“Any deviation is looked upon as a perversion, is feared, and is usually a target of hatred and prejudice.” ~ Joey Skaggs

The PVRTD Project has premiered online, and early reactions have ranged from one of my closest friends citing it as my best work, to another summing it up as “dark dingy and depressing.” By far my favorite response up to this point has been the following, which perfectly sums up the whole experience: “Jesus on a biscuit, I need a drink after that.” See what you think on The Projects page.

How we are approaching the middle of November is beyond me. (And if that freaks you out, Thanksgiving is NEXT WEEK!) Holy fucking turkey, I need to get the yams before they’re all gone. And we need to have a viewing of ‘Home For The Holidays’ already. Sigh… time is not going by so slowly… would that it were. To slow you down further, and buy me some more time for the next post, here’s a collection of what we did this past week.

The last installment of the vainglorious PVRTD Promo interview was posted. (But if you missed any of the promotional hoopla, check out this helpful link-filled post.)

It’s not the Spice Girls without Posh (and David Beckham’s bulge). 

Madonna went bananas. 

Chicken curry in a hurry. 

A cactus by any other name. 

Fall in all its glory. 

A smudging returns a house to a home. 

#TinyThreads

Hunks of the Day included Nick Merico, Zachary Zane and Mikhail Kolyada.

“They had no conception that sex had anything to do with emotional feelings and the desire for human contact – even among homosexuals. All that they cared about was a little bit of pleasure for themselves.” – Heinz Heger

We are but days away from the online premiere of PVRTD – my new project – and in case you missed out on the promotional previews that have really nothing to do with the project itself, here’s a post to catch you up. Lingerie and naked skin make for a typical trapping of click-bait, and if that brings someone new into our eclectic circle of friends, then so much the better. We always have room for more.

I also wanted to showcase the dichotomy of how we live today. You cannot – at least, I cannot – turn a blind eye to the world as it is, and the way we want to live. No one wants to live out a life of fantasy more than me; it’s simply no longer possible.

~ A Perverted Beginning

~ The PVRTD Tease 1

~ The PVRTD Tease 2

~ The Promo Blitz

~ A Hint of the Perverted

~ Perverse Thrills

~ The Act of Creation

~ The Decadence Before the Perversion

“Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies, the yellow, pink and brown triangles, were the prisoners who suffered most frequently and most severely from the tortures and blows of the SS and the Capos. They were described as the scum of humanity, who had no right to live on German soil and should be exterminated… but the lowest of the low in this “scum” were we, the men with the pink triangle.” – Heinz Heger

How to reconcile the way we live, with the way we once lived, with the way they live, and the way they used to live… How to make sense of our happiness and comfort in a world of such pain and sorrow and injustice?

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 1

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 2

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 3

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 4

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 5

~ The PVRTD Promo Interview Part 6

“All of them, before their imprisonment in concentration camps, had been decent people in private life, many indeed highly respected citizens, who had never come up against the law, but were set apart only by their homosexual feelings. Al of these otherwise decent people had been assembled here, in this melting pot of disgrace and torment, for extermination through back-breaking labor, hunger, and torture. None of them were child molesters or had had sex with children or adolescents, as all of these had a green triangle. Were we with our pink triangle really outrageous criminals and “degenerates”, a menace to society?”
~ Heinz Heger

The wind was peripatetic that day (see Meryl Streep in ‘Doubt’), flitting this way and that with large gusts that would press the imperious fountain grass close to the ground while ripping the staunchest oak leaves from their tenacious grip. It pushed against windows and doors, shaking the whole house and making me glad to be on the inside looking out. Before hunkering down for the long wait of winter, however, I needed to do one thing: smudge the house.

I opened up various windows and doors and started in the attic. Lighting a stick of sage and lavender, I filled the first corner with the cleansing smoke of ages, and relaxed a bit. The bad spirits were swept instantly away, and I waved the burning wand in gentle swirls, making sure the smoke went into every hiding space. Working my way downstairs, closing windows and doors behind me when the cleansing of each space was complete, I filled the house with the pungent aroma of burnt sage and smoky lavender. A purification and a benediction. The christening of a new couch and the start of Daylight Savings season.

