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 related to the massive growth of baby-boomer city-living homos in the 70s and beyond. All those young gay men, all working out to look hot and stay attractive so they could get each other in the sack. Such effort! When the body will give up anyhow, or so the lazy ones like me thought. I’ve joined a gym at least three times in the last decade, but I never get beyond a few months. To be frank, going to the gym bores me, even if I like looking at the results.

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 often a bit sarky and suspicious when it comes to ideas of community, especially in the gay world, but I have to admit that there are real elements of it that enrich my life here in Auckland. Unlike “the old days” when we all seemed to go to the same places, dykes, poofs, trans and friends, now we’re more split up, but there are links and bonds that matter.

Take my local, Urge, as an example. (No, I don’t get paid for mentioning them). In 2009 they raised around $14,000 or so for charity. Around $7,000 for Outline, for example. Together with Caluzzi at the BGO they raised about $4,000 for NZAF. And they’ve run events for Prostate Cancer and Body Positive as well. To be able to pull together a group of gay men and get us to fork out that much cash over 12 months is pretty damn exceptional and praise-worthy I think.

Especially when you look at the size of the place. It’s actually quite a small bar physically, 80 people makes it feel crammed, 100 and you can barely move. On New Years Eve it was probably more like 150 and nearly impossible to move anywhere for a while. But most of the time it’s far less crowded, yet over 12 months, with planning and hard work from the owners and staff, they are able to put back a sum of money into the community that most larger venues don’t come near. So a big shout out and thanks to Urge for all it does for us all. I shudder to imagine gay life in Auckland without it.

We finally buried HERO. A twinge of sadness there, but it had had its day. Another sign that the community just isn’t as cohesive as it once was. We don’t seem to have the interest to all band together and create a huge festival like that at the moment. So it’ll be interesting to see how the Aroha Festival and OurFest do. I’m still not exactly sure what they are, but I’m looking forward to finding out. The Big Gay Out is coming, and will, I am sure, be the biggest gay event in the country for the year and as usual a hell of a lot of fun. And courtesy of Urge, we have NZ’s first Bear Week, which will be dependent on volunteers helping make it work. Here’s hoping we get a nice crowd of men from overseas to join in and make it an event worth repeating.

And now we get to revel in summer for a while, which is always great. So many hot men in shorts and tight t-shirts on the streets. I’m doing a few hours work every day, trying to get my head back into PhD mode, and looking forward to another year. I’ve had my first cohort of old friends from overseas staying, which has been great. We’ve known each other since our late teens, and one of the great things in life is to have friends you’ve known for decades. Watching the changes, seeing what remains, and just having that sense of a deep rich warmth that comes from such long acquaintance is something I love.

There’s bound to be some shit along the way this year, as always, but at the moment I’m feeling remarkable upbeat. I hope you all are, and that it lasts for us all.

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. Perhaps there are a number of other 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 do.

Analogies are always imperfect, but what would you do if you had concrete evidence someone was a serial-rapist, or a paedophile, what  if in fact you’d been told this by one of his victims? What if you then heard through the grapevine of other victims? What do you do with that sort of information? I think you have a duty to take it to the right authorities, and personally I saw no difference here. But it wasn’t an easy decision for me to make.

I know he has friends who love him and defend him. I can understand that. I don’t believe he was simply a monster who only lived to infect people with HIV. But he had a part of his nature that did that without, it would seem, too many qualms. 

I have heard people blame the men he infected for not taking better care of themselves, but it ignores the fact that even when he agreed to use condoms he had a history of deliberately tearing them or taking them off. The recent reports of his date-raping men also point to how he thought and operated. It wasn’t about consent or care or love.

