; you shouldn’t trust anything else. I used to think science was contradictory— that one scientist might say one thing, and another scientist another. Now I understand. The reason why there are sometimes contradictions is because scientists are constantly discovering new things. This causes them, understandably, to change their minds from time to time. You see, scientists are always doing experiments. And sometimes those experiments come out one way, and sometimes another. Scientists never actually make mistakes, they just ‘revise previous knowledge’ — which means when you think they are being just plain stupid — well that’s impossible of course! Scientists are not stupid. And they have your best interests at heart, they really do. You see, a new experiment can turn the findings of an old experiment upside down. It happens all the time, and it’s a good thing. Take for instance, the latest scientific findings that have come to light in Ontario. For those ‘international’ readers, I should explain that Ontario is a ‘province’ (which means, like a ‘state’) in Canada, near the American border. Here in Ontario we have a wonderful ‘premier’ (which means a ‘governor’) named Doug Ford. He just brought some new scientific findings about COVID-19 to light.  (Don’t mix up Doug Ford with Rob Ford. Rob Ford was the mayor of Toronto many years ago. You may have heard about Rob Ford on the news — he was the fat older brother of Doug Ford, and he was a drug addict. Doug Ford is much younger, less fat, still alive, and he is not a drug addict at all). So, the news is this, get ready — hold onto your hats! Scientists (God bless ‘em, really) are now revising their previous findings about COVID-19. It was once thought that it was dangerous for people to be indoors, but now it has been discovered (isn’t science amazing? Always changing….) that COVID-19 spreads most easily outdoors. So in Ontario, they have just brought out a whole bunch of splendid new rules responsible people must follow. Really, you must all follow them. If you don’t, then you don’t care, and you don’t love your fellow man, and you are selfish, and if someone’s grandmother dies in an old folks' home it will be your fault, and you should feel guilty about that. So these are the new rules. It is so dangerous to be outside during COVID-19 that the police are now going to stop you and ask you: “Where are you going?” — if they catch you outside. You must be either going to a grocery store or to a pharmacy. If you are not, you will be fined $750. The second most important finding of these new scientific experiments is how dangerous parks are. Gee whiz, I thought parks were dangerous because of the crack needles you might find there! But now we know — COVID-19 can be spread very easily in parks. So never to go to parks. But the most important finding is this. Children —who we previously thought were immune from COVID-19 — are not. Children are ‘spreaders’ and probably will start dying in droves at any minute. There was a horrible ‘inflammatory’ illness that many young children got many months ago. Children were thought to be safe from COVID-19. But no, they are not. In fact children are so dangerous to us — and to themselves — that they are not allowed to go to school anymore, and they are not allowed to go outside.  I would not take your child to a playground. No. Doug Ford said that playing on playgrounds is the most dangerous activity of all -- then he took it back -- but that still makes me suspicious of playgrounds (you never know!). Whatever you do, do not let your child play outside. Lock them up in the house. The safest place to put your child, actually -- is in the attic. And you might put a mask on your child up there, or better yet wrap a scarf around their head to cover their mouth to make sure they don’t get — or spread —- germs. It might also be a good idea tie your child up- — attach them to the wall with hooks or something. You may have to bring food to them occasionally — but don’t do it more than you have to (it takes a child a very long time to starve, really, don't worry--  a child only really needs water — and so I would just stock up on water bottles and leave them in ‘Little Johnny’s reach.) Some children may get bored or depressed by all this (especially if they have ADHD) and — of course — you could give them an iPhone up there in the attic. But that’s not such a good idea. Iphones are one of the biggest spreaders of COVID-19 (not many people know this). I would just lock the attic door and turn out the lights. Your child will probably get pretty weak  — from lack of food and exercise — but after a lot of crying your child will probably just go to sleep, maybe even for a very, very long time. I do thank the wonderful COVID-19 scientists for coming up with these new findings, and Doug Ford for implementing these important rules. I thought for a minute that Doug Ford might be accused of being irresponsible, of playing Russian Roulette with people’s lives. But no way. Premier Ford has proved that he is a follower of science and that he is really trying to save us all — so I would vote for him again! All in all he has done surprisingly well — around COVID-19. As you can see, an added bonus is that due to COVID-19 regulations we don’t really need to be bothered anymore by children or seniors — both were kind of a bother before the ‘new normal.’ But it’s not a good idea to visit ‘seniors’ (vaccine or no vaccine — you can’t be too careful) and with ‘Little Buster' or 'Mary-Anne’ or ‘Keefer’ (if it’s a ‘they’) locked up in the attic, our lives should be a lot more peaceful from now on. Thank you Science!  We all really appreciate it! And I apologise for casting aspersions on science in the past. I‘ve sure learned my lesson! Let’s hear it for continuing and dedicated experimentation — and for the right of each and every scientist to change their mind!

