This is hell we are

living in hell. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. To be locked up in your house, ordered never to leave, told not to see friends, told not to make love without a mask (thank you Theresa Tam!), told not to hug or kiss — universities, concerts, galleries, theatres, restaurants closed? All of the above are not ‘luxuries,’ they are what make us human. We are living in hell, and if someone tries to tell you otherwise, I give you permission to slap them -- good and hard. Joe Orton used to talk about Morocco (he would go with Kenneth Williams — that gorgeous comedian from the 'Carry On' movies — and with Kenneth Halliwell who eventually killed him) and he would say that the boys in Morocco would just come up and ask him if he wanted to have sex -- whereas in London it was a lot more work to get laid. He would say ‘Morocco is human, unlike England’ and (putting aside all the colonialist associations of his remark) I think his point is well taken. I was born in New England, USA, and my parents were Congregationalist Protestants, so I know about man’s inhumanity to man. I know a culture that views hugs, kisses, sex, music and art as godless. So I give you permission — since we are living in hell — to find the satisfaction you need. You are now completely under government control (I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and it isn’t a rhetorical device me saying that) and to be under anyone’s control is intolerable for most people unless they are masochists who have turned their life into one big sex party, or they have Stockholm Syndrome. No life is now intolerable for most people, and the worst part is there is no ‘timeline.’ Make no mistake about it, we are now being told that the much anticipated vaccination may not help -- will certainly not allow us to ‘hit the streets’ any day soon-- and that it may not even stop people from getting infected.  And even if this vaccine  ‘works,’ there will inevitably be another pandemic. The powers that be have been hinting for a long time that from now on  life will consist of one pandemic after another.  I worry not so much about the people in the middle — but the very old, like me, and the young. I don’t have much time left, so it would be nice to actually live the remaining years  — not just sit in my room feeling guilty that I am not wearing a mask in my own home. But imagine if you were young? Imagine if you are 18 years old? This is the time of your life -- when you must start loving and screwing; you are horny as hell and/or as romantic as hell and you want it now, because you will never be young again. So what are you doing to do? Well I say, run, don’t walk to the nearest porn site; they were made for you, that’s why they are there, after all, what other alternative do you have? Human contact is dangerous, porn is not. Sure it’ll screw up your sex life, it will screw up your expectations of what is and isn’t good sex -- no one has sex like that in real life — and it will completely wreck your idea of what the human body is (the body fascism in porn is beyond belief). Porn is a wildly unrealistic fantasy, sure, and it will deeply mess you up. But what else are you going to do? The natural urges you have, to love and to make love, are human ones. And you must somehow satisfy them. The same thing goes for drugs. Take them. Now is the time. They are readily available at every Cannabis store, and the government seems to encourage it, so go ahead — after all, it'll keep the economy going. Now is the time to indulge your vices! Because if you don’t you will simply die of boredom or slash your wrists. You are and will continue to be human and have human needs, but that is no longer recognised. So what you must do is figure out a way to live vicariously -- by consuming drugs and porn, and whatever else this little silver or black or white box in front of you has to offer (there's always Netflix, I guess!). Cuz that’s all there is. You can and will learn to live this way, and make no mistake about it; this little machine that I’m typing on — and that you’re reading this on — is a drug, and it was made exactly for this, to allow us to imagine that there is an escape from the world’s inhumanity.  Someone told me something very interesting and terrifying about China the other day. This is not hearsay; he has relatives in China and is Chinese. Okay, so this is what’s going on in China — and why they are apparently now the world’s greatest power. After the pandemic hit  China eventually  managed to contain it quite neatly because they utilised big data to control their population. This means that they put digital data collection to practical use beyond just discovering the specific algorithm that helps your computer figure out what you will want to buy next. In China, apparently, the powers that be can keep track of your every move digitally — they know where you are going and what you are doing, and ergo, they can restrict your behaviour, if you are an ‘at risk’ person, accordingly. This makes terrifying sense and I assure you it is real.  I’m no saying this to depress you. I’m saying this so that you can understand what life will be like in the future. Yes of course, you can find others like you, who will want to hug and kiss and have sex, and sing and dance, etc, but it will be hard to find them, and you will have to make sure not to tell Theresa Tam. Ultimately it’s best to do what Big Pharma — and Dr. Fauci — tell us — wear a mask and go online for the pleasures you have been denied in real life. You will not be able to completely replace those real life pleasures; and you will still miss them. Maybe, as  in Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 you will join a secret society where people are allowed still, to be human? Maybe? So there is a kind of hope. But what you may need for the next little while at least, as the Beatles say, is a little help from your friends.