And there is a problem: Our entire safe-sex message, use a condom every time,  is built on the idea of “Take personal responsibility for looking after your health”. It’s built on the idea that people are all in fact able to do this. But when you’re newly coming out, perhaps with a family that is unsupportive of you because of your sexuality, you are in fact, more vulnerable, and less experienced. I think that those people who blame the really young people who got infected are simply wrong. These were little more than children out in the gay world, and all too easily inclined to trust this charismatic man.  to say, as some have, that “They knew what they were doing!” is simply wrong. Yes, in NZ legally you are free to fuck from 16 on, but 16 year-olds are not renowned for the quality of their decision making, neither are 17, 18 or 19 year-olds. It’s unfair and wrong to lump them all in as adults who are entirely responsible for their sexual health. They thought they were in love with a man who they could trust, and they were young, naive and too trusting. I know he lied to these young men on more than one occasion when confronted about his HIV status.

And it seems that with a number of the other, older men, he deliberately lied, or again, tampered with the condom. I heard yet another story of this yesterday from someone who’d slept with him, but luckily did not get infected. My usual reaction when someone older gets infected is “That’s terible, but it’s not the end of the world, let’s do what we can to support you” but I don’t have a sense of blame, so I’m surprised to hear the voices raised here and there that blame anyone for getting infected in this case. The people so willing to blame, and to, so it seems to me, take some sort of delight in finger-pointing and self-righteously cackling “It’s your own fault for not using a condom!”  are either totally ignorant of how this all happened, or nasty, vindictive and petty to a degree that is really disturbing.The picture that emerges here of Mills is not clear, and not simple. While I’m sure he had many good and loveable qualities,  he was also devious, manipulative and uncaring in his attitude to many when it came to his HIV. It is, I believe, impossible to interpret his actions as anything other than deliberate and malicious attempts to infect people. These weren’t careless one-off accidents, but a pattern, repeated again and again on men and women, and some of them extremely vulnerable young men and women. He knew what he was doing, he had known since 2007. But he continued to do it.His death means that those brave people who were willing to take the stand against him don’t have to, and that has to be seen as a good thing for them. But it means he never has to face up to what he did. His death has left things hanging that will never be answered now, and I think that’s unfair.

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 (he 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 started using it I don’t think there were photos - this of course, was before broadband - just chat. And we did chat. And we hooked up.

When the net started up, there were all sorts of excited cries from academics in universities about how this form of communication would finally take us beyond our obsession with bodies and physical appearance, now we would meet as mind-to-mind, in cyber-space, and no one would know or care if you were a man or a woman, ugly or drop-dead gorgeous, 25 or 85 - using the net we’d just, you know, meet in this pure and perfect manner. This idea was, it has to be admitted, largely based in thinkers from the more obscure edges of gender studies, with a vested interest in showing us just how the physical body doesn’t matter. Once again academia got it wrong. 

One of the interesting things about online socialising/cruising, I think, is the way we try and show ourselves, how we present ourselves to this mysterious audience. In the best possible light of course. I’ve taken and re-taken photos until I thought I had one that I could stand, being one of those typical people who can’t bear their own photos. Make sure the light is flattering, try and lessen the flabby bits, emphasize the good points, all the usual things. In fact, for what is such a transitory and technology dependent place, we really put a lot of emphasis on the body. The internet is utterly overflowing with representations of the physical.  But even so, I don’t imagine I’m going to do anything more than chat to a few guys and very rarely pick up in there. In fact, I can’t think of the last time I pulled a guy online. I just tend to use both nzd and gaydar as letter boxes now. Even for sex, I find the net less and less useful now, or perhaps I’m just satiated. I think I’m far more likely to pull in a bar than online these days.

But when you flick through the profiles, and see so many guys pretty well saying the same thing - in essence:”Done the scene, looking for a partner” -  I have to wonder just how effective the net is for really meeting men for more than just a shag. I have heard of some guys who’ve met and settled down after meeting online, but they seem the exception rather than the rule to me. As for straight acting, well, there is a surprisingly large number of “bi-curious” or “straight” men who hang out on these sites as well. You can’t help but wonder how long they just look, and how many jump the fence. I’m sure part of it is the way the net exposes us and de-sensitises us to so much, not least of all sex. I’m guessing a fair number go from looking to trying at least once or twice, even if they don’t take it up full-time.