It's all quite

hopeless. I was going to write a blog recommending suicide. But I can’t do it. Just now I went back to Dorothy Parker’s poem Resume, hoping for some insight, but I got caught up in the polysemous nature of language (a big problem for me). All I could think about was the line ‘nooses give’ — her argument against hanging yourself. What’s lovely is that ‘giving’ is such a nice thing, and even nicer in this context. But what’s also lovely is her lackadaisical lack of enthusiasm for life, which is what I have presently but am not used to having. Frankly all I have to look forward to -- besides writing this -- is getting drunk on weekends and eating too much food. I can easily see why people gain weight and OD on drugs — so there’s no need for me to recommend suicide as an alternative to lockdown; it’s happening all around me anyway — slowly or quickly as the situation permits. Last night — well I don’t know how to describe it. He's a film maker, but mainly a cameraman, and he looks a little bit like Iggy Pop. Please don’t imagine me having sex with Iggy Pop. Although a friend of mine did have sex with Iggy Pop, apparently — I think it happened before her sex change. At any rate she told me once about an incident in bathroom stall in Detroit. Those were the days. The highlight of my evening was when my friend and I, (yes I shall call him my friend? even just because he was generous with his private parts, but it was more than that, really) we watched a punk video which was so gloriously inept and hilariously appropriate: You’ve Got to Fight for the Right to Party — never have the Beastie Boys seemed quite so relevant. The video was very badly done in that 80's way —the girls' hairdos were odd, and the boys were trying to be sexy, and they needn’t have tried at all really. There was a lot of pie throwing. So anyway, I rented a room in a guest house for myself and my paramour. I got there first, and when I opened the door it was absolutely fabulous, only 80$ a night, and after I climbed three flights to our little love nest I was impressed not only with the cleanliness, but with the elegance -- of the bathroom. There was a balcony so my paramour could smoke, and it was nice to shove open the doors and let in the night. When my paramour arrived (paramour is definitely better than friend) we drank and watched sad, bad old videos together on the ‘Retro’ channel. The most surprising thing he said was that he was very much an extrovert and sometimes scared people away with his aggressive behaviour. I saw none of this, and wonder now if perhaps he had imagined it, or perhaps he was aggressive only not with me,  or perhaps what other people call aggression I quite enjoy. It happened exactly as I hoped it would, we got to know each other (for I hardly know him, or only knew him hard, or more accurately, semi-hard) and I really do think he is a nice guy; that is not aggressive in the way that I know aggression, not driven or competitive or tortured. He was not exactly zen, but just, well, there. And he did travel to the ‘Sky Gilbert place' for a moment, but I deftly redirected him: ‘I haven’t read any of your books...’ he said, and I said it didn’t matter, because it doesn’t, it isn’t my books that I wanted him to be paying attention to at that particular moment. We got down to it gradually in the kind of way I like to, which means chatting and getting drunker and revealing things and then beginning to take off clothing. But there was really only one thing to get to, really, and that was me committing the act of fellatio upon his person. (How’s that for euphemism?) That lasted for most of the rest of the night. I left and he slept there. I’m trying to get it to happen again next week; it’s my coping mechanism. I’ve shown you mine, will you show me yours? It’s either this or suicide; I’ve chosen the easy way, I think. So I’m not going to recommend suicide. I can’t do it. Instead this is now going to turn into a plea. I’m going to try and keep at least some of you alive, the ones that can be kept alive during lockdown. What I’m going to say now I don’t even believe myself. Yes, I do. I must cease being ironic immediately -- and just tell ‘the truth.’ You must live because — why? I think mainly because we don’t really understand what living and consciousness is, it is, as far as I know, God’s experiment. By that I mean whoever or whatever (I’m not big on God) is running things took a startling turn with human consciousness. Whatever we are — and I’m not quite sure — there is probably nothing else quite like us in the universe, and we were not meant to be, nor are we necessarily a terribly successful experiment. In other words, matter — life — was not meant to think about itself; because if it has consciousness of itself, it immediately gets worried and anxious and bored, and wants to have sex with guys who look like Iggy Pop. Consciousness is, in this way, not entirely practical at all really, because you cannot think about yourself, you cannot imagine yourself, because when you die you don’t think anymore, so what it is you are experiencing now, when you are alive? It’s a quandary. But the reason you must stay alive, and I sincerely wish that you do -- despite the fact that the whole universe right now is conspiring to kill you —  is precisely because, meaning, it's because it's all so essentially hopeless. that you must live. There is something heroic in that, there always have been, you have to give people credit for living their pretty senseless lives, and suffering so much, and still managing to love and produce poetry (because poetry is love really). The present suffering will be over, I guarantee it. Even as I say this I don’t believe that. But we must. We will be let out of our homes, we will hug and laugh and dance again. Yes we will. Until then I would recommend you do absolutely anything you can to survive. Anything. Yes drugs, yes alcohol, yes yes overeating, yes seeing people you are not supposed to see. And touching -- do it! -- touch them — because that touch might keep you alive, and who knows how long this will last?  I can’t imagine why I’m trying to keep you alive. I don’t even know you. But I see you daily, trudging down the street, your mask dangling forlornly from your ear, and I do identify. We have no idea of why or wherefore we persevere, but precisely, for that reason and that reason alone, we must.

