Archives for posts with tag: glenn beck
Greenpeace demonstrating against Esso. March, ...

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Dinner with Jason, Jennifer, Hilary and Rex Weyler.

What an incredible man!

I will let you discover who he is and what he does.

Discussed his film…the film he wants to make with Viggo Mortensen about the creation of and how he co-founded Greenpeace.

We discussed potential directors and (rather unusually) how much a film like this might cost.  Can one really justify spending 50 million dollars on a film?  Really?

Naturally we discussed Egypt and how when the people speak governments are forced to take notice.  We congratulated Julian Assange.  We mourned the dead in Bahrain.  We wondered about Israel.

The demonstrations in Madison Wisconsin are particularly heartening as are the angry British protestors who are presently targeting Barclay’s bank over claims of tax avoidance.

Is this Glenn Beck’s ‘coming insurrection’?  Let’s hope so.

Ultimately the question one has to ask ones self is:  Am I prepared to take a bullet for what I believe?

I told him that I knew people who were oblivious of what was going on in Egypt.  In fact more than half of all Americans were not aware of what was happening in Egypt.

Why are people not more inquisitive?





















My irritation with Glenn Beck is balanced almost perfectly with my frustration for Barack Obama.  It is easier to listen to Glenn’s simplistic message (as it has always been when the right open their stinking mouths) than Obama the intellectual buffoon.

The problem, yet again, when the left of center are swept into power by the cheering crowds (when the pendulum swings) is that they are woefully unprepared to deliver what the people want.  When the right get into power they let off bombs and create armies and the fearful are made safe, the patriotic are assuaged, the rich rub their hands in glee.

When the left of center are elected they ‘negotiate’ with their enemies, they want to be ‘bipartisan’ and have absurd ’round table get togethers’ with their opponents to ‘sort everything out’.

Of course I am disillusioned by Obama just like you are.  I cried when he was elected.  I was so happy.  He promised so much and has delivered so little.  He and his administration cow tows to the likes of Glenn Beck.  Obama moans and whines, he says pathetically that “change is hard”.

Was the only ‘change we could believe in’ the black faces of the first family?  Was that it?

For those faces to then be called liars out loud by pasty white-faced congress men?  For those same black faces to doff their caps to people like Glen Beck?   To be called racists? Obama has not adequately taken the reigns because deep down he fears the consequences, he may be president but he does not behave like a president.  His rhetoric is merely that..rhetoric.  Hollow promises, empty gestures.  He looks haunted, like those negro men and women in the black and white photographs taken in the deep south, covering their heads as the police hit them with batons.

He looks beaten.  He sounds washed up.

Yet, all it would take is just one moment of clarity, one moment to take back his power, a moment of shock and awe.  It is unlikely to happen.  He is just too busy having his photo taken like JFK in the oval office with his little daughters.

Last week a friend of mine confided in me she had heard from reliable sources that Obama would not run a second term and that Hillary would be elected and everything would be just the way we want it.  Bullshit. Of course a second term for Obama is unlikely but not because Hilary is waiting in the wings to take the crown that was promised her. The people will choose a simpler message, a familiar message.  One that they can understand.  Change maybe what they want but they have washed their hands of change.  It’s too complicated.

The nation is crippled, the people are meek and fat and stupid and unable to change anything.  The nation is crippled by inactivity, inertia, fear.

The banks and their paid friends in government have deliberately crippled the USA.  They will do nothing to heal this country until they have an elected government who sees things exactly their way.

When the dependable right get back into power..everything will change.  Lending practices, house prices, small business..all will suddenly change and the people will breathe a sigh of relief.  The banking reforms will vanish, the Obama health care system will too.

My friends tell me that President Obama has achieved much but they forget that I come from a country where real socialists have changed the fabric of society for the good and the bad.  Where the pendulum really swung, where the people were represented and the legacy of that extreme governance is health care, education, infra structure.  That’s all I want for you.  So I do not have to endlessly put my hand in my pocket for the steady stream of homeless beggars now on every street in America.  Millions of desperate unemployed.

