I finally figured

 out what drives me crazy about Starbucks. It’s not just that they’re all 'Woke Folk' (though they are) it’s that they’re having so much damn fun. It always irks me when the waiting staff at a restaurant is having more fun than I am. I mean they may frolic privately — but they should hide it, because their job is to serve you so that you will have fun. They are not the pleasure seekers but the purveyors of pleasure, and as such they should remain polite but silent. Strolling into any Starbucks is like attending a trans birthday bash in somebody's private home, all 'The Young Wokies' are whipping out their politically correct ‘isms, cooing their pet names at each other and sharing private inscrutable 'Woke Jokes.' Sorry guys. but I should be the one partying, not you. This used to drive me crazy years ago when I first 'came out.' It was fashionable then, to eat at Bemelmen's on Bloor. Of course all the waiters were gay, and probably screwing each other in the washrooms or the kitchen, and having a grand old gay time. And here I was, young and unsure of my new gay self, and as yet, unlaid, as I was finding it impossible to navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I resented those waiters terribly and even imagined they were laughing at me. (They probably were, as I sported an unruly curly mop top in those days, very unfashionable, which it took me nearly ten years to shave off so that I might morph into a respectable, if not exceedingly attractive, faggot.) If all this may strike you as classist, it is. I inherited it from my mother who was dastardly to all waiterly persons, in fact to any staff anywhere. Especially cab drivers. She considered all working people her private servants, and  treated them with the utmost disdain. One time she was in Port Elgin (she had followed an abusive man there; he wore 'transition lenses' — never trust anyone who wears those) and she was out in a taxi with her friend in some 'hell-and-gone' byway outside Port Elgin. Well, she started yelling at the cab driver and he (good for him) threw her and her friend out into a field in the middle of nowhere, and promptly disappeared (needless to say my mother and her friend survived). In restaurants with her I wanted to hide my head in shame because she was always browbeating some hapless waiter or other. I wanted to whisper  —“I’m sorry, even though she is my mother I know she’s a relentless bitch!’” The reason she was so classist is because she was working class -- her father was a farmer (my grandfather died young, mysteriously, in a barn fire) and my grandmother was a single mother and a teacher with no money. Because my mother (before she met my middle class father) spent most of her life struggling to make ends meet it was absolutely necessary for her to pretend she was rich, and to condescend to the 'little people.' For awhile she lived at The Sutton Place i.e. in a hotel. The moral of this (yet another tale of my mother) is that those who are most classist are often those from humble beginnings, as it is incumbent on them to shroud their origins in mystery. Noel Coward was such a person; he was born in a working class suburb and his father used to demonstrate organs in an organ store (sounds filthy doesn’t it?). Noel changed his accent, dressed up (but not too much, as he didn’t want to appear effeminate) and fooled most of the world into believing he was very upper class indeed -- which explains his affection for Princess Margaret and The Royals. Just a poor boy trying tomake good, and incidentally lying-- like a very fancy Persian rug. Noel Coward was the quintessential homosexual and always will be. Most gay men aspire to be like straights, and to be loved by them. Ever since gay marriage there’s been a kind of epidemic of this (though I’ve heard the the young are rejecting gay marriage, and I do hope so.) All this explains why you hate homosexuals so much. I know, I certainly do. (At last, the cats out of the bag, of course, I’m homophobic!) Most gay men are odious, pretentious, and repellent. But wouldn’t you be too -- if you’d gone through what they have? They resemble what James Joyce used to call ‘the New Irishman.’ These detestable men made a performance of not drinking and not being carefree and imaginative, but instead posed as down-to-earth, respectable citizens. Joyce found these ‘new’ Irishmen alarmingly pompous and wished them all dead. I must say I sometimes feel the same way about my own kind. Gay men are not effeminate because they take it up the ass, but because they are prissy, purse-lipped and uptight. They are the very definition of hypocrisy.“I draw the line there,” they say -- "I will be pissed upon but no one defecates on me!” Well, La-te-da. When Christopher Newton was my lover many years ago (I’m trying to impress you now) he  educated me in table manners -- as he said I would someday be invited to grand gay houses fro dinner.  Needless to say I wasn't. I still chow down in my own way, thank you, and have no illusions about it. And of course, I’m not talking about food. 