The Mauritanian is

one of those perfect movies we are likely to see more of; by perfect, I mean perfectly flawed. It is very well made, and features big stars, but is the kind of lecture we get on TV every day. We must treat it like it was  a COVID-19 newscast, there’s nothing new here,  certainly nothing we haven’t heard before, just perfectly groomed excellent people who will clear their throats and prepare to tell us what we already know. In The Mauritanian, as in COVID-19 (but alas, not in life) the good guys win, and the bad guys -- to their chagrin -- don't (that is  — as Oscar Wilde sagely observed — not life, but art). Just as we know anti-maskers are evil, and are pleased to see them denounced on social media, just as we know that there is one way to live — these days— and that is — to stay home and die of boredom, The Mauritanian teaches us that the U.S. government is an evil thing, and there is no one more virtuous, loving, handsome and fun than A Persecuted Arab. You see, the tables have turned somewhat. There was a time when we laughed and frolicked, and ridiculed boring bumpkins who stayed home. There was a time when The Arab was the villain, and it was enough for him to appear with his unruly black beard; we detested the ground he walked on and gleefully threw popcorn at the screen, expecting — nay aching — for the knives and swords to appear —  props that so typified his treacherous race. But now The Requisite Handsome Arab is inevitably gracious, and if we don’t love him for all the injustice done to him then we are not worthy. I cried at the end; I cried several times -- mostly  from watching Jodie Foster grow older by the minute, and Benedict Cumberbatch making a fool of himself.  Of course it’s a pleasure to see two gay icons kind face off -- alas they don’t, really, the film is missing that 'scene-a-faire,' as Cumberbatch (spoiler alert) plays a decent man who comes eventually to understand The Noble Arab’s plight. It would be nice to see Jodie and Benedict in a gay movie, with Jodie going down on a likely wench while Cumberbatch greedily munches on some fetching swain. Both have (I think?) played their own sexuality on screen — but the Gods have decreed that it will not happen too often, and they must certainly not appear together in such a manner —  for it would be too sinfully delicious, like eating dark chocolate ice cream and watching old Woody Allen movies with your younger sister. Jodie  simply is a lesbian, 24 hours a day; she is a movie star, not an actress. I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve those academy awards, she does— along with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant —who also played themselves superbly and honestly. But Jodie is always much butcher than a man, more inhibited, harder, fending off feelings with a steely kind of courage that threatens to consume whatever tenderness she has left. Cumberbatch is another kettle of fish. Here, he is all red hair and red eyebrows, as if someone had just given him a ginger bath. Seeing the two of them together is a like watching Crawford and Davis, you watch Crawford eat up the screen with her own hypnotic narcissism while at the same time being somewhat distracted by the fact that Bette Davis can actually act. Cumberbatch is the Meryl Streep of gay actors, he is so consumed by his role, that we are amazed to forget, for a moment, how open-minded we are for so enjoying a performance by an admittedly homosexual actor -- but somewhat glad of it, for it is irksome to be constantly reminded. Jodie Foster, on the other hand — though she was chided for not properly coming out in that silly speech she made at the Golden Globes so many years ago— can’t help affirming her sexuality on the quotidian. And on top of that she insists on being beautiful. This is something that — come on — admit it — we don’t expect from a lesbian. And the movie is dauntingly earnest, and wishes to lecture us, and we come out of it thinking we are better people, when of course we are not. This is all we want from anything that pretends to be a work of art.  This has movie has all the fire and passion of a magamusical (though considerably more narrative skill). if we were living in civilized times we would be leaving our  houses to see it, now we sit at home huddled over our little silver meme machines, no one to share it with — unless we are family (God help us). And this is certainly a family movie. Even the torture is for a good cause. 