1969 was a VERY big year!

1969 it was a very big year for change. A lot happened in 1969 - not all of it good.

It was the year that Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected President of the United States of America, the year of the last ever public performance by The Beatles, on top of Apple Records, the year of the first flight of the Boeing 747, the Jumbo jet that would revolutionise air travel, Judy Garland died from an accidental drug overdose, Prince Charles was invested as Prince of Wales, Apollo 11 was launched and the lunar module Eagle landed on the lunar surface, Charles Manson and members of his cult murdered a pregnant Sharon Tate, the Woodstock Festival was held in upstate New York, The Brady Bunch premiered on American television, Sesame Street started, the first GAP store opened. It was a busy year.

Two other events were reported for 1969, events that have changed the life of every gay man and woman.

1969 is reported as being the first year that the HIV virus was documented as migrating to the USA from Haiti.

1969 was also the year of the Stonewall Riots in New York.

These two events would continue to colour our lives for the next four decades and probably for many more to come.

In Greenwich Village on Christopher St. there was a small, rather seedy bar run by the Genovese Mafia Family. It served watered down drinks, paid off the police and was frequented by transvestites, lesbians, gay men and homeless kids. On the night of June 28 the New York Police raided the club. This type of event was reasonably common in the 50s and 60s but for some reason on this particular night, people had decided that they had had enough and refused to go quietly.

No one is really sure who was first to say “Not this time”, was it a butch dyke dressed as a man or a transvestite who first resisted arrest and started to rally the crowd?

It started with the throwing of coins, a symbol of the graft that the Mafia were paying the police, (gayola) and quickly escalated to bottles, rocks and anything handy being hurled at the law. The normally meek ‘fags’ decided that now was the time for ‘Gay Power’.

Word spread through the Village and across the city; hundreds of gay men, lesbians and other minority groups converged on Christopher St. to join the protest.

The Police were woefully outnumbered and had to use the pay phone inside Stonewall to call for reinforcements. Bolstered by the Tactical Patrol Force, (TPF), riot police specially trained to deal with anti Vietnam War protesters, New York’s finest tried to regain control of the streets but every time the protesters were dispersed they would reform and challenge the TPF by forming a ‘kick line’, like a crowd of angry Rockettes, singing and mocking the police. This was a different style of protest, a protest never seen before but soon to become familiar throughout the world. A protest with panache, that would one day become the mainstay of Gay Pride marches throughout the world, proving that you could get your message across and achieve change with wit and humour.

For the next five nights the crowds, in varying numbers, would regather to hammer home the message, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

In July, the week after the riots, a new organisation was born in New York, the ‘Gay Liberation Front’, (GLF), whose sole purpose was to promote equality and force change on an unwilling government. During the next year lesbians and gay men, through out the world formed their own version of the GLF and took their fight to their streets.


In Australia as news of the riots filtered through, Sydney’s first political group, ‘Campaign Against Moral Persecution’, (CAMP), was formed in 1970. The first national Gay Pride march happened on 15 September 1973, with 18 arrests. In 1975 Rod Stringer with Bill McElvie launched ‘Campaign’ a national gay men’s magazine. On the night of Saturday, 24 June, 1978 the first major protest rally to demand equal rights for homosexuals was held in Sydney and from that march the ‘Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras’ was born.

Meanwhile, back in 1969 that little known virus that had migrated from Haiti to America was marshalling its own troops and by the 80’s was ready to mount its own attack on an unsuspecting populace.

1969 was for a lot of reasons a very BIG year.

Get Outta My Face (book)

It’s Friday night, it’s been a shit of a week, so to celebrate I thought I would treat myself to a cup of tea, a normi, (the tablet not the singer although they both achieve the same result) and a good lie down. By 10.45 I was happily, blissfully, asleep. I had survived another week and was looking forward to a relaxed and pressure free weekend. What I didn’t realise was that while I slumbered, somewhere across the globe in hundreds of darkening rooms; a plot was being hatched by faceless, nameless “friends”.

I woke up the next day, groggy, my face forming a perfect relief map of the Blue Mountains, to discover I had 300 new friends! Now I don’t know about you but I have trouble keeping track of the five, okay three, friends I have IRL, (that’s young folk type for “in real life”). So the weight of 297 people demanding my attention hit me like the Liberal Party election loss.

Let’s be honest, I’m too old for Facebook and not nearly “gay” enough; I don’t straighten my hair and I wear my jeans around my waist. God knows why I joined in the first place - but I did. I’m thinking at 50 I’m more a “Get Outta My Face” book type of guy. I’m not a networker, social or otherwise, in fact I don’t really like people much at the best of times, just ask my partner. I went to Stonewall, once, only because I thought it was still the NAB, (National Bank of Australia). I did think it strange how funky the tellers were dressed as I handed over my deposit. (What is the deal with old banks turning into gay bars anyway?) I’ve never sent a Christmas or Birthday card in my life. Even a quick text to say “thanks for dinner” is beyond me but now I’m constantly sending hugs and kisses to these strange friends.

Do I really want to go to Ryan’s farewell drinks in Basingstoke on Trent, do I care that Sally has split up with Fiona but is now partnered for life with Cherie from Lucerne or Jose` is seeing Sweeney Todd in Queens? And just who is David Paris?

My time is being co-opted by these pals, demanding that I join their clubs, sending me nudges, pokes, winks, pictures and links to YouTube videos that are just NOT funny. Why do I have to write on someone’s Super Funwall, why do I have to take quizzes all to find out I am most like Joan Crawford and not Joan Fontaine? Why do I keep accepting the invite? It’s insidious, addictive, destructive and yet strangely compelling.

I can’t leave my bedroom, I’m forced to eat cold meals delivered by Christine Courier in front of my laptop, I chew coffee beans to keep myself awake, my back is developing a hump. I’m going mad answering every message that hits my intray. I don’t wash, I don’t shave, my hair has become home to a small nest of spiders and my fingernails are heading to Howard Hughes length. I have no me time, no down time, no quiet time.

I’ve never been so popular.

Please, please, please if my name pops up on your screen don’t feel compelled to add me, treat me the way you would if you saw me or any other MAG out. Ignore me! Gotta dash, Andrew’s not coping with Biomechanics, (I mean really, who is), and my two new “best friends forever” from Ghana want me, or at least my account number at Stonewall.

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?