The Gay Blade

I listened to a couple of guys I know the other day making jokes about lesbians. Not nice jokes. These were gay guys too, not idiotic straights - and it made me wonder: Why do some gay men seem to find lesbians hard to deal with? I've always had dyke friends, since I was 17 or so and just coming out. Maybe that's exposed me to their world more, so I'm comfortable around it, I don't know, but some of the stuff I hear from other gay guys really repels me. It's nasty sexist bullshit, and I doubt they'd tolerate it if a straight guy talked about them that way. And I remember the way so many dykes stepped up and got so deeply involved in HIV/AIDS: They didn't need to - it's not a virus that lesbians tend to get infected with. But they stood up for us in a huge way. Way more than some of the closety bitter queens that are still around. Lesbians helped protest for better care and treatment, they helped in a practical on-the-ground sense of getting food to peop...

Every now and then I get an email from some dating site I joined up and lost interest in, telling me someone has left me a message. They're usually from Ghana or somewhere in the old USSR, telling me how much they loved my profile and that distance is no obstacle to our love - I don't even bother checking those emails now. But thanks guys anyhow. I've looked at, and joined, and forgotten, a lot of sites over the years. Just how many gay dating sites are there? Here in New Zealand nzdating has things pretty well sewn up, but gaydar can get pretty busy. They're all a bit different, but with a fair amount of crossover too. Damn, admitting I know that shows how much time I spend on them. Well, I did do my MA on gay men's online sex-lives, I'm just maintaining my research interest, honest. Let's see - what comes to mind first? - NZDating, Recon, Gaydar, Gay.com, Grindr, Manhunt, BearWWW, Hairy Turks, GayRomeo, Squirt, Silver Daddies, Adam4Adam - that's j...

Some of you will be aware of this story that has been doing the rounds this week. Two men, lovers, in Malawi, have been sentenced to 14 years in prison for getting engaged, for publically acknowledging their love for each other and for being public about the fact they are men who love men. Malawi is an old British colony, like us, and like us they were governed under British laws, and it is under these laws that these men have ben prosecuted. One of the weird things about so many ex-colonies, and old cultures that have rushed to embrace the modern western way of life is how puritanical sexual ideas have taken such strong root in them. When Catholic missionaries got to China in the 16th C they were appalled at how people regarded men having male lovers as not even worth commenting on. China after the revolution became sexually more puritan than the Seventh Day Adventists. We know that in Africa all sorts of different forms of sexuality were seen in the many different cultures there: Tod...

Which label fits you best? Which one do you use for yourself ? Or do you hate them all? I think a number of us have had these words spat out at us as terms of hatred at times, and that's always nasty. I generally tend to call myself gay, but will also use poof or fag at times, just for the hell of it. In lectures at Uni where it's appropriate I sometimes call myself a big old homo: Because let's face it, I am. But the full word "homosexual" (only invented in 1867, heterosexual came 10 years later) now is seen as clinical and less appealing to many. It sounds like an illness to many, so it seems less popular as a personal term. There's an old political idea that by taking over the words our enemies use to attack us and using them ourselves we rob the words of their power as weapons - the growth of Black Pride in the USA in the 60s & 70s (in contrast to the older, more respectable "Negro" or "Coloured") is an example of this, and so is t...

I was interested to read this article on gaynz about the magazine "Collective Thinking" and how Body Positive (BP) and others view it and where it should be. Now, let me declare my potential conflicts of interest up front: I have written for the magazine a number of times. I have close links to NZAF as an ex-Chair of the organisation. I have also served my time on the Board of Body Positive back in the 90s, and I have helped run a number of support groups for BP over the years, I think I co-facilitated five of them in the end, as a volunteer. I also carry out research at University into life with HIV for gay men in New Zealand. So I'm sort of in the thick of it to some extent. Do HIV+ people in New Zealand need some sort of magazine or forum where they can connect or at least feel as though they matter? Yes, definitely, and like Ray Taylor I'm a fan of the idea of turning it into an online resource. Is BP the right group to be running this? Well, personally, I don...

