The Gay Blade

I have never been all that confident about my looks - like a lot of gay men I guess. I tend to see the negatives, all the things I wish I could change or hadn't been born with. When I was younger I genuinely thought I was ugly - and  now I feel sorry for that teenage boy who couldn't see how cute and hot he was, and wish I could sit down with me then and explain how wrong I was about how I saw myself. I don't think I'm unusual in that. So many guys I know have their anxieties about how they look, whether it's physically or their clothes, and so many of us have worked hard to come to terms with our bodies and faces - learning that we won't be as perfect as the images in the magazines takes time - some of us never really learn and keep beating ourselves up over our failure to look like a cover model. And I can think of men I know who are drop-dead handsome, fantastic bodies, and lovely personalities, but they still think they are ugly and undesirable. And for ...

I haven't blogged for a while - just been busy I guess. I'm sitting here on a break from my PhD writing and once again thinking to myself "Why the fuck did I decide to write a PhD about HIV? Why?" I ask the question because it takes up so much space in my life anyhow, so having to read and think and write about it as well in an academic way may not have been the best move for my sanity. The answer is obivous of course. It matters. What HIV does to the men I count as my community matters - the stories that poz guys have so generously entrusted to me about their own experiences matter and deserve to be heard and to feed into our work on controlling the spread of it. They also simply deserve to be heard, and I hope I can help do that. This morning I was re-reading the interview I did with a young guy who died earlier this year. We just had the annual Candlelight Memorial here in New Zealand - I used to go to them but I don't any more. I feel like I remember t...