Blame the faggots (again)

As if 9/11, hurricane Katrina, global warming, the Discovery blast and Queering Eyes making for the Straight Guys were not enough, now rabbis are claiming that homosexuals are the cause of World War III (a.k.a. the Israeli-Hezbollah spat) now breaking out:

Are Israel's troubles in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and the Hezbollah rockets slamming daily into major Israeli population centers here a result of the Jewish state's tacit support for a homosexual parade slated for next month in Jerusalem?
Some rabbis seem to think so, and they are attempting to block the event from taking place in Judaism's holiest city.
"Why does this war break out this week, all of sudden with little warning? Because this is the exact week the Jewish people are trying to decide whether the gay pride parade should take place in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv," Pinchas Winston, a noted author, rabbi and lecturer based in Jerusalem told WND.

Link via Billmon

Sand in the lube is murder

Some good news from the South Pacific, for a change: (via Gaynz.com)

The Fijian High Commissioner says gay men will not be arrested for consensual sex in Fiji, allaying the fears of Labour’s Rainbow Caucus, which arose after the Out Takes Reel Queer Film Festival offered a prize of a trip for two to Fiji. The offer of the prize had come under fire by LGBT advocates, as a letter from the Fijian High Commission, published in ‘Express’ newspaper, had stated that gay sex was illegal and men could be arrested.
This was in spite of the ruling of Fiji’s High Court that found that the anti-gay laws were unconstitutional. Labour MP Maryan Street asked the Fijian High Commission for clarification on the issue, and has just received a reply.
However, Fiji maintains a ban on entry for HIV positive people.

We're off to Rarotonga soon. No gay nookie allowed there either, but nobody cares there what you do.

20 years of legal buggery

This weekend it's twenty years since the "homosexual law reform" happened in New Zealand, when it finally became legal as a man to sleep with a man. Of course 1986 was rather late in the piece, since other countries had abolished buggery as a crime much longer ago (or even have never considered it worthy of being a crime). Even the UK got into the act in 1967, two years before that other recently celebrated act of queer defiance, the Stonewall riot in New York (or commemorating Judy Garland's death, whatever floats your boat).
But the main difference and great thing about the New Zealand legalisation was the equalisation of the age of consent at 16 for both orientations - something which the UK has only recently managed to do.
And, of course, the removal of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in other Government policy areas such as immigration, resulting in me being here through my relationship rather than through dollops of cash or special skills (although I'm applying my special skills, don't you worry about that!)
So it's celebrations all around the country, with veterans of the campaign rekindling old memories. An events listing here.

Xlibris Releases A Fantastic Superhero Novel Written By A Long Time Comic Book Collector

Since the 1930s, tales about superheroes have been an essential component of comic books.. From Batman to the X-Men, superhero tales endure in popularity because of the relevance of their dramatic social and moral messages. The elements that make superheroes so exciting will again stir your imagination as Xlibris proudly releases The Superhero’s Closet, the compelling new superhero novel from author and veteran comic book collector H. Andrew Lynch.
Set in San Francisco, The Superhero’s Closet introduces us to four super humans – teenager Lain Grey (budding powers), young Kathleen (who channels dead philosophers through her dog), Vernon Hood (the most powerful man alive) and Geoffrey Gilman (the original superhero) -- each with dark secrets, who inexorably cross paths when the city is suddenly attacked by a mysterious woman called the Goshenite. As the crisis grows, the riddles of their past collide with the present. Will these super beings be able to unite for a common cause or will their past divide them? The Superhero’s Closet contains all the excitement and surprises that you find in today’s comic books. The novel’s special focus on the pain and joy of humanity will attract the attention of a wide audience of readers, especially adventure fans and comic book readers. Considering the popularity of super heroes in modern society (Hollywood’s X-Men: The Last Stand and Superman Returns are big theatrical successes), The Superhero’s Closet is a relevant and entertaining book that people cannot afford to miss. Be sure to order a copy of H. Andrew Lynch’s fantastic superhero book by visiting his website or by visiting your favorite bookstore today!

