Once again I am forcibly reminded, I am my body. Crossing Queen St on Wednesday on my way to a meeting at the AIDS Foundation, I felt this sudden Bang! like someone had slammed the back of my left calf with a hammer. I’d pulled a muscle, just by running across the road. Pain! And not the fun kind! I rang my Dr, got an appointment. Rang my boss and told her I wouldn’t be back in. Staggered onto the Link and got to the meeting. The Dr couldn’t see me till after 2, and they’re only 5 mins away ...

Should certain forms and formats of music and musical expression be banned, not because of their non-conformism to the accepted western forms of music, nor because they are are mere sounds or noise, but because they are akin to illegal drug taking and induce immoral behaviour?That's the question that vexes Roger Scruton in a lengthy article for The American (the house organ of the American Enterprise Institute).His answer behoves his epithet as Margaret Thatcher's favourite philosopher: if young people like their music which old people cannot stand or bear to listen to, then it automatically follows that the young ...

      One would think that the Christian Right would have better things to do during the current recession than continually harping on about the alleged iniquities of same-sex marriage and civil unions. Unfortunately and predictably, that isn’t the case. Recently, the so-called “World Congress of Families”, an international Christian Right coalition of opponents of feminism, reproductive choice and LGBT rights met in Mexico City, just after it had opened same-sex marriage proper and adoptive parental responsibilities to lesbians and gay men. Red Familia (Family Network- Mexico’s WCF affiliate) opposes the introduction of same-sex marriage in Mexico City and will present a petition to ...

From the United States comes troubling news from the US Southern Poverty Law Center, a valiant organisation opposed to racism, homophobia and the US far right. There have been some worrying developments amongst the anti-Obama movement in the United States. I’ve seen the same before, in New Zealand’s own political past, during the Muldoon era of the seventies and early eighties, and the Christian Right backlash against homosexual law reform and improved abortion access in the mid-to-late eighties. At that time, human rights and civil liberties reached their nadir in this country, then rebounded under Lange. Due to Muldoon, there was ...

Given that the Bishop of Bling Brian Tamaki has been in the news lately, I thought it was time to have a look at divergent religious responses to the current global recession. One is commendable and compassionate, while the other is typical fundamentalist rort and cant. Witness Reverend Tim Jones, a York Anglican minister in the United Kingdom, who provided a heartbreaking account of a recently released petty burglar with less than one hundred pounds to live on over Christmas, with no social welfare benefit access, propspects of employment and little assistance available from his probation officer. Loan shark borrowing, begging ...

In California, the ‘outing’ controversy has resurfaced, following the outing of a prominent Californian State Senator who has a consistent record who opposed LGBT rights initiatives. State Senator Roy Ashburn (Republican) was elected in 2002. The divorced conservative Catholic (??) senator has a profoundly conservative antigay voting record, including voting against state recognition of out of state same-sex marriages, opposed a state legislature resolution condemning Proposition 8 (which repealed the right to same-sex marriage in that state), the expansion of state anti-discrimination laws and the declaration of Harvey Milk Day, commemorating the life of the slain San Francisco city supervisor and ...

I was out dancing the other weekend and “Forever Young” came on. I was dancing with a small group of old friends, some of us have been dancing together for 30 years. I’m 48 and I often go out dancing. Do I want to be forever young, as the song says, or not? Should I have taken myself off the dancefloor in shame? Gay men are often accused of having a Peter Pan complex. And while we visible ones on the scene help create this stereotype, it’s often applied to all homos with thin-lipped disapproval, to show we aren’t really serious or ...

Unfortunately, in the case of HIV transmission criminalisation, there’s evidence of a backlash. In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada found that non-disclosure of HIV status and unprotected sex could open one to charges of aggravated assault. Since then, several HIV+ people have been charged with serious offences, including the aforementioned and even ‘murder.’ The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network and Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange are providing forums and intervening in related litigation, hoping to insure that any such charges are moderated by evidence-based medical and scientific criteria. While deliberate unprotected sex is reprehensible, HIV- men also need to face their own ...

Preliminary evidence suggests that it is possible that young gay BBC presenter Kristian Digby (32) died as a result of accidental autoerotic asphyxiation. What is this fetish/paraphilia? Autoerotic asphyxiation is a paraphilia, listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. It is involved in extreme BDSM play, in which carotid artery compression may result in ‘pleasurable’ sensations, hallucinations and intensified orgasm, derived from lack of oxygen inflow to the brain and cumulative carbon dioxide buildup. It has been known to exist for the last four centuries, as an extrapolation from postmortem tumescence on male corpses after hanging. Hanging, ligature abuse, gas or ...

I have the impression that every year a local magazine has trouble finding eligible bachelors who are straight and don't look like total losers. They even had to go find candidates in Australia, Latin America and Germany.You can judge for yourself here.I voted for one who isn't a model. ...

The tsunami alert yesterday in New Zealand had everybody scrambling to higher ground along all east coasts of New Zealand; the Onetangi Beach Races were postponed two weeks; and most people had to find something else to do but go to the beach on a perfect Summer Sunday.In the end we got off lightly, only a few sea movements on the beach happened here and there but nothing dramatic.The map looks really cool, it shows how an earthquake turns the ocean into a shooting gallery. Picture pinched from Tumeke. ...

