gay creation story

I went to the Rally for Same-Sex Marriage Rights the other week in Melbourne (28 November 09). As we marched up Collins Street, this guy standing at a tram stop yelled "...you came from a man and a woman, it's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve." Not particularly original but today I thought of the best comeback: yes but I'm not the one who believes in the virgin birth." A child born of two men now that would be a miracle.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh.
And Adam said, this is now my bone and my flesh and he shall be named Steve; he is of me and I of him.
And they were both naked and they were not ashamed.
And Adam knew Steve and they conceived a child and bare Cain; for great is the power of LORD God that maketh the infertile fertile.

AMEN to that!

long time between posts

Two thousand and nine has been a shit year. Never mind the fires and the floods, earth quakes, the insurgents and their improvised explosives, I turned thirty. Abandoned by the rest of my siblings (who've gone off to enjoy their exciting lives) I've had stick around Melbourne to look after my mother. Having to put off returning to Chile and Julio and South American adventure. I've had to move out of my home because of a dickhead house mate who was petty and aggressive and had issues with my sexuality. I'm now living alone. I've had one of my best friends misread an sms I wrote and decide that I was killing myself. To make matters worse the Optus network died and he couldn't call. He thought I'd switched my phone off. He was soooo angry when I tried to explain the misunderstanding. He told me he was tired of my games and I told him to fuck off.

Despite all of this and yes I am really thirty, I am feeling positive, I am feeling good. I am looking forward to meeting new people and making new friends, to living alone with my own crazy thoughts and writing again. Here's to thirty and cheers to that.

i'm having one of those lower case days where i can't be bothered hitting the shift key on the keyboard. you see i'm trying to quit smoking. i only made up my mind a half hour ago to drop the habit while cycling down to the shops in brunswick i thought i was going to have a heart attack. heart beating like a mad fucker and all i could think was - is this the last thing i am going to see? fuck needed to use the shift to type that question mark. but that's not the only thing i guess. it's been a stressful week, nightmarish temper tandrums from a housemate that almost led to violence almost led me to the point of leaving, a social life that has crawled to well a crawl, and not to mention a job that is uncertain because of budget cuts. yeah feeling pretty lowercase.

tasmania

When I told my mum I was gay her first response was of love and reassurance, her second was that she didn't understand and was concerned about my future, and lastly that if I didn't mind terribly much she wouldn't tell the rest of the family. It is this third comment that has resurfaced in conversation time and time again. The fear and shame that the moral disapprobation from her conservative Christian family would be "all be a bit too much of a bother."

Her recently widowed sister and her female friend have been staying with my mum this week and out of some obligation I headed out to her place today to say "howdy." They laughed at this as I entered the room and after introductions my aunt and her friend returned to their card game and my mum to her British crime drama. I sat down and pulled from my bag, a book that my friend had lent me yesterday called Coming Out from Within and from what I can gather it is a spiritual approach to understanding and dealing with grief and loss faced by gay men and lesbians (from coming out, homophobia and death). As my mum drove me to the train station I realised it wasn't in my bag, I'd left it on the couch in her living room.

It hurts that my mum is so worried what her family will think about her. That she is deep down (not so deep) really ashamed that her son is gay and it is a fact she feels she needs to hide from them. For a moment there I actually considered not telling her and let the fates decide whether her sister found the book or not. However this thought was a brief one. Embarrassing my mum like that would do neither of us any good and so I offered her a choice: if you don't want my aunt to know that I'm gay then you'll need to hide the book. I'll pick it up next weekend.

I hope she reads it instead.

The Forever War

I stumbled across some notes I'd scribbled down a few months ago after finishing Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. The novel is something of a sci-fi classic, less for its science or its story but its anti-war basis, which is largely attributed to the author's experiences in the Vietnam War. The book is diametrically opposite to the psuedo-fascist musings of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (which it is often compared to) written at the end of the 1950s. What I noticed, quite unexpectantly however, running beside this anti-war theme was a somthing of homo subtone, which was largely ignored in my edition's introduction.

When William Mandella, the book's main character returns to Earth after a disastrous campaign agaist the Tauran enemy outside our solar system he finds a changed world. Relativistic physics means that weeks maybe months have past for Mandella but back on Earth it has been decades since he left. Earth is now a violent and impoverished planet where the global currency is based on calories. To combat an unsustainable population, the global government has introduced what are termed homosex policies. Homosexual relationships aren't now so much as tolerated but encouraged.

Mandella tracks down his mother, now elderly living with a female friend, her lover and partner after the death of his father. It is something he struggles hard to come to terms with. Back in the 1970s, he says, before leaving for the war there was a growing acceptability of the homosexual lifestyle. It was something he generally agreed with but to find his mother living with a woman: this is something different. Uncomfortable with his mother's life choices, Mandella flees to the country to find his fellow soldier and lover, Marygay Potter.

