The Gay Blade

The tragic suicide of Dr Matt Wildbore last week as well as the imminent publication of Dr Chris Brickell's new book "Mates and Lovers" made me think of a few things. One thought that I keep returning to is the way our history, individual and collective, is so fragile. For many younger men in Auckland, Matt Wildbore is not a name they'd know. For me, and I guess for my generation, he was a symbol of compassion, of care, of fun, of bravery and support through the worst days of the plague. He was vocal, he was courageous, he cared. The effort he put in, and also the efforts of many others, through those dark days when all you could expect after an HIV+ diagnosis was to get sicker and sicker and die, usually terribly, perhaps in your own shit, emaciated, blind, demented, unable to recognise those around your bed who loved you, it seems that history, that part of our culture, has been lost to some extent. It's as if the generation coming straight after a terrible w...

A good friend, who at 44 is a couple of years younger than me, had a heart attack the other week (henceforth known as HAM -Heart Attack Man). Given that he smokes like a chimney, and in his drinking makes me look (at times) like a Salvation Army officer, perhaps it’s not surprising. Worrying, as I am very fond of him, but maybe not so surprising. Another friend, also younger than me, but only by a few weeks, has been living with a nasty cancer diagnosis (henceforth known as CB - Cancer Boy) for the last 2 months. Both of these guys, myself and another friend (let’s call him the 4th), were sitting chatting the other night on K Rd. CB and HAM were sort of swapping notes, while both were smoking still (I can be smug as I haven’t had a ciggie in weeks and weeks now) joking a little, when I asked the 4th if was ok, and he assured me he was, and he asked me if I was ok, and I said “I’m fine thanks, just fine” or words to that effect. There was a slight sort of pause, then I said, “We...

Here’s a question for you: Do all immigrants to New Zealand, or any country, share the same issues? I mean, do a multi-millionaire French immigrant and his American wife settling in Marlborough and running a vineyard have that much in common with an IT peon from Shanghai in Wellington? How much does either one share with a Samoan wife joining her husband and his family here in South Auckland? They all have to adjust, they all come from somewhere else, they’ll all feel a bit different here, for a while at least, but their social and material conditions are vastly different, and this will affect how they adjust to life here. I ask because from among the mailing lists I’m on, I received one the other day that had this acronym - GLITTFAB = gay, lesbian, intersex, transgender, takataapui, fafa’afine, asexual, and bisexual. What an assortment! And why on earth are we all grouped together? That’s what I don’t get. As a gay man, I think I do share a few interests with lesbians. We get ...

A message from a guy I don’t recognise on nzdating - “So, do you still paint your fingernails black?” How long ago was that? 1981? Did I ever paint them black?Maybe in my late-70s wannabe punk days. I remember whore red, sometimes with turquoise glitter laid over the top when the varnish was still wet (cosmetics were more limited in those days). Not sure about black though. I did have black hair with pink stripes. And then lime green hair with a big pink triangle that came down over my forehead to the tip of my nose. I can’t remember all the rest of the stuff I put through my hair. It changed colour regularly. I used to have a beautiful white angora mini-dress, from Streetlife I think. I wore it to my first anti-Springbok tour protest outside Air NZ house, complete with the lime green and pink hair, and tights, one leg pink, one, you got it, lime-green with, I think, red boots. After getting baton-charged I started to wear more protection to protests. I remember having a pair of...

So I see the idea of “Negotiated Safety” (NS) has been re-appearing, both here on the message boards and in the rag. Actually, that’s unfair, Mark Farnworth in express actually wrote a fairly good, if historically uninformed piece on the topic. And at first glance it is easy to see why people go “Why doesn’t NZAF push this idea…?” NS was first “named’ by the Australians, Kippax et al, in 1993 if my memory serves me right. They claimed they had ‘identified’ it as a strategy being used by gay men to avoid getting HIV. I guess Mark was still in primary school when this first surfaced back in the early 90s. Official NS goes something like this: you and the guy you’re with go through a 3 month minimum process of discussing the idea, figuring out how much you trust each other, how easily you can talk about your sex-lives honestly and openly (and that’s never a problem, right?), with a counsellor, then it’s about getting tested, sharing your test results, waiting another month or so,...

I like bars. But, I do like a drink and chat. And even with their drawbacks, bars are one of our main social spaces as homos. There are guys I know from bars and only from bars. We never or very rarely socialise outside them. Yet we know each other, or we know about each other. I think the gay male world is one of the few places where you can know a guy’s intimate details, you know, how big his cock is, whether he likes to top or bottom, what sort of men he goes for, any special kinks, does he like to get pissed on, or get turned on by leather, and still never know his surname, how big his family is, what his living room looks like or what he does for a living. But you will know what he drinks. In fact, you can know all that about another guy without ever having talked to him or even had sex with him. You see, we do tend to talk to each other and about each other. Every time I see one particular guy walking down the street, I think “There goes Mr Accident” after a friend told me of an ...

LOVE MAKES ME GAY I don’t think about why I am gay so much these days, unless I have to. When I was an angst-ridden teenager, it occupied my mind considerably. Why was it that I had no sexual interest in girls, like the other boys did, I wondered? Why did I enjoy showers so much, all of us standing around in the communal shower room, talking and soaping up. Why did I keep thinking about guys all the time? Why were all my wet-dreams based around men, not women? What was wrong with me and how could it be fixed? I was terribly confused, full of self-doubt, and sure there was something deeply “wrong” with me for all this. My family would reject me, if they ever found out, as would my friends. I would be an outcast, a weirdo, unloved and unlovable forever. And it took me a while to get over it, quite a while really. But when I think back to before my balls dropped, I remember that even as a five-year old, while I enjoyed hanging out with the girls in Primer 1, I also really enjoyed the fe...