I too, am

The Wrong Man. Like Henry Fonda in Hitchcock’s film I have been unduly punished for a crime I never committed. I am innocent. I recently watched the engrossing Truman and Tennessee (a new film about Capote and Williams in their own words) and was shocked to hear that Williams' sexual history is not unlike mine. At one point, when interviewed by David Frost I think (dear me, what were people watching on televisions back then!) Williams says ‘I never masturbated.” And then later he admits something like ‘The first time I actually had sex with a man was when when I was 27 - no — 28.’ This is exactly my story. Precisely: I didn't touch myself until I was in my late 20s, I used to rub up against the bed (I could pretend it was not happening) and I slept with women until I was 28. What I’m realizing now, being in Montreal and stepping out of my COVID-19 cocoon (yes I am somewhat like a butterfly now -- while I was dour, creeping, and furry in an unattractive way during lock down) is that having sex with men constantly (which is my wont) changes the way I look at men, generally. When I was in the closet I was not just not having sex with men, I was punishing myself constantly for wanting to -- for desire -- writing in my ‘journal’ about how to stop fantasizing about men, about how I was a good person and didn’t need to give in to my emotions (i.e. sexual desires). This meant a daily exercise in which I saw men on the street who aroused me but I tried not to be aroused. Also; much more horrifying, my resolve was never to be gay, ever -- which meant I could never partake of these impossible pleasures, though that banquet was laid before my eyes, daily (men are beautiful). So until I was 28 years old I viewed all men really with regret — they were something that I wanted but could not have. When I started having sex with men, suddenly I allowed myself to be attracted to them. This is a proof of my essential puritanical nature; it just didn’t make sense to me that I would desire and not act on that desire. So why desire at all?  When this lock down happened, it was impossible for me not to fall prey to the same exact feeling once more, to fall back into the dark pit of repression. So for months I have been gazing at men, feeling attracted to them, and then feeling bad about myself. I can’t have sex with them, so I will not desire them; as before. (Please don’t ask why it is so necessary for me to have sex with men constantly in order  to give myself permission to desire them; leave that to my therapist, but the point is that after 28 years of being a puritan in the closet, it became a kind of habit.) Anyway, when I was walking along St. Catherine last night I noticed that I could relax, that I could breathe again, look at beautiful men and desire them; because later I would have one. And I did. Last night -- he was as delicious as an ice cream cone and twice as sweet, and I melted under his lips into helpless, messy pleasure. He had skin as pale as — but I won’t go on. But "rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" and I’m sure one day he will be older. (Fortunately I got to him before that all happened. Sigh!) The Wrong Man is fascinating because it is Hitchcock’s attempt at realism (he actually filmed on location, something he didn’t like to do) and it is the very opposite of films like The 39 Steps which are sheer candy floss. (How many German spies are missing the top of their left baby finger? How many times does a flock of sheep interrupt an arrest? And try hiding under a waterfall, geesh…) But there are things that are not real in The Wrong Man, for instance the credits say that Fonda’s wife in the film (Vera Miles) recovered from the insanity that was induced by the wrongful accusations and temporary imprisonment of her husband. In fact Manny Balestrero’s  wife never fully recovered. Hitchcock couldn’t resist giving us a happy ending after showing us this nightmare. Also Henry Fonda is very good at just thinking,which is a rare quality in an actor. Finally, what I find fascinating about this film  is that the real Manny Balestrero was almost jailed due to eyewitness accounts of his ‘robberies’ (when he was in fact somewhere else -- apparently a quarter of all eye witness accounts of crimes are bogus). So much for trusting your eyes. Hitchcock includes the icky scene in which the two women who swore that they had for sure seen Henry Fonda rob them, are confronted with Henry Fonda after the actual robber is brought to justice. They of course avoid his gaze. Don't trust your eyes. Trust your dreams instead. And definitely don’t trust a soul who says 'I saw it!' Or worse yet 'I have proof!' Or (mostly found in those who claim to want safe sex)  -- 'I’ve had the HIV test and I’m negative!'. I saw a robbery with my own eyes last night at the bathhouse, or rather I should say, I had finished my lovely business and was attempting to exit the place, when someone started screaming ‘Voleur!’which even with my pigeon French I know means 'Thief!' I think he was accusing a meth addict. I immediately felt guilty because I had allowed some guy to smoke his pipe in my room on my first night there. First, I guess I should not do that, and second, I apologise. Jesus who am I apologizing to? You’re certainly not there -- and God doesn’t exist -- so I guess I’m apologising to my mother. Sorry Mom, for letting a meth addict smoke his pipe in my room at the baths, but frankly I wanted to suck his you-know-what and that was the only thing that would make him stay. They leave, all of them. I don’t mind. I prefer it that way. They do leave me with a warm heart though. I get along a lot better with my lover now that we are both getting laid.This may seem odd to you -- but frankly I don’t care, because you don’t exist. You may insist that you do.  But I press on disbelieving you because what I share here is private, and should never be read by anyone, and certainly never believed.

It is sheer

entertainment; sheer joy. I return to The 39 Steps, first just to wonder what so enchanted J.D. Salinger — it was his favorite film. It’s clear to me that there are two reasons for this. One, the essential innocence of the film. It’s sweetness. It’s one of Hitchcock’s early sound films, made before he went to Hollywood, and in it he seems to be laying before us all his concerns -- quite exuberant about what he has discovered he is capable of doing, about what he is going to do. The film begins with  ‘Mr. Memory’ performing at a music hall. Hitchcock is obviously in love with this atmosphere (he brings it back at the end with The London Palladium). He loves the interaction between audience and performers — the uninhabited candour when they are dissatisfied with the show, but — this is all in good faith — he says — take it with good humour. The audience might complain, but no one really dislikes the show or the performers — we’re all in this together — we just want you to know you’re being fooled, and, ultimately, it’s all foolishness. This kind of goodwill would not have been lost of Salinger, who — for all his faults — was remarkably innocent, or at least thought himself to be so -- a child really -- whose fate was to be disappointed, then destroyed, by evil. The film proceeds with many delightfully unlikely adventures. Like Shakespeare’s Pericles — or any of his romances — it is about transformations, about the uncertain relationship between the outer and the inner self, and how do we find the truth inside? Robert Donat is certainly meant to be handsome — I do not find him so really -- but his too carefully groomed mustache gives this away. Madeleine Carroll is handcuffed to him half-way through the film, and their spirited banter is grand — you know they are attracted to each other, but unlike Hepburn and Tracy we know it would be impossible for her to be in love with him — as he is supposed to be a murderer (but he is not). My favorite moment is when they are handcuffed together in bed, and just before going to sleep he gleefully recounts his crimes — all lies of course -- and she can’t help laughing (she turns her head away so he won’t see). Of course she is in love with him; somewhere deep down she knows he is good. Because we all know, don’t we, the fundamental difference between good and evil? This kind of trust in the redeeming power of love would have appealed to Salinger. So would the hero’s mistaken identity as killer. Salinger grew to be a kind of criminal — first for falling in love with women who were inappropriately young, but really for daring to detest his fans. This is what I take from Salinger. Nothing I write here -- or anywhere — is for you. It's for me. One or two people may read it now and then, but I owe you nothing. Only this, because it’s all I have. It’s appropriate that I should be watching The 39 Steps (O I just have to tell you one more moment, when Carroll and Donat touch secretly at the end, as they are watching the capture of the German spy. Their hands drift together, quite naturally of course, and no one can see it but us. And Donat still has the chain dangling from his wrist. What does that mean?) Yes I am in Montreal. And I can’t quite believe I’m writing these lines. My lover said that he was tired of me being unhappy; all I could say was “It isn’t likely to change until I have a real weekend in Montreal.” I’ve had it; and we’re still here. Now I know what it is I missed. Men. The everything of men. The smell of them, from stem to stern. The way they strut around — men strut their stuff you know, they know what they have down there, and many of them know how to wield it, and they are proud of it too. They are even proud of what’s behind. I must tell you that I haven’t had quite so many men sit on my face — one after another — for quite a long time. This is what I missed, most of all; it’s always been, for me, amazing, just giving into the sheer ‘mannness’ of men, by letting them take advantage of me in that particular manner. No one has sat on my face for approximately a year. The very few strangers I have met online — well I didn’t feel comfortable doing that with them; there has to be something really gorgeous about you if I am to submit to you in that way. The first one was hairy and muscular and sweet (adoring) and was pretty intoxicated by calling me ‘Daddy' and having ‘Daddy’ tell him to do things. The second was a young man — who, it took me a few seconds too realize— was pretty hypnotized by his own butt, and it only took me a few minutes to be hypnotized by it too. This is where I was meant to be, and what I was meant to do; I realize now what I suspected. And I’m sure it’s true for many queers. During COVID-19, I went back into the closet for a year. It’s been just like it was back then; the trauma of this is pretty severe, I think it’s probably why people are ODing on drugs like clockwork, committing suicide and shooting each other. Not because they are queer — though I’m sure some queers have joined that club — but because whatever particular nightmare is your worst fantasy, has -- for many of us -- come true during this time. If you have read this far (God help you!) you will probably understand what I’m saying. But many will not. “What in God’s name are you whining about?," they say. “You don’t have it that bad.” It’s like the husband who says “Why are you divorcing me, after all, I don’t beat you." A quote: “Ever allow the implacably objective to come to power, and that will spell the end of compassion and imagination on earth.” (Jakob Wassermann) We have been ruled by ‘reason,’ by left brain fanatics who have given us twenty thousand reasons for not loving each other, not hugging each other, and not sniffing each other’s private parts. Like dogs we will now take to the streets, and reclaim our destiny— because what is human about us is that we are animals. The problem is only when we dare to  imagine — even for one moment -- that we are completely 'objective.' That is a kind of fatal fooling.