Looking at some of the profiles, they are like shopping lists. you must have these interests, this age-range, this weight-range, skin-colour, ethnicity, etc. Perhaps this is how match-makers work? You give them a list and they go and find the nearest thing? But how long do you hold out for perfection? And of course “Straight acting”. Seeking perfection online - it just isn’t going to happen that way. And when I look at the solid, long-lasting relationships I know in the gay world, the guys are not perfect, except to each other. These lists seem self-defeating and self-deceiving as well. If the mythical perfect Mr Right suddenly left a message in your mail box, would you really be able to follow through, or would it be like a dog that’s been chasing cars for years and finally catches one and goes “Now what?”

And what do you make of a guy who has his hard cock as a profile pic, and says he’s “Looking for love” - I mean, is he joking, or does he really think love and sex are the same thing? If you’re really after a partner, do you need to show them your hard-on? Or is it just maximising your time use “Yeah, I really really want a lover, but while I’m waiting, I’m horny.” Somehow I doubt this strategy is going to work.

Does this whining mean I’m going to stop going online and looking around and chatting to total strangers? Hell no! Because maybe this time I’ll get lucky and fall in love, or at least, get laid…

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 who are still too scared to admit they are attracted to the same sex. People in Sports, Politics, Business, the Art, on TV and everywhere else in our world who, in spite of all we’ve gained, even in liberal homo-friendly NZ, are terrified that someone will find out that they are somehow “different” and have to hide  this part of their personality.

I have to say I find it weird that people today find it hard to come out as gay, but if you’re in professional sports, trying to make a career on TV, being same-sex attracted is still seen as a weakness. Of course, if they all came out, well, it wouldn’t be seen in the same way: That is the basic argument for Coming Out as an act - it makes us visible and normal.

But it can’t be denied, it still takes courage to come out as gay. Those people these days who don’t come out,  I do tend to think of as just a little bit cowardly, but I understand their cowardice.  One friend recently recalled the fear and terror of it all and referred to coming out  as “stomach-churning”, and I know what he means. It is opening yourself up and taking on an identity that is stigmatised, looked-down on, and saying, “Hey, I’m just as good as you!” when a number of people still think that we are sick, sinners or just evil.

But in reality we are just as good, or bad, or ordinary, as anyone else, gay, straight, queer, whatever word you want to use.

I wonder how well it could work for making HIV seem less fearful and more normal. I wonder how it would be if every HIV+ person came out, so everyone around could see that we are just normal people going about our lives. I’m not suggesting right now that every HIV+ person tell all to the world: It takes time and preparation and support before you can do that, and some people will never get to that point. But more of us could I’m sure.

One night back in the 90s at Volt (long gone alas) I was chatting with a guy, and said to him “I guess you should know I’m HIV+” and he said to me “You really don’t need to tell me that, in fact, you shouldn’t tell people. We should all just assume everyone is HIV+ and always play safe. “

That has always been the basis of the “Use a condom every time” message. We just don’t know for sure who has it or who doesn’t. And that message used to be very strong in our world. This was all just after the new drugs came out, and things were starting to turn around for us, but there was still a strong communal knowledge of how bad things can get with HIV, so many of us had seen friends get so sick, and then die.

But that safe sex message has remained the same. And it does make sense still. We don’t tell people “If you smoke 5 cigarettes a day you’ll be ok”. Even though people continue to smoke, we still don’t encourage them to risk a few, we tell, with damn good evidence, that the best thing they can do is stop completely. And of course, realistically, we all know that these messages won’t be blindly followed. So even though, you might be fine risking it having unsafe sex  9 out of 10 times, you might also have been exposed to HIV each of those 10 times you didn’t use condoms. It’s a brutally simple message, but one that is still factually true.

