The Gay Blade

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...

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...