Rebel Without a

Cause is about masculinity, it can best be understood in light of Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen. The imagery and symbolism are chivalric in nature — the questions ‘how can one be a man?’ and ‘what is a man?’ are asked often, and this is James Dean’s central issue. It’s amazing to see how times have changed; it mattered very much in 1955 whether or not your father was a good father, but it does not so much matter now. Being a good father nowadays means simply being a good human being; being kind and gentle and understanding, etc.. But In 1955 being a good father meant instructing your son about 'how to be a man' (terribly important — and very different from raising a daughter -- well perhaps she would need to learn from her mother: ‘how to be a woman’). In Rebel Without a Cause being a good father is about men and boys (although Natalie Wood’s father mistreats her -- he won’t kiss her because he considers her ‘loose’ --  back then what happened to her is of less importance). What is of primary importance in this film is the look on James Dean’s face when he questions his father Jim Backus: “If you had to do something, and it was dangerous, and it was a question of honour, what would you do?” This question means little to us today, and in fact would not be asked by a young man, as we live in a culture which has rejected the orthodoxy of masculinity, and indeed we consider masculinity to be fundamentally toxic. In The Two Noble Kinsmen as in Rebel Without a Cause -- men must be noble. This means that they respect their enemies, even love them — the men they may kill in battle the next day -- it’s all about honour, which means acting bravely together, whether on the same team or on opposing sides. When Dean is about to race a car to the edge of a cliff with another boy — to see who jumps out of the car first —  he and the boy talk, quite respectfully — man to man. The boy says to Dean “I like you.” And Dean asks ‘Why do we do this?” And the boy replies “You gotta do something, don’t ya?” It’s evident that strong young men must use their bodies, fling them about, compete, and sometimes kill each other. It’s a matter of honour. It’s all about men, and it all has deeply queer implications, to those of us sensitive to that sort of thing. Nicholas Ray himself was a homosexual; his marriage with Gloria Grahame was a strange sort of sham, he was a drug addict, he hated himself. He tried to insert a scene in Rebel where Dean and Sal Mineo (Plato) kiss. Apparently it was actually shot (where is that footage?) but ended up on the cutting room floor. Everything about Plato is tied up in his name — platonic love — ideal love that can only exist between men, because it is by definition the purest love, and has nothing to do with women’s bodies. Women’s bodies  -- according to early modern sexuality (and still, to some degree today) are mired in blood, and mud, and deeply attached to the ground. Women’s sexuality is not pure— however men’s can be, that is if they do not habour excessive desire for women, but only procreate. The two noble kinsmen (in the play of the same name) love each other purely, as warriors, until they both fall in love with the same woman. The woman, of course, comes between them, drags them down with her body -- which is of the earth. Similarly in Rebel Without a Cause the relationship between Natalie Wood and James Dean is only pure, is only acceptable, because it is ‘platonic’ they talk a lot about love and kiss once, chastely, with their faces only, their bodies are not involved. But their love is also inextricably tied to Plato, it is somewhat about him; they can love each other purely because they both love Plato, who of course must die, because he is an angel, and not of this world. What are we to do with all this, today? The ‘moral’ of Rebel Without a Cause is that Jim Backus (famous for voicing the myopic, nerdy, cartoon character Mister Magoo) is dominated by his wife, and men must never be dominated by women, they must always be strong, and brave, and fight with honour. As I said above, presently our values are reversed. We live in a feminized culture that essentially rejects masculinity — except in it’s least ‘masculine’ forms. Am I a ‘men’s libber' standing up for male rights? Of course not; I’m would not be very happy in the world of Rebel Without a Cause, as in that world the gay boy always dies; and Dean and Mineo can only love each other chastely. This old veneration of masculinity is an anachronism. On the other hand -- though we must protect women and embrace feminine values — it will not do any good to assume that all masculinity is toxic: this will merely drive masculinity underground (QAnon) where it becomes a cult of fascism and male worship. This is the danger of trans theory, which is anti-sexual, anti-body, and homophobic. We all have bodies. Men have bodies, male bodies, strong bodies, they are stronger than women, and they have too much testosterone; it effects us emotionally and spiritually. This does not mean we have a right to abuse, it means that if you do not allow us to be masculine — which means to be, proud, brave, strong, compete in extreme physical activity — then yes we will most certainly turn toxic and destructive. The world of masculinity is alien to me; I am an effeminate gay man and a drag queen; I’ve never understood masculinity, masculine men are generally alien to me, and scary, I’m not even attracted to them. I prefer femininity. But just as I think I should be able to express my femininity, I think that men should also be able to express their masculinity -- and women too! Lastly, the most plaintive cry in this film comes when Plato, disillusioned, screams at Dean “You’re not my father!” Everyone in Rebel Without a Cause is looking for a family. COVID-19 has ripped many queers from their non-biological families, for many these are the only family we have. Some of us are wandering about -- right now -- wide eyed, lonely, like Sal Mineo -- we can only hope the guns we carry are not loaded.

This will be

 a tribute to my friend ‘H’, one of the many lost to COVID-19. By that I don’t mean that she died, I mean that she disappeared from my life. There are so many like that. Anyway, maybe I’ll send her this blog, maybe I won’t. As soon as I started watching The Bat, I thought of her. An awful movie. 'H' is a lesbian and a huge fan of film noir (as many lesbians are -- but ‘H’ is a very special lesbian). Since we are on the subject of lesbians — wow, apparently Agnes Moorehead was one. Wikipedia says there was much speculation about her sexuality, and Paul Lynde said "Well, the whole world knows Agnes was a lesbian – I mean classy as hell, but one of the all-time Hollywood dykes.” That explains a lot. The only reason I chose The Bat was because of Agnes Moorehead — Vincent Price bores me, and yes, it’s about a killer called ‘the bat’ (yawn) who is terrorizing the town, there is a very complicated plot which I didn’t even bother to follow, and it was taken from a stage play, and they’re all in an old house, and he’s killing people. Kind of Agatha Christie without Agatha Christie (who you really do need, if you’re 'doing' Agatha Christie). Anyway, at the centre of it all is Agnes Moorehead, who plays Cornelia Van Gorder — a mystery writer who buys an old spooky mansion. (It sounds like a great plot idea but nothing comes of it.) However, Agnes gets to prance around and be Agnes Moorhead. First of all there’s something enormously strong about her — which means she played a lot of spinsters and teachers etc., but then when she gets to play the lead you see what an amazing actress she is. She’s in an awful lot of movies with bad actors, like -- let’s say Rock Hudson -- and all of a sudden when she walks in the screen comes alive. Immediately you know something is up with Cornelia Van Gorder — she’s got something on her mind, always, I can see Moorehead’s actress mind working on the character mind of Cornelia; I presume Moorehead’s approach would have been ‘Well she’s a writer, so she’s always plotting things. Very pragmatic, down to business, everything serves a purpose, she gets things done.” How can I explain it, Moorehead always comes up with something that drives the scene. In Bewitched, where she played Samantha’s mother Elvira -- it was disdain, she was simply disdainful of everything, and she was the funniest thing on the show. 'H' is writing a play about Cornel Woolrich, so now I will write about how obsessed both of us are with him. Cornel Woolrich is a little known American mystery writer; he is little known because he was gay, okay? Yes he was a very sad little alcoholic gay man who lived with his mother all his wife (I identify, as I drink too much, and my mother took up residence in my psyche long ago -- and refuses to move out). Probably the most interesting thing about Cornel Woolrich is that Hichcock based the leading character in Psycho on him. (I may have written about this in another blog, but at this point, I don’t give a you-know-what). You see Rear Window was based on Woolrich’s short story, and Hitchcock saw him on the set, and well -- how could he resist? Woolrich was a very gaunt, shy, sallow, half-dead looking sort of person. He in his mother lived in a hotel — in the days before apartment buildings, when you could to that sort of thing. (My mother lived in a hotel — Sutton Place in Toronto— people who live in hotels are very special people, or at the very least they think they are, which is much the same.) The details of Woolrich’s life have kind of left my brain, but I know after his mother died, he was devastated and continued to live in the same hotel room for awhile, and then moved to another hotel, where he drank himself to death. There were many movies based on his books, including Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. He wrote as well -- or better -- than Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, but he wasn’t heterosexual or dashing like them, and often wrote from the point of view of a female character -- so everyone ignored him. What captured Hitchcock’s imagination about Woolrich was a man who was in love with his mother. I was once in love with my mother so I get it. (I’ve written about that over and over. I just wrote another play about her.) Suffice it to say that I believed that she could read my mind. I told my therapist when I was 19 that I wanted to tell my mother to f-off — just in my head. And the therapist said -- 'well why don’t you?' and I said, 'because I’m afraid she’ll know I cursed her in my head' and she said -- 'but your mother can’t read your mind.' This was a huge revelation to me; I started to tell her to f-off in my head all the time after that, and then actually did it to her face which she didn’t like at all. But I’ve abandoned 'H' (which if you knew the rest of the letters in her name, would be a very poetic statement). I love 'H' very much. You know those COVID-19 friends you lose for awhile— you didn’t used to see them very much, maybe once every two months. But after COVID-19 she moved out of town and of course no one was supposed to see anyone. 'H' is tall, lanky and looks just like a boy, even though she is definitely a girl. I think the reason I am a little in love with her is because she is -- like me --completely unsuited to live in the world. There is a sense that she wouldn’t know how to turn on a tap if her lover didn’t tell her how to do it. I have the same relationship with my partner. He imagines that I am totally inept and dysfunctional without him and — it’s not true! It’s simply not. He says I would still be living in a hovel over the Kentucky Fried Chicken Take-Out at Church and Wellesley, if it wasn’t for him. This is only partially true, and anyway I really didn’t mind living there. But 'H,' like me, really understands nothing but the fictions she makes up in her head; she kind of lives in there, and when she has to suddenly do something in the world (you see this sometimes when she’s thinking, and then turns and looks at you) you realise she’s saying to herself ‘Oh yes, life! I have to deal with that, don’t I?' I identify. For people like us it's a difficult life, but unique in a way that you perhaps will never know.