When I was done, and the last of the negative energy had been driven out of the house, I walked outside to snub the smudge into its mother-of-pearl shell. I inhaled the wind as it rushed by and gave quick thanks for all that we had. Our house was again a home.

A scene such as the one that’s been playing out in our front yard is so beautiful it merits an excessively-flowery post title, hence the literary histrionics at hand. (Not that anyone could tell a difference; I’ve made bigger deals out of mouse poop, I’m sure.) Anyway, here is the late afternoon sun illuminating the Chinese dogwood and Japanese maple in front of our home. This photo was taken before Andy had a chance to give one final haircut of the season to the lawn, but I like its wayward appearance. It reminds me of a rocky ocean, much more befitting of this time of the year. The beauty of November too often goes unnoticed or unappreciated. I’m trying to do better service to the month and the notion.

“Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial warmth of 4 p.m.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

For our last official interview session, he has invited me to witness the “sacred space” of getting ready for a big party. Only a few select people have been behind this curtain, and even Andy is not part of most of these intrigues. While he’s only recently been more vocal about his social anxiety when it comes to events large and small, it’s been with him all his life. He’s worked out various ways of dealing with it (a cocktail never hurts) and in the hours before heading out he has several methods of which we’ll try a smattering. First up, a showing of ‘Auntie Mame’ – no party he throws is complete without watching a few minutes of Rosalind Russell greeting her guests in the opening tableau. Her gift for gab and meaningless small talk, along with her carefree skills as hostess form the backbones of his cocktail persona. Second is Madonna. In the bathroom, she blares from the stereo speaker while Alan fixes his hair and makes his cologne selection.

In an impossibly-frilly satin robe, silver in color and accented by numerous sheer flowers in darker shades of silver and gray, he opens the glass door that leads to his pride and joy: an extensive collection of fragrances, anchored by the largest number of Tom Ford Private Blend bottles I’ve seen outside of Ford’s flagship Manhattan store. Even rarities like ‘Japon Noir’ and ‘Amber Absolute’ are here, along with recent offerings such as ‘Fougere D’Argent’ and ‘Fucking Fabulous’. It’s a cologne connoisseur’s dream featuring other houses as well: Byredo, By Kilian, Hermes, Diana Vreeland, Creed and Frederic Malle. For tonight’s event he chooses By Kilian, and the rum-accented ‘Straight to Heaven’, the name of which he quickly condemns. “How would I ever tell someone what I’m wearing?” he asks. “If it didn’t smell so heavenly I wouldn’t abide it, but it’s so good I couldn’t resist. And I suppose cheesy over-the-top nonsense is what I do best, so ‘Straight to Heaven’ it is!” With a dramatic flourish of the handsome black cologne bottle, he expertly lands a few spritzes at all the pulse points and caps it with a click. I giggle at the histrionics and he laughs at himself too.

Walking by me with a swish of his robe, he does smell damn good. “Pick out something to wear too!” he shouts over his shoulder before closing the door to his bedroom. The opening electronic strings to ‘Vogue’ sound as I peruse the olfactory riches on display, and for a moment I give in to the decadent indulgence on hand, losing myself in how pretty the world can be, and how gorgeously it can be scented. “When all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today… I know a place where you can get away…”

I make my choice: ‘Vert D’Encens’ for its incense-like take on fall. A single spray on my wrist is all I need, or want, and I make my way out into the living room. Settling into the ornate conversation couch, I spy the ‘PVRTD’ project on the table before me. It looks smaller than expected. For something that contains such powerful images, it appears diminutive and harmless, with its elegantly-abstract cover and manageable size. Surrounded by beauty, and scented decadently by Tom Ford, I feel at odds with the pages I slowly thumb through, and the opening images of a snowy winter lend a sudden chill to the moment.

Though I’ve seen them already, the photographs draw me in again. ‘PVRTD’ is one of those rare works that gets better with repeated viewings. The subtlety lost on first glance returns with a resonant grace, while the overall arch of the piece comes into a more focused rendering. For all its referenced horrors, ‘PVRTD’ is very much a work of beauty – heartbreaking, harsh, atrocious beauty – and it encompasses the human spirit simultaneously at its best and worst.

