San Sargasso

Helmut Lotti

I was feeling kind of depressed earlier because a friend told me he couldn't see me today because he was "overbooked." What the fuck? And another loved one of mine has been neglecting me (and I'm mad at her because she never kept her promise to take photos of me that I can use for online dating, which I'm too embarrassed to say is SO important to me). And I spent yesterday with my dear friends who are a straight married couple with an adorable little almost-2-year-old boy. I love them with all my heart and when they visit it is so blissful and pleasant, but when they go back to Glendale I feel so melancholy because they have the kind of love I am so heartsick for. And even though they are so warm and loving to me and call me "Uncle Lee-Bird," I still feel alone and melancholy after they leave.

To add to it, I bought this chic new ultracompact digital camera (Fujifilm Finepix Z1) and got my straight friend (who is a Hollywood screenwiter and knows how to take good pictures) to take some snapshots of me for dating purposes (which is very difficult for me to ask of anyone), and they came out quite good, but I couldn't get them to download to my computer. FUCK! It's a cosmic conspiracy to keep me perma-single!

Anyway, here I am feeling sorry for myself and drinking beer and watching KPBS, and they're having a membership drive, and they start showing this video: "Helmut Lotti: From Russia With Love." So, it's this very cute, boyish and sweet- and gay-looking Belgian singer - sort of a cross between Engelbert Humperdinck and Nana Mouskouri.

And he traveled to Russia to be filmed singing all these incredily campy and sentimental Russian songs. I mean DRIPPING UNBEARABLY OVER-THE-TOP sentimental songs. Some of which I didn't even know were originally Russian - like "Those Were the Days", which was a pop hit in the 70s sung by Mary Hopkin - I actually bought the 45 record when I was a kid. And he sings "Lara's Theme" ("Somewhere my love, think of me now and then ...")

The visuals totally destroyed me - staged shots of Cossacks riding on horseback - Russian folk dancers in garish dresses dancing and spinning around insanely to the music. Helmut lipsynching at the Kremlin. Helmut in Red Square. Helmut in front of Russian palaces. Helmut in Siberia! And the shots of architecture and countryside are actually incredibly beautiful. I have never before in my life seen any images that made me want to visit Russia. Not even after reading Dostoievsky.

And, needless to say, it's all making my head explode. And I am TOTALLY falling in love with Helmut Lotti (sorry but I have lived in CA for 10 years and we do say "totally" without irony). I wondered whether I could actually love someone like that who, one part of me would be laughing at, and the other part of me would be completely wanting to possess him and fuck his brains out. Would that work? I would have to let him in on the joke. But how could I do that without completely spoiling his purity?

But I have a feeling that whatever I did I could not destroy his purity. Of course that's why I'm falling in love with him: It's the innocence, the complete lack of irony, the sentimentality, his charismatic nature, his open heart. So, so, far from me, like that beautiful innocent young girl Marcello sees at the end of La Dolce Vita ...

Sad Omelette

I was reminiscing about one of those quintessential lessons in love, depressing at the time, but now the story makes me laugh. It was a drunken night at the Metro, the mega-warehouse dance club in Boston in the early 1980s. I was cruising a very pretty guy, about 20 or so, blond and tanned. Of the type a friend of mine refers to as "pretty ponies."

We were both soused; he kept grinning at me in an obvious way; I pounced. There wasn't much talk, and we started making out there in the club almost immediately. I dragged him to my place and down into "the cave." We had a pretty good time, though he was quite passive and basically lay back while I panted over him, which I was happy to do since I thought he was gorgeous.

In the morning, being my desperately lonely self, I naturally wanted him to stay as long as possible, so I asked him if he wanted some breakfast. He said sure, and sat there looking pretty and vapid for a while. While I was preparing the meal, he said he needed to go out and get some cigarettes but he'd be right back.

So I laid out breakfast and waited, and waited, and waited, and there was my beautiful omelette, made with love and tender anticipation, getting cold and congealing on the plate like the saddest thing in the world, because of course THE BITCH NEVER CAME BACK!

Now, this kind of insulting rudeness is so commonplace that after a while you come to expect it and learn to smile when it occurs.

What's even stranger is that I often hear certain of my friends expressing surprise and indignation when they get stood up or treated disrespectfully by people they are dating. I hesitate, perhaps out of cowardice, to point out to them that I have observed them to behave exactly the same way to other people whose company is of no consequence to them. For some reason we seem to ourselves to be of such great importance that the idea we might not be so important in the eyes of others seems incomprehensible.

The Water-Torture of Conformity

When I hear about high school massacres, my automatic response is, well, what do you expect? If it's anything like my high school experience, those environments are so horrible and the kids are so viciously cruel and arrogant and stupid day after day, that it seems perfectly understandable to me that it would eventually push someone off the deep end. I'm only surprised it doesn't happen in every school.