Obama has achieved nothing of any consequence, no real and immediate healthcare, no real financial reform.  How could he?  He surrounded himself with banking insiders.  Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner are complicit in the devaluation of your house, the loss of your job and as one government melded seamlessly into another oversaw a massive banking Ponzi scheme: the banks took your TARP money tripled the value of it and with huge grins on their bloated faces returned chump change to you the people.

Nowhere else in the world did this happen so effectively than here in the USA.  The Americans tried exercising monetary hegemony in Europe but the European Union is too disperate.  There are simply too many politicians from too many fractured political parties to bully and bribe and most of them have more integrity in one member’s little finger than the entire American congress and senate put together.

The European Union cannot be bought.  This explains the British ruling elites fear of the Euro, the European Union and everything east of the Channel.  Yet, look at what is happening in Europe.  The economies are growing, the people did not lose their homes, communities were not compromised.

We have had revolution in Europe.  Revolution is essential to destroy the status quo for the status quo is not good for the people.  It is good for the few.

The media and Obama hating pundits, as well they might, evoke the ghosts of the French Royal family but Michelle Obama is no Marie Antoinette.

It is easier for us to discuss Michelle’s vacations and high-waisted fashion faux pas than the dead and the maimed and the wounded in our fruitless wars.  Fruitless, unless you are the owner of a munitions factory or a service industry dedicated to war.  We will never be able to stop profligate war funding because we are coerced by the rich to believe it is our patriotic duty to support our troops by giving them more and more money as our schools rot and our teachers become beggars.

I am eager for revolution in whatever form it may take.  The people voted for Obama not to be meek or timid or careful of his enemies but to take back what had been stolen from us during the Bush years.  To restore what Glen Beck is now touting..some American honor.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have chipped away at the truth of Barack Obama so that today more and more Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim, that he bailed out the banks, initiated the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

They believe that Obama is not and has never not and has never been a bone fide American.  They believe that he is not like them, that he has become president by suspect means.  That the good people of America could never have deliberately elected a black man and his descended from slaves wife.  How could that have happened?

Their racist outrage has never been stamped upon, outlawed, mocked.  Why?   Because we were too busy, like bullied kids in the playground, crying and running away after trying to befriend and engage those who are simply incapable of listening.

The house by day is magical.

Jason and Hillary, quite separately, popped by and both brought lunch.  Hillary arrived with a friend’s dog called Willy who decided to pee on everything the moment he came indoors.

Hillary made a delicious gazpacho and Jason brough chevre and smoked salmon.  Three mad brits eating an Enid Blyton lunch in our tree house over looking the ocean.

I ate bread which I bitterly regret having eaten today.  I am bloated and my tummy aches.

The house after dark can be a little noisy.  I lay in the dark listening to the raccoons squabble, the coyote’s howl and the owls hoot.   The little dog had a restless night, so, of course did I.   He was up and down the stairs shouting at anything that disturbed him.  After an hour of this nonsense I closed the windows and he slept peacefully.

It was meant to be in the 100’s all week but by last night in Malibu it was colder than Whitstable.  I am sure the firemen are very happy as there have been so few wild-fire warnings.  Everything is very damp in the morning from the thick mist that rolls off the sea.

Jason left and Hillary and I decided to take the dogs for a long walk along the length of the new road (Rambla Pacifico) that leads to the PCH.  The house is now walkable from the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) and since they started building the Rambla Pacifico extension empty lots are now for sale, lot owners who abandoned their lots 26 years ago are on the mountain with contractors discussing driveways and bedrooms with ocean views.  There is a certain excitement up here which cannot be ignored.

I applaud myself for paying so little for this house.  I just KNEW that one day the road would be built..who knew that it would be so soon?

Apparently I am not the only resident who regularly walks the muddy track which will one day be our new road/life line.  We saw a man armed with shopping bags marching over the hillocks.  Everyone is so impatient to feel less isolated.

It is only a few weeks until the rainy season starts so they must get a move on and finish this project.  The worst that could happen is that heavy rains come before it is finished and all their hard work is washed away.

