The Gay Blade

There's an old line that straight men are afraid of gay men because they're worried we'll treat them like they treat women, and I think there's more than a grain of truth to it. I've been watching the #MeToo movemen t arising from the  fury so many women have at the way sexual assault has been used against them, and as in the case with Anthony Rapp, we see Kevin Spacey also accused of doing this to men. I have felt  invisible in all the commentary on this topic that I've seen reported, the assumption is simply that what applies to heterosexual women around consent applies to all. I don't think it's that simple. It doesn't resonate with my lived experience. I want to explore that disconnect, between things that are so real for so many of my female friends and women in general, and my own experiences. If I think of my own sex life and the encounters I've had. I estimate I'd had sex with around 1,000 men by my early 20s, and maybe 2,0...

I think it was Chateaubriand who said that trying to imagine our own death is like trying to stare into the sun.We can't do it. Death is the one human experience that we will all go through, but the one that nobody can describe. Nobody has come back from death and said "It feel like this" 'This is what happens". Some do tell us such stories, but the fact they have "come back" means they have not died, and their knowledge is as limited as ours. In the '90s when I was expecting and expected to die from AIDS, I thought about death a lot.I'd been diagnosed in '87 or '88, I can't quite remember when now. Nothing really happened to me after diagnosis, years of just going on as before. But then it started, I began to get sick, weak. And as I got sick,  I became angry, bitterly furious. My body that engine of pleasure, this sack of meat that is me, no longer did what I wanted. My body had betrayed me.That's how it felt. I spent...