Images that rekindle the holocaust, white supremacy, and prisoner abuse are etched into our minds, but they are fading. Someone growing up today doesn’t have the same visceral reaction to a hooded KKK figure or a burning cross. ‘PVRTD’ wants to jolt us into feeling that abhorrence, to shake us from the lethargy of apathy, stir up something inside each of us that we must never forget or allow to be dulled. Our complacency is our death. If it’s Ilagan’s most political project to date (there isn’t much competition) it also manages to steer clear of direct reference to current events, taking the past for its initial inspiration. That said and seen, it’s shocking how prescient it feels when one thinks about the state of the world right now. When framed with that, ‘PVRTD’ is almost perfectly, if diabolically, timed.

As Madonna fades into the background, and the distant rumble of drawers and closet doors being opened and closed sounds in muffled fashion, an eerie sense of being suddenly and unexpectedly alone begins to give unnerving apprehension to the images in my hands. On this cusp of day and night, when the inside and the outside light are a match and you’re not quite sure which will end up being brighter, I find myself in a disconcerting disposition. This, then, is the twilight.

Andy is out getting groceries, Alan is getting ready, and I sit upon the conversation couch sifting through the pages of PVRTD. An ancient folk song plays from a music box in some sorrowful minor key. At least I think it’s a music box. The raspy way it slows and repeats indicates some mechanized element; it sounds like the whole world is ticking slowly down to a standstill. A waltz picks up where it leaves off, some bit of Viennese elegance and enchantment, and I turn the pages of crumbled stone and snow, dust and ice and desiccated flowers gone to empty seed-heads. A world of ruin beautifully frozen in gradations of gray. Beauty’s where you find it…

The dichotomy of this – the conundrum of such hard reality and history in the face of such comfort and beauty – makes me wonder at the world. I know that these photographs are intended to inspire contemplation. Raised awareness. A reminder that these atrocities did occur, they did take place – this was all real. And it might be again. 

The circle of gold-rimmed cocktail glasses sits atop a smoky mirror, surrounded by a border also gilded with gold. They are empty, and perhaps a little prettier because of it. They hold the emptiness of promise – the possibility of getting filled or getting left behind. We will not fill them tonight, but there will be other nights, at least I hope there will be, when company will regale itself with revelry and camaraderie. After all, what else is there besides company?

I think of the times we have spent together – all the moments, really. Once you make a friend of someone, they are with you forever, most of the time anyway. And if you’ve made a friend with yourself, well, that’s the best kind of friendship to have. If you can get on with yourself, you can get on with just about anybody. 

I hear him in the distance.

A door opens and closes, and another one opens. 

There are many doors in that little hallway of that little house.

Eventually I hear the rustle of his approach. I want to turn around and look, wondering what he or I may have chosen to wear on such a night. I wonder at what we wear on any given night. How silly and foolish and all-important it might be. Outside, the world has gone black. A lone light stands in the middle of the front yard. Is it safety? Is it warning? Does it welcome or does it repel? Oh what a world. What a wicked, wonderful, wayward world. 

He rounds the corner of the couch, lifting the finery in which he is draped, and sits down gently beside me. Close and near, it feels as though our hearts beat as one. I place a hand on his leg out of reassurance, and friendship and, yes, love, and I feel it on my own leg. The finery surrounds me, and in such beauty and luxury there is comfort. 

It is time to go. A party awaits. Andy is back and dressed, and I’m just about ready. As I search for the remote to turn the television off, I catch the last bit of a Lawrence Welk episode on PBS. The farewell song is playing – the song that once lulled me to sleep as my father would lift me up, carry me upstairs and tuck me in to bed: “Good night, sleep tight, and pleasant dreams to you, here’s a wish and a prayer that every dream comes true…”

Flinging a coat over my shoulder, I laugh. Half a guttural guffaw, and half a demonic squeal, all before Andy can hear and question my stability. The absurdity and sorrow is so much that all there is to do is laugh. 

The song fades.

Silence, and then the static-like crackle of a distant fire, and a hissing that grows louder…

On the news, reports of a shooter in a synagogue are just trickling in. The gunman reportedly shouted out “All Jews must die” as he killed eleven people at a baby’s bris. Thirteen bombs have been sent to Democratic leaders and supporters who have opposed the current President. Two black people were killed at a Kentucky supermarket after the gunman tried getting into a predominantly black church. 

