Saturday, August 05, 2006

jogging on

My shorts are too short and tight I think to myself as I attempt to keep some semblance of pace as I jog around princes park. I hear the shocked and amused thoughts of those I pass in my head; the paranoid psychotic voices are always hard to filter out even when I am exercising but then again where else to go but inward. Strange weird swirly visual effect.

I find myself dwelling on a conversation I had with a friend of a friend last week at some homo party held regularly under inflation nightclub in geddes lane in the city. I sip on my vodka lemon/lime spritz spouting my usual crap, nonsense that comes out whenever I am nervous... which is most of the time. Imagine standing on the Bolivian plains of El Salar de Uyuni (something I hope to see next year) the world's biggest salt lake wearing pitchblack motorcycle goggles, the kind Tom Waits would be proud to wear... stillness and blinding light reflecting on the pure white lake contrasted by a deep breath of blue sky above. I say if only I could find the optometrist crazy enough (oh my, my poor myopic eyes) , say with the vision to undertake my patronage. Turning to me he grins in his sheepish way and without detectable venom "did you realise I stopped paying attention about five minutes ago." I am taken aback. Fuck you too I think and shut my mouth.

Disolve to a small cafe, a scene in which I sit with my soy latte retelling this to a friend; still a little put out by it all. His eyes light up, incredulous that someone had sought to shoot me down about this and we build together on my little fantasy stimulated by caffiene and we both dream of mad optometrists in lab coats surrounded by diodes as lightening flashes through tubes above.

My foot lands in a puddle on the path and mud splashes up my leg but I keep jogging.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Graduation Day 2002

On 14 February 2002 I stood with maybe a quarter of a million other people protesting the coming invasion of iraq and the Howard government's tacit (yet nonetheless full) support for it. I left work early and had driven in with friends joining an ocean of equally angry bemused citizens who were like me wholly unconvinced by the justification for any military action. Weapons of Mass Destruction? When was the last time you heard someone say that? If feels redundant now to even bring it up, the once sexy acronym rolling of my tongue. Terrorism? Well I could never understand how dropping bombs on a country the other side of the planet was supposed to make me feel safer. Why should I feel safer anyhow when some American 'smart' bomb detonates in someone else's living room fire and concrete... when isn't it better I feel a little bit nervous and let the owner of said living room continue watching the arabic equivalent to pop idol? Freeing the Iraqi people? From what? Saddam? According to BBC online an average of over one hundred Iraqis die now every day because of the violence. Yes we freed them alright. Freed them from this mortal coil.

Graduation Day: 20 March 2002. I woke up early to clean the house getting things in order for my little afterparty, my mum out shopping getting a few last minute supplies. The TV was stuck to the ABC watching the coverage and waiting for the expected... and when it came I stood in the hallway scrubbing brush in my hand, mouth open and tap running. The Americans were bombing Baghdad and I flooded my bathroom and bedroom.

Why did we go to war again? I'd like to say I told you so as if anyone was ever listening to me but that would denote some self satisfaction. I don't feel any. I would also like to tell you all the best way forward but I don't know, only that things look pretty fucked up and I am sorry for that.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

deep-fried exorcism

The other night I witnessed (in a dream of course) the exorcism of a plate of french fries. Now I don't know the difference between one sort of potato chip from the next let alone one possessed by the devil... so I thus referred such prodding and pocking, decifering and deciding to the experts: the priest and laymen and laywomen who stood around the table that 'lay' this plate and its chips upon. I was just about to discover, truth revealed if the oil the chips were fried in had been unholy cursed when I was abruptly woken by my alarm... time to get ready for my office nine to five I said to myself, wrenching my tired body from beneath the covers.

My friend Darren who told me tonight, in response to this story that I have some of the strangest dreams around.

I tend to agree.

the last I dreamt

Saturday, June 24, 2006

STFODC

I was at dinner with friends last sunday: shanghai dumplings off china town. A cheap and no-frills restaurant where melbourne's young creatives are increasingly drawn to dining by the low prices and chance of experiencing the authentic... that is until everyone else finds out about it and they are forced to move on like "Brunswick street used to be a community man, a hub of creative energy but now its soul is dead" unaware they are actually the cause of it.

