Thoughts From the Bed Pan

‘As we that are left grow old’, there’s a phrase to strike terror into an aging ‘homosexualist’. As I approach my dotage and this recession/depression takes huge chunks out of my superannuation which was never enough anyway, I’m left wondering ‘what the …?’ My entire financial forward planning is now based on a Lotto win.

Was it just two years ago that I sat back thinking, “well if all else fails at least when I turn sixty five I’ll have a small income supplemented by a smaller pension to keep me in lattes and Polident”. Now I’m facing a future of Nescafe` and unstable dentures.
I had my chances; I recklessly spent one large windfall on airfares and cocaine in 1988, and reluctantly spent another on surgeons in 2003. I could’ve bought a house but somehow New York seemed like a much better proposition. I thought that if you’re going to NYC then naturally you fly first class. There was a joke often told by my friends, “How do you make a small fortune?” answer, “Give Peter a large one and wait six months”. We all laughed, some of us louder than others.

I don’t blame anyone for my decisions and god knows I had a blast making them but on reflection they may not have been altogether wise.

I have a much older friend who now lives in a private nursing home, which luckily for him is in the Eastern Suburbs. His main fear when he moved was that he would be forgotten out there in the ‘burbs’, because we Sydney queens are notorious for never travelling far from our comfort zone. You know the old saying, ‘out of sight, where’s what’s his name again?’ Luckily he has enough money to get by rather well. With global warming I’ll be lucky if there is an Ice Flow left to leave me on. I’ll be thrown into some institution in Tempe, possibly the Tip.

So I’ve been pondering my future and what’s to become of me. I’ve always been, as one of my harshest critics described, ‘a survivor’ and I’m sure I’ll get by but I want to more than just survive, I still want to have a ‘life’. I don’t see myself lining up at Mathew Talbot hoping for a bed at night but …

Is this just a problem for us ‘gay folk’? Does our lifestyle promote instant gratification and, pardon the pun, bugger the consequences? Maybe it’s just my generation; a generation that through the eighties wasn’t expected to live much into the nineties so some of us had a tendency to squander our ‘dosh’ and now we’re rather surprised at how old we’ve become.

I worry that the ‘gaylings’ of today seem destined to head down this same path to penury. Perhaps now might be the right time to revisit the wise words of one learned gent by the name of Micawber, “… annual income twenty shillings, annual expenditure twenty one shillings, result misery’.

Old age creeps up on you alarmingly fast. If I was to offer any advice, which is never a good idea because it always has a way of coming back and biting you on the bum, it would be to somehow find the means to occasionally deny yourself that next ‘NEW’ thing and put a little aside because hopefully you will lead a long, long FABULOUS life.

Boys and Their Dresses

Drag has always been about beautiful costumes, colour and movement but recently there has been a tremor in the force. A new ingredient has been added to the mix. Drag is under going a revival. I’m amazed, and that’s no easy thing these days, by the number of boys who like to “frock” up. If I had been asked in the early 90’s did I think Drag would survive? I would have shaken my head and knowingly pontificated that, “The young ‘Gaylings’ have moved on and Drag has had its day, like the rotary dial telephone”.

How wrong I would have been.

A potted history - Drag came of age in Sydney in the 60’s and flourished through until the early 90’s. Most of the performers, especially in the 80’s were “professional” full time live in a frock and grow your hair long kind of DQ’s. When Drag moved off the revolve and out of the proscenium arch of Cap’s and onto the bar of The Albury I was convinced that this was the beginning of the end of “the Show”. The great production shows of Mitchell and Penfold that had theme and story were now replaced with a succession of spot numbers. Oh sure a few of the shows were still held together with a storyline, like The Priscilla Show, but mainly they became a pastiche of star turns.

With the closure of The Albury, Oxford Street lost some of its glitter and Drag seemed to disappear and for a while it went into a form of stasis, waiting for the next wave of gender bending, in-your face entertainers that we have today. Little did Miss 3D and Cindy Pastel know what they had begun or perhaps they did.

