I realize it

now, all I had been missing was excess joy. The epiphany came the other day when I had a little excess joy during the day (you know, an overflow) and I was chatting up the guy in The Subway Shop about having to deal with homeless people when I sit by the window and eat my sub. I have now decided that it’s better to hide a bit at the back of The Subway Shop, because King Street in Hamilton can sometimes be a lively place, and I just want to eat my lunch, not get involved. People will see me in The Subway Shop window looking prosperous and ask me for money, or much worse, one guy once asked me if I was a homosexual which was unnerving — as I am one, but that is an antique term. Anyway I was in possession of a little excess joy, so I chatted up the guy behind the counter (could he be gay?) who is always so nice to me, and who once said ‘you look very different today’ which was encouraging — because it seems to me to be a virtue not to always look the same. And I began to think about the fact that I have absolutely had no excess joy to share with anyone for a very long time. I have a naturally frowny dour face, and apparently am intimidating— with my pierced ear and tattoos (I’m not trying to look intimidating, just sexy — but I guess sometimes it amounts to the same thing). So people don’t normally talk to me;  I have to talk to them. And sometimes when I am in possession of excess joy, I do, and it’s fun. So where did all my excess joy go to? Well, COVID-19 took it. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that eliminating excess joy is what COVID-19 was all about. I mean that’s what the authorities were telling us all the time: ‘You should be able to put up with this, I mean surely you can manage to make do with simple — old-fashioned — joy — what do you need with an excess of it?” To must of us, because we are puritans who are descended from a long line of pleasure-exorcising, self-flagellating crazies (that is our Empire Loyalist Heritage in Ontario) this sounded pretty reasonable. (It’s important to note that I am speaking of nice middle class people when I speak of this excess joy. When it comes to the working classes, or worse yet, the homeless and the very poor, COVID-19 meant much more than just missing a little excess joy, it meant madness, addiction and death. I am still counting the bodies of the friends — they are still slowly piling up, as the isolation of COVID-19 has had slow and chilling after effects). But for us middle class types, it sounded easy -- at first -- to give up a little excess joy. So let me define excess joy right now. Regular joy is -- satisfaction. I think the best way to look at it is in terms of orgasms. Orgasms, are by definition excess joy. The reason God made us this way (or mother nature, or whoever you think is in charge) is because sex is kinda fun -- but orgasms are really fun, and if a man has an orgasm then he will impregnate a woman, which God apparently wants, I guess. There are those of course who think that orgasms are not necessary, who just put up with them in order to make sure that the earth is fully populated (but of course we know that is no longer an issue). Similarly there are those who think that simple old-fashioned joy is quite enough. You know, reading a book and being engaged but not inspired, or watching TV on some device that passes the time, you know, being entertained, having bad sex out of obligation, chatting with a boring person just to be nice and well, you know.... That is what I would call good old fashioned simple joy. But an excess of joy means that you are having an exquisite time, and for me that only happens at parties or with friends, and when I’m writing, or at a great play or movie, or watching HBO, or (yes of course) having orgasms. The fact of the matter is that all ‘art’ could be considered an excess of joy. You see, there is your mundane life, and sure, there are lovely sunsets and petting the dog — these are uncomplicated pleasures that everyone has at their fingertips, and of course if people are Zen enough, they can enjoy them and be satisfied. But what I am making an argument for here (perhaps you can tell I was warming up to this) is that we need the 'excess of pleasure,' well -- a little more than we think we do. In other words it’s not enough just to be satisfied (or worse yet to ‘get what you need’). What life is really about — and what we actually live for — is an excess of pleasure -- what is a special, unworldly, unmatchable, indescribable experience beyond pleasure -- divine, ecstasy -- OMG!— you know what I mean. Because life is basically dreadful (I hope you are still with me here) meaning we are all eventually going to get sick and die — or if we are very lucky, we are simply going to die — and because life routinely refuses to live up to our expectations. And people — well I just don’t know where to start with them — but they constantly disappoint, infuriate and just drive us nuts with their inability to be what we want them to be most, i.e. perfect in the sense that they not only fulfill our needs and make us happy but make us ecstatic in some way (it’s not always about literal orgasms). So we must have something else! This is excess joy…. bubbling over, it is art, it is artifice it is what is beyond -- well, reality -- and we all need it, and it’s really what we live for whether we admit it or not. So what I’m saying is that COVID-19 not only took away something we really need, but something which many of us can’t do with out, and on top of that, COVID-19 made it seem like we shouldn’t really need it at all. So here we are, pretending that we do not need or want excess joy; and I for one am apoplectic. (I had to look that word up, but it  seemed right — and it is — “overcome with anger, extremely indignant”).