Why it’s called

Purple Noon I’ll never know, the original title in French is Full Sun, which makes a little more sense; the main thing about this movie is it stars Alain Delon, who I’m vaguely familiar with, but I can’t remember what I’ve seen him in. Oh yes — and Patricia Highsmith’s comment on the film — it was the first adaptation of her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, and she called the suggestion at the end that Ripley would be brought to justice a betrayal. It is. Highsmith wrote several novels about Ripley. I’ve read most all of them; she had the uncanny knack of getting inside a twisted brain. Her killers are most often cultured fellows, and certainly sympathetic — they just have one ‘quirk’. Many of her novels though — not the Ripley ones — present really interesting moral dilemmas. In one of her novels a young woman falls for a Peeping Tom. The Peeping Tom is kind of a nice shy guy; she is more predatory than he, so she invites him in. In another one of her novels a man sets out to kill his wife, but is not able to carry it out, then she dies. Is he somehow then guilty of murder? Purple Noon has been called sun-drenched, and indeed it is. I am trying desperately to remain calm, but I’m supposed to be going to Montreal on Saturday, and yet again the whole trip is fraught with anxiety. Will it live up to expectations? Will life begin there again? Will I be sun-drenched, or just desperately lonely for life the way it once was? My therapist says I have to come to terms with loss; I’m certainly not very good at it. My best friend tonight reminded me that it is going to happen to all of us — death — because her ex-husband just died of brain cancer. Then she told me that she would be there to take care of me when I passed away. I’m not even sure I believe her — not because she’s a treacherous person but because she has also told me before that she is categorically not good at that. But with her ex-husband, she was. She just sat downstairs and drank -- with the knowledge that he was dying upstairs -- helped him as much as she could, and did the most beautiful thing you can imagine. For she said to him “Are you afraid of death?” And he said “No. I’m just afraid of leaving this house.” So he never did — that is, he died there. She did take care of him, so perhaps she will take care of me. At any rate it’s the thought that counts. Dear me what brought that on; well I’m somewhat ill — nothing serious it appears — but I never like to get ill before travel, and then there is my own mortality which keeps staring me in the face. I mean when am I actually going to start living again? Enough of that. So, Alain Delon plays a luscious Mr. Ripley, less guilt-ridden and certainly less gay then Matt Damon. And far far prettier. He’s quite unbearable to look at him; he is perhaps the most beautiful man I have ever seen, and that says a lot (or does it because I call a lot of men beautiful.) There is the blue of his eyes, which matches the sea, and those cheekbones, and the firm line of his jaw, the casual straight hair, his lean body and yes the bulge in his bathing suit (I think they didn’t even notice of such things in the 60s. Elvis’ bulge is quite out of this world in some of his movies — did no one notice?). The thing about Alain Delon is that he reminds me of Tim Guest. I don’t know if I have ever told you the story of Tim Guest. He was another one who was too beautiful for words. He was too beautiful for me; I never had sex with him, I wouldn’t have known where to start. I had heard of him, he was famously the lover of Felix Partz — part of General Idea. I remember looking at photos of Felix Partz and wondering how Tim could have been in love with him; but back then I had no idea how strange love can be. I moved into 67 Homewood and Tim lived there. We hung out quite a bit; I had never met someone quite as brilliant and quite as beautiful. It was odd because everything he said was interesting and complex and somewhat sarcastic in a gay sort of way, and at the same time he was so drop dead gorgeous that you wanted to just  drop to your knees and worship him. The only thing I remember — besides the long list of beautiful young men he dragged to his room — were his comments on them: “I like to watch the very very clean boys get dirty” and then at one point: “Don’t you love it when your screwing them and they look surprised?” (I had experienced the first thing but not the second.) He was an art curator, and later he curated performance art for Rhubarb! (at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre — the theatre that I used to run). This is so Tim Guest: he said  -- “I have this fabulous piece — it’s a homeless guy (I think he would have called him a ‘rubby’ back then) and he takes a bath in front of the audience! That’s the whole piece!” This was Tim’s sense of humour to a tee. The piece was performed at Tarragon Theatre, and I remember the bigwigs there -- Urjo Kareda and Mallory Gilbert -- were not amused. I liked it. I felt morally compromised watching it; but I thought, that’s the point, isn’t it? After all, the guy was getting paid, and he got a bath, and he seemed to have a good time. (Nowadays you would probably be run out of town for it for programming this.) Then Tim moved to New York, and found another lover and I was so happy for him — that seemed like the perfect ending. And then suddenly I heard that he had mouth cancer, and had died -- just like that. This devastated me. I didn’t want to think of him as anything but the most beautiful boy in the world. Sorry this blog has been so much about cancer. It’s strange the way COVID-19 makes me, at least, think less about COVID-19 than just dying in general. Because it is a kind of death. All the crime going on everywhere, and the ODing, and just the look on people’s faces - or just the faces you can’t see  because of those damned masks, or the fear of each other. That’s it. We are all of afraid of each other in a way we weren’t before, ever, and that’s a kind of death in life. Sorry. Best not to think about all this, I guess.

Ah! Mamma Roma

is devastating. Most artists only dream of being protested by fascists — Pasolini was. (What would the equivalent be today: getting bashed by QAnon on social media?). Pasolini was first and foremost an antifascist. His Christ, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, is a revolutionary, Marxist Christ, trashing the merchants in the public square. And in Mamma Roma it is the city of Rome that stands for fascism — the oppression of the poor: those ugly, naked, monolithic apartment buildings looming in the distance — below them the fragments of ruins — grotesque, phallic, crumbling -- like Pasolini imagines fascism to be. But Pasolini found his ‘proletariat’ in the faces of the boys — they belonged to him — the boys of Rome, the young suburban ne’er do wells -- their grubby mischievous faces — playing soccer, loitering, stealing stuff, plotting to lay the neighborhood tramp. Pasolini loved them in more than in just a political way; although his adoration might be deemed economic, as it was those boys that he paid to have sex with him every night. And one of those boys (Giuseppe Pelosi) killed him (although his friend Laura Betti insisted that it was the fascists who really did it.). Let’s face it — for a lot of people Pasolini represents the apotheosis of evil. In private, with his boys, he was the ‘king of shit’ —he wanted them to do their ‘business’ on him; they were forever his tasty, nasty brethren. Pasolini refers to his sexual predilection at the end of Mamma Roma, when Ettore, the son of prostitute Anna Magnani, is strapped to his bed in jail — the bed where he dies — and his fellow inmates are joking about the 7th ring of Hell which apparently (sorry, I’ve never read Dante) is shit. How did Pasolini’s pickups feel about being asked to take a dump on him? I’m sure it mattered not at all to them really, he was just an old guy who gave them money to do gross things. But the fact that Pasolini was an admitted human toilet seems to have hurt his literary reputation somewhat. I remember when I first found out about all this from Peter Day. Peter was a gay man — a Brit, very witty, very smart, kind of dashing too. He had a lovely young boyfriend (who I still know). Peter committed suicide a couple of years after I met him; he was on the board of my theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I remember walking up to him in Glad Day Bookshop about 40 years ago (the gay bookstore in Toronto) and telling him that I had written a play about Pasolini. Peter said, blithely, savouring every word: ‘You know what Pasolini was into, don’t you?” “No,” I said innocently — for I was somewhat innocent back then — “Shit. He liked boys to shit on him.” I didn’t know quite what to say. I was disappointed, partially because I hadn’t included this in my play, and also frankly because it took Pasolini down one notch from the very top of the pedestal where I had so carefully placed him. (But I was also a bit frightened by how much Peter enjoyed making me feel like an ignorant prude.) Certainly Pasolini is my ideal. A perfect artist, and shockingly amoral in real life. On the streets — he was a scatalogical outlaw, on the screen, a puritan aesthete. All that mattered to him was beauty. In Mamma Roma Pasolini's ex-lover Franco Citti plays Magnani’s ruthless ex-pimp, and an oddly gorgeous boy with the face of a 10 year old — a tiny pug nose and pouting mouth — Ettore Garofolo (a second glance at Ettore Garofolo makes you feel like a pederast ) is Magnani’s gawky adolescent son. (Garofolo appeared only in two movies after this.)  Pasolini loved each of these young men ostentatiously, the camera worships their faces, their very ordinary sex appeal, their imperfect masculine charm. Then there is Magnani, simply a force of nature. In her first scenes she is dragging pigs to a wedding — presumably to make fun of the hick girl her pimp Citti is marrying. In every scene she laughs or cries or screams or dances — or all four — she’s eternally shaking her voluptuous body — not just with abandon, it’s a commitment to animality that is all too frighteningly human. She’s terrifyingly real; and gives quite a new definition to words like femininity and ‘woman.’ The bond she has with her son is primal, her friend asks if she would die for him. She says ‘like Christ on the cross.’ And though she quits hooking — in order to ‘bring Ettore up right’ — there is absolutely no hope for her, or him. The forces of capitalism are against them. Rome will eat her son — the way Magnani would like to, obviously. She says ‘look at him, isn’t he a prince?” (If only it was possible for any of us to love anybody, without killing them just a little.) She watches him working in the restaurant, and Pasolini captures the aching essence of a young buck at work, an anter-less stag strutting about boldly on his skinny legs, grinning sheepishly at his mother and hauling food from table to table, as in love with her as she is with him. Mamma Roma’s dream of respectability is in vain; the pimp Citti reveals to Ettore that his mother is a whore. Ettore then steals a dying man’s radio in a hospital (in anger), the next thing you know he’s in the seventh circle of Hell, strapped to his bed in prison. “I’ll be good” he pleads, but it’s too late, the system has already chewed him up and spit him out. I wrote a play once called Why We Tortured Him for Theatre Aquarius. Susan Clements --a fascist, law and order freak -- trashed it in The Hamilton Spectator, without either reading it or seeing it. The play was cancelled by Theatre Aquarius  It was a play about the relationship between poverty and crime. It’s not something you’re supposed to talk about. Pasolini does. But you will not find this type of truth in Niagara Falls, stitched on a pillow. You might find it one night in Rome, when you’re being screwed against an ancient ruin. If you're like me, you will gaze up at the stars, and suddenly realize that ruin is you.