But I think one thing that has changed a lot is that now people who think they’re HIV negative are placing a far greater responsibility of those of us who have the virus to tell them. It used to be all of us together - now it’s seen more and more as the HIV positive person’s job.  With the numbers of people living with the virus here in NZ going up all the time, living well and not looking as though anything is wrong, and fewer and fewer of us dying, in fact the opportunity to be exposed to HIV has increased significantly.

The other advantage from that old way of behaving was that it didn’t stigmatise HIV+ people as much. The burden was shared, and that was a good thing.

Today, if you’re a fit, healthy looking gym-bunny who just happens to have HIV, as so many are, there is now I think even more fear and stigma about admitting it to others. And that’s a shame.  It used to be Poz and Neg together, not , as we often seem now, in two differing camps where the HIV Negative think the HIV Positive should shoulder all the responsibility.

Because having HIV is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a virus in our blood. It’s not a moral judgement.  But the weight of social judgement and stigma, not least from the gay world, is such that most people with HIV feel a need to hide it, so as to avoid the pain of rejection, pity and ostracism. And this leads to more invisibility, more fear and shame felt by those living with the virus.

But  maybe if you knew just how many of us are out there, perhaps you’d think differently.

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 cruising area. Now there is shelf after shelf of work on gay/lesbian/queer stuff and I barely bother to give it a glance, and I haven’t noticed any hot undergrads hanging out cruising there either.

The old OUT! office in High St (very near to where Unity is now in fact) was my first source of gay literature. I still have some of the books I got there. Felice Picano’s poetry The Deformity Lover and a few others. I wish I’d kept hold of my copy of the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex though. That office was a strange place. They had porn under the counter, and serious literature on the stands. I bought works put out by the Gay Sunshine Press from SF, which I still treasure, because I do treasure books.

At one time, anything written to do with being gay was seemed esential to me. I read, and by reading heard of other books I should read. By reading I learnt what it was to be a gay man.  Giovanni’s Room made me cry. Dancer From the Dance made me want to live in New York, dance, fuck and take lots of drugs. Faggots made me re-evaluate that, temporarily. I loved Rita-Mae Brown’s work, and others from that era. Books helped me learn about how gay men lived in other places, gave me models for what to expect, how to dress, how to behave, what drugs did, styles of sex, all of that. They gave me an education, when one was hard to find locally, and showed me that I belonged to a much bigger more exciting world than 1979 Auckland.

Now there are hundreds of books, by many different authors available. And yet I feel little compunction to follow the latest trends in gay fiction or poetry. It just doesn’t seem to matter to me any longer. Yet once it was central to me discovering who I was and how to negotiate the world. Perhaps internet dating sites fill that function now? I can’t help thinking that they can’t do it quite as well, but technology is always socially transformative.

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The following article has been  classified R18 by the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

It has been restricted to persons over the age of 18 years of age.

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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, well,  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.

A big part of it is, of course, the fact that our anus is such forbidden territory when we are growing up, and even for most adults. It is, understandably, associated with dirt, with our shit. We are taught to be ashamed of our arses and our arseholes. The idea that they are a source of pleasure undermines such training. And the arse itself was often the site of punishment - I’m showing my age but at school we got caned on our arses, another way to mark it as a place of taboos and bad things.

When you think about it, all the organs that give us sexual pleasure are excretory. You piss through your penis, women menstruate through their vagina, we eat food, breathe and vomit through our mouths, and yes, we shit through our arses.  Yet the idea of talking about it openly is anathema to so many, especially in the straight world. I think gay men as a whole are much more at ease when talking about our arses. even those who don’t go in for fucking still are living in a world where it’s normal and so they’re exposed to the ideas around it. And it seems more guys in NZ are learning to douche properly, which is a very good thing indeed. Accidents are not enjoyable, but occasionally come with the territory it has to be admitted.

We men are all being reminded now to be aware of our prostates, and it’s a good thing that we are. Anal health is important, and gay men should be the ones who are most in touch with any changes in our prostates. No-one wants prostate cancer, and we should all be able to be aware of any changes going on there before we need to see a Dr. And taking care of your arse’s health also involves thinking of good lube, of being aware of how relaxed or not you are. There is a huge range of anal toys out there, but don’t forget, the colon is about as strong as wet tissue, and lined with blood vessels, so take care up there.

