Kylie
I identified with Kylie Minogue for several years. My strange way of surviving. She would have been a successful stripper. I admired her pride in her libido, because mine had a stranglehold on me. No matter what I should be doing, if I found a man sexy, I was a goner. I’m not proud of that now, but at the time, I was built that way, for whatever reasons, and because I was stuck with it, I wanted to be proud of it. Proud of my ass, proud of my hussy's body overall.
So when Morrissey dissed Kylie, I felt he was slut shaming her, and therefore, slut shaming me, as I identified with her. I took it to be hatred of my kind, so I started making fun of him, in my journal as ‘redpathetic’. I remember posting a poem about Morrissey being on a stripper pole and having eaten too much potato or something like that. I posted taunts time and time again.
Around that time, I saw an interview of Morrissey by Russell Brand, called Wrestle With Russell. I glommed onto how sexy Russell seemed, and thought it was harmless fun to post a video I found on YouTube of pictures of Brand, set to Kylie’s song Wow. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but that’s another story.
One day I was in the liquor store, around that time, and some guy hands me ten bucks, out of the blue. I was always dirt poor in those days, and accepted the ten dollar bill. Later, on the street, we chatted, and he wanted me to do some housework in exchange for cash. I went to his apartment to assess how to possibly go about helping out. Somehow he ended up buying a couple of acrylic paintings from me, one of a paparazzi photo of a naked Kylie on a beach, and I think the other one was of Morrissey, perched on a table, as if avoiding a mouse on the floor.
The guy was guzzling hard booze constantly, but he was pretty laid back, and he didn’t mind my dog being with us. He even liked him. He didn’t force himself on me sexually, another big point in his favor. And, of course, I needed the dough. He’d sit on the couch drinking, and we’d chat while I cleaned, arranged, and cooked, in the adjoining kitchen. He said his money was from royalties. He wouldn’t say what songs they were from. I remember two of his buddies coming by for a beer. They were polite, but they must have wondered where it was going.
Where it went, was we were watching YouTube videos, and he said I reminded him of Jeff Beck. That was flattering, but when it was my turn to play a video, I chose Kylie’s song Come Into My World, with The Scissor Sisters, and in it, she makes sounds at an interval, that make her seem like she’s in sexual ecstasy. I asked him what he thought of Kylie, and he said “She’s a slut!”
You can guess how I reacted. I took my dog and left, and went home. He called, or I called him, and I told him I wasn’t having anything to do with him anymore. I didn’t explain why. I didn’t know how to communicate with people. I hope I’m better at it now. He cried out “What about me?”, and I don’t remember what I answered, but I believed that calling Kylie a slut was hateful, and because I identified with her, that he would hate me too, when he realized I fit the bill of ‘slut' too. I guess I was a slut, but again, that’s another story.