We have learned many things

from COVID-19.

1. It’s about quantity, not quality.
    The important thing is not how happy you are, but how many years you live. For too long, we have casually tossed off phrases like ‘let’s throw caution to the winds!’ as we down another whiskey shot. For some, ‘live hard, die young’ has been the motto, but this virus has taught us that we must become more and more cognizant of what shortens our lives. The thing to remember, is that though such a life may not seem enjoyable now -- if you expose yourself to illness and disease, you will most certainly pay for it later. So if you can possibly manage it — just don’t do anything. That’s the surest way to live a long, long life.

2. The old should be left alone.
    All those years we were hugging them and kissing them.  Sure, it was uncomfortable -- seeing them like that — ‘old’—  and imagining it might happen to us one day too. Now we know that it’s simply too dangerous for old people to have contact with the young. They must be put away somewhere— in buildings that no one enters — except for nurses and other trained personel, heavily supplied with PPE. Don’t worry, the old people will be fine. They can always chat with you on their iPads, and it will be virtually the same as having you there.

3. Stand together by standing apart.
    This is one of the most important of all the lessons. Before, we thought that when we were physically close, we were ‘together.’ What an old fashioned concept! We can be completely and utterly together in so many ways, even when we are far apart. Even more together in fact. We can send virtual hugs, kisses, pictures of our favourite pets, or just pictures of dogs and cats that we find on the internet and cherish, and want to share. We have to embrace the apparent contradiction (of course I mean embrace it virtually) and understand that being safe is what brings us all together. It's being unsafe that ultimately tears us apart.

4. Because, after all, home is where the heart is.
    This is undoubtedly the most important lesson to learn, but it’s most certainly the most difficult one. There have always been excuses for not staying home. “I’m bored’ or ‘I want a drink in a bar’ or, even:  'I want to pick up a street whore for casual sex! ’ Today, we can see how silly such sentiments are. Dorothy was right in The Wizard of Oz — ‘There’s no place like home.’ After all Dorothy traveled practically to another planet searching for happiness, when all the while that happiness was at home, on the farm — with ‘Auntie ‘Em’ and the three farm hands (who were not, in reality, a scarecrow a tin man or a cowardly lion). Once Dorothy realized her folly she also understood how silly the song ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ really was. (They didn’t put this in the movie, but that’s what happened.) Now this final lesson may be  difficult for some. Most of us -- with computers, yoga mats, and big backyards — will understand.  (And let’s face it, these days we all know for sure that there’s nothing better than a big backyard!). But there are those who  must be taught this lesson over and over again, because their situation is not exactly the same as ours. Let’s say for instance, that you are a young girl, and your father is an alcoholic and a drug addict, and you live in one room with him and your mother. Let’s say that he has always beat your mother. And late at night when your mother is asleep he sneaks into your bed and rapes you. Well lately, now with losing his job he’s been doing a lot more drugs. In fact each day during COVID-19 — when your mother is making the daily trip to buy toilet paper (masked, it’s a necessity!) — he rapes you for the second time that day. In this particular situation it may be harder for you to remember, little girl, that it is safer for you to be at home. But consider this. Let’s say you you were to go outside — or worse yet — try and run away.  And you might say -- ‘I’m young and I probably won’t get sick from COVID-19!’ While though that’s statistically true, l beg to differ. There are some cases in which children have suffered from a very rare limb inflammation disease that might be related to COVID-19. But never mind that! It’s about time — little girl — that you stopped thinking about yourself! If you run away from home you run the risk of infecting others with COVID-19. Others may die because of your selfish acts! Thank about that. Sure, your life seems troubling at home, and maybe it is troubling but when it comes down to it, what’s one more rape a day? What’s more important is that if you run away from home you may cause others to die. Listen little girl, you’d better start considering other people for a change — not just your own needs. After all, you are not alone on this planet!
    
