Men are bastards

Obsessed with sex, driven by their small heads, not their big ones, afraid to love, afraid to care and hyper-competitive.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  It's a generalisation.  And I know one or two top blokes, who are loving, kind, caring, compassionate, thoughtful, honest and good.  Some of them -- will wonders never cease! -- are even straight.  There ya go.

But the broad male culture ... I hate it.

Majorca Flats -- 92

Café Università, Melbourne

Dear gran,

I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye. I don't know whether they told you what happened. Brent shot himself and it was because of me. I felt I just had to get away.

Anyway, here I am. In Australia. I've got a job at a bar, I'm staying with a nice old lady who reminds me of you, and I'm trying to start a new life.

Please don't tell mum and dad or anyone where I am. It's my fault Brent killed himself, and I just couldn't bear dad's indifference or mum's spite. You know how they are, and they never accepted that I loved him or even that he was a real person. I hoped that we would be together always, like marriage is supposed to be, but that isn't going to happen now.

This is my new email address:__________  I don't know how long I'll be at the address where I am now, but the email will move around with me wherever I go. I used an internet café near where I live to set up this account, and that's where I'll go to access my emails.

I've only got a six-month's visa, and I'm not supposed to be working. Maybe when my Ozzie visa expires, I'll go to New Zealand. I've always wanted to go there, ever since I read that Mary Stewart book you lent me – you remember, what was it called? About the telepathic woman and her lover? – anyway, it seemed wonderfully romantic and far away, and I've been longing to see it ever since.

Ozzies are very friendly and likable. I'm starting to make friends. No one from “society” – mum would have a fit! – but they're all genuine and sincere people.

I haven't your email address, so please email me soon, and I'll write back and let you know what's happening.

I miss you a lot, and Mr Minims too. I can't send him an email, so give him a kiss for me, and one of those biscuits he likes so much.

Much love.

Jason

[Image from Floating Robes]

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Grief and Remembrance

A wise bloke once said to me that it takes a lifetime to make a real friend, but you can lose him in a minute; yet it takes just a minute to fall in love, and you can take a lifetime to get over it.

For the most part that's true.  But every so often, you can fall in friendship just like you fall in love.  I met a bloke on-line, about 4 years ago now.  Within weeks we were as intimate as if we'd known each other all our lives.  He was married with one kid, I was married with three.  He was a lot younger than me, but that didn't occur to either of us as anything important.  I haven't become so close to anybody since I met my best friend 43 years ago.  We fell in friendship, not in love.

Both of being us gay-shaded males, there was also the obvious issue of sexual attraction.  Maybe more might have come of that if we weren't both married and faithful.  But even while accepting that that might have been so, what really connected us wasn't sex.  It was love.  What attraction there was came out of our love for each other, not the other way round.  And it was a selfless love.  I remember when he told me he'd reconnected with a man who loved him very deeply (his first two marriages didn't work out) wandering around the whole day in a daze of happiness.  I loved him so much, and wanted him to be happy.  And he was.  For a while.

Roughly three years ago he was diagnosed with colon cancer.  He's been dead now two years today.  He was a profoundly good man, and blessed my life while he was in it.  I miss him more than I can say.

Dligo tson, drûgon moin, jus i tathro.

Gentlemen's Clubs

No, I'm not using this as a euphemism for a brothel.  I'm talking about old-fashioned clubs for men.  I'm reading The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by the talented and insightful Dorothy Sayers.  First published in 1921 (90 years ago!) she describes how the very old General Fentiman leaves his flat in the morning, and then spends the rest of the day dozing in the armchair next to the fire, having a drink or two with old acquaintances, complaining about the state of the world, before going home in the evening.  General Fentiman comes of course to a sticky end.

It occurred to me while I read it that such an institution would be the perfect home for me.  Not just when I am old and decayed (next year, for example) but now.  A place where I can meet other men, not to hook up, but to chat, share a drink, and reach tentatively across that gap which divides us from each other.

