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.