5. It's wonderful, —when you think about it -- all the lessons we have learned from COVID-19. And if this horrible plague ever ever goes away (which won’t happen for a long time— and anyway —  it will probably be followed by another pandemic — even worse than this one) we will carry these lessons with us, forever. Yes COVID-19 has changed our lives. And ultimately, for the better, don’t you think?

I was so afraid

    that I rushed to my desk and wrote this. All I could remember, that is. It was a dream, wasn’t it? It must have been. We were gathered in a kind of luxurious bunker, and it was all my friends and sex buddies. But he wasn’t there, my lover — and I realised that for some reason this tragedy had kept us apart. There were vast windows looking out on numbing, terrifying vistas, I didn’t want to look, but of course I did, we all did, there were spirals of smoke swirling from the tops of buildings — whatever it was, it was a science fiction movie — but it was now happening to us, and we knew we were going to die soon, and that was the torture. There was nothing we could do. I touched someone, someone who I recognised, someone who I had touched many times before — but he didn’t recognise me and turned away. I considered getting very drunk. We were not listening to the newscasts, there was no point, and anyway we were afraid of what we might hear. We saw nothing before us but our own demise. I was wearing a Greek toga— it seems I had imagined it was some kind of party, but the various men that I knew there (or thought I knew) were ignoring me, when I turned to them they turned away. There was no laughter, if it was a party in honour of our own deaths. It seems we were together because we had to be, there was nothing else. And as we gazed out through that enormous wall of glass at the soul-destroying annihilation, well, we knew we were next.  I don’t think we can live this way any longer — and I don’t mean quarantine — I mean the fear and dread used against us. I don’t blame the lock down for my dream, I blame Dr. Fauci. I blame everyone who has ever used fear and dread as a kind of punishment. I’ve lived with fear and dread all my life — how many of us haven’t? And then there were the moments when the veil was lifted, when someone allowed me not to be afraid. First there was the social worker in group therapy who told me that it was alright for me — in my head  at least— to tell my mother off. And I did, in my head. I never told my her to her face — though when I told her that she was no longer my best friend (believe me, I know that sounds cruel but it was the only thing to do at the time) it was like telling her to jump in a lake, which was an important thing for me to do. (And she did jump, eventually, into the cool clear lake of alcohol, but not because of me, because of life). And then there was just — art, which lifted the veil, momentarily. (And there was my boyfriend who— and he said I could talk about him here — who gave me permission not to worry about being ‘the best’ anymore, which was a pretty huge thing for me, as I was eternally terrified that I wasn’t.) There was J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac and Frank O'Hara, and Noel Coward and Harold Pinter, and ‘the Barbaras' — Barbara Pym and Barbary Comyns — and Patricia Highsmith and Iris Murdoch and Rebecca West (really just The Fountain Overflows) Elizabeth von Arnhim and all the writers I loved. They gave me permission to relax. But that was an escape, it was an escape from dread, and to some degree, Daddy was still holding the ladder. (That’s Adorno’s metaphor.) You go to escape but when you’re halfway down the ladder with your fiancee in tow you look down and suddenly there’s Daddy — snarling, snorting, chomping at the bit. Which means it’s not easy ridding yourself of fear and dread. And so when some make it their job to utilise those two magical, hypnotic, lethally potent forces to keep you in line for their own special interests — which of course they deem to be yours (i.e.the public good) please don’t do it. No I won’t have it! It’s got to stop — they can tell us what to do, they can enforce the law, but do not manipulate my emotions do not make me afraid for your own special purpose. It used to be the only thing to fear was fear itself— but before that it was always a weapon. During syphilis it was a weapon. It was a weapon during AIDS. But we, the sluts, said 'no way.' I interviewed three people for Toronto Life magazine (1989?), there were two men and one woman with AIDS. Yes, they were diagnosed with AIDS, and the were alive and not on medication, and they were challenging the HIV paradigm, yes they were. You an look it up — I almost won a bloody journalism award for that damn article. And I’m not bragging, I’m just saying times have changed. Or maybe it was just that no one really cared about the fags, so we could be revolutionary, even about our illness. But we knew then — it was our shameful secret — that the doctors couldn’t scare us away from screwing. And when they went after us for blowjobs (‘well blowjobs might cause AIDS you can’t be sure!’) we just went out and had a lot of blowjobs. Because living in fear is not living. That’s what my dream was telling me. You cannot live in shame and fear and guilt and dread with people waving your fingers at you all the time, insisting you can and must be a better person. Screw you Dr. Fauci! Did they teach you that at medical school? That the best way to keep your patients healthy was to torture them with guilt and fear and shame and dread? It’s not for myself, or for those others who live in relative comfort, but for those can’t work from their homes, those for whom the deprivation is actually real, and especially for those who -- of the world -- were already fearful, never had any hope, never wanted to live, who never really wanted to leave the house ever. They. Will. Stop. Living. Is that the idea: to stop us all from living? I think so. Because living is about dying. It’s not about not dying. It’s about doing dangerous stuff — stuff that is dangerous to your health. Or else you may end up like I was last night, waking to a shivering doom and no way to lift the veil. I was there, I was really there, and the creature was slouching towards Bethlehem, it was the very end, and it wasn’t the dying, it was seeing it coming, and seeing no reason to go on living.