If only Malibu would buy the road so it can be used by everyone rather than a select few.

Watched TV until midnight…yes there is a TV here and fell into bed.  I watch home improvement shows and laugh gently at how cheap and ill-conceived the ‘improvements’ are.

The Lil Dog was exhausted from running after Willy all day and his long walk but not, apparently,  exhausted enough.

P.S.  The despicable Glenn Beck is holding his reclaim America from anyone who isn’t white rally today in Washington.  For those of you who underestimate the ambition of people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin I urge you to take notice of their message.  They are determined to undermine the goodwill and inclusive character of this great country and, my friends, they will succeed just like their right-wing predecessors.  They will use all the usual tactics:  fear mongering, false patriotism and the invocation of their malevolent God.  These men and women are not clowns, we cannot afford to grandly sneer at their absurd antics.  For as the liberal elite laugh in their grotesque faces they are gathering speed.  If we are not very careful it will be soon too late for those of us who believe in freedom to stop them for we were too busy laughing.

without beard in sydneyWhenever some catty reader tells me to go home to the UK because I write optimistically for positive governmental change, fair taxes or that there might be a public option in the healthcare bill-where am I meant to go?  I live here!  Some of you can be very cruel, writing vile and damning notes to me-do I care about your vile and damning notes?

Do I fuck!  It takes a great deal more than a few inarticulate insults to upset this old goat.

What could any of you possibly do to upset me?   Well, like my errant lover, you could keep me hanging around LA waiting for you when all I want is you beside me-that’s pretty unsettling.  I am unsettled. Bemused by adolescence.

Even though I know you are fragile, it’s hard not to be selfish.  I love you. I need you.

I want to fuck you.

However, I loved laughing with you last night Mr. Darling NYC.  Sitting together by the fire in Malibu with Chris. Laughing like we should be doing when two people meet and fall headlong into…whatever men like us fall into.  I wish there was a word for that exciting moment just before you fall in love.

I couldn’t sleep last night.   I remembered the giant from twin peaks.

This is all I am permitted to say.

So, I was thinking about just how lucky I am surrounded by like-minded friends who want the best for all of us-rather than just themselves.

I was thinking about God and how regardless of circumstance I am never alone because I have faith.

A great deal of faith.

There’s a man in a smiling bag.

I have faith that the good of the people will overcome the evil in men’s hearts.

I was thinking about being a liberal.   I was wondering what American’s mean when they say the word ‘liberal’?  When they think of a liberal what do they see?  I was thinking that in some countries even Glenn Beck would be perceived as a liberal and that it’s all a matter of context.

Actually, regardless of whichever country Glen Beck lived, he would still be a simpering, self-obsessed cretin – a suppurating sore on the backside of humanity.

Unable to sleep I was thinking a great deal last night-holding my lover in the night gently snoring and fragile in my arms.

Without chemicals he points.

Having been one, I was thinking about the British Aristocracy.   Drunk aristocrats, dressed in tartan, over glasses of port rueing the day the British media went bad, nostalgic for a truly right wing rag.

Some would raise a glass to Oswald Mosley.

I met Oswald Mosley,  leader of the British Union of Fascists and his beautiful wife Diana Mitford in Paris when I was 19.    By the time I met him he was a demented old man wracked with Parkinson’s disease.  Lunch was cancelled because he took a dump in the sitting-room-I remember the smell and thought to myself  ‘that was a stinky poo’.

Until his dying day, Oswald Mosley was convinced that the British people would eventually come to their senses and call him home to lead the country he believed vehemently he was born to lead.

Oswald Mosley was not a rogue British fascist.  It is well known that had Hitler invaded the United Kingdom the aristocracy, of whom Hitler was in awe and had great sympathy, made a pact to hold onto what they owned.  Edward VIII‘s pro-German views made him a source of concern for the British government. “He’d always admired Hitler. He was, frankly, very pro-Nazi,” says John Julius Norwich.