You see, that sort of club is not for couples.  There, men can be friends with other men without their wives also having to be friends with each other or with them.  After marriage, for the most part it's couples (whether it's a het or gay marriage):  you go out to drinks together, or to dinner together or even to the cinema or the opera together.  So if your wife/husband/partner doesn't like your friend's ditto, a strain is placed on the friendship.  Also, you cannot be intimate in a group, and intimacy is indispensable to friendship.  Intimacy is personal, individual, private.  One cannot confess to one's weaknesses and failings in public.  Not without bathos.  But with someone you care for, who cares for you, you can admit to disappointment or unhappiness or a sense that life has passed you by.  You can even admit you are less than perfect because you are gay, or have just been diagnosed with a terminal disease, or some other personal catastrophe.

A few people tried to get me to join clubs when I first came to Oz.  A boss took me to lunch at the Australia Club, very grand, dreadful food, with a full length portrait of the Queen, housed in a wonderful stone late-Victorian building.  In those days, I didn't believe I was clubbable, and anyway, it was all rather stuffy and dull, and all those nabobs from industry, commerce, politics and banking rather intimidated me.   So I didn't pursue his offer to put me up for membership.  I know, I know, I'm really quite hopeless about networking.  I'd be much better off financially these days if I'd joined.  Another boss took me to lunch at the Savage Club, which was more my line -- a club for artists, musicians, scientists, actors and writers, and those who appreciated these arts.  Alas, this time, it was he didn't pursue the offer, and I was too shy to push it myself.

"Old Man with Dog" Ivey Hayes

There are humbler clubs: the local cricket or footy clubs, the country club, or the local choir.  Alas, I can't play cricket or footy, and they asked me to leave the choir because I couldn't sing.  (How humiliating is that?)

We are social animals.  We need others of our species.  Because we don't have human friends we get a dog.  But dogs are only a partial cure for loneliness. Better than nothing, I suppose.  I expect I shall be an old man with dog, one day.

For people who are clubbable, people who can join groups with other people who have an interest they share, life must be easier than it is for odd and eccentric loners like me.  Ninety years ago, there were clubs for all kinds of purposes and people from the humblest to the highest belonged to several.   Even if you were without close friends you didn't have to be alone.  These days we have Facebook.  Or Yahoo groups.  It's not the same, somehow.

A Particular Friendship

I was a bit teary when I finished reading A Particular Friendship. How is it possible that one can come to "know" people after reading about them, so that their loss makes one sorrowful?

There were some very funny passages in the book -- even writing letters, DB had a gift for words -- but overall it left me a little sad. Both DB and Mrs X are dead, and I'd grown fond of them. Of course, my own griefs have made me more easily moved to tears than I used to be. All the same.

I found it chilling that Bogarde never once says 'we' in his letters. He lived with his lover -- his husband -- Tony Forwood (he's the bloke on the right in the picture) for well over 20 years, and yet he felt the need to be so discreet that even with someone he became as close to as Mrs X, he never (or at least in the letters we have) discusses or even mentions his man. For most of their time together, gay sex was illegal (extraordinary, not so?) but by the time he was writing to her, Britain had legalised homosexual acts "between consenting adults". Ironically, Bogarde's film Victim, about a married lawyer blackmailed because he has a gay affair, which he made in I think 1963, helped change opinions in the UK, leading directly to the change in the law in 1967.

The extraordinary evils of the closet! Even though he was married, to all intents and purposes, he had to lie and deceive about his life. There are occasional bitter and acidic touches to his writing, in this book and his autobiographies and novels, and I wonder whether it comes from the contempt he must have felt for the "normals", the heterosexual world he was shut out of. Actors are, or perhaps were (so I'm told) easier about gayness that the rest of us. Yet acting is a kind of lying and deceit, which must make it harder to believe in people. Or perhaps the startling touches of wormwood come from his formidable intelligence which made him see the grubby and mean aspects of life without illusions.

The other thing that interested me was how the friendship between Mrs X and DB cooled. Maybe this is inevitable with 'non-physical' friendships, those conducted by letter and postcard and email. Maybe without 'body' it's too easy to let a friendship drop or wither. Maybe after all the skeptics are right. Bit sad.

