On grindr and other hook up apps some guys used to have a line in their profiles, “so-and-so’s to the front of the line”–ivy-educated twunks or soft doms or whatever. You don’t see it much any more because it was stupid and people made fun of it. Other, smarter guys would put in their profiles things like, “Don’t message me if there’s an imaginary line of guys waiting to get with you.” But I was thinking that over time, there’s a line even for me. I’m not exactly a Messalina, at any given moment the line’s pretty short, but if you think about over months or years, almost anybody who keeps at it gets a few takers. Rasputin had an office–overseen I think by his daughters—where Russian society ladies would come there and wait in a little parlor for their healing visits. My own waiting room is naturally virtual, and I suppose the guys in it often just end up going off together. I used to think of grindr as a giant interactive, pornographic performance piece, which it kind of is, but, well I was with a guy the other night and he really just wanted someone to talk to. He had broken up with his boyfriend because he wanted to open up the relationship and his parents weren’t supportive, and we ended up just hanging out and watching these American movies suggested by some Amazon algorithm, movies so baroquely stupid and strange that you almost can’t imagine either the circumstances that might have led to them being made and released, or perceive whatever nub of human experience might have served as the initial grain to stimulate their production. There are some movies, some of Warhol’s, that I think you can’t understand unless you are taking the same drugs the people who made the movie were taking. I think the Factory people did a lot of speed. I’m not sure if that would improve the experience of watching Chelsea Girls or not. It may fall into Warhol’s category of movies better talked about than seen. I feel like a lot of American movies at least are sort of made with at least the tacit acknowledgement that they would be best seen high. The entertainment comes from observing sets of fundamentally disconnected, incoherent episodes brought together and stamped into recognizable units of story on a procustean bed prepared by Aristotle and Syd Fields. Being high allows you to split your experience of the movie into an emotionality that is open to stories that might otherwise seem trite, while simultaneously alienating you from the diagetic reality of the film, not in a Brechtian way exactly, although maybe it is, since I at least end up sympathizing with the actors trying to bring ordinary human feeling into the whole thing, so all movies end up feeling like they’re about Capitalism—the Glory of it demonstrated in CGI, personal grooming, continuity, and production values, its Horror in the tears you know must’ve been faked nineteen times to get a particular shot. It often makes me think of an old LSD “revelation.” The woman I was with was an actress or wanted to be an actress and she pointed out the obvious pain in the smile of a blond woman in a menthol cigarette billboard ad. Of course I knew even then that the smiles are faked in a magazine or a catalog, but until that moment I had never really experienced the expression as almost rictus.
The guy asked me if I wanted to play, but I said, well you don’t seem to want to and he said, well yeah, so we just lay on his bed trying to follow the terrible plots of those terrible movies. I believe there must be an actual gay community, of which I am not really a part, but I either realized or imagined, that really at that particular moment I was part of it, that in a way I was it for him right then. Other than, like a hotline. We were both lonely, and horny, and bored on a long weekend. He was in a kind of terrible place. I was in a sort of typical whatever place, not fragile, but not exactly on a certain path on solid ground either. It was if in wandering the enormous half-empty, self-service pleasure palace of grindr I had found myself in a room devoted to the exploration of the comfort of just being (high) together. It reminded me of college, but being high always reminds me of college.
The weird thing about daddyhood is that you brevet into it ready or not just by living. Even if you pretty actively avoid it, it will find you. I always think going grey is a bit I think like going blond. You become attractive to certain people for reasons that feel like they have nothing to do with you. Grey hair, unlike blond, usually conveys some actual information, although I wonder if there isn’t a certain amount of evolutionary trickery going on at least in premature greying with our selfish genes attempting, misguidedly at this point, although it seems a little strange that the appearance of youth is so absolutely prized now considering how active and healthy middle and old age have potentially become, to help some men silverback their way to a degree of unearned authority like the Founders powdering their wigs or maybe the same genetic tactic supports a separate but converging evolutionary strategy of blurring the process of aging by starting one of its markers before its real effects, so it’s also like Warhol snapping on his silver wigs in order to look old and spry rather than merely middle-aged. That’s what he said, but what he really achieved was presenting himself as the same image for a long time. David Byrne says if you want to be famous you should always wear the same thing. I, of course, am not going grey, or for that matter balding, prematurely—it’s all very much in due course. A friend of mine was horrified when his mom told him that she felt like a teenager inside. Put that way it sounds like something out of a horror movie, but I didn’t feel young when I was young, so why should I suddenly feel old. Aging as a beta male in the US is an odd thing. Gay men are a bit out of that game anyway, unless they manage to become actual daddies, but refusing to play is still a kind of losing. First you’re too young to be taken seriously, then you’re past date, but maybe age is just a convenient way not to take some people seriously. Not that I’ve ever wanted to be taken seriously particularly. Be a clown, be a clown, but comedy hard, dying is easy.