This is not a conspiracy theory but

 one can’t help wondering. When AIDS first appeared it was said to attack Haitians, homosexuals and drug addicts, a triumvirate that might be considered unsavory, at best, by most ‘right thinking’ individuals. But then the task of trying to decide who might set out to kill three such disparate groups was certainly beyond my own — and others’ - skill set. The extinction of these three constituencies would certainly have been considered desirable by many of those who, in contrast, are usually considered savory  — i.e. non-drug addicts, non-Haitians and heterosexuals. I gave up trying to figure that out. But I don’t want to give up on COVID-19. This, our latest ‘human catastrophe,’ clearly favors mega-corporations over small family owned businesses. But why in heavens name would a conspiracy favor one over the other? Surely family owned business are no threat to Google? But now, alas, it appears small businesses must go. And row it has been decreed that we must forever live our lives online. This, again serves Google. (But, really, are we going to blame Google for everything?) It gets more complicated when we realize that the activities that have been temporarily or perhaps permanently exiled from the human condition include singing, laughing loudly, and shouting — because of course these things spread germs. (There’s no doubt about that, because we have seen those germs in virtual graphic re-creations on news shows.) Then, to speak frankly (and you know I will), for those of us who enjoy our sex outside of marriage, well, we must give that up too, if for no other reason than most of the people you have sex with (if you are a slut like me) are people who only do it occasionally, and you are just lucky to get them on a bad night when they had a spat with their significant other. And if you knock off the market all germaphobes, hypochondriacs, and the sexual obsessives who were having sex not because they wanted to but because they felt obligated — and then you get rid of well, the human sheep (i.e. people who always do what everyone else does) —  then there is simply no one left to screw. With the singing, laughing, dancing and screwing gone, I was — quite early on on — ready to blame The Puritans, but Globe theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck talked me out of that. And how do we account for the clearly tragic gradual disappearance of the aged and the non-white? (Most COVID-19 deaths in the USA and Canada involve those who are either over 80 or ‘of colour.’) One would think Puritans of any ilk would approve of the very, very old — as they mainly just stay home and knit and worry about dying. Isn’t that what Puritans want people to do? And why would black or aboriginal people outrage The Puritans? Well I suppose black culture — in North America at least - seems to involve hyper-sexuality. But surely it’s mean spirited to do away with black people because of a music video culture that is clearly not really representative of most? But of course conspiracy theories are by nature mean spirited. So what is the organizing force behind our present pain? And don’t forget ‘the mad.’ (‘Mad’ is a term I much prefer over ‘mentally -ll’ — and some mentally-ill people seem to like it too. I mean why be ‘mentally ill’ when you could just be mad, which seems to include, by default, being devil-may-care and perhaps even charming — though perhaps in a somewhat alarming way?) What would Puritans have against ‘the mad’? At any rate we won’t have the mad to kick around anymore because so many have already committed suicide during lock down number one, and many will continue to commit suicide — what with medical experts dourly predicting, on the hour, that we must prepare for a ‘dark’ winter. So you can see my dilemma -- trying to come up with a theory that explains COVID-19 — but especially an elegant one? Because  isn’t that we want in a theory, most of all: elegance? Whether or not a theory makes sense doesn’t matter because we are not thinking beings but feeling ones; most of our so-called ‘rational’ thoughts are simply rationalizations. In terms of elegance, in theory — I’ve always been fond of the notion that the universe is gradually being sucked into a black hole. (I think we have Stephen Hawking to thank for that.) Then there’s the ‘big bang’ theory (wasn’t that Hawking too?). But the most elegant theory of all was the notion that AIDS was caused by gay men having sex with monkeys —I say elegant, because it is so unlikely and yet so outrageously appealing at the same time. No gay man in his right mind would be caught dead having sex with a chimpanzee. (Although I will admit I had sex with a man once who liked to imitate a chimpanzee. He made chimp sounds now and then during intercourse.  But he was not actually a chimpanzee, he simply wished to imagine he was one, And outside of being very hairy, he in no way resembled a real monkey.) Well maybe we are simply very stupid people and we will ultimately believe anything that anyone tells us if they shout it loud enough while wearing a mask. I think COVID-19 is caused by capitalism. I say that precisely because there is no rhyme or reason to it, and — outside of God or fate — capitalism is one of the few concepts to exist outside morality. Capitalism (like Donald Trump) does whatever it wants to make money. And there is no doubt that money will be made, and people will die, and I’m not quite sure why everyone is getting into a snit about it, as this has been going on for the last 400 years and very few seem to care.  Perhaps we are waking up — or just going to sleep — and as Gorgias said “sleep already begins to hand me over to his brother, death.” If we must die, it might as well be for no reason at all, unless we make one up, and that’s what being human is. (Making things up.) I would make up a reason for our deaths but capitalism wouldn’t be interested as there is very little money in it, unless you are an evangelist preacher, which I am not. So now I must be silent.