'Great for the kids!' says the reviewer from The Christian Science Monitor. I’m so terrifically tired of being told what is good for me. And it has a sneaky, dangerous effect. It’s not so much that I am becoming right wing — though I was enormously tempted to become a fascist after seeing the QAnon Shaman’s magnificent belly on the evening news — it’s just that I always want to do everything I am told not to  -- i.e. make endless human contact (which I am hoping to do with a fetching swain tomorrow night). But if we are cursed with a curfew I will make Love in the Afternoon. That’s the title of a movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper that I reviewed last summer. It was a tiresome star vehicle like this one — its only redeeming characteristic being that it had no redeeming characteristics — it was blatantly sheer entertainment and slightly politically incorrect, thank God, as Gary Cooper appeared to be making passionate love to his granddaughter. Apparently they only filmed him in the dark; I understand -- dark rooms were very kind to me when they existed. If a curfew occurs I suggest you all just sink into the couch and fear everything, which is what they seem to want, or masturbate yourselves to death with all the bad porn available for free online. Just stop initiating things, stop yearning, stop passionately needing. It should be easy enough -- at least that's what Public Health says. “Is this what you call living?” Someone asks in The Threepenny Opera. That is a question I’m afraid to answer. I look at the walls of my room -- and yes, they are a prison, but unlike The Arab in The Mauritanian, I have no mat to pray on. So instead, I inflict — upon you, well — this.

Writing in code

is the thing. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw the HBO special on QAnon. It is clear that QAnon — whoever he is —  is a poet, and his poetry is the writing of the future. One of the wonderful things about QAnon (if you are Russian agent of chaos) is that there is no ‘party line’ in the sense that no one knows exactly what it represents, because the spectral prophetic musings of the poet who is QAnon are impenetrable and must be deciphered — they descend from on high much like the Ten Commandments or the Gospel According to St. Matthew, offering the possibility of endless, all-consuming exegesis. This is a Godsend in COVID19 times — we all need something to do; better yet something to obsess about. (We used to be obsessed with the ‘real’ world — sadly, no more.) QAnon is undoubtedly a religion, but it is one step ahead of the Woke Folk’s creed. In the Woke World there are rules, they are the modern puritans. The puritans read The Bible for content and insisted that ‘spilling  your seed on the ground’ meant one thing and one thing only. The punishment for such a transgression was swift and clear. I don’t know what religion will appear next, it is abundantly evident that human beings need one, and that it did not work, ultimately, for Nietzche to claim that God was dead. People need God or Gods, they need fantasy (hence Harry Potter, comic books, the endless science fiction and mystical/religious TV shows). We know intuitively that real truth is mysterious, and anything that we feel gives access to the truth is not only attractive but addictive. I learned all this from my studies of Shakespeare and Renaissance England (I have expanded my studies somewhat and I’m now trying to make my way through Spenser, tough slogging, let me tell you, I will never love Spenser, but it is all too engrossing a mystery.) The early modern English writers wrote in code, and there was a good reason for it. Shakespeare, on the one hand, chose that his work be only about deception. And he is the wisest of all the Renaissance Brits, because he became obsessed with one key thing; how do we know what truth is? It’s an unanswerable question certainly, but absolutely rewarding. These early moderns wrote in code because they had to, England was a hotbed of spies and sedition; Catholicism was banned, the monasteries pillaged, it behooved you to practice Catholicism in private. If you did it in public you were in danger of being locked in The Tower or torn apart by horses. We live in a similar atmosphere today. Being cancelled on social media is apparently something akin to being torn apart by horses — at least I hear — when I was cancelled I had no access to social media, or at least I didn’t want any — so I don’t know. What’s lovely for QAnon is that outside of a few truisms (Trump is God) they argue quite endlesslessly — like Hasidic Jews — over the meaning of the prophets and the existence of angels. In contrast we all know all too clearly what the Woke Folk think, and as they are the young, and the young are where the money is, the business wing of the digital world (which