N

Only Connect

Nelson Mandela was held in prison on Robben Eiland (Dutch for 'Seal Island') by the apartheid government for over two decades. Not because he had committed any crime, but because of his beliefs. His jailers were working class Afrikaners -- the descendants of bywoners (squatters on farms), ignorant and uneducated, devotees of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, and among the most racist of white South Africans. Nelson Mandela was educated, civilized, brilliant and a Xhosa nobleman. Americans can, I think, understand the situation best by imagining some jail in the deep south staffed by white trash holding a upper class black who'd been to university, spoke three languages fluently, and who was in jail not because he was a criminal lowlife but because the state was afraid of his ideas and his magnetism.

And a miracle happened. Mandela and his jailers connected. I'm still amazed and moved at this. I knew these people. I went to an Afrikaans school. I knew their bigotry and narrowness, their extreme racism, their fear as a minority group in their own country. His warders came to him with legal problems, and he advised them. They came to him with personal problems and he suggested solutions. They called him 'nkosi'. My lord. My lord. White trash. The dregs of Afrikaner society. They trusted him. They admired him. They respected him. Isn't that absolutely amazing? And in the end that great man's capacity to connect led to the peaceful transformation of South Africa to the multi-party, non-racial democracy it is today.

Only connect. Of course, E M Forster wasn't talking about one person connecting with another. This is what he wrote, in Howards End:

"Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire."

Oh yes.

I wrote a couple of days ago about the claymation film Mary and Max from the ppl who did the Oscar winning Harvey Krumpet. Two ugly misfits connect, by letter. They would not have connected in real life. Max has Asperger's syndrome. Mary is just 8 years old. And they become best friends, and their friendship lasts for 20 years. OK, it's fictional. So therefore not true :-)

So let me tell you of a true story, back from the days of snail mail. You remember how at the back of comics they had a classified section selling stuff to kids? Well, one of the things was to get a penpal somewhere. And so, way back when, a teenage girl in England started a correspondence with another girl in Canada. They wrote regularly to each other about their lives, they got married, they had kids, and all the joys and sorrows of life they shared. 30 years later (yup, that's right -- 30!) they met for the first time. Each other was, they said, exactly what they thought they would be. It was like 'coming home'.

Only connect.

Or take my mother. When I was, I suppose, 7 or 8, she had a job at the Northern Rhodesia Police telephone exchange. In those days, telephone exchanges connected calls with cables capped with small pegs which plugged into sockets. Her job was to take the call from the exchange down the line and connect it to someone there at Police Headquarters, or to connect it to the next exchange somewhere in British Africa or England. Sometimes I was taken to work (I suppose on the days when the babysitter didn't turn up) and I would listen to her connecting police from South Africa with police from Kenya or Tanganyika or London. She knew all the police telephone exchange operators. They would have a moment of chat while they waited for the Commissioner or the head of Interpol to pick up the phone. They exchanged Christmas cards and birthday cards. Occasionally, they'd meet. The telephonist from Gweru or Bulawayo might be driving through Lusaka (the capital) on the way to another town, and they would drop in. "Sometimes they'd look quite different from what their voices sounded like on the phone," my mum would say.

Human beings are programmed to connect. Even poor Max Horowitz, from Mary and Max, despite having Asperger's (which makes it hard for you to interpret others' facial expressions and emotions) connected, with Mary. By letter. I would go so far as to say that we are programmed to love. Not romance (never trust it, dearly beloveds) but agape or philia. We are supposed to have originated in bands, or tribes, of proto-humans wandering the veld 100,000 years ago. The band would have had to cooperate to hunt; to care for children (our species has the longest childhood as a percentage of total life span of any species on this planet, and there are extremely good evolutionary reasons for that); to drive off competing bands. Loving one another ("as I have loved you") is genetically programmed into us. Tribes which cohered survived.

