The Gay Blade

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...

Another year over, and already into the next. I'm not complaining, I'm glad I'm still going. I know it's a bit artificial to think of each year as somehow separate and distinct from the other, but it's how we humans work. What will I remember 2009 for? Personally, the pain and chaos the Mills affair wrought was not fun to deal with. But that's over now. Work has been OK. Study has been OK. I've made a few new friends, which is always a plus. It's the first year in ages I haven't been out of the country, but that's OK too. And I had my first brush with the Censor thanks to my "full and frank" discussion of anal sex in a previous post. The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards, set up by the mad ex-nun Patricia Bartlett, but still apparently going in its own little echo-chamber, complained about it. The Censor's office didn't uphold their complaints, but they did want an R 18 warning on it, which is fine by me. I'm...

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...