Although I am nonviolent by nature, I identify more with the shooters than with the jocks and cheerleaders crying on the lawn. And, yes, there is a secret, evil part of me which says, if people are going to mercilessly taunt and push someone to the point of suicide, then, yeah, give them a taste of their own medicine, go on a fucking rampage, make them understand the gravity of what they have done. Isn't it the same idea as capital punishment acting as a "deterrent"? If people know that when some people are cruelly taunted they are liable to go on a killing spree, perhaps they'll think twice about it.

I'm being facetious, of course: I don't believe capital punishment is an effective deterrent to murder, and I don't believe going on a killing spree is a deterrent to cruelty, either. But there is a sense in which those kids needed to die and the other kids needed to see them die. I don't mean they needed to die physically, but that their false taunting destructive egos needed to die. That was where the shooters made their mistake: they identified the egos with the persons and killed the persons instead of the egos.

When I see the way these incidents are treated in the press, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Naturally everything's got to have a neat little digestible prepackaged spin to it, so they say, oh these individuals were insane or emotionally disturbed. Well, duh, who wouldn't be emotionally disturbed if you're treated as an outcast by everyone around you, including teachers and other adults who should know better.

Or they say, well, it's the parents' fault or the school's fault, they should have seen it coming. Well, yeah, but instead of looking at these troubled persons as a disease with warning signs, why isn't anyone held accountable for the environment which helps to produce such extremely troubled persons? Why doesn't anyone say, gee, that kid was probably treated cruelly and/or neglectfully, is there anything we can do about that? No, because the cruelty is not only taken for granted, but tacitly condoned and even encouraged.

The disease is not difference, but rather the pressure to conform. This pressure is simply a product of fear. The word "conform" is not adequate, because it has a taste of complacency, but what conformity really tastes like is fear. And not only that, but it's like a dripping faucet, drip, drip, dripping on your head day after day until you want to scream or die. It seems like a small thing, but the sheer accumulation, the insidious implacability of it, is enough to drive a person to murder or suicide.

The members of certain subcultures, like some of the punks and the goths and the gays, have come to understand this fundamental fact of life; others will never understand it. The ones who don't understand it see their own insanity as sanity, and so to conform is no more than to obey and follow the natural order of things. To fail to do so can only be perversity and insanity to them.

The best response to this state of affairs is not despair or outrage or going on violent rampages, but irreverent humor, satire and parody. For example, I think that the way that South Park treats these issues is brilliant and extremely powerful. If you present the ignorant, stupid, cruel, self-serving rules and behavior of persons in a certain way, it is astonishing how quickly they are exposed and dissolved in the fire of laughter. And it is encouraging that the creators of South Park have hit upon a format that appeals to people of all ages. South Park gives one hope for the future.

The Blob

There really is something intangible and extremely powerful that enters into us and tries to take control of us; often succeeds. It is like a living entity - a blob whose goal is to assimilate us and feed on our power, our essence. It's nature is continually changing.

I used to think that certain powerful individuals were in on the conspiracy to disseminate this blob which arose from their own fear and paranoia. Some individuals recognize it and may have the power to shape it, but it is bigger than any one individual and has a life of its own that survives every individual. Anyone who thinks the Blob serves them is deluded; they serve It. It wallows in fear, hatred, violence, control, egotism.

I have always been aware of the Blob, but I am starting to wonder whether there aren't other forces inimical to the Blob: forces that emanate from loving and enlightened people; from nature. Who can remain long possessed by demons on a beautiful sunny day in a place like San Sargasso? The tree festooned with its golden berries and the sky bedecked with its changeable clouds; natural things with their beautiful quiet resplendent being wait patiently for us to see them with our being and to dissolve everything that is false and destructive in us.

Project Terror

I have always found it difficult to convey the extremity of the alienation I experienced as an adolescent: alienation from myself, from my body and from other people. Whenever I attempt to express this to friends, they pretend to understand, probably thinking that this is just the normal adolescent angst many people experience, but I can see that all they know is the relatively stable and confident person I have become, and therefore cannot conceive of me as a creature wracked by suffering and torment.

And the only reason I still would attempt to describe it here is not to express indignation at the cruelty inflicted on me by a society that despises sexual difference, but rather to record the magnitude of the transformation that has occurred within me, just as if one were recording an extraordinary and unexpected fluctuation in temperature in some climate, a melting of the polar icecap and its transformation into a tropical oasis.

In searching for something to help me cope with the extremity of my suffering, horror films became a natural outlet and obsession. These were mostly films of the 50s and 60s that were recycled on television for Saturday matinees or nighttime marathons. In particular there was a weekly late night double feature on Friday nights in San Antonio at that time called "Project Terror." Every Friday night I would tingle with nervous anticipation, praying that everyone else would go to bed so that I would be alone with my monstrous, erotic fantasies. If they didn't I'd get irritable and snappish - sign of a true addict.

In spite of my mother's warnings that the rays would damage my eyes, after she went to bed I would turn out all the lights in the living room and lie on my side with my eyes as close as I could get to the screen, so that the image would encompass my view and the eerie bluish rays would flicker over my body as if saturating it with otherworldly energies. Inevitably I would masturbate; you can imagine what kind of perverse fantasies would arise and become ingrained in my psyche under such circumstances.