Edward’s affair with Wallis Simpson – an American with a racy past, who was even more pro-fascist than Edward – was of great worry to the Royal Family. In 1936, Edward gave up the throne. The couple married as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 1937, and went on a tour of Nazi Germany, finally settling in Portugal. While Adolf Hitler plotted to seize the duke and use him as a puppet king, Churchill banished him to the Bahamas – where he could do the least damage to the British war effort.

I want to write about the private option.

The man I met in New York, the scruffy handsome man is gone.  There’s no two ways about it.  Gone, gone, gone. I just didn’t call him back and now friends are calling pissed at me for my summary dismissal.   One night he lays there in my arms as gently as a baby the next he is on the streets diving into gay bars in The East Village.

Jake bauman Jake Bauman

That, my friends, is the way it is in the life of a sex addict.

What do these things mean?

LUNCH:  Cold poached chicken with watercress sauce.  Delicious.

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random Malibu interior

I climbed Runyon.  It didn’t shift the feeling of rage that shook my body after a curt little note from Adam at the American Foundation for Human Rights.

I met Adam after the Precious event at the Chateau Marmont.  I showed some interest in the human rights work he is involved in.  I offered to help.  We became Facebook friends.  I offered to take Adam to lunch.  Adam said he was available after Thanksgiving.  I emailed him once again today.

Adam replied that he didn’t have time to meet to discuss the Foundation before say, February.  He is ‘stressed’ too stressed, apparently, to think that maybe somebody like me could actually help.  Adam will be appearing, however, in a choir, carving pumpkins and decorating his Christmas tree with ‘friends’ and ‘family’ during the holiday season. Adam, as you can imagine, is ‘single’.

Before I launch into this I just want to remind you that I have devoted my life as an artist and filmmaker and now TV personality to serving the gay community.  My last gay film, The Picture of Dorian Gray a reworking of the original text by Oscar Wilde was either the opening or closing night film at 5 major gay film festivals around the world and played in over 300 others.  This film followed in the footsteps of 5 previous films.  When Jimmy Kimmel said publicly, mockingly that he had not heard of me my response was why should he?  He doesn’t go to gay film festivals but there are many thousands of us who do.  Before becoming a filmmaker I made theatre primarily for a gay audience.  My credentials as a bone fide, committed, gay artist and cultural aficionado are without doubt.

I watched the promotional video on the site of the American Foundation for Human Rights.  The gay men at the heart of the Prop 8 human rights case were dressed anonymously, the lesbians like a man and a woman.  The representative for the Foundation earnestly telling the rapt audience that they were going to find ‘justice’.   The straight lawyers from ‘across the political divide’, already married to heterosexuals, were coming together so that gay men and lesbians who ‘deserved’ equal rights could get married just like them.  As usual, they spent time invoking and quoting and channeling the ubiquitous Dr. Martin Luther King, as usual ignoring the irritation this causes black men and women who are loathed to let the gays appropriate their tireless martyred hero.

Why should that be you wonder?  Why should the black community want to hold so preciously onto Martin Luther King?  Why do they feel that their struggle is so different to ours?

Well, for a start the gays can’t muster enough of a consensus to find one man or one woman who speaks their truth or to their condition.  There is no face to the voice that whines and complains.  I suspect the black community loath comparisons between their struggle and ours because we so rarely struggle.  Because they really did struggle: appalling, life threatening, daily, no reprieve, at the back of the fucking bus struggle.

If you take time and look at Dr King’s timeline scarcely a month passed when he was not actively risking his life for equal rights, where he marched in hostile neighborhoods,  where he calmly faced a sneering, Glenn Beck type media.

When he was assassinated there were riots in 130 cities, 20,000 people were arrested.  There were riots in 130 cities.

Dr King galvanized his community as a leader could galvanize ours.  Where is our fearless leader?

When did the gay men you know really fight for equality?  When did the gay man you know last risk his life or risk being arrested or simply hand a leaflet to a person outside of WeHo or Chelsea or your cities gay ghetto?  When did he take real risks for what he believed in?  When did he let someone who never previously met a gay man know him so that that someone could put a face to the notion on the ballot before he/she voted?