As relativistic time throws Mandella further into a distant future, he finds himself commanding an entire strike force of homosexuals. Centuries in the future homosexuality is now considered the norm, throwing his hetero-normative world upside down. Children are born in vats and heterosexuality is seen as something medically disfunctional; children who are found exhibiting these tendencies are "reeducated" early. This leads Mandella worry that his sexual orientation, his pathological attraction to women will undermine his command.

I am in two minds about this, either this is an early attempt to demontrate difficulties experienced by gay people in everyday life or it is simply an exploitative vision of the future where tolerance has led to a nightmarish disfunctional world. I prefer to believe the former although Haldeman does cop out at the end when Charlie, a sypathetically portrayed gay man chooses to be medically transformed straight. Oh well.

cocaine diaries

Alex James, ex-Blur bassist and now cheese farmer, once wrote that he had spent a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. Now cocaine-free James recently visited Colombia, the source of 80 percent of the world's cocaine, on the invitation of President Alvaro Uribe, to see first hand what his personal drug habit and that of the estimated 800,000 Brits has had on his country. Vice President Francisco Santos explained to him, upon arrival that when a "person starts consuming coke, all that money comes here to finance landmines, destruction of the environment, terrorism, kidnapping, displacement." During his visit, James met with drug dealers, farmers and members of an anti-narcotic unit, who according to the BBC website, 10 percent of them have been killed since filming in 2008. In Bogota, the capital of Colombia, James met with a contract killer, disguised as a taxi driver. Driving through the streets of Bogota, the driver told James that business was very good, making allusion to the paid killings. It's all drug related, he explained. The taxi driver was killed himself after filming.

I saw the documentary Cocaine Diaries: Alex James in Colombia a few weeks ago and it got me thinking. So much attention on part of the 'left' is paid to sweat shops, organic food, and reducing carbon emissions, of thinking globally acting locally but how many of these people use illicit drugs and how many of these people know where they came from? And again how many of them care?
I was at a party a week or so ago and I was chatting with this guy who told me he was partial to the occasional line of coke. So I told him about the film. "Yeah I've heard about it but haven't seen it," he told me, "Actually I have a friend who's constantly bugging me about my drug use for all those very same reasons and I feel kinda bad but I think I live a reasonably good life, I buy the right things and give money to charity, you know? It's just a bit of fun."

It's like the blood diamonds, I told him. Westerners with too much money, wanting something bright and shiney on their finger, whose money was used to fund a brutal civil war in Western Africa, where aputations and killings were a part of every day life. The war was sustained by there money, and in the end it was more about controlling the supply of diamonds that it was about ideology or territory or old ethnic tensions.

"What if I offered you a line, right here and now?" he asked me. "What would you do?" So I answered him as honestly as I could: "I guess I would have to think about whether the several hours off buzzing off my nut is worth more than the life of someone on the other side of the world and I hope I would say no."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/7200749.stm

the self hating homosexual

I've been listening a lot to gay troubador Rufus Wainwright of late, having bought two of his albums, Want One and Want Two at this marvelous post christmas sale at JB HiFi: two CDs for sixteen dollars. Chilling-out in my room with the lights turned down low listening to what I can only describe as theatrical folk, I was taken by the thought that I so rarely get to hear songs where the lyrics so explicitly relate to gay men in love (or out of). I mentioned this to a friend of mine while sitting round the barbeque on my balcony. "I'm not a big fan," he replied. I'll admit I was somewhat surprised, I had thought Rufus Wainwright was so him and so I pressed the issue. "A guy at work was playing one his albums off i-tunes and I thought it was kinda cool, but have you ever heard him speak? It turned me off him a little," he explained.
"What do mean?" I asked him.
"Just go listen to him and you'll understand," he told me and I did.

Watching an interview from American television on youtube, Rufus explained how he had been living in Berlin with his boyfriend recording his new album. He spoke with a slight but noticible, well I guess you could call it a "gay lisp", wouldn't you? He sounded gay.

I was reminded of a book I read while I was at University called Jewish Self-hatred by Sander Gilman. It was all about how European Jews, pre-holocaust, that were attempting to assimilate into a wider Gentile and generally anti-semitic European society. They disavowed themselves of anything Jewish, the mannerisms, the traditions, in the hope of being accepted, while at the same time criticising and even attacking such behaviour in others, labelling them the bad Jews. The thing is however, the reason why anti-semitic Europe reviled the Jews was not about how they acted, but the very fact they were Jewish. No matter how much they acted Gentile-like they would never be accepted and their future was to be like all those flamboyant and unrepentant Jews: the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

Thinking about it, there is a similar mindset within the gay community. You can be straight-acting or camp, a good homosexual or a bad one. Dating websites are replete with references to acting straight and being indistinguishable from our straight brethren (something it seems that is both important and desirable) except for the simple fact that we like to suck cock of course. A small difference, yes? The point however, is that the reason why we are so disapproved of, feared and hated has nothing to do with a lisp or a limp wrist, it has all to do with sucking cock and taking it (or giving it) up the arse. Sure acting camp makes you more open to homophobic abuse, but since when has a victim ever been to blame for the violence of others, whether it be in word or action?