It's easy for a lot of us to think that now we've got all those legal battles behind us, you know, we're legal now, can't be discriminated against for being a homo, can get a Civil Union if you want, to think that it's just fine and dandy for everyone else who's gay in the country, but as I've been reminded a few times lately, it's not the case. It's pretty hard for most of us to avoid family and the impact they have on us. And if you're queer, it can be really hard if the people you've grown up with and known since you were born freak out when they find out that you're not going to follow the straight and narrow path they just assumed you would naturally take. Family matters. Their opinions of us are important, even when they're negative. And I don't know why but I've heard quite a lot of stories recently from people who have had really shitty experiences with their families. Outright rejection is the most obvious and hurtful...

So, whoever would have guessed that Ricky Martin was gay? OK, all of us really. But it matters. And it shouldn't matter - that's the trouble. I can remember years ago as a scared gay teen desperately looking for any sign of gayness in singers, actors, public figures: I just wanted to know there were others out there like me, and they'd been successful. But of course, so many successful queers have had to hide who they are in a way that straights don't. And that's not right. There have been some really nasty homophobic comments on message boards and youtube since Ricky made the announcement. The saddest thing for me is that it still seems necessary for success in the entertainment industry to pretend to be someone you aren't. The general public are the problem more than the industry itself, yet it's a vicious cycle: if people in the public eye are warned that coming out will kill their career, they won't, and so the hypocrisy continues, and instead of qu...

Once again I am forcibly reminded, I am my body . Crossing Queen St on Wednesday on my way to a meeting at the AIDS Foundation, I felt this sudden Bang! like someone had slammed the back of my left calf with a hammer. I'd pulled a muscle, just by running across the road. Pain! And not the fun kind! I rang my Dr, got an appointment. Rang my boss and told her I wouldn't be back in. Staggered onto the Link and got to the meeting. The Dr couldn't see me till after 2, and they're only 5 mins away from my Dr and home, so I thought, "Just go for an hour" and I managed. The Dr said "you've pulled your left calf muscle near the top." Gee, really ? A compression bandage (so not sexy) and panadol - not even a decent opiate-based pain-killer. Although a surprising number of friends have them in their medicine cabinets it turned out, offers of all sort of things came in - thanks for that! An awful lot of people have walking sticks lying around too it seems....

I was out dancing the other weekend and "Forever Young" came on. I was dancing with a small group of old friends, some of us have been dancing together for 30 years. I'm 48 and I often go out dancing. Do I want to be forever young, as the song says, or not? Should I have taken myself off the dancefloor in shame? Gay men are often accused of having a Peter Pan complex. And while we visible ones on the scene help create this stereotype, it's often applied to all homos with thin-lipped disapproval, to show we aren't really serious or mature somehow. We don't want to grow up, apparently. We like to do "young" things, like dance, dress up, go to parties, sleep around, and worry about our appearance, apparently. We spend money like teenagers, apparently. So we are judged by some, including some of our own, to be immature. Well what's mature? Holding down a nine-to-five job till you retire? Getting to bed at 10 on a Saturday night because you're rea...

Last Sunday saw well over 10,000 people at the Big Gay Out here in Auckland. Over 10, 000 assorted quuers in one spot. It was a lot of fun, as it is every year. And it's the last big LGBTQ community event in Auckland. The days of HERO are now over, for all sorts of reasons. And before HERO, we had private celebrations, but really it was only our protests that were public. Things have changed. When was the last time you heard of a gay protest? So we've gone from a mega dance-party with huge shows, and an in-your-face street parade that offended many, and both with a strong and obvious emphasis on HIV, to a happy family picnic day that the right-wing Prime Minister of NZ thinks it is a good strategic move to appear at, along with the obnoxious born-again Christian Mayor of Auckland who believes we will all burn in hell as we're filthy sodomites, but hey, he still wants our votes. In short, the BGO is a huge success. Everyone wants a piece of it. And yet it also holds onto it...

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...