Bonjour Tristesse is

a beautiful movie. After viewing it I went directly to Wikipedia. I was confirmed; the American critics hated it — the film resembles none of the Hollywood slop that was being dished up in 1958. Everyone associated with the film must have felt privileged to work on it, because it’s about something important. It deals with human evil in a matter of fact way; Jean Seberg and David Niven drive Deborah Kerr to suicide — both Seberg and Niven are charming, beautiful and simultaneously odious people — and they get away with it. The only American film comparable to this is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours, in which the anti-hero gets off scott free after committing murder. Jean Seberg’s character and Martin Landau’s character (in Allen’s film), both experience remorse, but also relief that they can never be implicated. This is in contrast to the scores of Hollywood films in which good is rewarded and evil punished. That is the way Oscar Wilde defined fiction. It is something that hardly ever happens in real life — i.e. truly evil people like Donald Trump more often end up being worshiped like Gods. Stanley Kauffman (an idiotic American critic famous for an article in which he castigated Williams, Albee, and Inge for undermining American culture with their ‘homosexual influence’) found  Bonjour Tristesse ‘tedious.’ Seberg was also ripped to shreds by critics, the British Film Institute accused her of merely 'speaking' her lines rather than acting them (it's called naturalism). There nothing to justify the  general hatred of Jean Seberg, or her harassment by the FBI (they may ultimately have been responsible for her death). The FBI harassed her because she supported civil rights and and made contributions to the Black Panthers. The FBI's method of destroying Seberg’s life is worth noting; they spread rumours that her child (fathered by her husband Romain Gary) was actually her child by a member of the Black Panthers. She was characterised as not only a lefty but a whore; a double-misogynist whammy. The child in question subsequently died, and Seberg insisted on an open coffin so that the press could see that her child was not black. All this foreshadows social media;  we destroy people today the way Vladmir Putin and J. Edgar Hoover did&do, that is -- not by shooting them with guns -- but by spreading lies about them on social media. Which brings us back to evil. I will make the argument here that all great artists are bad people — or at least deeply flawed. It is necessary for artists to know evil intimately in some way. This runs counter to the latest trend — that artists must be nice, good, moral people — i.e. not Woody Allen or Roman Polanski. Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger (he directed Bonjour Tristesse) were also infamous — not for molesting children — but abusing actors; Hitchcock tortured Tippi Hedren by demanding she be locked in a room with live birds (for The Birds) and Preminger fired Tom Tryon on the set of The Cardinal -- in front of the whole cast -- and later on told him denied it ('Didn't you know I was just joking?’) I have said before that I think we must not see the evil artists do in their lives as a reflection on their work as -- if we did --  there would be no  art anymore. But I am going a step further by stating that a familiarity with evil is necessary for any great artist. Yes, that means artists are necessarily evil. I don't know if artists have to be 'evil incarnate,' but they have to have done bad things, and what is particularly important is that they must at the very least be fully conscious of — or at best plagued by guilt over -- their misdeeds. The does not necessarily redeem them as human beings. If you do something awful it only matters in a court of law if you are sorry, in real life one might find your apology irritating, frustrating or even a nightmare to listen to. I'll use myself as an example. I’m very ashamed of being a homosexual. That’s why I go on and on about how wonderful homosexuality is; it’s why the Black Panthers said that black people were better than white people, it’s why Lytton Strachey went on about ‘higher sodomy’ (he preached that homosexuality was superior to heterosexuality). I will always think it’s wrong to love a man, or to suck his you-know-what. I was born in 1952, for Chrissakes. Yes I go on and on about gay liberation and how wonderful gay sex is, but that is just overcompensation for my self-hatred. I have not done too many bad things (at least as far as I know), but what I have is a heightened sense of guilt, so that I am constantly accusing myself of wrongdoing, and I feel bad about everything in kind of a Lutheran manner (Lutheranism is the most poisonous religion of all --  original sin that can never be wiped away.) The reason a familiarity with evil is important for artists is that evil is the only thing that it’s important to write about — but the only reason an artist will write about it, is if he or she is appalled by their own evil deeds, which leads them to detest all human hypocrisy, and ergo, the artist tries to destroy hypocrisy by exposing it. (Hypocrisy is rampant nowadays; everyone thinks they are a good person, it’s what’s destroying the world.) Jean Seberg is a pretty cheery young French girl — but she ain’t no Gidget — she is perfectly willing to destroy someone’s life if she can’t get what she wants. This means she must welcome sadness into her life (i.e. 'bonjour tristesse!'). Perhaps what Francoise Sagan is saying in her novel — and Preminger in this film — is that being an adult means welcoming the sadness which comes with the loss of innocence. I still like to imagine though, that I am innocent, when I get naked with another man -- or kiss him -- but usually I am drunk -- so all is soon forgetten. Sad perhaps, that this is far too true for so many gay men; we are enslaved by our addiction to forgetting.

I don’t know what

 to say about House on Haunted Hill (1959)— even the title is a mess; it feels like it should be 'The House on Haunted Hill,' and anyway, what in heaven’s name is a 'haunted hill'? And it’s the house that’s haunted anyway, not the hill. Add to that the fact that the nutty director William Castle decided to feature as 'the house' — not an appropriately haunted looking old gothic mansion as in Hitchcock’s Psycho —instead a quite gorgeous looking building — The Ennis House — designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. (As was Wright’s wont, the house looks more like a postmodern version of a Mayan Temple than anything else, but that’s the way it goes.) The most alluring thing about this movie is the vat of acid in the basement. That is truly the only thing that struck even a small spark of the slightest fear, in me. The idea of being dropped in a vat of acid is pretty horrifying. But other than that the movie is just arch, and silly, and about as scary as your grandmother’s behind (I take that back, in certain cases that might be pretty scary). This all explains why camp film director John Waters loves William Castle. Keep in mind also, that Castle was fond of promotional gimmicks, the gimmick for this one was called ‘Emergo.' When a skeleton flies out of the vat of acid at the end of the movie, a skeleton was rigged up — in some theatres — to fly over the heads of the audience. I think at this point we need to differentiate between ‘startling’ and ‘terrifying.’ Terrifying things have a psychological nature. In other words, you are terrified because your imagination is caught up in a fantasy; you are imagining yourself in a situation that is particularly terrifying for you (we are all terrified by different things). For instance, I am not afraid of skeletons, nor am I afraid of the ineptly painted fake heads that keep appearing in this film — at one point in a woman’s suitcase. The head looks nothing like a human head, it looks like a rubber face trying desperately to be a decapitated head. This is the essence of camp as Susan Sontag describes it; trying magnificently and failing. This makes William Castle very special — I understand what a pathetic filmmaker he was, and how stupid his gimmicks were. Waters loves what this says about the human condition, the human ego, ambition, imagination etc. It also says something about art; that all art is a fake and a manipulation and that we shouldn’t trust it; all very important to hear. Unfortunately though, what Castle does ultimately, is what most of the popular horror filmmakers do today. Like them, he doesn’t have the talent or imagination to invent a terrifying fantasy, or to execute a film about it (like Hitchcock does in Psycho) so what they de instead is surprise us. Again, in Castle it’s charming. But unfortunately this is now the modus-operandi of horror films everywhere. Nowadays horror films are populated mainly with moments of silence followed by sudden loud noise— but this is startling, not frightening. Then there is the unexpected appearance of a blood-soaked 'something', a 'something' you know is fake, whatever it is, but when it first appears, yes, it startles you. Ergo, the charming camp ineptitude of William Castle has been turned into much more than a cottage industry — people are making millions off bad horror films that are greedily consumed by the young — and this is a problem. I am concerned about the young (and I speak of them with fondness, you may imagine that I am old —which I am — but not that I am jealous of the young— I am merely concerned about them). The young have been trained by the commercial film industry to go to horror films with the expectation of camp — except it isn’t camp they are seeing. They go to a horror film expecting to laugh at the ridiculousness of the special effects, period. Oh yes, they also wish to be startled, but not deeply frightened, and certainly not deeply terrified. No, that would be too much for them. But being deeply terrified by art is what art is all about. If we have forgotten that, we have forgotten what art is. Take for instance — Midsommar (2019) a fine Swedish film directed by Ansi Astar. The film was somewhat of a success, but I know for a fact that some young people were afraid to see it. I was ranting about how wonderful the film was one day, and some young woman said to me: “We went but we left because my friend got too scared.” Okay, fine. People don’t have to watch scary movies if they don’t want to — after all I avoid movies about torture (for that reason I have never been able to watch The Usual Suspects). What I find worrisome is that when we watch a movie or a play these days we want to maintain ‘control,' when art is all about losing control (remember Dionysus?). It’s about intoxication, hypnosis, unreason, and the loosening of boundaries that keep us ‘normal.’ We experience art because we know we all will get sick and die, and we need to experience these things at a safe distance — it’s part of good mental health — and also part of just being a person who actually lives in the world. If we don’t experience these things then we end up like the young of today (again, I am concerned, not chastising) many of whom would rather not have any sort of truly unpleasant experience, or ever lose control. Midsommar is particularly scary for young people because it features pretty teenagers who visit a lovely commune in the Swedish countryside one summer. It seems like it is going to be an adolescent fantasy of romance in the woods and fields. It soon proves to be quite something else. Gradually the visit goes sour -- there are drugs, public sex rituals and inevitably -- human sacrifice. I found the whole thing exhilarating — and yes, truly scary. We are losing our capacity to dream; this may also be why so many of us are happy being locked up in our homes. For to really dream, is to escape everything that is normal, expected, and deemed correct. I do hope someday we will begin to dream again.

The Light in

 the Piazza (1962) is an odd film; the premise is a bit difficult to handle. Yvette Mimieux has the mental age of a 10 year old girl because she was kicked by a horse as a child. She is, however, ravishingly beautiful. George Hamilton (actually quite good here, as he is speaks very little and most of it is in Italian) falls in love with her. Olivia de Havilland  (who died last year at the ripe old age of 104)  dreams of her daughter marrying, and encourages her to do so. At her wedding at the end, in a moment which is conspicuously but inappropriately comic — like much of this film — Yvette Mimieux bends down to pick up -- what appears to be a bit of popcorn -- off the ground, and eats it. De Havilland is worried — will her daughter be exposed as mentally deficient? But George Hamilton proves to either as mentally deficient as she is —  or just terribly in love with her — as he picks up a piece of popcorn off the ground and eats it too. De Havilland intones, quietly (to herself) — ‘I think I did the right thing.’ But did she? Earlier, when her husband objects to their mentally deficient daughter marrying, de Havilland says “She may not know long division, but she is woman.” This is perhaps the most disturbing sentence in the film. Why might not knowing long division be an integral part of ‘being a woman’? The suggestion seems to be that all you need is breasts, not a brain — or simply you only need to be as beautiful as Yvette Lemieux — which no one ever will be. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I couldn’t help getting wrapped up in Olivia de Havilland’s plans for her daughter. But when Rossano Brazzi says of George Hamilton — ‘he’s no scholar’ the implication seems to be since his son is dense as a post it’s alright for him to marry a mentally deficient girl. In other words, it’s fine for  stupid people to find other stupid people and marry them. You see what I mean?  One doesn’t quite know what to say; on the one hand the film seems to want to raise profound moral questions (does it matter if you don’t tell someone that the person they are marrying is — what we used to call — ‘retarded’?). On the other hand the movie is a kind of ode to love. And the message seems to be that love transcends intelligence. Well let me clear this up. Wouldn’t all this make sense if both members of the betrothed pair had an ‘intellectual disability’? Though I must say I am not fond of that particular politically correct euphemism. ‘Retarded’ is at least clear, you know what you’re talking about, and frankly ‘intellectual disability’ seems more to define someone who believes in QAnon, is against abortion, or believes that an aliens has have probed their anus — i.e., there are those who are quite intelligent and even entertaining, but when it comes to certain topics they have a couple of screws loose. Sometimes it has to do with trauma — not getting kicked in the head by a horse, but— having an unfortunate experience that makes it impossible for you to think about something rationally. I have a friend, for instance, whose brother — a sex trader worker — was brutally murdered. To this day I know he cannot stand to hear me talk about ‘sex trade work’ in a positive way. Although I do understand, this does seem to me to be an affliction. Okay let’s use the damn term (because we have to): I have no problems with people who are ‘intellectually disabled’ —I think they should be able to live their own lives, but it might not make sense for an intellectually disabled couple to have children. But even that gets into a sticky wicket, because The Nazis routinely sterilized ‘idiots.’ Montgomery Clift plays one such person in Judgement at Nuremberg — the filming of which raises the same moral questions as does Light in the Piazza. Apparently Clift was so addled and drugged during filming that he couldn’t remember his lines; Stanley Kramer suggested he ad lib his speeches. Kramer claimed that Clift still achieved the essence of the character. He certainly did, Clift’s unhinged, wide-eyed, stuttering performance is utterly chilling — the problem being only that it is so effective because Clift was at that point in his life certifiably nuts  — and not in any way acting. I will now take the opportunity to implicate myself in a fundamental way. I am somewhat attracted to people who are deficient in some way. Of course we are all deficient in some way, and I am perhaps the most deficient of all (something which my present partner constantly reminds me of!). But one of my ex-boyfriends also had a disability, and I know this was perhaps part of my attraction to him. This is not quite as evil as it sounds. It can be evil, though. I know a straight man who is perpetually attracted to only blind or disabled women. It may just be a matter of needing to be deeply needed. Robert Wilson (the esteemed avant-garde American theatre director) fell in love with, lived with, and adopted a young man (Christopher Knowles) who was severely autistic. The boy also inspired -- and starred -- in Wilson’s play/opera/extravaganza Einstein on the Beach. Now I never starred my ex-disabled-boyfriend in a play (though he claimed he was a very good actor) but I starred him, for a time, in my life. I think I did that partly because I was attracted to the fact that he was more controlling than even my mother (who, when she died, was so controlling that her bowels were as hard as lead). However, the reason he was so controlling was because he had been a mistreated, disabled child — so when he grew up, he decided he would have no more of that. I must also admit that I am a little bit in love with another young man with a disability — right now, today. (But I won’t go on, because he might read this blog.) I’ve tried to make The Light in the Piazza relevant, and in the meantime I have turned myself into a monster in your eyes. Good. Anyone who writes anything — or calls themselves a writer -- is a monster. Everything a 'writer' tells you is suspect. Enjoy, but — watch out.