To be clear

I have nothing against Jen Sookfong Lee. All this is not her fault. She’s a great writer — that is she writes well, and insightfully, and with great wit. I do have something against ECW Press -- or rather I am very sad when I think of them, for I had a professional relationship with them for nearly 20 years. They published several novels of mine and also several books of poetry. I really counted on them them to support me — not financially but emotionally. I needed to know they were there and were committed to my work -- and then suddenly they disappeared. There was no explanation really, just after 20 years a committee was now making editorial decisions and that committee had decided that my work was not suitable. There was no why or wherefore, but it became clear to me what was going on when I submitted a proposal for their ‘pop classics’ series of tiny essay-books. Or let’s just say it's become clear now  after reading Jen Sookfong Lee’s  lovely essay gentleman of the shade. my own private idaho. Again, this is not about Jen Sookfong Lee, it is about ECW Press. My proposal to ECW in 2018 was to review several movies from a gay perspective (I can’t find the proposal now, I'm not sure exactly what it was —maybe  I wanted to write about a John Waters’ films, unsure). Anyway, I was planning a book much like gentleman of the shade. my own private idaho — that is a chatty analysis of a queer film. They didn’t want me, so they hired Jen Sookfong Lee. What’s missing here? Jen Sookfong Lee is not a gay man. She is, as far as I can tell from her book, a heterosexual woman, although she hints that she is not only into ‘gender fluidity’ but also bisexuality — though she never identifies with either of those labels. You may say ‘why is Sky so attached to labels?’ I'm not, but because I have sex with men, I have experience with several things that Jen Sookfong Lee does not I.e. — homophobia, and having sex with another man. She says of the director of My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant) that "he uses established tropes and expands them with sexuality or gender fluidity or jerky camera shots.” She says Van Sant’s view of queer sexuality in the movie now seems to her "sweetly naive.” She speaks a lot about mass culture and how fake and shallow it is, and she treats Van Sant’s movie as ‘authentic’ in that it alerted her to new realities. Part of that seems to be a certain class consciousness, as -- though she identifies as working class -- it is clear from her 'epilogue' that she is a middle class person: “I left my real job at 29 to write full-time and my agent worried that I would starve. …I decided to keep freelancing instead of looking for a steady job.” No working class person blithely quits their job and makes light of starving, let me tell you. I have nothing against Jen Sookfong Lee for being middle class -- I am middle class -- but being gay has opened up a whole new world of class consciousness for me that Jen Sookfong Lee only gets secondhand from viewing a film about gay street hustlers. The fact that she finds Van Sant’s view of the characters' sexuality ‘sweetly naive’ indicates she doesn’t know much about gay men, or hustlers. I have hired boys to strip for me in bars, and had a boyfriend who was a sex trade worker. Sometimes their work is as sweet and lovely -- as it is portrayed occasionally in My Own Private Idaho -- and at other times it is oddly detached and cold. But so, of course, is most of life. The overall impression one gets from reading Jen Sookfong Lee is that when she first saw My Own Private Idaho at age 15 she was a tourist in the gay world, and she began to get a taste of what it might mean to live an 'alternative' lifestyle. All that’s great, but as a gay man my experience of the film is very different. It made me think very much about what it means to be a straight acting fag (which I am not) and what it means to be paid for sex (Jen Sookfong Lee mentions this, to be fair, but her experience was not mine as a gay man). Finally Jen Sookfong Lee does not know what it means to live in a cultural wasteland, a vast desert of feeling where everything that is important to your sexuality and your emotional life is barred from you, because these feelings are verboten, obscene, fatally outside the mainstream. She does not know what it means to live every day for years fearing AIDs, and never losing the shame of AIDs. Or what it means to be sexually and emotionally castrated by homophobia --  to live the first 30 years of your life jerking off to pictures in porn magazines, and then throwing the magazines in trash bins distant from your home because you are terrified that your mother, or girlfriend, or anyone, will find them. The problem is that no one cares to hear from gay men anymore about anything. We are actually barred from writing about our lives, because it is assumed that other voices are more acceptable or politically correct than ours. What about all the young gay men who are lost and rejected -- considering suicide? They aren’t looking for essays about how looking at gay movies helps straight women feel better about being rebellious -- they're looking for some way out of their suicidal anxiety. Well good luck to them. The powers that be have decreed that our voices are to be silenced -- and that means that lives will be obliterated too. Oh, well.