Drag is back, bigger and better than anything we’ve seen for a long time.

These days it seems as if every pretty and some not so pretty boy is tarting up his visage with taffeta, toile, mascara and makeup, then hitting the boards and the bars to dance, mime and even sing LIVE. The world has gone brilliantly mad.

Sequins and glamour are back and it’s wonderful to see. Choreography is queen and high heels are “strutting” their stuff up and down the tiles of a battered and bruised Oxford Street. Whether it is a career choice or a casual dalliance Drag is wowing them again in the bars of Sydney. Performers like Prada Clutch, Tora Hymenand Trevor Ashleyare the Aeysha, Rose and Michael Michelle of the new generation.

Heading this pantheon of impersonators is the wonderful and very talented Courtney Act, a former contestant on Australian Idol, who now also spruiks make up to a frightened and confused Larry Emdur on breakfast television. Courtney has made Drag fashionable, fantastic and feminine again. Courtney by night and Shane by day is leading a parade of “glamazons” who are proud to embrace the history of Drag gone by and create the myths of tomorrow.

As post party Sydney drags it’s aching head reluctantly into recession and winter, isn’t it great to see splashes of rainbow colour reflecting from the sequins and once again lighting up the pavement of Oxford Street.

The Golden Mile is getting a little of its glitter back.

Sex and the Sissies

Sex, sex, sex is not just a phone number in New Zealand. Sex is a confusing, clumsy, enjoyable, frustrating, messy, irritating part of everyday life.

I just had sex, when will I next have sex, am I getting enough sex, why do I crave sex, am I any good at sex? Everywhere we turn sex is thrust down our throats.

Gaydar, Arq, Stonewall, Town Hall, it’s a non-stop barrage of sensuality and opportunity. We crave sexual satisfaction and, like Chinese food, once we’ve had it we want more, just from a different wok. At least that’s the theory.

But do we do more talking about sex than actual sexing? Night after night in the chat rooms of Australia cyber boys are pounding keyboards bemoaning the fact that no one is having sex, at least not with them.

All the bottoms are in Melbourne, all the tops are in Sydney, all the versatile guys are in Albury-Wodonga and the ones who are up for it — well, they’re just not up for it with me!
It’s as if we’ve made this subconscious pact to always want the person who wants someone else, the ass is always keener on the other side of the bar.

To paraphrase Marx, Groucho, not Karl, “I would never have sex with someone who would have sex with me”. I know exactly what he meant.

We’re told that we’re the great sexual hunter-gatherers of our time, rutting and sucking at the drop of a pair of aussieBums. Is it true? Maybe it’s all just a myth.

Do gay men have more sex than anyone else? According to the Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behaviour, on any given day intercourse (fucking), happens 120 million times. So that’s about 1 out of every 25 people in a population of 6.1 billion people.

Now if gays (male and female) are numbered as roughly ten percent of the population that means… you do the math, because I can’t. But it’s not a lot of us who are actually doing “it”.
As a sidebar, if you’re lucky enough to have sex, choose a Brazilian. According to the Atlas they can go for thirty minutes. The quickest are Russians — they only last for 12 minutes. Suddenly I’m feeling a little better about myself.

The upside is that there is great peace in knowing that we’re not the fucking machines that the writers of cheap porn novels and makers of those DVDs would have us believe. The relief of not having to live up to an expectation allows us to just enjoy the monthly shag and not feel as if we’ve failed the numbers game.

Don’t get me wrong. I know some people are keeping their end up and taking one for the team, but I reckon most of us just lead normal, lustful lives that are never sated.

We go out, we stand around, we perve, we flirt, we make out (pash and grope), but still end up collapsing into our double beds alone at the end of the night. The only happy ending we usually get is a good night’s sleep after a little self-pleasuring.

Thank God for IQ and those replays of Scrubs. And that’s not such a bad thing… is it?

