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it more than he did, and who suffered in silence. But when those weedy flowers with the pretty faces would start pressing against him, he would get crazy and do anything to get away.
    And that’s all I’m going to say.
    I’m also not going to talk about the radio show. Okay? If you want me to go
there
, just throw down that gauntlet again. But I will say this: my father and I were a lot alike.
    However, I’m not my father. I’d be dead by now if I was.
    It’s you who is misinterpreting my scholarship. You are twisting everything around. And suddenly Dash King becomes my father, and I’m my father, and pretty well everyone is my father! Untrue. Because when it came down to it, you know I was pretty insulted when they tried to say that my “affection for homosexuals” had something to do with him. It didn’t. I
was
a homosexual, as far as I was concerned. I mean, that’s pretty fucking clear.
    And don’t listen to Liza, please don’t listen to what she said. You know I don’t like trashing my own children, I really don’t, but she whitewashed things. She liked to paint a pretty picture. Not sure why, not sure who that serves in the end. “Mama was a good person.” Yeah, well, good
intentions
. . . maybe. “Mama took care of us.” Well, no. I mean, I was there until they grew up, I didn’t abandon them. And I supported them financially because that was the easy part — until it got hard. But a good mother doesn’t get taken care of by her children. She takes care of them. I can’t tell you how that must have fucked them up.
    Look, I’m interested in Dash King, not because he is what used to be called a homosexual — like my father. I’m a scholar now, remember? I’m interested in the decline of the West. And part of that decline is not, as so many assume, due to the ascendance of homosexuality, but instead to the disappearance of it. Orgies are not about desire. When people get all horned up, they normally don’t have orgies, they don’t obliterate themselves with sex. Orgies are all about repression and self-hatred. Orgies and decadence are the symptoms of a civilization that is struggling with repression. Sex and sexuality do not have a natural inclination to get out of hand (as Freud suggested) — no pun intended. The tendency of sex is not towards too much sex, it’s just toward, perhaps, more sex. Too much sex is something that happens when people are afraid they might not ever have sex again.
    Dash was writing during a period when people were witnessing the end of sex. Sex was virtually over, in the sense that virtual sex had taken over what used to be called sex. It wasn’t just that people began to live in the virtual world — though they did. It’s that the virtual world became so available to them that there was no longer any way for them to measure or understand their real lives. It started in my era; I was one of the causes. (But I didn’t write the movies, so please don’t blame me.) It was because of Hollywood that millions of people — especially women — grew up imagining that love had something to do with sunsets, violins, perfect profiles and happily ever afters. Not having lived through this, you cannot imagine what it was like. And this deluded rush after an ever-dwindling perfect was the media’s fault.
    But the movies had nothing on pornography. It was one thing to destroy love. But to destroy sex — that really gets people where they live. I mean that in the sense that one of the few links we have to reality has now disappeared. Sex used to be, if nothing else, real. You have written about the state of current sexuality — and the state of the university life. But as one who actually lived through it all — amazingly — I have a unique perspective.
    I’m only mentioning this to re-emphasize the context for Dash’s sad obsessions.