Monkeypox is a

poem. I will now analyze it for you. Initially we are just struck by the power of the word; it is brutally efficient — so much is said by the sound alone. The word ‘pox’ is a physical shock — the ‘p’ is plosive and the ‘x’ has makes a lovely 'hiss.' The word ‘monkey’ isn't bad either (that harsh ‘k)’. There is lots of harshness in this word. It startles and pleases in just the right manner. More significantly, the word ‘monkeypox' is redolent with associations, one can almost smell it. We have the photos of course — those gorgeous terrifying images of skin that should be lovely and smooth — blanketed with postules! What could be more horrifying? One is immediately rendered not only physically uncomfortable but ugly -- untouchable. And it is that ‘untouchableness’ that is key. The most evident and pronounced resonance surrounding the word ‘monkeypox’ comes in the first part — ‘monkey.’ This is obviously a racist word -- rich — nay abundant — with associations. When Obama became president I received a ton of racist emails from someone I barely knew.  What ever-ending invention there was -- of both a digital, and a lexical variety! I certainly didn't know there were so many different ways to imagine Barak Obama as a monkey! Yes, of course, he has big ears — we can imagine the oversized teeth, the fur, all the rest —  and for these racists such images are deeply hilarious. If black people are monkeys, they are of course stupid and probably sexually voracious (don’t monkeys masturbate all the time? ) and  they have no shame. And because of the 'monkey' part of the word, we know it is a ‘black’ illness — i.e. that it comes from Africa -- and that it is most likely spread by Africans. A welcome echo is the idea that AIDS originated in Africa, where men and women undoubtedly have sex with monkeys.  Thus monkeypox is not only a black disease, but a gay one too. Of course we know this from AIDS - the first victims of AIDs were — bisexuals, Haitians and drug users — the very bottom of the barrel; basically human excrement. So of course we aren’t at all surprised to see that the first cases of monkeypox in Canada occurred in a gay bar on Church Street  — Woody’s — and in a gay bathhouse in Montreal  —G I Joe’s.  (Do they still have bathhouses for gay men?  Oh yes yes yes! Through their diabolical sexual practices gay men continue to inflict their gross illnesses upon the rest of the world!) Racists and homophobes know that  gay men eat excrement and are in their own way, a kind of excrement, so all of this is no surprise. Then there is the final, and probably most important aspect of the word 'monkeypox' --   it is transmitted through contact with animals. Not so co-incidentally, we have recently come to understand that we have cruelly raped our planet; our technological selfishness has hastened the demise of Dear Mother Earth with a frankly suicidal ferocity. And we are paying for it  - in a manner that not even Alfred Hitchcock imagined in The Birds. We will all die with the image of Greta Thurnberg stamped on our psyches! How tragic! It took in innocent child to speak the truth!  We are descending to a kind of hell — we have abused Mother Nature for too long and now she is having her way with us, and there is nothing any of us can do. All of this exists in a beautiful tragic word/poem called ‘monkeypox.’ What is alarming to me — and no one else apparently — is that as we gradually remove literary analysis from school curriculums (along with ‘close reading’) and substitute for it math and science, we render ourselves epistemologically impotent. There was a time when the primary subject of all study was rhetoric -- i.e. the theory that the world can be read as a poem, created by God. You see, the world is ultimately unknowable -- at least in a 'rational' 'fully conscious' way. But we can -- by experiencing beauty, by allowing it to have its way with us (as we might do with that gorgeous, terrifying word/poem ‘monkeypox') -- well, we might come to better understand what actually is. However, it's terribly important to remember that the concept of rhetoric does not mean simply enjoying beauty but -- from the time of Gorgias — rhetoric reveals to us that all language is deception; and that words create our reality. Yes, even scientific theories are poems, and the only way to live in this world with any sort of clarity at all is to be acutely aware, from moment to moment, of the techniques of manipulation utilized by master poets, philosophers and scientists to sway us to their various points of view. But sadly, this particular skill set is now lost to us; we know nothing of rhetoric, and even pretend we don't like poetry (i.e. in books).  But alas, though we pledge allegiance to the 'truth' we are aesthetically flawed and fatally addicted to mists, miasma, and metaphor! Our tragedy is not ‘monkeypox’ -- it is that we have forgotten that we are dreaming -- and there is no one left to wake us up.