My Man Crush

I’ve got a “man crush”, well it’s really more of a “man/boy crush” but I’m proud of it. The only real problem I can see is the man/boy I have the crush on lives in New York, oh and one other small detail, he’s a little younger than me. I’m guessing he was born on or around the year 1988 – in that year Australia was celebrating its 200th birthday and I was celebrating my 31st. You see my dilemma – geographical distance and that other kind of distance.

Let me tell you how it all began.

About a year ago I became a huge fan of [title of show], the little show that could and did make it to Broadway. The way they did it was to set up a web site dedicated to raising awareness and creating a buzz for the show. They filmed “webisodes” for YouTube and used their friends who just happened to be Broadway celebs to help promote their push to get the show on to The Great White Way. All the usual suspects where there, “Broadway” Cheyenne Jackson, Bebe Neuwirth, Michael Arden, Nathan Lane – are you getting the idea. One of the NYC celebs they used was a fresh faced young chap by the name of Jeffery Self, cute as a button and funny to boot.

A couple of months later another friend in London, who was appearing in The Sound of Music, sent me a YouTube link for the “VGL (very good looking) Gay Boys”, starring the very same Jeffery Self and his perky but cheeky offsider Cole Escola. These boys have about twenty or so clips listed and between the two of them they manage to send up Broadway, the recession, flies, post coital chat and Bernadette Peters to name just a few. Their humour is gentle and not nasty and they have the good sense to send themselves up at the same time. There is nothing malicious or mean in their performance. They’re just funny.

I was trapped, I couldn’t stop watching and I became an addict demanding more and more from each clip that I saw. Never once have they let me down.

But getting back to my “man/boy crush” – those who know me would be forgiven for assuming that Jeffery would be the object of my rather scary cyber stalkering, (there you go a new word), but au contraire, it’s the delightful, discerning and I think slightly demented Cole Escola. The boy is a genius. There’s nothing he will not do for a laugh, not a wig or an accent that he will not wear out, no piece of scenery he will not chew to get that gag.

So yes I have unrequited “man/boy crush” on a performance artist who lives over 30 hours away by Qantas Airbus380.

And you thought you spent too much time in front of the laptop.

So You Think You're Ready To Bareback

So you think you’re ready to bareback? You’ve selected your partner and had an informed, in-depth discussion. You’ve known each other for a while, you both look good, gym three times a week, proper food and only do drugs on special occasions. You trust each other. You commit; NO casual sex. You have blood tests so there are no doubts.
Sitting at home watching re-runs of Will and Grace, you wait, counting the days until the results are in.
Finally! You’re a little nervous, who wouldn’t be. In the waiting room you sit next to a gaunt man with shaking hands, sallow cheeks and strawberry blotches on the side of his neck and you wonder. You’re called by your Doctor; you follow him down the corridor. You’re both negative. The much planned and longed for event can go ahead.
You set the day, Saturday. Dinner first, drinks at the Pub, a line of coke, maybe an E, and then the foam party at Arq. So many sexy guys, sweating, bodies all moving as one to the music. You see yourself reflected in the eyes of the other dancers. You’ve never looked better. Tonight’s the night.
At your apartment you fall into bed and pretty soon you’re more intimate with this man than you’ve ever been with anyone.
So now you’re really ready to bareback.
Twenty minutes later it’s worth it. All that discipline, being so careful. It’s never felt like this before. Is it the booze, the E, the coke or the cock. Doesn’t matter, it’s awesome.
A couple of weeks later he’s moved on. You’re feeling run down. You’ve been hitting it pretty hard for a few weeks. Time for a vitamin shot and, while you’re there, might as well get the bloods done.
A week later and you’re feeling much better; you almost forget that Doctors appointment.
The results are back. Unexpectedly, surprisingly, you’re positive. How could it happen? You only had unsafe sex with “him”.
While you were watching Karen and Jack he was at a “private party” and met a guy. They only screwed for a minute and it was such a small cut on the head of his cock that unless he looked really close he would never have noticed it. They took turns, versatility was the key. Neither of them came in the other, well not much anyway. It was over fast. It was “safe”.
So you’re ready to bareback. Good for you and good luck to you. Go for it. But if it goes wrong YOU take responsibility. Don’t blame your partner, you made the decision. It was your choice and you need to own it.
Ask yourself this “Is it worth it?” Is it worth a lifetime, no matter how long or short, of taking pills, every night, of worrying about every sneeze, every sweat and every ache? Are you ready for a trip to the doctors every three months, worrying about T-cells and viral load? What about treatment failure? Is it worth worrying every time you lose weight? Is it worth it?
So you still think you want to bareback?
Across Australia the rate of new HIV/Aids infection is increasing. The time when a man is most infectious is when he sero converts.