At the end

of Ship of Fools Michael Dunn, the narrator/dwarf speaks to — and for — the audience when he says, ironically — “What has all this to do with us? Nothing.” This seems particularly prophetic right now, as Ship of Fools is one of director Stanley Kramer's noble cinematic rants against fascism — i.e. the same fascism that is ever so popular these days. It’s obvious, Adorno was right (‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’) and well-meaning artists who rail against evil are ultimately ineffective; mankind will continue to bumble along quite suicidally no matter what. What matters, though, in this endless film (it's 2 and 1/2 hours) are the performances. I was particularly taken with Oskar Werner (who was nominated for an Oscar) and Vivien Leigh (who wasn’t). Simone Signoret is lovely but she’s required to be sad all the time — although a gracious God did bless her with those ever-weeping eyes, which — when enhanced with black mascara -- make her into a veritable crying machine. Signoret plays a drug addict, but Leigh undoubtedly was one — certainly she was ‘mad’ —  described as such by her peers. Her performance here is heartbreaking -- a repeat of her character in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. After awhile it seems they only wished her to play the desiccated siren who has reached the bathetic, sordid nadir of her existence, and must avail herself of the services of paid male escorts. In her final gorgeous scene Leigh slaps on too much makeup and inquires of the mirror: ‘is this what men want?” Then she beats Lee Marvin furiously with her spike heels (apparently she accidentally did actually hurt him — quite seriously). I want to be Vivien Leigh. No! I am her.  I went to a party in Danville Sunday (I bet you don’t know where Dunville is!) in drag, and was reminded, fleetingly, again, of what it is like to perform. My appearance was ‘just for friends,’ but one darling man did ask me about a play I wrote (Toller), and I held forth at quite nauseating length re: my wonderfulness. As I now am possessed of the requisite leathery turkey-neck, I feel rather authentic as ‘old’, and it’s so much fun to play a sexually inappropriate, fading lady — forlorn and dissipated — and be pitied certainly -- but never ever scorned. It was harder I’m sure for Vivien Leigh to actually be that, but to some extent she was playing at it too; a role she had been given in life, as the discarded, unsuitable wife to the closeted Laurence Olivier. (When they divorced, Olivier married Joan Plowright —  who was not a drag queen like Leigh — and a much less likely ‘beard.' Rumour has it Olivier was having it off with Danny Kaye at the time. I imagine their sex was 'inventive'). Ship of Fools is an ‘invention’ by novelist Katherine Ann Porter in the tradition of an episodic tale — the screenplay bounces from couple to couple, each slightly more dysfunctional than the last. The film invokes a wise, Shakespearean melancholy in the audience —‘we’re ALL pretty much fools, aren’t we?” Indeed we are. But when this movie premiered (1965)  there was such a thing as reality, and movies were the opposite — a fantasy; Ship of Fools was heightened, attenuated, drama ‘four people being rude in a room’ as my friend David calls it. I’ve noticed that I mention my friends more and more in this blog. By name, even. I can’t resist, sorry, but I’m so lonely. The only place I live now is with my friends, really (and in this blog). They’re all in the theatre or I should say were of the theatre; all illusionists of some kind, they make things up - their lives, their loves, they don’t live much in the real world, but they are (as Vivien might say!) terrifyingly entertaining. I need them all so desperately right now and hate them for it -- because, with them, I do a lot of reminiscing about theatre; if we get drunk enough we can pretend we are back in the past, when there actually was theatre. When -- after a few drinks -- a theatre friend says goodbye, the curtain goes down, and I don’t quite know if I can stand it. The nice thing is that fantasy has taken the place of reality in all of our lives. Or perhaps I should say fantasy is now framed as reality, and reality bears no relationship to truth. Plays and novels must bear witness to righteousness, but the news is insane. We are all dying from an illness called COVID-19 (except that we are not), trans people claim they are being driven to self-immolation by our bottomless dearth of sensitivity to their agonised, tortured, victimhood — and when it comes to intersectionality we might as well give up, as we never will understand how deeply unhappy everyone is. Then there are those who have been driven by the insanity of the COVID-19 unreality to invent another unreality -- one which is far more entertaining — the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and George Soros (who is he again? It’s been explained to me so many times but I keep forgetting) are out to take over the world. It all has to do with the high price of steel and lumber and — gee, I get confused. But I do know that ‘they’ are programming something into our DNA with these vaccines. If I were you I wouldn’t trust anyone;  the ‘truth’ is officially as slippery as an eel and twice as messy. There was a time when one could feel safe in the day-to-day reality; now we walk down the street at our peril — it’s not the germs, it’s the homeless people living in tents and OD-ing, willy-nilly --with a kind of benign audacity, everywhere, every day, as if it mattered to anyone but themselves whether they lived or died. You can’t get properly sexually serviced anymore, nor can you get a phone plan that isn’t so complicated that it rivals Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the Theory of Relativity.  Oh, for the days when life was mundane but made sense, and then we watched Ship of Fools and escaped, wistfully, guiltily to an artificial world of tinsel and sawdust. Now we are in that movie; we are the deluded mad lovers -- and if Lee Marvin broke into our cabin by mistake one night we would probably butcher him to death with that high-healed shoe.

So Evil, So

Young (1961) is the title. And it’s true, the young are evil. You can measure the corruption of a society by its romanticization of the young. In the Victorian era children were deified as pure, and fed graham crackers and cornflakes to keep them from masturbating. The play The Children’s Hour is based on an actual court case in Scotland (1811) — two little girls whispered that their teachers were lesbians; the teachers were assumed to be guilty because no child could possibly make up such an atrocity. Nowadays children are exalted again — we pretend they are not all watching porn on line (isn’t that what the internet was created for?) — especially now, during the sacred lock down, where children must find salvation in the ‘safety’ of their computers — we would rather they learn about sex from the warped world of porn (I’m an addict; but I don’t recommend it for children) than reach out and touch someone real. Anyone who has been bullied knows how evil children can be; and most bullies are enabled by their parents. Parents wish to get off scot free: ‘It’s not my fault — she was a Bad Seed.’ But they are guilty too. Those are the facts. (I said don’t trust me when I say ‘It’s a fact’; so don’t -- but, are you persuaded?). So Evil, So Young is a much better movie than its title; I thought it would be too lousy even for camp -- but outside of the pink reform school outfits, there’s nothing camp about it at all. It’s especially relevant to our lives now, we are all in prison, and likely will continue to be so for some time; it’s as if someone has nailed our hands to the floor and is slowly pulling out the nails one by one. Miss Smith (Joan Haythorne) is the matron, and Jill Ireland’s nemesis. Jan Haythorne is Theresa Tam, Dr. Fauci et al. For a minor misdeed a sensitive girl is sent into solitary by the formidable Miss Smith (who Jill Ireland calls a 'fat old witch' in a particularly enthralling moment). The girl commits suicide. Miss Smith says “You had your fun, we all have to pay for that.” Another girl, innocent of any crime -- but in reform school -- weeps: “Sometimes I think it’s all a dream and I’ll wake up! How can this happen when I didn’t do anything wrong?” This is the question we ask ourselves every day during lock down. There is a prison riot, in So Evil, So Young —like what’s happening in the The States right now. Why else do you think everyone is suddenly shooting everyone else? Because we have all been punished for more than a year -- told we are bad for simply wanting to live -- and sent to our computers for salvation -- where we find only capitalistic rot: the poison of wokeness and populism. And yet they continue to disinfect, and erect plastic berries in restaurants which won’t stop the dreaded ‘germs’ from flying up and over. Well here’s a taste of what real people have been doing while you meditate and watch Netflix — they’ve been screwing and doing drugs for months; they're too poor for this fake pandemic to make any difference in their desperate lives. I hang out on the poorest part of St. Catherine Street East, Montreal, swarming with crack and meth addicts, people lie on the pavement for hours, days, no one is sure if they are dead or just sleeping. At night they prowl about; so do I. Last night I displayed my wares in such a gross and blatant manner that even the beggars were shocked. I was leaning against a shuttered patio sipping a malt beer (“Teasy’); a  tiny angry human started screaming at me: “That pizza place is closed! I know what you’re up to hanging out there? If you leave and there’s any of that beer I’m taking it!” I left an empty can which he threw angrily on the ground. There are some ‘nice’ people on St. Catherine East, mostly fags in couples walking very quickly, with their dogs, chatting each other up wildly, trying not to see me-- but it’s hard to miss someone as large and tattooed as I, especially when I have managed a semi-erection that makes a huge bulge (for some reason) in my shorts — which I touch occasionally — when someone hot walks by. I almost got laid twice. A very cute guy came up to me: “Do you smoke?” “Only cigarettes…” I know that’s not good enough; he’s off again. Later on my way home, there is a look from someone, and then another, and we end up in an alley, But he keeps saying ‘People can see us…” We kinda do it — but he’s too skittish and then he’s gone. This is the chase;  an acknowledgement that I am a sexual being and that I exist -- which, strangely enough, I still need to know. Think of these blogs as an anthropological expedition of sorts — you learn here about a sordid life you will never participate in, thank God. That’s fine. They will rise up you know -- the poor, and they will kill us, and burn us, and eat us, if at all possible. That’s what the new movie New Order is all about. I saw that yesterday too. It's a sister film to So Evil, So Young — but while the earlier film is a preachy lesson on the need for prison reform, New Order is truly great, by Michel Franco — a Mexican filmmaker of prodigious talent. Roger Ebert doesn’t like the film because he’s not sure which side Michel Franco is on. Franco is clearly on the side of artist -- Roger Ebert --you dumb twit! Franco is presenting his own version of reality. That means New Order is a fantasy, a game, a lie, and a provocation. Franco does not tell you how to think, or what to think -- only priests and politicians do that. New Order is the story of a Mexican uprising in which the poor, Indigenous, working servants finally take on their oppressors — the arrogant, Spanish, oblivious, idle rich. It starts at a pampered daughter’s wedding — most everyone there is eventually killed and/or tortured. As in life, there are ultimately no good guys or bad guys — just people committing atrocities in the name of ‘the truth.' You must see it. Don’t forget, also, that the poor — that is the ones who have not died of their addictions or from lack of proper medical coverage during the fake pandemic — will rise up in anger everywhere in response to the ridiculous, needless finger wagging we call COVID-19. The poor know something we don’t — that life is nasty, brutish, short, and really only about pleasure --  and if you can get it, keep it —  and for that, there must be no punishment.