Alix Strauss: Death Becomes Them: New York: HarperCollins: 2009. This book deals with the suicides of brilliant, famous or notorious celebrities…some of whom were lesbian, gay or bisexual. Gay male youth suicide was a major concern in the New Zealand context, prompting the development of LGBT youth groups and active pursuit of inclusive school antibullying policies, resulting in a reduction in recent years. However, unlike Strauss, I don’t intend to go into excruciating detail about the methods used, so as not to provide unwanted information to those in a vulnerable state. Celebrity suicides are particularly poignant due to the fact of past or ...

In DNA 121, Joseph Brennan notes Japan’s thriving gay male art scene and asks whether conclusions that Japan is trailing the field in terms of international LGBT politics aren’t a tad overdone. It is not surprising that some ‘neoclassical’ Japanese gay male artists feel nostalgic about the Japanese samurai (warrior class) ethos of nanshoku, which consisted primarily of love and sexual exchanges between adult males and late adolescents akin to that which flourished in ancient Greece. As Japan modernised in the nineteenth century, the samurai class declined and nanshoku traditions fell into disuse. In an excellent article, Brennan also notes that contemporary ...

Dennis Covington: Salvation on Sand Mountain: Addison-Wesley: 1995. Snakehandler Pentecostals are the most embarrassing dirty secret within the cloisters of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. To his credit, Covington does try to portray the ‘true believers’ here with some dignity. At its root, the snakehandlers are descendants from desperately poor Northern English, Scots and Ulster Protestant settlers who became desperately poor Appalachian miners, Prohibition moonshine whiskey still runners, pot croppers, subsistence farmers and probably meth lab creators during the current decade. He doesn’t romanticise them either, starting the book with Glenn Buford Summerford, an adulterous alcoholic pastor who used the subculture’s poisonous reptile obsession ...

Recently, Sydney Mardi Gras blocked an Animal Liberation Front float from parade participation. What is the connection between these two social and political movements? For the first generation of nineteenth century lesbian and gay activists, their utopian socialist morality combined sexual freedom, communitarian socialism, green politics, anti-imperialism, pacifism and womens suffrage…alongside ethical vegetarianism and animal rights politics. One such exemplary figure was Edward Carpenter, the nineteenth century Sheffield  gay utopian socialist author and activist. Marxism gained ascendancy within socialist politics, refocusing it on class inequality, industrial relations and trade union militancy, though, relegating sexual freedom and animal welfare to liberal legislative reformists ...

Our reactionary, know-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing-Government has non-commercial, publicly owned service in its sights for destruction. Having a Minister in overall charge who made his loot in commercial radio, it's not surprising he's puppeteering the Broadcasting Minister (a medical doctor, go figure) to redirect the large market share public radio enjoys (no wonder given the aural crap on our airwaves) to his commercial mates.A Facebook campaign has been set up to counteract these retrograde moves, so unfortunately you need to be a member to join the campaign. Which I did temporarily until it is has been saved. ...

In the United Kingdom, ‘exgay’ fundamentalist ‘reparative therapists’ have been trying to manipulate clients into fundamentalist conversion ‘away’ from their ‘former’ sexual orientation…using mainstream GP referals and National Health Service funds. And what is its connection to disgraced ex-Northern Ireland MP Iris Robinson? UK gay journalist Patrick Strudwick went undercover and wrote about his experiences for the Independent newspaper. He attended a fundamentalist ‘reparative therapy’ conference held in London last year and heard US exgay conservative Catholic ‘reparative therapy’ propagandist Joseph Nicolosi state that all gay men are ‘wounded’ and ‘pathological.’ We apparently all have ‘distant dads’ and ‘overnurturant mums.’  As ...

 Fundie beauty queens, same-sex church weddings and Gareth Thomas, oh my! BEVERLY HILLS: It appears that there’s more where fundamentalist California ex-beauty queen Carrie Prejean came from. Witness this outburst from Lauren Ashley, Miss Beverly Hills 2010: “The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Ashley told FOX News. “In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white.” Meanwhile, that epitome of fundamentalist ‘chastity’ ...

When faced with onerous modernity, earlier generations of lesbians and gay men tended to retreat into (romanticised) utopian pasts. But were those bygone eras so ‘golden?’ For some gay men, Classical Greece served as an enduring paragon of elite homosexuality at a time when male homosexuality was either punishable by death or by long-term imprisonment. However, as James Davidson now tells us, the era in question harboured a strictly limited concept of permissible and acceptable same-sex relationships, love and sexuality, predominantly focused on older male mentors and late adolescent beloveds. This was beset with rules, regulations and restrictions. Woe betide any ...

or, if you go to many of our main gay venues, Caluzzi, Centurian, Dots, Urge, Kamo  you’ll find Bears. It’s the first Bear Week we’ve ever had here in Auckland.  Which raises the question: “What’s a Bear?” And it’s a hard one to answer in some ways. Initially being a Bear seemed to be a rejection of the over-muscled, shaved and waxed body look that grew so popular in the 90s. It was a stance of saying “I’m a man, here’s my body, warts and all, I’m still sexy, I don’t need to shave my chest, I don’t need to try and ...