African-American gay SF writer Samuel Delany is one of the great minds of his genre. In this novella, he has some academic amusement with Ancient Roman gay life.
Delany is fairly out, and many of his SF characters are lesbian, gay or transgender. In Triton, Bron Helstrom changes sex on that colonised large Neptunian satellite. In […]

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For some reason, there seems to be an escalating amount of gay satirical crime fiction…coming out…at present. Witness James Lear’s mixture of smut and sleuthing.
What lies in the back passage of a stately English manor house in 1925? Initially, Edward (Mitch) Mitchell is far more interested in other sorts of back passages, primarily the one […]

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In 1964, the late Susan Sontag wrote an influential essay entitled “Notes on Camp.” Subsquently reprinted in her collection Styles of Radical Will, it proved to be one of her enduring aesthetic commentaries. But what is kitsch, and how does it differ from camp?
 Camp has some serious, if ironic purpose, and can be used to […]

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Jeffrey Dahmer
Ever since I did a brief article on Aileen Wuornos - and, tragically, the murder of my dear Palmerston North friend Stan late in 2006 - I find myself more and more interested in the darker recesses of the human mind.
According to crime writer Harold Schechter, only about fourteen percent of all serial killers […]

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A few weeks ago, I did an article on the gay zombie craze in some corners of LGBT indie film culture for GayNZ.com. For this post, I thought I’d follow up with a brief but not exhaustive analysis of gay zombie cinematic fare itself…
Given that introduction, I thought I’d explore the two other entries in […]

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I recently discovered remaindered copies of Jean Genet’s classic Querelle of Brest at Whitcoulls, and promptly picked up a shiny new copy to replace my dilapidated old one.
I was almost twenty when I encountered Querelle for the first time, as well as the work of Jean Genet himself. Genet was a French gay badboy author, […]

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Perversity: 1965!
In 1965, the US “Citizens for Decent Literature” produced an anti-pornography ‘dreadful warning’ documentary. Today, it serves as a source of unintentional hilarity to contemporary video vault viewers. Welcome to “Perversion for Profit”
!!!
Was this documentary responsible for a certain infamous Wellington-based ex-nun’s public career as a smut fighter? Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance […]

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Why is it that the Christian Right is so fond of pontificating about sexual ethics when some of its members are so bereft of even vestigial business ethics? Case in point- a recently revealed Israeli oil scam.
According to leftist US Mother Jones columnist Mariah Blake, some fundamentalist apocalypse mongers believe in the existence of a […]

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During Summer, there is usually some occassional debate about whether or not we should relax our public nudity laws. So, how little is too little?The issue surfaced briefly over the scanty “mankini” male thong worn by Borat, the loveable fake Kazakhstani news reporter and emulated by some male fans of the Rugby Sevens in Wellington, […]

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New Zealand doesn’t seem to have been afflicted with the latest breed of militant fundamentalist nuisances- the Watchmen on the Walls group, from Russia with loathing.
Indo-Fijian Satender Singh (26) was attacked by two Slavic-born fundamentalist thugs at Lake Natoma in California, while picnicking with friendly Indian families. He later died from a brain haemorrhage after […]

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