I fast forwarded

several times in Never Say Goodbye. I wish I could do that with this pandemic. Eleanor Parker is an excellent actress, but she always comes off as a little bit too good to be true; perhaps that’s why she never got the Oscar — and ended up being the sad nice lady in The Sound of Music. Of Errol Flynn nothing need be said other than he is so achingly beautiful that it is sometimes difficult to watch him. He was reportedly a pedophile of sorts — I imagine he could sweep anyone off their feet. The movie foreshadows The Parent Trap, there is an excruciating chid (‘And….introducing Patti Grady! As Flip!’) who should have been shot or perhaps poisoned at at a very early age. Please save us from cute, precocious children. You are allowed to be a prodigy, but you must also be an unslightly geek to approach anything near that reality of such a thing. I should know, I was somewhat of a ‘gifted' child -- not a genius certainly -- but frighteningly odd, effeminate, and anti-social, I liked to read Ayn Rand and was far too attached to my mother.  J. D. Salinger wrote about nothing but these attractive creatures who are quite ill-suited for life; I always adored his work (and wrote a book about him). Now apparently we must cancel Salinger because he was most likely a pedophile too. It’s not that I’m in favour of pedophilia, it’s just that if everyone who is talented is one, what books and movies are left for us to enjoy? I don’t believe Salinger was a pedophile, I believe he was a perpetual child who fell in love with younger women because he couldn’t stand most adults; this is neurotic surely, and pitiful, but no crime. That he idolised female children in his books occasionally, is not proof of anything except art. The two I’m really worried about losing though are J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll. I also wrote a book about Barrie — who I don’t believe was a pedophile -- but much like Salinger -- he adored children and abhorred adults. At any rate — whatever his personal issues, if we were to lose Peter Pan we would lose a matchless, juicy fantasy of eternal innocence, a panoply of unhinged infatuation with boyhood as well as motherhood, and a complex bewildering romance with death (‘to die would be an awfully big adventure!’) And we need all this very much, thankyou. When it comes to Lewis Carroll it’s mainly about children at twilight playing in the dwindling day. It’s about the disappearance of childhood — the haunted echo of it, and what is lost when the darkness comes. We mustn’t lose all that either, however odd the photographs that Charles Dodgson took of Alice Liddel may be. I’m all about vanishing sunsets these days, I feel I mustn’t miss a single one, and chase after them in a feverish search for, or perhaps escape from, night. You’ll be pleased to know, Dr. Fauci, that I had my first anxiety attack in approximately 50 years yesterday. It’s all your fault -- at least the fault of the measures introduced by you to save us from this ‘pandemic.’ You shall not be forgiven, at least by me. I know you’re not  plotting with Bill Gates to take over the world, but I’m quite sure you’ve made a little money off the COVID-19 vaccination -- if only to make up for what you didn’t make on the AIDS vaccine -- the one you dangled before dying gay men for approximately 30 years before giving up the goat. The anxiety attack was completely unexpected; I was sitting in a cab in Montreal trying to forget — well, everything (which is really where anxiety starts, you can’t ‘forget everything’) and I thought of my boyfriend and I in Berlin, and how excited he was to find a restaurant called Das Klo, advertised as a ‘toilet bar.' The idea for this place really suited my boyfriend’s sense of humour (warning: he can be scatalogical). We took a cab there from very far away, only to find ourselves in what did not live up to expectations; it turned out to be a slightly tasteless student pub. I remember how disappointed he was; thinking about it now makes me cry. Then the anxiety starts. It’s all very strange, but not really — I just want him to be happy, and he never is, or only is rarely, and I seem to be quite incapable of doing anything about it. Is that what love is, trying desperately to make someone happy when you can’t? The truth is he will probably never be happy, I mean who of us is? But I do think this all has something to do with dwindling twilight and promises my mother made to me (sorry to bring her up again) and the promises made by films like Never Say Goodbye, the films I grew up on. Any movie about a hopeful child trying to reunite their parents is simply divorced from reality. You know, maybe my therapist was right. Because when I think about that restaurant in Berlin and about my boyfriend’s disappointment I also think about the moment my mother told me she was divorcing my father and taking us to Toronto — my life fell apart -- apparently,  my therapist said, this is where my abandonment issues come from. But now I am truly abandoned -- by all the boys, they have all left me, for,  it seems forever -- and I want them back now, and there is no magic wand to wave. I was in the closet for 30 years, then fell in love with a boy who wouldn’t have me, and the only way I’ve been able to make up for that has been to have sex constantly all the time for the nearly 40 years that followed. I know it’s adolescent and neurotic and obsessive -- and sick even -- and foolishness of perhaps a dangerous kind (I always use condoms and don’t do anal much though) but that doesn’t make up for the fact that it is the way I chose to live my life. It was my only solace for what I never had; but now I can only look at the boys — without bars or bathhouses they are so far away, and the kind of random, brief, uncomplicated touching which I need so much has now disappeared -- and for an unspecified length of time. I hope Errol Flynn wasn’t a pederast. But I can imagine how irresistible it must have been to be wooed by him, and that is what every moviegoer wishes. Flynn is an expert liar -- we all know they type, and love them. And all we want, really, is to be lied to, often, perhaps not wisely, but much too well.

I did need

this escape. That’s all this film offers, though it’s a trifle long. The Bells Are Ringing stars Judy Holiday; a story in herself. I don’t like slapstick, but I like Lucille Ball and Judy Holiday who were both geniuses. Let’s make one thing clear: I know something about comedy, it’s probably the only subject I can claim to be an expert on. You either have it or you don’t. Sorry, all you unfortunate graduates of Le Coq. (I had to deal with many actors who went to that Parisian clown school when I was a young theatre director.) The fact is that you’re either naturally funny or not. I am funny. I know I’m funny because people laugh at me even when I’m serious. I’m probably funny because I take everything so seriously. Want proof? Here — I’ll brag. The only real acting gig I ever had was in Montreal, many years ago, I starred in a play (for a month run) called The Food Chain at The Saidye Bronfman (now Segal Centre). I played a 400 pound gay man and the whole second act was mine, I had to chase a cute boy around a bed while furiously eating a bag full of bagels and donuts. In the reviews I was compared to Charlie Chaplin. But I know I was funny, because the old Jewish ladies laughed and then apologised afterwards when they came to my dressing room —it was seeing me without my fat suit — “We would have laughed more but we thought you were really fat and we didn’t want to be rude.” I had a fight with the director; he kept adding foodstuffs. It was very difficult to really eat and act simultaneously. Which brings us to Judy Holiday, gorgeous, a closeted lesbian, the voice of a little boy, investigated for communism, died of throat cancer. What a doll she was. At one point in The Bells Are Ringing it is necessary for her to suddenly disappear behind a couch -- which she does with hilarious aplomb, she just drops to the floor — her expression saying, quite unconvincingly ‘I’m not doing this.’ Later Dean Martin blithely remarks: “You’re crazy.’ She answers very earnestly ‘I know,’ with such profound belief that you know that for her, this is a shocking admission.  Judy Holiday is always real; it’s no accident that she was working on a one woman show about Laurette Taylor when she died (Taylor brought naturalism to the American stage). I have worked with several actresses who, like Judy Holiday can make anything funny; it doesn’t really matter what the gag is, they redeem it. (If the gag is not funny they are funny about  trying to be funny) Thank God for these women. And yes, I do need the escape that Vincente Minnelli offers us in this film; it’s now clear to me why God put homosexuals on this earth — to create diversions of this nature. This is the kind of old fashioned musical where Judy Holiday and Dean Martin are dancing in a park then suddenly find a chorus of people watching them — who, in turn, begin singing along with them. Don’t you understand why we fags love this stuff? If magic like this can happen— well, ergo, therefore — men can love men!  I’m sitting in a cafe on St. Catherine St. in Montreal,watching the meth addicts walk by (they are usually hurrying actually). You can tell they are meth addicts by their mouths -- very strange and scary. They too, are longing for escape. But what Minnelli offers harms us in only one way --  it damages our ability to deal with reality. But if you’re like me, you end up hiding in the alternative world you create. One moment to acknowledge Doria Avila — a famous Texan and a famous dancer. He founded the Doria Avila Dance Academy, as well as the Rio Grande Valley Ballet. He appears for only a few moments in The Bells Are Ringing-- at first I thought —oh Judy Holiday has a cute gay neighbour, undoubtedly someone who Minnelli was screwing (who knows?). In this movie Doria is about 30 years old, and gorgeous, he does a little impromptu cha cha with Holiday. He died in 2005 at age 78 at the hands of his 27 year nemesis (Richard Redmond Jr.). One doesn’t know quite what to say; I wouldn’t call it an admirable death, but I would call it a very gay death.  It’s good to know that Doria — who was chosen as one of Living Legends of Dance by the Governor of Texas in 1992 -- still had some life left him at 78 — even if it was extinguished by a young man who was undoubtedly his lover, or perhaps just some young man he worshipped at the alter of. Wikipedia censorship is really pissing me off. There are three gay stories (at least) connected with the cast of this film. Judy Holiday had a fake marriage to a man, so of course you’ll find that on Wikipedia, but nothing about the female cop she was dating at the time. It’s history, our history and no one cares. The most eloquent symbol of our erasure is that the best way to tell if a famous person is gay or not is go directly to their Wikipedia page. Look under personal. The first thing you’ll see is that their bio is very short (not so for heterosexuals). You will discover, amazingly that they were born, and had parents (interesting details, of course, who would have guessed?) and that they lived somewhere, and that they had a parrot or a cat. Oh yes, and that they died. (Perhaps at the hands of beautiful young hooker, but he will not be called that, of course!) If I sound bitter today it’s because I am; completely lost and sad. Frankly, as nice as it is to go to a Montreal pool and have outdoor patios, you still can’t get a coffee inside a Startbucks for some strange reason. It’s not been easy having our lives destroyed; I’m sure you share the feeling but you dare not express it. I’ll tell you why. You are surrounded by people who the pandemic has made quite happy They were miserable before COVID-19; the pandemic has given them a marvelous excuse for not living. They are no longer to be blamed for their misery, the fault is not in themselves, but in their stars. Here’s a lesson. Learn it. Now! Everything is your fault. You are responsible. The stars — well, they will burn brightly — or not — in any case.

