Is Jesus a Homophobe? Do you mean Jesús Gomez, my gardener?

If you haven’t seen Jesus The Musical, where he performs I Will Surivive, it’s only a couple of minutes long and sooooooo worth it!!!

Now, did my title offend you? No? Too bad, that’s what I was going for.

A couple thousand years ago, (mostly) illiterate middle-eastern camel herders passed legends on to each other. Legends about a god that was kind of a combination of all the gods that came before him. Before Jesus was born on December 25th, the all mighty Mithra was born on December 25th of the virgin Anahita. He too had 12 companions or “disciples.” His sacred day was Sunday, “the Lord’s Day,” hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ.

Before that there was Horus who was apparently:

Conceived by a virgin, Isis-Meri (not Mary but . . .)

His conception was announced by an angel to Isis, his mother.

Did I mention Krishna? Sent from heaven to earth in the form of a man? Had an earthly father who was a carpenter? Resurrected? Celebrated a last supper? Apparently people in that part of the world were nowhere near as creative as Tolkien or even J.K Rowling for that matter. I care as much about whether the X-tian Jeebus was a homophobe as I care if Zeus liked spicy chicken wings, Hamlet liked 400 thread count sheets or Goldilocks was a good housekeeper. Jesús Gomez on the other hand, it would matter if he was a homophobe, because he’d probably get angry at me peeking out into the garden in summer to see him working with his shirt off.

NOTE: Spanish gardener/staff jokes are only racist if you’re not Spanish, but as I am, I’ve got carte blanche.

Escorting, Gay Hang-Ups and Getting Over Myself

A reader asked me this week why I’d done porn, and after giving a short and incomplete answer, I’ve decided the topic merits a proper response.

The story begins in Madrid at a club called Pasapoga. Formerly an old theatre where Frank Sinatra once performed it was transformed into one of the most popular gay clubs in Spain.  It retained its glamorous frescoes, red velvet curtains and crystal chandeliers.  It was a summer evening and the music boomed, I smoked More cigarettes then, the thin long brown ones. I was on a

Pasapoga

campaign of self-transformation and although I’d had a few boyfriends and a whole lot of casual sex, a major problem remained: I could only do it whilst intoxicated. Why? A combination of fear, self-loathing and internalized homophobia. My  conscious, logical mind knew the guilt and the shame were rubbish and found a way around my subconscious mind by drugging it. Kind of like giving one’s self a roofie.

I’d left the upstairs bathroom at Pasapoga and stopped at one of the balconies to look down. A vision of blue and purple flashing lights and shirtless men. I could see from the corner of my eye that a man in his forties was watching me.Unlike the barely clothed rest of us he was wearing a dark

Me in the Pasapoga days

blue suit. He couldn’t have looked more out of place. I went back downstairs to get another drink and he followed. As I reached for my wallet he stepped in and handed the bartender a bill. I smiled at him and explained it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted. We sat down together on one of the red tufted sofas and he told me his story. He was the person I probably would have become if my conscious mind wasn’t such a loud-mouth anarchist. In fact he sounded just like me. He had a problem with having gay sex, but his way to deal with it wasn’t to get drunk or take drugs. Instead, he paid for it. He said it made it seem like a business transaction rather than sex. He could remove himself from the experience, compartmentalize it. These days I ask myself how someone who understands what’s wrong with them doesn’t make an effort to fix it, indulging the problem instead. That pattern is self-destructive on every level. Being his age and never being able to honestly face one’s self seems like such unnecessary self-inflicted torture. Next, came his proposition. My ridiculous polite response was the same as before, “Oh no, that’s not necessary”. Yes, my reaction to being propositioned in a sex for money transaction was it’s not necessary. What I meant was, hey, I’m drunk, you’re cute, let’s go, no cash necessary. What he understood was, he wants more money than I offered. That’s when he multiplied his initial offer by five. My mild indignation was immediately substituted by a grin. The strange realization that the weird awkward teenager who thought he was hideous and different, turned out to be the sort of person a cute guy was willing to pay to touch. Conscious mind was doing a little victory dance with a baseball bat in one hand while it prepared to beat- up subconscious mind. I accepted, and it was a great night, it was also the beginning of me breaking down my many sexual hang-ups. I was an escort (polite term for rent-boy) for a year or so. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it wasn’t. A visit to the world of porn seemed like a good way to consolidate my acceptance of gay sex. Document it, make it public. Doing porn itself wasn’t fun at all, though. I had the very inaccurate impression porn was about sex, rather, you have these incredibly hot lights pointed at you, there’s a man holding a microphone over your head, another one shouting instructions. A rubbish script that makes you feel like an idiot as you utter some silly lines. Three cameramen filming from different angles, and half (or more) of the guys who do it are actually straight, so they’re not even enjoying the experience. I’m not knocking anyone who does it, but it just wasn’t for me. Escorting on the other hand was a much more interesting experience on a human and psychological level. The average person think of prostitution as a b/j in a car or an hour in a hotel room far from home. But that’s an illusion. There are real people and emotions guiding the protagonists of each encounter. It’s a life where every day you’re dealing with something as intensely personal as sex and the complexity of other people’s (and your own) expectations of it. There’s the client you hope falls in love with you, but doesn’t. There’s the one you don’t really like who actually does. There’s a burn victim who’s too embarrassed of his body to have sex with anyone but a sex-worker. A widower who feels 68 is too old to re-enter the gay dating world and you become his only physical human contact. It’s like spending your days at the movies, happy and sad stories all blending into each other, and you’re suddenly a character in all of them (maybe temporary, maybe not)- trying to figure out what your own role is in life and where you’re going to end up. 