Tim, the guy who did visuals for my friend's band Low Rise Estate, grabbed my camera. I had taken a few choice shots during their set at Loop and having finished my mushroom and veg dumplings was entertaining myself by pointing my camera at those left eating. He proceeded, most expertly to highlight its technical shortcomings and how other cameras more favourably compared (undoubtedly his). Satisfied that his male posturing had impressed he handed the camera back and began telling us about some new organisational technique that people on the web were buzzing about... I tuned out as he began as images of more entertaining telecommercial testimonials flashed infront of my mind.

What? I said, drawn back in. What the hell is a PAA Hipster? I asked. He brought out a wad of palm size sheets of paper held together by an bull clip, grining and like that yankee carpetbagger he called it macaroni. Apparently PAA stands for personal analogue assistant and is a technique being promoted by none other than google's Tom Limoncelli. This technique involves, now hold you breath: writing your thoughts down on paper.

Your kidding, right? I asked. It's brilliant and it really works. It clears valuable cerebral real estate for other thoughts, he said that now he doesn't have to think of things, he can think about things; upon which his dinner arrived and distracted, he accused the waitress barely maintaining composure, of bringing dumplings uncooked. You want them deep fried? She asked seemingly a little confused and without a hint of sarcasm. I was given the impression that she was unaccustomed to customer complaints.

I say to all you PAA Hipters out there: STFODC! It stands for stating the fucking obvious dumb cunts! It is actually called a notepad and not some exotic plant from the amazon that until the drug giant Pfizer discovered it only a few naked indians had heard of it.

It makes me want to punch myself in the head.

Monday, June 12, 2006

jesus is coming... loudly

Seriously kids, if the words gay and jesus put side by side on a page makes you a might bit uncomfortable, then the sentence "he slowly began to stroke my rod" is unlikely to anything to allay this anxiety. So if this is the case then I strongly suggest that you don't click on the hyperlink below.


http://www.jesus21.com/poppydixon/sex/gay_jesus.html

west bank story

Check this out! This article entitled "Queen Hussein" gives a snapshot into the lives of two gay men living in the occupied territories and appeared in the lefty rag Monthy Review earlier this month (orig. translated from the Hebrew edition of Haaretz).

Queen Hussein

Friday, June 09, 2006

what i wish i'd said

It's always the way that you think of something really witty to say five or ten minutes after having the conversation. Some side that would have stung or back hand so fabulously devised and delivered that your cool quota is spent in one blow...

I was booking a ticket today for the opening screening of Renaissance at the Nova:

- We only have three split tickets left so you'd be sitting by yourself.

- That's fine.

- I can only get you a seat on the front row, either on the extreme right or the extreme left.

- If I realise they are the same thing do I get to sit in the centre?

(what I really said: well I better take the extreme left then... hehe)

But I suppose I come out sounding a dick either way.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

666

Did you know that fear of the number 666 is called hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia? No?

Does anyone else feel that the only reason that 20th Century Fox decided to remake Omen, a film that cost a reported $52.4 million was for the sole purpose of releasing it on the 6 June 2006?

Monday, June 05, 2006

this things a party... Grandmaster Flash @ the Forum 3 June 2006

Whatever it was, it was the best fun I've had at a live event in six months. Flash if nothing else played the crowd so well he even managed getting my most stolid of friends shaking their booty in what was as much a history of hip-hop as dance party. "I made the decks into an instrument, no one else can say that" Flash proclaimed with out a hit of humility as he took us deck by deck educating the uninitiate in the ways of hip-hop, beginning with some old-school beats mixing through tracks from the 70s and upwards from Gangstarr and Snoop Dogg to Phil Collins and Nirvana, he said that hip-hop knows no discrimination be it "pop, rock... black, white, Australian or Japanese, when I play it, it's all hip-hop."

Through our journey Flash gave props to lost friends, dead hip hop greats such as Big L, Easy E, TuPac and Notorious B.I.G, addressing the crowd "if you see see someone that you miss... that you remember... that you love then I want you to make some noise" repeating as each image swirled up on the projector screen in cheap digital effects stolen it seemed from a powerpoint presentation.

Noise I made and dance I did as we hit level three paying tribute to the four pillars of hip-hop: the graffiti, the breakdance, MC and most importantly the DJ... counting them off with his fingers. But with a patch of floor so sticky it nearly stole my shoe, unnecessarily agressive security and Flash's increasing frustration at sound levels the show lost a little of it's earlier momentum which was nonetheless powerful enough to carry me all the way home still buzzing.