is taking over the web) — wants to be on their side. So we now have creeping censorship on Youtube, Amazon, Google, etc.. (It’s no use saying the web is not government — and that what the web censors is not censored —frankly what is on our computers is all we have these days.) Sure, much of what is censored is, actually, 'hate speech,’ and I’m sure it is somehow connected with the endless human suffering that we we now experience daily. (It does seem to be more endless than usual, doesn’t it? Or is that just the media? Or is it just me?) I believe lots of speech is hateful -- but that no speech or thought should be illegal. It’s not about the deceptive manipulative phrases that come out of our mouths, words are instantly and ultimately deformed (as Plato said of all poetry) and separated from ‘reality’ at the moment of conception. Forget censorship; all that matters is the human heart. True, that’s hard to get at, but religions work hard to gain access. What we call reason is a failed project; human beings are not reasonable and do not want to be, and reason has it’s own manipulations (you can prove anything). But as the digital world polices what is ‘hateful’ and what is not — it becomes necessary for the true writer to write in code. For instance; one could not at this time seriously critique the COVID-19 elephant that is racing around the room— and I don’t mean the illness, I mean the social imperatives that accompany it — isolation, the rise of the rich, mass depression, dependence on drugs and digital media etc — one dare not challenge the COVID-19 orthodoxy. So…the answer is poetry. I highly recommend it. I try and practice it here, but rarely achieve it. One can look to Shakespeare — though I know that for some, he is just another old guy. However exploring ‘truth’ in the den of lions that was England under Elizabeth was good for him as a writer. Everything is a boat to float, all is fantasy, we are the stuff that dreams are made on, lies are truth, and the most fantastical the better — the more resonant the better. There is — Shakespeare knew it — a way of speaking -- nay dancing -- through veils and fog; the artist will find it.  So many years ago Kyle Rae the eminent Toronto gay city councilor (where is he now? I do hope he’s lost some weight) said of my column in Eye magazine ‘everything Sky writes is fiction’ So true; it is my saving grace. I’m really not sure what I am writing here, at this point in the blog the words just carry me away. There is a wind in the willows, and toad is overeating, and Craig’s Cookie's is doing very well on Church Street right now. I really wish Craig’s Cookies had a dark room to have sex in.  But that is impossible; at Craig's Cookies, you may only buy cookies. That is what ‘gay liberation’ has come to. But remember; cookies are dangerous.  Oh, sorry that’s only on your computer. It’s all so confusing. I wish you contentment I really do. But you will find it in fantasy, only. If you can wade your way through it - to the real.

I wish they

would just leave Darren Star alone. In case you don’t know he created Sex and the City as well as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. I am in lock-down desperation mode and will do anything to keep myself entertained, so I just found two recent Darren Star series that I didn’t know existed: Younger and the more recent Emily in Paris. It must be said that Darren Star is an excellent TV writer -- faint praise I know -- but considered in the context of the busloads of unfunny crap that’s out there, he gets a shitload of credit. But ever since Sex and the City went out of style he’s been getting very bad press. Of course Sex and the City was considered controversial at the time, but Lena Dunham 'out controversialed' him with Girls -- written by a woman and well frankly less 'consumerist' and more contemporary. All that said, I don’t think it’s fair to throw old Darren in the garburator quite yet. To do so (yes, I’m going to say it) is homophobic. He's a fag who writes about women, okay? Yes, it irks me that he doesn’t just write a bloody gay show, but let’s face it no one would watch it — unless the leading characters were friggin’ boring — they’d have to be deaf, married, raising an autistic son, and virtue signalling all over the place for the public to accept them. There would be no gay hook-up apps, shame, AIDS, sex in alleys, male prostitutes, butt plugs, or drugs. Though these are all still staples of gay culture, they are nevertheless unmentionable. So maybe this is why Darren has to write about middle class straight women. Or maybe he just wants to? But nowadays -- with appropriation -- you have to not only be what you write about but be authentic as hell to back it up. Okay, I get it. Darren Star is not a middle class straight woman, do I need to say it again? I get it, but people are being so mean and stupid about Emily in Paris. It is what it is -- very entertaining, but also thoughtful   --and I’ll tell you why. I’m sure lots of women and gay men just love seeing Emily get it on with that hunky chef, she’s so adorable and very Audrey Hepburn, and her potential boyf is even more adorable and sensitive than her, and has already shown us his fab abs! Anyway, Emily is getting it from the uptight-puritan-frowning-critic-woke-folk because she just moved to Paris and doesn’t speak French.  