The Gay Blade

I always loathed PE at school. Anything to do with sports made me shudder. Except of course for the communal showers afterwards. But I hated playing rugby, cricket, going for runs, doing workouts - all of that. I've never had a great sporting relationship with my body. But I was lucky, I was able to get by on youth for a while and good genes, although, like so many of us, I never considered myself that handsome or attractive when I was younger. I look back at photos of me in my 20s and realise how mistaken I was. Now, the years are definitely showing, as are the effects of long-term use of HIV meds. I was having a little pity-party for myself last week. "I'm nearly 50, I've got a gut, I have HIV, no-one looks at me and thinks I'm hot or handsome anymore" that sort of thing. And let's face it, it's not that unusual. Hotness and desirability don't last forever. But we homos try to make it do that. The birth of gym-culture is at least partially relate...

Another year over, and already into the next. I'm not complaining, I'm glad I'm still going. I know it's a bit artificial to think of each year as somehow separate and distinct from the other, but it's how we humans work. What will I remember 2009 for? Personally, the pain and chaos the Mills affair wrought was not fun to deal with. But that's over now. Work has been OK. Study has been OK. I've made a few new friends, which is always a plus. It's the first year in ages I haven't been out of the country, but that's OK too. And I had my first brush with the Censor thanks to my "full and frank" discussion of anal sex in a previous post. The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, set up by the mad ex-nun Patricia Bartlett, but still apparently going in its own little echo-chamber, complained about it. The Censor's office didn't uphold their complaints, but they did want an R 18 warning on it, which is fine by me. I'm...