For a long time I felt ashamed about these fantasies, and I was horrified to discover that I was involuntarily aroused by images of sadistic violence: handsome males getting beaten, stabbed, strangled, hanged, bitten by vampires, etc. This only confirmed my fear that I was mentally ill and would surely be locked away if anyone ever found me out.

In fact this dark side of my eroticism carried forward to some degree through my twenties: after coming out as gay, it was like a second closeted life underneath the first which I was ashamed of discussing with even my closest friends and lovers because I was afraid they would think I might have violent fantasies about them or that I was a homicidal maniac.

Naturally I tried to learn as much as I could about sadism to try to understand why these fantasies had such a powerful attraction for me. It wasn't until I went to the source - the Marquis himself, along with other French authors who interpreted him - that I found a way of resolving and transmuting these horrible ideas into something positive and even fruitful.

The 120 Days of Sodom is so disturbing as to be almost impossible to read all the way through. However, I did read it through, and what I realized was that while he may have been a monster or criminal as a person, Sade was a very fine writer who managed to transform his monstrous fantasies into something beautiful and liberating. How could crime and murder be beautiful? Well, if you don't understand that you should study art, literature, or film. For example, if you have an understanding of painting, you can see the beauty in a painting that depicts a rape or murder.

Real violence is never beautiful: but it is possible to transmute violent images and experiences into beauty through art or spirituality. Another valuable aspect of understanding Sade is that once you have surrendered to him and allowed your mind to stretch where it is afraid to go in following his lines of thought, which go farther in a certain terrifying direction than anyone before him and perhaps even beyond anyone who came after - once you have done that, your mind is prepared for anything that is thrown at it.

That doesn't mean you become numb: it just means that when real violence occurs, whether close to you or far from you, or when violent thoughts arise in your own mind, you are better able to absorb the negative energy and neutralize it without letting it overpower you or depress you. In a spiritual sense, the violence passes through you because you don't resist it; you don't turn it into something directed at you. You realize that there are higher and purer things like art and spirituality that cannot be touched by violence. [Photo attributed to Howard Harris via this page.]

The Dainty Diner

I think it was in first or second grade, in the school cafeteria at lunch time. I was sitting directly across from a thin hispanic boy who had a girlish sing-song voice and effeminate mannerisms. Apparently he was observing me and all at once said matter-of-factly, in his girly voice: "You eat so dainty."

I recall a feeling of shock: although I knew I was attracted to boys and therefore was sure something was very wrong with me, up until that time I had thought that at least my "illness" was not readily apparent. However, if I appeared strange to someone as queer-looking and -sounding as this boy, it must be really obvious. I was mortified.

That reflection of myself in his eyes must have intensified my extreme self-consciousness about my appearance and carriage. I remember studying the other boys and trying to model myself after them, but it only seemed to make me more nervous and self-conscious. I never knew what to do with my hands: they seemed like monstrous creatures with a mind of their own which I was always trying desperately to quiet and tame.

I don't think I ever really felt my hands belonged to me until I was in my thirties and started building my body, which gave me a certain confidence. But in order to do that I had to kill those other hands, which for all I know could have developed into beautiful and expressive instruments if left to their own devices.

The Bullying Instinct

The thing that disturbs me sometimes about the cruelty and harassment that happens to children in public schools and communities is not that kids are cruel and not that parents don't care - there is nothing anyone can do about that - what angers me is that it is sanctioned by teachers, administrators and other authorities who are responsible for the well-being and education of children. They are not doing their job.

It is really appalling to me that entire communities may be allowed to harass children to the point of suicide, as happens frequently with gay kids. In my opinion the government should send troops in to protect those kids the way they went into Selma to protect the blacks who were being harassed. But I suppose there is not much you can do in that vein if the parents themselves won't protect their own children. Good God, even an ape, even the lowliest rat knows enough to protect its own offspring from harm.

I had always thought that the universally accepted tormenting of gay children was entirely a product of cultural insanity. However, one day I was watching a television program on animal behavior, and it showed a brood of wild dogs ganging up on the weakest member. They were worrying it and nipping it and harassing it, very much the way children bully others perceived as weaker or defenseless.

I am by no means a biologist, but it seemed to me then that this behavior must have an evolutionary origin: the weakest member of the group is a hindrance to the survival of the pack and therefore the pack turns on it and forces it to fight even harder for survival. If it is strong enough, it survives; if not, it is killed and the disadvantaging genes are not passed on.

The fact that this behavior is of instinctual derivation of course does not make it appropriate or even beneficial to our species; it merely explains the universal virulence of it. In the human instance, the behavior often backfires, because gays are only perceived as being weak and worthless, when in fact many of us have qualities which are quite beneficial to the survival and flourishing of the species. We may not be disposed to bear children ourselves, but we can and often do raise them and teach them.

Isn't it interesting that even though the nature of our sexuality would seem to program us out of the gene pool automatically, we are still being produced in droves. If our sexuality is indeed largely the result of genetic predispositions as I strongly suspect, could it be that we do have a purpose in the genetic scheme of things?