Duh. That is a central issue in the series for Chrissakes! It is the very focus of her conflict with her boss, and all the French people are quite rightly yelling at her about it. Secondly, the series is criticised for portraying French people as snotty and elitist about their culture. I don’t know how to tell you this but The French are snotty and elitist about their culture -- and Jesus, they have every right to be!  Anglo culture just doesn’t measure up. We have Shakespeare but they have Rabelais, Proust, Hugo, Voltaire and Flaubert -- and they basically own modern philosophy. And what about the French feminists (Catherine Millet etc.)? And what about Michel Houellebecq —my favourite author in the world? You don’t have to convince me-- French people have every right to be stuck up -- anyway who cares if the show has something against French people (which it doesn’t)? Finally, the show is being criticized for being ‘consumerist.’ Criticized by critics on digital media. Well there is nothing more ‘consumerist’ than digital media. If you are making money writing for the web, then you are part of a vast corrupt plot to steal our data, and ultimately all our money, and most of all--  make money off our kids. So don’t lecture me about friggin’ consumerism Mr. Rotten Tomatoes Critic. So Emily likes to buy dresses. But who doesn’t? Now that I’m into the 4th episode I figured out why Darren Star chose to write about an American girl in Paris in 2020; it makes perfect sense to anyone with even half a brain. What all these idiot critics are ignoring is that Darren Star is valorising French culture and pillorying the puritanism of anglo culture; and he is absolutely right to do so. I can’t think of any other western culture that embraces the politics of pleasure like France. As one character says ‘you live to work, we work to live.’ Having spent a lot of time in Montreal (thank God they had a lock down protest last night — I hope they have five thousand more protests and start wrecking things!) I can tell you that Montreal is a culture of pleasure, and Toronto is a culture of work -- because Montreal is French and Toronto is English — and never the twain shall meet. But all this criticism of  Emily in Paris comes down to something more significant than just woke stupidity, virtue signalling and political correctness (now just as ubiquitous as COVID-19). Emily in Paris is Darren Star’s experience of his own life right now. And yes, he imagines himself to be a pretty 24 year old in Paris; that is his artistic translation of his own experience into entertainment. You don’t have to like it, and you can certainly challenge it’s accuracy  if you wish — I challenge the accuracy of gay representations all the time. But also recognise that Emily in Paris — like all art or even really good entertainment — is just someone saying: "this is the way I see it — and by ‘it,’ I mean — life!" This applies not just to art and good entertainment but to everything. In other words, this blog, and any review you read of Emily in Paris on Rotten Tomatoes, and anything you find in SLATE or SALON.com is simply someone’s translation of their own experience. It's not gospel and should not be treated as ‘the truth’ because nothing is. All writing and speech should be treated with skepticism, and that includes everything from Rex Murphy to Andrea Dworkin to Vivek Shraya to the latest TV analysis of COVID-19 and the latest Black Lives Matter pronouncement. We are all culpable, we are all liars, and everything that we produce in writing or speech should be viewed with deep critical suspicion and not accepted as the last word, or even merely the first word, as it might just be fictive crap. So listen guys, will you just leave Darren Star alone? Okay, so you can’t seem to imagine yourself as a beautiful Audrey Hepburnish young woman starting a new job in Paris -- falling in love with a hunky chef. Well, that’s your problem. Thank God, it’s not mine.