The world burns, but oh how brilliantly it glows…

{See also Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5.}

‘PVRTD’ will be released on The Projects page this month.

“Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

There’s an epilogue to one of the ‘Grey Gardens’ documentaries that shows Little Edie touring the yard at the brink of winter. They had long since finished principal filming, and this looks and feels like a reunion of sorts after their summer together. A torn fur coat is draped over her shoulders as she surveys the damage of the colder seasons. All the leaves that provided such verdant drapery for the movie have been ripped from their perches and the land is bare but for the winding architecture of vines and tree limbs. It is comparatively somber, and Little Edie lets out plaintive coos about another oncoming winter.

I’m reminded of that scene when Alan brings me into his backyard in upstate New York, where the pool is still open but filled with dark leaves and swirling dead flowerheads from the once-glorious seven-sons-flower tree. He is not in a fur, but rather a colorful crocheted poncho made of yarn predominantly in a shade of flaming poppy red. A pair of jeans and a sensible yet still stylish pair of work boots complete this look, and once again his shape-shifting leaves a new impression. His scent is both intoxicating and off-putting for anyone other than cologne aficionados. I like it on him. I can’t imagine it on me. “Don’t worry,” he tells me. “It’s a secret combination of Tom Ford Private Blends. You’d never be able to conjure it. I probably couldn’t do it again either.”

He is equally imperious and self-deprecating today. If you’ve only heard about him or experienced him from his website, you might be surprised at how easily and quickly he will burst into laughter, often at his own expense. As we survey the wilted baskets still hanging from the canopy frame, Alan pulls the long, limp, lifeless length of a sweet potato vine off one of the patio lounge chairs. It has apparently been a long time since anyone sat outside. “We are but one step away from the poor-man’s version of ‘Grey Gardens’! And maybe not even that far…”

Inside, Andy is up to his own machinations in the kitchen. It makes for a cozy scene, these two gentlemen about to entertain for family and friends on a fall afternoon. “Let’s sit outside for a bit, while we still can,” he implores, brushing off more leaves from one of the chairs. “I love being on the verge of cold weather. It affords so many more wardrobe options.” A collection of gold crosses and chains dangles from his wrist, and he asks about favorite fall libations that he might have on hand for me. I venture a few beer selections, at which he scoffs. “I meant a real drink. This isn’t grade school.”

A simple yet potent Manhattan later (“note the Bada Bing cherries, do!”), I’m under his spell, and an afternoon that at first looked bleak and gray has blossomed into a rich wonderland of autumnal beauty. The sun slants through the fine fiery fronds of a Japanese maple and the ripe heads of a tree hydrangea, still holding onto their rich salmon shades. Alan is going on about the virtues of a certain Sweet Vermouth when Andy opens the door and asks what I want for dinner. A charmed existence indeed. 

A spaghetti and meatballs dish ordered and en route, I return us to the task at hand, and though talk of the ‘PVRTD’ project “feels almost blasphemous” on such a gorgeous day, Alan is game for more. But only a little more. “Must we sully the afternoon this way?” he asks himself almost inaudibly at one point. The air grows colder as our afternoon wears on. He folds his arms over his chest and wonders whether he should grab a hat. At such an idyllic autumn moment, it is difficult to place the horrors of humanity that are hinted at in the new project. Yet it pervades even this escapist space of respite. At the bottom of my almost-empty Manhattan, a cherry of the darkest red bleeds sweet juice and takes its final dying breath. I swallow the last of such bourbon-soaked sweetness and contemplate the predicament of an empty cocktail glass.

We touch a bit on the more controversial photographs in ‘PVRTD’. There are references both blatant and subtle made to the Holocaust, white supremacy, and the KKK – and it’s always dangerous to reference that kind of historical pain. As a gay man of a certain age, and a bi-racial minority from an inter-racial marriage, Ilagan has his own history of prejudice and pain. Though he comes from a position of financial stability, he can get away with a bit more because he also speaks from inside a place of first-hand prejudice. Before the choruses of ‘faggot’ as he got older, there were the students who poked fun of his Filipino heritage.

