The Gay Blade

So I see the idea of “Negotiated Safety” (NS) has been re-appearing, both here on the message boards and in the rag. Actually, that’s unfair, Mark Farnworth in express actually wrote a fairly good, if historically uninformed piece on the topic. And at first glance it is easy to see why people go “Why doesn’t NZAF push this idea…?” NS was first “named’ by the Australians, Kippax et al, in 1993 if my memory serves me right. They claimed they had ‘identified’ it as a strategy being used by gay men to avoid getting HIV. I guess Mark was still in primary school when this first surfaced back in the early 90s. Official NS goes something like this: you and the guy you’re with go through a 3 month minimum process of discussing the idea, figuring out how much you trust each other, how easily you can talk about your sex-lives honestly and openly (and that’s never a problem, right?), with a counsellor, then it’s about getting tested, sharing your test results, waiting another month or so,...

I like bars. But, I do like a drink and chat. And even with their drawbacks, bars are one of our main social spaces as homos. There are guys I know from bars and only from bars. We never or very rarely socialise outside them. Yet we know each other, or we know about each other. I think the gay male world is one of the few places where you can know a guy’s intimate details, you know, how big his cock is, whether he likes to top or bottom, what sort of men he goes for, any special kinks, does he like to get pissed on, or get turned on by leather, and still never know his surname, how big his family is, what his living room looks like or what he does for a living. But you will know what he drinks. In fact, you can know all that about another guy without ever having talked to him or even had sex with him. You see, we do tend to talk to each other and about each other. Every time I see one particular guy walking down the street, I think “There goes Mr Accident” after a friend told me of an ...

LOVE MAKES ME GAY I don’t think about why I am gay so much these days, unless I have to. When I was an angst-ridden teenager, it occupied my mind considerably. Why was it that I had no sexual interest in girls, like the other boys did, I wondered? Why did I enjoy showers so much, all of us standing around in the communal shower room, talking and soaping up. Why did I keep thinking about guys all the time? Why were all my wet-dreams based around men, not women? What was wrong with me and how could it be fixed? I was terribly confused, full of self-doubt, and sure there was something deeply “wrong” with me for all this. My family would reject me, if they ever found out, as would my friends. I would be an outcast, a weirdo, unloved and unlovable forever. And it took me a while to get over it, quite a while really. But when I think back to before my balls dropped, I remember that even as a five-year old, while I enjoyed hanging out with the girls in Primer 1, I also really enjoyed the fe...