Of course, the implication is that we are also programmed to hate. That damn tribe across the hill! Always stealing our melons! Fuckers! Redefine an insider as an outsider and it's easy to hate, to turn your face away when they suffer. Think of the Jews of Germany and Central Europe. Think of Matthew Shepard. But right now I'd prefer to talk about the love. There's enough suffering in the world, and I do not want to dwell on it. I know humans are capable of evil. But we are also capable of love, of loving long after it's pointless; of heroism; of self-sacrifice, the glamorous kind (saving a drowning child) and the unglamorous kind (working day after day to keep your family.)

Which brings me to email. Now email differs from snail mail in some critical ways. Obviously, just for a start, it's quick. No waiting for 10 days for the letter to be delivered. And, unlike snail mail, you don't know that the person you're "talking" to is who they say they are. Martin Bizzlewit might in fact be Marilyn Santana. And the address can be nuked in an instant, whereas you tend to live in a place (once you've settled down) for years and years. And, natch, you can't see faces, or expressions, so you have to deal with what a dear e-friend insists on calling 'texts'. At one level, email is no better -- perhaps in fact inferior -- to the communication we have with the guy who sells us coffee (he's cute!). Yet, even though we talk to him day to day, we never really tell him that we are afraid of the random pains in our gut, that we wish we'd made different decisions several times over the last few years, that we worry about our kids and our friends. Any more than we do with most of the (let me call them) e-acquaintances on line.

But email has advantages too. Most of my embodied acquaintances don't know I'm gay (or bi or whatever). It's too awkward to tell them. Most online do -- because after all they're here because of my writing. Always assuming I'm not in fact Mrs Euphemia van der Westhuizen, LOL. So if you start connecting to someone on line you can tell them about your secret fears and wishes, your sorrows and failures in a way that's hard with embodied acquaintances. Good --- and bad. For maybe, after all, intimacy too easily gained is a bit suss. Easy come, easy go.

Another advantage. There are many ppl I would never have met in my "real" life. I avoid sportsmen, for example. Being half blind, and in fact blinded by the jock bullies at school, I start off with a certain.... hostility. I can't play games, because I can't see where the ball is. More than that: I find the life of ideas and concepts much more interesting than sport. When I see a group of young jocks, I am still afraid enough of strange men to avoid them. But suppose you start to talk to someone on line, and you discover, after you have grown fond of him, that he's a jock? All your preconceptions are given a thorough shaking up. That would never have happened without email, or e-groups, which are in effect assemblies of pen-friends, would it?

I come back to all the examples of penfriends in the good old days of steamships and prop jets, and will end with this one.

Dirk Bogarde, the actor and novelist had a long correspondence with a woman he never met. She once lived in the house he bought in France, and on the strength of that, she wrote to him, and they became friends, close friends. His book, called A Particular Friendship is about it. Dirk Bogarde was gay, and lived 40 years with his husband. But he became very close to Mrs X. They became best friends. And consider: it was quite by chance. Mrs X saw an article about Dirk Bogarde in an English magazine while she was having her hair done. Maybe all the best friendships are by chance.

There are some who say that e-friendships aren't real, because they lack "body". Maybe. Yet I have and have had close and dear friends on line. Just like the penpals described above. Just like Dirk Bogarde and Mrs. X. My e-friends are real to me. My heart is engaged, bodies or no. The genes which make me want to connect with like-minded ppl work on line just as they did for my ancestors in Serengeti, making sure we build communities where selfish interests are balanced with altruism. They (the genes) don't know your friend is far away, unembodied. To them, he or she is a warrior next to you, defending the tribe against lions or rapacious neighbours, or joining in the hunt. To me, the point about affection and friendship isn't about embodiment. It's about soul and character. And soul and character come through in letters and emails. Sometimes, perhaps, even better than they might in real life.

Only connect. I think E M Forster would have approved of my hijacking of his phrase.

Mary and Max

Yesterday my lady and I went to see Mary and Max, an Ozzie claymation film by Adam Elliott and his team. He was the guy who did Harvey Krumpet, which won the best animated short film academy award in 2003.

Mary is a fat, plain little girl, with a birthmark in the middle of her forehead, growing up in a Melbourne suburb in 1976. He mother drinks too much tea and cheap cooking sherry and shoplifts all the time, her father works in a teabag factory, her granda tells her that babies come from the bottom of a beer mug, and (of course) she gets bullied at school. One day she goes to the post office and intrigued by the picture of the lady with the fire coming out of her hand, opens the New York telephone directory at random and copies down an address: Max Horowitz.