What does it matter how a person talks? I ask you. What is important, to steal from the Reverend Martin Luther Jr, is the content of a person's heart and not the limpness of their wrist. Straight-acting as a term seems loaded with self loathing, why should anyone act? While wider society may ridicule the effeminate man, it is only a symptom of a deeper unease. To say there are good gays and bad gays is a chimera; there is one thing homophobes and I agree upon and that is that they fear/hate what we do in bed not our haircut or the way we walk and talk.

home truth

I got an email from a friend last night. He was responding to an email I sent prior to Christmas and I guess I must have been moaning about work/life etc; who knows, I was probably drunk when I sent it but in his response he said: "I never remember you ever saying that you really liked it that much." I didn't pay it any heed but I guess home truths are like that: it's better not to think too hard about them, just file 'em away for later.

I lay back after finishing my poorly worded email to Julio and picked up Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos. Somehow trying to understand the intricacies of warping spacetime at half-past-twelve at night is a war I can't win, no matter how many Simpson's characters Greene drags out to explain Einstein's theory of general relativity. The book dropped onto my chest and I was fast asleep...

...wobbly spacetime distortion effect...

It was my birthday and my friends and family were throwing me a big big party in the warehouse apartment that was my home (yes one can dream). Everyone was there, throngs of people... wow I didn't realise I had so many friends... and then the speeches began. My mum, close and bestest friends all saying exactly the same thing: I've been on this planet for thirty years now and done jack with it; I've amounted to nothing and by the look of it, I never will. I was ropable. How could people who professed to love me say such awful things? While tears welled in my eyes the merrymaking continued around me, drinking laughing smoking as I sat in the corner feeling sorry for myself, abandoned. As things wound down, people made their excuses and left. The night was young and apparently there was a better party to go to.

Alone now, my appartment seemed to expand and darken and grow colder as I wandered around it.... then my alarm buzzed and I was awake and I knew it was time to get up and get ready for another day at the office.

Funny hey? I'll admit I've spent most of the day thinking about this. The dream's left me with a feeling I can't shake and as a result I feel a little shaken. It's not like it was an epiphany or anything so profound like that, nothing I didn't know before but hey I guess that's why you call it a home truth.

Do we ever really leave the closet? I think as I sip tea in the house of my Sudanese friend. Years back I used to teach him english, way back when he first arrived in Australia as a refugee. He could barely speak a word of english then and now we can discuss politics, the global credit crisis or why for example I am not married. "It's important to have children, I think you should have at least six children... you need to find a wife" he tells me.

It's moments like these that time stops, butterflies fill my stomach as I experience something you might call the truth or lie reflex. I dodge and evade until I can either disclose my sexuality or ... for instance say "maybe 2009 will be my lucky year" and reinforce his belief that I am just another happy, albeit unlucky, heterosexual.

Why did I say that? I think to myself, whincing a little but with my friend's conservative christian values, I just don't want to have THAT conversation with him right now or perhaps ever. Where does that leave us though? Do I just keep quiet hoping it'll never come up? I am not normally ashamed of who I am but there are times when I just don't want to get into it. I don't want to explain or defend who I am. I just want to be one of the boys ... but then one of the boys generally means being heterosexual.

I was at a new years party, sipping a vodka mixer. I was engaged in a lively discussion about South America with me the centre of attention. I was standing about outside on the balcony having a cigarette with a couple I had just met. They'd wanted to know why I'd been drawn back to Chile so soon after my first adventure eight months earlier. You meet someone? The guy joked. I hesitated. "Yeah I met a... guy."
"Oh.... that's wonderful," the girl said with a little shock but recovering it well. "So what's his name? Where did you meet him?" I answered her questions gingerly but soon relaxed. We talked about our various opinions of men, past relationships (mainly mine) until the guy bored, up and left the conversation.... and then she sprung it on me as if she had been waiting for her moment, "so when did you come out, when did you tell your parents?"

I had to answer those same questions twice more that evening/morning until I felt like I was just going through the motions. Surely this conversation is as tired for you all as it is for me? Obviously not.

concluding comments:
I do wonder whether you can ever really leave the closet. We all have that moment in our gay lives that we can point to and say "that's when I came out," but we rarely say "that's where I briefly stepped back in," or "oh, when did I come out? Just now actually to you... and before that to that woman over there who kept touching my arm and asking me to dance."