(Recycled from the House of Love)

It’s not the first time someone has reported seeing my doppelgänger; — reports of my shorter, stockier, more muscular but otherwise identical twin have been a regular feature of my life for almost a decade. He’s been spotted on both sides of the Pacific by friends and lovers from Daren onwards. And, as usual, when I hear a report I fancy rooting him. Am I peculiar because the idea of finding my exact double and shagging him senseless a[m|ro]uses me? As Neal said in a follow-up message,

…while I wouldn’t say that you are in any way less gorgeous than this pretender it is possible on closer inspection to see he works out at the gym very solidly or takes a lot of steroids or something, but the face — my God if you were rooting him and looking into that face it would be a head trip, like that Eternity ad, you wouldn’t know where he finished and you began…

And of course I have a big mirror next to the bed already; I could get another one for the opposite side of the bed (and one for the ceiling too, why not, since we’re on this flight of fancy?) and immerse myself in a universe populated only by a perfect super-race of well-built but otherwise identical clones of … me.

Elsewhere on this site I assert that I am not conceited, or vain, but I do admit to having a rather large ego and a reasonably high opinion of myself. I do not imagine myself especially physically beautiful, but I do know I’m quite shaggable in my way and, sure, given the opportunity, in some Star Trek-style temporal anomaly or subspace inversion or parallel universe, yeah, I’d give me one.

It wasn’t always so. For much of my life I thought myself supremely plain. Until about the age of twenty-seven I was convinced I was not, nor could I ever be, one of the beautiful people. I was surprised if anyone was ever attracted to me, and shocked on those few occasions where I pulled someone who I thought doable. I spent all of my teens and most of my twenties lusting from afar.

Then, something happened. I woke up one morning, hot.

Perhaps not coincidentally, about the same time I also woke up one morning HIV-positive. The two events are not unrelated.

I say "I woke up HIV-positive," but I know now I’d been positive for years before — I reckon my date of seroconversion to be late 1985 at the latest, but it was the early nineties before I had the sense to get tested (denial is a powerful creature) and my first ever HIV antibody test, in 1991, came back positive. Realising I’d been harbouring Iris the Virus for several years, of course, was a moment of both great tragedy and power. An epiphany. My flash of insight on the road to Damascus.

I was shit-scared, yes. But I was also suddenly aware, perhaps for the first time, of the value of this precious life I’d been living, and by extension my own worth in it. I woke up that fateful morning, looked at myself in the mirror and, more or less for the first time in my life, I said to myself, "Hey, you’re hot."

Inexplicably, or perhaps inevitably, from that point onwards an increasingly large proportion of the boys I lusted after from afar looked back, this time with lust in their eyes, and I found myself disposed to lust from anear. I don’t want to lend any credence to the Norman Vincent Peales of this world, but the change in my own opinion of myself was reflected, noticeably, in others.

When Paul and I were together I told him this story and, in his own way, he went through the same transformation. We gave it a name: gorgeoconversion. The moment of becoming gorgeous.

Whether that moment would ever have come without the intervention of HIV I don’t know. Perhaps it was merely coincidental that they happened at the same time. Perhaps I really was butt-ugly until the age of 27. Or perhaps the entrance of HIV into my life taught me many lessons, and this has been one of them.

So if you’re wandering around this weekend and you see someone who looks just like I would look if I went to the gym more than once a month, ask him to get in touch with me. I don’t know if I’m his fantasy, but I’m at least fairly shaggable and he’s … hot.

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Right now, down at the Opera House, a bunch of earnest lesbians and the occasional blokey poof are rigging up the stage, testing the lights and sound equipment, stocking the bars, rehearsing their speeches, tuning their instruments. At 8 o’clock tonight, somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand queers will jostle for space on the steps of Sydney’s most famous landmark to mark the beginning of the three weeks we call “Mardi Gras”.

It’s a big deal, this festival of fagdom, to this city that loves a festival. Continue reading →

(Recycled from the House of Love)

Two recent, unrelated but contrasting, events. First, this message from patric:

you are a shining, glittering example of what a smirk, what a lark it is to be gay. i ADORE that you see the thin candy-coating around this whole stupid babefest concept and are perfectly happy to lick the candy away to reveal the juvenile slap-fight inside.

Second, my brother Bill reports that “a member of our family” commented recently of me, “it’s such a pity that he’s gay.”

Bill, being Bill, saw the absurdity of this statement, but you’ve got to wonder if most straight people get it at all. As a kid, I knew the official stereotype of gay men — that they are lonely, miserable, despised perverts — long before I knew what a gay man actually was, let alone that I was one. But do people still believe that crap? Continue reading →