I had my

vaccination party last night. Roy, Mark, Joe, Rosemary and Donny were there, as well as Jewel -- who is the man I share an apartment with in Toronto. We had a lot of fun. My friend Roy arrived early looking very dapper; I am always amazed at his hair, at age fifty it is plump and perfectly coiffed — and he was wearing purple pants which I quite coveted. (Roy is my ‘conspiracy theorist’ friend who often says ‘I’m just asking a question, that’s all’ which I try and ignore, but when he’s not ‘just asking questions’ he is being very smart and funny and dirty which is what I really value about him, or anyone.) Roy is an ex-concert pianist but Jewel couldn’t get him to play the piano —that night, anyway. The first person to arrive was Mark, I had no idea that meeting him would be momentous, but it was. I went down to let  Mark and Roy in, so Mark ran up to the apartment as I chatted with Roy outside. When we got back up Mark was dancing (Jewel had set up a disco ball and had put on some disco music). I noticed right away that Mark looked like a slender young man — even though he was not one — and ‘ex-slender young men’ are precisely my type. He was dancing in a winsome sort of way, which was his wont. Mark is generally gentle and unassuming. I have seen Mark 'around' for years, but barely said hello to him, which says something about me, and about COVID-19. But coming back up to the apartment and finding him all by himself dancing -- I was suddenly taken with him. So Roy and I started chatting with Mark immediately, and right away I was afraid Roy was captivated by Mark’s winsomeness also. But really when it comes down to it, the party was for me. Mark was one of the two gay friends Jewel had invited. Even though Jewel is not himself gay, he has many gay friends — and it seems that Joe and Mark were both somewhat taken by my celebrity, or my ex-celebrity. I know. It all sounds very sad, doesn’t it? That I would be obsessed with my own ex-celebrity? But truth be told it’s nice to be recognised now and then. Next to arrive was Joe — Jewel’s other gay friend. Joe was definitely a handful, meaning the most sex-obsessed queen I have met in a long time, and that’s saying a lot. He immediately cornered me and asked my opinion on just about everything. Later it turned out — and I had suspected this — that Joe and I had sex at some point in the distant past (at the bathhouse) -- he had quite the tale to tell about me leading him around on a leash, or something. I honestly don't remember. I felt bad for Jewel —who suddenly burst out of the shower — all freshly washed and handsome — because the only people there were two of his gay friends obsessed by my ex-celebritiness, and my personal friend (the conspiracy theorist and ex-concert pianist). But after all it as was my vaccination party -- and no one else's -- so I tried not to feel bad about it. Soon Rosemary arrived —   a lovely very dark girl with large breasts, etc., and Jewel began to insist that she pull up her shirt, which I think she did, but honestly I was too busy to notice. Sometime much later Donny arrived —a straight filmmaker who wears a black ladies wig and is extremely unprepossessing. I don’t dislike him, but he makes himself hard to notice by sitting in corners and chatting with Jewel all the time. So the party went on — I at one point became obsessed with hearing Tom Jones. (I know Jewel has one of his albums.) I adore Tom Jones, partially because when I was 12 I went to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins in Connecticut. My aunt was about 45 at the time and addicted to sherry (she used to work at the liquor store). 'Aunt Peg' was very large and loud — and while downing a glass announced:’We’re going to see Tom Jones in New York City. He’s going to get me through menopause!” I quite know how she feels, now. Even to this day I still have fond memories of my Aunt Peg, though on that very trip she chased me around the picnic table because I refused to eat my crusts “You’re going to finish this sandwich!” she yelled. I think she thought that I thought I was 'above' eating crusts. She didn’t mention the starving people in Africa but they were also on her mind. So finally Tom Jones came on and I was very drunk. Mark said he was going downstairs to have a cigarette so I followed him. As soon as we got outside  we started necking — it just happened, honestly — he just hiked himself up on a flower box so he was perfect kissing height—and it was just so easy to kiss him. He is certainly very old, maybe even as old as me, but his long hair hangs down over his face (he kind of resembles ‘IT’ on the Adams family) that if I closed my eyes and kissed him he was suddenly a very sweet young man. We went back upstairs and people were very very drunk. Jewel makes fabulous videos of himself singing and doing various other.things -- often shirtless -- as Jewel used to be a male stripper and is the gayest straight man I’ve ever met. This does not mean that he has any desire to have sex with men, he just kind of wishes he was gay, and has a gay soul, and there aren’t many straight men like that. (For instance, Jewel sculpted a bust of John Waters which is also signed by John Waters. Not many straight men would do that.) Anyway Jewel took his gang — Donny and Rosemary—  into his room to look at videos of his fabulous shirtless self, and Joe and Roy were talking (Joe never tires of recounting his sexual exploits which are very very extensive) so I dragged Mark outside again and we fooled around. I was pleased to see that Mark was well endowed — it is amazing what nature giveth -- and what she taketh away. He just said modestly: ‘Yeah, I’m a skinny little guy you would never know.” He told me he was staying at The Town Inn where his friends had been having some sort of orgy for days. Before the party ended Mark gave me his ‘card’—  I still have it. It really was the nicest way to celebrate my vaccination; I hope to have another vaccination party in August after the second dose. That is, if I don’t die of a blood clot after the first (it was Astra Zeneca). If you play your cards right, you might just get invited.