She writes to him, enclosing a cherry ripe as a gift, and her own small portrait of herself.

Max is unemployed, dysfunctional, enormously fat and has Asperger's. He calls himself an aspie. After the shock and terror of receiving something new and unknown, which he takes a few days to get over, he writes back, using his Underwood typewriter, pages filled with details of his life -- his therapist, his overeaters anonymous group, his fish, his parrot, his passion for chocolate hotdogs.

So begins a friendship which lasts 20 years.

Mary has no friends, and nor does Max. Every one of Mary's letters frightens Max, and it takes him a few days each time to get over each new one. But their correspondence flourishes. And the gifts flow backwards and forwards. They write to each other that they are best friends. And they are. Max has no friends because Asperger's makes it hard to relate to other ppl. But somehow, on paper, he can communicate his thoughts, his love and affection for Mary, and because he doesn't see himself as an adult, he doesn't treat her like a child. She doesn't know you are not supposed to make friends with fat old retarded men. She treats him exactly as she would any friend her age.

Of course, there are quarrels and misunderstandings. But the friendship becomes the most important relationship on their lives. And they never meet.

It's an extraordinary film. The local crits gave it 5 stars, and when I left the cinema I was wiping my eyes. Over some Plasticine figures! But oh! Oh! How it resonates! Friendship between misfits; comfort arriving in the letter box; a relationship that helps both survive their lives. It's not a Hollywood film. There are no cliched moments or contrived endings. There's a gay character, and a man who lost his legs in WWI and desperately funny and sad portraits of the ppl in both their lives.

It made me think (which all art should). You know how ppl say, this is my life partner, or this is my best friend -- how lucky I was to find him/her? But why should someone from your school, or a bloke you met at work, be your best friend/lover/husband? It's because you connect. That's the key. And it doesn't matter that one of you is an 8-year old girl in Melbourne and the other a 44 year-old aspie in New York. Or whether you are both in the same school and you fall in love. It's the connection that matters. Of course, it's easier in school or the workplace to connect -- unless you have Asperger's or are a fat ugly child with batty parents. Then the magic of letters or e-mail takes over.

There are many who pooh-pooh e-friendships, because they aren't "real". But the essence of a "real" friendship is love and affection and fondness and caring. When Max writes Mary that he can't cry (after yet another of his goldfish dies) she thinks of something sad (her cat being run over by a lawnmower) and collects the tears and send them to him so he can uses them when he feels sad. When she writes to him that the boys at school mock her because of her birthmark, he writes back and says that she should tell them that it's a sign from God that when she goes to heaven she'll be in charge of all the chocolate, and then adds (because he has Asperger's and is therefore intensely literal) that that is a lie because there is no Heaven and no God, but to do it anyway. Neither of them think this is peculiar. Their friend needs something, so they send it. Unconstrained by conventions, they are exactly what the other needs.

Like all the very greatest stories, it's about love and sorrow, about hope and despair, about our feelings for each other. It is a triumphant declaration of the power of love and affection, of the innate need and capacity for love in humans, whoever and wherever they are.

Go and see it. Don't take your children. It's a story for grown ups. Especially if you have loved, and lost; if you are lonely and an outsider; if you believe in hope but suspect in your heart that your hope in hope is hopeless. There are so many deplorably rubbishy films made, filled with tired old recycled piffle, made with all eyes on box office success and none on the the worth of what they're creating. This film is a gem. And if you don't laugh on the way through, and hold your breath with tension when it looks as if it won't work out, and cry at the end -- you're dead, and no one told you. It manages to be sad as well as uplifting, to be engrossing and exciting, funny and moving and clever. Somehow, despite the gentle fun poked at Ozzie suburbia and Mary's weird little family, at Max and his acquaintances, it never preaches or talks down to you, yet all the same still makes its message crystal clear: only connect.

You can read The Age's film critic's take on it here.