Why We Need Another Plague

Well this is going to offend; at least I certainly hope it will. I want to hear arms being crossed and every dudgeon being set to high.

Okay what I mean is, our community needs another challenge, focus, raison d’etre. Something that will bring us back together, a common goal or purpose.

In the 50’s and early 60’s we had the one common purpose of “keeping our closet safe”. We formed groups of like minded men and women, met in secret places and kept our secrets safe. Everything was word of mouth as clubs began to open and then flourish. In the late 60’s and 70’s we found a new voice. Out of the Anti – War, counter culture protest movement and moratoriums we decided that we had something to say and we had a right to be heard. The more radical amongst us learned how to network, form cells, alliances, collectives and societies. Slowly out of those disparate groupings, we put together a cohesive force that burst onto the streets of Sydney and marched. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! It was wonderful and exciting. It was the start of our brave new pink world. But somewhere along that road to full liberation we settled. Not everyone, but lets be honest most of us, settled for “our once a year day”. Mardi Gras. Until finally even that day is now becoming an irrelevancy. We settled for an existence rather than a life.

Then along came that big disease with the little name and suddenly we were focused again, united against a common enemy. All of that energy got us back out of the Bars and onto the streets. This time we marched under a rainbow banner and demanded that “attention must be paid”. We were dying, slowly, painfully and in alarmingly increasing numbers. Not the pretty death we had hoped for after watching “Now Voyager”. Who was going to look after us if we didn’t start looking after each other?

As the pages of this paper began to fill with the death notices of young men in their 20’s and 30’s we decided that silence really did equal death, it was time to Act Up. Each victory was hard fought and sometimes the battles took unexpected tolls on those fighting. Despair overwhelmed some and they found it impossible to go on. So we formed more groups, groups of caring, unpaid, volunteers like ANKALI and CSN. to support not just the sick but the carers as well. Then new drugs began to appear, then combinations, then a 10 year life expectancy became 15 then 20 then……what was once a death sentence has become a manageable chronic illness.

So we gave up, not everyone but most. The death notices were replaced with Real estate adverts. The quilt was wrapped up and put away and now only occasionally bought out as a relic, an example of how things were. HIV AIDS became the disease of “that generation”. Once a year the names of our martyrs are read to ever decreasing numbers of people.

We lost our focus. Our bright but brief rainbow community dissolved into fractious internecine fighting. Our crusade became a vehicle for people to hitch their wagons to, to promote their own careers and agendas. God save us all from pragmatists.

We are settling. And what is it that we are settling for? A life of self congratulatory self gratification, of selfishness rather than selflessness. We are still at war but now it’s with each other. The discriminated have become the discriminating. The one thing that the Festival of Light could never do we have done to ourselves. We’ve gone from fabulous to fatuous. We’ve become a theme park for out of “towners” to come to each weekend or on that one night in March, Mardi Gras, and point and stare and snigger at the “gays”. We’re becoming an irrelevancy, a footnote in the last part of a millennium gone by; being sucked slowly and inexorably into the mundane. We live small lives and because of that we are becoming smaller people, focused totally on ourselves.

So yes we need another plague because maybe then we will come together truly as one community and stand up for something more important than our right to drink, drug and “rut” ourselves into oblivion 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The need is out there it’s the willingness that’s lacking. All it will take to get us back on track is the desire to do something for someone else without once thinking “what’s in it for me”. Will we do it?