Let’s face it - the arsehole is a source of great, deep and intense pleasure. Especially for men, because we have a prostate. That is the joy of getting fucked for guys, well, part of it. The way another’s cock stimulates the prostate,  it intensifies so many of the rest of our sexual feelings, just sends the body, or mine anyhow, into some sort of sensory overdrive. Yes, I love being fucked. I love my arsehole and all it can do for me. I’m a homo: arse-fucking is one of the things that defines what we do in bed. The great erotic tragedy of HIV is the way we now have to protect ourselves in this most intimate and delightful of acts.  I still mourn that loss of spontaneity that we had before safe-sex, as much as I support the message and need for rubbers now.

It is amazing though, how the idea of anal sex  scares so many straight people. And why, as I mentioned above, telling a straight guy he’s a got a hot arse will freak him out so much. Part of that reaction comes from the idea of associating the arsehole with shit and dirt. But an equally important part of their reaction comes from the idea of a man becoming “unmanned” - by getting penetrated, and enjoying it, we are certainly not fulfilling the dominant cultural model of men as conquerors, inserting our cocks into women. We are, in the straight mind anyhow, somehow becoming women by doing this and enjoying it. But I don’t see it that way. I don’t think it makes me any less of a man because I enjoy it up my jacksie. I’m just a lot more in touch with the pleasure I can get from my physical home, more than most straight people, that’s for sure. I know my body better, and know how to give and get pleasure from it, and how to do the same for other men as well.

I know that some straights are into arseplay as well, but for them it’s more of a fetish it seems, something extra. To me, and I guess I uneasily stand along President Clinton here, sex isn’t really sex unless it involves one of getting into the other. The rest, however much fun it is, is just the buildup. I’ve never been one of those guys who just lives for blowjobs - for me they are a starter, something before the main course.

So let’s enjoy our anuses, our arseholes. Let’s take some pride in being uphill gardeners. But let’s do it with care for each other. Love your ass and it’ll love you back.

And the way to this man’s heart is not through his stomach, I’m telling you.

That’s so Jewish!? 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? Does anyone in the UK go “That’s so Paki!” ? 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 basic rights denied, and then use it “jokingly” as a term for lame or poor quality. Well, fuck you.

It does seem most popular among younger people. Ah, young people these days. But not among all young people, some I know consciously avoid it. Some think it’s fun to be offensive a bit, and push the boundaries. Do they go and make Auschwitz jokes to their Jewish friends I wonder? Or would that be going too far? Probably.

But it’s ok to make fun of gays, and then claim you’re not, because, well, we don’t count.  The simple fact that they don’t make use of terms such as ”Jewish” or “Black” in the same way shows just where we rank as a group. If we object, if we complain,  we’re being kill-joys, we’re not seeing the joke, no sense of humour, not moving with the times. Yeah, right. Those were the approaches used years ago to justify racial jokes and other forms of subtle, snide oppression. They were seen for what they were then - why is it so hard to see them for what they are now?

This use of the term gay as an insult shows minds that have no political awareness. They have never fought for anything in their lives, except for Daddy to pay their bills usually. With no understanding of the political fights that have gone before, of the sacrifices made and hard work that it took to get us to this point, they feel free to trample over us, and then claim they didn’t. Hypocrisy, ignorance, laziness and a sense of entitlement reek from those who use these words so blithely.

I’ve been told I have “no right” to censure their free speech. I disagree. I have every right, and will express it. They tend to think, when they do think, that they are entitled to say and do anything they like, so long as no one says or does anything that hurts them. Their own pompous outrage when criticised or mocked is often comical to see. Perhaps it comes from years of schooling where they’ve always been told how special they are, and how clever, even when most of them are, in fact, decidely average.