(props go to my friend Aaron who also assisted in getting me home)

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

what's wrong with me? seriously

How come I can enter into near empty pub and within minutes have a woman introduce her good self, interrupt whatever I was doing and sit down at my table but I struggle to even get a guy to speak to me at a gay bar? And when a guy does come up to me he turns out to be straight... but... what goddamn kinda wrong signals am i sending out? What strange pheromone is seeping out my sweet glands? I mean how the fuck in the stretch of one evening at q&a (local gay night-standing for queer & alternative) of the two guys who approach me one is so clueless (and straight) that he didn't realise he was in a gay bar-wanted to talk to me about some chick he'd scored- and the second wanted to pick a fight with me for being a screaming poof .... ?

What am I trying to tell myself? Would I have made a better hetero? Christ!!! Yes god, maybe you were right.

Postscript: Admittedly the young lady did then tell me that if her boyfriend saw us together he ... well it's not like he'd beat me up or anything, not if he only saw us together... but that's not the point... seriously I am not happy!

Monday, May 29, 2006

oh my gay lord its vodou!

In Haiti the lwa or loa, the spirits of vodou, leave their home beneath the ocean, bas de l’eau to walk the earth and commune oh-so personally with us through the act of possessing. During a service, held often in a hougan or mambo’s (priests and priestesses of vodou) house in a room called the peristyle (vodou chapel) where music, dance and sacrifice swirl around a central post that represents the universe the lwa chooses and then rides a person like one rides a horse, taking the reigns and guiding them this way and that way to the beat of the drums; there they demand, promise and prophesise, dance and cavort, there they swear and say dirty crude things to offend and titillate. Joan Dayan wrote that from a Western vantage these gods of vodou might appear to lack a certain grandeur or transcendence, surrendering themselves to the “spectacle of ceremony with a kind of rough immediacy,” as the lwa of the dead particularly, not tied to a mortal coil nor suffer its tiresome consequences engage in animated exaggerated sexual behaviour, that is much comic as it is erotic, as the Gede (the dead) dance the banda, thrusting their hips to a staccato beat.

Sidestep:

Thus travelling throughout the transcendental realms of the multiverse in my search for a true gay lord I journey to the Caribbean and find an island deep in as much the violence of the past as it is the present. Haiti, a land shrouded in the myths of hollywood zombie movies and technicolour CNN television coverage of its violence and political unrest. Vodou has gotten itself a bad name, whether through the media and church attempts to discredit it, colonial and neo-colonial slander perhaps or maybe it’s sometimes close relationship with the island’s nastier side of sorcery for sale, I don’t know. Regardless vodou is a religion that traces its roots back to Western Africa and was brought to the Caribbean with slavery and thrived despite it or even because of it and is practiced often alongside the christian faiths, primarily catholic who consitutute about eighty percent of the population with little (if any) perceived contradiction with gods from Africa often portrayed using the same christian portraits they do the saints.

Well… it is not exactly the place you’d expect to find some homo-friendly god or religion; where priests and priestesses practice their faith and their sexuality with little moral prohibity. Mambo Racine Sans Bout, an initiated and ordained priestess of Haitian vodou writes that gay men and women though “rigorously excluded from Protestant congregations, and frowned upon in Catholic services” find in vodou an outlet for spiritual expression. Saying that there are a higher percentage gay people at vodou ceremonies and in the priesthood than represented in the general population, knowing of a few peristyles in Port-au-Prince that have congregations where being gay is an entry requirement. While not unknown the priestess continues, homophobic attacks in Haiti are not on the level that they are in other parts of the Caribbean, like Jamaica that have seen mob attacks and killings. Although male machismo is as high in Haiti as it is elsewhere in the region a high level of bisexual activity may point to why it doesn’t easily translate into violence against gay men (lesbians are another story).

Sidestep:

Erzulie Freda, a powerful and important lwa of the Rada nation who was born in Dahomey and brought with the boats that carried the slaves to the new world; Freda is portrayed as the epitome of grace and has the airs of virginal mercy that can be seen in the eyes of Mother Mary. She is fair skinned and very beautiful and is often seen wearing fine jewellery and is the lwa of ideas, hopes and aspirations and is often said to hold a special place in Her heart for gay men who inturn place Her as their met tet (ruling lwa). Yet She is also a woman says Bob Corbett on his Haiti page, who walks with “a saucy sway to her hips”, a lwa who is pleasure loving, taking delight dancing kissing and caressing men. Mambo Racine Sans Bout says that the gay men in Her sway dance wearing the fine colourful dresses that She loves. Thus like nowhere else in Haiti or in the Caribbean for that matter they may openly flirt with other men. Indeed it is in vodou ceremonies she says that gay men are above all prized as dancers combining their athletic prowess with the “voluptuousness of women.”