About the Author:
For the pure enjoyment of it, H. Andrew Lynch has read and collected superhero comics for 35 years. A frequently published horror and sci-fi short-story writer in the 90s, Lynch wrote three superhero manuscripts before discarding them all to write his big superhero tale, The Superhero’s Closet. Lynch lives in San Francisco with his Beagles, Woody and Darwin.

The Superhero's Closet * by H. Andrew Lynch Publication Date: May 9, 2006 Trade Paperback; $21.99; 212 pages; 1-4257-0567-7; Cloth Hardback; $31.99; 212 pages

Trivia detail: Andrew wrote large parts of his novel when staying at our place in 2000.

Where I have slept (sometimes with a local)

Create your own visited countries map

Turning passion into love is a relationship's main task

If your culture invents the campest art form (opera) you would think it has little trouble with deviant sex. But no, Italy is hardly known for a fantastically open out of the closet queer culture. Au contraire, gay culture seems to be one of the most closeted I have come across, for a country that has been part of the liberal west for a long time. The men may walk arm in arm along the street there, but you cannot presume they have are anything else but friends. Last time friends of mine visited Italy they had huge trouble finding any gay clubs or saunas. Do I have to blame that church organisation in Rome again for this?
In contrast, queer representation in Italian art, be it cinema, literature or the plastic arts, has huge abundance: Fellini, Pasolini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Versace... But when it comes to day-to-day Italian boys getting it on together, lovingly approved by La Mamma and patronised by La Famiglia, it's a totally different situation from, say, in Spain where the boys can get married and people like Almodovar have made a lifetime film career out of it.
We watched a wonderfully romantic Italian film last night called La Finestra di Fronte, which has a terribly sad gay side story of a young pastry chef who saved a lot of people during the war from deportation but had to sacrifice his secret lover to the Nazi round-up. If you have working gaydar you deduce that his secret hidden love is not heterosexual really soon but it takes almost until the end of the film for this to become explicit.
Highly recommended and the totty award goes to Filippo Negri (left, husband of the film's main character, and doesn't appear enough times shirtless for my liking)

Am I bothered? Do I look bothered?

The BBC Board of Governors okayed the use of the word "gay" to mean "rubbish":

"The word “gay” now means “rubbish” in modern playground-speak and need not be offensive to homosexuals, the BBC Board of Governors has ruled.
A listener complained after Chris Moyles dismissed a ringtone by saying on his Radio 1 breakfast show: “I don’t want that one, it’s gay.”
The complainant argued that the use of the word gay in this context was homophobic. The governors said, however, that Moyles was simply keeping up with developments in English usage.

and the gay guardians are up in arms about it:

"Troubling? Absolutely. Whenever someone outside a cultural group adopts such a charged term to apply a derogatory meaning, it's a step backward. There's plenty of debate within minority communities – whether gay, black, or physically disabled – on whether offensive words should even be used within their community, let alone by anyone else. But an outsider throwing around "gay" to mean something patently unsavory — because "young people" deem it okay? We shouldn't even have to raise the argument about anyone but people of color using the word "nigger."

Oh dear, precious queens up in arms about cultural appropriation. How deliciously ironic after all those protestations over the last 50 years by heteros shocked by the redefinition of the word to mean something not quite what they envisaged the word to mean.
I've never liked the word gay to describe my particular passion, because it always sounded so innocuous, so bland, so white picket fenced and completely out of step with my particular tastes, smells, sounds and vision in man on man action. So I have no particular problem with the re-definition: language use will always evolve and it will involve fashions among the young and brainless which no-one should be upset about.
The "nigger" analogy doesn't compute, helas, because that is about the appropriation of the insulting term by the targeted minority (as queer is). "Gay" has outlived its usefulness and should in future only be used to denote a marriage arrangement that isn't "sad" (i.e. heterosexual)

