The Gay Blade

It's twenty years since the first Hero Party and the foundation of a deliberate attempt to strengthen the gay community and help us look after ourselves in the face of AIDS. Hero did a huge amount of good, it gave gay Auckland a face, inspired similar groups in Wellington and Christchurch, and it gave us an organisation that could act as a public voice for us, until it collapsed in a mire of corruption and broken trust. Yes, I'm still bitter about the money from the street collection, collected for people living with HIV, that a certain group of Hero trustees "borrowed" to cover a shortfall and never returned. Yes I'm bitter about the  CEO who embezzled funds then escaped back to Australia. But before that sad side of the story, there was a huge amount of good that came out of Hero.It made us visible, it gave us a reason to take pride in being queer. Visibility matters, and so does pride. Hero when at its best and strongest was inspirational. I doubt we can r...

Sometimes I hear newly diagnosed HIV+ guys say they'll never have sex again. They feel dirty. They fear passing the virus on to another, which is pretty understandable. They feel undesirable, unsexy, also pretty understandable as a reaction. But it doesn't have to be that way. I didn't have sex with another man for more than three years in the 90s. I barely even masturbated. Sex just seemed irrelevent at best, a terrible disease and death-ridden thing at worst. Over three years without sex - I did feel like a virgin again. Some good friends helped me through that phase in the best possible way. They had supported me in the mid-90s when I was so sick and we all thought I was dying, and they were there as I was recovering, helping me get back on my feet and into life again. When I was sick I'd totally lost interest in sex, and as I was recovering, I was stuck in a head-space where I saw myself as polluted, dirty, unsexy, and unloveable. They saw this on some leve...

I've been re-reading Patrick Moore's book "Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the History of Radical Gay Sexuality". I really like it. He looks at that great flowering of the new gay culture that was taking place in the late 60s- 80s, before AIDS struck, and considers what gay life would be like today if this hadn't happened. At the back of the book is a list of over 1000 names of artists and similar creative types, held by  The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS  who died - imagine the cultural impact they would have continued to have without this plague. It is very much an American take on the situation, but America was in the vanguard of both Gay Liberation in the 60s and 70s, and then the fight to deal with AIDS, so that's not unexpected, and there are parallells to be drawn. What I like is the way he shows the culture that was being developed - and it was a new and radical and at times chaotic and self-indulgent one - but it was a culture, a varied and inte...

Bears. Cubs. Otters. Admirers. Cuddly. Furry. Fun. Love 'em, hate 'em, we're here. I guess I'm a bear. I'm hairy (not so much on top these days...) got a little gut going on. But it's a hard group to pin down and define. Often it seems like we're defined by what we're not. We're not all young, we're not trying to be pretty, we're not 'smooth' (hairless) we're not obsessed with flash clothes. But even that doesn't quite get it right, because I know young bears, I know smooth bears, I know gay guys who hang out in the bear world because they don't feel like they fit in elsewhere. I think one of the things I like about the gay bear world is that it is inclusive. You don't have to be hairy, you don't have to be big, you don't have to be a certain age, you don't have to be anything really; just a man who is into men. And isn't the essence of being gay? Loving and desiring men? In many ways it's a c...