Another terrible movie,

the only reason to watch The Long Hot Summer is Paul Newman’s abs, or his eyes. He’s so incredibly beautiful and a marvelous actor, I wish I could say the same about Joanne Woodward. There’s nothing wrong with her, but she’s just not girly enough or sexy enough for me. Okay, I’ll say it: she’s not a drag queen. Mere actresses are not required to be drag queens  but movie stars are. This film is a bogus, boring copy; it was apparently cobbled together from Faulkner short stories to take advantage of the success of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  The starkest evidence lies in Orson Welles determinedly lacklustre performance as this film’s ‘Big Daddy’; he makes it nauseatingly obvious that he’s very unhappy. He’s acts too much — puts on a gruff voice and a frowny face, but that’s it. His performance keeps yelling ‘I'm playing a character!” Will Varner is an ugly, mean man — but it turns out the fault is not his; he simply loved his wife too much— the lead character 's arc is identical in Queen of Outer Space; this is the favoured backstory for all ‘thought-provoking’ American message films — ‘I’m nasty because I was not satisfactorily loved ‘— and you always find out in the last 10 minutes, so why even bother? Also the film is all about fathers, sons, and emasculation, I couldn’t be less interested, frankly. They just need to play some football and then screw each other in the locker room; stop this shilly-shallying around. Then there is the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes. Speaking of which, I got laid last night in Montreal! I will accept congratulations from those of you who have my email. There’s a reason to live again (as Blanche Dubois says “Sometimes -- there's God — so quickly!”). I started drinking early, as restaurant patios are few and packed. So after fighting with my boyfriend (don’t worry, we made up right away, and yes, we still love each other, but it was getting very stressful, I mean him getting laid constantly and me not at all. He had sex yesterday in the change room of Priape — a little sexy gay store. The boy clerk said 'Can I help you?' the oldest trick in the book, and so they did it. The others in the store apparently didn’t notice. Meanwhile I was at home, knitting!) So by the time I hit the streets I was drunk as a skunk. Approaching a patio I was accosted by a big, bearish, bartender from Toronto's Woody’s bar — Joe — who I have somewhat vaguely known for years (several of my friends have been in love with him). He invited me to sit with his pals — his lover (a big bear), and un autre bear and his 'boy.' They were a jolly bunch and all ate ravenously (one of them had a macaroni ’n cheese hot dog, yummy). They were terribly kind to me. They kept saying ‘didn’t you write plays or something?' I said yes ‘I did do something a long time ago.’ One of the bears kept asking me to play with his nipples while his boyfriend watched. I obliged. it was very invigorating. Leaving, I thought — well that was kind of like getting laid, so maybe it doesn’t matter whether I get it tonight or not. This is precisely the type of zen thinking that facilitates successful cruising. I was wearing my see-through-net shirt and my ‘Looking for Loads’ hat—a winning combination. I passed a young man who was quite lovely, dark, bearded, somewhat middle-eastern looking. We did the stare thing, he circled back and started to walk down a side road. I followed him. It was tough getting him into an alley at first, he was frightened of being seen. Yes there were people in the alley, but they were obviously crack addicts, and had their own business to attend to. I could feel it pressing against me, and I pulled it out of his pants, and then did what God put me on earth to do. (It was delicious.) He zipped up and we wanted out in to the street again. I thought he was gone, but somehow he appeared again and smiled at me, walking in the opposite direction As I have said here often, before, I’ve never been able to cobble up the requisite regret on these occasions. One is supposed to feel lonely and unloved; that’s the necessasry emotion. (We didn’t even kiss! But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just kiss it.) Relieving him of that very personal stress was all I needed; instant intimacy with no complications.  No, it's not intimate? (I can hear you whispering in my ear). Who are you to judge? Real sex (i.e. real pleasure) is always intimate, and loving, even if you are not in love. It’s always kind, civil and respectful too, since nobody’s in it to put anything over on anyone else; it’s pretty impossible to lie about anything significant when your 'you-know-what' is out. I’m now sitting on St. Catherine Street opposite ‘Bar Relaxe’; it’s a bar for the old and their hooker boys, we call these places ‘wrinkle bars’. It frightens me. I only went there once. I love the name though. Was it perhaps originally built across from an establishment called 'Bar Stresse' — Bar Relaxe, of course being the necessary antidote? I’ve been typing blogs since 9 a.m. because my boyfriend is working from our home, and I am not to disturb him. I’m off now to the pool. Whenever I go there, I think of Charles, he was my second lover, and I don’t talk about him ever. He had a large penis (I know, I know) and liked screwing me. He would watch me eat — gleefully — and say 'That food will make your ass plumper!' I didn’t really like getting screwed up the bumhole -- never really understood it until recently -- that is , until now when the 'front' is somewhat unreliable. Well, the back door is certainly open, just so you know! Anyway Charles’ older lover (I was the 'other woman') used to have an apartment in the abuilding overlooking the pool I now frequent when I'm in Montreal. He let me stay in the apartment once, when he wasn’t there, I took cocaine -- for the one and only time -- and had a panic attack — thinking I was going to jump. I’m sorry Charles, for never falling in love with you, even a little bit. But you either see God, or you don’t; and it’s not a matter of religion, really.

I Was a

Male War Bride is a terrible film. I have mixed feelings about director Howard Hawks' fondness for the war of the sexes; of course it can be sexy as hell, and friction is what it’s all about. Sex, I mean. And I don’t just mean frontage; it’s all about difference, fighting, if you have no difference of opinion with your partner and you are ‘as one’ you are in love but are probably not ‘in sex.’ Even those two lesbians you see — overweight, matching bad hairdos, matching parkas —they find some difference somewhere; maybe one of them has a gigantic clit or something. So yes; in principle when men and women fight they also usually want to screw, which is why spousal abuse can be sexy for some women (I’m not saying it should be, but that it sometimes is). But what we have in I Was a Male War Bride is fake sex antagonism; it’s difficult to believe Ann Sheridan and Cary Grant are attracted to each other. She’s a bit tougher than he is, and, seems actually physically bigger than him in some scenes. It's only when he ages that the gay Cary Grant is totally convincing as a heterosexual leading man. I buy him as a sexy straight guy in Charade (Audrey Hepburn was also very good at adoring him and probably did). There’s a lot of slapstick in I Was a Male War Bride -- it just makes me nervous. I’m always thinking — can’t they fix that chair before it breaks? Hawks tries for fine comic moments, but they often don’t work (like  clowns; I hate clowns). In the last half hour it’s all suddenly interesting because the book that inspired this film  is apparently based on the real story of a French soldier who married an American WAC, and had to sign forms saying he was a ‘bride’ in order to accompany her to America. Cary Grant is hilariously droll as he looks directly into the eyes of a surly sailor and sanctimoniously intones: “Yes, I am a female bride." This has a certain relevance today. It’s certainly a finger in the eye to all those who aspire to be taken seriously as real women when they don’t have a vagina, never had one, and/or never plan on having one. If you ‘claim’ you are a woman, sans vagina, you may end up looking as ridiculous as Cary Grant after Sheridan sticks the horse hair on his head (“Couldn’t you at least cut if off the mane?” he inquires, plaintively). Listen to me before you run to Facebook, I said ‘you may end up’ — some trans women may be perfectly lovely looking, but if you don’t have a vagina and never will, I’m afraid you know nothing about what it means to be  a woman; it is misogynistic and oppressive to women for you to pretend you do. That’s all I have to say about that. My favourite moment in I Was a Male War Bride (stolen in Some Like it Hot) is this: Grant’s in drag, and a sailor glances at his retreating gams and says “Well, she does have nice legs!” This all could have been a code, a game, on Hawks' part, he undoubtedly knew Grant was gay. Speaking of writing  in code: why is there so much discussion of ‘lying’ in these blogs? I’ve tried to explain it before — doubtless to no avail. First, it's so I won’t be held responsible for anything I say; which is what writers must do these days, because we are being fired and cancelled, knocked off publisher’s lists -- willy nilly -- for speaking with candour about things that matter. But all rhetoric is a lie. And that includes facts. All facts are a lie. You can use certain facts to turn on your toaster and give yourself an enema (why did I chose that example?) But other than that, so-called ‘truth’ is mostly lies. So in these blogs you will find no truths in what seems intended as truth. In other words do not look for ‘truth' when I rant about politics, COVID-19, or particularly when I say 'this is the truth!’ (Watch out!) Apologies to my friend D -- out west, who is joining the Western Separatist party — I love you from afar, and you seem to like my rants; don’t discount them, but enjoy them for the fiction they are. But the truth lies in stories; and in some memories (depending how made up they are — the more fictional, the better) and of course, in all the sheer fiction you find here. Truth is in fable, allegory, myth, that you feel or understand, but sometimes can’t articulate. Thomas Nashe -- who was a drinking buddy of Shakespeare’s -- believed this. Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, by the way. We know this because he told us this in code  in the sonnets: “That every word doth almost tell my name” Get it? A ‘vere word’ doth tell my name. He wrote in code also because -- it was even scarier back then than it is today (nowadays you don’t get torn apart by horses, just Facebook). I am in Montreal now! Yes! I went out last night! It’s not fully open, but it was fun to share a drink with David whose stripper name was Scott (my ‘trick name’ is Scott so he and I share a fake name). He’s now 50 but doesn’t look a day over 35, and his sexuality is indescribable — which means real. He lived with a gay men once and said ‘It was great I could screw women and he could screw men.’ Dave/Scott bought me four shooters which were his specialty from his bartending days. Are you ready? Vodka shot. Then lick some sugar off your hand. Then suck a lemon. Tequila shots for babies! That drink charmed the panties off our 22 year-old waitress, so it works. I could tell he wanted coke or crack or something, so I let him be. I wandered off to the most notorious sex and drug park in the gay village, astounded to see — not only the usual crack addicts —  but also a gang of young gay men who were gathered to chat (it seemed) rather than screw. This was disappointing. I heard  the word ‘moisturizer’ bandied about. What is the gay world coming to? Is this what young gay men do now in parks, talk about moisturizer? But maybe I’m just old. And if I don’t get laid soon the only sexual encounters I narrate here will be baroque, embellished, impossible fantasy. Which they kinda were, anyway, to tell the truth.