It’s not true,

really. That is, nothing is — and that’s the point. I haven’t written a lot of blogs, probably won’t write a lot more, mainly because I was traumatized by COVID — too many blogs — I wrote one every day and my life depended on them. My God, I’m sitting in a Starbucks in the heart of Leslieville and I don’t know if I can stand it here, the neighborhood is so bloody privileged and white and oh dear. Three girls trashed me in this Starbucks last week for walking too slow (i.e. arthritis). I told them to fuck off. They were three pretty, conceited, well-off girls and I just wanted to kill them. I said I was disabled and they had the gall to argue back— JESUS. The atmosphere in this Starbucks is incredibly toxic, everyone is super nice but at the same time totally poised to get into a fight about identity politics. And there are so many white people with babies. And so many nauseatingly perfect homosexuals. I just want to scream; but I’ll write this instead. Anyway, I have a bad taste in my mouth about blogs, after Covid-19. Strange, as I was fine after having my life somewhat destroyed by The Vivek Shraya Blog — or thought I was  fine— but it was writing movie blogs everyday during COVID that really did me in. I felt like a word whore, a literary prostitute; I was writing just to get through the day. But also what’s the point of expressing your opinions anymore? People are so generally hateful and eager to dismiss you as evil. Civil discourse is over as far as I’m concerned, so I try and keep my discourses uncivil. Like this. I wish it were a poem so I’ll try and make it more like one. I haven’t kissed a really pretty boy barely half my age — in at least a month — and it’s driving me crazy. I know I’m old and mouldy and to top it all off I’ve been suffering an arthritis attack (hence the slowness) which means I’m even scarier to the young than I usually am. Oh yes, I quite forgot (not to suddenly go all British on you!) but my therapist recently suggested that I need to not expect too much of myself anymore as I am aging. I know it sounds horrible but she’s right. In other words life just isn’t the way it was before; I’m not the centre of all things, and shouldn’t expect to be, and I should enjoy my anonymity and my work, as there is no need to get anywhere, I should just feel damn lucky that I’m still alive and have enough money to live on. Oh, by the way, can you believe all this hysteria about the two little black girls who were ignored by a mascot at a Sesame Street Theme Park? I mean yes, I would totally sympathize if it was a real human being that had purposefully ignored two black girls. But a mascot? My sister actually makes mascots (I hope she does’t mind me mentioning her) so I feel I have some sort of affinity with them. Sometimes I feel like a mascot, bobbing my way through life trying to make a good impression — but not really connecting — you know? Also a very dear friend of mine was once Polkaroo. He’s very tall and the costume fit.  (Also I was the genie in Dudley the Dragon once, and I had to act with a mascot-like creature, i.e. Dudley, which was weird.) I mean I know mascots are not real people. There are really people in them, but those real people are also trying to navigate a contraption, with fans on, and without really being able to see. And the person hiding in the ‘racist’ mascot claims that the mascot was not being racist, but just couldn’t see the girls because they were so short. That certainly makes sense to me, and I’m actually more worried about the mama of the girls turning them into professional victims by telling them that ‘Rosita’ ignored them because they were black. Let me tell you something, it’s probably better in the long run for children to come to terms with the fact that mascots may never notice you. Feeling depressed because a mascot won’t hug you is a bit like saying  “I saw Robert De Niro’ in The Godfather when I was very depressed. Yet he just refused to sympathize — and went on about The Mafia!” On the other hand what I do approve of, is that these little children obviously believe that 'Rosita,' a fictional character, really exists. I too believe that fictional characters exist. I have been reading novels by Stella Gibbons (of Cold Comfort Farm fame) and I’m telling you every one of Gibbons’ plucky little heroines is me. I live their anxiety with them, and I am obsessed with whether or not the beautiful boys they love will love them back.  If you think it’s odd that a 70 year old Doctor of Philosophy (i.e. me) imagines himself a teenage girl now and then — well get used to it. I never had a proper adolescence. This morning I was reading  Margaret Mead who was talking about the Polynesian Islanders sending their teenagers into little huts to experiment sexually when they reach adolescence --yet there were no unwanted pregnancies, and the kids turned into  happier adults than you or I. I never had my gay adolescence when I was supposed to — so I still want boys to notice me, and I’m still mortally wounded when they don’t. (Sigh!) Maybe that's why I shouldn’t write blogs. They become embarrassingly personal, as it’s useless to try and convince you of an actual idea anymore — as you’re all so set in your ways and resistant to thought. So all I can hope for is to send you a postcard from my reality, which, like any postcard, will be wacky, sad, and a little confusing. “Having a great time. (I think!) Wish you were here! Oh by the way, who are you?"

