The Gay Blade

So remember how last year I got cajoled into entering the Mr Urge Leather contest, and was Runner-Up ? Well as I was leaving Wellington a few weeks ago after the excellent Outgames Human Rights Conference and Urge Black Party, I discovered that the lovely Jamie who'd won the title was unable to make the contest in Melbourne this weekend - so I am heading over the Tasman tomorrow to represent my country on the international stage. Now, I won't be looking as good as the guy on the right, a photo that was taken in the 1950s, and that shows just how long leather has been part of the erotic world of gay men. I nicked the pic from a blog about gay leather history , and there is quite a bit of it. Just why some of us have a thing for leather is hard to pin down. It's something I've moved in and out of over my life. It's kind of cool for me that this is in Melbourne, because it was there, way back in 1980 when I was just 18 or so, that I first got involved in this worl...

The latest figures on HIV infections in New Zealand are not good news, with over a hundred new cases in the gay/bi male world in 2009 and a higher level expected over the coming years. Now of course, most countries would love to see a number this low, along with the estimated total of only 1,800 people living with HIV in the entire country. If we include the dead, we're probably at around 3,000 since the start of AIDS in NZ. While every new infection is a personal tragedy, we actually have a tiny epidemic compared to nearly any other Western nation, and that is a good thing. It's tempting to point the finger and blame people or organisations, and while blame is counter-productive, there are legitimate questions that must be asked. The NZ AIDS Foundation gets millions of dollars of government funding every year specifically to prevent the spread of HIV among gay men, and has an Executive Director now paid in the vicinity of $150k per annum to achieve that goal. It i...

Yesterday marked the 2nd anniversary of this blog - I know because I wrote the first one right after the Big Gay Out two years ago. That's a lot of writing since then. Aren't you lucky ? As for the Big Gay Out yesterday - it was fantastic. It's such a lovely way to spend an afternoon, hanging out with all sorts of people from the queer communities. It is great to see thousands and thousands of us in one spot. As it's a summer's afternoon, it's always pretty chilled, people  just cruising away, gay mums and dads with their kids, people catching up with friends, having a few  beers, others moving downwind from the Police when necessary. Thank you to the friends' picnic I crashed - you're great guys, nice Pinot Gris, and i loved the salami. To make up I drove them home and they drank all my beer on my back porch as the sun went down. The BGO is the last relic of Hero, and it really holds to some of the original Hero feeling and messages. Ideas like bein...

It's twenty years since the first Hero Party and the foundation of a deliberate attempt to strengthen the gay community and help us look after ourselves in the face of AIDS. Hero did a huge amount of good, it gave gay Auckland a face, inspired similar groups in Wellington and Christchurch, and it gave us an organisation that could act as a public voice for us, until it collapsed in a mire of corruption and broken trust. Yes, I'm still bitter about the money from the street collection, collected for people living with HIV, that a certain group of Hero trustees "borrowed" to cover a shortfall and never returned. Yes I'm bitter about the  CEO who embezzled funds then escaped back to Australia. But before that sad side of the story, there was a huge amount of good that came out of Hero.It made us visible, it gave us a reason to take pride in being queer. Visibility matters, and so does pride. Hero when at its best and strongest was inspirational. I doubt we can r...

Sometimes I hear newly diagnosed HIV+ guys say they'll never have sex again. They feel dirty. They fear passing the virus on to another, which is pretty understandable. They feel undesirable, unsexy, also pretty understandable as a reaction. But it doesn't have to be that way. I didn't have sex with another man for more than three years in the 90s. I barely even masturbated. Sex just seemed irrelevent at best, a terrible disease and death-ridden thing at worst. Over three years without sex - I did feel like a virgin again. Some good friends helped me through that phase in the best possible way. They had supported me in the mid-90s when I was so sick and we all thought I was dying, and they were there as I was recovering, helping me get back on my feet and into life again. When I was sick I'd totally lost interest in sex, and as I was recovering, I was stuck in a head-space where I saw myself as polluted, dirty, unsexy, and unloveable. They saw this on some leve...

I've been re-reading Patrick Moore's book "Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the History of Radical Gay Sexuality". I really like it. He looks at that great flowering of the new gay culture that was taking place in the late 60s- 80s, before AIDS struck, and considers what gay life would be like today if this hadn't happened. At the back of the book is a list of over 1000 names of artists and similar creative types, held by  The Estate Project for Artists with AIDS  who died - imagine the cultural impact they would have continued to have without this plague. It is very much an American take on the situation, but America was in the vanguard of both Gay Liberation in the 60s and 70s, and then the fight to deal with AIDS, so that's not unexpected, and there are parallells to be drawn. What I like is the way he shows the culture that was being developed - and it was a new and radical and at times chaotic and self-indulgent one - but it was a culture, a varied and inte...

Bears. Cubs. Otters. Admirers. Cuddly. Furry. Fun. Love 'em, hate 'em, we're here. I guess I'm a bear. I'm hairy (not so much on top these days...) got a little gut going on. But it's a hard group to pin down and define. Often it seems like we're defined by what we're not. We're not all young, we're not trying to be pretty, we're not 'smooth' (hairless) we're not obsessed with flash clothes. But even that doesn't quite get it right, because I know young bears, I know smooth bears, I know gay guys who hang out in the bear world because they don't feel like they fit in elsewhere. I think one of the things I like about the gay bear world is that it is inclusive. You don't have to be hairy, you don't have to be big, you don't have to be a certain age, you don't have to be anything really; just a man who is into men. And isn't the essence of being gay? Loving and desiring men? In many ways it's a c...