The Gay Blade

So it's a week since Glenn Mills' death . I for one can take no pleasure in the way his life ended. What I would have preferred is to see him stand trial, and, if found guilty (as I have no doubt he would have been) to do his time. The trail of destruction he has left will continue to have its effects. We know of the people who came forward, but undoubtedly there were others, perhaps not infected, but at least treated with the same careless contempt by him in exposing them to HIV. And perhaps I'm being too optimistic here, but perhaps there are a number of people who've been infected by him, and we will never know exactly how many. I've had to ask myself at times, if the decisions I took around all this were the right ones. I was not the first person to alert authorities, but I helped get things going. It has been one of the most ethically and emotionally fraught things I've ever had to deal with, but overall, yes, I did what I believe was the correct thing to d...

On NZ Dating the other day, an 18 year old asked me to do cam sex. 18 . I told him he was a bit young for me (didn't even look like he shaved) but he said "It's just cam and I'm horny". I said thanks, but no. It just would have felt...icky. Yes, I know, he's legal at that age, and maybe he goes for older men. I know I did. But still - it just didn't feel right. And truth to tell, I'm not really big on cyber-sex anyhow. Being on cam doesn't do it for me usually, although the voyeur in me doesn't mind watching others if they want to show the world. I just get too self-conscious to do it myself. There's no doubt that the net has changed our lives. So many gay men spend so much time there - there are so many sites. I did my MA thesis on how we were using it, and focussed on the chat rooms in gay.com. Remember gay.com? It used to be pretty popular, but now I never even think of it, though it still exists and has followers it seems. When I...

One of the most successful tactics of the Gay Liberation Movement back in the 70s was the emphasis they placed on "Coming Out" as a political statement. The logic was that if every gay man and lesbian came out and admitted who they were, the general public would see so many queers everywhere that they'd appreciate we were just a normal part of the population. If our real numbers were revealed, we'd be stronger. I remember reading somewhere a piece from back then where this activist said he wished every homo would turn purple overnight, so we could all be seen. Coming out did work. It took brave people at the start, but over time it become more and more ordinary, and now it is hard to imagine a world where it doesn't happen, in the West anyway. By making ourselves visible, instead of quietly hiding away, we made ourselves part of the landscape. It was a very clever political move. Even now, unfortunately, there are queers in New Zealand and elsewhere in the world ...

I read a lot. So I go to bookshops a lot, and love spending time and money in them. If you're ever stuck on what to give me for a present, book-vouchers are perfect. But I have to admit that it took me a while to figure out that Unity Books here in Auckland had moved their gay literature section to another part of the store. On reflection, this surprised me: not that they'd moved it, but that it took me so long to notice. Time was I couldn't wait to get my hands on any books that dealt with gay life. Fiction, poetry, biography, research, theory, whatever, they just seemed so important and so necessary to me. When I first enrolled at University, one of the first things I did was find out where all the gay books were kept in the library. I used to have that catalogue number memorised. The first time I went up there I remember looking at the books, pulling a few off the shelves, and looking down the aisle to see a guy with his cock hanging out, using the gay section as a crui...

I think I was 16 the first time I was rimmed. It was an utterly mind-blowing experience. Nothing I had ever heard or thought about had prepared me for the fact that my arsehole could be so exquisitely, delightfully, sexily sensitive. The tongue working away down there, in that most forbidden of areas, the waves of pleasure sweeping over me, and then even more shocking to my youthful mind, his tongue actually going up inside me! A man's tongue up my arsehole ! Feeling so good ! Taboos broken left, right and centre. Shock, but no horror - shock and delight. A pleasure which continues to this day I might add. Of course, at 16 I had such a sweet arse too. Pert, firm, ripe, all those good things. it stayed that way pretty well through to my late 20s I guess. These days it has given in to gravity a bit. But I still admire a good arse on another guy. Sometimes those cheeks just call out. And if you want to freak a straight boy out, tell him he's got a cute arse. And part of it i...

Yeah, well I wouldn't say that or even think it, because it's offensive. In New Zealand, why hasn't "That's so Maori" as a term taken off? Or "That's so Samoan"? In the States, why haven't for example, "That's so Black" or "That's so Latino" to equal "That's so lame" become popular? Maybe because people would find those terms just a little offensive and you'd get your head kicked in if you tried it? So why do more and more people think it's fine to say "That's so gay!"? I've heard the argument that "gay" used this way has nothing to do with me as a gay man - but that's deceitful self-serving bullshit. It does, and it's oppressive and insulting. What people do, when they use the word in this way, is take a word that is associated with a minority group in society, a group that has regularly and continues to be targetted, beaten up, murdered and have their basi...

A friend gave me some back issues of gay mags the other day. DNA, Attitude, Gay News etc. All choc-full of images of beautiful men. Men who obviously spend hours every day in the gym and live on wheatgrass juice, tuna and rice - I know, I know, they're models, but even so, they're held up to us as the image of what a gay man is supposed to be. These images are powerful, and their common-place use to depict gay men tells us something about our world, and I'm not sure I like it. And really, let's face it, these guys are our equivalent of busty blonde bimbos for straight guys. Hasn't Gay Liberation been a great thing? Baby, we've come such a long way... So many muscles and such sharp definition that the split in their abs starts to look like a vagina, a friend noted. Ridiculously slim waists. And, with one exception, no body hair. So even though they're supposedly what gay men aspire to be like, if we're not already there, they actually look more like perpe...