THE FORGIVEN is

a gorgeous film by John Michael McDonagh — Martin MacDonagh’s brother (Seven Psychopaths). But it will die an ignominious death -- killed by the cowardly, politically correct critics that would have it be something it is not. You see, because The Forgiven a film about decadent colonials in the desert, it, must, necessarily, be about how horrible white people are. But the critics have decided the white people in this particular flick are not bad enough. Generally the film is being damned with faint praise — “it has nothing fresh or insightful to say about the ugliness of white privilege. It’s like attending a weekend bacchanal and forgetting what happened once Monday morning rolls around, or perhaps not wanting to remember.” The Forgiven is ‘decadent,’ which means that people drink, and take drugs, and have sex (in excess) something which we prefer to pretend ceased after Covid-19, or after AIDS — or whenever it was that we all became so bloody self-righteous. The Forgiven has been accused of homophobia because the director is evidently “saying something by making two gay lovers the story’s most conspicuous embodiments of neocolonialist excesses.” Right. Sure, much of the action takes place at a semi-orgy hosted by gay couple Matt Smith (Smith is the new Neil Patrick Harris — see: Mobius) and Caleb Landry Jones (who must be gay, because he has no personal life on Wikiipedia). I for one, am ecstatic to welcome a decadent gay couple once again to the silver screen! Not since Michael York and Helmet Griem in Cabaret have we seen the likes of 'em! I’m so tired of  gay film couples who are mixed-race, married, living in the suburbs, adopting twins -- and who  have to unctuously deal with that homophobic/racist pa -- and one is a teacher and the other is a cop. And they don’t drink or swear, or do anything interesting. So, like — where’s the fisting? I have no problem with movies or plays that represent gay men as drunk, and/or stoned, and sex-crazy, and promiscuous, as that’s so, dare I say it — true to life! But apparently faggots in movies these days must be squeaky clean. And then there is the one moment — I kind of relished it, because I know people will necessarily be scandalized— belonging to  Ralph Fiennes (I forgot to mention he plays the leading character; a very sweet yet detestable man who kills an Arab child by accident, and then spends the rest of the movie paying for it). Well Fiennes goes on about how Morocco is the destination ‘vackay’ for ‘pederasts,’ citing Allen Ginsberg. (Unfortunately the word ‘pederast’ has been made meaningless by Christians who throw it around like an old football. They insist, for instance that Joe Biden is a pederast. Whaaaa?) But I don’t think Allen Ginsberg was a pederast. No, no, he was an epheberast, which is something quite different. In  case you don’t know what ‘epheberast’ means, it’s someone who falls in love with teenagers. You won’t find a definition online because of the prevalent societal hypocrisy. The whole of western culture is ardently epheberastic — it started with James Dean,  and climaxed, for many I’m sure quite literally -- with Miley Cyrus’ saucy twerks. And Fiennes’ character in The Forgiven, after all, is speaking the truth somewhat. Gay men who live in uptight western countries have, historically gone to Morocco to dally with gorgeous and very willing Moroccan boys. (You see sex before marriage is forbidden in Muslim culture, ergo, the ‘love that dares not speak its name’ flourishes. Homosexuality in fact flourishes anywhere the ‘powers that be’ forbid young men to touch young women — so, also in the city of Naples, and in the U.S. prison system.) Yes. I knew two quite celebrated epheberasts who loved Morrocco. They were both also quite prominent figures in the Canadian literary world: Bill Glassco and Scott Symonds. I can talk about them now, because they’re both dead (though occasionally dead hands do rise from the grave to grapple with me). I was told that Glassco had a house in Morocco -- by his fellow epheberast Scott Symonds  —when Scott visited me once. That was a debacle. I was sitting at home minding my own business when Scott knocked on the door and said “I’m Scott Symonds, and you’re Sky Gilbert, and we definitely should meet.” So I let him in. We talked for a bit about how repressed Canadian culture was, and then for some reason he ended up in my bedroom all by himself (I think he asked 'if he could see it') and when I came back with our iced teas (or whatever I was getting for him) I found he had slipped one of my porn videos into the VCR and was masturbating. I had to kick him out. But that’s another story. Anyway, The Forgiven tells it like it is, daring to see both white colonialists and Moroccan muslims as human beings — as flawed but still sympathetic, and the film kind kind of equates the two cultures. This is its fatal flaw, as presently right and left wing enthusiasts would have us see Muslims and Christians as irreconcilably different. Sorry to be the bearer of paradoxical tidings, but we’re all human, and kinda loveable  — that is, when we’re not being hateful — whether we are Muslims, Christians or just decadent fags.

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!)