Tim Brough's Black Leather Bookshelf

Delta weekend is something I look forward to, maybe more than most any other event in the year. To the point where I've become a member of the board and operate as Club Secretary. I also now create the musical playlist that gets turned on at the Upper Dungeon space. There are some men there I see only once a year, and in one case, grieve in his absense. We got to spend several, intimate hours together this year, and, as usual, his generousity overwhelms me. 

I am stunned that it's already been two months since I got laid off from work. While there have been plenty of good things to keep me balanced (like getting to IBR and becoming friends with a fellow writer named Thom who has moved from NYC to Philly), overall I am fighting depression. I had to ask my doctor for anti-anxiety meds to keep me from flying off the handle. I would lay down to sleep and my brain would just take off like a motorcycle of disconnected thought. It's been damn near impossible to settle my mind before getting to sleep; ideas and weird, non-linear thoughts would literally feel like they were crashing around in my brain.

The other problem is, once asleep, I've been having seriously violent and suicidal nightmares. I see myself with a dagger driven through my forehead and out the back, or taking a pistol and blasting myself. (Please don't worry about my actually doing these actions, as they only seem to be haunting me in my dreams.) The anti-anxiety meds seemed to help for a while, but then the dreams came back on a regular basis. The other things the meds helped with was to, again just for a week or so, turn of the weird screaming subconscious voice that tells me what a worthless person I am in no indelicate fashion. It had been so long since my brain hasn't been screaming at me that I'd forgotten what a tranquil mindset felt like.

So when I came back to my "new normal" (I've been dealing with this since about 2000 or so), it was even more frustrating than ever. While Joel has been somewhat helpful throughout, I can tell he's furstrated that I am not working at some high level specialty position that he thinks I am suitable for. He also has a habit of lecturing when he thinks he's being conversant, and i tend to just shut down when he gets that way. The situation is not reached a critical mass as yet, and I am trying my best to insure it doesn't.

One of the actions I've been taking is to try and make the basement office (aka the Dungeonette) back into a working space. I have done a lot of writing down here, but atrophy and entropy have allowed it to become cluttered with the last eight years of living here. The process has been emotional and cathartic. (And has already broken one paper shredder.) One of the emotional parts has been taking all the old Butch Media paper work and throwing out that which is non-personal, and using the shredder on all things including personal or financial information of me, Peter, or any Vulcan America/Butch Media customers. It took days to complete this task, and a few tears. Vulcan published its last mag in 1999 and I took the website down in 2003.

Once the paperwork was destroyed, the last thing to go was my Apple PowerMac, purchased at a Sears in Los Angeles in 1996. (I still had the receipts.) It has been sitting on a table, pretty much unusable, for 5 years. The last thing I did with it was to transfer files from the Vulcan archives to my current machine, and then to formulate much of the material into the book "Skin Tight." The PowerPC was then blanked, and tossed into the recyclables. With it, just about 10 years of activity went off to the junkyard. Like I said earlier, emotional yet cathartic.

My dad is recovering from his heart surgery, which is good. He's a strong old goat, and I hope I've inherited his repetitive genes. However, he is recovering at my older sister's home, and that woman and I have such a toxic relationship that, when she attempted to use this moment as a weapon against me (and my younger sister, I should add), there was a final rupture in the Brother/Sister relationship. Dad is now aware of it, as is my Mom. (The full details would take a lengthy post, which may or may not appear at a later time.)

I promise to return to a more disciplined writing schedule soon, as my daily musical posts have been less frequent through this period, and frankly I use them as brain exercises. And again, please know that while I am dealing with the depression, I am Okay overall. I just needed to vent and LJ seemed like a good place to type it all down.

With all the hooey about Reagen's 100th birthday and the pig vomit being espoused about his greatness, one needs to be reminded not just of Iran-Contra, the destruction of the middle class, his lust for deregulation and union-busting, but most of all for his political homophobia and the ignorance that led to so many of my friends dying tragic, unnecessary deaths,

Aids Activist Larry Kramer wrote The following piece, which was published in The Advocate issue dated July 6th, 2004

Our murderer is dead. The man who murdered more gay people than anyone in the entire history of the world, is dead. More people than Hitler even. In all the tributes to his passing, as I write this two days after his death, not one that I have seen has mentioned this. The hateful New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print”) of course said nothing about this. We still are not fit to write about with total honesty in their pages. Not really. Just as we were not fit for Ronald Reagan to talk about us. What kind of president is that?