“Some of them thought I was Chinese,” he remembers, “And would pull their eyes into slits to make fun of me. And there was one kid who simply would not believe that I was NOT the Asian actor from ‘The Goonies’ – he insisted it was me. He was not really making fun of me, he just couldn’t get his head around the fact that the world was comprised of different people outside of those who attended St. Mary’s religious class in Amsterdam, New York.” He laughs a little at that memory.

Racism wasn’t always as direct as that, and most of his childhood and formative years would be divided between those who favored and doted on him as the first-born son of Dr. and Mrs. Ilagan, and those who eyed him suspiciously in stores, or substitute teachers who seemed harsher to him than to others. Is there any hard-proof that some of these adults treated him differently because of his race? No. That’s the insidious nature of latent racism; one usually never quite knows. But it’s there.

Homophobia was a little more easy to ferret out, particular when people would yell ‘faggot’ as he walked past, but it was no more easy to accept. The world has made strides toward equality, but the current administration and the things we are seeing daily on the news indicate a backlash against acceptance and love. In some respects we seem to be going back in time to a more sinister era when racism and homophobia were the accepted order of the day. Some of the same conditions are in place, some of the same hatred has risen to the surface, and some of it is sanctioned by the uppermost levels of our government.

The photographs of ‘PVRTD’ illustrate the perverted nature that society dictates and builds into existence. It’s dangerous folly to think that something similar won’t happen again – gays are being killed around the world, especially transgender people – and the suicide rates for both groups are exponentially higher than heterosexuals. What if it’s not a sickness that’s born with them, but one that society has imposed and created from years of oppression and hatred? What if the perversion is not of nature, but a man-made symptom? It gets into a dicey and difficult area, and such questions are not blatantly asked, which is another departure for Ilagan. (He has, of his own admission, veered into heavy-handed hamming when it comes to making a point or illustrating a thesis). ‘PVRTD’ offers no such up-front explanation to its images, and even less of a defense for the more incendiary photographs.

He himself gives no easy answer, no kumbaya save-the-world push for peace, no bumper-sticker feel-good turn of phrase – only the cold images that echo the barbarism from our past. It’s easy to think of the Ku Klux Klan and their burning crosses as the stuff of ancient history, to relegate the Holocaust and its Anti-Semitism to the sepia-toned memory corridor of long ago; Ilagan brings a renewed recreation of those horrific images not only to remind, but also to reveal. What does it inspire in the viewer? Outrage? Apathy? Disgust? Dismissal? Why does the very notion of a burning cross cause such a commotion? And if we push it away, if we avoid it and bury it and pretend it doesn’t have a place in today’s world, why couldn’t it happen again? More than ripples of such hatred have been making waves in America. The latent racism and tamped-down hatred of certain groups has found fissures and outlets to release itself, and certain individuals and political parties seem to embrace this dangerous divide. Ilagan wants to hold them to the light, to bring them forth from their caverns and basements and hidden recesses and reveal them for what they are. That can get messy, especially when he doesn’t offer a clear-cut answer. ‘PVRTD’ takes its premise of how hatred perverts the natural order of love with which most humans are intrinsically born, and makes the bold stance that the historically ‘perverted’ categories of people have been made so by the actions of those denying them their true nature. ‘Gay reparative therapy’ with its electroshock treatments and cruel, forced method of eradicating the ‘gayness’ of its subjects is the most glaring example of this. To cure a ‘pervert’, one need only force them into a hetero-normative situation and mindset.

The oppressiveness of this dark new world sinks into both of us as we head inside for a refill. Andy says that my dinner plate will be ready in a few minutes. Alan is working on a bourbon cocktail for fall, as family will be arriving for dinner soon. He arranges a circle of gold-rimmed glasses on a smoky mirrored tray then disappears for a wardrobe change. I spend the remainder of my time with Andy, enjoying his homemade meatballs and feeling cared for in a way I don’t often get from my own family.

I have to leave before Alan emerges in his latest finery, so I can’t report what he was wearing for that evening’s gathering, but we have one more official interview before I can return to my status as friend and confidante…

{To Be Continued… Also see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Part 4}

I was about to go all devastated about the news that the Spice Girls were mounting a tour without Posh, but then I realized that Victoria Beckham has much better people, I mean things, to do. 

PS – Find more of Mr. Beckham in his underwear and other gratuitous glamour here.