Every time we say Dr Kings name in regard to our struggle we choose to overlook the history of slavery, emasculation, lynching, rape, child abuse, murder etc. etc.  But mostly we choose to ignore our own dirty little secret:  the appalling racism that exists in the gay community.  Let me say it again:  we simply overlook this most shocking fact.  Endemic RACISM in our own community.

  • According to a 2008 study, racism against gay Asian/Pacific Islander men leads to socially and contextually prescribed sexual roles for that may also contribute to the practice of unsafe sex among this group.
  • According to a 2000 survey conducted of LGBT African-Americans in nine U.S. cities, a third of respondents reported negative experiences in predominantly white LGBT organizations and with white LGBT persons in bars and clubs.
  • In 2005, Les Natali, the owner of a gay bar named Badlands located in San Francisco, was criticized by the city’s Human Rights Commission who determined that thirteen instances of racial discrimination by the staff occurred. Examples include refusal for entry by African-Americans, white patrons being served first even though African-Americans were first in line among others.Badlands was picketed by a diverse group of community activists over several weeks to bring attention to the situation and a group, And Castro For All (AC4A) was formed that has continued to promote dialog about racism in LGBT communities.
  • In 2006, there were reports of verbal attacks on gay Latinos by gay whites in The Castro district of San Francisco. John Mendoza, a protest organizer against racism in the Castro, said he was told by a gay white male to “go back to Mexico, you fucking wetback, where you belong”. A rally was staged in response.
  • Drag queen and performance artist Chuck Knipp has been criticized by anti-racism advocates for his character Shirley Q. Liquor. Knipp performs his act in blackface, and makes comments about blacks and black culture which some people consider offensive. Several protests have taken place and Knipp has canceled several of his shows.
  • Some LGBT media outlets have been criticized for not putting a racially diverse representation of gays and lesbians in their works, like magazines such as The Advocate and gay-themed television series such as Queer as Folk.Shows such as LOGO’s Noah’s Arc utilized more gay people of color in their casts.
  • The late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe produced a work called The Black Book which many gay, African-American artists have called fetishistic, racist, and demeaning.

Thought you might not know that stuff.  Think you might hesitate before quoting Dr King next time?

As usual this Human Rights Foundation is merely a money making machine for more over paid lawyers. Lawyers and more lawyers feeding off of the carcass of our community.  Using the same old routes expecting a different destination.

Why is it so difficult for us to find our own Dr King?  I want my own brave, eloquent gay leader?  Can we get ourselves a leader who galvanizes our community?  I very much doubt it.  Unless he’s a porn star of course or Ellen.

Another thing.  When I walk the streets in my gay neighborhood I get pestered for cash all the time by pro gay marriage beggars.  Can we spend our communities money wisely-I suggest we spend it on pro-gay aren’t we fab type advertisements, on outreach, on being visible to people who might not know who we are but hold the deciding vote?  So, when and if the time comes we are known, that our faces and stories are known beyond our gated community.

I am sure Adam is a very nice boy.  I am sure his friends and family will appreciate his ‘time’ during the holiday season.  I am only sorry that, as usual, there seems to be no time for those of us who have engaged successfully with changing the law in our own country without pissing off a community that suits a comparison but not a shared culture.

Some of us want to get involved, feel included without being shoved condescendingly to the sidelines by prissy queens who seem, by their Facebook profiles to know tribes of identical men with identical, mediocre hair cuts and manicured histories and no idea what it is to be risky beyond snorting crystal and barebacking.

P.S.  I had a dream that every man I ever objectified lay in a pile of naked, rotting pink and brown tangled limbs.  Every man I ever slept with, fantasized about, intrigued with.  Every man from straight college man dot com, from Sean Cody dot com, Corbin Fisher dot com-they were all there. Rocky, Max, Tucker, Rider, Sean.  A mountain of dead bodies, a heap of  pristine white underwear, blue jeans, teeshirts, huge piles of expensive sneakers.  Every man I ever wanted, however briefly, a useless, decaying memory.