What about the argument that we “stole” gay in the first place? Actually, it had a history in slang for quite a while meaning queers and those on the edge of society for quite a while before Gay Liberation took it over in the 60s. And there was a clear political reason behind our use of it, just as there was a clear political reason behind the use of “Black” rather than “Negro” or “Coloured” in the same era.

We were, in fact, reclaiming words that had been used to attack us, words used to put us down and keep us in our place.

I do not, and will not accept that using “Gay” to mean stupid or lame is acceptable. I am a gay man. We didn’t spend years fighting for the few rights we now have to have it all subverted and be put back in our place by this casual form of linguistic insult.

Words matter. Words are powerful. Words can hurt, and words do have a political and social message attached to them.

A friend gave me some back issues of gay mags the other day. DNA, Attitude, Gay News etc.

All were 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 perpetual teenagers, stuck in early pubescence forever. They don’t look all that masculine to me. I’m not immune to the charms of youth and beauty, but this sort of airbrushed perfection (and let’s face it: these shots will have been enhanced) leaves me cold.

And what is wrong with body hair? On the one hand we have people prattling on about “nature” and “being Green” and then they rip their hair off with wax and look totally unnatural. Did you know you can buy “green” hair removal products? Why? Yes, I am hirsute. So I do have a personal axe to grind on this one. I like my body hair. And I like hairy men, I think they can be very sexy. And yes, so can men with very little body hair and all the gradations in between. I just don’t get this desire to pretend that men don’t have chest hair, hair around our cocks and balls, hair on our stomachs ( I just love following a treasure trail down ) facial hair, even… hair on our shoulders and backs! I just can’t measure a guy’s hotness by his hairiness, or lack of it, which is the image the magazines keep pushing.

As I look at the ads for the next dance-party, or the photos used on most gay websites, it gets harder and harder to find a piece of body hair, or a body that doesn’t make Michaelangelo’s David look flabby. Look back at some older porn or erotica and well over half the guys that were thought sexy in the 50s, 60s and 70s just wouldn’t make it today. Instead we’ve somehow ended up with this hyper-muscular baby-bottom smooth twenty-something as our icon, and I’m not quite sure how it happened.

I’m old enough (here we go again…”The good old days”) to remember when the gay media contained a level of self-critical reflection and political awareness that didn’t simply centre on our right to imitate straights by getting married and having kids. I know, I know, consumption is everywhere and we’ve been swallowed up by it. These gay mags tell us about how to spend money to fit into certain social groups. And they all assume we have a disposable income, live in the city, are under 30 (or idealise youth) and are happy uncritically taking part in a political system that is, actually when you peel back the veils, not exactly on our side. We’ve had to fight hard and long for the rights we’ve gained, they weren’t simply a gift by a benign system, and now we’ve been swallowed up by it. Yeah, I’m on a kind of a doom and gloom kick.

These images might be pretty, they might be hot, they might handsome, but what they also do is exclude a lot of us. Look around a gay bar or club, and the number who fit that images is way smaller than those who do. But the number of people trying to fit it and not making it is often quite high. And it just looks a little sad and a little wrong when some guy in his mid 50s is trying to look like a 29 year-old and not pulling it off (err, the look I mean, you dirty-minded filth).

What those of us who don’t fit into these dominant advertising-driven models of gay bimbos get told is we’re not quite up there, not as good, not worth as much. “Here is an image of what a gay man is supposed to be if he wants to be successful and loved” these ads say. “Ooops, you don’t fit, so you’re not going to succeed”, is the hidden message here.

So remind me now, who else has to put up with relentless Body-Fascisim, pressure to look ”right”  and bimbos in ads showing them up all the time? Oh yeah, straight women. That’s what we fought for, isn’t it, to be just like them.

I was at Urge again the other night and noticed a poster from The Basement. for those who don’t know, The Basement is a sex-club. Anyway, the poster read something like “Thursday Night is Fetish Night at The Basement”.

But what a shame I can’t turn this into a career path. All those years of experience, so much to offer, so much to teach, maybe I should get the cards printed after all.