Contrasting the feminine Freda is that of Her Petwo sister Erzulie Dantor, a strong black woman who was born in the brutality of slavery in colonial Haiti. An enemy of Freda, it is said that the scars that adorn her black face were obtained battling Her pale and delicate sibling. With her Dantor carries knives that she willing to draw in the defence of the vulnerable, deploring violence against women and children and will seek vengeance upon the men who abuse them. While married with children she is said to lie with both men and women in her bed and is seen as something of a patron to lesbians.

Vodou is a religion born out of and in reaction to poverty, slavery and life times of suffering and as Joan Dayan argues, the lwa of vodou do not sit high, detached up in heaven but live, love, hate and suffer with their people. They do not stand above us in some glow of moral puritanism, nor is there a priest to stand in the way of communion simply because of the partner you sleep with... gasp.

Disclaimer
*I have not been to Haiti nor have a witnessed a vodou ceremony so my apologies if I have anyway misrepresented vodou, its believers or the lwa themselves. I promise you it has not been my intention.

References:

Websites:
- Richard Ammon, Gay Haiti 2003, Global Gays

- Mambo Racine Sans Bout, The Vodou Page:
Sex In Vodou
Homosexuality In Vodou

- Bob Corbett, Bob Corbett’s Haiti Page
NOTES ON CENTRAL LOA

- Kevin Filan, Ezili Danto: Single Mother with a Knife, Widdershins, vol 9 issue 5, 2006

- Wikipedia, Haiti

Essays:

- Joan Dayan, “Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods”, Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah and the Carribean, 1997, pp. 13-36.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

quote of the day

Walking down the steps into missinglink today, searching for Wheat album I couldn't find at JB I stumbled on an instore performance by grind band Fuck... I'm dead. Surrounded by a sea of black metal t-shirts and long unkept hair I stuck around and listened to a few songs, when lead singer Jay Jones said to the crowd "if you don't like someone, set them on fucking fire." Take of this what you will... but I shook my head and left the store, suffice to say I didn't get my CD.

halley's comet and a luminous trail of sentimentality

I remember my dad waking me in the early hours of the morning, and with stern prodding and despite my several determined attempts to fall back asleep he suceeded in getting me out of bed. It was 1986 and we were driving down an unsealed road in our '76 Holden Torana, binoculars on the passenger seat and my siblings and I in the back. I was six years old. We were to witness the comet that Edmond Halley had named and had last visited this bright blue globe in 1910 and wouldn't be back for another 76 years or so for its fifth flyby since Halley had spied it through his telescope. By all projections I'd be lucky to see it again.

My father has been dead now for about 15 years and like many father-son relationships it was a distant one. My father was an academic who spent most of his time in his room slash study and many of my memories about him involve a kiss to a face covered in stubble, as I had quietly interrupted him and his work to say 'night'. Someone recently told me that the love of a father is different to that of a mother but that it could nonetheless be found beneath all the anger, derision and disappointment aimed at his fat sad son. And then sometimes I think maybe Freud was right.

You know I even thought about telling him? It was less than a year before heart failure threw him to the ground. I was eleven and my grandmother was staying with us and in need to accommodate the Empress Dowager in our modest homestead my father and I were sleeping in a caravan we'd hired and parked in our driveway. I think it was really my brother who was supposed to sleep there instead but there had been an argument and a fight, with my father and brother falling into each other so clumsily and my mother screaming for them to stop... well perhaps this is why my father was sleeping out in the caravan and not in the house.

I was in bed and reading when my father came in. The book was about some ecologists fighting poachers in deep dark Africa, sort of a dumbed down 'Gorillas in the Mist' for children where justice and universal good sense prevail. Instead of the murdered researchers bodies being found their heads split by Hutu extremists who would go onto pile the land and rivers of Rwanda high with the bodies of their Tutsi neighbours.

I lay there nervously with the words sitting on my tongue but I said nothing, either because I was scared of how he would react or simply incapable of fully articulating my feelings at that age, I don't remember. But the lights went out in silence and I fell into sleep.