I don’t know

where to start with Terence Davies’ Benediction. I would say he is in a class all by himself, but there is a little club of bitter old fags many of whom are still alive (you see they didn’t have much sex, so they didn’t get AIDS) and who hate themselves for being gay, and hate gay culture, and have to write about it over and over again. Larry Kramer was the prime example of this type. It doesn’t matter how much that evil fag did for AIDS, he was still a nasty queen who hated the rest of us for getting laid and having fun. Don’t get me wrong. I hate gay culture as much as the next guy -- but frankly it’s all we’ve got, and it’s much better than straight culture -- which could put you to sleep when you’re already sleeping — it’s so boring and predictable and self-righteous that you just want to kick it in the ass and say "haven’t we listened to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony enough?" (Oh come on:"'Isn’t the Queen a Wonderful Person?" And: "When it comes down to it, there's just nothing at all quite like the loving warmth of ‘the family’"? Pullease.) Terence Davies new movie just makes me want to write something better. Benediction was for me, at first, addictively watchable. At last, a gay movie! But like The Power of the Dog, it must be set in another time and place because we mustn’t ever ever watch post-AIDS fags frequenting sex parties they booked online, or getting high on meth and ‘G’ and poppers, or cheating on their husbands because they are pretending to be nice middle-class straight people when they’re the furthest thing from it. So Davies brings us a biography of Siegfried Sassoon in which he relays the heart-wrenching tale of a poet (circa 1914) of great talent and integrity who somehow mistakenly forgets himself and ends up traipsing around  being a homosexual during his misspent youth. And before he knows it, he’s dancing the tango with beautiful young bucks, sucking off Ivor Novello, and just generally acting like a bitchy, nauseating, promiscuous sissy! Of course these parts of the movie are the only thing that’s watchable —Sassoon’s eventual redemption (he converts to heterosexuality) and conversion to Catholicism — as well as his courageous anti-war stance — is supposed to be what we are engrossed by (and what we can congratulate ourselves for adoring when we leave the theatre). But how can we even pay attention to all that noble stuff when these days we never ever ever get to see cute gay men being bitchy and screwing each other — sometimes even at the same time! (Except, of course, in real life!). I’ve got news for you, gay men are not the only people in the world who are narcissistic, superficial, promiscuous, and mean. Everybody is. So why are we still making movies about how horrible gay men are? I go clubbing every weekend (yes I’m the old guy you see in the corner trying not to look like he’s a day over 50) and tons of gay men (young and old) are doing Very Bad Things, and yes acting just like they did before AIDS, but that’s why I like them! Don’t you see? Most straight people don’t even do enough Very Bad Things in their whole life to have anything to lie about. (I do pity them!) But why are we still lying? Isn’t that what gay liberation was all about? Why do we have to put up with the self-important inflated egos of damaged gay men who try to pull this load of hypocritical horseshit over our eyes — it’s all lies! Do you hear me? Lies?! I can’t f-in stand it anymore. Can we at least try a little bit to stop hating ourselves for one moment for being who we are? I daresay (and now I sound like a character in a Terence Davies movie) I daresay I am one of the few gay writers these days who writes about gay men, and also one of the few of those few, who doesn’t detest his own kind — or at the very least, knows that he hates himself, but really tries not too. I’m not pretending to be the wisest person on earth but I'm old enough to know that gay men are no more horrible than anybody else. The problem is not sexuality, the problem is that the only thing that seems to make people happy is comparing themselves to other people, and deciding they are better, and doing horrible things to those other people because they feel inadequate. You can search for the why and wherefore of such behaviour but I’m afraid it’s just human nature — schadenfreude — relishing the suffering others. We are all to some degree sociopaths. And we love it, especially when people suffer because they do Very Bad Things that we always wish we could do but never did because we were far too cowardly. Or heterosexual. Or something.  Well I’m back! We’ll see how long I can keep this sort of thing up. I used to be able to do it for days, but I'm not quite the man I used to be (however I’m learning how to 'bottom,' don’t you know, and the rewards there are indescribable! We’ll talk more about that later!) Or maybe we should talk about it now. There is nothing quite like submission. There's a whole religion about it, Houellebecq wrote a whole lovely novel about it (I tried to do that too recently, but I guess I can’t, because it didn’t work out). Let’s just say this: what demeans you is what redeems you. And if you don’t understand that, then (sigh) —  he said condescendingly — then for you, there is very little hope. But I’m crossing my fingers. (And they are, presently, up my bum!)