When Marines go feral

As the official investigation into the Haditha incident, where Marines in Iraq allegedly murdered two dozen Iraqi civilians because one their troops was killed by a roadside bomb, glacially proceeds, our thoughts inevitable turn to the appropriate punishment should they be found guilty. Rumour has it they may face the death penalty - although "Right Blogistan" is demanding the head of Representative Murtha instead for being a traitor to the troops by digging into the issue.
So what would be an enlightened penalty for murdering civilians while being in uniform in the Government's service?
Well, some lateral thinking is needed here: how to minimise the cost to the taxpayer for keeping them locked up for the rest of their life (if we discount the death penalty), how to appropriately punish them for the rest of their lives; and how to humiliate them sufficiently and continuously so they act as a deterrent for a future repeat?

I know:
You lock then up in a Big brother style prison, being webcast 24 hours a day and subscribers can tell them what to do if they want to earn any money to keep themselves alive. It doesn't have to be all sexual perversion, but I bet that would generate more viewers and cash rather than sitting around chatting inanely. And they could give ActiveDuty.com a run for their money. A win-win-win situation for everybody involved: the Marines can strut their macho stuff 24 hours a day, the taxpayer makes some money and the punter gets off. Even the Pajamahadeen wouldn't need to get away from their computers to support their troops.

Out Takes poster causes drooling

The annual Reel Queer Film Festival is taking place at the moment and they have been promoting it extensively with posters on bus shelters around town. It may not be very visible here on-line, but the gist is: boy on left holds ice cream and boyfriend on right has white drool dripping from his chin. All very double/triple/rainbow entendre in the contemporary queer way: you could interpret the image according to your favourite perversion. How inclusive is that! And on bus shelters! Around town!
But not so according to queer trend critic Philip Patston (who is a stand-up comedian in his spare time, even while sitting in his wheelchair) in a guest column on gaynz.com:

The boy's "cummy" chin is just tacky and juvenile, not to mention sexist - I can't see any muff fluff on the girls' chins. But worse, the image could be construed as sexual harassment. Anyone confronted by that image in a public place could legitimately complain that they are being harassed.

All very precious and prissy, if you ask me.
An ice cream is sometimes just that, an ice cream. (Thank you, Prof. Freud)

In a vaguely related issue, the Reel Queer organisers scored a spectacular own goal. They offered an incentive prize of a mini-holiday in Fiji for festival attendees. Since gay nookie is a no-no in Fiji (men have been arrested and jailed for gay sex there while on holiday), just as it is in most Pacific islands, except New Zealand, and people with HIV are very unwelcome there (Bruce Kilmister of the HIV support group Body Positive was well pissed off), one has to wonder why this kind of prize is being offered to its main target audience. Perhaps they wanted to attract a few straight couples to their film offerings with the prize?
Then, not to be outdone by Reel Queer, another sponsor of the film festival, the NZ Aids Foundation found itself in hot water too over a prize it offered viewers of a trip to Hawaii despite the USA having a restrictive access policy for HIV+ people. What a mess! And they wonder why people are ignoring their messages.

The only reason to cross the Tasman Sea

Good to see the queer brothers and sisters across the ditch in Australia are mighty fed up with little Johnnie Howard's government's 19th century attitudes towards buggers getting hitched. They have set up a Gay & Lesbian Kingdom as a micro-state in the Coral Sea, complete with sovereign and postage stamps, to act as a refugee place from the mainland.
If only New Zealand was 10 degrees further north in latitude we could have served for that purpose, since everybody knows queens prefer warmer climes. But the hardier ones have made it over here, and most welcome they are too.

Good news from Hawaii

(via Queerty and AP)

The state will pay $625,000 and change policies at its only youth prison to settle a lawsuit over alleged abuse of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender inmates, according to a proposed settlement.
The lawsuit involves three inmates at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility who are lesbian, transgender and gay, the attorney general's office said.
They claimed they were physically and emotionally abused by guards because of their sexual orientation. They also said correctional officers didn't intervene when they were harassed by other youths in the prison.