We left the car in a gravelled car park and made our way to the oval. The air was that kind of frigid that sets your skin taught so as to remind you of the boundaries of your self and the outside atmosphere and we stood still and looked up into the universe above and to be honest, even with the assistance of the binoculars I don't remember seeing very much at all; unable to tell the comet from the stars. Maybe there were too many clouds or too much light pollution but I was tired and unimpressed. So we headed back to the car with my father in silent irritation and whether he was angry at the comet or me I don't know.

I could of course try and recall this a little differently, construct an alternative memory to exist alongside this one where I was really awestruck by the sight through the binoculars of this streaking sliver of light. With my father crouched next to me helping me hold the binoculars, speaking in a soft warm tone explaining how this comet travels through cold dark space being warmed by the light and love of the sun that gave birth to it, causing it to stream and sparkle like the magnesium fire on top of your birthday cake. Crossing these skies striking fear, awe and joy into the hearts of many men, reminding us of our place in the world and those things that are really important.

I understood not a word of it yet given how much I saw of him I enjoyed just being near him and in hindsight am grateful to have had moments like this however fleeting before he too disappeared into the night.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

a giant wombat & me


For the last week and a half maybe I've had nightmare after nightmare. Almost every night a new one. It is getting to a point where I am beginning to wonder about my own mental state.

On sunday night I dreamt that I had angered a giant wombat. Perhaps it was a Diprotodon australis or a some great and terrible animal spirit of the land. Maybe it was both, I don't know but what I do know is that he took a particular disliking to me and for whatever reason he wanted me dead or at least severly crippled.

I ran from him as fast as I could to my house, the one that I grew up in. There an assortment of friends and family waited for me and as I told them of my plight one by one they made there excuses: shopping to be done, rock concerts to be seen, new countries to visit and they left me, abandoned me.

Meanwhile the great Diprotodont recruited many other animals to his cause, to aid him in my destruction. And they gathered around my house; a keen labrador stood by his side: his able lieutenant.

I rang every number I had on my phone in desperation: no answer, can't talk, too busy. I thought of places to hide, doors I could lock but a sense of finality gripped me and my stomach dropped. A wombat the size of a truck could easily smash any door, any lock, any wall that I might put between us.

I was grade A fucked.

  • the last I dreamt
  • Saturday, April 29, 2006

    no silence in the graveyard

    "... as silent as a graveyard," the English reader read.

    "What is this?" my student asked underlining the word 'graveyard' with his finger.

    I started explaining speaking clearly and carfully spacing my words: "It is a place where dead people are buried, where funerals are held when they die. Do you know the word cemetery?" And I knew he knew.

    "Ah." He read the line again. "But in a graveyard..." reading the word slowly, sounding the syllables out with due care "... there is many noises and lights."

    Wednesday, April 26, 2006

    fate of the ill handed messenger


    Recent translations of a New Kingdom sarcophagus inscription, dating early in the 11th century BCE gives an inciteful glimpse into the religious life of ancient Egyptians.

    "lo Anubis held the feather aloft, placeth upon the balance scales that only Thoth may read, that weigheth the heart of the deadman according to the life lived and if crimes were made against the goddess* in life, the man that never returned messages of text even when credit was owned his heart outweighed the feather of ma'at/truth and lo it was thrown into the mouth of Ammit the bone eater to die a second death."

    See ancient wisdom bastards! So if someone text messages you it's only polite to reply. Be here warned.

    *the goddess - Ma'at or truth, both a goddess and idea who is represented by a feather.


  • other moral prescriptions for a good life
  • Wednesday, April 19, 2006

    more on my dreaming 2

    Sick again and while I am blaming the latest dream on the fever that I am running, I do sometimes wonder why my dreaming life is far more exciting and imaginative than my waking one. I mean last night's dream reads like a Tom Clancy novel.

    Here I am a CIA undercover agent operating in Africa who is ordered to sway a particular civil conflict in a way that is favourable to the US government. To do this I travel to of all places Havana, Cuba to recruit mercenaries that will fight and train local troops.

    I could never ever admit this rather realpolitikal geopolitical fantasy to my lefty friends. They'd be all like "man" and I'd be all like "I know man but it's just a dream and it's not like I love the US, I hate them and think George Bush is stupid" but they'd be still like "man".

    It'd be like admitting that I had a nocturnal emission about Alexander Downer... and I didn't... really... seriously.