P.S. In case you’re wondering why I have photos of myself like the one above… well ladies, you’ll probably be pleased to know that gay men worry as much about cup size as straight men, except we worry about our own cup size. The crazy, narcissistic, paranoid ones like me, even keep photographic records and take measurements until we reach our size goal. Go ahead, laugh!

Straight-Acting? Then What’s That Peee-niiis Doing in Your Mouth?

We’ve all seen the ads: No Fats, No Femmes (no, lesbionic peoples, not your femmes, our femmes. No Male Femmes). You might be asking yourself why someone who is in a long-term relationship still looks at online gay personals? Mainly because I’m a gay man, we do weird stuff like that. We also like classified ads, penis’ and music that’s so loud it permanently impairs our hearing. Did I mention the arms in the air dancing thing? A few days ago I wrote about gay hierarchy and heterosexism, and this is the natural extension.

Over a decade ago I responded to one of these ads. I was neither fat nor a femme (nor Asian- yes that’s also a recurrent NO. Don’t ask me why but I’m guessing it could have something to do with penis stereotypes) so I fulfilled almost everyone’s criteria. I selected a gorgeous blond Norwegian guy and that started a three-month fling that took us from Spain to London and then back again, all the while being plagued by his straight-acting obsession.

Do I look straight in this?

Do you really have to sing along to Bette Midler when we have other people in the car?

Are Bette Davis impersonations really necessary?

OMG, what’s your penis doing there?!?

That last one was a joke, apparently the only part of being gay he didn’t mind. He’d fallen into the absurd trap so many of us still seem to be falling into. He had internalized gender stereotypes. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Except that’s a total invention. Pink actually used to be for boys and blue was for girls.

“…a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti.”

Needless to say the relationship ended badly one night when I made the joke that has become the title of this post…  Straight acting? Then what’s that penis doing in your mouth? But I still wonder what happened to him and if he ever got over it. I wonder because I still see the No Fat, No Femmes on profiles and because some people are still writing things like this.

The “essay” begins with: “I do not support little gay boys who are becoming YouTube famous just because they are ok with people laughing at them for being flamboyantly gay and obnoxious…”

Goes on to:

“When immigrants come to the US (just like our families) most of them adapt to the US lifestyle. Same thing with gays, we are minority and WE need to be the ones adapting to the lifestyle of heterosexuals. Why? Because we live in a heterosexual world.”

And then:

“If society thinks that it’s ok to be gay and transgender but they are not crazy about the idea of men being overly feminine then we need to respect that.”

So if we hate ourselves and each other within our community, what chance do we really have to make sure “It Gets Better” for the generations that are still to come? I like to think there’s more to human character than banal oversimplifications. Yes, I like Bette Midler and yes, I can take down a tree with a chainsaw. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. We are all masculine and feminine, better yet, we are all what we perceive masculine and feminine to represent.

Andrej Pejic

Gay Marriage VS. Gay Identity

Not bad, right? Above is my post-gay-marriage suburban home. I live in Southern Europe, in a place modelled on Palm Springs by an American millionaire developer called Joseph McMicking. Our streets are lined in palms, oleander trees and SUV’s. No house can have a garden of less than 10,763 square feet. Across the street from us resides the very elegant Andrea von Post, daughter of President Kennedy’s first glamorous mistress, Gunilla. When President Clinton visited Spain and wanted to play at our golf club, the Valderrama president, Mr. Ortiz Patiño (friends with the Bush family), denied him access. Some former Presidents also spends their summers here as do a dozen or so royals. We live in an unnecessarily large and slightly over-decorated home. We regularly attend charity events, dinner parties and lunches, we also have Ralph Lauren polo shirts and sweaters in almost every colour. Did I mention there are only two “out” gay homes? The other gay couple is Swiss and that’s about the most exciting thing I can say about them.

This is the new suburban me

In the past decade it seems we have  re-packaged gay identity. We moved away from the old hedonist stereotype to the other gay stereotype: one that’s monogamous, adopts Asian babies, cooks like Ina Garten and is entirely de-sexualized. The kind we see on Modern Family and Desperate Housewives. A few years have gone by in these suburbs, and I’ve realized that in our desire to be assimilated with the general population -to be just like everyone else- we may have substituted who we are for who they are. The truth is, although I should have the same rights as everyone else, I’m not like everyone else. I’m gay and subversive. I like transgression. I’m sexually liberal, I’ve enjoyed casual sex, I’ve briefly done porn (more on that coming soon). Why should my place in society be contingent upon adopting heterosexist norms and normalcy? We shouldn’t just have Rick Santorum’s right to marry, have 25 children and wear sweater vests. We should also have Elizabeth Taylor’s right to marry seven gorgeous men, and Anna Nicole Smith’s right to marry a wealthy octogenarian at death’s door and legally inherit his estate.

The old me performing with Bel-Ami star Paolo Estefan