We were watching "Dog, The Bounty Hunter" the other night, a reality trash show set on Hawaii, where Dog and his whole whanau goes hunting for escapees and fugitives from the law.
I don't know why every family member has to conform to the standard trailer trash stereotype: bleached mother with DDD cups, dad with bleached mullet halfway down his back and snotty kids with attitude. But the eldest son, Leland (pictured left), is 100 percent trailer trash spunk and I wouldn't mind being apprehended by him if I was ever to transgress Hawaiian law.

Bisexual, bi-curious or bifurcated bollocks?

Mark Simpson wrote a lengthy commentary on American "research" that found males are 27 times less likely than women to be attracted to the same sex. He rightly skewered the report as an outcome of social attitudes rather than actual sexual behaviour, and then goes on to "salvage" male bisexuality from the current trends to make it (males who are attracted to both sexes) disappear into a puff of what is tendentiously called "bi-curiousness" (straight males trying to find out what all the fuss is about they heard of).
As any male knows, only your mates assign you a sexual orientation, based on their perception, your alleged behaviour and, occasionally, your protestations. Women, in contrast, will always be women but men are only socially labelled "real men" after a passing muster with other men. Professing an interest in other males or any kind of "deviant" (i.e. all non-hetero) sexuality will guarantee you the label queer, no matter how many women you sleep with or insist your "deviancy" is out of curiosity rather than taste, or, worse, orientation.
This is a longstanding given in male social history. The ancient Greeks were not "bisexual" but actively interested in fucking epheboi, adolescents in the first bloom of adulthood. They would have scoffed at the notions of our modern gay sexual orientation definitions. Even the label bisexual would have been laughed at as dishonourable for men - if it meant taking the passive female position in sexual intercourse.
This is why in the current fashionable vogue of "bi-curiousness" or bisexual claims by many a straight man isn't really all what it seems. When I meet those guys in a sex club, they are there - dusty boots and check shirts included, straight from the building site - not to get some sweet loving from a male because the girlfriend is unavailable, nor to try out being anally penetrated - you'll get a slap if you suggested it to them - but to get a good blowjob, because they have heard we give them better than their girlfriends.
So I think labelling males who seek out other males to perform sexual services on them they normally expect and get from their girlfriends as bisexual a tad misleading. And they wouldn't describe themselves as such either: recall the many interviews with male hustlers who only take an active role - they never regard themselves as gay.
Top and bottom roles, as this is familiarly known in the gayworld, matter more to the sexual self-definition of the exploring straight male, than labels such as gay, bisexual or queer.
Mark relates an episode from his own sex life - something he does not do enough of, it's all theoretical bones without some hot muscle!:

A separated ‘bi-curious’ fireman in rural England I met a few times before he went back to his wife recently contacted me to tell me something rather alarming. ‘She found out about you,’ he said. ‘She hacked into my Hotmail account.’ ‘Oh, shit,’ I said. ‘What did she do? Did she throw you out?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘She got turned on! She wants to watch.’ The poor guy had to tell her that that this really was a kinky bridge too far for him. That he was too much a traditionalist to go down that path...

But Mark leaves out the most crucial bit of information that would support my argument (or not): did he top or bottom before he went back to his wife? We should be informed! Real bisexuals take it up the arse like a man before they go back to their girlfriend. All the rest is "bi-curious" cant.

Queerisms

The queerisms are now quite a large collection on the Queerclick site (NSFW).
Which one is your favourite?
The one on the left had me laughing. It means:

euph. To masturbate. From the US baseball player Carlos Zambrano, who was put on the Chicago Cubs injured list because of a wrist injury caused by spending four hours a day on the internet "emailing his brother".

The Profanisaurus is a more general slang dictionary, in the inclusive sense that it also (mostly) carries heterosexual terms, but also great fun.

Proof found there is no gay interior decorator gene

This had me amused all weekend: Lurid Digs: horrifying gay amateur interiors. It's a site that collects gay personal ad photographs (you can submit your own too) and their queer style experts discuss not so much the meat on offer as the interior decor the personal photographs are set in. Amazing what those pictures reveal not by ludicrously posing unclad but by the style of their living and bedroom room furniture and furnishings. An absolutely fun site, though not worksafe. You'll never look at another personal ad ever in the same way again, at least you won't ignore the decor.