  • the last I dreamt
  • Monday, April 17, 2006

    more on my dreaming

    I dreamt another fantastical dream last night:

    War had visited us once more, poking another of its ugly little hydra heads through the crust of the earth to breathe foul flame and death and destruction upon creation, upon the cities of this fair land. Hmmm … this is all a little too dramatic perhaps (and a little inappropriate) so I will endeavour to tone down the literary flourish just a tad and try to siphon off just a little of my own bathos if you will permit. And I am sure you will. Suffice to say the cities were not safe and while no declaration by our distant enemy had been made they had made veiled threats and my city had been on the top of the list of targets. So the atmosphere at home was palpable, thick and heavy-laden with fear and foreboding.

    My apologies: there I go again with the over-acting prophesising end-of-the-world routine, I really must desist.

    I absconded my responsibilities and took a little sojourn into the Victorian countryside and admitted my self into the best mental hospital money and privilege could buy. And while the title mental hospital is technically correct it is perhaps a little misleading, a term like Healing Farm might be more accurate and fitting at least in terms of the hospital’s marketing strategy. The Farm was built on a small Gippsland property not so far from Churchill and the staff were experienced and supportive, the facilities warm, friendly and very open; trips into town were frequent and encouraged so we spent our time there watching movies, doing chores, and of course talking about ourselves and our problems whether it was in group or over cake and coffee in town.

    It’s not that I wasn’t sick as I’d been depressed for years and quite frankly I fitted in there better than I had anywhere else in all the days of my life but there was something not right…. and then I was woken by my mobile phone feeling a little unsettled.

  • the last I dreamt
  • Tuesday, April 11, 2006

    dead flag blues

    Heard a tune by God Speed You Black Emperor called The Dead Flag Blues today and I scrawled this down on a series of receipts that I had in my wallet. Apparently the dialogue is part of some film one of the band members efrim has been working on. So if your feeling like you just wish the world would end now now now, like I am, then as Molly Meldrum says: "Do yourself a favour, check it out" and revel in it.

    Transcription:

    The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
    and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
    and a dark wind blows

    The government is corrupt
    and we're all on so many drugs with the radio on
    and the curtains drawn


    We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
    and the machine is bleeding to death
    the sun is fallen down and the billboards are all leering
    and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

    It went like this
    the buildings topled in on themselves
    mothers clutching babies
    picked throught the rubble and pulled out their hair

    The skyline was all beautiful on fire
    all twisted metal stretching upwards
    everything washed in a thin orange haze

    I said kiss me you're beautiful
    these are truely the last days
    You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
    like a daydream or fever

    Sunday, April 09, 2006

    Oh my gay Lord!

    Now despite some genuine and heartfelt attempts by some on both sides of the picketed fence of the sexual divide, gays and lesbians are not generally accepted let alone catered for in contemporary mainstream religion. Now there are those amongst the faithful who would take me to task on this telling me that they readily accept homosexuals but—I would ask them—do you really? Do you accept them but not their sins or some other idiotic mantra? I personally would be hard pressed to think of too many faiths that don’t place some form of moral restriction upon gays and lesbians, from celibacy and guilt-ridden self-denial to out-right heterosexual conversion aka ex-gay ministries but don’t get me wrong there are plenty of groups out there that are bent on challenging the establishment like the Metropolitan Community Church and Al Fatiha but they’re just that: challenging, fighting the system line by line, verse by verse so that G-d, Jesus and Allah open there arms and welcome us into heaven so that talk of smashing sodomite heads on the sides of mountains all becomes resigned to history as a bad and unhelpful interpretation (and there have been many to go that way), that they are viewed as an insignificance to be absorbed by a greater understanding of the word of God. But alas this is not how things are going. The way things stands most religions are pretty uncomfortable with same-sex couples and as the Anglican church threatens to schism, their conservative elements use the gay-card to wrestle control of their church back out of the hands of the more liberal elements, fundamentalists in the Moslem world (among others) describe homosexuality as a western disease to be stamped out and decree horrible punishment for those found practicing it.

    But who are we to pray to then? Are we then a godless bunch, the unchosen children, the un-inheritors of God’s kingdom? I downright refuse to accept that I am the willing servant of Satan as some have labelled me so then what are we to do? Surely there is in the great pantheon of heaven one god who will stand up and be counted to protect the gays and lesbians amongst us. Surely!

    It is fine to say that God loves us despite our sins but who is willing to say God loves us because of our sins, or who sees love between two men or women as a beautiful thing? Who is it then that I ask for divine intervention when I want to go to bed with this really cute guy that I met the other night? What ceremony do I perform upon a prophylactic so that its latex skin stays true and unbroken and then what words of thanks do I utter when he calls me the next day?

    This is my project.