Something Shakespeare said....

  “Dost thou think
because thou art virtuous
there shall be no more cakes and
ale?”  
                             - (Sir Toby Belch)  

                                        Twelfth Night or 'What You Will'       

How to survive

COVID-19. Of course I don’t mean the disease — you have more than a 99% chance of surviving that, unless of course you are very old, or in some way otherwise infirm. We shall survive countless germs in our lives, that’s what our body is supposed to do, not something we should be afraid of. But there is the lockdown, there is the most depressing winter we’ve ever experienced in our lives  — and we are about to experience it, apparently — so they say, and who are any of us to argue? So I am here to help you survive that. And  don’t worry I’m not going to go on about my ‘covid-radical’ ideas. There are no ideas about COVID-19 that are confirmed. No, it’s called science — which is all about experimentation.  After some well documented experiment and a peer reviewed article today's certainty could be tomorrow’s bad facts. Speaking of which we live in the era of alternative facts — but facts were always ‘alternative,’ because ever since Aristotle, reason has been in the eye of the beholder. That is, the rational man with all the answers is only the man who wins the argument. But I’m not going to go on about all that; no.  I’m going to talk about your mental health. I’m going to try and stop you from committing suicide. Suicide has been happening a lot lately. More of my friends have died of suicide than from COVID-19. It’s partially because they are artists and ‘sensitive,' but let’s face it we’re all sensitive when push comes to shove. I know how to deal with this because I got through AIDS. And I know you think, oh, he’s gay, and he’s different — and that’s a different situation. Well if you think that  just stop reading this now. Fear and disease are the same whether it’s the ‘gay plague’ or what Trump calls the ‘China plague’: it’s all about fear. And the first thing you have to do is rid yourself of that fear. It was all fine and good to be afraid when the lockdown first started in March, off we went scurrying to buy toilet paper, it would only be a few months, after all. And then came the worrying talk about the ‘new normal.’ Well now we are there. We know what the new normal is. So we can adjust to it. But before we can adjust we have to stop being afraid. How do you stop being afraid? Well you just stop. But one thing that helps, one thing I learned — yes during AIDS— is this: pick some best practice for yourself, and then follow it. If it means not kissing the kids, or not having sex with your husband, so be it. If it means kissing your kids constantly and then going out at night to pick up strange men on the corner -- and not using protection -- so be it. I mean it. I truly mean it. We don’t know anything, everything changes day to day, and as I say there are no facts anymore anyway, the best thing to do is  decide on a plan of action and then follow it; no guilt, no fear, no second guessing. Of course you can always change your plan of action when you get a new set of ‘alternative facts.’ But you must, again, at that time — be comfortable and happy with your new set of rules. You can’t be worrying all the time. Let me tell you if we faggots worried every time some damn condom broke we’d all be dead from anxiety, never mind AIDS. So: fear gone. And your plan of action is ? — well whatever you decide. Whether or not to wear a mask is a decision based on scientific fact, which could change tomorrow, but there are laws that tell you that you have to wear it in -- let’s say --  the mall. So wear it in the goddamn mall, don’t be an idiot and get arrested. But please remember this. There is science, which is always changing. And there are alternative facts. But then there are out-and-out lies. Here are some of them:
‘Stand together by standing apart.'
‘A mask is love.’
‘We’re all in this together.’
The kind of people who say these things also tell you that even though the next six months are going to be hell, you can solve all that with a little yoga and a good book (oh and don’t forget that zoom chat!) ‘Stand together by standing apart’ is just Orwellian newspeak, it’s a blatant freakish, f-ing lie. By definition, if you are standing apart you are not together. You might say — but it’s a pleasant thought. Yeah a pleasant thought that might make you lose your mind. I’ll tell you what being together is — it’s hugging, kissing, screwing, putting your body parts in close proximity with another’s, dripping saliva all over each other, singing in someone’s face, dancing with someone, yelling at some one, performing for someone in the same room, holding hands, linking arms, rolling around in the grass, going to a party and passing a joint and having a group hug, a group grope, an orgy -- flirting, touching caressing and yes: penetrating. That’s what it means to be together. We have bodies and they are made to love and touch and yes f….k. If we don’t do that, we die. We are social animals -- unless we are sociopaths like Donald Trump. You may decide that you will never touch anyone again, but it will kill something inside of you — chances are — before COVID-19. What about  "a mask is love? “ No, I’ll tell you, I’ve been in love, am in love now, I can’t describe it, but it’s the opposite of a mask; no, the mask is down; after all, he knows everything I do, pretty well, and I do everything, pretty much for him. I do things I never imagined for him, quite regularly, I think about him dying, and then think about me dying and think it would be better if I died first, but then that would not be fair to him -- and it goes on and on. That’s love. It’s not a mask. It’s not a frigging mask. As for “we’re all in this together,” well, we’re not. I hate to be the first one to tell you this but we live alone and we die alone, and thus, ergo, it stands to reason or unreason: we need each other. We need each other like hell because we are so alone in this life — at the beginning and end — that we need at least to have those few moments in the middle when we touch. Yes, it’s all about touch. If you don’t touch each other you  die. So. That’s my COVID-19 advice. I’m sure it will get me in trouble but frankly I’d rather be touching somebody than anything else, and if you told yourself the truth (and that is the only truth, what you tell yourself, not what you tell other people) it’s everything  you want, too.

