The Gay Blade

I take a real pleasure in reading other people's diaries. After they're dead, of course. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf are still one of my favourites. Diaries of gay men hold a particular fascination for me, and I've been following one on Facebook called Mr Lucas .  Follow it - it's fascinating. As the pinned post at the top of the page says :  " Mr Lucas has been buying sex since the 1950s. An unremarkable man, he led a rather remarkable life. Born in 1926 in Romford, he lived a quiet unassuming life as a civil servant in the department of trade (I think he did something with contracts, but that’ll become clearer as we go on). But, by dint of his sexuality, he also lived a very active life in the sleazy streets of 1960s Soho. That is, when he wasn't cottaging. Or paying guardsmen for sex. Or pining for a normal life." They are a treasure trove of a side of gay life largely gone from most Western countries, but still, I imagine, very similar to the...

There's an old line that straight men are afraid of gay men because they're worried we'll treat them like they treat women, and I think there's more than a grain of truth to it. I've been watching the #MeToo movemen t arising from the  fury so many women have at the way sexual assault has been used against them, and as in the case with Anthony Rapp, we see Kevin Spacey also accused of doing this to men. I have felt  invisible in all the commentary on this topic that I've seen reported, the assumption is simply that what applies to heterosexual women around consent applies to all. I don't think it's that simple. It doesn't resonate with my lived experience. I want to explore that disconnect, between things that are so real for so many of my female friends and women in general, and my own experiences. If I think of my own sex life and the encounters I've had. I estimate I'd had sex with around 1,000 men by my early 20s, and maybe 2,0...

I think it was Chateaubriand who said that trying to imagine our own death is like trying to stare into the sun.We can't do it. Death is the one human experience that we will all go through, but the one that nobody can describe. Nobody has come back from death and said "It feel like this" 'This is what happens". Some do tell us such stories, but the fact they have "come back" means they have not died, and their knowledge is as limited as ours. In the '90s when I was expecting and expected to die from AIDS, I thought about death a lot.I'd been diagnosed in '87 or '88, I can't quite remember when now. Nothing really happened to me after diagnosis, years of just going on as before. But then it started, I began to get sick, weak. And as I got sick,  I became angry, bitterly furious. My body that engine of pleasure, this sack of meat that is me, no longer did what I wanted. My body had betrayed me.That's how it felt. I spent...

There has been a fair bit of anger and upset in certain LGBTTI+ circles this week, after express writer Sarah Murphy published a report on long-time community stalwart Paul Heard's racist comments after he and his partner were gay-bashed on K rd as they were finishing a night out. I've known Paul for many years, he's a friend and someone I know as a good and decent man. But as soon as I saw those comments I knew he was in trouble. Paul's comments were racist and offensive, nobody has ever said they weren't. But he had just been gay-bashed, for the third time in recent years, on K Rd, a space that we do tend to view as our own. Getting gay-bashed is traumatic, to put it mildly, and unlikely to elicit a calm and reasoned response. Yet the event had happened nearly two months ago, and had been reported on the now closed Gay.com very soon after it happened. Just why Sarah Murphy decided to dig up the story and present it again at this time is strange. The tone ...

I ran into an old friend a few weekends ago. We were both at the wonderful Fāgogo exhibition at the St Paul Street Gallery. Pati Solomona Tyrell, the artist, has created something truly intriguing, evocative and beautiful. It's nearly over now, but if you can, go see it.It is worth your time. The works by themselves are beautiful pieces of art, If this exhibition were in a dealer gallery there would be red stickers by them all. And in a wider context, the entire exhibition tells a story. To put it simply, going by what I've read, Fāgogo is a form of story telling in Samoan culture that builds and holds community heritage and history. Stories told "in a shared context, with an expectation to share the story." He brings this alive in the biggest piece, projected on a wall with a running narrative. The work is intimately tied into the Fafswag scene that is getting more attention, as we see different queer Pasifika voices make themselves heard. It's th...

Clunky, quirky,  and not exactly easy on the eye, but I'm going to miss it. Long-time editor Jay Bennie announced  that he and his business partner Neil Gibb have decided it's time to retire, which looks like it means the end of Gaynz, the only site of genuine journalism and news that focussed on NZ's LGBTTI+ world. And as a disclaimer, it's only fair to note that I've been published there many times, as well as in Express when Jay owned and ran that so well. The website was definitely past its best-by date. It would seem to go against every cliche there is about what wonderful flair for design gay men are supposed to have. And Jay was generous in the way he covered so many smaller events and gave free publicity to many smaller community groups and efforts. And most importantly, underneath the plain front was real journalism, not just empty puffery for advertisers. Jay is a trained journalist, and he hired trained journalists over the years to edit the...

Why are we so invisible? I don't know if you saw, but there was a news report out this week saying a pair of bodies that had been trapped in the lava at Pompeii, and identified for many years as "The Maidens" is in fact two male bodies. This has led to all sorts of speculation that in fact they were two lovers, two men taking comfort in each other's arms at this terrible time. The UK magazine Attitude got so carried away that it claimed that they were. And it's a beautiful and poignant way of thinking about them.Two men, in love, as this terrible catastrophe destroys their world and comes to take their lives, finding some comfort, some refuge in each other, in death as in life. But it's highly unlikely to be true. There is in fact no way of knowing anything about them except they are two bodies whose forms were preserved in lava. Yet so many of us  really, really wanted to believe they were lovers. And that's because we so rarely see an...