Maybe violence is the new plague. Maybe the “Reclaim the Street Vigil” is the start of the new Community.

Define Me a Relationship

Yes I’m having a long term, long distance cyber affair and I have to say it is the most satisfying relationship I have had in a long time. We message each other daily on msn or Gaydar, we send txts and sometimes we eat dinner together, him in his room and me in mine. We’ve never met and really not ever likely to but it did get me thinking – “how do you define a relationship in these modern times”?

Apparently everyone wants one, at least that’s what they say and yet so few seem to admit to having one. Lesbians of course are the natural exception to this rule. I have never yet met an unattached Lesbian.

If relationships are so important to us why do we continue to define them by the paradigms of the past? The traditional Anglo monogamous role play version we see on TV. Do any of us need to have our union sanctified by George, (Pell) or Peter (Jensen)? We spend hectares of old growth forest proclaiming our individuality and yet the one thing we want it seems, is to conform to society’s snapshot of a happily coupled couple. We march for miles, in all weather, in tight fitting, chafing, sequinned thongs with chiffon capes and for what? To be like George and Mildred! The wind created by the rush to be married could power a large Reception Centre. And what’s so great about being like everyone else anyway it seems a little grey and mundane. A very wise individualist said, “we are all unique - just like everyone else).

Most of my friends are in committed relationships, just not the type of relationship that we’ve been told by Leo Burnett or Val Morgan that they should be. One couple I know, much older, so naturally much wiser, had been partnered for over 30 years, (one now sadly deceased), both had younger boyfriends and the boyfriends had boyfriends as well. That’s one hell of a table come Valentines. It worked perfectly, for them.

We’re all in relationships, just look around. It may not look like the Doris Day / Rock Hudson version or the Tom Cruise; Mimi, Nicole, Katie variety. So its not what you imagined it to be when you were in high school secretly fingering your dog eared copy of “The Front Runner” or proudly proclaiming your “outedness” reading “Tales of the City” on the 380 bus.

For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, (mostly poorer at the moment) I seem to have fallen into a relationship, (this is different to the cyber one), with a man 10 years older than me. If you knew how old I am then that would frighten you. Let me stress this though, right here and right now, we never have and never ever will have sex – I think we would both rather set our hair on fire. But we go away on holidays together; we eat dinner in together 5 nights out of 7. We watch House together and we are furious, together, that “So You Think You Can Dance” has finished. We get invited out too most things together, I’m still “Anne Guest” ,(yes I mean Anne), at the STC. We have shared a house together now for over 15 years. He has sat by my bed, in hospital – twice. Although the second time he did demand my Qantas FF number before he would let the Doctors put the tube down my throat. I woke up, a week later, 25 kilos and a 100,000 points lighter. However you cut that flan, that’s a relationship, it may not be healthy, but it’s mine.

Our best friends have been partnered for over 20 years. True they don’t sleep together or in fact live in the same house. They live next door with connecting passageways and five bathrooms. But it works and works very well, for them. They are the happiest couple I’ve ever seen. Two other gay men I know are foster parents to 2, count them 2, children. Another couple flew off to Canada for a commitment ceremony then a honeymoon in Tasmania.

As far as I can tell we are swimming in relationships. Whatever works and does no harm should be encouraged, celebrated and respected. Just because your relationship doesn’t look like Lucy and Malcolm’s, or George and Laura’s, doesn’t make it any less real. Ultimately it shouldn’t matter what the boys in the back room are whispering it’s your life and you are the one living it. So what if it’s not like the fairy tales, who wants to live with 3 bears or 7 small miners or a cow and a beanstalk anyway. Then again maybe you do and maybe you are, that’s fine as well.

Oh and allow it to happen for heavens sake. There is no set time or age when you should buy that summer share in Port Douglas or get those matching Celtic tattoo. It isn’t instant coffee after all. It happens when it happens; in the big scheme of things it’s all perfect.

Go stand in the middle of Taylor Sq. or where ever you like to stand, take off that beret, throw it in the air and you’ll see that love is all around and you’re gonna make it after all.