I remember when religion

 was private and sex was public. What does it mean for sex to be public? It means that it is not only polite to talk about sex -- it becomes obligatory dinner conversation. At certain festive gatherings it is suddenly de rigeur to speak of the sex you had last night — not only identifying the partner and perhaps the positions utilised — but also the device (dildo, tit clamps etc.). When we began doing this back in the 70s it was bragging — because we had never talked so brazenly before. And it was for gay men asserting what had been forbidden. Eventually it became a fine art, that is sexual discourse — because after all, sex is interesting. Like human beings, sex comes in infinite variety; one person’s feast is another’s famine. Ken McDougall used to go on about a man who licked him from head to toe — he moaned: ’It was heaven!’ But for me it would have been a certain kind of hell. Ken and I  had a friend, a musician  (he shall remain nameless) who was very beautiful, but for him sex was apparently a mystical experience. This again seemed to me a nightmare; to turn something which has as its primary value its very materiality into a prayer. Not that sex isn’t a kind of prayer; it certainly is, but it is a prayer for philistines who have only accidentally — and precipitously — fallen to their knees. But to say sex was public does not mean only that we talked about it openly, it actually happened in public, with people watching, either by accident or design. Group gropes were once commonplace -- and an integral part of theatrical presentations -- this was sexual liberation, it was believed we could discover not only other people’s bodies but their souls. I suppose it was a kind of religion because it replaced religion in the public square. But I still insist it was not mystical. God was not so much sensitive and all-knowing as extremely well hung. (The painting of Jesus that hung over my bed was very sexy — many of us had sexy pictures of a very white Jesus back in those days — and if he was not the actual subject of our first masturbation he might crop up, now and then, in our 'minds-eye'). The result of all this? AIDS? Not necessarily. AIDS is not the consequence of group gropes, but of a specific sexual act — the insertion of an orgasmic penis into a bleeding orifice. The raison d’être of a group gropes was not penetrating as many people as possible -- although that did sometimes happen of course -- but a plethora of human contact. Human contact is what it’s all about; what everyone requires, what keeps us healthy and alive. Today sex is no longer public, it has become quite unmentionable. Trans folk announce shockingly that their queerness has nothing to do with sex; young people are no longer proud sluts they are ‘gender non-binaries.’ Religion has taken over the public square. Religions are vast bureaucracies of varying degrees of corruptness (see: The Roman Catholic Church). They must necessarily recruit and lie -- the way any capitalist organization does. All this has nothing to do with the human spirit. What happens between oneself and one’s spirit — or the spirit of another, or the many spirits in the air — is a truly private matter; no one should talk about it or spread it around as they might COVID-19. Religion means simply a commonly held belief; or one should say a belief which is not actually believed, and certainly not practiced, but merely confessed to publicly, often displayed, often boasted of, and thus competitively asserted. The new religion is altruism; everyone talks about it, no one practices it. For instance; there is a quick solution to COVID-19. The people who die (except for those with mysterious unacknowledged co-morbidities which make up a very small portion of deaths) are the abject -- those who are not privileged, those people we do not in fact care about. People died in nursing homes and meat packing plants because they lived in appalling conditions unfit for humans. They were dying before COVID-19, but we refuse to admit it, for that would reveal our culpability. The majority of the COVID dead are also non-white. If we were to give these people access to health care and and basic human rights they would not die from COVID-19. We don’t want do that, but we insist that we do, fiercely displaying our public religion—  i.e. altruism — but the fact is we will never fundamentally change the social system because we don’t actually care about other people. Caring for others is difficult and time consuming. We would rather jaw endlessly about our evil neighbour who forgot to put on his mask. Last night I walked past a gay bar on Church street that was packed — as packed any bar can be these days. It’s called The Well, and it opened briefly and proudly for one night only before lockdown; The Well is now closed for a month. It’s what we all need. A place — like all gay bars — that offers the possibility of making sex public again — and making religion private. For some things just must not be spoken of; it is not sexual acts which are obscene but our hypocritical altruistic lies; they are the furtive greasy glue that holds society together. We want nothing less than to be thought perfectly good, and in our own minds we are.  Don’t ask if anyone remembers the Holocaust; we are living in it. Last night a man told me about his father. His father will soon be dying of cancer because his father will not get proper medical care, because of precautions taken due to COVID-19. Make no mistake. This Holocaust will be duly noted by future generations; and Hitler too — please don’t forget — often spoke of a uniquely German concern -- putting the common good above the individual good, performing his persuasive altruism. I know it’s not pleasant to think about it, but that’s the problem really. We wish for our imaginations to entertain and reassure us. Alas they will wither from this misuse and abuse; our minds-eye is the most valuable gift God gave us; it was meant to rock he world, not rock us to complacent sleep.