Tip from Starrfucker

Flying gay

There is an interesting call for a boycott of Emirates Airlines because its owner (the state of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates) has sentenced eleven men, arrested last year after allegedly attending a 'gay wedding party,' to five-year terms for homosexuality and one-year sentences for obscenity, according to reports from Abu Dhabi.
It seems a fair call for a boycott, but one needs to be consistent too.
Places with popular airlines don't always have the right attitudes towards deviant sexuality. For example, Singapore's penal code is hardly liberal towards gays.
Or Fiji and most Polynesian islands who were rid of their easy-going sexual and sensual attitudes by generations of missionaries, so Polynesian Airlines and Air Pacific are out too.
I'm sure you could find dozens of other examples to avoid, so best to stick with Air New Zealand since we don't want to fund that fundie Ocker John Howard and his Qantas either.

New year resolutions

I must:
1. Increase the truly pathetic average number of sexual partners a New Zealander has in a year.
2. Exercise more. (Can anyone recommend me a good gym, preferably one where you don't have to wear clothes, as the ancient Greeks did)
3. Find a way, or rather, ways, to combine points 1 and 2. (A sex club with a gym would be ideal)

Making money from the plague

A couple of niche sex video producers found a new hole (as it were) in the market: barebacking videos. Of course, a stack of very old material has long been available, ever since video was invented and earlier, quaintly dubbed the "pre-condom era". But since covering up against the plague is de rigueur, most recent and contemporary gay video output is rubbered up. Some political queers have started promoting barebacking as a radical statement of autonomy and free will ("gift-giving"). Since the porn industry is the earliest adopter of all, barebacking is back on screen but without any sexual-philosophical or political intent, just to make money. Or as GayPornBlog puts it:

"The bareback studios are financial insurgents, capturing a large segment of the market with the eroticism of danger."

We watched two offerings, on loan from friends but you can watch them online, from Sxvideo. The company uses this kink as its main selling tool. The word for the activity depicted is in larger size than any of the video titles, and it shows in the content: the films concentrate on nothing else, as is wont with fetish videos, but "unsafe sex".
This is a major difference with the pre-condom films where un-rubbered sex was just the norm, and in that sense I was really watching not a porn movie but a slo-mo snuff film.
You could argue that the people involved must have the freedom to put whatever substance into their bodies as they want, but I fail to see what difference there is between this and a (hypothetical) movie where junkies shoot up for real and share the needles, in order to turn on viewers (presumably junkies too if they are susceptible to be turned on by drug taking).
I felt rather sad instead of turned on.

Something for the weekend, Sir?

A queer art history anthology: marvellous homo-art dating back 2,500 years, loads of beautiful paintings, sculpture, photographs and drawings.
I didn't spot my favourite male sculpture so here it is:

Oh, and before you ask, it's called "The Dying Gaul".

A housewife? Not me! Desperate? Never!

Jesse, the half naked gardener, had disappeared, and even the plumber hasn't taken his shirt off for a couple of episodes, so I was a bit flagging in my keenness to watch Laura Bush's favourite soap.
But then it suddenly all got interesting again. The gardener's flatmate, Justin, turns out to be a closet queen desperate to sort out whether he's gay or straight - I would have thought rooming with Jesse Metcalfe would pretty much settle that fast! - by pashing the only decent looking female on the show and then he didn't feel anything. Snogging Jesse would have been conclusive immediately, but then during a pool party he was found snogging the horribly miscast Andrew Van Der Kamp dude who is on the swim team (with a flabby body like that no swim team would have him!). It's simply not good enough!
Contrast this syrupy state of affairs with the Shameless episode, on afterwards, involving seed-filled condoms being thrown around to try to prove hetero manhood. You would never see that getting Laura Bush's approval!