I have been writing a long work of history which I call The American People. I chose this title because in every speech he ever made Reagan went on and on about “the American People.” We of course were never a part of his American People. And we knew it. Year after year of his hateful and endless reign we knew we were not a part of the American People he was President of. He would never talk about us, of course, or do anything for us except murder us. There were no social services for us. There was no research into our health. Even as we were dying like flies. How could he not have seen us dying? The answer is he did see us dying and he chose to do nothing. There was no representation in his government of us. There was never anything for us but his ignoble dismissal of us. All of Washington, indeed the world, knew that Reagan hated us. How could they not? Most of them did, too. And when Daddy doesn’t love you, who is there who will stand up to Daddy? This is a trick that Hitler used and which I believe the young Reagan learned from him. He never had to say much out loud himself about his hatreds; but everyone knew what they were. Gays were as hated under Reagan as Jews were under Hitler. It is a trick that both George Bushes have carbon-copied. We have not been included among their American people either.

I could never understand why Reagan’s hatred of us was so intense and manifest and never-ending. Some of Nancy Reagan’s best friends were gay, the self-loathing Jerry Zipkin, at one time her principle “walker,” chief among them. It is said he taught her how to dress. In my play, Just Say No, I dramatized my own theory of why she and her husband kept gays off their agenda as if we were the plague, which of course, as in some hideous self-fulfilling prophecy, we became. Ron Reagan, Jr. That is why. It was no secret in an ever-widening circle that Ron Reagan, Jr. was suspected of being gay. In his freshman year at Yale (I believe this was his only year there; perhaps there were two) I have been told he had numerous gay experiences. I am well known at Yale. Indeed, I have established the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale to document the evil acts that American “history” has performed on us.

And just as damning of the son’s reputation of course, because it could not be hidden, was that Ron Reagan, Jr. was a ballet dancer. This did not look good and was obviously exceedingly embarrassing to a father who rode so many horses. So off with the tutu and on with a wedding ring. Junior was married off and sent to far-off places in positions of low visibility. I have gay friends in Hollywood, equally closeted, who knew him and know him and protect him. To know him is to be sworn to some sort of pact of secrecy. What a hideous life Ron, Jr. must have led all these years. To be denied a life and to have been so utterly gutless about fighting back. (Well, we know all about that.) While his own mother was gallivanting around with some of the biggest fairies in the world. What hateful parents to have had in the prime of your life, “the great communicator” of a father out there communicating how much he hated you and his wife out there going along with this. I suspect by now Ron Reagan, Jr. actually believes he is straight. By now he may very well be. He may well have been all along. He just looked so suspicious, and of course it was this perceived suspicion that, one way or the other, is what caused his father to murder so many of us. Why does history not recognize this monstrous and never-ending history of hatred and the inestimable number of deaths it continues to cause?

People magazine called me for a quote Reagan’s death. “I wish he had died before he was elected” is what I told them. I wonder what they will run.

It is remarkable that two of the so-called “greatest presidents” have also allowed the greatest perpetrations and perpetuations of mass murder. Franklin D. Roosevelt was shamefully inept in dealing with “the Jewish question,” (see my play The Normal Heart), most ironically since so many Jews were his most loyal supporters, the Jerry Zipkins of their day. No one really writes about this. Roosevelt is one of history’s great gods. Just as no one really writes about Reagan and “the gay question.” These two major murderers so far have got away with helping to cause the two major holocausts of modern history. Just as Jews are asked to never forget their Holocaust I implore all gay people never to forget our holocaust and who caused it and why. Ronald Reagan did not even say the word “AIDS” out loud for the first seven years of his reign. Because of this some 70 million people, so far, have become infected with HIV/AIDS. I wonder what it feels like to be the son and the wife of a man responsible for over 70 million people so far becoming infected with a virus that has killed over half of us so far. I wonder what it felt like while he was alive to ponder this. For surely he must have thought about it. How could he not? He has been called the consummate actor who came to believe all his lines. Does this not make his legacy even more grotesque? It should.

Hitler knew what he was doing. How could Ronald Reagan not have known what he was doing?

But of course no one is writing about this. Reagan too is one of history's gods.

So far he has got away with murder.

Last week in the series of snowfalls we had, I fell on a patch of ice while clearing the driveway. What I thought was just a minor sprain has turned out to be a fracture in my wrist. I am waiting for the Dr to call to tell me what comes next. This on top of getting let go from work Thursday.

Not my week