He was no

Dylan Thomas, that's for sure. Emlyn Williams was a Welsh writer and actor; like Frank Vosper he had great success with ‘thrillers’ in the 30s. But Williams is eternal corn (hence his runaway hit The Corn is Green). The play Night Must Fall is pretty fascinating, the reason it has traction in film and theatre -- even to this day, is this: it has a great leading part for an actor as a psycho-killer -- who comes apart during the last five minutes. Emlyn Williams wrote the part of ‘Danny’ for himself, Robert Montgomery produced the film hoping to get the Oscar (he got a nomination). On the other hand Montgomery's damn good in it -- a part ham-written for a ham-actor. He gets to be both charming and a killer. A friend of mine once said: ‘Anyone who can charm you within 10 minutes of meeting you is a psychopath.’ Somewhat of an exaggeration, but there is some truth in it. Well, I am on the side of charm. Night Must Fall is not, and that’s why I don’t like it. But also, come on — when the killer is exposed at the end, his speech is worthy of David Garrick’s misappropriations of Shakespeare. Garrick rewrote Macbeth in the 18th century because well, the problem was a) we sympathise with Macbeth too much and b) he doesn’t get punished enough at the end. So Garrick wrote a horrid, maudlin, unlikely speech for Macbeth (which I will paraphrase here) about being dragged into hell “I’m sinking — there is no help! I am wicked. God forgive me for what cannot be forgiven. ARUGH! I am choking suffocating…the flames! Agh!” Or some such rot. Macbeth, of course, isn’t the least bit interested in the flames at the end, but instead has a heartbreaking speech about art and representation, one we all know by heart and love: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s not the bad writing in Might Must Fall that I object to, but the idea that it’s toxic to live in your imagination. Or, I should say; merely toxic, alone. Danny is a quintessential Irish charming liar. You’ll find this type in so many plays and movies — The Playboy of the Western World for instance. And there is an American variant (watch out for it, more dangerous than ‘Delta’!) — The Music Man. These are charming liars who seduce both men and women, they teach people how to live; because it is from the imagination that we come to understand human possibility. But they are not villains, especially not killers. Emlyn Williams cheap psychoanalysis is this: Danny can’t stand the horror of his reality, so he chooses to live in fantasy. He is a charmer by day and a killer by night. The film also has an ancillary message: ‘Girls! Beware of charmers!’ — i.e. marry a dullard. I hate this shit. The fact is that most of us live in fantasy, but most of us are not murderers. For instance I am a great writer -- that is, in my imagination. Truth is, I will go down in history (if at all) as a ‘gay activist’ who at times was too ‘militant’ for his own or anyone else’s good (John Clum already called me ‘militant’ in print. For him and for Richard Ouzonian and for Urjo Kareda  too, I was the quintessential too faggoty faggot, too outrageous for my own good, this is reflection or projection, okay I’ll stop there.) ‘I am that I am,’ as Shakespeare says, but what I am exists only in who I imagine myself to be, and the same is true for you. It’s best we don’t know who we actually are, and that we attach ourselves to people who are too terrified to tell us. So don’t pick on the imagination Emlyn — it just shows your lack of it. And yes, all you ugly, fat, boring, men are permitted to go on about how all the evil charming men unjustly get the women, but those guys usually have larger than usual sexual equipment. And if they don’t, they somehow manage to convince us they do (which is the same thing). I will stop defending the imagination -- indeed I am setting out on the train to Montreal to obliterate my own imagination. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I went on vacation from writing this? If life was so intense that I didn’t need art? I fear I will be compelled though, to tell you my dirty stories, to brag if nothing else — and of course to ornament reality. (Did I tell you about the f-buddy I had once with the very large penis? I was praising it once, and he said 'Oh for me, it’s just an ornament’ — he was a bottom you see, so was I — it made sex testy, to say the least. Anyway, amazingly, he went on to have that ‘ornament’ cut off, and is now a trans woman. I am hoping his member has been preserved somewhere though, because it was not so much an ornament as a monument. In formaldehyde perhaps?) Yes — thanks for asking —  I have brought my ‘Looking for Loads’ hat that my partner sweetly crafted for me at Christmas, and also my socks that say ‘bottom’ on them. I am tempted to wear both the 'Looking for Loads’ hat and the ‘bottom’ sox on the same outing? Is that too much? Will that mean I’ll end up being the ‘lonely girl’ at the prom? I just want people to look at me; I’m an exhibitionist, always have been, there’s nothing I like better than appalling people, and the older I get, the easier it is to appall. My boyfriend says my tits are gone (no gym). Well I managed not to gain any weight during COVID (or perhaps just a little) so what can I say? All I want is to be desired. Is that too much to ask? At this late date? A friend of mine said about another friend that he’s 'past his due date’ — terrifying thought. But this was about a boy who had only one thing going from him -- his beauty. Edmund White talks about that in States of Desire — he goes to some town in Godforsaken-knows-where America and remarks on how the boys there have grown older, but are only accustomed to being sex objects (much like straight women) and have nothing to offer except rapidly dwindling echoes of their dusky youth. I’m lucky; I never was very sought after, so my aged neglect is only a slight alteration on my youthful wallfowerness. Wish me luck. If there is no fun-- then I will imagine it.

Thank heaven for

COVID-19, or at least for this lock down. I wouldn’t have got trapped in a Frank Vosper wormhole otherwise. So TCM is showing a movie called Shadows on the Stairs (1941), based on a play by Frank Vosper called Murder on the Second Floor (1929). Frank Vosper is a fascinating figure in gay history who, consequently, no one cares about. He’s quite a talented playwright -- and from the looks of it, he was a very talented actor too. He died tragically and mysteriously at age 36, and that’s what this blog is all about. So Vosper’s connections to the gay glitterati are intense. He undoubtedly knew Noel Coward because he played the villainous homosexual Dulcimer in the first production of The  Green Bay Tree by Mordaunt Shairp, which was probably the very first modern gay play (produced in England in 1933, and then in New York City, financed by Noel Coward). Vosper also wrote a dramatic adaptation of a novel by G.B. Stern called No Funny Business, and G.B. Stern was part  of Coward’s lesbian circle (he called her Peter) and one of Coward's favorite novelists. (Fascinatingly, a young, gay, Laurence Olivier was in both The Green Bay Tree and No Funny Business, the lesbian Gertrude Lawrence was in No Funny Business also — this was Coward’s circle.) Vosper’s work as an actor and author always involved murder and mayhem; he played  the villain Ramon Levine (opposite Peter Lorre) in Hitchcock’s 1st try at The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) — undoubtedly Hitchcock saw him as the stereotypically effeminate homo in The Green Bay Tree and snapped him up. Vosper also wrote another very successful play — Love from a Stranger (1936) — which was an adaptation of a story by Agatha Christie. All the credit for that play is given to Christie, but from watching Shadows on the Stairs I can attest that Vosper was himself very talented. Shadows on the Stairs is meta-theatrical (this is a spoiler): the killer turns out to be — yes, an effeminate married man, cuckolded by his wife — who would rather play chess with his friend than cuddle her. He is also (the first?) cross-dressed killer — way before Psycho -- (he dresses as the maid to do the deed)— for he reveals in his final confession that he first cross-dressed as a boy, to act in the play Charley’s Aunt. Shadows on the Stairs is meta-theatrical in yet another way too, for it turns out that we are watching — not ‘reality’ — but a filmic enactment of a reading of a play written by the young playwright (Hugh Bromilow -- played by Bruce Lester) who is also the film’s hero. My point is that Vosper was interested in lies and artificiality — as Oscar Wilde was, and Coward was — and though he might not be as talented either of those two; he’s in their ‘camp.’ Now: Vosper’s life. Wow. I think I can solve the mystery of his death here, and also illuminate the death of Joe Orton. So Vosper’s lover at the time of this death was Peter Willes, an actor — young and blonde — and quite fetching. In 1937 Frank and Peter were returning to England from New York City on the SS Paris. It was a glamorous crossing, as not only Ernest Hemingway —but also Muriel Oxford —  who, by the way, also happened to be Miss Great Britain — were both on board. Being a celebrity fag couple Vosper and Willes hung out with Miss Great Britain, and it was during their night together that Frank plunged to his death. No one knows what happened; it was investigated with no conclusion. There is no doubt that Frank dropped out of his cabin window, however it was not ever sorted out whether it was a suicide or by accident. Well, what about murder? This was hinted at by the press — could both men had been in love with Miss Great Britain and vying for her love? Well, in fact, it’s unlikely either Peter or Frank could have cared less about the sexual accoutrements of Miss Great Britain, who vehemently claimed at the time that she definitely not had sex with Peter Willes. Nevertheless, though Peter was cleared of any suspicion of murder, this did not stop the circulation of a popular saying: ‘Never get on a ship with Peter Willes.” Truer words were never spoken; I would amend them, and say never do anything at all with Peter Willes, and certainly don’t fall in love with him. It is my theory that there was a kind of triangle going on on that fatal night — on that fatal ship -- but not the one people thought. The gorgeous young Peter was pretending to flirt with Miss Great Britain and a jealous Vosper (jealous of losing his lover Peter not of losing Mss Great Britain) threatened suicide and finally did it, probably on a dare from Peter. You may say I’m nuts (and I am).  But in my worm-holing on Peter Willes I discovered that later in life he was a very good friend of Kenneth Halliwell. Halliwell murdered his lover, Joe Orton. There were rumours Willes had something to do with Halliwell murdering Orton — because everyone knew Willes hated Orton immensely, and had encouraged Halliwell to hate him too. Let me put it this way: how likely is it that any one person would be so closely associated with two horrific and suspicious deaths — and yet be completely innocent? Bloody unlikely. Look at photos of Peter Willes. He started out as an angelic, delicious, ingenue and finished off as a middle-aged, devilish rogue. The face changes; but it’s the same man. Maybe I’ll write a play about Peter Willes some day. But I will, of course, be vilified -- as I always am -- for misrepresenting the 'good kind folx' that queer people always  are. Listen, I don’t hate gay men -- any more than I hate people in general. People must be exposed whenever possible — as the selfish, greedy, lying, narcissistic, hypocrites most of them are. Look on the bright side; when you know how disgusting most people are, you come to value  so very much those who are at least not-intentionally evil — because — under the circumstances— it’s really the very best that they can do.